PRUUUUUUDES!

Jacqulyn Levin, a high school health education teacher, had a simple lesson plan to help students understand the anatomy of the female reproductive tract.

“She stood in front of the students,” district spokesman Jeff Puma said. “If you can picture a body builder flexing his arms and having his hands [above head level] out to the side, my hands would be the ovaries, my arms would be the fallopian tubes, and so on.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me — it’s a way to get the layout of the structures clear in students’ heads. I’ll be teaching human physiology this term, and I’ll just project photos and diagrams of the various ladybits and manbits on a giant screen in front of the auditorium — I don’t know if a public school could handle the level of detail I’ll be going into. Levin’s approach sounds like a good compromise.

But wouldn’t you know it…some parents in the school district freaked out.

King said his son objected to participating, and both he and his son objected to him being “forced” to participate.

“I’m all for scholastically based sex education,” King said. “But this dance is meant to take away modesty and is disrespectful to women.”

Oh, the poor widdle boy! Forced to pretend his manly muscled arms are womanly fallopian tubes! And oh, those poor little girls! Immodestly made aware of the existence of ovaries, ovaries that their mommies have told them to keep covered and hidden away!

This has become a cause for the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, who have taken a brief moment from their usually obsession with homosexuality to decry elementary sex education.

A couple of months ago Crystal Lake’s Prairie Ridge High School Health teacher Jacqulyn Levin decided that the best way to teach her co-ed class of sophomore students the parts of the female reproductive anatomy was to use something she called the “Vagina Dance.” To the tune of the Hokey Pokey, Levin led her class in a puerile dance that involved pointing to and singing about reproductive body parts while prancing about the classroom.

Her selection of this inappropriate instructional activity demonstrated a lack of empathy for those who may have a degree of modesty and self-respect that Levin does not possess. Did she consider that some students might feel uncomfortable participating in or even watching this dance and that they might fear being ridiculed if they chose to opt-out?

Her decision to use this dance as a teaching tool also reveals that she has no commitment to fostering modesty (please don’t be deceived by the attempt of “progressives” to conflate essential modesty with some kind of priggish, neurotic prudery). The very fact that a teacher would consider such an activity reflects how debased and immodest a culture we have. And it reveals that she has no regard for the values of all the families who have entrusted their children to her tutelage.

“Priggish, neurotic prudery”…why, they snatched the words right out of my mouth.

There is nothing immodest about the demonstration (which, by the way, the IFI portrays dishonestly and inaccurately). There is nothing titillating or arousing about fallopian tubes, any more than there is about the common bile duct or the duct of Wirsung or the epididymus, and if you’re getting aroused by hearing about any of those, or blushing in embarrassment at a generic discussion of guts, there’s something deeply wrong with you. I’d suspect the lunatic who wrote the above words of having some morbid paraphilia, actually.

Wanting to pretend that your insides have all the uniformity of a potato is not self-respect, it’s ignorance and denial. Those are things a school is supposed to correct, and I don’t think a school or the teacher should feel any remorse about politely instructing kids in the nature of reality.

Vae, puto deus fio!

It’s good to see the old traditions kept alive. The Romans were fond of monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and deifying their emperors after their death, and look at the Vatican: monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and now the rapid beatification and expected canonization of their popes. Unfortunately, none of the popes have had the wit and humor to appreciate the custom, as Vespasian did, and laugh on their deathbed, “Alas, I think I’m becoming a god saint.”

So one dead pope, John Paul, is about to be officially beatified, which means the Catholic Church has determined that John Paul is actually in heaven right now. How do they know? Because they found a nun who said she prayed to the dead pope (which is weird right there), and her Parkinson’s symptoms were alleviated. Why is this a miracle and not a spontaneous remission or a misdiagnosis or a response to treatment or a hysterical game (“He turned me into a newt!” “I got better.”)?

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints said doctors “scrupulously” examined the nun’s claim and could find no scientific reason for her cure.

Ah, they don’t have any positive evidence of divinity…all they’ve got is a scientist saying “I don’t know,” and from that they leap to the conclusion that the ghost of John Paul is selectively and invisibly dispensing magic. Our ignorance is their evidence. All they’ve got is the bits and pieces we can’t answer yet.

So, Religion, how does it feel to be reduced to feasting on the scraps left from the table of Science?

And another conference!

I will not be at this one…I wouldn’t want you to think I was verging on a state of godlike omnipresence. It should still be fun and informative, and has a good lineup: It’s the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism, on 9-10 April in New York City. Of course, it’s not set in the Pacific Northwest, so it does have an inferior venue (NY? Who’s heard of that strange place?), but you’ll learn stuff there anyway.

A “spiritual science”

Back in the dim and ancient days of usenet, I used to take astrologers apart for fun. They had such goofy ideas, and they were so serious about it. But fortunately for us, astrology is unlike creationism in that it is mostly powerless and unpersuasive, and only the deeply gullible and ignorant can fall for it any more. And it’s so darned inconsistent — even the rationale that forms the foundation of the belief doesn’t hold up. I’ve tended to ignore the irrelevancies of astrology most of the time, but the Star Tribune had a short piece on astrology, and it’s nicely dismissive — so I’ll mention it again.

“When [astrologers] say that the sun is in Pisces, it’s really not in Pisces,” said Parke Kunkle, a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society.

