Have you ever felt like you spend all your time explaining the obvious to idiots who are going to reflexively reject the evidence anyway? That’s the discouraging thing about battling creationism, you’re fighting willful ignorance. Even more significant is the need to explain the importance of vaccines when we’ve got mush-brained cranks like RFK Jr. geysering nonsense into the discourse that the media treats gently as if he has something intelligent to say.

This has always been a problem, though. Today I learned that Minnesota had mandatory vaccination laws for school children in 1883 (Yay! Woo-hoo! You go, Minnesota!) but that they repealed it in 1903 (booooo) after…a debate.

Fucking debates. Anyway, they dragged Justus Ohage, a real physician and the public health commissioner for St Paul into a debate with a carpet-bagger from Indiana, WB Clarke, who proceeded to glibly gish-gallup all over the place.

Dr. Clarke spoke next for an hour. He called Edward Jenner’s research “bogus.” He threw out incorrect and cherry-picked examples. He claimed that Germany had compulsory vaccination but also had the worst smallpox outbreak in Europe in 1871…
He did not mention that the smallpox epidemic was caused by unvaccinated French troops in Germany fighting in the Franco-Prussian War and that the vaccinated Germans suffered far less than the French.
There was no way for anyone to rebut these claims as he was making them, and Clarke was a smooth talker. He spoke quickly and vividly ultimately comparing the “vaccinator’s lancet” to a “highwayman’s butcher knife” saying that people had a right to defend themselves against each.
When Dr. Ohage took the stage, he only had 15 minutes. He said he did not have time to offer a rebuttal of each of Clarke’s claims. Instead, he had to defend “the attitude he had taken” against the anti-vaccinationists. The damage was done.

The result: the Minnesota legislature repealed the mandatory vaccination law in 1903.

Wait, no, that was only the proximate result. The long-term consequence was that Minnesota was ravaged by a smallpox epidemic in 1924-25 that killed 500 people. Oops.

State law blocked a sound public health response. An 1883 state law had required all school-age children to be vaccinated against smallpox. But in 1903, the legislature repealed that law and made compulsory child vaccination illegal. Although smallpox vaccination is almost 100 percent effective, public health officers had no power to make people protect themselves. They could recommend, but not mandate, the vaccine.

Starting in November 1924, both cities launched free vaccination campaigns. Once the deaths mounted, the frightened public jammed the vaccination centers. As reported in the Minneapolis Journal, as many as 17,000 got their skin scratches in a single day. By mid-December 1924—according to public health officials—some 210,000 people in St. Paul and 350,000 in Minneapolis had been vaccinated.

Clarke was never called to account for all the people he was responsible for killing. The sheep of Minnesota were cheerfully duped by a smooth-talking liar, and stampeded into the vaccination clinics to save themselves from their own stupidity.

It’s 1902 in the United States all over again. I’ll make the bold prediction that in 20 years or less we’re going to have to pay the piper.

There’s nothing I can say about this. Russian bad guy Putin has pissed off Russian mercenary and bad guy Prigozhin, and now we’ve got what looks like a full-blown civil war, with Prigozhin marching on Moscow, while the Ukrainians stand in awe as their enemy looks to be killing themselves.

I don’t know how this will end! No one knows what will happen! People will die and cities will be devastated, but beyond that, it’s Godzilla vs. Ghidorah.

I think NATO might be flying bags of popcorn into Kiev, but otherwise, I’m just going to sit back and watch incredulously. Hmmm, I might have some popcorn around the house, myself.

Pose for the history books, ladies.

I think it’s useful for future generations to see that haters and bigots and morally reprehensible scumbuckets can look like quite ordinary people — middle-aged soccer moms are entirely capable of deep ignorance and hatefulness. It’s also the case that ordinary, respectable institutions can accommodate them, as the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia has done. That museum is hosting a Moms for Liberty event next week, betraying their own reason for existence.

