Bad science on vaccines from a so-called science fiction author

The anti-vaxxers aren’t my usual beat, but this guy was so egregiously ignorant I couldn’t sit quietly. Jon Del Arroz, “the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction” (we’ve encountered him on these pages before) believes that vaccines are population control and makes some very silly arguments.

Rockland County has in effect declared Martial Law on its citizens because of the measles. The media is calling it an “unprecedented move” as it’s banning children from public places.

Something smells fishy here.

Those are two useful words, “in effect”. No, Rockland County did not declare martial law. They declared a state of emergency because they’ve had a constant stream of measles cases for six month, and they’ve only banned infected children from public spaces. They are trying to break the chain of transmission by telling people you can’t stage involuntary pox parties and infect other people’s children.

Misrepresenting the situation is not a promising start.

First, if vaccines worked so well and they made us all immune, why should we be panicked about someone having it?

Because not everyone has been vaccinated. Babies typically are vaccinated against measles at 12-15 months…so my baby granddaughter, for instance, is still vulnerable. Why does Jon Del Arroz want to make babies sick? Does he just hate children?

Also some people are immuno-comprised and more susceptible. Then there are all the dangerous fools who think vaccines are bad and have avoided them for themselves and their children — and while it might seem just that they should suffer from a life-threatening disease and remove themselves from the gene pool, it is not what a humane society should do.

The whole claim is that this ends the disease and we have to therefore inject tons of dead viruses into our body in order to have a healthy society. It seems counterintuitive that we should then be scared of the same disease we were told we eradicated.

Measles was eradicated from the Americas by diligent vaccination efforts. However, it’s still prevalent worldwide, and almost 100,000 people die of measles every year. It’s staging a comeback here in the US because we’ve accumulated a vulnerable sub-population who refuse vaccination for specious reasons. We’d rather reduce that population which acts as a breeding ground for disease by vaccinating them, than by allowing them to die.

The truth is, most outbreaks of measles and mumps happen to VACCINATED people. So it appears whatever vaccine is being used is not all that effective. For outbreaks to be a big problem, this would have to be the case, and it means all the shutting down discussion on any vaccine topic by shaming anyone trying to discuss it seems to have a deeper purpose.

This is flatly false. People who have been vaccinated are safe from measles outbreaks, according to the CDC. However, roughly 10% of the American population has not been vaccinated against measles. Those are the people we’re concerned about.

10% of the US population is about 32 million people. Why do you hate your fellow Americans, Jon Del Arroz?

Second, how many people constitutes an “outbreak?” We’re told it’s only 150 cases in the last year or so. How many people have it now? 154 over an entire year spread out could mean as little as 4-5 people have the disease.

And yet they declared martial law.

It’s not martial law.

The disease was declared eradicated in the US because the chain of transmission was broken by the relatively high rate of vaccination — you were unlikely to encounter someone with the disease, so even if you were susceptible, it wasn’t likely that you’d meet someone who was infected. In local areas like Rockland County, where the number of infected individuals has risen, that’s no longer true — susceptible people, like little babies, have a good chance of randomly encountering a measles carrier. That’s the purpose of the state of emergency, to get people to stop risking other peoples lives and health by bringing the measles virus into public spaces.

It’s very similar to government overreach in New Zealand based on one shooting–they’re grabbing all of the populace’s guns.

Oh god. One track minds.

It’s more like telling people they aren’t allowed to fire their guns randomly into public spaces. You believe in responsible gun ownership, don’t you, Jon Del Arroz? Why do you think people should be allowed to spew infectious snot into crowds?

On the vaccine end, the discussions need to be had. Is every vaccine effective? Is putting them all together in a cocktail healthy for children? Or is there something else at play? Are these used for something else, like creating a populace who ARE chronically diseased all the time and further dependent on the government healthcare?

These discussions have been had. Where were you? You can find discussions of vaccine policy in the scientific literature and at places like the CDC.

Different vaccines have different degrees of effectiveness, because infectious organisms and viruses evolve. Influenza varies frequently, for instance. The measles vaccine is effective and safe.

