Hitchens: "(Human beings starting out) Worshipping Bears early on, I can sort of see why..."

Made me laugh out loud. Someone needs to grab that sound bite and send it to Steven Colbert.

Hitchens: "If I can't be erect, at least I can be upright."

I found McGrath's personal style cloying and suspect. He was also unbelievably deferential to "Mr. Hitchens" over and over again. He never made an effort to argue for God's existence or for the story of the Christian God in particular, or even treated of the redemption story that Hitchens began to shred in his first segment.

Hitchens' story about Goebbels' excommunication was priceless. No wonder I'm a fallen Catholic. I wish he ahd taken on McGrath's assertion that nature cannot be read as authoritatively atheistic, agnostic, or Christian/theistic, but accommodates itself to all three.

"We're half a chromosome away from chimpanzees, and . . it . . shows." He turns a wicked phrase.

The one thing on which I diverge from Hitchens is his assertion that we're involved in a just war. For the rest I'd give him every point in the match.

Mcgrath: "I used to be an athiest, but then I saw all this wonderful evidence that religion was true. However, most of that evidence consists of me thinking atheism is a religion and a joke about nuns and urine. Goodnight!"

As much as I disagree with Hitchens about his stance on the war, I'm at least able to understand his justification for it. If Bush was this honest about "killing our enemies", I might have more respect for him, because his excuses just don't cut it anymore.

Norm, why did you post the blog on Bill Maher? I found the link to be just a rant against what Bill said, but the blogger didn't really back up his rant. Most of his links were to other rants. Just wondering what opinion you had that might have led to posting the link here?

Vaccines are bad for a lot of reasons that Bill did not mention. Some of them contain mercury. Some have formaldehyde. The pharmaceutical companies use many different preservatives to prolong the shelf life of vaccines. Vaccines shelf life should never be prolonged. To be effective vaccines need to be fresh.

Also, they wear off much faster than they tell you so you think you are safe, but you might not be sooner than you were told.

Orac is an establishment dildo who can't accept the fact that ALL medicine was alternative at some point. He reminds me of the anecdote told in Vonnegut's last book, Man Without a Country, in which a young surgeon was ostracized by the medical establishment for suggesting doctors should wash their hands after handling cadavers. Moreover, suspicion of Big Pharm & their minions in the FDA is perfectly rational after all the drug-induced heart attacks & advertising scare tactics. I don't necessarily share Maher's suspicion of all vaccines, but with obvious crooks like Donald Rumsfeld at the helm of the pharmaceutical industry, it's easy to see why Maher feels that way. The question should be, "Is Orac really that ignorant?"

Oh BDM, you disappoint. You "don't believe in vaccination either." I see you do but with reservations that you don't spell out. Make an argument, don't just give us empty rhetoric like all medicine was alternative at some point. Now I'm suspicious of big Pharma. We should all be on guard when it comes to the coporate bandits, after all there primary goal is profit not good deeds. Understanding how Bill Maher feels is not evidence that his arguments are sound. The question should be what were you thinking when you made your comments.

Norm, As Mac observes above, it’s Orac who’s using the empty rhetoric. And as you yourself observe, “there (sic) primary goal is corporate profits, not good deeds,” so I don’t understand where you stand on this issue. I can remember as a kid feeling grateful for the vaccines I received, and feeling sorry for people in other countries who still must contend with malaria & diphtheria & cholera and other diseases that we Americans now take for granted. But now it seems as if WE are the third world country and the world is passing US by. Where else is cough syrup killing children? And the CDC has been warning about anti-bacterial soaps & lotions for years, but Orac’s friends in the pharmaceutical industry have been using scare tactics to foist those products on us anyway. And now, guess what. Drug resistant strains of staphylococcus have become so prevalent that they may soon overtake AIDS in death tolls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19staph.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1192791985-2Tyf3SH+QV7knz5Ps0ktig

Remember a couple years ago when there weren’t enough flu vaccines for everyone? This was because the company that manufactured most flu vaccines, Chiron Corp., lost its license, and the FDA was aware of Chiron’s violations for almost a year, but they remained mum.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58482-2004Nov17.html

As I write this, there’s a commercial on TeeVee for Ambien, the “sleep aid.” The “warning” portion of the script is longer than the rest of the commercial. Some users, states the warning, might get amnesia while driving. I’m not making this up; it’s what the commercial really said. I wish I could type fast enough to include the whole warning disclosure. Guess who makes Ambien. It’s Donald Rumsfeld’s old company, G.D. Searle & Co., a division of Monsanto and makers of such other gems as aspartame and the largely ineffective Celebrex, both of which were “fast-tracked” by the FDA. And why are so many people having difficulty sleeping? Could it be they’re petrified of the junk Big Pharm is pumping into them and their kids? Orac even invokes the NIH, probably the world’s most corrupt medical institution. In 2000 (it took several years for the news to make it all the way across the Atlantic) Spanish researchers published a report showing that THC, the active ingredient in pot, may prevent brain cancer. But, perhaps more importantly, they revealed that the NIH made the same discovery way, way back in 1974, but that they concealed the information at the request of the also notoriously corrupt DEA so that they could continue raking in billions for their phony baloney drug war. http://www.alternet.org/story/9257/

The same Spanish research also found that pot actually reduces Alzheimer’s related memory loss. http://www.world-science.net/othernews/061018_marijuana.htm

But if Orac & his friends in the medical establishment have their way, this information will never be widely disseminated.

I could go on and on. The upshot is that I stand by my original comment that Orac is an establishment dildo spewing Big Pharm disinformation. I didn’t see the original Real Time episode to which he refers, but IMO, Maher is perfectly justified in suspecting vaccine manufacturers and their motives. One Good Move usually supports the skeptical approach, which, I assume, is why you post a Maher clip at least once a week. Why are you now embracing the anti-skeptic establishment rhetoric?

I think Orac is probably over-reacting. I think Mahr was probably not saying "toxins" in the same way Homeopaths talk about "toxins", he's probably talking about the Trans-fat/pill popping/extraneous drug culture we live in.

I can see his position as reasonable though, to watch some people reject vaccines outright because they don't trust medical science, which must be frustrating to a medical scientist.

I think that the truth about vaccines falls somewhere between Orac, with his unwavering support of vaccines, and the "toxin" group, which completely distrusts any sort of drug/vaccine.

Agreed. But I still think Orac is a dogmatic dildo.