Categories
Politics Skepticism/critical thinking

Oops, he did it again

Just yesterday, I commented about an article that analyzed President Bush’s penchant for using rather artless straw man fallacies when answering his critics. By an almost amazing coincidence, that very day he was busily engaged in doing more of the same in a press conference. For example, when asked about the terrorist surveillance program in […]

Categories
Medicine Politics

Good news

evolgen reports that that Specter-Harken amendment to restore some of the cuts to the NIH budget and provide a modest increase necessary to prevent the our biomedical research effort from slowly eroding. Support was broad, and it was bipartisan. (No doubt it doesn’t hurt that this is an election year.) However, this is just the […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine

African traditional healers and AIDS

Recently, the BBC posted an article soliciting opinions about whether African traditional or alternative medicines have a role in combatting AIDS. Not surprisingly there were a lot of credulous responses saying yes, but one response was more on target: BBC, this question “Can herbal medicine combat Aids?” to me is a big joke. HIV death […]

Categories
Politics Skepticism/critical thinking

President Straw Man

Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a news analysis article pointing out a politician’s love of a logical fallacy: WASHINGTON – “Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day,” President Bush said recently. Another time he said, “Some say […]

Categories
Politics

Is this what we’re fighting for?

American soldiers are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan. It’s not nearly as many as in Iraq, and there aren’t nearly as many news stories about it, to be sure, but we are still spending blood and treasure to “stabilize” this supremely dysfunctional nation. The reason, we are told, is to bring freedom and to […]