This is terrible, wasteful, stupid news from Africa.
A measles outbreak has claimed the lives of 70 children in Zimbabwe over the past two weeks, mostly among families from apostolic sects that shun vaccinations, state media said Thursday.
I’m still waiting for news of evangelical atheists traveling to distant lands and killing people by encouraging ignorance. It doesn’t seem to happen.
California has had zero deaths from whooping cough in the last 55 years.
The toll this year: 9 babies dead of whooping cough. So far.
There is something about that link above that makes me angry. The source given for the terrible statistic is the Huffington Post — a site which has done far more than its share to promulgate lies and fear about vaccination, and which should bear a portion of the guilt for those dead children.
This video is of a crop circle fanatic seeing her dream come true: she actually gets taken to a fresh crop circle to experience the mystic energies emanating from it. It’s going to change her life, she says.
In case you don’t recognize the mysterious symbol flattened into the grass, all is revealed here.
Dr Hall had a gig writing for Oprah’s woo-laden magazine, and I didn’t even know it (that tells you how often I’ve looked at O), and it was a good plan: she’d be writing a skeptical column for them that would address common medical myths. Unfortunately, reality smacked hard into the jello of pop pseudo-medicine, passed through quickly, and Dr Hall now finds herself not writing for Oprah. She didn’t belong in that den of inanity anyway.
One amusing thing, though: compare the comments discussing her departure at Science-Based Medicine with those on Gawker. Right out of the gate, the Gawker commenters are whining that science doesn’t know everything, and wondering what’s wrong with Reiki, and accusing Dr Hall of all kinds of egotistical perfidy.
Two children are missing in Belize, and no one knows what happened to them. So a helpful ‘psychic’ declared that they had been fed to the crocodiles in a nearby sanctuary. The results were predictable.
Reports are that the mob shot and killed some of the 17 crocs held in captivity at the sanctuary. Also destroyed were the Rose’s two story home that included a laboratory and nursery for baby crocs. One baby American Crocodile was to be flown to Chicago to the Wildlife Discovery Center in Lake Forest, Ill. USA for the first ever animal exchange program between Belize and the USA. Over $2,500 in vet supplies that were recently donated for a new humane society that Cherie, along with other locals were working on in Punta Gorda were also lost. “This one wrongful incident has effected and hurt many innocent people and animals,” added Cherie.
The sanctuary looks like it was an amazing setup: all power was provided by solar and wind, they offered educational programs, they were training students, and they were also supporting local eco-tourism. And of course their primary mission was protecting endangered reptiles.
Now it’s all destroyed by the lies of one ignorant fraud, whipping up a mob into a ridiculous frenzy. Even now the people who ran the sanctuary can’t come back — they’ve been threatened with death.
Ignorance isn’t just a passive failure. Ignorance topples and destroys the great things people build up.
The organizers are asking for donations — they’re hoping to rebuild.
International wiring account number for donations
Belize Bank # 630-1-1-10130
Account# Vince & Cherie Rose Fire Victim Account
It’s a ridiculous myth that sharks have magical properties that prevent cancer, but it’s not true: sharks do get cancer. Furthermore, even if they did have low rates of cancer, grinding them up and powdering them and tossing them into your gut for chemical breakdown would no more cure your cancer than it would turn you into an unstoppable ferocious eating machine with gills.
Add them to the long list of species being exterminated on the altar of sympathetic magic.
Here’s a swami with his magic breathing advice for coping with throat cancer. How these guys can dispense bogus medical advice and not get lynched by angry cancer patients is a mystery.
At least he looks really goofy when he curls his tongue and breathes. Now if only there were some yogic enchantment that could do something about his creepy squink eye…
Roy Peter Clark wrote a book about language which was savaged viciously on Language Log — in other words, the poor guy was publicly ridiculed and his work rudely trashed. He couldn’t possibly have learned anything from that, could he? He has a guest post now in which he describes his reaction.
In brief, the criticism, some of it harsh and uninformed, helped me straighten out some crooked thinking about language, a process that resulted in the recent publication by Little, Brown of my book “The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English.” On August 22, Ammon Shea gave the book high marks in the New York Times Book Review, calling it “very much a manual for the 21st century.”
I write this on Language Log not to tell you that my success has proved some of your commentary off the mark. Quite the contrary, I have often said now to friends and colleagues that had I not been roughed up by the Language Loggers, I could not have developed the muscle tone to write the book.
Hmm. Who would have thought that maybe the response to criticism was dependent on the attitude of the recipient? Oh, gosh. Me.
I see that the don’t-be-a-dick tone debate is still going on — I’ve been totally unimpressed with the arguments from the side of nice, not because I disagree with the idea that positive approaches work, but because they ignore the complexity of the problem and don’t offer any solutions but only complaints (what are they going to do, break the fingers and gag anyone they judge as ‘harming the cause’?) I side with Richard Dawkins’ comment on the issue. We don’t need to be trivially abusive, but on subjects we care about deeply, we should express ourselves with passion.
