Month: February 2012

  • The Heartland Documents, Doubt is their Product

    Everyone is writing about desmogblog’s leak of internal documents from the Heartland Institute. But to me I think leaked documents are nothing compared to their fully public, out-in-the-open history of being openly contemptuous of science, funding cranks with advanced degrees (though not in climate) to disparage the field, and their hosting of denialpalooza. James rightly…

  • Planned Parenthood: Trying to Addict Your Kids to Sex

    How’s this for a tinfoil hat conspiracy, brought to you by the American Life League– Planned Parenthood’s strategy in this great world is to: Phase one: Get kids addicted to sex. Phase two: profit! Through selling birth control, STD testing, and abortion.

  • Should doctors fire patients who won't vaccinate?

    WSJ has an article about the increasing number of pediatricians who fire their patients who refuse to vaccinate: Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are “firing” such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor’s responsibility to these…

  • More Evidence that Universal Health Care Would be Less Expensive

    We’ve written quite a bit about single payer health care systems as well as other models that are a mixture of public and private spending. We’ve also analyzed some of the sources of excess cost of US healthcare to other countries. What is uniformly true about universal health care systems is that they all spend…

  • Damn you Pubmed.org!

    Somebody please tell me why the national library of medicine gave up their pubmed.com and pubmed.org domains? It used to be you could just type “pubmed.org” and get pubmed. Now, some cyber squatter has put some worthless spam search on the site. Before I realized it wasn’t a site redesign my search got me redirected…

  • Stop Lurking Paul Krugman

    Sometimes I’m reading essays in major newspapers and have to wonder if they’ve been reading denialism blog. Today, Krugman on Santorum: Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse…

  • What Illegal Abortion Looks Like

    Many are linking to this story around the blogosphere and I encourage everyone to read it. In it, a Ob/Gyn describes her emergency care of a woman who arrived in her ED in hemorrhagic shock from a botched illegal abortion. Though clearly it was touch and go and there was some panicky action, our heroine…

  • More Examples of Right Wing Stupidity/Racism

    Lot’s of blogging hay was made over the conservatives = stupid and racist article two weeks ago, but it seems like since that was published they’re going out of their way to provide supporting evidence. Between reincarnating a 40 year old dead argument about whether or not women should be able to have birth control,…

  • The Great Labor Department Conspiracy to fake new jobs

    One of the characteristics of defective thinking, particularly of cranks (see theHOWTO) that we’ve discussed on scienceblogs is their poor ability to process information that is contradictory. Last week there were some interesting reports on a study which suggested those who believe in conspiracy theories can hold two seemingly contradictory pieces of information in their…

  • A global warming conspiracy theorist has won 4 states, should we be worried?

    The states in Green have gone for Rick Santorum, who besides having a a Google problem also believes in one of the wackiest conspiracy theories there is – the climate change hoax. That is, the belief that there is a shady group of Illuminati that have power over thousands of climate scientists from all over…