It’s Tylenol?

RFK jr claimed over a month ago that this month they were going to find and announce the cause of autism. We all knew he was full of shit — he’s permanently full to the eyebrows with shit — and that this was a political game they were playing, because autism is a multifactorial syndrome with multiple enabling factors, and you’re not going to find a ‘magic bullet’ for it. Well, yesterday the gang of frauds and liars in the White House announced that there was a central link, and that it was acetaminophen, or Tylenol. This is like announcing that the cause is consuming bread — something with a widespread, long-term use that a huge number of pregnant women had eaten. Mothers with autistic children will now think that using a common, well-tested pain reliever is the cause, and blame themselves.

Trump gathered his crack team of worthless quacks to make this announcement.

Speaking from the Oval Office alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump did not keep his remarks to Tylenol during pregnancy. (I don’t know who the woman is, I guess no one thinks she’s important enough to name)

Of course Trump tried to take credit for this “discovery”.

It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby, Trump said, without providing further evidence.

Extensive research has shown that there’s no link between vaccines and autism.

Trump thanked Kennedy for bringing autism to the forefront of American politics, along with me. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has promoted discredited theories that vaccines cause autism.

We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it, Trump said.

Oh god. All the gullible people who believed him about ivermectin are now going to be telling pregnant women that they just have to suffer through headaches and fevers, all because a group of elected and appointed clowns say so. They presented no evidence for a link between autism and Tylenol, but just blithely charged in and invented one. The studies have been done to show that Tylenol is not a significant factor! Here’s one that looked at 2,480,797 children and found no connection.

Study reveals no causal link between neurodevelopmental disorders and acetaminophen exposure before birth
NIH-funded research in siblings finds previously reported connection is likely due to other underlying factors.

Acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy is not linked to the risk of developing autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability, according to a new study of data from more than 2 million children in Sweden. The collaborative research effort by Swedish and American investigators, which appears in JAMA, is the largest of its kind and was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Scientists compared siblings — who share genetics and other variables such as parental health, environmental exposures, and socioeconomic factors — and were able to limit the influence of other potential risk factors. This allowed them to focus specifically on, and eliminate, the risk associated with acetaminophen. The study design was unique due to the size of the population captured in the Swedish Medical Birth Register and the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register. Before siblings were considered, there appeared to be a small increase in risk for neurodevelopmental disorders in children exposed to acetaminophen, which was noted in previous studies.

Acetaminophen is commonly used as a pain reliever and fever reducer and is found in a variety of medicines available over the counter and via prescription. It is often taken during pregnancy instead of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, which can cause low levels of amniotic fluid, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The reasons pregnant people might take acetaminophen, including fever, or conditions such as chronic migraine, could be, and in some cases are, associated with an increased risk for later neurodevelopmental disorders following pregnancy.

One limitation of this study is that it relies on data from prescribed acetaminophen and from self-reporting from pregnant people during prenatal care. It may not capture all use or dosage in all people, particularly over-the-counter medicines. However, the number of patients included in the study sample and the ability to control for many other confounding factors support the conclusion that acetaminophen is not directly linked to an increase link of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability.

To inform best preventative strategies, additional research is required to fully understand the genetic and non-genetic factors that increase the risk of autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability.

The effect is simply not there! Because Trump has surrounded himself with incompetent frauds, this claim is going to resonate through society and have multiple deleterious effects on American health. Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and RFK jr belong on a list of infamous quacks alongside disgraced “doctor” Andrew Wakefield.

Charlie Kirk shot

A single shot was fired at Kirk during one of his rants at Utah Valley University, striking him in the neck.

Apparently, he’s still alive.

No automatic or semi-automatic fire? No bump stock? No large magazine? Violent liberals really need to learn more about the gear the Right embraces so readily.

Thoughts and prayers! Nothing more!

You guys didn’t pray hard enough. He’s dead.

This is bad news. Not only does no one deserve to be murdered, but this is going to be used to blame everyone the Right hates.

Remember what he believed.