The vaccine schedule has been empirically evaluated and determined to be safe, much safer than the diseases they prevent.

Vaccines do not make you chronically diseased. They prevent disease states. You will need less healthcare, government or otherwise, if you don’t catch a disease than if you catch one. Your conspiracy theories are bogus.

Our own president said it: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!”

I’ve yet to see him be wrong.

Vaccines do not cause autism. It’s been tested over and over again. Your own president was wrong.

He has also made claims about Puerto Rico that were factually wrong. He was wrong about Mexico. Do you also believe that wind turbines cause cancer?

Jon Del Arroz is a science fiction author, emphasis on the fiction part. I prefer that my SF authors have at least a passing acquaintance with how science works. Jeez, at least learn how to look the facts up.

Signs of Spring (spider edition)

It’s an unboxing video! I hear those are popular. Only what I’m unboxing is a pair of spider egg cases.

Spoiler: I don’t find any spiderlings inside. I find evidence of them being there, in bits of molted cuticles, but nothing was moving. I’ll let them warm up for a few days and look again.

If you want to know more about how spiders overwinter, here’s a source:

Tanaka K (1997) Evolutionary Relationship between Diapause and Cold Hardiness in the House Spider, Achaearanea tepidariorum (Araneae: Theridiidae). Journal of Insect Physiology 43(3):271-274.

The relationship between diapause and cold hardiness of the house spider, Achaearanea tepidariorum, differed geographically. In a cool-temperate population, enhanced chilling tolerance and supercooling ability were observed in diapause individuals, whereas a subtropical population showed only chilling tolerance. Because this spider is considered to be of tropical origin, it would follow that the ancestral diapause of this spider was equipped with chilling tolerance, but not with an increased supercooling ability. It seems that the ability to lower the supercooling point evolved through natural selection in the course of expansion of this species to the northern climates.

Now I have an excuse to visit Florida on a collecting trip, to gather representatives of southern populations. Maybe I should go in, like, February.

One other thought I had about the barrenness of these egg cases: it’s like the Donner expedition. Maybe one of the ways spiderlings survive the long cold winter is by eating their siblings, and this winter was particularly harsh.

WND in its death throes!

It’s been sweet watching the Alex Jones empire crumble, and that tin-pot emperor getting his balls ground to goo in courtroom depositions, but this is even better: Whirled Nuts Daily, aka World Net Daily, is collapsing. Best of all, it’s falling apart in a whirlwind of mismanagement and corruption by its founder, Joseph Farah, and has been stiffing the conspiracy theorists they call “writers”.

Coburn recalled in an interview that he had a “very frank and disturbing” conversation last year with Farah about unpaid royalties for his 2017 book, “Smashing the D.C. Monopoly.”

“I accused him of not being honest,” Coburn said. “He doesn’t keep his commitments. He doesn’t keep his word.”

Other authors, initially attracted to WND by the image Farah crafted for himself as a devout evangelical Christian, have groused that they paid WND’s pay-to-publish division thousands of dollars to have their books printed but haven’t received the royalties they were promised or other items, such as audio versions of their works. Their complaints, requests for basic accounting statements and pleas for help were largely ignored, according to emails and interviews with more than a dozen authors.

The secret to keeping their scam afloat for so long was…religion. That was the brand they were peddling, that because they were devout Christians, they could do no wrong.

At points scattered across the country, others reached the same conclusion: They could trust WND because of its Christian values.

I long ago reached the opposite conclusion: if an organization brags about it’s piety, that’s a clear sign that they’ve got no integrity.

While WND provided blog fodder for years, I’m not going to miss them at all. Hillary had Vince Foster murdered, Ray Comfort and Kevin Sorbo as columnists (clearly rivaling the NY Times in quality), aliens, gay bashing, bomb the Muslims, all that kind of crap promoted by Farah and acting as an inspiration to people like Alex Jones…no, just fall into a pit of bankruptcy and die, WND.

Looking for some fun reading?

