Just letting you know I've thrown down the gauntlet to an email I received. Chances are, you'll be seeing the results somewhere down the line.Okay, I admit it, it's Dave Mabus. He decided to go directly to my personal email instead of comment spam, so it's a bit more personal, and I've been wanting him to throw down. I wouldn't be surprised if he chickens out of answering some simple questions:
1) If he's saying Nostradamus predicted a swine flu epidemic, why wasn't he sending emails about it years ago? The real answer, of course, is that it's a postdiction made after swine flu hit the media blitz.
2) How can us skeptics have "disconfirmation bias" in regards to the evidence for ID/Creationism if they can't even figure out what sort of evidence they're looking for?
10 comments:
This is only marginally on topic, but I found it fairly astonishing when I read it a minute ago and then Bronze Dog, obviously predicting my response, gave me an outlet!
So, for those of you living in the USA and getting your news from the American media:
Based solely on the media coverage from US news outlets, which country has (and I write this on Thursday 30 April at just after 10pm mountain time) the highest number of confirmed swine flu cases?
Did I hear you say "Well obviously it's Mexico. Are you some kind of non-media outlet trusting moron or something?" ?
Well, you might be surprised then.
As I write:
Mexico : 49 confirmed cases
USA: 109 confirmed cases - just over double the number!
I can't decide if this is just rubbish journalism, part of some wierd patriotically driven fact fudge, racism (cue Rethuglican chants of dirty Mexican immigrants, close the border, send them home etc etc) or a mixture of all three and then some.
Is it just me who sees this anti-Mexican slant?
And back on topic:
Mabus really thinks Nostradamus predicted a swine flu pandemic? Really? Which one of his quatrains did he cite so we can all take a look?
Not going to post direct parts just yet. And he didn't directly say it. He also seemed to imply that it was going to cause an "atheist purge."
What the hell is disconfirmation bias?
Jimmy - the thing is that you need a fairly sophisticated analytical process (starting with sample collection) to confirm exactly which strain caused a particular case. Mexico has by far the highest number of suspected cases, but they don't have the necessary infrastructure to be able to confirm them as this particular H1N1 variant as quickly (or indeed at all, in many cases), whereas I would assume that every single suspect case in the US is being given the best available analysis as quickly as possible.
He linked to some post on Telic Thoughts. My guess is it's some sloppy attempt to steal skeptical language that completely misses the points we make about Creationism.
Dunc:
Can't argue with what you say about diagnostics and when talking to my better half last night she brought that up as well - the panic figures are about suspected cases. However the media here has made it sound like Mexico is overrun with the virus and is exporting it like Tequila, but they have stayed very quite in comparing the number of actual confirmed cases found in both Mexico and the USA - they are just focusing on the numbers of people turning themselves in because they have a runny nose or cough.
I just thought the number was interesting given the context of media coverage here in the US. And don't get me started on the advert I saw for Fox news and their Gardasil reporting.
Now I am interested however in what exactly makes me as an atheist more likely to be 'purged' by a flu virus!
And checking the outbreak map now shows Mexico now has 300 confirmed cases - almost treble the amount now - so it looks like diagnostics is catching up with media hype.
So bad journalism it was then.
Now where's my atheist facemask....
I don't understand how it's even possible to have a conversation with Mabus. He's a random gibberish machine.
Agreed about Mabus. I like that you keep his posts around so we can have a little fun, but he's clearly insane, and not willing to have any kind of conversation. He just copy-pastes the same drivel, the same ridiculous claims, and puts new versions of the same insults at the top and/or bottom.
There's no substance to Dennis Markuze, just concentrated Canadian crazy.
So far, no replies to my questions as I suspected. Think I might try going more provocative.
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