Glutton for punishment


Deepak Chopra is incredible. After sticking his foot in his mouth once already with an awful article on genes, he then proceeds to kick himself in the teeth, followed by an attempt to turn himself inside out. No, I’m sorry, I simply can’t read the Huffington Post as long as this clown graces its pages…and I’m ashamed that he can misrepresent himself as knowledgeable about science and medicine in this country, and that people buy his books. Quacks ought to be tarred and feathered (metaphorically) and run off, I think.

Comments

  1. Stephen Erickson says

    PZ, I wouldn’t give up on HuffPo just because of Deep-pocket Chopra.

    The commenters, some quite knowledgeable and articulate, have been giving it to him with increasing incisiveness.

  2. Stephen Erickson says

    I hasten to add, HuffPo includes quite a wide variety of viewpoints and other content under its umbrella, from high-brow to low, to its credit, IMO.

  3. says

    Quacks ought to be tarred and feathered (metaphorically) and run off, I think.

    Delete the “(metaphorically)” and I’ll agree with you 100 percent.

  4. ProfWombat says

    Knew Chopra before he got ayurvedic and what-not; he was a first-class endocrinologist. Seems to me he got seduced by the green side of the force.

  5. says

    I’ve only read the Huffington post a couple of times, but everything I read seemed to be ok. I guess this is now going to be used to prove that even liberals can support ID.

    Incedentaly the wikipedia article on the Post currently starts “The Huffington Post (often referred to on the Internet as HuffPost or HuffPo) is a political group weblog founded by Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer. It was launched on May 9, 2005 as a news and commentary outlet to trash the Internet with a predominantly stalinist/maoist/commie tilt. Its roster of bloggers includes many people from Huffington’s extensive network of prominent friends, such as lesbos, traitors, commies, criminals, sexual offenders and other perverts in a broad array of fields – representing many different sick viewpoints.”

  6. oldhippie says

    Chopra’s tired nonsence would seem to show very little evidence for any form of intelligence.

  7. says

    Deepak gives hope to the half-dozen or so conservative scientists left in the US, by reminding us all that not all the irrational antiscientific loons are Christian Conservatives.

    It makes me feel better to know that the left and right each have more than enough obscurantist charlatans to ruin the country.

    Er, no, wait, that didn’t come out quite right….

  8. says

    Actually, PZ, I felt much the same way last year when, by a mere two weeks after its launch, the HuffPo had already published multiple articles full of antivaccination lunacy of the “vaccines cause autism” type, including articles by Janet Grilo, David Kirby, and Dr. Jay Gordon, a prominent pediatrician in Santa Monica who tends to cater to wealthy alties and who also has a tendency to buy into at least part of the HIV “dissident” line in addition to his antivaccination tripe (although I notice that he’s toned down his HIV “skepticism” that was on his website before since the death of Eliza Jane Scovill, whose care he was involved in.

  9. says

    I don’t think we should censor him (and I’m pretty sure no one’s seriously thinking of that, here). We should deflate and ridicule woos louder and more often. If someone speaks woo, he should be embarrased by it, and he should be informed exactly how he’s being wooish.

  10. Opiwan says

    PZ, you should check out Orac’s blog… he fisked the Chopwoo pretty thoroughly while you were on travel :)

  11. says

    Well considering the new importance of epigenetics it’s definitely scientifically viable that macro quantum chaos could change DNA through focused resonance of thought. It’s also the truth!

  12. says

    The endocrine system has hidden potential — specifically the connection between serotonin and the adrenal glands — just as Professor Robert Sapolsky. Serotonin turns into Melatonin which turns into DMT. Now use harmonic resonance and voila! You create a spirit body of biophotons.

  13. Steviepinhead says

    D’woo hempel strikes again.

    Actually, that was three strikes in the last five posts, D’woo. Yoo’re oot!

  14. says

    Bronze Dog:

    We should deflate and ridicule woos louder and more often.

