The humanists of Uganda are in desperate need of your help!

The organization has been gutted by a robbery.

“We woke up today to the sad news that our offices had been broken into and lots of property and cash taken. The first people to reach the office found [the building security guard] unconscious lying at the upper/ behind part of the building. Our offices were wide open.”

The thieves have taken all 6 computers, 2 laptops, power cables, their projector and camera, three guitars, a desktop printer, and even the office phone was taken. Some cash due to be paid for rent was also stolen. (The security guard is now conscious again, by the way!)

They need donations, fast. I chipped in a little bit, if all of you do likewise, we’ll get them back on their feet quickly. Every little bit helps.

Ah, sweet Schadenfreude

Delicious. Stefan Molyneux failed miserably at attempting to be an “attractive young woman” leaving a comment thanking the wonderful Stefan Molyneux. Unless, maybe, there is an attractive young woman who looks to Stefan Molyneux for guidance who just happens to also be named Stefan Molyneux.

There’s a simple way to avoid getting caught inventing imaginary fans. Don’t invent imaginary fans in the first place.

Anyone can be director of an institute of pseudoscience, I guess

So the Washington Times is disseminating quackery — nothing new about that, I guess. But this is pretty awful stuff.

jennylies

You have to suffer to find out what she is talking about: this link takes you to a canned presentation. You’ve seen these before, I presume. They use a custom video player with all the controls stripped out, so once it gets started, you have to go through the whole thing, and you can’t skip ahead. And it goes on and on, hammering away at how evil modern medicine is and how it will kill you and stirring up fear and anger before it gets to the point: they have a cure for cancer, but Obama and the medical establishment are hiding it from you, and you can buy it from them. Wheee. So predictable.

Their miracle cure is a fermented wheat germ extract, marketed as a dietary supplement. It’s called H-86 or Avemar. Contrary to their claims that Obama and the FDA are trying to silence its existence because they want you to die a horrible painful death, it’s an object of active research. I’ve seen one clinical trial that showed a significant improvement in survival time for melanoma patients; there are a number of papers that investigate it and try to identify the mechanism (it may stimulate apoptosis in some cancer cells).

So it’s one among many. It’s got some promising preliminary results — but those are dime a dozen, I’m afraid, and many drugs that are initially interesting don’t pan out — and scientists are exploring it and publishing on it. It doesn’t magically vaporize tumors. The melanoma patients eventually died, but their average survival was prolonged. That’s the reality of cancer research.

But I was intrigued by the Health Sciences Institute. That’s a name with authority, and it sounds like a real thing. When you dig a little deeper, though, it seems to be little more than a website and Jenny Thompson, who has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and has appointed herself director of her very own sciencey institute of research and medicine.

I’ve been missing a trick. I need to declare Pharyngula to be a research think tank, start issuing dozens of e-alerts every month, and promote more FUD to draw in the massive donations so I can afford to advertise in the Washington Times, or the Daily Mail, or whatever hack rag with no standards will accept my money.

I just need a good title. “Pharyngula” is probably too obscure. Give me some ideas for convincing masks for pseudoscience, so I can get on that gravy train.

Jenny Thompson is a very naughty person. I did not sign up for anything on her website, and I didn’t even leave my email address anywhere there…but she went ahead and signed me up for her HSI e-alerts anyway. That’s OK, though, I’ve also put her HSI email address in my spam filters, so we’re even.

Todd Akin is sorry that he was sorry

Please, Republicans, welcome this man back into the fold, and make him a mouthpiece for the party. We are happy to see you drive women out of your camp. Todd Akin thinks there’s still a legitimate concern about legitimate rape.

"When a woman claims to have been raped, the police determine if the evidence supports the legal definition of ‘rape,’" Akin writes. "Is it a legitimate claim of rape or an excuse to avoid an unwanted pregnancy? Are the police warranted to take action against a crime or not?"

"In short, the word ‘legitimate’ modifies the claim and not the action. There have been women who have lied about being raped, as Norma McCorvey did before the U.S. Supreme Court. The infamous Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 was based on a lie."

