Who is letting these frauds prosper?

Here’s a list of organizations you must not ever trust:

  • Children’s Health Defense
  • Informed Consent Action Network
  • Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance
  • America’s Frontline Doctors

Look at those names! How can you not support them? Those titles are all lies, though — these are fronts for quacks and medicine denialists that are raking in millions of dollars promoting anti-vaccine bullshit. They are busily undermining health care in this country, and somehow they avoid the criminal charges they deserve. They’re big money sinks used to spread misinformation, and perhaps the only salvation we have is that they’re all run by venal grifters who siphon off much of their money to pay themselves overblown salaries.

One of the most prominent grifters is Joseph Ladapo, the stunningly incompetent Florida Surgeon General. Florida is experiencing a measles outbreak — a serious, potentially disfiguring and even fatal disease that is extremely contagious — and Ladapo is basically doing nothing.

Amid an outbreak of measles at a Florida elementary school, the state’s surgeon general has defied federal health guidance and told parents it’s up to them whether they want to keep their unvaccinated child home to avoid infection.

In a letter to parents of children attending Manatee Bay Elementary school in Weston, where six cases of measles have already been reported, Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state health department “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”

That advice runs counter to what Ladapo acknowledged in his letter was the “normal” recommendation that parents keep unvaccinated children home for up to 21 days — the incubation period for measles.

This is not the first time that Ladapo has challenged health recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Last month, he called for halting the use of COVID vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.

Ladapo is supported by Republican conservatives who fast-tracked him into his current position, and…he has an MD and PhD from Harvard! Harvard seems to be losing what reputation they had as a prestigious university, and are fast becoming the MAGA equivalent of a diploma mill.

New depths in pseudoscience

Creationists have been playing a game for about 60 years. Their claims can’t get published in legitimate scientific journals, so they have created their very own boutique journals that mimic the real things: Answers in Genesis has the Answers Research Journal, which, surprisingly, always comes up with the same answer. The Discovery Institute has Bio-Complexity. The oldest of the bunch is Creation Research Society Quarterly, which proudly announces that it is Peer-reviewed by degreed scientists…with the caveat that in order to be involved in the journal at all, you must be a Christian who subscribes to their statement of belief.

It doesn’t need to be pointed out that real scientists don’t publish in any of those ‘journals’, only kooks who are in the business of rationalizing their superstitions.

But there’s one thing that they haven’t done, as far as I know, and that is creating their own Institutional Review Board to legitimize experiments. One good reason is that they don’t do experiments, especially not experiments on animals or people, so they don’t have to bother. You know who does have to pretend to do experiments? Anti-vaxxers.

They’ve gone and done it. They already have their own fake journals, but now they’ve gone and created a fake IRB so they can rubber-stamp horrible experiments with ridiculous reagents on living people. Orac has the low-down.

Recently, a longtime reader made me aware of a recent podcast episode in which an antivaxxer about whom I’ve written a number of posts over the years, James Lyons-Weiler, revealed a “surprise” announcement a little over halfway through the podcast that his antivax “research” organization, the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), is planning on forming his own institutional review board (IRB).

Lyons-Weiler has a fake organization and a fake journal, so why not go all the way and create a fake IRB to approve fake experiments?

IRBs are important for maintaining ethical standards and getting expert review of experimental protocols — setting up a fake IRB is a declaration that you want to work around those requirements. Orac has a specific idea of what Lyons-Weiler wants to do — not actual research of his own, but an opportunity to data mine other studies.

In the interview, Lyons-Weiler inadvertently reveals what is likely to be the true impetus and purpose for his IRB when he points out that states are refusing to release public health data, particularly record-level data, to researchers because they don’t have an IRB-approved protocol. My first thought was: How much do you want to bet that the “researchers” to which Lyons-Weiler refers are antivax “researchers” who want to data mine state public health databases in order to seek “findings” that attribute horrific harms to vaccines, particularly COVID-19 vaccines? In other words, how much do you want to bet that Lyons-Weiler’s IRB will exist to rubber-stamp antivax human subjects research protocols, so that antivax researchers can get their hands on that sweet, sweet state record-level public health data on vaccines?