    There’s something to be said for abusing anyone who spouts groundless lunacy yet expects it to be taken seriously. I actually posted something similar today on the way we’ve been waaaaay too tolerant of religion; what struck me about your comment here was that it seems to parallel some of my own sentiments:

    There is no sense of shame in fanatics. They insist they have a right to hold their views. I say that wherever their views conflict with reality, they must expect to be ridiculed.

    The problem, as I see it currently at any rate, is that there isn’t enough of this public shaming going on. The solution is obvious — and could be vastly entertaining.

  15. Andrew Wade says

    Actually, that was three strikes in the last five posts, D’woo. Yoo’re oot!

    You mean that wasn’t a parody? Wow.

  16. thwaite says

    I suspect D’woo is only channeling the cover story in the November issue of Discover magazine (not yet online): “THE NEW GENETICS: DNA is not your identity”. It’s all about epigenetics – modulation of gene expression throughout the lifespan, via e.g. methylation. It highlights work by Moshe Szyf, a pharmacologist at McGill studying cancer, and others. Author is Ethan Watters, whose bio lists no professional affiliations.

    The article does have some suggestive if unquantifiable tidbits. M. Z. Fang’s 2003 paper in Cancer Research shows, via animal studies, that green tea can alter a methylation disorder which facilitates some cancers. And Sxyf’s sometime-collaborator M. Meaney, a biologist, posits environmentally-initiated changes in hippocampal methylation patterns in mouse infants correlated with the pups temperaments (shy/bold, usually considered mostly heritable traits).

  17. thwaite says

    (And just to be explicit, I don’t consider Discover to be part of the primary scientific literature. I mention it as a source and reinforcer of currently popular notions.)

  18. Steve_C says

    D’woo reminds me of Dr. Mong Tang or whatever that unpublished kook’s name is…

    I think D’woo has a santeria site or something.

  19. says

    The only way the HuffPo has come to my attention is when it publishes somehing completely wacked, usually (but not always) of the anti-vaccination variety. It does seem to have also published some worthwhile stuff, but it’s been swallowed up in the large volume of good stuff available from other sources. There is a moral here for content providers: Don’t start publishing wacky crap, or all your best efforts will go ignored.

    By the way, the vandalism of the Wikipedia article on HuffPo was caught and corrected in twenty minutes. They’re pretty good over there.

  20. says

    “As science advances, those phenomena will emerge out of the uncertain realm of the paranormal and into the more comfortable domain of the normal. Such transitional phenomena are called the ‘perinormal,’ meaning near-normal, by fiercely skeptical Cambridge University zoologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins offered this new term at a skeptic’s conference in January 2005. As author Ted Dace wrote in reviewing that conference, when Dawkins was asked about one of the prizes offered for demonstrations of the paranormal, he responded: ‘About the million dollar prize, I would be worried if I were you because of the fact that we have perinormal possibilities.’ It appears that among skeptics, the smart players are beginning to hedge their bets.” (p. 290, “Entangled Minds” 2006, by Dr. Dean Radin).

  21. says

    “As science advances, those phenomena will emerge out of the uncertain realm of the paranormal and into the more comfortable domain of the normal. Such transitional phenomena are called the ‘perinormal,’ meaning near-normal, by fiercely skeptical Cambridge University zoologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins offered this new term at a skeptic’s conference in January 2005. As author Ted Dace wrote in reviewing that conference, when Dawkins was asked about one of the prizes offered for demonstrations of the paranormal, he responded: ‘About the million dollar prize, I would be worried if I were you because of the fact that we have perinormal possibilities.’ It appears that among skeptics, the smart players are beginning to hedge their bets.” (p. 290, “Entangled Minds” 2006, by Dr. Dean Radin).

  22. says

    “As science advances, those phenomena will emerge out of the uncertain realm of the paranormal and into the more comfortable domain of the normal. Such transitional phenomena are called the ‘perinormal,’ meaning near-normal, by fiercely skeptical Cambridge University zoologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins offered this new term at a skeptic’s conference in January 2005. As author Ted Dace wrote in reviewing that conference, when Dawkins was asked about one of the prizes offered for demonstrations of the paranormal, he responded: ‘About the million dollar prize, I would be worried if I were you because of the fact that we have perinormal possibilities.’ It appears that among skeptics, the smart players are beginning to hedge their bets.” (p. 290, “Entangled Minds” 2006, by Dr. Dean Radin).