"My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down," Akin adds in the book, "was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization. This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google ‘stress and fertilization,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject."

Yes, sometimes women are bad and ignorant and dishonest, just like men. Sometimes people lie about being robbed in order to get the insurance money, too; that doesn’t mean we have such a cynical view of humanity that we dismiss all claims of theft as fraudulent.

I found his last challenge interesting, though. But don’t go to Google — that’s wide open and leads to a lot of garbage. I did his search on PubMed. It returns about 1500 peer reviewed papers on the subject, but the problem is that ‘stress’ has a rather specific meaning in biology, and it’s not about transient terror — it’s about relatively long-term metabolic changes. It’s also a big database, so it covers everything — plants, mice, insects, etc. So I narrowed the search to just humans, which gives me 136 results. That is not very impressive.

I browsed through them all. Some looked interesting:there’s stuff on the role of follicular antioxidants, how serotonergic modulation affects the stress response in zebrafish (they mention modulators developed for human research — they’re giving Prozac to fish larvae), issues in treating Jehovah’s Witnesses with in vitro fertilization, heat stress and DNA repair in sperm production, lots of stuff about oxidative stress, and surprising numbers of papers about the effects of stress on sperm in general. I guess sperm are just easier to work with. Maybe Akin should be arguing that stressed-out rapists are firing blanks? Nah, the research doesn’t support that, either.

I found one relevant paper in my search: Stress and anxiety do not result in pregnancy wastage, by Milad, Klock, Moses, and Chatterton, published in 1998. They were looking at the effects of the psychologically stressful process of IVF on fertility clinic patients. It has a small n of 40, so it’s not entirely conclusive, but the abstract concludes:

In conclusion, there is little association between psychological scores and physiological stress hormone concentrations. Also, it does not appear that high levels of anxiety and stress result in an adverse pregnancy outcome.

Again, these are studies of long term stress — we know there are effects of overwork, worry, lack of sleep, poor diet, and fear that cause metabolic changes in the body that can reduce the likelihood of reproduction. But that’s a far cry from suggesting that a single psychologically traumatic event can instantly shut down ovaries and prevent pregnancy, like a switch.

Also, a search on PubMed on the subject of stress and pregnancy turns up many more papers. It’s easy to conflate the two issues, and it’s certainly the case that metabolic changes occur and can affect pregnancy. But it’s also easy to send people off on a wild goose chase on a complex topic to confuse them.

So far, I haven’t found any peer-reviewed papers that support the Akin Hypothesis. I probably need to dig deeper into fringe journals.

Creepy WorldVentures cultists welcome here

mlmrules

Stephanie Yoder wrote a blog post criticizing WorldVentures, one of those nasty MLM pyramid schemes. She pointed out that 72% of those roped in to the scheme made no money at all, and the median commission was only $40, etc., etc., etc., par for the course for these kinds of phonies, in which only the scum at the top get any money out of it.

So now WorldVentures has sent out one of those blustery vague cease-and-desist letters (oh, I’ve seen a few of those) to Ms Yoder, and the Popehat signal has gone up. I am not a lawyer, I’m not even vaguely knowledgable about legal matters, but I’m posting this because Popehat made a promise:

If you write a blog post questioning WorldVentures, you will very likely draw a crowd of very enthusiastic, very intense, somewhat off-putting WorldVenture supporters.

‘Offputting’ doesn’t worry me at all — my inbox has biohazard warnings splattered all over it, and leaks venom whenever I shake my laptop — but enthusiastic crowds…bring ’em on. I get paid for the visits, and I expect I might make 10, 15 cents with an invasion of MLM wackos, and besides, my commenters need chew toys. They wear them out so fast! Multi-level marketers probably don’t have much endurance — WorldVentures sounds like a pathetic, desperate lot — but if we get enough volume, it might make up for their friability.