The 2019 Hugo awards finalists have been announced. Tragically, neither Vox Day nor Brad Torgerson nor Castalia House are anywhere on the list. Did I say “tragically”? I meant “hilariously”. I guess the gate-crashing Puppies made their last sad yelp in what, 2016? Instead, we’ve got a lot of books and stories that were chosen because people enjoyed them, rather than being forced on everyone by a lot of wanna-be Nazis. Instead, we get this:

The list is dominated by women, with 5/6 women finalists in Novel, Novella, Novelette, AND Short Story, and 4/6 in Best Series. That’s amazing and proves what all we Rioters already know—women rock at writing SFF. We always have, and we always will. And in these five categories, nine nominations go to authors of color, a decent amount, though SFF awards in general still need more diversity.

They’re good stories! I was skimming through the list, and had to stop and read “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat”, just because of the title. Raptors are great, but there is, however, a shortage of cephalopods and spiders. Perhaps next year diversity will be extended to other phyla.

Something I noticed about the category of best long-form dramatic presentation…

  • Annihilation, directed and written for the screen by Alex Garland, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer (Paramount Pictures/Skydance)
  • Avengers: Infinity War, screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Marvel Studios)
  • Black Panther, written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, directed by Ryan Coogler (Marvel Studios)
  • A Quiet Place, screenplay by Scott Beck, John Krasinski and Bryan Woods, directed by John Krasinski (Platinum Dunes / Sunday Night)
  • Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley (Annapurna Pictures)
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, screenplay by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman (Sony)

“Infinity War” is the weakest of the nominated works, and it still made buttloads of money (I favor Into the Spider-Verse or Sorry to Bother You myself). The amazing thing is how many high quality, and critically acclaimed, SF movies are being made nowadays. Fifteen-year old me is finally getting his day in the sun.

Now if only I had time to read all that…and you know, excellent authors keep pumping out new stuff for this coming year, too.

In case you were wondering why Quillette is a hacky web site

They ran an article titled Activists Must Stop Harassing Scientists. That made me wonder what they’re complaining about: animal rights activists setting fire to labs? Anti-vaxxers deluging immunologists with abusive emails? Republicans misrepresenting climatology and trying to shut down research?

Nope, none of the above. They are concerned that women complaining about sexual harassment are driving “good” men out of scientific fields. Their evidence: two anecdotal complaints. The first is from an anonymous Australian astrophysicist who left his native country for a position in China, because of the “political climate in Australian universities”.

It’s very hard to find a tenured job in astronomy if you don’t belong to a protected group (alas, I am a white hetero Christian male, bad luck!) and/or you don’t do enough visible activism (or at least enough virtue signaling) for a number of green-left issues. In China, it’s highly likely that Chinese astronomers are subject to the same political interference from the Communist Party, but at least a foreigner like me is left alone, and I can do astronomy in peace, without wasting my time with diversity initiatives. And I see first hand that astronomy jobs are still given to the best candidates regardless of gender, ethnic origin, etc. Unlike my Australian boss, my current Chinese boss has never berated me for not being socialist enough.

Huh. Here’s a chart of the percentage of women in the International Astronomical Union, by country.

I don’t see evidence of discrimination against males, Christian, white, hetero or otherwise in Australia, or in China. Rather, there seems to be a strong bias against women. I wonder why that is?

If you care about the science or your specific field, abandoning diversity initiatives would seem to be likely to drive more good women out of the field than good men. If you actually cared about merit, I would think you’d want to work to make sure the best people had opportunities.

He also complained that he had to write a diversity statement. It is routine that researchers have to justify their contributions to university administrations — you have to write a summary of your research, your teaching, and committee work and outreach. This is utterly normal. As he describes it below, the diversity statement is simply more of the same.

There are many levels of discrimination. At one level, you have an increasing number of jobs, fellowships and grants officially reserved for women and “first nation” people. At another level, for jobs open to white males, there will be special clauses in the application to make sure the candidates are sufficiently woke. For example, you’re required to write a “diversity statement”—which is nothing more than a pledge of allegiance—to illustrate how you have shown “leadership” when it comes to diversity issues in your previous jobs, your teaching and your research (organizing workshops, writing reports, giving talks for women-only audiences, etc.)