  23. says

    Parody can’t keep up with the woo.

    Wallowers in newage sewage share a vaguely consensus psychosis, but calling it spirituality makes it no less demented than any other flavor of fuckwittery.

  24. says

    Spokesman Review (Spokane, Wash.), September 15, 2006

    WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY FINDS TOXIN, CANCER LINK

    Study finds link during pregnancy

    [Rachel’s introduction: Pregnant rats were exposed to high levels of a fungicide commonly used in vineyards. In male offspring and three subsequent male generations of the rats, 85 percent of the animals developed cancer, prostate disease, kidney disease, premature aging or other problems.]

    By Shawn Vestal

    New research by Washington State University scientists suggests that a single exposure to environmental toxins during pregnancy can cause cancer, kidney disease and other illnesses for future generations.

    The research, led by WSU professor Michael Skinner, suggests that environmental pollution could permanently reprogram genetic traits in a family line, creating a legacy of sickness. It follows previous studies in Skinner’s lab that showed similar long-term effects from toxins on the reproductive systems of successive generations.

    “It’s a new way to think about disease,” Skinner said in a WSU news release. “If this pans out, it gives us a host of new diagnostic and therapeutic tools.”

    It also provides possible explanations for increases in some diseases, as well as spikes in illness that are tied to a geographical region. And it highlights the potential long-term dangers from environmental pollution, said Skinner, the director of WSU’s Center for Reproductive Biology.

    In the research, pregnant rats were exposed to high levels of a fungicide commonly used in vineyards. In male offspring and three subsequent male generations of the rats, 85 percent of the animals developed cancer, prostate disease, kidney disease, premature aging or other problems. Most of the rats developed more than one illness.

    The research was published in two papers Thursday in the journal Endocrinology.

    Skinner’s lab has been working on the question of “epigenetic inheritance” for years, and published research last year that showed toxic exposure during embryonic development could hurt fertility over several generations. Epigenetic inheritance involves chemical modifications in the operation of genes from parent to offspring – changes in which the DNA itself isn’t modified, but the way the genes “turn off” and “turn on” is affected, WSU said.

  25. Steviepinhead says

    D’woo, sorry to learn of your finger-spasm diagnosis.

    Maybe too much exposure to that vineyard fungicide?

  26. says

    Schwartz is ahead of the game Pinhead!

    Nature 443, 401-402(28 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/443401a; Published online 27 September 2006

    Evolution: Different paths to the same end
    Antonis Rokas

    Top of pageAbstractGenetic dissection of a yeast gene-regulatory pathway shows that the logical output of such a pathway can remain the same even though the molecular mechanisms underlying the output have diverged remarkably.

    From penguins to mushrooms and baobabs, the world around us harbours a bewildering diversity of life forms. Much of the evolution of this diversity is due to changes in the under-lying genetic regulatory architecture1. But what happens to such architecture when organisms that diverged long ago retain the same traits (or ‘phenotypes’)? Can this regulatory architecture diverge while the overlying phenotypes remain similar? On page 415 of this issue, Tsong et al.2 examine the gene-regulatory circuit that governs mating type in several yeast species, and they identify a remarkable example of divergence at the genotypic level (the DNA sequence) despite conservation at the phenotypic level.

  27. says

    — Passed on for several generations! In male offspring and three subsequent male generations of the rats,

    There’s been several studies verifying the INHERITANCE of environmental factors.

  28. says

    Drew Hempel, you are about to get banned. Knock it off. The repetition is highly annoying and mindlessly stupid.

    Do it one more time, and bam, you’re gone.

  29. says

    Steve, I’m still just blown away by the revelation that there isn’t a 1:1 correspondence between genotype and phenotype. As you say, who knew?

  30. says

    Professor Meyers blame the stupid computers at the corporate-controlled institution that pays your bills! The only repetition was a common loading problem — from the Engineering Library — not from me!!