I should confess that for many years I avoided having to get IRB approval, despite working on vertebrate animals, because there was a loophole that allowed experimentation on anamniote embryos — when you’ve got an animal that spews out hundreds of eggs per day, most of which will be cannibalized if they aren’t harvested, it’s hard to justify detailed animal care protocols for embryos (for adult animals, that’s a different story…but I didn’t do experiments on adult animals.) Now, of course, I’m working with spiders and flies, and no one cares what horrible crimes against God and nature I commit on them. I wouldn’t worry if the IRB decided that spiders need protection, because I’m doing entirely ethical work on them…I would just hate all the additional paperwork.

But it’s frightening to think this guy believes he can get approval to do whatever he wants to humans by recruiting a compliant board. Or that he can somehow escape data privacy requirements.

The plague resumes in 4 days

I’ve been at home, rarely stepping out, other than to visit an empty university and a lab populated entirely and exclusively by spiders. And I like it that way! Alas, it all changes on Tuesday, when the students return and I have to mingle with them 5 days a week. I have my masks, and I’ve been thoroughly vaccinated, but I’m also aware that there are plague demons among us. People like Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general of Florida, and accomplice to the fast-fading fascist, Ron DeSantis.

It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.

That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.

This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”

He’s basing this sweeping dismissal on ONE (1) swiftly debunked paper by an anti-vax crank.

It’s not just COVID, though. I’m concerned about that as I prepare to share an atmosphere with students again, but also because we’ve got idiots like Ladapo everywhere who are disrupting basic public health with their absurd ideas.

Then there’s the public health context: As COVID infections have been surging coast to coast, advisories from public health authorities to resume masking and take other protective measures, such as making sure you’re up to date on vaccinations, are almost invisible.

Even more worrisome, the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases may be rising. As many as nine cases of measles have been reported in Philadelphia, some associated with an infection started at a daycare center with a family that violated quarantine rules.

Among the victims, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, are “an infant who was too young to get vaccinated, an unvaccinated older child and the older child’s unvaccinated parent.”

Nine cases may not sound like a lot — 41 were reported nationwide in 2023 — but they could be a harbinger of worse to come, in clusters in which anti-vaccine propaganda has taken hold.

The “invisible” aspect of public health advisories is notable — my university used to have a big bold link on the main web page that pointed to the status of the pandemic on campus, with recommendations for protecting oneself. It’s gone. You have to dig to find any updates on COVID. I guess someone thinks COVID-19 is over.

And then, undermining public confidence in such basic principles of good preventive medicine, such as vaccines and hygiene, as Ladapo is doing, is going to do long-lasting harm. I don’t want to die of COVID, but I also don’t want to die of polio, or measles, or the bubonic plague, or some exotic new disease that springs up in the rotting flesh of some Republican ignoramus. Ladapo and all of these conservative know-nothings are making that more probable.

How do these morons get any power at all in government, I’d like to know.

Anthropology panels, Elizabeth Weiss, and the devious self-serving propaganda of “gender critical” bigots

The other day, I mentioned that a few people were protesting the cancellation of a panel session at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society. The first clue that the session was intended to be something unpleasant is that the cancellation outraged Kathleen Stock, the anti-trans advocate who lost her professorship because she was such a big fan of conversion therapy, opposed the idea of gender self-identification, and was a trustee of the LGB Alliance, that group that openly repudiated the idea of trans rights. I’d be wary of support from such a person.

Then I learned further that the panel was a collection of gender critical feminists (the new term for TERFs) who were going to use the panel for their ideological propaganda from Elizabeth Weiss! I’m doubly wary now. Weiss was an anthropologist at San Jose State University who hated the idea of repatriating the bones in their collection, and stirred up a major row after being photographed making light of the remains.