Moms for Liberty lobbies for book bans and aims to dictate how history is taught, stripping it of any mention of slavery, racism, and LGBTQ people. The group got its start fighting mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory. It spreads anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, falsely labels LGBTQ people as “groomers,” and led Florida’s hateful campaign against LGBTQ teachers. It openly harasses transgender and nonbinary young people and their families, advocating new laws and policies to restrict their lives and freedoms.

The group claims an affinity with America’s founding, yet they have failed this test in historical symbolism. Revolutionary Philadelphia was at the forefront of scientific inquiry, education, publishing, medicine, and government — all things that Moms for Liberty lobbies against.

Read the whole article for more historical examples of how the Moms for Repression are wrong on every count.

Newspaper articles about the growing tension between the North American colonies and the British crown were reported alongside dramatic stories of “female husbands” — people assigned the female sex at birth who lived as men and married women. In May 1766, London’s Public Advertiser printed the notice from Lord Chamberlain’s office about the movement of “a quantity of ammunition, and Part of the Troops destined for North America” on the very same page that it also noted the death of “the famous Sarah Paul, who went thro’ a Variety of Adventures in Men’s Clothes, which made a great Eclat about seven Years ago, when she married another young Woman, and was distinguished by the Appellation of the Female Husband.” While living as a man, they went by the name Samuel Bundy.

North American papers embraced these accounts as well. The Pennsylvania Gazette, printed by Ben Franklin in the Franklin Court Printing Office, reported on Charles Hamilton, who was detained in Chester in July 1752 while en route to Philadelphia under suspicion “that the Doctor was a women’ in mens clothes.” Since there was no explicit law against cross-dressing, authorities reported they would only keep Hamilton in prison “till we see whether any Body appears against her, if not she will be discharged.”

It’s a real shame. When I interviewed in Philadelphia 30 years ago, one of the things that won me over is that I was just turned loose for a day in the historical district of Philadelphia, which is simply a wonderful place to wander. Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Benjamin Franklin Museum (but not the Museum of the American Revolution, which did not exist then), all in easy walking distance. Then, in a bit more substantial stroll, you could walk up Market Street to the city hall, and visit all the science and art museums arrayed along Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The heart of the city is a bit old-fashioned in that it’s designed for people walking places, rather than freeways.

And now these horrible people are moving in. You know, if I were interviewing for a position in Philadelphia, and my visit were marred by an encounter with the dishonest harridans of Moms for Liberty, I probably wouldn’t take the job.

Look at that fish!

It’s beautiful. That’s the only thing I care about in this photo — I want someone to buy me a fishing junket to Alaska. My dad managed to make a few salmon fishing trips in his last years, and I think they made him happy.

By the way, the guy on the right is a supreme court judge. He got flown on a private plane to this fishing camp, with a billionaire, Paul Singer, footing the $100,000 bill. It paid for Singer to do that, since he had several cases before the court, and got favorable rulings. That fish is a bribe.

It’s looking like Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society goon, is hooking up each Supreme Court appointee with their very own billionaire sugar daddy. Clarence Thomas got one, Sam Alito got one, I wonder whose patronage each of the other judges got? Somebody had to have paid off Kavanaugh’s loans. I’d like to know who. Let us know who bought each member of the Supreme Court.

Still, that is a magnificent King Salmon. That’s the price of a corrupt judge? OK, maybe some ethics rules would be good.

I have an unfortunate history with CFI and The Skeptical Inquirer. I ought to be aligned with the principles of skepticism, but too often organized skepticism has been this stodgy, hidebound dinosaur that is more interested in conserving the privileges of a narrow group of people than in actually implementing productive change. So I abandoned it, writing this in 2011.

[Diversity] has long been an issue with the skeptical movement. I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy. I didn’t let my subscription lapse in protest, but out of lack of motivation.

Then, a few years ago, they fired Kavin Senapathy, a huge self-own. I commented on that:

That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.

Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.

Kavin revealed some rather obvious inside information:

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

You get the idea. It’s the whitest, most oblivious skeptical organization, although Shermer’s group is competing well with that status. Worse, they aren’t at all interested in broadening their perspectives and getting better. I publicly announced my departure from the organized skepticism movement over these sorts of differences years ago.