    My other post was regarding Professor Jeffrey Schwartz — a topic that Carl Zimmer stopped in it’s tracks, in a debate I had with Stevepinhead and a couple other posters.

    Epigenetics is definitely part of this topic as well.

    So that’s 3 different approaches — not repetition at all.

    As for being “banned” we’ll I’m just surprised I got in as much as I did since you normally censor me (how convenient for the Orwellian Truth of corporate-controlled science — there’s 300 businesses controlling science at the U of Minnesota).

  31. says

    there’s 300 businesses controlling science at the U of Minnesota)

    And Drew is ready to list them all multiple times!

    At first I thought Drew’s stuff was parody. Then I thought he was just an altie troll. Now I think deranged is in the running (not entirely incompatible with the previous case).

    Funny guy.

  32. says

    As long as people keep making comments about what I write then responses on my part are reasonable.

    The 300 businesses are listed in the research contracts availble from the Tech Center that runs the U of M — I got the list in 2000 and analyzed it as part of a self-directed masters class I did with Professor Robin Brown. I then passed out about 500 copies of the report — covering the 150 year history of the U of Minnesota as a tool of Imperial Genocide through corporate control (starting with John Pillsbury, the Skull and Bones “father” of the U of Minnesota). You can find reference to my report in a MN Daily article covering my protest of President Yudof’s State of the University speech. I pointed out an adminstrator stating that “for enough money we can make tomatoes as big as basketballs” for Monsanto.

    That’s the real story of science — for which Lawrence Soley was fired from the U of Minnesota, after his book “Leasing the Ivory Tower.”

  33. says

    Latest post by Deepak Chopra at Huffpost about his new book on Afterlife:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/death-at-the-door_b_31962.html

    You should check out the just released book by Deepak Chopra, “Life After Death: The Burden of Proof”, where he used science and reason rather than faith to prove the exsistence of afterlife:

    http://www.amazon.com/Life-After-Death-Burden-Proof/dp/0307345785/sr=8-1/qid=1161203517/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2648371-8879359?ie=UTF8

    Oct. 17: The “Today” show’s Ann Curry talks with spiritual guru Deepak Chopra about his new book, “Life After Death.”
    Today Show Books:

    Watch the video:

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15291472/

    In ‘Life After Death,’ Deepak Chopra draws on scientific discoveries and wisdom traditions to provide a map of the afterlife.

    “World renowned spiritual guru Deepak Chopra has worked for years on teaching the mind-body connection. His books have sold over 20 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 35 languages, and he also guides Sirius satellite radio listeners on a weekly journey into wellness and spiritual health. In “Life After Death: The Burden of Proof,” the best-selling author turns his attention to a subject we often fear.”

  34. Steviepinhead says

    Yep, ChopraFan, you’ve really stumbled upon a hotbed of pent-up Chopra-demand here.

    Maroon.

  35. says

    Life after Death — I’m definitely going to give that book a once over! Thanks. also any more dirt on Deepak Chopra soliciting sex on the street? I had posted the link on my old blog… but it’s not worth digging up. The sign of a true spiritual master is the eternal hard-on for fun!

  36. JayS says

    First three observations, then a possible action to HuffPo?

    It seems to me that there are several things about that article from the snake oil salesman, Deepak Chopra.

    1) the most offensive thing about the articles is the misrepresentation of the biology. His characterization of the biology of genes is just wrong. He builds on top of misinformation/”libel on biology” a justification for his particular brand of mystical snake oil/woo/bovine by-products.

    His views are probably mystical nonsense, but he is entitled to believe the rough equivalent that the moon is made of blue cheese, if we wants…but he is not entitled to misrepresent the science of others in order to “prove” his wacky ideas.

    2) that his (deliberate? ignorant?) misrepresentations of science from the bizarro “crunchy” left is remarkably similar to the misrepresentations of the naive creationists or youngearthers from the religous right. It is probably more dangerous: the public may not expect religous wingnuts to understand or argue fairly, but HuffPo might have a “patina” of respectability to the non-science crowd.
    3) That HuffPo has often has been really bad about where science and policy intersect in a few cases. Further, that misreprestations of the science are dangerous, in general. Its balance in science is just god-awful. We have too few places like HuffPo that enable liberal discussion. It is better to fix than to just ignore it.

