Denialism Blog

Author: MarkH

  • Friday Cat Blogging

    Name this cat.

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    She appears to be a a Russian blue with silver coat, green eyes and mauve footpads. Although being a shelter cat, this could be pure accident. Her first google search was RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. And so far names in the running go from the simple Gray to Lucia.

    It’s kitten season, and many more are looking for homes at the Charlottesville-Albermarle ASPCA. You can find all sorts of pets to adopt in your area from Petfinder or just look at pictures of kittens. While I was there they had piles of kittens. It was pretty unbelievable. I should have taken pictures for Cute Overload.

    Also, I’ll take entries for banners for one more day. here’s the requirements basically, 756 x 93 and based on what comes to mind when you think of cranks or denialism. We’ve had some killer entries, and after the winner gets a week I’ll put all of them into rotation.

  • Sicko

    Anyone want to go see sicko with me? It’s playing in Charlottesville tomorrow night and I plan on catching a 7:30 showing on the downtown mall.

  • How many studies does it take to satisfy a crank?

    David Kirby asks us to move the goalposts one more time on the vaccines-cause-autism question.

    Epidemiologic studies have shown no link. The Institute of Medicine has looked at the evidence for the link between mercury and autism and found it to be specious. Thimerosal has been removed, to no effect. Throughout the Autism Omnibus proceedings we’ve seen the best case for a link and it’s a joke. The measles PCRs linking gut samples from autistic kids to “chronic measles infection” from the MMR jab were false positives. At every single point when this problem has been studied it’s been found to be a specious link. But are the anti-vax cranks like David Kirby ever satisfied? Of course not. It will always be one more study. And there will always be specious evidence for the anti-vax denialists to grasp desperately to so this issue will never die. They will propose things like “mercury efflux disorder” without any proof of its existence. They will switch from thimerosal, to other parts of the adjuvants like aluminum, to blaming environmental mercury (as Kirby did in his last post). Or they’ll generate more bogus correlations, for instance, Kirby loves this new Survey USA poll:

    It certainly wasn’t hard for the respected polling company, Survey USA, to find nearly 1,000 unvaccinated children living in nine counties in California and Oregon. All they had to do was pick up the phone.

    Survey USA, commissioned by the anti-thimerosal group Generation Rescue, completed telephone interviews in 11,817 households with one or more children age 4 to 17. Of the 17,674 children inventoried, 991 were described as being completely unvaccinated.

    Interestingly, the survey found that, among boys (who have neurodevelopmental disorders at a 4-to-1 ratio over girls) vaccinated children were 155 percent more likely to have a neurological disorder, 224 percent more likely to have ADHD, and 61 percent more likely to have autism. Among boys aged 11-18, the increased autism risk was 112 percent.

    Is that so? I wonder what would happen if someone actually took a close look at the survey results…

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  • Crank Magnetism

    Back when we wrote the Unified Theory of the Crank one of the main things we discussed related to crankery is their inability to recognize competence in others. As a result, cranks tend not to mind the crankery of others, since they see themselves as opposed to a scientific orthodoxy. Consistency be damned, they just want to see science with egg on its face so they can prove that they are being persecuted.

    Well lately, Uncommon Descent has been doing a pretty incredible job of sticking to this script. First we have Dembski, insisting upon the persecution of ID abroad, because the Germans jailed a holocaust denier who happened to be a creationist. Dembski, not being the sharpest tool in the drawer, didn’t think to look to closely at the story and, well, played the persecution card a little too soon.

    Now Uncommon Descent, aiming for a trifecta of denialism, is using HIV/AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg to attack the orthodoxy. It really is true, cranks are so incompetent at reason and logic they simply can’t see that they’re making a terrible case. In this instance, they’re using Duesberg’s Chromosomal Chaos hypothesis to suggest that science is so addicted to Darwinism we’ve been getting not just cancer research, but bacterial resistance wrong for decades.

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  • Want to hear a dirty little secret?

