I love magnets. I played with them a lot when I was a kid, and now that I am a mature grownup, I use mature magnets: neodymium or rare-Earth magnets. These are like magnets on steroids, superstrong and a ton of fun.

But they’re also dangerous. They won’t give you cancer or yank out the iron in your blood or anything like that. But because they are so strong, they can attract each other quite, um, forcefully. I’ve had a finger nicked once or twice by them, and it hurts.

But geez, let this guy’s story be a stronger cautionary tale. WARNING: nasty trauma images in there. Don’t eat dinner while reading it. Barf.

Still, I’ll play with my magnets; I have a little ball magnet about 2 cm across that is way too much fun to roll across a floor. I’d love to find a flat frictionless space to roll it, and see how much it deflects due to torque from the Earth’s magnetic field.

But then, I’m a dork. But I have all my fingertips!

These guys never quit, do they? When all the evidence is against them, when their hero — Andrew Wakefield — turns out to have not just feet of clay but claims of mud, when scientific study after scientific study shows no link between vaccines and autism, when kids are getting sick and dying because people believe the antiscience claims of the antivax/pro-disease movement, what do antivaxxers like Jenny McCarthy, David Kirby, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. do?

Why, they just keep boldly spreading nonsense, garbage, and propaganda, of course.

I need not go into details here, as Orac has done it very thoroughly (and has followup info), as has Skeptic Dad.

I guess if you’re putting kids’ lives at risk, bearing false witness is a far less unforgivable sin.

In case you missed it before, at TAM 7 we’re holding a vaccination drive in Las Vegas, to make sure that kids get the protection they need against easily preventable diseases. Even if you aren’t coming to TAM, you can contribute to the cause to get kids their vaccines; it’s only $16 for one shot, and $25 for more than one.

The best defense against McCarthy, Kirby, Kennedy, and their ilk? Get kids their shots.

Randi pretty much speaks for all of us here, I think. He certainly does for me.

Presented without comment, except that it’s got some NSFW words.

OK, one comment: I hope these guys make lots more videos. Made of win.

I am very pleased to announce that registration for The Amaz!ng Meeting 7 is now open!

TAMs are the premier conferences for critical thinkers across the globe. Hosted by the James Randi Education Foundation (JREF), it always features great speakers, good times, and a warm and wonderful community. TAM 7 will continue that tradition.

This year, our keynote speaker is Bill Prady, the executive producer of The Big Bang Theory. Suh. Weet. We also have Randi, of course, My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™, Jennifer Ouellette, Joe Nickell, Michael Shermer, Emily Rosa, and a passel of other great speakers. I guess that means me, too.

We have all sorts of plans for this one. We have workshops, paper presentations, magic shows, music (George Hrab! W00t!), and even… a talent show. Yes, really. Do skeptics have talent? We’ll see.

This is my first TAM as JREF President, and I want to see lots and lots of BABloggees there. Who’s with me? TAM 7 will be from July 9 – 12 at the South Point Hotel, Casino, & Spa in Las Vegas, Nevada. I hope to see you there!

I remember that day in November, that day when the Republican party was handed their head on a platter by the voting public. Now, a lot of people would have taken that as a lesson, perhaps realizing that something is wrong if so many people voted against them.

I guess the Republican party leaders are not in that group of people.

Bobby Jindal gave the Republican "rebuttal" to the President’s speech yesterday. Yes, that Bobby Jindal: amateur exorcist, creationist, doomer-of-Louisiana. He is obviously making a run for 2012, though how well advised that is might be up for vote. Perhaps literally.

Anyway, last night, in an attempt to make a sound bite, he bit himself instead with this line about the stimulus package:

Here’s the transcript of what he said (emphasis mine):

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called volcano monitoring. Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C..

Are you freaking kidding me? Are these guys still trying to score points by being blatantly antiscience? I bet there are a few million folks in Seattle, Oregon, northern California, Alaska, and, y’know, Hawaii that think volcano monitoring is a fine and dandy idea.

Not to mention Yellowstone, potentially the scariest place on the planet.

What the heck is it with these guys? I don’t mean Republicans in general, I mean the ones running the party. Do they not get what’s really important, and what’s just rhetorical partisan garbage? I hope that this line by Jindal becomes his fruit fly, his planetarium-as-overhead-projector. Because when people in charge say things so mind-numbingly dumb, it is our duty to make sure everyone knows it.

Louisiana, I’m sorry your governor is such an antiscience ignorant blowhard. But please don’t try to foist him on the rest of the country in three years.

[Update (12:15 Mountain time): A lot of commenters are asking why this sort of funding is in the stimulus bill in the first place,and call it pork. They're missing the point: the point of the stimulus bill is to stimulate the economy, both in the short and the long term. Funding science does exactly that; it helps pay for scientists, experiments, equipment, and more. I have written about this before. Funding science pays off multiply in the long term; it always has.]

Tip o’ the blinders to Splendid Elles, who has great comments on Jindal’s nonsense.

David Gorski is a surgical oncologist, and also a well-known though bepseudonymed blogger for Science Blogs. His anti-antivaccination stance is legendary, for good reason: he is incredibly well-spoken and his posts railing against the pro-measles (haha) crowd routinely eviscerates them.

But none of his posts has ever done so in such a remarkably thorough fashion as in this lengthy post in which he destroys the movement from top to bottom. What we have there, ladies and gentlemen, is the be-all and end-all of posts about the antivaxxers, showing their lack of evidence, their ad hominem attacks, their lies, their fraud, and everything else that makes them one of the greatest health threats in the United States, if not the world.

From the vacuous pseudoscientific nonsense of antivax spokeswoman Jenny McCarthy, to the out-and-out evillness of Andrew Wakefield, the father of the modern movement whose conflicts of interest when it comes to vaccines are simply breathtaking, Dr. Gorski’s post is nothing short of what should be The Link, the one you send to all parents who question whether they should vaccinate their children or not. Everything you need is there, with the history, quotations, false claims, and everything else about the antivax movement, including links to more information. I’ve put it in my sidebar blogroll, and if you think children should stay healthy and not get measles, rubella, pertussis, the flu, encephalitis, and even possibly die, then please help promote Dr. Gorski’s post. You may help save thousands of lives.