Well, now we have achieved the merger of skepticism with the aggrieved privileged conservative crowd. The Skeptical Inquirer has published an article by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja titled The Ideological Subversion of Biology, which is full of bogus nonsense about how the Progressive Left is strangling science. It’s the same silly crap as that loony In Defense of Merit in Science paper that Coyne coauthored a while ago, and it’s a perfect fit for the Inquirer.

The title is an interesting choice — it’s a blatant call-back to anti-communist hysteria, and will strike a chord with Republicans and MAGAts all across the country. Once upon a time, it was the kind of thing the John Birch Society or Lyndon LaRouche would publish.

It’s really bad. Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see.

I’m working on a response to it. Coyne has written a long gish gallop of a paper, so it’s going to take a while, and another thing that’s not helping is that I’m flying off to a 4-day conference this weekend. I’ve also written to the Skeptical Inquirer asking if they’d be interested in publishing a response — I kind of doubt that they will, given their ideological predilections and the fact that they published a load of nonsense in the first place.

Stay tuned. With a few long days at the computer, I might finish a response before my flight on Sunday.

Traffickers are overloading boats to enable people to flee terrible conditions in North Africa and the Middle East, with disastrous results.

In the early hours of Wednesday, 14 June, an old fishing vessel carrying up to 750 people capsized and sank 47 miles off the Greek coast.

So far 79 people have been confirmed as dead. Only 104 had been rescued by the time the search was called off, so it’s possible that more than 600 people have been lost in total. Survivors report that the boat sank “in minutes” in a place where the sea is four kilometres deep. It is unlikely the bodies, including up to 100 children, will ever be found.

The battered fishing vessel left from Tobruk, eastern Libya, and was heading for Italy despite Greece being a closer destination. The reason why is clear. In the past three years, Greece has enacted an increasingly harsh policy of pushbacks, making it almost impossible for asylum-seekers to arrive safely on Greek territory.

Many of the victims were Pakistani. You’ve got to wonder how bad life is in Pakistan that they would risk drowning or Greece, where the survivors have now been thrown into barren warehouses under armed guard. They must have been hoping to reach civilized Great Britain, that land of prosperity and liberty that would treat them with dignity and respect.

I’m joking, of course.

If any of the survivors of the shipwreck make it to Calais, and brave another crossing over the English Channel, their reception will be no better than in Greece. Starting later this month, the Home Office plans to house people seeking asylum in the UK onboard a barge that has been likened to a floating prison by multiple organisations, including MSF UK.

The Bibby Stockholm is a barge that has been designed for 220 people. Is currently being refitted in Falmouth to accommodate 500 asylum seekers. It has been the target of an ongoing resistance campaign led by local groups, with regular protests and actions linking up to the #NoFloatingPrisons campaign launched by my refugee support organisation Reclaim The Sea.

Prison hulks are a long and dishonorable tradition in English history. Respect history!

Don’t forget or forgive America, either — we’re pretty casual about wrecking countries outside our borders, creating the refugees that are fleeing to their oppressors.

I couldn’t get past the opening paragraphs of this article.

While thousands of Ukrainians were fleeing their submerged homes after a catastrophic dam explosion last week, high-society Russians gathered for a glitzy restaurant festival in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, just 500 miles away from the devastating flooding.

The event, called Gastreet, saw some 5,000 citizens pay up to $2,000 dollars for the opportunity to listen to some of Russia’s top businessmen, restaurant owners, and influencers over the course of five days. The event also included concerts, lavish nightlife experiences, and gourmet dinners.

If there’s one thing that was made clear at the Sochi resort, it’s that no amount of Western sanctions, Kremlin restrictions, or spillover violence within Russia can stop the country’s rich and famous from living large—despite the raging war in neighboring Ukraine.

Ummm, yes? Is this news? Do you think this is a Russian phenomenon? People are starving in the US, and we still have our Met Galas. America continues to bomb Afghanistan with drones, it’s just too boring to make the news, while influencers get paid to pose with beer brands. Our public schools continue to get almost daily visits from fanatics with assault rifles, while a reality show called Bridezillas has been running on cable for almost 20 years.

