Clearly modeling his strategy after the anti-vaccination campaigns, Stephen explains how to cobble up your own homemade controversy on just about any subject. All you have to do is ignore all the evidence and invent a non-existent danger, and people will believe anything you say.

Today is Carl Sagan Day — I think that means you are officially expected to be filled with awe of the cosmos all day long, while also being thoroughly skeptical of the supernatural. Hang on…I think that means I celebrate Carl Sagan Day every day.

If I want to do something different, maybe I should make an apple pie from scratch.

Another thing you can do is consider the importance of science on social policy. It could be a very busy day!

The authors of Freakonomics have a new book out, called Superfreakonomics. It doesn’t look promising: a couple of reports have it promoting climate change denialism, which is unfortunate. There are risks in having skepticism with the status quo (which is a good thing all around) when people lurch too far into simply finding excuses to reject everything.

Sorry, there’s another piece there that really irritated me. Maher reads the data selectively: he quotes the CDC’s list of possible contaminants of vaccines, like aluminum, insect repellant, formaldehyde, etc. But that is simple honesty in advertising! Everything you put in your body contains at least some trace amounts of environmental contaminants; if you freak out over the fact that insects have crawled over the organic and chemical components of food and drug manufacture, don’t look at the FDA description of what you might find in a jar of peanut butter. And especially don’t look at the crap that you’ll find in the unregulated herbal and organic nutritional supplements that Maher probably considers just wonderful.

So Maher just looks at a tiny piece of the detailed information that the CDC presents about the vaccine. He must think they’re some kind of sophisticated authority on this matter, or why doesn’t he simply dismiss everything that the CDC says because they’re pawns of Big Pharma?

Here’s a suggestion. Read the CDC’s recommendations and explanations of the swine flu and its vaccine. Read the whole thing. That’s where you’ll find the settled medical science, with overall results and recommendations, and reasonable discussions of the reservations. Maher is not an informed source at all. He’s bought into quackery and is searching for rationalizations.

Orac is breathing fire over this, as expected. He points out that Maher’s litany of ingredients isn’t just from the CDC’s list, but also comes from another site: that lunatic radio personality, Jeff Rense.

Once again, Maher sticks his foot in his mouth and gnaws on it for a while.

The most telling moment for me was when he compares vaccination to global warming and evolution; global warming and evolution, he says, are settled science (which is correct), but vaccination is not. That is not correct. Vaccination works. It’s been tested and measured and analyzed, and vaccinations save lives. It has been settled, repeatedly.

Michael Shermer has commented on RichardDawkins.net on this issue, too. Maybe someday it will sink in.

I’ve recently made arrangements to come speak at the University of Ireland in Galway in early February. Hooray! I’ve been looking forward to visiting Ireland for some time, so it’s going to be great.

And then I discover that not all the Irish are sane. There are crowds listening to ‘psychic’ prophets and standing in churchyards to stare at the sun until their eyeballs are all wobbly and semi-toasted, and then declaring that the fact that they can’t see straight is a miracle! From God! Hallelujah to a creator who would make a delicate energy sensor friable!

I was planning on giving a couple of serious talks, but now I’m cleverly thinking…if I just hand out ball-peen hammers to the audiences and tell them to bang themselves on the head until they see stars and angels and Jesus himself looking like Bono and singing lullabies, I’ll have a little more time to sneak out and get all touristy.

Except that the people who’d come to listen to me would probably be more critical than the ones who’d listen to a self-proclaimed ‘clairvoyant’ like Joe Coleman. Darn. Preaching reason and autonomy and rebellion from the dictates of mystical authority does have its downsides.

Bill Maher doesn’t believe in vaccines at all? Man, you’ve have got to be utterly nuts to make Bill Frist look good.

The first part is pretty good, where Frist gives Maher a lesson in vaccines; the last bit is rather annoying, as they find common cause in agreeing that we don’t need to make modern medicine available to more, because “we have the best health care system in the world” (baloney), and our bloated health care budget is simply a consequence of bad food and obesity.