She had claimed she was the target of cancel culture after being blasted for tweeting a photo of herself returning to campus following COVID lockdowns in the fall of 2021, holding a skull with her bare hands and writing: “So happy to be back with some old friends.”

She had already been the subject of criticism over her recently published book — “Repatriation and Erasing the Past” — that opposed laws returning skeletal remains to Native American tribes when 870 academics from Stanford to Oxford denounced it as “explicitly racist ideology.”

In the midst of the backlash, San Jose State University Provost Vincent Del Casino Jr., posted a letter to faculty saying the image of Weiss holding the skull “evoked shock and disgust” and asked, “in what context is it ever ethically appropriate for an academic to handle remains while smiling with ungloved hands while calling these remains ‘friends?’”

In an emailed response to the provost, Weiss wrote that her tweet was showing her admiration for the collection: “We should be celebrating the lives of these first occupants of Silicon Valley — not allowing their voices to be silenced by a vociferous campaign orchestrated by woke activists whose strategy is to try to shut down debate, and promote superstition over science.”

If you’re “celebrating the lives,” why is it that the native peoples whose ancestors you’re treating so cavalierly are complaining? I would think that sensitivity and respect are important parts of your training and work. I guess Ms. Weiss was absent that decade in class. Furthermore, Weiss was the third wife of J. Philippe Rushton, the infamous racist and face of the Pioneer Fund. I can tell whose side she would be on — marrying a prominent racist is a loud commitment to a repugnant point of view.

Are you beginning to see a theme here? You don’t have to scratch a gender critical very deeply to find a fascist.

But wait, there’s more! The organizer of the conference panel was Kathleen Lowry, a proud gender critical feminist whose anti-trans views have been protested.

“The university has said it’s perfectly OK to fire people for doubting that men can get pregnant, for doubting lesbians can have penises,” she said. “The implications are very dangerous because this is a live issue in our contemporary Canadian democracy.”

She was not fired, by the way. She was removed from a university committee, nothing more, which is something many of us would consider a reward.

I think you can see why the panel was dissolved, though. The conference organizers could clearly see that they were going to be platforming a crew of notorious bigots who would be assembling a bomb on stage, that they would be facilitating an ugly exercise in one-sided anti-trans prejudice that would definitely do harm to other attendees at the event.

I don’t feel like being fair to Weiss and her cronies, but I will note that she has expressed her perspective on the cancellation online, at a page titled “Discussing sex is no longer allowed at anthropology conferences”. I will note that even the title is dishonest, since sex is a legitimate topic in anthropology — what isn’t is inflammatory bias and the rhetoric of hate.

The one good thing to emerge from this repugnant episode is that the anthropological society has published a beautiful statement explaining their decision titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology”.

The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.

Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex. Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher. Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy. There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.

The function of the “gender critical” scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the “race science” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is to advance a “scientific” reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex / gender binary.

Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people. We believe that a more just future is possible—one where gender diversity is welcomed and supported rather than marginalized and policed.

I’m already seeing people trying to argue against that statement that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” largely by insisting that their standard, whatever it may be, is definitive, by definition. I’ve seen this strategy used for decades: first it was morphology, they can tell who is a woman by looking at them; then it was X/Y chromosomes; then it was hormone titers; now many of the bigots have congealed around a definition based on gametes. They never seem to appreciate that the variety of arbitrary ‘standards’ are often in conflict with each other, or that many of them are outright invisible or dependent on invasive and offensive examinations. Do you determine the ‘biological sex’ of people you meet by asking for a sperm sample? I would hope not.

I like the comparison of “gender criticals” to “race scientists”. It’s particularly apt given that at least one of the people behind this panel is a closet race scientist herself.

Who the heck is Clay Clark?

I never heard of him before, but suddenly my email is flooded with crap from him — some troll probably signed me up. What I’m seeing is flyers portraying stark raving madness, like this one.

