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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Quackery Television

Jenny McCarthy shows off her intellect

I know, I know it seems like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but some creature that I can’t identify is having a fight somewhere in the neighborhood, freaking out my dog, and now I can’t go back to sleep; so why not blog? In any case, I found out last week that Jenny […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Discover: Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On?

Unfortunately, Orac has been feeling a bit under the weather since last night–so much so that he actually did something he rarely does and stayed home from work. But enough with the third person schtick. If I feel better later, maybe I’ll post something. Hopefully I’ll be back to 100% tonight and can produce the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The hypocrisy of anti-vaccine activists

If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement in general and one of its chief mouthpieces for propaganda, the Age of Autism blog, in particular, it’s rank hypocrisy. One of the key tenets of anti-vaccine ideology is an unrelenting distrust of big pharma. While that in and of itself would not be entirely unreasonable, given […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Melanie Phillips: Crank magnetism in action on evolution and vaccines

A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

The best snark at Oprah Winfrey…

…comes, from of all places, Gawker: Oh, good, Oprah is going to give Jenny McCarthy a talk show, because she wants your kid to die of the measles. McCarthy, a famous celebrity from the long-defunct Playboy magazine and much missed MTV channel, has been on a crusade to find an evildoer responsible for her son’s […]