    A possible thing to do?

    Perhaps biologists should consider an email or blog campaign to editors to HuffPo (the latter with emailed URLs to editors) ? …Or, perhaps, drafting an open letter to the editors of HuffPo to warn them they are being poorly served at matters of where biology, health, and politics intersect and the snake oil merchant Chopra is a good case in point.

    HuffPo should add commentators that actually understand the science, not just try to sell snake oil from gross misrepresentations of biology. It certainly does not do their reputation any good. Unless they see their audience is exclusively liberal arts majors from a tiny group of the crunchy “science-hating” left, it would not do them a lot of good to continue to piss off politically-liberal people that have a (good) undergraduate or better understanding of science.

  37. says

    I’m sure Johnjoe McFadden would be game and he has the right credentials as well — Professor of Genetics — oh wait he’s author of the book “Quantum Evolution” (2005) so his views lend a “patina” of respectibility to madhatter Deepak. Oh well, there will be plenty others willing to ride the wave of fascism in the U.S. — growing the ultimate “man crop” as those progressive eugenicist Professors proclaimed in the 1930s.

  38. Scott Hatfield says

    Hmm. I don’t particularly care for Deepak Chopra’s little brand of snake oil, but I guess irony is officially dead when the eccentric Mr. Hempel can label Indian medicine’s answer to P.T. Barnum a ‘madhatter’. Drew, surely you have enough awareness to realize just how outside the mainstream your views are? I would think so. As I’ve mentioned before, you’re probably too smart for your own good. I guess the silver lining to your elaborate and manic belief system is that you don’t appear to be a fraud. Which probably explains why you don’t have a zillion pseudoscientific works in print, like Deepak.

    Anyway, I don’t know how to say this without sounding a little bit snide, but take care of yourself…SH

  39. says

    I’ll come clean with a little diddle, on the sly. Quack or madhatter comes from quicksilver — mercury — which also, ironically, was the first scientific use of chemotherapy — a cure for syphilis. Mercury in vaccines IS a serious problem! But corporate-controlled science knows how to do the smack down when necessary.

    Mercury (cure for S.T.D.s) was really another name for the flying serpent of Kundalini — sex transformed into spirituality (really just an asymmetrical harmonic oscillator, previous to logarithmic tuning).

    So when scientists label spiritualists as quacks those scientists are only willfully ignoring how mercury continues to be used in modern science to the detriment of general health (along with all the other absurdities of “science”). In my “crank” psychology this is called “negative transference” (i.e. repressed sexually not known how to be sublimated into “real” mercury so used for smack-down science).

    The “real” use of mercury (beyond quacks and smack-down scientists) is described in Mutus Liber — the 17th C. alchemy book of the West.

    Mercury is the FEMALE principle as water vortex energy since the negentropic, antigravity anomalies of water are due to water having special TETRAHEDRON binding properties (as per physics Professor J L Finney’s 2004 article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. “What’s so special about water?”).

    Female principle as in nonlocal consciousness, not representable through a precise symbol for infinity (the square root of two). Female principle as in lunar-calendar, 60-based number system, controlling the water cycles for carbon-based evolution.

    So we have 25 years left of freshwater (real MERCURY) on the planet — (the worst ecological crisis in our times and the most ignored) — all the more reason to bicker about quacks by quacks so that the REAL scientists (the serious madhatters) can get on with their Freemasonic Nanowater alchemy experiments at Sandia Labs, etc.

    The asymmetrical sine-wave of the atomic electron must be squared! Detailed in the freely readable online book “Hacking Matter” (mercury has a 97% refraction rate so is very efficient in nanotechnology).

    Now let’s not talk about mecury-based “ion propulsion” being used in secret high-tech flat, equilateral triangle aircraft.

  40. says

    Serotonin turns into Melatonin which turns into DMT. Now use harmonic resonance and voila! You create a spirit body of biophotons.

