<Jenny McCarthy>
My child didn't eat a tuna steak 5 minutes before he was diagnosed with autism!
</Jenny McCarthy>

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It seems there's a portion of the population that will compulsively latch onto hear-say and pseudoscience nonsense and conspiracy theories, no matter what we do. Maybe we should just accept that. Just deal with it and make the best of things.

I've got this totally scientific evidence that autism is caused by the ink in lottery tickets. The ink doesn't affect adults, but the chemicals stick to your fingers. Then when you touch your kids the chemicals get absorbed through their skin and disrupt their developing brains. My kid was perfectly healthy one morning, and at a routine checkup that afternoon my child was diagnosed with autism! And the only thing that happened in between was that I bought lottery tickets and hugged by child! You can't imagine how devastating that is to a parent, unless of course you're a parent who bought a lottery ticket and immediately had their child diagnosed with autism.

Have the so-called "scientists" tested the lottery ticket ink? HELL NO! The government rakes in millions of dollars on lottery tickets! Scientists all want grant money (our money taken in taxes!) to do their research. And is the government going to give them money if the government doesn't like the results of that research! OF COURSE the scientists are going to be biased and tow the government line.

I am not anti-lottery-tickets.
I just want to reduce the ink and reduce the toxins. Lottery tickets are fine when the government proves that that new ink ensures no children will get autism.
If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want their kid to have autism, or whether they'd choose to pass up on a lousy lottery ticket, well duh they'll pass up on the lousy lottery ticket.

What parent would ever knowingly risk giving their child autism? It's unthinkable! It's just not worth the risk.

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Because the percentage of scientists who say anti-vax is nonsense is within a rounding error of 100%,
and because the percentage of scientists who say global warming is real and serious is within a rounding error of 100%.

(Not that I know jack squat about James Cameron's movie, but the question was why one celebrity voice would be credible while another would not be. A celebrity who doesn't speak French, but who accurately recites a French dictionary, is backed by the full credibility of that dictionary.)

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The tone was intended to be playfully humorous. I called you a "dick" for the sole purpose of invoking the "right and a dick" thing in a self-referential manner. "Whistling innocently" was my best effort to hang a guilty-of-mischief hat on it.

C'est la vie, c'est la internet.

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Calling people "overbearing assholes" makes you a total dick.

::whistles innocently and wanders away::

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I know nothing about the merits (or lack of merits) of a "European schedule" vs any other schedule, but reading your post all I can think is...

People are screaming that flowers attract fairies and fairies are eating children's brains, to which you reply:
"Just plant European bushes outside the schools. European flowers don't attract fairies."

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You could rev up to about 1940's era technology pretty quickly. With the exception of flat screen TVs, the internet and integrated circuits that brings us pretty close to modern standards of living. After that you've exhausted all of the low hanging fruit like high tensile steel, most ceramics and crude plastics. Space age technologies (flexible products like modern rubber, silicone rubbers and other elastomers, hyper pure titanium, rare earth alloys, etc and of course Velcro) took about 4% of the national GDP to identify uses for, and then produce on an industrial scale over the period of a decade. This was on top of an incredibly prosperous era and winding down from the education boom of the 1940's that produced the scientists needed for the space race. Given any other outcome, we'd be lucky to have late 1980's technology today.

The uptick of .net seems to have been that they unified their C/C++ computer scientists and C# business programming jockies, along with powershell scripting monkeys on top of the same framework. And fir the first two, share the same development environment.

To further the point, the placebo effect is at work even when you take medication with an active ingredient.

Pain reduction, for instance, occurs much faster than is possible by purely chemical effects when you take a tylenol. I've heard up to 40% of the painkilling effect is placebo, and it happens moments after you take the pill. You're anticipating relief from the drug, and so your brain helps things along.