“Renowned scientists and scholars” who deserve shaming

There’s a new book out to defend science, titled uncreatively The War on Science, by Lawrence Krauss. The theme is nothing new: I’d recommend instead The War on Science by Shawn Otto, or The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, both of which are well-researched single-author works that more objectively examine the people and processes that are literally targeting the institutions of science for destruction.

Krauss’s book stands out because it is completely different. Most people discussing the war on science talk about the influence of dark money, or capitalist motivations to sacrifice long term investment for short term profit, or lobby groups that shape the government for personal gain, or the undermining of the educational system to generate an uninformed citizenry. They talk about specific initiatives by special interest groups that are counter to good science. They discuss the malignant influence of reactionary religious organizations.

Not Krauss!

He has gathered 39 contributors, calling them “renowned scientists and scholars,” who are instead petty, entitled whiners who have personal grievances against the social institutions that have alienated them from the mainstream. It’s written by sex pests, racists, bigots, and defenders of genocide. They don’t like the fact that senior scientists are told not to sexually abuse junior faculty and students. They don’t like the fact that people with different ethnic backgrounds hold protests on their campuses. They resent being expected to respect aboriginal peoples in their research. They are horrified that better informed people are rejecting their old bigotries and recognizing that gender is on a spectrum. They all think that Woke is the enemy of science, and that hordes of Leftists have been battering the Ivory Tower to bring it down.

They’re all idiots.

They also have very bad timing. This series of screeds against the evils of the Left was published this summer, after the Right took control of the government and began to literally wreck science in this country, revoking grants, punishing universities, giving control of the NIH and NSF and CDC and NASA to political hacks who began dictating new directions for science, telling libraries what books they’re allowed to stock, deporting scientists and students who weren’t sufficiently “American” for their taste, enabling more religious influence into government, and basically trashing the Constitution. So now we have this book on the shelves screaming about an apocalyptic threat from gay and transgender scientists at a time when far-right conservatives are flexing their muscles and sending troops to university campuses.

Hemant Mehta has summarized multiple reviews of this wrong-headed book, and the defenses of its authors. They recognize that their timing was ludicrously bad, and all of the authors make the same goddamn stupid argument.

We wrote it before Trump was elected again, and we had no idea the Republicans would do this.

Larry Krauss has been an embarrassment for a long time.

That’s no excuse, and if you’re so ignorant you couldn’t see the Right’s agenda, despite the fact that people have been writing about it for decades, then you are in no position to publish a book that so thoroughly misses the point. And they’re still arguing even now that the True Danger is Wokeness, as Trump tears their institutions down around them.

For an example of how pig-headedly idiotic the authors are, Hemant quotes Jerry Coyne.

The book was put together before Trump began his assault on universities by punishing science grantees and by appointing people like RFK Jr. to science positions. I expected that, after this unpredictable bout of executive-branch bullying, there would be some wokesters who adopted a “whataboutery stance,” saying, “This book largely comprises attacks on how the progressive Left wing is eroding science. But Trump is dong much more damage from the Right.” And right now that is indeed the case, but Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed), the government will cut back strongly on interfering in the funding and production.

The effect of the Right on science, then, will probably be more temporary. In contrast, that from the Left will last a lot longer, for progressive professors who believe in nonsense like a spectrum of sex in animals will teach this nonsense to their students, and thus it will pass among academic generations. We simply cannot sit by and let progressives distort science in the cause of ideology, regardless of what the Right is doing.

(I hope Jerry is enjoying the sight of the National Guard patrolling his campus, the fucking moron.)

Unbelievable.

Hemant has an excellent summary of this abomination of a book.

The War on Science isn’t a defense of reason. It’s a monument to intellectual cowardice. Its authors, armed with petty grievances about pronouns and diversity programs, aimed their intellectual firepower on paper cuts that exist only in their minds while everyone around them is being decapitated. They act like the biggest problems in science involve grad students asking for inclusive policies, professors acknowledging biological complexity, or institutions offering STEM scholarships to underrepresented groups.

