I should've got this up on April Fool's Day but (scary thought here) I was too busy with Kathy Griffin's tits:We doubt that either Dr. Oz or Andrew Wakefield will be proudly displaying these honors on their mantelpieces: Both received "Pigasus Awards" this April 1 from the James Randi Educational Foundation for the dubious honor of being among the "5 worst promoters of nonsense."Dr. Mehmet Öz and Andrew Wakefield are, of course, the quack doctors promoted by Oprah Winfrey and Jenny McCarthy (the NewAge television celebrity and the anti-vaccine child killer) so, please, feel free to attach any condemnation, of the two fakers mentioned above, to them as well:Dr. Mehmet Oz got the "Media" Pigasus. The foundation explains why he won the prize: "Dr. Oz is a Harvard-educated cardiac physician who, through his syndicated TV show, has promoted faith healing, 'energy medicine,' and other quack theories that have no scientific basis." Among the guests that Randi's foundation deems especially dubious: psychic John Edward, who claims to talk to dead people. (Check out this TV Guide interview in which Dr. Oz says that having Edward on the show "changed [his] life!" and adds, of Edward, "He seems authentic, not at all like a charlatan. I've learned in my career that there are times when science just hasn't caught up with things, and I think this may be one of them.")
Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher known for his repeated assertion that autism is caused by vaccines, got his Pigasus in the "Refusal to Face Reality" category. Wakefield's study in the 1998 that started the whole brouhaha has been thoroughly discredited, and study after study has failed to find a vaccine-autism connection. (In fact, a lot of autism researchers aren't even sure that the rates have truly risen, because in the past, milder cases were not diagnosed.)
I do, and it does my heart good.
Not too long ago we did a Tweet about Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, that said:Mark Zuckerberg says he's giving 1/2 of his money to charity because, I guess, he can't find anyone poor.Now, finally, we've found someone who actually agrees with our perspective - how often is that? - while also having some other ideas we can agree with about how Mark's money could be even better spent:
Just in time for Christmas (or maybe Chanukah) another billionaire has pledged to leave half his fortune to charity. Not that Facebook CEO and Time magazine's "Man of the Year" Mark Zuckerberg needed any arm-twisting. He was -- he texts -- happy to spread half the wealth. It's right there on his Facebook page.There you go. That was written by Christopher Orlet, and if he had only mentioned this blog it would've been perfect, though (we have to admit) the mentioning of Green Acres would've forced us to praise him, no matter what.
At only 25, Zuckerberg is already worth about $7 billion, give or take a few million. It used to take guys like Andrew Carnegie or George Hearst a lifetime to amass that kind of fortune. The Carnegies first had to sell the chickens and borrow £20 from relatives to immigrate to America. In Pittsburgh, young Andy worked his way up from bobbin boy. Zuckerberg, by contrast, was a spoiled computer prodigy from the get-go, always with the best tutors and teachers. No stoking boilers in a textile factory twelve hours a day, six days a week for this Harvard grad.
What gets missed in these self-serving headlines is the remarkable generosity of not-so-wealthy Americans. Americans who earn less than $20,000 a year give twice as much of their income to charity as those making $100,000. If you earn less than $25,000 you probably give 4.2 percent of your income to charity. That's a big deal even though Zuckerberg probably tips his doorman more than that. My not very subtle way of saying that for most of us, our 4.2 percent hurts a LOT more than Zuckerberg's 50 percent, which doesn't hurt at all.
IT IS BELIEVED the United States has 170 billionaires. So far 60 have taken the Giving Pledge, which is what you sign on to when Bill Gates or Warren Buffett calls you up during dinner and shames you into giving away half your fortune, preferably before your soup gets cold. And it won't do any good to get an unlisted number. Bill Gates has your unlisted number -- unless you make under $25,000 a year or own a Mac, which is pretty much the same thing.
