Those troublesome, shaky X chromosomes!

It’s easy to find lists of dumb things creationists say, and I’m familiar with that lot, but here’s a fun new time-waster: Things Anti-Vaxxers Say. Here’s a beautiful example of something I’ve rarely seen so clearly stated: they get the facts totally wrong, actually the reverse of the actual situation, but nope, that doesn’t stop them from inventing a bogus rationalization around them.

You can do your own research but it comes down to chromosomes -- the X chromosome is shaky, and boys have two of them. So they are quite literally twice as likely as girls to be adversely affected by genetic and environmental factors that can lead to the development of autism -- they are at twice the risk, purely because of their gender alone.

You can do your own research but it comes down to chromosomes — the X chromosome is shaky, and boys have two of them. So they are quite literally twice as likely as girls to be adversely affected by genetic and environmental factors that can lead to the development of autism — they are at twice the risk, purely because of their gender alone.

Uh-oh. I have 22 other chromosomes besides my sex chromosomes (I’ve actually seen them!), and…they’re all in pairs. I’m doomed.

But wait! I only have one X chromosome! I’m saved by the reduction in its pernicious influence!

I guess Sweden isn’t perfect after all

Friday was a wild night in which mobs of men ran around the Stockholm train station attacking people. Something must be done about these immigrants! Foreigners!

Only it wasn’t the immigrants doing the attacking. It was native Swedes concerned about the purity of their country.

Hundreds of masked men marched through Stockholm’s main train station on Friday evening, reportedly beating up refugees and anyone who didn’t appear to be ethnically Swedish.

Wearing all-black balaclavas and armbands, the men “gathered with the purpose of attacking refugee children,” Stockholm police spokesperson Towe Hagg said.

Masked men slapping children around? Sounds brave and noble. Also so logical.

After the attack, the Swedish Resistance Movement, a neo-Nazi group, released a statement claiming the attack had “cleaned up criminal immigrants from North Africa that are housed in the area around the Central Station”.

“Police have clearly shown that they lack the means to stave off their rampage, and we now see no other alternative than to ourselves hand out the punishments they deserve.”

Who was rampaging here? Who deserves punishment? It seems to me that the neo-Nazis just indicted themselves.

This is not how you do science

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There is a myth about how science progresses: great men have a eureka moment, and rush in to the lab to do the definitive experiment, often bravely and with the opposition of the Science Establishment, and single-handedly revolutionize a discipline. It’s nonsense. I can’t think of a single example of that kind of work that has gotten anywhere — the closest might be Isaac Newton, who developed some great ideas working privately at his home in Woolsthorpe, but even he was tightly connected to a community of fellow scientists. Science is very much a communal and communicative endeavor, and is built “on the shoulders of giants.”

So I do not approve of the work of Phil Kennedy, which looks like a lot of hare-brained Frankensteinian self-indulgence. Kennedy could not get approval for his experiments in implanting electrodes in human brains — I wonder why? — so he charged off to the Caribbean and had bits of wire and glass stuck deep into his own brain. It did not go well.

The brain surgery lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. In the afternoon, after the anesthesia had worn off, the neurosurgeon came in, removed his wire-frame glasses, and held them up for his bandaged patient to examine. “What are these called?” he asked.

Phil Kennedy stared at the glasses for a moment. Then his gaze drifted up to the ceiling and over to the television. “Uh … uh … ai … aiee,” he stammered after a while, “… aiee … aiee … aiee.”

Don’t worry, he got better — his deficits were caused by post-operative swelling of his brain, and that eventually diminished, and he started recording data off his electrode.

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Crap. Maher.

How much more atheist disillusionment can you take? At least in this case, the fall isn’t quite as far. Bill Maher used his show to promote HIV quackery. The man thinks you’re dumb to get vaccinated, but drinking the milk of arthritic goats…now that’s brilliant, and will cure you of everything.

Maher hosted—and seemed to take seriously—Dr. Samir Chachoua, who famously injected himself with Charlie Sheen’s blood while treating the HIV-positive actor in Mexico, as revealed on an episode of Dr. Oz that ran earlier this month. Chachoua is not licensed to practice medicine in the U.S., a fact glossed over by Maher, who repeatedly gave the “doctor” the benefit of the doubt as a beacon of hope in the fight against AIDS. Maher furthermore denigrated the usefulness of the antiretroviral drugs that are proven life-savers to promote Chachoua’s supposed miracle cure.

Chachoua claims his cure comes from the CAEV virus, which he says is present in the milk of arthritic goats. “This virus destroys HIV and protects people who drink it for life,” he claimed to Bill Maher. While he didn’t get into the exact science, what he’s offering is a cure not a therapy, which means that after Chachoua’s services, Sheen should be HIV free. Sheen is not HIV negative, which means that Bill Maher should not be taking this quack seriously, much less giving him ten minutes of airtime to spout his nonsense, which is full of evident contradictions. Chachoua, for example, claimed to Dr. Oz that Sheen was “the first adult in history to go HIV negative.”