To publish such a book now, in the face of deliberate and systemic sabotage from the highest levels of government, is not only ridiculous, it’s malpractice for any half-decent scientist or science communicator. Even Jordan Peterson should be embarrassed—and that’s saying something.

Every page wasted on performative outrage over “wokeness” is a page that could have been used to sound the alarm about the real, ongoing destruction of the scientific world. And given that many of these authors have spent the past few years appealing to right-wing bigots, that could have been extremely useful.

Instead, by pretending that the greatest threat to science comes from progressive inclusion rather than authoritarian arson, Krauss and his allies have given cover to those who would dismantle our research institutions. They’re compiling propaganda for those who want to bury science under the weight of their own ignorance. They are enablers who fiddle with culture war nonsense while the laboratories burn.

Meanwhile, like most of the professors I know, I’ll continue to teach that the development of sex is a complex, gradual process with multiple variations and that gender is a social and psychological process expressed as a continuum, not because of ideology, but because that’s what the evidence says. At least, I’ll do that until I hear the jackboots marching down my hallway and the Republicans shut down my liberal arts university.

For now, though, here is the list of authors of this terrible book, every one a disgrace. Remember them. They aren’t going anywhere, and we should be prepared to publicly shame them at every opportunity.

Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson

Good news on the autism front!

Within a month, we’ll know definitively what causes some forms of autism. RFK jr says so.

We’re finding certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly causing autism, Kennedy said. We’re going to be able to address those in September.

That’s a bolt out of the blue. These kinds of conditions are difficult to research, and we’d expect to hear that kind of announcement in scientific papers and presentations at meetings, rather than at Trump’s regular ego-stroking sessions with his cabinet.

It’s also surprising since this is the state of our knowledge, according to the NIH:

Scientists don’t know exactly what causes autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Autism was first described in the 1940s, but very little was known about it until the last few decades. Even today, there is a great deal that we don’t know about autism.

Because the disorder is so complex and no two people with autism are exactly alike, there are probably many causes for autism. It is also likely that there is not a single cause for autism, but rather that it results from a combination of causes.

So the NIH doesn’t know, but RFK jr does. But then, the NIH is a hollow shell of a scientific institution, since they appointed an anti-vax hack, Jay Bhattacharya, to run it, and since they canceled approved grants right and left. I don’t think the answer is coming from the NIH.

Maybe the CDC has been working on it? I don’t think so. RFK jr has taken a wrecking ball to that organization, firing its director, and seeing senior leaders resigning.

The ongoing chaos at the CDC reached its breaking point Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported in the afternoon that Monarez was being ousted just four weeks into taking over the role, a decision later announced by HHS on its X page. Over the next few hours, four senior staff members, including the CDC’s chief medical officer Debra Houry, turned in their resignation notice. Some of the members posted their resignation letters online, including Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

I don’t know where RFK jr is getting his revelations, but I do know that in science, it’s not just the answer you get, but how you get that answer, and he’s not only failing to show the trail followed to arrive at his answer, but is actively working to obscure the methods behind his conclusions.

As a guess, I suspect that the big announcement in September will be that vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been disproven over and over again.

By the way, he went on to claim that windmills are “wiping out the whale population” in the Atlantic. He’s just pandering to the crooked mafioso at the head of the table, so expect more of that in September.

Slimy underbelly #2: Jillian Michaels

On an episode of “CNN NewsNight with Abby Philip,” the topic being discussed was a serious one: the Trump administration’s current program to purge the Smithsonian, and other museums, of exhibits that painted white Americans in an unflattering light. In particular, this meant that exhibits about the horrors of slavery were going to be censored, and were going to misrepresent a significant chunk of our history.

CNN, a cable news network, in a news program, brought on a round table of about 5 people and the host, Abby Phillip, to discuss this issue. One of the participants, Jillian Michaels, came prepared with a long list of exhibits that, she claimed, had the theme of “white people bad” (that’s actually how she phrased it — I rather suspect that no professional museum exhibit said such a thing. I’d also like to know who gave her that list…the Heritage Foundation? The Ku Klux Klan?)