WTF? Straight-up MAGA Jesus, with some of the more outrageous hate-ranters available, like Greg Locke. Oh, look, they got “comedian” Jim Breuer making funny faces, which is pretty much the entirety of his act (oh, wait, there are also obnoxious noises.) This tent-revival-style shrieking looks like my personal vision of Hell, but the impresario isn’t Satan, it’s some asshole named Clay Clark. So I looked him up on Wikipedia.

The ReAwaken America tour was founded by Clay Clark, a business coach and entrepreneur and former mayoral candidate in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In August 2020, Clark initiated a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa for its mask mandate to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The lawsuit alleged that wearing masks caused oxygen deprivation, leading to “migraine headaches, shortness of breath and dizziness.” The lawsuit was dropped in March 2021.

Clark has publicly espoused his belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. When he spoke at the January 5, 2021 rally held at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. in support of Donald Trump’s protest of the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Clark told attendees that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax and instructed them to “turn to the person next to you and give them a hug, someone you don’t know. Go hug somebody. Go ahead and spread it out, mass spreader. It’s a mass-spreader event!”

On a June 2021 episode of the Stew Peters Show, he argued that the COVID-19 vaccine contained luciferase, which he believed was a cryptocurrency technology associated with the Mark of the Beast prophesied in Revelation 13:16-18. This conspiracy theory, according to Clark, included Bill Gates (under the influence of performance artist and alleged Satanist Marina Abramović), and Jeffrey Epstein. Clark accused Gates and Epstein of attempting to create a new race of humans by combining luciferase and Epstein’s DNA into the COVID-19 vaccine.

At an October 2021 rally in Salt Lake City, Utah, Clark made the unproven claim that “COVID-19 is 100 percent treatable using budesonide, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.” He also accused George Soros of funding remdesivir, a drug used to treat severe cases of COVID-19 but which Clark said was “killing COVID-19 patients in the hospital because it causes renal failure”.

Oh. So he’s like the stupid version of Satan, then. He seems to believe that COVID, a disease that killed over a million Americans over the last few years, is a hoax…and that wearing a mask, which I still do for hours every day, causes oxygen deprivation. I’ve used luciferase, it’s just an enzyme. Epstein’s DNA isn’t in any vaccine. Ivermectin doesn’t work. But he has turned these loony beliefs into a big money-maker for himself.

There is also a nice Rolling Stone expose, which mainly reveals what a colossal asshole the man is. At least I was happy to learn that devout Christians are waking up and protesting these MAGA megachurch vermin as enemies of their faith.

Each stop on the tour now draws protests, of varying size, and the show is sometimes booted from venues — as it was in upstate New York this summer — leaving Clark scrambling. In Virginia, a lone van sent by the liberal clergy group Faithful America, which has been organizing against the tour since early this year, putters past the location with a rented billboard denouncing the speakers. (No one from that group is in attendance, citing safety concerns.) Reached by phone, Nathan Empsall, Faithful America’s director, says, “This tour is the face of unholy Christian Nationalism and they are bringing this deadly message to many churches.”

We atheists despise him, too. This sounds like the kind of thing where atheists and theists can find common cause. At least on agreeing that Jim Breuer is not funny at all.

Sherri Tenpenny is not a doctor

Finally, one quack goes down. The notorious anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny has had her medical license suspended, at long last. It should have been done long ago.

Two years ago, a Cleveland area physician strode into the House Health Committee room and told state lawmakers that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize their hosts and “interface” with cell towers.

Her comments, the subject of widespread ridicule, triggered a swarm of 350 complaints to the State Medical Board and a chain of events that led to the regulators indefinitely suspending the medical license Wednesday of anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny.

Oh, yeah, the magnetized people claim. It’s as stupid as it sounds.