Any time you have colossal economic disparities, you’re going to get these kinds of contrasts. Neither the oligarchs of Russia nor the investment bankers of America are going to feel any pain, and they’re all going to frolic in the wreckage of other people’s suffering.

The way conservatives have promoted stupid ideas on social issues to become the dominant narrative in the news is simple and interesting…and horrifying.

• Start with a cranky, bigoted idea that few people like.
• Create a group with a catchy name that does sound like something they’d like: Moms for Liberty, for instance, or The American College of Pediatricians. They sound sensible and reasonable, right?
• Find your few fellow like-minded cranks and bigots, and get them to sign up for your group. All it takes is a few to seed your cause.
• It used to be that you’d fire up your fax machine, but nowadays it’s even easier: get on Facebook. Facebook lets any ol’ crap get through.
• Start spamming the media with press alerts. Eventually, some gullible newspaper or television network — like Fox News — will invite you on. You’ll find more cranks and bigots.
• Eventually, a billionaire — a demographic that’s particularly rich in idiots — will find you and throw money at you, and you’re a success.

It’s been happening. The anti-choice movement in this country is driven by a small number of cranky zealots who have mastered this recipe, as illustrated by The American College of Pediatricians.

A small group of conservative doctors has sought to shape the nation’s most contentious policies on abortion and transgender rights by promoting views rejected by the medical establishment as scientific fact, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post that describe the group’s internal strategies.

The records show that after long struggling to attract members, the American College of Pediatricians gained outsize political influence in recent years, primarily by using conservative media as a megaphone in its quest to position the group as a reputable source of information.

The organization has successfully lobbied since 2021 for laws in more than a half-dozen states that ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths, with its representatives testifying before state legislatures against the guidelines recommended by mainstream medical groups, according to its records. It gained further national prominence this year as one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit to limit access to mifepristone, a key abortion drug.

They’re a tiny group, barely qualified to pontificate on the subjects they promote, and is dominated by ideological opposition to abortion, birth control, homosexuality, and trans care. That’s the glue that holds them together, rather than an honest medical consensus.

Records from early 2022 show membership of the American College of Pediatricians at about 700 people — just over 60 percent of whom self-identified as possessing medical degrees, including some holding prominent positions as hospital chiefs and a state health commissioner. The group, citing privacy, would not comment on the size or makeup of its membership.

It’s a religious organization.

Joseph Zanga, founder of the American College of Pediatricians, who had led the American Academy of Pediatrics in the late 1990s, described the splinter organization as “a Judeo-Christian, traditional-values organization” in a 2003 interview with the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, which promoted conversion therapy. His organization’s core beliefs are “that life begins at conception, and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children,” he said at the time. Zanga declined a Post request for an interview.

They followed the Right-Wing Recipe, though, and got picked up by the worst of the worst of media, convincing audiences that they are legitimate and credible, when they are not.

The group found an eager audience through conservative media, including the Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham shows on Fox News, the documents detail. Since 2016, the American College of Pediatricians has been mentioned in more than 200 articles published by conservative news sites such as Breitbart, Daily Wire, the Epoch Times, the Washington Examiner, the Blaze and the Gateway Pundit, according to a Post analysis. Its profile has continued to rise. The volume of articles mentioning the group during the first four months of 2023 was five times that of the same period in 2020, according to GDELT’s online news database.

“They’re part of a coordinated, politically motivated anti-science ecosystem,” said Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine and an expert in misinformation.

One more element to add to the formula: when their strategems are revealed and exposed, it is an attack on them, and they can then deploy the “silent majority” gambit.

“There’s a silent majority out there that stands with us,” she said. “This act has awoken a sleeping giant.”

The numbers may say they’re a loud minority, but they can always claim that the majority of Americans are with them, they just don’t say it aloud. This was also a popular excuse from the early days of the internet: “the lurkers support me in email,” even when they didn’t, but how could you check?