We are inundated with pseudo-science. I have a few relevant links:
Via Fast Science:
... the pace of scientific discovery is slow. This does not mean that we need to hide every step of it from view until we get the results that we deem worthy of sharing. On the contrary, I agree with those who think that sharing at the more interim steps can only improve what we do. Yet the innumeracy, fame and fortune are forces that put such free sharing in peril by misrepresenting it as the final answer to everything. And when the answer is changed, which is not only expected, but indeed desired in scientific pursuits, the public opinion punishes science.
From Science vs. PR:
That’s the whole substance of the paper. Straight-ahead chemistry, exploring a possible explanation for an observed phenomenon and drawing out one tentative prediction. “Showing that it could have happened this way is not the same as showing that it did,” the author most properly concedes. He should have quit while he was ahead. What imp of the perverse induced him to add two more sentences?
Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.
Maybe the PR guy talked him into it.
From The New Phrenology - How liberal psychopundits understand the conservative brain:
That the “rich and powerful” are identical to conservatives and Republicans—Edsall’s assumption—is a hoary idea dear to many Democrats and essential to their self-image as the opponents of privilege. It persists even though many of the plushest and most powerful institutions of American life are in the hands of liberal Democrats: public and private universities, government bureaucra-cies, nonprofit foundations, movie studios, television networks, museums, newspapers and magazines, Silicon Valley . . . Among the fabled “1 percent,” according to Gallup, the number of self-identified Republicans is only slightly greater than the number of Democrats. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in these pages, political donations from 19 of the 20 richest ZIP codes in the United States go overwhelmingly to Democrats, by a ratio of four to one or more. Democrats are the party of what Democrats used to call the superrich. Only Democrats seem not to realize this.
From Pathologizing Normalcy and Overdiagnosing Pathology:
In the U.S, the DSM boils down to three critical issues: reimbursement, reimbursement and reimbursement. It should be renamed the American Diagnostic and Reimbursement Manual, so that those who use it outside the U.S. better understand the influences behind it.