It was June 2021, just as scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines began to wane and health officials focused on the yeoman’s work of convincing hundreds of millions of Americans to take up the novel products. However, many conservatives sought to undercut this campaign, often under arguments about “medical freedom.” Tenpenny, speaking before a crowd of anti-vaccine activists, warned of purported dangers of vaccines with a firehose of debunked and misleading statements.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized,” Tenpenny said to the panel of lawmakers.

“They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks … There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.”

Behold my magnetic powers!

Although…it’s true. I’ve received many vaccinations, and I just tested it, and look, I can make pennies stick to my forehead! I’ve been able to do this for my whole life, though, and I can’t say it’s particularly useful. I guess I could entertain my granddaughter for a minute and a half with that trick. Or drive an anti-vaxxer into a frothing fury for a couple of years.

Unfortunately, stripping Tenpenny of her medical license won’t slow her down in the slightest. It’s not as if she’s been practicing medicine all this time, she instead peddles “alternative” treatments to the gullible. Being denied a license by The Establishment will probably enhance her reputation among her clientele.

Her podcast is still squawking lies into the æther, and she has the ear of influential people — such as Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general of Florida.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo recently appeared on the podcast of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, where he continued to make claims about vaccines that are contradictory to widespread medical consensus.

Medical experts have said Ladapo’s claims are dangerous, and that his very presence on the podcast — and other recent appearances on shows promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories — gives credibility and support to anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Lapado’s latest comments are part of a litany of dubious claims that have alarmed public health officials in Florida and across the country since he got appointed surgeon general more than a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

This is a guy who says the risks of the COVID vaccines outweigh the benefits for most people, who has blocked the use of COVID vaccines in Florida, and refuses to use a mask — but he is a Harvard graduate, you know. He’s also blatantly ideological and conservative, making his comments to Tenpenny particularly ironic.

Despite being the head of Florida’s Department of Health, Ladapo bashed a majority of the nation’s physicians for their vaccine beliefs, saying they cannot separate themselves from their ideologies and politics.

“Our colleagues, for the most part, can’t be brought back into alignment with reality,” Ladapo said on the podcast. “I don’t have any faith that most of our physician colleagues, sadly, can be rehabilitated.”

Tenpenny went so far as to compare current doctors with those in Nazi Germany who participated in or didn’t oppose the mass killing of and experimentation on people, namely Jews, citing a passage written into the first page of the foreword of Ladapo’s own book, which he promoted on the podcast.

Kudos on getting a license suspended after years of talking, but Tenpenny isn’t going to hesitate and is going to continue to poison the discourse for many more years to come — and she’ll make bank off it, too.

I feel like half my life is spent goggle-eyed in amazement at the stupidity of humanity

This is about right: the COVID vaccines have been proven effective and safe, are now readily available, and are cheap. But there are still people adamantly opposed to the best treatment.

xkcd: The vaccine stuff seems pretty simple. But if you take a closer look at the data, it's still simple, but bigger. And slightly blurry. Might need reading glasses.

Part of the problem is that quacks get away with it. You can disseminate criminally dangerous misinformation as an MD, you can kill patients with bad advice and ineffective, even deadly treatments, and get away with it.

A Wisconsin doctor in 2021 prescribed ivermectin, typically used to treat parasitic infections, to two covid-19 patients who later died of the disease. He was fined less than $4,000 — and was free to continue practicing.

A Massachusetts doctor has continued practicing without restriction despite being under investigation for more than a year over allegations of “disseminating misinformation” and prescribing unapproved covid treatments, including ivermectin, to a patient who died in 2022, according to medical board records.

And in Idaho, a pathologist who falsely promoted the effectiveness of ivermectin over coronavirus vaccines on social media has not been disciplined despite complaints from fellow physicians that his “dangerous and troubling” statements and actions “significantly threatened the public health.”

Across the country, doctors who jeopardized patients’ lives by pushing medical misinformation during the pandemic and its aftermath have faced few repercussions, according to a Washington Post analysis of disciplinary records from medical boards in all 50 states.