    The New York Times writes an editorial about hospital rankings based on mortality of medicare patients from cardiac disease, and not surprisingly, misses the point on metrics of patient survival comparisons between hospitals.

    Famed medical institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital are lumped into the broad national average category when perhaps they deserve better (we can’t tell), and no doubt many other hospitals deserve a lesser ranking. In the next round of evaluations, the Medicare program ought to make public every institution’s mortality rates along with any caveats needed to help patients understand them.

    I’ll tell you a dirty little secret if you like. It explains why all this data is essentially going to be bunk.
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  • CNN covers "the Secret"

    And actually doesn’t make a hash of it. If CNN actually dedicated this much effort to all their journalism, people might actually emerge from their site more informed than when they showed up – a rare occurrence.

    For those of you who haven’t heard of “the Secret”, it’s the latest woo-laden self-help nonsense that proposes powerful new physical laws about the universe. In this case, the Law of Attraction. That is, that “like attracts like”. Translated into self-help, it means that positive thinking makes things happen, always, every time. It is a law after all.

    Now, people like me who think most self-help books, theories and advocates are scams, nonsense, and charlatans respectively, are immediately skeptical of new physical laws that are dreamed up by Australian TV producers like Rhonda Byrne and promoted by people like Oprah. CNN was good enough to actually get some skeptics’ opinions – and they nail it pretty well.
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  • WaPo publishes anti-GW nonsense

    The pathetic thing is that it’s the same old tripe. Emily Yoffe writes “Gloom and Doom in A Sunny Day” and rehashes the same tired old anti-GW tripe.

    We start with the use of an idiotic example of misunderstanding climate change to mock global warming:

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  • Bong Hits Lipitor 4 Jesus

    Boingboing puts it eloquently:

  • The drug war – another assault on reason

    I’m deeply saddened by the results of the most recent Supreme Court decision on the free speech rights of students. The so-called “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case was decided in favor of the school.

    WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner case — a split decision that limits students’ free speech rights.

    Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002.

    Principal Deborah Morse confiscated it and suspended Frederick. He sued, taking his case all the way to the nation’s highest court.

    The justices ruled 6-3 that Frederick’s free speech rights were not violated by his suspension over what the majority’s written opinion called a “sophomoric” banner. (Watch the banner unfurl and launch a legal battle Video)

    “It was reasonable for (the principal) to conclude that the banner promoted illegal drug use– and that failing to act would send a powerful message to the students in her charge,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.

    You hear that? Free speech is OK until it promotes something the government doesn’t like. For instance, drug use. When the hell did we become so obsessed over illegal drug use, even pot (for Jesus), as advocated in this sign that students can’t legally speak about it? Off school grounds no less? This is a bizarre case. Even though student free speech tends to be limited relative to political speech outside the school, the fact that he had the banner across the street from the school, to me at least, should have protected him from any disciplinary action.

    I think Stevens summarizes just how I feel though in his dissent:

    Roberts was supported by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito. Breyer noted separately he would give Morse qualified immunity from the lawsuit, but did not sign onto the majority’s broader free speech limits on students.

    In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message.”

    He was backed by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

    This leads me to another point, and a topic I think we’ll discuss in the future here at denialism blog. And that is the anti-drug science that comes out of funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse or NIDA. While not truly junk science per se, it tends to always be misinterpreted and twisted to present a uniformly anti-drug message. I consider this the political abuse of science by the government, and hope to write about it when it comes up in the future.

  • Another loss for ID

    The Brits have decided that Intelligent Design creationism, is well, creationism. It will not be allowed in science classes in the UK.

    The government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum.

    It has also defined “Intelligent Design”, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with “creationism”.

    …

    The petition was posted by James Rocks of the Science, Just Science campaign, a group that formed to counter a nascent anti-evolution lobby in the UK.

    He wrote: “Creationism & Intelligent design are…being used disingenuously to portray science & the theory or evolution as being in crisis when they are not… These ideas therefore do not constitute science, cannot be considered scientific education and therefore do not belong in the nation’s science classrooms.”

    No. Can’t have. Not science.