Indeed, most horoscope readers who consider themselves Pisces are actually Aquarians. So instead of being sensitive, humane and idealistic [Hey, I’m a Pisces, that’s a perfect description of me!], they actually are friendly, loyal and inventive.[Oh, wait…that’s also a perfect description of me! Maybe there’s something to this astrology mumbo-jumbo}

Or not. [I think I’m going to go with that choice]

There is no physical connection between constellations and personality traits, said Kunkle, who teaches astronomy at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. “Sure, we can connect harvest to the stars,” he said. “But personality? No.”

That’s the case. There are no good correlations even between astrology and personality, and definitely none that match the claims of astrologers. All horoscopes are is a crude form of cold reading.

The funny thing about this article is that it has smoked out a kooky astrologer, who is quite irate. He fulminates about the article, explaining that there are three kinds of zodiacal interpretations, the Sidereal, the Tropical, and the Constelllational, and while those wicked scientists may have nitpicked away at one of them, they haven’t touched his zodiac. He does medieval astrology which has its own specific set of pulled-out-of-his-ass presumptions and assertions and funky clunky rules.

And then he goes further and declares that Scientists should stay the hell out of astrology. Why? It’s hilarious. Because science doesn’t support his lunacy and works to debunk his beliefs.

Why would astrologers even CARE what modern science has to say about astrology? Modern science is almost universally hostile to astrology; and modern scientists who do have some sympathy for our Art usually are trying to “help” by proving astrology on scientific grounds. Being a Spiritual Science, if you will, astrology will never be proven correct, true, or valid to the satisfaction of the modern academy, which is still held captive by the materialist/atheist world view. I’m not suggesting that astrologers ignore everything that modern scientists say about astrology (or any other field), but why would we give it such weight? Is their goal to work with us? In most cases, their goal is to debunk astrology completely. Do you think that these scientists who “corrected” the zodiac dates actually consulted with an astrologer? Of course not! If they had, they might have realized how absolutely ridiculous their “corrections” are.

This is the attitude I recall from all the astrologers I used to argue with, and it’s the same stuff we get from any pseudoscience or theology. In the rare cases when astrologers made specific and testable claims, they didn’t work. So they demand exemption from the way the universe works; their art doesn’t actually have results that can be assessed empirically, or measured, or even seen…which makes one wonder how astrologers and theologians ever came up with their claims, and why we should care about the operation of invisible rules that simply don’t function.

But maybe some astrologer out there will try to defend his superstitions here. If they show up, try not to break them right away — they can be fun, but they’re very fragile.

Precious bodily fluids

Last night, I finished reading Paul Offit’s Deadly Choices(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), his new book about the history of anti-vaccination movements. It’s very good and very thorough and very convincing, and I found it informative because it also takes a broad view, looking everything from the campaigns against Jenner to the crazy talk of Jenny McCarthy. I had never really seen where these opponents of a simple life-saving procedure were coming from, but seeing a few centuries worth of their rhetoric lined up and put on display was helpful, and I finally realized what was wrong with the anti-vaxers.

They’ve all got Jack D. Ripper Syndrome. What drives them nuts is the idea that someone will pollute their (and worse, their children’s) precious bodily fluids with filth and contaminants and base animal substances. It’s a concern about purity and a fear of foreign substances that is amplified beyond all reason; they take a reasonable core concern about cleanliness and avoiding toxins, blow it up into a hysterical terror about a medical procedure that intentionally introduces minute quantities of a foreign substance, and then build pseudoscientific rationalizations for their fear. It’s all gotten a bit ridiculous.

For instance, all the howling about formaldehyde in some vaccines; it’s a trivial amount, a tiny fraction of the quantity your very own metabolism produces in the normal course of a day. If you’re going to get upset about trace formaldehyde in a shot you’ll get once in your life, you ought to be even more upset with your liver, which is trickling more aldehydes than that into your bloodstream every day. Here’s how Offit handles that, in his discussion of the avuncular Dr Bob Sears and his pandering to the anti-vax lobby:

Unfortunately, Sears fails to educate his reader about the importance of quantity—that is, that it’s the dose that makes the poison—and that spacing out vaccines to avoid exposure to quantities of chemicals so small that they have no chance of causing harm will accomplish nothing. For example, Sears claims that formaldehyde is a “carcinogen” (cancer-causing agent) but omits the fact that formaldehyde is a natural product: an essential intermediate in the synthesis of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and of thymidines and purines (the building blocs of DNA). Everyone has about two and one-half micrograms of formaldehyde per milliliter of blood. Therefore, young infants have about ten times more formaldehyde circulating in their bodies than is contained in any vaccine. Further, the quanitity of formaldehyde contained in vaccines is at most one six-hundredth of that found to be harmful to animals. It would have been valuable if Sears had informed his readers of these facts rather than scaring them with the notion that formaldehyde in vaccines could cause cancer.

We’re living in a world swarming with all kinds of gunk and goop and dirt and bugs, and some of it is bad for you…but it’s only bad if you get a dose that exceeds your body’s capacity to manage it. The stuff in a vaccine is at such a low concentration and purified to an amazing degree to minimize the quantity of nasties that it contains to a point below the amount that can do anyone harm.

If you’re going to dread a few proteins in a shot, though, I have a tale to make you quiver in disgust. I just had two carrots for lunch, and I didn’t peel them, I just gave them a quick wash in the tap. The quantity of uncharacterized filth and strange chemicals and weird biologically active agents, not to mention the scattered nematodes and bacteria and viruses colonizing the surface of that vegetable, was immense. If I get some random disease in the next day or two, should I blame the carrot farmers of America? Who knows what mysterious pathogens I took into my system via those horrible plants. Farmers raise them in dirt!

(By the way, Orac has a review of Oracian length on this same book. Check it out for the details.)