Encouraging news for Oklahoma

Ryan Walters, the superintendent of education who was trying to force Christianity on students — introducing PragerU trash into the curriculum, requiring Bibles (the Trump Bible, actually), etc. — resigned a short while ago. I assumed it was because he had been made a more lucrative offer by a conservative Christian organization, but it may have been a deeper problem than I thought.

Walters is being investigated by the state ethics commission! He had been abusing teacher licenses and firing people he didn’t like, among other fiscal irregularities. He had given high-paying positions to his friends, instead. Some of his actions are already being revoked.

Starting with the cases regarding teacher licenses. The board voted to dismiss several cases for revocations of teachers like Regan Killackey, the Edmond teacher who went somewhat viral last year after an Instagram post from five years prior came to light that showed his kid in a Trump mask and Killackey with a pirate sword, they were at a Halloween store around the holiday time.

The board also voted to dismiss the case of the teacher license revocation for Alison Scot, who also became a target under Walters when she commented on someone’s social media post regarding the assassination attempt of President Trump.

Also cool: the Oklahoma education website, which once promised all this crap about Bibles and PragerU, is already being revised, and his weird religious programming is already beginning to disappear.

As Sam Seder mentions above, this suggests that the Oklahoma citizenry aren’t as far gone as we feared — they’ve been quietly fighting back all along, and we’re starting to see the bad policies of the Walters era being rolled back. Maybe they’re getting tired of being the 50th worst education state in the country.

The latest medical nonsense

Well. Now we have another cause of autism. Thanks, RFK jr!

There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol, Kennedy stated during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.

That man is just incredibly stupid. He doesn’t understand cause and effect, he doesn’t understand correlation, and he doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t make off-the-cuff remarks drawing unfounded conclusions.

One of the papers he claims support his conclusion is direct that it is a correlational study, and it doesn’t even look at tylenol use.

The 2013 study looked at circumcision rates in boys versus autism rates. The authors admitted that national and state averages may show correlation, not causation, and said their study may have mistakes, bias and confounding. “Circumcision practices are also tied to culture and religion, which also affect autism diagnoses and health care use,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News.

Another expert brings up a rather salient point.

“There is absolutely no studies establishing any causality,” Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder and medical director of Ocean Pediatrics, told CBS News. “While some observational studies suggest possibly an association, there’s no studies (showing causality) — and the conclusion by any credible medical resource is agreeing that there’s no causal relationship between Tylenol, circumcisions or vaccines to autism.”
…
“We almost never, ever use Tylenol after circumcision,” Abelowitz said, adding he’s performed about 10,000 circumcisions across his 30 years of practice.

Fire that guy.

By the way, circumcision is a pointless cosmetic procedure that you shouldn’t do anyway, but not because it causes autism.

I have evidence that spiders are posting on the internet

This ‘person,’ David Love, is definitely a spider.

Female spiders possess structures in their reproductive tracts called spermathecae that are used to store sperm. Humans lack them, and in fact, the human female reproductive tract is hostile to the survival of sperm. From this, I am forced to surmise that David Love is, in fact, a spider — and further, a female spider.

Alternatively, many other invertebrates have spermathecae, so it’s possible that he is instead a hermaphroditic earthworm.

Megyn Kelly is deeply weird

Remember when Megyn Kelly was deeply offended at the suggestion that Santa Claus wasn’t white? It’s an imaginary figure, yet she insisted he was white.

Now she’s doing it again. Jezebel commissioned Etsy to put a curse on Charlie Kirk, which is already silly (you know, curses don’t work, right?)

I want to make it clear, I’m not calling on dark forces to cause him harm. I just want him to wake up every morning with an inexplicable zit. I want his podcast microphone to malfunction every time he hits record. I want his blue blazers to suddenly all be one size too small. I want one of his socks to always be sliding down his foot. I want his thumb to grow too big to tweet. To ruin his day with the collective feminist power of the Etsy coven would be my life’s greatest joy.

It’s silly, it’s stupid, it’s a joke. But then Kirk was shot, and the gullible reared back, aghast, certain that this was confirmation that curses actually work. No, it’s not. This is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

All it tells us is that the person promoting the idea has a prior belief in the power of curses, and is presenting a random fact as evidence for that belief.

So what does Megyn Kelly believe?

First of all, Christians are opposed to casting spells or contacting the spirit world – not only because they believe there is only one God, but because they acknowledge the existence of the devil and evil spirits. Fr. Mike Schmitz actually talked about this when he joined me back in episode 399.

He basically explained how you are playing with fire with this stuff. There actually are demons in this world. Calling up the spirit world – in particular the devil’s spirit world – can have real-world consequences. It is not something to mess with. This is very dangerous. It is not a game. It is literally evil.

Demons aren’t real. Neither is Santa Claus. It is literally goofy, but Kelly believes in them. But then she goes on to undermine her own beliefs.

Second, and this is what I want the people at Jezebel to know, Erika and Charlie Kirk heard about these curses, and it really rattled Erika in particular. She knew Christian teaching on this subject. She loved Charlie absolutely. She was scared when she heard of the curses Jezebel had culled up. So much so that she and Charlie contacted a friend – who I believe she said was a Catholic priest – and asked him to pray with them and over Charlie… the night before he was murdered.

She eventually worked it through, and so did Charlie, that, as she told me, “weapons will form but not prosper,” that “satan and those witches have no power.” Of course, God’s will is the one that matters, and his blessing over Charlie was real and palpable. All you had to do was spend time with him to know that.

OK, if I took this at all seriously, the Kirks brought in a priest to officially negate a curse to give him a zit, and instead Charlie got shot in the neck. Following Kelly’s logic, does that mean that the Catholic church is less powerful than a coven of Etsy witches? Is this confirmation that Etsy curses are real and powerful?

As usual, these weird fantasies vanish in a puff of contradictions. Megyn Kelly doesn’t care, though, all she wants to do is rationalize hating the people she disagrees with. They’re evil, don’t you know. It also gives her an opportunity to engage in melodramatic theatrics.

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.