State medical boards charged with protecting the American public often failed to stop doctors who went against medical consensus and prescribed unapproved treatments for covid or misled patients about vaccines and masks, the Post investigation found.

Another part of the problem is gross politicization. It is currently the policy of the Republican party to encourage the early death of their electorate, and hopefully snipe off a few Democrats with terrible medical advice.

“State boards can only do limited things,” said Humayun Chaudhry, president of the Federation of State Medical Boards, a nonprofit that represents the licensing agencies. “The most common refrain I hear from state licensing boards is they would like to have more resources — meaning more individuals who can investigate complaints, more attorneys, more people who can process these complaints sooner — to do their job better.”

Instead, the opposite is happening: The boards face new efforts, largely by Republican state legislators and attorneys general, to rein in their authority in ways that are “potentially dangerous and harmful to patient care,” Chaudhry said.

Florida legislators passed a law in May that effectively prevents professional boards from punishing doctors accused of spreading covid misinformation online.

Six other states have limited the power of medical boards to discipline physicians for prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.

Yeah, Florida. It’s never good news when the words “Florida” or “Texas” are in the article.

At least now we know how humans will respond to an apocalypse: with doubt, cynicism, and lies.

The Trans Agenda is a conspiracy to sterilize your children!

James Lyons-Weiler is an odd duck. He started his career in bioinformatics conventionally enough, getting a PhD, following it up with post-docs, eventually getting a position at the University of Pittsburgh, and then…he succumbed to the lure of the crackpot circuit. He now wanders about the country, giving anti-vax lectures and giving his uninformed opinions about autism. He also launched a website called IPAK-EDU.org, where IPAK is short for “Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.” Yeah, he also invented an academic institute, which is his, and of which he is the sole member. He peddles online courses on various topics — you can, for instance, gain access to a series of lectures on evolutionary biology for the low, low price of $160.

He’s also notorious enough that he has a Wikipedia page. It’s short. Here’s the bulk of it.

Lyons-Weiler has made numerous false and misleading claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. United States Court of Federal Claims Special Master Christian J. Moran concluded in 2020 that Lyons-Weiler was “wholly unqualified to opine on the question of vaccine causation”; the decision related to a lawsuit in which Lyons-Weiler had testified claiming that a woman was injured as a result of the HPV vaccine.

His February 2020 claim that SARS-CoV-2 contains a genetic sequence proving that the virus was probably engineered in a laboratory was discredited by researchers and fact-checkers.

Now you know where he’s coming from: he’s a failed academic who ekes out a living by being a mouthpiece for quack ideas. He’s anti-vax, he’s got weird ideas about autism, and now, oh joy, he’s jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon. He has an essay that seems to be fairly typical for him, Evolutionary Analysis of the “Trans Agenda” as Mass Sterilization of Youth as Reproductive Spite, in which he lards a lot of nonsensical pretentious jargon around the thesis that gender-affirming care is a scheme to sterilize your children.

Please understand that this article was written to create awareness about the new reality involving the interplay between social dynamics and the way people control and influence others’ reproductive heritage. I have not seen this issue addressed by anyone because discussions about evolutionary principles and social dynamics are taboo because evil people in the past twisted Darwin’s understanding of evolution toward their own advantage in ways that led to mass forced sterilization. I am issuing this article as a warning of the hidden dangers of de facto state-sponsored sterilization programs being implemented by certain states within the United States embedded in the Trans Agenda.

The evolutionary principles and social dynamics he’s talking around are the ideas of eugenics and the extermination of undesirable individuals. Yeah, it’s taboo, and he is the brave truth-teller who is going to expose the Trans Agenda as the same thing. He’s going to explain Haldane and Hamilton and Maynard Smith to back up his argument that gender affirming care is a nefarious plot, and he’s going to cite animal examples as evidence (bonus points for mentioning spiders).