    Ready biophoton torpedoes…

    What Hempel doesn’t know, is that we’ve replaced his Dilithium Crytals with Rich Folger’s Coffee Crystals!

    I’m afraid it’ll take transmutation into thorazine for the cascade of graphomaniacal fuckwittery to subside.

  41. says

    Ken — sorry to say that you’ve been duped by the CIA-Freemason-Gene Roddenberry Council of Nine “Stargate Conspiracy.” From the promo for the book “the Only Planet of Choice” — based on CIA mind control scientist Dr. Andrija Puharich and his Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton research buddy Professor Oliver L. Reiser: “This is the first book to deal with the background and reasons for these cosmic visits. It is made up of hundreds of transcripts transmitted through the channel Phyllis V Schlemmer over a period of more than 20 years from a group of universal beings, known as The Council of Nine. Members of a distinguished international research group who have worked with Phyllis include such famous names as Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, former British racing driver Sir John Whitmore, and British Olympic hurdler David Hemery.”

    These are the real scientists! (read the recent books “In the Fire of the Mind” by George Johnson and “One True Platonic Heaven” by John Casti — both promote the Freemasonic agenda of Los Alamos, Santa Fe Institute and Sandia Labs).

  42. says

    The UK Guardian, Aug. 25, 2005:

    Finding that DNA emits weak but brightly coloured biophotons, Narby suggested these could be the basis for the luminous patterns in the ayahuasceros’ visions [from DMT drugs].

    Could the shamans be gaining information from DNA itself? Narby thinks it possible and outlined his theory in The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1998).

  43. says

    Robert Sapolsky: Well, the best evidence is that glucocorticoids, the human version cortisol, hydrocortisone, what it seems to do is increase the rate at which you use up your serotonin in certain critical parts of the brain, the rate at which you use up noradrenaline, another neurotransmitter that seems critical for mood . That seems to be the best guess. It’s very unsettled at this point, but essentially where the arrows are beginning to point about what goes wrong during depression, these stress hormones can bring about the same changes.

  44. says

    Dr. J.C. Callaway: Since these same Psychoactive tryptamines occur in humans, it is possible that their activity may be promoted by the actions of endogenous beta-carbolines for normal psychological processes; e.g. the production of visual / emotive imagery in sleep [or full-lotus yoga to decrease the brain frequency and increase the body’s amplitude through an asymmetric sine-wave oscillation].

  45. says

    AAAArgh. Drew Hempel is making Pharyngula a lot less interesting. Do you still have that option of skipping over annoying commentors? Where do I find/enable it?

  46. j.t.delaney says

    Drew,

    I think your aluminum foil hat is on too tight. Seriously, what happened to you? You should have stuck to dishwashing — you were good at that, back at the Resource Center of the Americas. You were a little kooky back then, but these kind of antics are kinda creepy. T

    his “activism” and “awareness raising” is more than a little embarrasing, and does nothing to advance progressive causes, period. Please, in the name of Aung San Suu Kyi, step away from the keyboard and behave yourself.

  47. says

    Ignoring the risible cuntwit who thinks water is really mercury, I would like to point out that PZ’s recent Anglophilia should be adjusted to take into account that Tony Blair is said to be a fan of Chopra’s wootastic wabblings.

  48. says

    Ha — I’m doing data entry right now for Clean Water Action silly! Aung San Suu Kyi and her party members survive ONLY because they practice vipassana meditation! haha. I read one scholarly book a day!

    “For example, physicist Johann Summhammer showed in a March 2005 paper entitled ‘Quantum Cooperation of Insects’ that if insects shared entangled states they could accomplish tasks more efficiently than if they had to rely on classical forms fo communcation. [from the Vienna University of Technology]

    [Here’s Summhammer:]

    “Entanglement would lead to a Darwinian advantage: Entanglement could coordiante biochemical reactions in different parts of a cell, or in different parts of an organ. It could allow correlated firings of distant neurons. And…. it could coordinate the behavior of members of a species, because it is independent of distance and requires no physical link. It is also conceivable that entanglement correlates processes between members of different species, and even between living systems and the inanimate world.”

