Is Audiophilia in the DSM?

What little I’ve read of the extreme audiophile community makes my brain hurt, and I’ve avoided it like poison. James Randi deals with the freaky audiophiles now and then — people who believe their special magic cables will make your stereo sound better, or that an array of weirdly shaped hatstands in your room will make the music resonate just right — but it’s not something I want to get into regularly. A reader sent me a link to the special One Drop Liquid, though, and I just had to share my cerebral agony with everyone else, out of spite.

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Party like it’s 2011

Speaking of satire that’s hard to tell from religion, one of the cycles of the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, which is prompting some end-of-the-world hysteria, and even a movie:

Apparently, the whole world is going to change suddenly on 21 December, five years from now.

Armageddon is not what it used to be

I think there is going to be more outbreaks of telepathy

This is my favorite quote:

Whether or not time ends in 2012, we should be assuming it will so that we take care of business. Secondly and most important, don’t cancel your appointments for 2013.

The movie seems to be taking this nonsense seriously—they got a whole mob of astrologers and shamans and New Age kooks twittering away. I’m afraid I don’t believe it.

Besides, everyone knows the real catastrophe strikes 100 years later, in 2112. (I actually own that album, on vinyl, buried in a box somewhere. That’s a more apocalyptic omen than anything in this movie, I suspect.)

PSA

Avoid Las Vegas between May 17th and 20th. There’s a conference going on there that will be like a black hole of stupid, with both Sylvia Browne and Deepak Chopra and a host of low-wattage luminaries of woo in attendance, and there may be a kind of intelligence implosion going on. Your brain may get sucked into the dark pit of delusional dimness if you’re too close.

Anti-vaccination foolishness in Minnesota

I got a request to spread the word around Minnesota—the anti-vaxers are gearing up again to push a silly bill in the Minnesota congress. I’ve put the letter below. If any of these people are your representatives, contact them and tell them they are being very, very silly.

There’s supposed to be a hearing next week on a bill that would limit the use of vaccines containing thimerosal, because of the belief that they may cause autism. This is the third year that this bill has been presented, and it keeps failing, but they keep bringing it back up, even though it’s clearer now than ever that there is no connection between the two – there’s been no more than trace amounts of thimerosal in childhood vaccines made since 2001, and more autism than ever in kids too young to have been exposed to it. This isn’t just bad science: it’s the Legislature telling parents they can’t trust their pediatricians, and giving credence to the quacks who want to treat autistic kids with chelation, homeopathy, hyperbaric oxygen, high-dose vitamin supplements, and all manner of other dubious remedies.

Perhaps you would be willing to spread the word that the committee members who will be voting on this bill (Senate File 1780) need to hear the scientific viewpoint? Especially the ones who are co-sponsors of the bill – including John Marty, committee chair, who just went down about four hundred notches in my estimation. I’ll append a couple of links for background and the committee list. I imagine you have a lot of MN readers who may be constituents of the committee members.

Thanks!

Lisa Randall

(an amateur immunization advocate who has experienced the lunacy first-hand)

Background and statements by the American Academy of Pediatrics

Bill text

Committee (co-authors’ names are in bold):

Chair: John Marty* (DFL-54)
Roseville
651-296-5645

Vice Chair: Patricia Torres Ray* (DFL-62)
Minneapolis
651-296-4274

Paul E. Koering (R-12)
Fort Ripley
651-296-4875

Linda Berglin (DFL-61)
Minneapolis
651-296-4261

John P. Doll (DFL-40)
Burnsville
651-296-5975

Sharon L. Erickson Ropes* [RN] (DFL-31)
Winona
651-296-5649

Michelle L. Fischbach (R-14)
Paynesville
651-296-2084

David W. Hann (R-42)
Eden Prairie
651-296-1749

Linda Higgins (DFL-58)
Minneapolis
651-296-9246

Debbie J. Johnson (R-49)
Ham Lake
651-296-3219

Tony Lourey* (DFL-08)
Kerrick
651-296-0293

Ann Lynch (DFL-30)
Rochester
651-296-4848

Yvonne Prettner Solon (DFL-07)
Duluth
651-296-4188

Betsy L. Wergin* (R-16)
Princeton
651-296-8075

Now on top of my usual creationists, I can thank Lynn Margulis for drawing in the HIV denialists that plague Tara‘s site, and this for the anti-vaxers from Orac‘s. Obviously, I need to put up something about global warming next. I’m going to call this little game Poketroll — collect them all!

Shame on Oprah

“The Secret” is the latest New Agey scam; there’s an excellent article on this con on Salon:

Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite — positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles — and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.” And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that’s at the root of the other two. Here’s “The Secret” on reading and, um, electricity: “When I discovered ‘The Secret’ I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good,” and, “How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don’t, do you?” And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of “The Secret,” because it’s why the book exists: “[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, ‘I’d like to have this experience and I’d like to have that product and I’d like to have a person like that.’ It is you placing your order with the Universe. It’s really that easy.” That’s from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to “The Secret,” on Oprah.com.

The main focus of the article, though is on how Oprah Winfrey is destroying her own credibility with the promotion of this nonsense; I never felt she had any credibility before (and heck, she had a negative account with me for advancing the career of that annoying fraud, Dr Phil), so that really doesn’t resonate with me…but the uncompromising dismissal of “The Secret” is worth reading.

Who the heck is ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith?

I’ve never heard of her before—I guess you have to be familiar with the routine quackery of the health food store to know of her—but she certainly sounds like a real piece of work. The Guardian has an entertaining exposé of her claims and her tactics. She’s one of those people who makes extravagant claims for dietary supplements that she sells, backing them up with loads of pretentious and utterly bogus pseudoscientific gobbledygook.

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Phil Plait, TV Star

That Dilbert guy, I don’t envy at all. The Bad Astronomy guy, maybe a little bit. He’s got a clip of his appearance with Penn and Teller now, in which he rebuts the moon landing conspiracy theorists.

Of course, the real reason we know the moon landings were faked is that if they’d actually landed there, they would have sunk into 50 feet of soft and fluffy moon dust and never been seen again. Plait never answers that one.