It’s not a “pledge of allegiance” to state how you have addressed diversity concerns in your work. It is not oppressive to be asked how you’re trying to correct a bias in your field. But I guess some snowflakes are so outraged at having to write a paragraph about that that they’ll pack up, leave their homes, and move to a country where their native language isn’t routinely spoken, rather than face up to real problems in scientific recruitment.

Their second example of the oppressive nature of Leftist academics is…Alessandro Strumia. Strumia is the guy who gave a talk at CERN in which he invented his own citation metric which conveniently “proved” that women were less productive in physics than men, and also even more conveniently “proved” that a woman who got a job that he applied for was inferior to Alessandro Strumia, as if the job application process could be fairly reduced to performance on a single metric. His arguments were all refuted by the physics community, exposing what a shallow, bigoted thinker he is. All you need to know is that Strumia blamed “cultural marxism” for sexist discrimination, and claimed that differences in physics ability were forged by “human biology practiced as in the plains of Africa thousands of years ago” (his grasp of English grammar is rivaled only by his understanding of biology).

(You can see all of his slides online. They do him no favors.)

Quillette predictably claims that he is the victim of…wait for it…a witch-hunt, a word that automatically throws a red flag on the play. But then, being published in Quillette is itself a big red flag.

The new astrology, accepted by True Skeptics

Skeptics, in my experience, are always strongly anti-astrology. It’s a ridiculous exercise in fortune-telling, based on the idea that distant stars and planets are influencing you at the moment of your birth and shaping your destiny. We laugh.

Then there is Chinese astrology, which we usually only see on paper placemats at Chinese restaurants*, although if you’re part of that cultural tradition, maybe you encounter it more often. It’s also ridiculous. Apparently, everyone born in 1957, like me, are “reliable and independent”.

I think we can all agree that that is absurd.

But there is one kind of astrology that is accepted without question by skeptics, and it annoys me to no end. It is the tedious categorization of “generations”. I recently listened to a podcast that went on and on about characterizing this generation, that generation, asking what we’ll call the next generation, what their attributes will be, and it was infuriating. The borders defined between “generations” are arbitrary, every generation is made up of diverse people, and you can no more define the nature of individuals with this categorization than you can with a paper placemat at a Chinese restaurant.

Look, the baby boom was a real thing: it described a demographic surge after WWII, in which sociologists noticed a rapid rise in the number of children being born. That’s a notable phenomenon. However, whoever first decided to describe the people inside that wave of births as “boomers”, shifting from a description of a population to a generalization of the individuals within that population, deserves to be dragged out and hanged, because it then spawned a whole pointless trend. First we had to name the generation after the boom, Gen X (fuck you very much, Douglas Copeland), and then we had to set up those stupid boundaries which mean nothing, since babies are born continuously, making the discontinuities pure invention. Finally, people made elaborate charts illustrating the long lists of attributes of each generation, an exercise that makes Chinese restaurant placemats look sane and sensible in comparison.

These things are garbage pseudoscience at best, and indulgences in bigoted stereotyping at worst. There are real shifts in the cultural environment over time, and it’s good to recognize those as aspects of our history, but it does a real disservice to the human beings involved to dismiss them as “boomers” or “millennials” or my favorite, “unknown, still being defined”. It’s about time someone stood up and pointed out that these are misleading labels that are about as credible as signs of the zodiac or Myers-Briggs personality tests.

*Chinese-American restaurants, I should say. I never saw them in Beijing, and the food was also completely different.

Why this should be is a total mystery

Jordan B. Peterson has found his people — the evangelical protestant theocrats at that institution of miseducation, Liberty University.

I wonder what he thought of their Creation Studies department or their doctrinal statement?

We affirm that all things were created by God. Angels were created as ministering agents, though some, under the leadership of Satan, fell from their sinless state to become agents of evil. The universe was created in six historical days and is continuously sustained by God; thus it both reflects His glory and reveals His truth. Human beings were directly created, not evolved, in the very image of God. As reasoning moral agents, they are responsible under God for understanding and governing themselves and the world.

