Denialism

Month: November 2007

  • Don’t give creationists power of attorney

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    MarkH
    in

    Just giving everyone a heads up. If you’re an atheist and you’re starting to get a little demented make sure someone is there to protect you from religious people with an axe to grind. The story of the so-called turning of Antony Flew is sad, and really very cruel, as IDers and religious ideologues have…

  • Gullible is not in the dictionary

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    by

    MarkH
    in

    As either evidence that you can convince idiots of anything to get high, or that police don’t have a sense of humor, check out the Smoking Gun’s coverage of this police bulletin warning of a new drug – Jenkem. The hilarious part? The drug is supposedly created by fermenting human sewage in the sun, then…

  • Why we don’t argue with denialists – the cartoon!

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    by

    MarkH
    in ,

    From Cectic of course.

  • Read this Post! WSJ on Subliminal Advertising

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    MarkH
    in

    Cynthia Crossen writes in today’s Journal about subliminal advertising: At a New York press conference 50 years ago, a market researcher, James Vicary, announced he had invented a way to make people buy things whether they wanted them or not. It was called subliminal advertising. He had tested the process at a New Jersey movie…

  • Vikings Disprove Global Warming!

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    MarkH
    in

    It’s the latest idiotic attack on the science of global warming, Joe Queenan tells us it was great for the Vikings! Why the LA Times publishes this crap is beyond me. So the argument is, the Vikings had a merry old time the last time it was warm like today, therefore, why worry? Global warming…

  • Ben Stein loses all intellectual credibility

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    MarkH
    in

    On his blog Stein espouses one of the weakest attacks I’ve heard yet against evolution, and not even original. It’s a pathetic set of logical fallacies. Basically, he starts from the assumption that scientific theories arise if they serve the prevailing ideology of the time period, and because “Darwinism” was developed during the Victorian/imperialist age,…

  • The Origin of HIV in the Americas

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    MarkH
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    The mainstream media has been reporting on this paper (open access at PNAS) on the hunt for the origin of HIV in the Americas. The surprising result was the finding that HIV first came to the United States from Haiti (rather than the previous origin which was thought to be a flight attendant from Canada)…

  • Animal Rights Extremists Wreck Scientist’s House

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    MarkH
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    The latest pathetic assault on a scientist came from ALF against UCLA scientist Edyth London. Using a garden hose they flooded her home, causing tens of thousands in damage. However, rather than intimidating her out of performing research in addiction she has written an article for the LA Times, defending animal research. For years, I…

  • Fight on Phenomenon!

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    MarkH
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    Last week you may remember I watched phenomenon with eye out for Uri Geller’s nonsense, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Criss Angel playing the skeptic pretty well. Well this week’s was awesome! Jim Callahan does a pretty cheesy psychic bit, with some really terrible acting, and it’s so bad that Angel calls him…

  • Ask A Scienceblogger – Which parts of the human body could you design better?

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    MarkH
    in

    The question this month is “Which parts of the human body could you design better?” This is a great question, because a lot of aspects of the human body represent what worked well enough for survival, not necessarily what works best. Therefore the engineering ends up being rather ramshackle, and convoluted, and sometimes, downright terrible.…