Michaels charged into the discussion, waved her list around, and declared that no, Trump was only trying to balance the presentation of slavery.

In a roundtable discussion about President Donald Trump’s latest plan, some on the panel accused him of attempting to whitewash history, including downplaying the horrors of slavery. But Michaels pushed back, arguing that some of exhibits in question unfairly target white people.

He’s not whitewashing slavery, she said. And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.

Michaels then went on to try to justify her argument by saying that slavery is thousands of years old and that only a small percentage of white Americans actually owned slaves, something host Abby Phillip did not seem to appreciate.

They were discussing the history of American slavery, which was pretty much a white-owned institution. Any museum exhibit is going to show white people benefiting from exploitation of an almost entirely black population. How can you hide that without grossly distorting the facts?

She also tried to claim that only 2% of American individuals owned slaves, a number you can get by including the more populous northern states, where it was outlawed, including the black population of the enslaved, discounting the fact that a whole family dependent on slavery only counted one person, the master, and yeah, let’s ignore the economic dependencies of the Southern states. More accurate and historically conscious analyses reveal a different number.

So, according to the Census of 1860, 30.8 percent of the free families in the confederacy owned slaves.
That means that every third white person in those states had a direct commitment to slavery.

OK, so who the heck is Jillian Michaels, and why was she brought into this serious discussion?

She was a reality TV star.

She was a coach brought on to a show called “The Biggest Loser” where she yelled at fat people to eat less and exercise more. She has zero expertise in history, museum curation, or treating people humanely. Her qualification for getting on the show were that she is extremely opinionated and conservative — that is, that she has a loud mouth and is stupid. She has no qualifications. She runs a blog and a podcast (because everyone has a podcast) where she peddles “supplements” and yammers about how much she hates DEI and immigrants and “wokism”.

What were the producers at CNN thinking? They definitely weren’t looking for informed, educated opinion on a complex issue. They just went with a pushy, random, white ignoramus who’d spout off controversial (and wrong) ideas.

And so the bad ideas continue to spread, thanks to media that doesn’t believe in informing, but only in keeping the paying public’s eyes glued to their ads.

Slimy underbelly #1: Clay Travis

I’m stewing in my own juices here — crippled, homebound, going stir crazy — and one of the things driving me nuts is the state of American media, since I’m stuck watching so much of it. I have noticed that one of the drivers of bad media is these wankers that promote the worst of the underbelly of the country with panel shows, debates, interviews, and far more attention than they deserve, and I could criticize, for example, Piers Morgan, or Joe Rogan, who are constantly dredging up horrible people and propping them up on camera entirely because they have opinions that align with their own ghastly take on the world. I don’t want to waste time on all these horrible people raking in big money by finding equally horrible people to confirm their views.

What I find most appalling are these “experts” who are nothing of the kind, who get paraded about on television for being “authentic,” when they are clearly people prominent for being ignoramuses. I want to take a look at the slimy underbelly, the jumped-up pundits who get prominent airtime for being voices of True America, the dumbasses who are encouraged to express their worthless opinions, and are rewarded with excessive attention in the press.

First up, that extremely punchable face to the right belongs to Clay Travis, a goober I would never have gotten to know if he weren’t being repeatedly consulted as a smart guy on politics. He’s not. He’s a Trump fanatic, through and through.

He’s been frequently quoted for his grading of Trump’s performance.

What is my verdict on the first 100 days of Trump? This is what I voted for. I think if you were arguing, if you voted Trump, and I imagine a lot of you did, some of you did not, that’s fine, if you voted Trump, I can’t imagine you giving him anything other than an A or B. Right? I don’t see C, I don’t see D, I don’t see F.

He never gives specifics — he just gives him an A overall. As someone who professionally grades students on their performance, I am offended. You have to have rubrics and criteria that allow you to judge work, and to give productive guidance on improving it. Travis is a child who thinks a grade is just an arbitrary trophy you hand on someone because you like them.

His “grade” is also indefensible: how can you think a felon who repeatedly tramples on the constitution, who is shredding the social safety net, who is demolishing vital scientific institutions, who wants to destroy public and higher education, is doing good work? A wanna-be autocrat who is arresting and deporting people without due process does not deserve a good grade.