What did billionaires do with their money before Bill Gates packed his bags for his little guilt trip? Well, it seems 19th and 20th century billionaires also gave away their fortunes. Yes, even the Captains of Industry -- dubbed "robber barons" by the pro-slavery, proto-fascist and "insipid muddlehead" (Nietzsche's phrase) Thomas Carlyle -- were civic-minded and generous. Carnegie put charity at the heart of his Gospel of Wealth, warning that "the man who dies rich dies disgraced." Meanwhile, old skinflint John D. Rockefeller confessed: "I never would have been able to tithe the first million dollars I ever made if I had not tithed my first salary, which was $1.50 per week." These men didn't believe it was enough to be incredibly successful or to create millions of jobs, or figure out new, innovative ways to make everyone's life better.
In fact, Carnegie went into poor, underserved areas and established schools in places where the government proved -- not surprisingly -- incapable. Carnegie was a meritocrat who wanted to give hardworking Americans "ladders within reach upon which the aspiring can rise." Zuckerberg has done likewise in Newark, New Jersey, only he's giving $100 million to failing public schools so they can continue to fail students for another decade and turn out another generation of doomed illiterates (by which I mean the incompetent teachers and administrators). Sort of the educational equivalent of propping up corrupt third world dictators with U.S. foreign aid.
The "robber barons" also established free libraries and art museums because they wanted to bring culture to the plain people, mostly because every time they holidayed in Europe they had to listen to some boring Brit lecture them about how uncivilized Americans were. Today their money is being used to fund exhibitions of shock-the-bourgeoisie art, because board members of these charitable foundations get a kick out that. Makes them feel superior. If that's not exactly what John D. had in mind, tough titty. He's dead.
Personally, if I had $7 billion I would use it a bit more constructively. I would buy MSNBC and fire Keith Olbermann. Then I would order the station manager to play nothing but Green Acres reruns. I would take the other $6 billion and place a $6 billion bounty on Osama bin Laden's head. And none of this dead or alive stuff. I want him Bonnie and Clyde dead. Eventually, one of his inner circle will succumb to the temptation and push Osama and his donkey (also named Osama) off the side of a cliff.
"In 1963 [Timothy] Leary and Mr. [Richard 'Ram Dass'] Alpert were kicked out of Harvard for their exploits, which included giving drugs to undergraduates. One of the men behind their expulsion was none other than Andrew Weil, still an undergraduate. Jealous at not being fully admitted into their world or, Mr. Lattin suggests, being given the best drugs, Mr. Weil helped engineer an exposé of Leary and Mr. Alpert in The Harvard Crimson. He took the pair down, Mr. Lattin writes, 'with the zeal of a jilted lover. The older men never fully forgave him."
"The Aids policies of the former South African president Thabo Mbeki's government were directly responsible for the avoidable deaths of more than a third of a million people in the country, according to research by Harvard university.-- Sarah Boseley, with an ugly opening to a story that just got uglier as we read it, in The Guardian.UK.
...From the late 1990s Mbeki turned his back on the scientific consensus that Aids was caused by a viral infection that could be fought – though not cured – by sophisticated and expensive medical drugs. He came under the influence of a group of maverick scientists known as Aids denialists, most prominent among whom was Peter Duesberg from Berkeley, California."
"Every Sunday they would go to church and see friends. That was a neat thing."
"Check out 'Structural Acupuncture for Physicians':
"…like many teenagers tragically lost in the Reagan ‘80s, I had Woodstock dreams, imagining some perfect purple haze of love. By the time I got to college, the cult of latter-day hippies had become a marketing phenomenon: Urban Outfitters was selling tie-dye T-shirts and groups of us made daytrips to Walden Pond to drop acid on Thoreau’s acreage. Undergraduates lived in shanties, built in front of the university president’s office at Harvard Yard, to protest investment in apartheid South Africa; all around the campus, reprints of posters advocating the 1969 student strike were thumb-tacked on kiosks and telephone poles. I was there, one of many, in love with a dream I’d had as a kid.
"Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by,...quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq.
"I wrote not long ago that Michelle Obama is a loose cannon, and I fear that her latest is not her last. I would have thought that two Ivy-League degrees, a joint income of about a million dollars, exclusive private schools for the kids, and a nice home in the suburbs were not so bad and might suggest that hope had made a comeback well before Barack's presidential run.