If that isn’t enough for you, Chachoua claims the regeneration of new heart tissue, new cardiac valves, brain tissue in Alzheimer’s; the clinical improvement and new growth of healthy tissue in systems thought aged, damaged and unsalvageable, placed this therapy in an unparalleled bracket. Reversal of emphysema, cardiac disease, MS, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, AIDS, ALS, diabetes, asthma, organ failure, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, gulf war syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory and degenerative diseases (with impact even on genetic diseases).

He injected himself with Charlie Sheen’s blood. Now there’s a valid scientific procedure for you, or at least Maher thinks so.

Feminism isn’t a side issue, it is a central issue in any movement with a pretense to rationalism

Richard Dawkins has issued a formal statement via CFI on his disinvitation from NECSS. It is civil, polite, and rational, and concludes this way:

The science and scepticism community is too small and too important to let disagreements divide us and divert us from our mission of promoting a more critical and scientifically literate world.

It misses the point.

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Michael Moore speaks the truth

He has ten things he wants to tell you about the Flint water supply. They’re rather appalling.

I really don’t understand what’s going on in Michigan, but I know I wouldn’t want to live there. Their governor ought to be in jail right now for what he’s allowed to happen — they’ve been poisoning an entire community for months, knowingly and with no concern at all for the citizens…all while bringing in uncontaminated water for General Motors and state employees. The entire goddamn administration ought to be facing court dates for criminal offenses.

Here’s another level of fucked-up-edness.

According to the NY Times, Snyder was informed in one email that a state nurse told one young mother to not worry about the damage being done to her child when her son’s blood showed an elevated lead level.

“It is just a few IQ points. … It is not the end of the world,” the nurse reportedly told the worried mom.

We’ve been watching too many super-hero movies. While we weren’t paying attention, petty villainy that wouldn’t be credible in a comic book has become a reasonable life-style choice.

I guess the good news for us in Minnesota is that after the botched, self-destructive experiment in libertarian/Republican greed in Wisconsin started torching that state to the ground, the crony capitalists marched east to Michigan rather than west to my state.

David Gorski, a native and resident of Michigan (I’m so sorry!), also addresses the fuckery behind the Flint water crisis. You should read that, too.

Learn from the lessons of others

That’s a good idea: when other countries do something better than we do, we should learn from them, try to emulate their successful parts, and avoid their failures. Here in the United States of America, though, our citizen’s bizarre and obstinate fixation on American “exceptionalism” holds sway, and suggesting that another country, like say Norway, has some better ways of doing things is regarded as unpatriotic, just shy of treachery. In a recent debate, Bernie Sanders might well be the only one able to suggest that we could learn from Denmark (but he doesn’t follow through), while Clinton rejects the thought with a smug “We are not Denmark”, and I would love to hear the squeals and shrieks if the Republican menagerie were asked to contemplate the idea, but it’s something we should take more seriously. We should try to understand what the Scandinavian countries are doing better.

What is it, though, that makes the Scandinavians so different? Since the Democrats can’t tell you and the Republicans wouldn’t want you to know, let me offer you a quick introduction. What Scandinavians call the Nordic model is a smart and simple system that starts with a deep commitment to equality and democracy. That’s two concepts combined in a single goal because, as far as they’re concerned, you can’t have one without the other.

Right there, they part company with capitalist America, now the most unequal of all the developed nations, and consequently a democracy no more. Political scientists say it has become an oligarchy, run at the expense of its citizenry by and for the superrich. Perhaps you’ve noticed that.

In the last century, Scandinavians, aiming for their egalitarian goal, refused to settle solely for any of the ideologies competing for power—not capitalism or fascism, not Marxist socialism or communism. Geographically stuck between powerful nations waging hot and cold wars for such doctrines, Scandinavians set out to find a middle path. That path was contested—by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand, and by capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other—but in the end, it led to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce. Struggles like this took place around the world in the 20th century, but the Scandinavians alone managed to combine the best ideas of both camps while chucking out the worst.

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Iceland, you have disappointed Ken Ham

Good work, keep it up.

According to a new poll, less than half of Icelanders identify as religious. The other half, obviously, are religious—as everyone has a religion (atheism, for instance, is a religion. When people say they are not religious, it usually means they don’t identify with a church denomination). And the younger generation in Iceland is the least likely to identify as religious, with more than 40% of young people claiming to be atheists (which means they adhere to the religion of naturalism—atheism). And 93.9% of those under 25 believe the big bang created the universe and 0.0% believe it was created by God. Zero percent! Not a single young person they asked said that God created the universe—not a single one.

Well, that was incoherent. I guess that happens when you try to type through your tears.

I find the common accusation that atheism is a religion ludicrous. It’s simply a denial of a negation: not-X is a kind of X! Ham is basically rejecting the idea of a religion at all, since in his simple little brain, everything is a religion. If that’s the case, then I’m going to join the church of Deadwood, hooplehead.