Month: February 2013
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No, It's Not the Sugar – Bittman and MotherJones have overinterpreted another study
Diet seems to be all over the New York Times this week, with an oversell of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, and now Mark Bittman, everyone’s favorite food scold, declaring sugar is the culprit for rising diabetes. His article is based on this interesting new article in PLoS One and begins with this wildly-inaccurate…
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What happens when you study conspiracy theories? The conspiracy theorists make up conspiracy theories about you!
I’ve known about this effect for a while as I’ve been variously accused of being in the pocket of big pharma, big ag, big science, democrats and republicans etc. Now Stephan Lewandowsky, in follow up to his “NASA Faked the Moon Landings – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax.” paper, has used these conspiratorial responses…
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What is the cause of excess costs in health care Part 4 – Time's "Bitter Pill", CEO compensation and the Kafkaesque chargemaster
Steven Brill’s extensive piece in Time has generated a good discussion once again on why Americans pay so much more for health care than other countries, and while I agree with most of his critiques, he seems to have gotten overly hung-up on the hospital chargemaster. Readers of this blog know I’ve also discussed reform…
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Denialism From Forbes Courtesy of Heartland Hack James Taylor
It’s fascinating when you catch the start of a new bogus claim enter the denialsphere, bounce from site to site, and echo about without any evidence of critical analysis or intelligence on the part of the denialists. A good example of this was an article by Heartland Institute’s contributor to Forbes, James Taylor, falsely claiming…