Homeopathy is garbage, and it should be treated exactly as the Australian government is treating it. But it's worth noting that a lot of these people DO have noticeable health benefits from being in contact with a homeopath. But homeopaths take time to talk to their patients and understand what the problem is, and sometimes that in and of itself is of benefit. On top of the vials of water, many of these homeopaths will make dietary and lifestyle recommendations that a regular doctor might not consider at first. Going for a doctor's appointment and feeling ignored doesn't increase one's sense of well-being.

What we should really be doing is providing more layers to our healthcare systems that centre less around overworked doctors prescribing medication, and more around trained health professionals (nurses, nutritionists, etc.) that can take some time and help you figure out what your trouble is and whether you really need to see a doctor, or if maybe you just need to cut things out of your diet or walk more or whatever.

First of all, that was probably a statement of opinion.

But looking at it critically, it may be a statement of opinion based on the fact that as a CEO, his credibility was damaged, and that's a major impediment to his actual ability to do his job. If the employees of the company hold him in low regard, he'll have a hard time motivating them or retaining them. In a year, he may well have been forced to resign for being unable to successfully fulfil his CEO duties, entirely because of this somewhat intangible quality.

Or, look at it this way: Steve Jobs was a great CEO not because he was an amazing engineer, but because he was inspiring to his workers as well as being an interesting and popular public figure. His ability to deliver on his responsibilities as CEO were based almost entirely on his personality. Eich was starting at a bad place, and it was going to be much harder for him to move forward.

I'd argue that it was more about the straight allies of the LGBT community than the LGBT community themselves. OKCupid is run by straight dudes, and they're not a front for any LGBT organisation that I know of.

This was a delightfully broad-based protest, not stemming from any group in particular.

It is, in fact, why I find it so absolutely irritating that bloggers keep going on about how 'damaging' this is to 'free speech'. This was free speech WORKING. This was a whole bunch of people speaking out and saying that it's no more acceptable for CEOs to hold this kind of opinion on equal marriage as it would be for them to hold a similar opinion on interracial marriage.

There's no outrage because he's changed his position (or, possibly, as other commenters have said, he had that position all along and merely claimed he was against equal marriage because that was the political thing to do).

Eich was given the opportunity to recant, but he didn't, strongly implying that this is still the thing that he believes.

"Seriously, think about that. What happens when this mentality involuntarily leads society to continue to shrink their ability to be attentive to anything?"

Someone made a documentary film on this subject a few years ago. IIRC it was called "Idiocracy".

Distorted picture? Seriously? Republicans fought a major legislative war to ... literally .... take food out of the mouths of hungry children. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, feeding children in poverty through no fault of their own, Republicans wanted to slash it by $40 billion, and did slash it $9 billion. I could go on and on about the appalling impact of other Republican policies, but that right there, literally fighting to take food out of the mouths of hungry children, is so wildly egregious to establish the Republican model of compassion. Taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. Taking fucking food out of the mouths of hungry children. At that point, virtually the only way to "paint a distorted picture" would be drag in Nazis or something.

I've seen the figures, and they don't support your claim.

Republican tax deductible giving is indeed higher, but you and I both know that tax deductible doesn't equal charity. Charity is giving to benefit other people, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, treating the sick, donating to research to cure diseases for the benefit all mankind, and so on.

A group of people buying themselves a clubhouse is tax deductible if you call the building a "church", hiring people to run that clubhouse and preform services for themselves is tax deductible if you call those services "religious services". But you and I both know that any money that goes towards buildings or goods or services for oneself is not charity. If someone gives $300 to their church, and only 3% of the church budget goes to feeding the homeless, then that's really only $9 given to charity and (tax deductible but non-charitable) $291 dollars buying a building and services for oneself.

The money given to buy themselves a church and buy themselves religious services cuts into disposable income, it cuts into the money Republicans give to charity.

Republicans have higher tax-deductible giving, but lower charitable giving.

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There have been quite a few studies on how single-digit percent of Jews actively practice religion and/or marry a religious Jew; however those who observe at least some traditions from a cultural standpoint is well over 75%. We're all creatures of habit, but somewhere along the way we mixed religion and custom together.