    “In his analysis, Summhammer used an example of two ants pushing a pebble that was too heavy that wanted to find each other. He showed that two quantum-entangled ants could push the pebble up to twice as far as two other classical ants, and two entangled butterflies could find each other up to 48% faster than two classical butterflies. Based on this analysis, he proposed that if biolgoical systems were entangled, then because of the advantages it provides, evolution may well have found a way to use it.”

    (p. 272-3, “Entangled Minds” 2006, Dr. Dean Radin)

  49. oldhippie says

    “He showed that two quantum-entangled ants could push the pebble up to twice as far as two other classical ants”
    Hahahahahahaha!
    Drew does give us the occasional giggle, but I am not sure it is worth it.

  50. V. Sukumaran says

    What’s Science and What’s Religion?

    I have read enough of obscurantist pedagogy by so called scientists and theologians, who(both)have nothing much to offer except some kerfufflish pedagogy that fails to rhyme with reality. These muddle-headed people including Deepak should keep their mumbo-jumbo to themselves.

    For crusading Evangelists bible and christianity are the free sources of inspiration while for the so called scientists paranormal and even perinormal phenomena taken from somebody’s experience are food enough for thought.

    I would like to know if you people have a common sense of science and religion. If Jesus were to come again he would commit suicide on seeing the amount of mutilation of what he said. Biblical teachings have been cited out of context to support religious hypocrisy and self-seeking scientology.

    Read a book like ‘The Paradox of Quantum Physics and the Fifth Dimension’, you will be enlightened.

  51. says

    AAAArgh. Drew Hempel is making Pharyngula a lot less interesting. Do you still have that option of skipping over annoying commentors? Where do I find/enable it?

    Drew seems to be engaging in the annoying habit of “flooding.” Either that or she represents the Flame Warrior known as Furious Typer, perhaps with a bit of Ferrous Cranus thrown in for good measure.

  52. j.t.delaney says

    Aren’t you guys being heavily spoofed here?

    Oh no; this is no spoof. Back in college, I used to work with Drew (thus the dishwashing reference), and this is actually how he is in real life. He is a unique individual. Truly, he is one of the FSM’s “special creatures”. He really was a superlative dishwasher.

  53. says

    I read HuffPo quite a bit, but I think I’m going to have to reconsider. This morning I was reading an article that was linked to from there and was reading a long and wondering, where do they get this stuff? Then I realized that I was on the WorldNutDaily.

  54. Steve_C says

    I think they post links to goofy wingnut stories to show how batshit crazy they are.

    Doesn’t help that someone can in turn link to the HuffPo drivel of Chopra and say “Look at them crazy liberal kooks listening to Chopra!”

  55. says

    Assuming that hempel is for real and not a hoax, he needs a psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, yesterday.

    And Chopra needs to be ridiculed, because he seems to be in it for the money and prestige.

  56. says

    Oh no; this is no spoof. Back in college, I used to work with Drew (thus the dishwashing reference), and this is actually how he is in real life.

    Which just shows that college isn’t an antidote for kookiness – it just increases the number of polysyllabic words that a kook uses.

  57. Been There says

    A few years ago, I was a lot like drew. Skepticism opened my eyes. Hopefully he’ll come around.

    Regarding Chopera, anyone you claims to be able to halt the aging process deserves immediate admission into the “Wacko” category. Huff’s website can do better than that. And I say this with the primal lust I feel for her.
    (she makes me get all ‘bonobo’)

  58. Lexi says

    I have an idea. Keep Chopra on Huffington Post, but just move his blog over to the right side of the Huffington Post site where they have all the “quality” articles, like “Paris Hilton to play Mother Theresa in a movie”, where he belongs.

  59. computer guy says

    “The repetition is highly annoying and mindlessly stupid.”

    It boggles the mind that all sorts of comment forms from scienceblogs to MSDN accept multiple subsequent identical comments.

    Computers can fundamentally do two things: count and compare.
    How is it even POSSIBLE to double-post?

  60. Steve_C says

    It may be a lag during submission so if he clips multiple times it registers them all.

    I know I can’t really comment on the same post multiple times with out a forced break.