Comment Summary, someone? (Score 2) 1029
'R.I.P.D.,' 'After Earth,' 'White House Down,' 'Pacific Rim,' and 'The Lone Ranger.'
Could someone briefly explain why *any* of those movies would be compelling, even if done well?
'R.I.P.D.,' 'After Earth,' 'White House Down,' 'Pacific Rim,' and 'The Lone Ranger.'
Could someone briefly explain why *any* of those movies would be compelling, even if done well?
Because the correct form is probably 'mercuric', 'mercuride', or some other chemo-jargon that I don't know and wasn't motivated to look up.
And it's not like they pour a little elemental mercury into every vial, though that notion seems to be what the fear-mongering thrives on.
'Cause movies weren't formulaic before 2005.
to play devils advocate here, medical scince has been wrong before:
It has been right a time or too as well.
The fact that science is sometimes wrong is not evidence that some particular fringe belief is correct. Remember that "They also laughed at Bozo the Clown".
When the people who know what they're talking about are in widespread agreement about some issue, that's generally an indication that what they're saying is the best understanding of the issue available.
But people who are motivated to reject it still will. Cf. evolution, global warming, the shoah (aka holocaust).
There is concern in the medical community that the use of a faux vaccination campaign to get OBL's DNA will lead to more resistance to vaccines being promoted by western medicine.
J schools are the problem.
Or maybe it's just that the media thrives on controversy, not on informing the public.
A lot of "antivaxxer" dolts trumpet Wakefield in that he's a victim of a hush-up and that he shall be exonerated. A good stick in the eye of these people is that Wakefield himself only sought to discredit MMR so that he could sell his own vaccine
He was also receiving "research funding" from an ambulance chaser who was suing the makers of MMR for other reasons.
Mod parent down all you like, but cracking the numbers is actually a pretty good idea.
If the non-vaccinated kids have significantly lower rates of autism, we accept that the MMR jab is responsible in some way, even if we don't understand how yet.
If not, we accept that the whole MMR avoidance thing is utter bullcrap.
Sounds like a fair way to run an unbiased experiment to me.
They quit using the "mercury" preservative that purportedly causes autism over a decade ago, and the rate of autism diagnoses in young children has kept going up.
The doctor that started all of his has been shown to be a fraud, sponsored by an ambulance chaser.
Your experiment would be interesting, but it's not necessary. And the outcome wouldn't convince the True Believers anyway.
but was ignominiously rejected.
By the zoo, or by the rhino?
If it was good enough for the pharaohs, it's good enough for the rhinos.
I dont understand why the ice age theory does not get more attention. Aren't we due for one according to the 100k year cycle?
The plot at the "interglacial" link above certainly seems to indicate that we're at or near a periodic minimum in ice volume.
Every winter a cold snap brings out a big crowd of people claiming that it disproves global warming.
Where are they during the current heat wave? Apparently the 'logic' only applies when it supports their position.
Climate change is not an existential threat.
Probably not, but there might be a possibility of a runaway system if it gets far enough from it's current equilibrium.
But certainly, it is an existential threat to our way of life. The US DoD and spy agencies have both identified climate change as the greatest threat to the USA in this century.
The polar ice caps are still here.
And I suspect that when the north one does disappear in a summer not so far in the future, that will be an inflection point in denialism. The lack of a north point is hard to deny. Even to oneself.
If evidence had any influence, there wouldn't be any denialism now.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