His reasons for supporting Trump are transparently stupid.

“Since we’re talking honestly about politics here, I have a question for you,” McLaughlin said. “My question is, and I want you to be really honest with me here, did you regret voting for Trump after his presidency ended in the January 6th riot?”

“No. I wish I could have voted for Trump ten times in 2020,” Travis replied.

“Really?” McLaughlin reacted.

“I think Joe Biden’s a disaster. And, I think one of the things that’s fascinating, you know, Ronald Reagan said he didn’t leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left him,” Travis said.

Travis went on to explain that the crux of his current political ideology focuses on him being “anti-cancel culture.”

He’s a free speech warrior who supports a man who sues people who criticize him, who uses the power of his office to force conformity, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s a hypocrite. He’s obsessed with Colin Kaepernick, who dared to kneel during the playing of the national anthem at the start of football games, yet now Travis has the gall to claim that he is “anti-cancel culture.”

And now, as a reward, he gets invited to babble on Piers Morgan. He is invited to do an in-person interview with Donald Trump on Airforce One. You might wonder, what are his qualifications to opine on politics or economics or civil rights?

He’s a podcaster.

Nothing wrong with podcasting, but it is not sufficient to make you an authority on pretty much anything. Anyone can get a microphone and start pontificating on the internet.

He’s also sports podcaster, possibly the most useless kind of them all. He has a site called Outkick where he basically makes predictions for sports bettors, leavened with his reactionary takes on politics. Maybe he’s really good at calling the outcomes of football games, I don’t know, but nothing about his profession makes him qualified to talk about much of anything outside sports.

But now, his stupid punchable face and unsupported opinions pop up all the time on the internet.

He’s the kind of negligible, uninteresting slime who happily acts as a useful idiot for conservatives to bounce their bad ideas off of — he’ll just affirm any foolishness, because that’s how he gets paid in money and reputation. The A he gives to Trump is worthless, but audiences will lap it up and ask for more.

That’s our current problem. It’s not just that media will promote bullshit, but that there’s no shortage of people they can find to parrot it, and that the general public lacks the capacity to question anything.

I’m afraid I’ll never run out of these know-nothings to highlight.

Loon sighting confirmed!

I told you that Brian Lauer is an ignorant buffoon, but you shouldn’t trust my opinion alone. Last night, Mark Reid and Dr. Dan worked over the same presentation and came to the same conclusion, so it’s official: Lauer is a kook.

But perhaps you are cautiously skeptical. You need more evidence. You want direct evidence from Lauer himself. Here’s the introduction to a podcast on Real Science Radio (it’s not real science) which is just conspiracy theories stacked on conspiracy theories.

RSR host Fred Williams is joined by Brian Lauer to unravel the World Economic Forum’s “The Great Reset”, a consortium of wealthy and powerful evolutionists looking to use the pandemic as an excuse to push their worldview. On the surface, it’s just another socialist economic plan in a similar vein to FDR’s disastrous New Deal and LBJ’s failed Great Society, but this time it’s driven by the flawed science of materialism and climate change. Like its predecessors, the underlying false assumptions will end up hurting the economy and tearing away at the middle class, further dividing society and fueling class warfare. “The Great Reset” globalists have posted 8 predictions of what the world will look like in 2030 if governments buy into their short-sighted ideas. Better stock up on T-bones now!

But even more sinister are a litany of ideas hidden in the subterfuge of “The Great Reset”, such as biometric surveillance and transhumanism. A key advisor to “The Great Reset” is Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While he warns that transhumanism can be pushed too far, such as digital dictatorships with total control over their population, his false worldview steeped in the fake science of materialism leads him to the silly belief that humans are “hackable animals” that can have their total consciousness manipulated such that “free will is over”. For more, check out this brief video Brian found and hear it for yourself! You can also hear more from his talk at a recent creation conference.

I choked and passed out at wealthy and powerful evolutionists, so the rest was just noise.