A self-proclaimed evolutionary biologist like Dr Peterson ought to find that at least a little troubling.

Discovery Channel is evolving into the Men’s Pulp channel

Several years ago, the Discovery Channel had this successful promotion featuring people singing “boom de yada” while doing awesome sciencey things, mostly. They were also promoting shows about fishing and blowing things up, but OK, it was sweet and memorable. It also featured brief clips of women doing things.

I guess they tried to repeat the success this year, only they forgot someone.

OK, all the stuff about manly men cleaning crab and driving cars and blowing stuff up again is…well, all right, it’s a way to get people interested in science, at least, even if it is only tangentially related to science. I try to be open-minded about approaches to stirring up enthusiasm for science. But it’s all men doing stereotypically masculine activities — there is precisely one woman in the whole thing, she doesn’t speak, she’s wearing skimpy clothing in a long shot as she walks through a forest. That’s it!

Come on, Discovery Channel. I know actual intellectual, thoughtful content isn’t on brand for you, but could you at least have a woman blowing up a truck while swimming with a shark or something?

It reminds me of all those men’s magazines from the 1960s which showed men in dangerous situations (everything in Nature is trying to kill you, you know, even turtles, and your role is to fight them off to rescue Your Woman). Discovery Channel is regressing. Maybe they should rename themselves the Saga or Argosy or True Men channel.

Tucker Carlson is simply a dumb, sexist bully

I got glasses in high school. It was great — I still remember marveling at all the things I could see. Apparently, objects 10 feet away from you aren’t supposed to be blurry. I also remember the school bullies having a blast laughing at ol’ four eyes, who was clearly a nerd now, with the final signifier in place.

Smarmy, sneering Tucker Carlson reminded me so much of those chickenshit bullies. He recently went on air to mock Chris Hayes for wearing glasses, which was a symptom now of being a feminist. Further, he spoke contemptuously of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a woman and “29 year old former bartender” who dared to talk about science. Chris Hayes is what every man would be if feminists had power. I had no idea that forcing men to wear glasses even if they didn’t need them was on the feminist agenda; I guess we’re all going to be forced to get degrees from Brown University and a Harvard fellowship, too.

There was more. He compared Hayes to Ellen Degeneres, as if that was some terrible insult.

“He looks like Ellen, kind of a fusion show,” Carlson said. “But did you hear what he said? Our only hope for survival. Holy smokes. That is terrifying. Help us, Chris Hayes.”

That’s not what Hayes said, of course. He said that some saw the Green New Deal as the only way of protecting our way of life. But Carlson’s frequent shtick isn’t to engage with arguments on the merit, preferring, instead, to levy insults.

As he did when first mentioning Hayes.

“Chris Hayes is what every man would be if feminists ever achieve absolute power in this country,” Carlson said. “Apologetic, bespectacled and deeply, deeply concerned about global warming and the patriarchal systems that cause it.”

Let’s compare Carlson to what science says…or at least, what one correlational study found.

To measure this, the researchers looked at Google searches for terms that associated with that insecurity — erectile dysfunction, hair loss, “how to get girls,” etc. — and cross-referenced the frequency of those searches with voting patterns in 2016 and 2018.

“We found that support for [President] Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as ‘erectile dysfunction,’ ” the researchers wrote in an article for The Post. “Moreover, this relationship persisted after accounting for demographic attributes in media markets, such as education levels and racial composition, as well as searches for topics unrelated to fragile masculinity, such as ‘breast augmentation’ and ‘menopause.’ ”

But maybe the fact that Carlson is bleeding advertisers is more relevant to his deep insecurities.

Also, if you’re going to sneer at someone who graduated cum laude from Boston University for not being competent to explain science, you might want to get your facts straight, and not misrepresent what was said. What was that about “3 million years of human history”? Homo sapiens is about 200,000 years old, and for most of that we don’t have a record that would count as ‘history’. Is he counting australopithecines in that history?