Dobbs vs. Wade

David Dobbs reviews ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ in the NY Times. Once again, Nicholas Wade falls flat.

If Wade could point to genes that give races distinctive social behaviors, we might overlook such shortcomings. But he cannot.

He tries. He tells, for instance, of specific gene variants that reputedly create less trust and more violence in ­African-Americans and, he says, explain their resistance to modern economic institutions and practices. Alas, the scientific literature he draws on is so uneven and disputed that many geneticists dismiss it outright. Wade also cites a 2008 paper that analyzed the genomes of almost 1,000 people from 51 populations around the globe. That paper found that people from different regions do indeed tend to have distinctive genomes. But Wade errs in saying the paper supports his idea that genetic selection has created races with particular social inclinations.

To begin with, the 2008 study mentions nothing about race. It merely establishes that many of the slight differences between human genomes cluster by geography at many scales, including continents, and that genomes from any given location will most likely be similar, just as two people from a particular place will most likely speak with similar accents.

Second, and far more serious, the paper’s authors specifically state that while selection may sometimes create genetic differences between populations, they saw little evidence that selection shaped the small genetic differences they found. In fact, they say the differences can be largely explained by “random drift” — arbitrary changes in genes having little to no effect on people’s biology or behavior. All of this directly contradicts Wade’s argument. Yet he baldly claims the study as support.

And he does this sort of thing repeatedly: He constantly gathers up long shots, speculations and spurious claims, then declares they add up to substantiate his case.

You know, mangling peer-reviewed articles and throwing a prejudicial slant on science that ignores the totality of the evidence is what creationists do, but I’m sure Wade’s HBD supporters will be along shortly to accuse Dobbs of being a ‘new creationist’.

Check out Dobbs’ blog post on the article. Very first comments are tiresome cliches from the same usual bores who show up to defend racism, flinging around accusations of “New Creationism” and “Cultural Marxism”. Prediction fulfilled.

It was a portrait of a delusion

Holly Hobby Lobby explains what she was thinking with that picture of her holding a bible and a rifle in front of a flag.

“I expected less backlash with this than I did the first one because the picture is, like, America’s founding principles,” Fischer opined to Fox News on Wednesday.

Hold it right there. Guns and God are what you get out of the Enlightenment principles that inspired America’s founders? That’s rather missing the point.

“That’s all that’s in the picture. And I really didn’t think it would cause the uproar that it has.”

What uproar? Pointing out, on media like blogs and twitter that parading about with a Bible and a gun isn’t exactly progressive, and exactly mirrors the attitude of the worst of the Abrahamic fundamentalists (heck, it is modern Abrahamic fundamentalism) isn’t exactly a riot. What I saw was a great deal of amusement on the left at the juxtaposition of Christian and Islamic ‘freedom fighter’, and most of the outrage came from the right, where they were howling in denial and insisting that they weren’t the same, because Muslims were gun-toting barbarians with a false god, while Holly was a white human being married to an American soldier. Totes different.

Fisher said that she posted the photo because there was a “growing intolerance among the left, and conservatives are becoming more and more afraid to speak up.”

In my culture, martyrdom is folly and a martyr complex, where no sacrifice is made but one pretends to be oppressed, is contemptible and stupid. Here, let me quell your fears.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News (hell, Holly was being interviewed on Fox), World Net Daily, Ann Coulter, the Family Research Council, Dinesh D’Souza, Sean Hannity, Sunday morning television punditry, Alex Jones, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Clear Channel, Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly, and the entirety of the Republican Party.

Conservatives aren’t afraid to speak up, because they sure won’t shut up. Everywhere I go, the Far Right Noise Machine is squawking nonstop.

Meanwhile, you probably think President Obama is a far left socialist/communist radical. He’s actually a centrist apparatchik who is less obstructive and destructive than the screaming idiots on the right.

You can complain when President Bernie Sanders is in office. Until then, your fears of socialism running the country are groundless. (And even then, a hypothetical Sanders presidency would be an even greater slog against the right-wing no-bots than the current one.)