Archive for May, 2009

Measles outbreak “worst in years”

Posted by admin in vaccine denial on May 20th, 2009

Ben Goldacre commenting on this article: “Take a bow, morons“.

Let’s say this again. It’s only a matter of time before a child is damaged or killed by the effects of measles.

In a perverse way, I’m looking forward to how the Daily Mail reports it. As long as the affected family is white, middle-class and in work of course.

No Comments

More woo than a WW2 siren: quantum healing

Posted by admin in homeoquackery, stupid medicine on May 15th, 2009

A bonus cockbucket for you today. Before I was exposed to the lovely Ben Goldacre, not like that you smutty people, I confess I had some vague feeling that there might be something in some of this alternative medicine stuff. Turns out, it was crap. Simple proposition: if there was anything in any of it, it wouldn’t be alternative would it? There’s no conspiracy. If it worked, your GP and the fine upstanding drugs companies, possibly even NICE, would be all over it.

It doesn’t fucking work.

It doesn’t stop stupidity like “The Secret”, or anything with “quantum” in the title roping in a bunch of suckers and making the perpetrators at the top of the pyramid a fuckload of money.

Then I came across this absolute beauty. It has everything: DNA, resonance, quantum, chakras, sacred geometry and much, much more! All you need to do is watch a video and listen to some special music.

Tell you what, I’ll listen to some trip hop and watch my screensaver for a bit. We can even get a bunch of people to do and and collate the results?

No Comments

Christian School Threatens To Expel Student For Taking Girlfriend To Secular Prom

Posted by admin in religious nuttery on May 15th, 2009

This is just beautiful.

A school is a place for flinging some facts at our children, teaching them how to learn and to work out where they stand in the social pecking order so their teens and early twenties can be angst-ridden messes.

Once you attach the words religious, Christian, Muslim, Jewish to the word school, that bullshit gets stepped up a level. And here is a great example:

Christian School Threatens To Expel Student For Taking Girlfriend To Secular Prom

Apparently it’s not him that’s the issue, it’s the hussies in their low-cut dresses that will lead him from the one true path. Jezebel sums this up neatly as the equvalent of “Well, she wore a skirt, she was asking to be raped on her way home from work.”

Just get the fuck out you weirdoes.

1 Comment

Why Oprah (& millions of her fans) love Jenny McCarthy

Posted by admin in oprah oddness, weird yanks on May 14th, 2009

This is the kind of pop-psychology I love. It’s not entirely unrelated to the thesis of the “Happiness Hypothesis” that we’re 95% elephant that does whatever the fuck it wants and 5% of rider hanging on like grim death steering it away from the tar pit[1].

So why does Oprah persist in plugging this shit uncritically? Because it “feels right”. That’s right, we think with our feelings and the plural of anecdote is data. Or not.

I do kinda get the feeling that the tide is now turning; critical thinkers are getting more militant about exposing such intellectual fraud and that we’re beginning to get the message out. Now all we need are media that will cover the retractions as well as the hype.

[1] Sorry, I’ve been to the La Brea tar pits in LA recently so it’s an appealing metphor.

No Comments

‘Superfood’ Promoted on Oprah’s Site Robs Amazon Poor of Staple

Posted by admin in oprah oddness, weird yanks on May 14th, 2009

A quick Oprah-bash. Plugging an Amazon staple food causes its price to rise up to sixty-fold so Americans can chow down on a nutrient-rich berry that FDA hasn’t issued an opinion on.

A couple of thoughts:

1. Hippies please feel free to rail against “globalisation”. Then please to stop using your Asian mobile phone and wearing those Indian/Egyptian/American cotton clothes. On second thought…

2. This is a classic “unintended consequence”. Oprah mouths off without thought to what the outcome might be. Still, if these people starve, she’ll get another programme out of it. Yay.

More Oprah to follow…

No Comments

Muslim dentist ‘refused to treat woman unless she wore headscarf’

Posted by admin in religious nuttery on May 12th, 2009

Riding on the back of the #theBNParetwats Twitter meme, we get this.

OK, so it’s in the Torygraph, so not that far removed from our racist, homophobic institution, that Daily Mail so kinda quite expected but still. It’s shit like this that brings out the latent BNP in anyone.

Can I just say: “who the fuck do you think you are?” Do you really think you’re doing us all a favour by stocking a headscarf in your little torture chamber? You’ve been spanked by your licensing authority once already for being a petty minded little religious stooge, by this stage I trust you’re gong to get struck off and sent back to the Halal butchers you belong in. You are living, working, paying taxes and servicing clients in a liberal democracy, such as it is. Live with it or go somewhere more in line with your level of cretinousness.

Or maybe Halal dentistry? Would that work?

4 Comments

Texas Charging Rape Victims For Rape Kits

Posted by admin in religious nuttery, weird yanks on May 11th, 2009

In a very unsurprising turn of events, especially in the light of the relatively enlightened LA having problems funding rape testing, it appears that Texas is charging rape victims up to $1800 for gathering evidence against their attackers.

When your head has stopped spinning and vomiting what looks very much like pea soup, consider that this the the same state where by a vote of 11-2, the door is wide open for religious anti-knowledge wingnuts to explain to children that the world is only 6000 years old.

Am I becoming an old fart? I remember doing physics (Doc Williams, bless ‘im, always good for an astronomy red herring) at school and having Geiger counters and shit and watching radioactive decay in progress, and from that extrapolating some very big numbers for the age of stuff. It’s these peoples ignorance of basic, high school science that leads so such belief in sky fairies.

Gah.

3 Comments

Oprah KFC offer fails to be condemned by PETA

Posted by admin in weird yanks on May 8th, 2009

So Oprah is giving away a coupon for free KFC chicken.

Uncharitably, my first response to this was “woman with weight issues sends acolytes to lard out in KFC”. It was then, more charitably, pointed out to me by assorted friends that “at least it’s grilled chicken”. Shyeah right. That chicken is going to get chased down by a mess of coleslaw, corn dripping in butter and a bucket of fries. And a diet coke.

Then, however, Deceiver pointed out that PETA have completely fluffed the chance to give Oprah a well-deserved carniverous roasting. This same Oprah who was the tofu-munchers’ woman of the year in 2008.

Me, I’m still not over the bullshit that was The Secret.

1 Comment

Erotic photography of people over 60 may be outlawed…

Posted by admin in weird yanks on May 7th, 2009

…in a slightly uptight state of the US.

This one nearly passed under the radar but as I thought about it, the more bizarre. I can see that preventing the exploitation of those unable to give consent, such as we do already with children, is a Good Thing. But to blanket label people over 60 “incompetent” and yet require certification of the mentally incompetent smacks of all kinds of bullshit!

I think there should at least be a committee which assesses the 60+ for their suitability for gerontoporn. A certain level of breast droop or penis enwrinklement would render the potential GILF ineligible.

The queue for the commitee forms over there. A long way over there. Behind the screen. Once I’ve got the blindfold on.

No Comments

CNN news anchor now expert on teen sex

Posted by admin in teen sex, weird yanks on May 5th, 2009

I have no idea, thankfully, who this nutjob is, but he is firmly in the cockbucket demographic. Apparently making emergency contraception available will lead to slutty behaviour in their seventeen year old girls. Luckily, Jezebel is there to rip him a new one.

This did lead me to wonder what would happen in the UK if this happened? Would we have Kate Adie lecturing us on how short skirts are just asking for rape? Or Paxman telling us that taking a quick toke on a joint is the first step to becoming a crack whore?

Fuck it. Chris Morris did it all already.

1 Comment