You know I’ve had this recent scary cardiac episode, and as it turns out, I think my own dickish personality probably (not certainly, since we’re dealing with odds here) helped me. There was one moment when I literally had two paths to take, and I chose what I think was the best and most rational one.
This whole hospitalization mess started a few weeks ago, when I was on my daily walk, and I’d gone a little farther and longer than I usually do. I was on my way home, and I felt a dull ache in my chest — nothing severe, nothing acute, just a soreness that spread into my left arm. And I stopped on the sidewalk, and looked ahead, where I was only a couple of blocks from home, and I looked to my right, where the hospital was located only a couple of blocks away. And the ache immediately receded, and I had a little internal debate between the nice angel on my left shoulder, and the dickish devil on my right.
And the angel said, “Oh, look, it’s just a little soreness and it’s going away already. Go home, have a cup of tea, lie down for a bit, and then you can get back to work, no worries. You’ll feel fine.”
And the devil replied with the potent one-two punch of reason and abuse: “You teach human physiology, you moron — you know this is one of the warning signs of heart disease. You’d have to be incredibly stupid to ignore this and hope it goes away…until a heart attack comes along to blow your heart up. Jerk. This isn’t even a choice.”
I thought about it a bit and realized that the remote prospect of dying (it was a very mild ache, and I had no feeling of imminent doom) was nowhere near as persuasive as the thought that I’d feel like an idiot if the iron spike of an infarct did nail my left ventricle at some time in the future, and I’d neglected a portent and hadn’t done the best thing for my health. So I turned right, even though I also felt a bit of a whiner for showing up at a hospital with such a small complaint.
Denial is so tempting: the appeal of choosing ignorance to avoid hard consequences was something I felt strongly — it would have been so nice to go home and pretend there were no problems, and I probably would have been just fine, on the surface. But the heart disease would have continued to progress, and a problem deferred would have become a problem amplified.
That is the virtue of dickishness. It provides the social and psychological penalties that counter the draw of complacency. It’s so easy to go with the flow, to pretend that a thousand issues, whether it’s homeopathy or religion or transcendental meditation or an absence of critical thinking or a lack of concern about our health, are OK because they make people happy, and it’s even easier to demonize the cranky Cassandras and make them the problem, because they make people uncomfortable.
But if bad ideas don’t have immediate consequences to the placid mob, and if everyone is being Mr and Mrs Nice Folk and reassuring everyone that they’re still good people no matter what foolishness they might believe in, where is the motivation to change? A skeptic who thinks their mission is to provide only positive messages and lead everyone along with affirmations and friendliness is going to be an ineffective skeptic.
I don’t watch Oprah enough, so I haven’t seen much open endorsement of the nonsense behind that unbelievable bestseller, The Secret. There must be a lot of closet believers, though, because that piece of well-whipped frothy BS sold 19 million copies. Now the author has cranked out another, similar excretion: The Power, nicely reviewed in Newsweek. Both have the same premise, that the Universe really, really loves you and wants to give you everything you wish for, if only you concentrate and ask.
The Power is a distillation of the central insight of The Secret: the “law of attraction.” It’s still true, apparently, that you can get anything you want, from parking spots to cures for obscure diseases, just by wishing for them and pretending they are already in your possession. But there are some new observations in The Power, such as the importance of being nice to your water. Researchers in several countries, she writes, “have discovered that when water is exposed to positive words and feelings such as love and gratitude, the energy level of the water not only increases, but the structure of the water changes, making it perfectly harmonious … When water is exposed to negative emotions, such as hate, the energy level of the water decreases and chaotic changes occur.” Since “the inside of your head is 80 percent water,” you can see how important this is.
It sounds like it’s been updated by tossing any ol’ recent woo claim into the stewpot, like that magic water silliness. She’s also added old stuff, like the patriarchs from the book of Genesis.
Death, like poverty, is subject to the law of attraction: “[P]eople once lived for hundreds and hundreds of years,” she writes, citing “ancient texts” as her authority. “So what’s happened? People changed what they believed.”
You know, some of the smartest people in history have asked what the core principles of the universe are, and they’ve often been people with deep cultural roots and an entirely human predisposition to hope that the cosmos revolves around them. And in every case, they’ve failed to find evidence of the beneficent love and charity that they had hoped would come sleeting in to Earth from the farthest reaches of the firmament, and instead found only impersonal forces like gravity and electromagnetism and cosmic rays and deep forces that draw particles together or fling them apart. We live in an impersonal universe where hydrogen vastly outweighs our brains and where the dominant environment is an icy cold emptiness filled with unbreathably attenuated gases and pierced by scattered photons and fleeting subatomic particles.
The real secret is that the universe doesn’t give a goddamn about us, doesn’t dream, doesn’t wish, doesn’t hope. The real power is that science gives us the tools to wrench the pointless detritus of reality into the shape that we dream of, to impose our wishes on the substrate. We don’t achieve that by lying abed and hoping really hard, though — we do it with work and real knowledge. The shortcuts of lotus eaters like Rhonda Byrne are entirely illusory.
