Political quote of the day 2

I wasn’t speaking as a doctor, I wasn’t speaking as a scientist. I was just relating what this woman said.

Michele Bachmann, referring to her claim that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. My translation: “I was just talking out of my ass.”

Political quote of the day

When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science – Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position….I can’t remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a – a party that – that was antithetical to science. I’m not sure that’s good for our future and it’s not a winning formula.

John Huntsman, GOP Presidential candidate. They’re not all batshit crazy.

Cultural quote of the day

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief…

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

Think about that.

 – Neil Gabler

Medical quote of the day

It is absolutely impossible for someone to fix their own hernia.

Sam Carvajal, surgeon at Glendale California Adventist Medical Center, after treating a patient who had attempted this. (via Quotation of the Day Mailing List)