Some female spiders may consume their own offspring. This is known as “filial cannibalism”, is seen in many species of fish that brood their live young, and is a form of reproductive spite. This behavior can be driven by a lack of resources or as a strategy to gain additional nutrients for the female, thereby increasing her chances of surviving and reproducing again, thus maximizing the mother’s, but not necessarily the eaten young’s, lifetime reproductive success.

In some insects, males deposit substances in the female reproductive tract that harm or kill the spermatozoa of previous mates. This approach to sperm competition helps ensure that their own spermatozoa have a higher chance of fertilizing the eggs and increases their reproductive success. While spermatozoa are not live, this feature of competition via spite is thought to be the explanation for the shape of the human penis.

Hang on there. He defines his term, Reproductive spite refers to the phenomenon where an individual’s reproductive behavior negatively affects the survival or reproductive output of other individuals, but the spider example is not relevant. The spider is optimizing its opportunities for reproduction by recycling its own progeny, not that of others. The insect example is just mundane, familiar sperm competition — it’s only affecting the reproduction of others in the sense that if a female is bearing the male’s children, she isn’t available to bear someone else’s. This is just weird. It’s like he doesn’t understand his own argument.

Then this is a surprise: spermatozoa are not live. What biologist would make that claim? Of course they’re alive! Also, that claim about the shape of the human penis is weak, supported only by some crude modeling studies, and has not been demonstrated to be functional.

And did you know that some kinds of gender modification (but not all) lead to sterilization? No trans person ever thought of that, I guess.

In the current Trans Agenda, in which gender modification surgeries are advocated for minors as “affirming care”, a dark link exists: gender modification surgery often leads to sterilization of those individuals as a side effect.

Again, if I choose not to have children, voluntarily and of my own free will, that is not “reproductive spite.” If a man chooses to get a vasectomy, you cannot argue that that is an example of the taboo subject of eugenics. Human beings are not obligated to bear children! Also, it is not your duty to have children for your parents’ sake.

The strongly negative reaction of parents to news that some state governments – and some in powerful positions in the US Federal Government – want to allow minors to choose gender reassignment surgery – even over the objections of their parents – is understandable from a rational, scientific point of view.

No, it is not. It is understandable from a narrow, utilitarian point of view that sees individuals as having one single task, the direct production of offspring. We are social animals, and the ability of individuals to specialize and fill other roles is advantageous to the population as a whole. Remember, please, that evolution is a property of populations, not individuals.

Evolution is also not a conspiracy theory, but Lyons-Weilers seems to see everything as a conspiracy theory.

…I am not saying I have evidence the connections are intentional, but I am saying: Screw the Taboo. We owe it to our children and our collective future to ask these questions and to use Science to find the answers.

There are other areas in which social pressure is used to try to coerce or force parents to put their children in harm’s way for the potential benefit of other children. Social psychologists who are deeply schooled in evolutionary principles should look into the potential role that the vestiges of reproductive spite may play in promoting tolerance of, or even the promotion of increased risk for harm to other peoples’ children in the area of vaccine mandates.

Right. Let’s abuse “evolutionary principles” to compel children to believe that having babies is their destiny. And oh, look, there’s the crackpot anti-vaccine nonsense! Getting vaccinated reduces harm, that’s the whole point of vaccines, so you don’t get to use that as an example of people trying to reduce the competition.

But then, this is a kook who sees trans people as an example of Mass murder, mass sterilization, just like he sees vaccines as a strategy for poisoning the other members of the population.

Brain bleach, stat

I’ve been poisoned with unwanted images of a corrupt 70-year-old Republican hopped up on Viagra demanding that a young woman service him, over and over.

Giuliani also took Viagra constantly. While working with Ms. Dunphy, Giuliani
would look to Ms. Dunphy, point to his erect penis, and tell her that he could not do any work until
“you take care of this.” Thus, Ms. Dunphy worked under the constant threat that Giuliani might
demand sex from her at any moment. Even when the Covid-19 pandemic halted Giuliani’s ability
to physically assault her, he demanded that she disrobe during their work-related
videoconferences.

