Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Pertussis returns in states with lax vaccination laws

I’m with Kevin, M.D. on this one. Not giving required vaccinations is akin to child neglect: CHICAGO – State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests. All states allow children to be exempted from school immunization requirements for […]

Categories
Anti-Semitism History Holocaust Holocaust denial

An anti-Semite demands: Why a Holocaust museum but no slavery museum?

The other day, in the midst of a discussion about one of my posts about Holocaust denial, an anti-Semite posting as “bernarda” demanded: Then I read books like Norman Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry and understood that it [the Holocaust] has just become a propaganda tool to create a permanent guilt complex, even on Americans who had […]

Categories
Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

More distortion of peer-reviewed data by HIV/AIDS “dissidents”

I knew there was a reason that I don’t often blog about politics, and yesterday reminded me of it. Maybe I should have just launched another enthusiastic debunking of the distortions and outright false information put out by antivaccination advocates like Dawn Winkler. Instead, I thought it might be educational to return to a topic […]

Categories
Medicine Politics

Libya’s miscarriage of justice

Declan Butler of Nature has issued a call for help from the scientific and medical blogosphere in protesting and raising awareness about an utter travesty of justice, a vile and utterly vicious miscarriage of justice. This is one that I can’t help but throw the paltry weight of my own blog behind. Here’s the story: […]

Categories
Personal Politics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Shortsighted, not curious, and proud of it!

While I am on vacation, I’m reprinting a number of “Classic Insolence” posts to keep the blog active while I’m gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I’m guessing that quite a few of my […]