It’s gross and disgusting and vile, but exactly what I should have expected of Giuliani.

A bombshell lawsuit out of Manhattan accuses Rudy Giuliani of forcing a former employee to submit to sex acts as a condition of her employment — including making her give him oral sex while he took calls from then-President Donald Trump on speaker phone.

“He often demanded oral sex while he took phone calls on speaker phone from high-profile friends and clients, including then-President Trump,” ex-staffer Noelle Dunphy claims in the 70-page lawsuit filed Monday.

“Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that he enjoyed engaging in this conduct while on the telephone because it made him ‘feel like Bill Clinton,'” according to the lawsuit, which seeks $10 million in unpaid wages and damages.

Like the worst of Bill Clinton.

I don’t want to hear more about the sex stuff, but I do want the law to dig deeper into the money stuff.

The lawsuit also alleges — buried on page 25 — that Giuliani asked Dunphy for help “selling pardons” for $2 million a pop. Giuliani told her that he and Trump “would split” the fee, the lawsuit alleges.

“He also asked Ms. Dunphy is she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split,” the lawsuit says.

Dunphy said she continued to work for Giuliani despite being “shocked and saddened by what had happened” because she feared losing the $1 million salary he had promised as well as free legal representation he had also agreed to give her.

It’s amazing how you can sit here thinking the crap from the Trump administration couldn’t possibly get worse, and then it does.

My genetics class is going ‘woke’!

I’ve been teaching the students all this basic transmission genetics all semester, and while it’s important and fundamental, it can have a bad effect on people’s brains. I cringe when I hear people talking about human traits using simple Mendelian terms like “dominant” and “recessive” because, while it works for many things, for others it misleads and is overly simplistic. I want my students to come away from the class knowing that genetics is complex and subtle and everything is polygenic and epistasis matters, and that’s hard to do when they’re trying to figure out the basics of doing a fly cross.

It’s also a problem because instilling only the basics of Mendel is a good way to make Nazis — it’s easy to distort simple concepts they barely understand into props for your biases. I’d like to forestall that. Also, I’m in Minnesota, and Minnesota has a smug white people problem.

“The racism you see in Minnesota is the type of racism where people say there is no racism. The only race is the human race,” Myers [not me, no relation] said. “How can we say the only race is the human race when all the people with dark skin are people with higher unemployment rates, dying from COVID, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be beaten by police and murdered? How does that happen when there’s no race?”

So I’m going to wake up all the smart students in my class. My strategy involves handing them a digital folder full of articles from science journals as well as newspapers, telling them to pick one, and present it to the class (I’m sure not going to just lecture on these things — I want students to think about them.) They’re getting the folder today, have to pick an article by Wednesday, and are going to prepare a ten minute summary and review for two weeks from today. It’s going to be fun, right?

Here’s a list of just the titles they have to choose from:

A framework for enhancing ethical genomic research with Indigenous communities (2018)
A review of the Hispanic paradox: time to spill the beans? (2014)
Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education (2022)
Can We Cure Genetic Diseases Without Slipping Into Eugenics? (2015)
Eugenics and scientific racism, (2023)
Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA (2011)
Genetic Evaluation for Hereditary Cancer Syndromes Among African Americans: A Critical Review (2022)
How to fight racism using science (2020).
Implications of biogeography of human populations for ‘race’ and medicine(2004)
National Academies calls for transforming use of racial and ethnic labels in genetics research (2023)
Population genetics, history, and health patterns in Native Americans (2004).
Race and Genetics: Somber History, Troubled Present (2020)
The apportionment of human diversity, (1972)
Using Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research (2023)
Women’s Brains, Gould (1980)

It’s an eclectic mix of sources, since I’m trying to capture a range of interests and abilities.

By the way, I do warn them that Lewontin’s “The apportionment of human diversity” is an important classic paper, but not for the faint of heart — it’ll be a challenge for even the most advanced students in the class. Some students love a challenge, though.