“Food” does not “cleanse” “toxins”

acitvated-lemonade

Aaargh. In an article about an organic food store, I get lots of buttons pushed: food fads, weird notions about nutrition, Gwyneth-Paltrow-style airy BS about purging oneself of toxins, all that kind of crap:

As a downtown crowd of artists and models balanced long nights of extreme revelry with long days of extreme diet and fitness, Organic Avenue became more of a destination, opening its first street-level shop in 2006 on Stanton Street and offering, among à la carte items, juice cleanse programs that might entail forgoing solid food for anywhere from one to five days in favor of concoctions made from blue-green algae, beets and the like.

If you’re going in for a colonoscopy, you’ll be told to go on a low-fiber liquid diet for a day or two, to clear out your colon for inspection. But this nonsense about “juice cleanses” is absurd. In fact, just run away if anyone uses the word “cleanse” in reference to your diet.

But it saves the best for last. There’s a new fad going around among the excessively wealthy right now.

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FtBCon4: call for proposals

We’re going to have another FtBCon on 22-24 January 2016, and we’re beginning to assemble a program. Your friendly bloggers here have some plans and ideas, but one of the virtues of having a conference entirely online, besides the fact that you all get to watch, no matter where you are, is that we can open it up to suggestions for talks and panels from you, the readership. If you are interested in putting your face and voice online, talking about freethought, science, social justice, video games, whatever, we have an online form for you to fill out. It’s easy!

A few important points: only fill out the form if you want to host a session. Don’t nominate others: you might want to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson (so would I), but we don’t need you telling us that you want us to draft him to speak. If Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to address our little con, on the other hand, he should fill out the form. We’ll probably accept his proposal.

You can propose talks, where you all by your lonesome talk at your computer’s camera, or panels, where you get together a small group (keep it to 4 or fewer, please: big groups don’t work well) and have a round table discussion. It’s all good. Again, don’t tell us you want to host a panel and ask us to fill up all the seats: you find your co-panelists first.

This form is for proposals. They won’t automatically be accepted. Make it enticing so we want to accept it.

Do tell us when you’d be available that weekend, and when you’d prefer to have the panel. We also love to have people outside US time zones participate, so it’s great when we’ve got panels/talks at times convenient for Europe or Australia.

Trolls: don’t bother. Submissions from this form will not be displayed publicly — we’ll just screen them first, and we’re quick on the delete key. If you think you can lie your way into getting on the schedule and then switch topics on us at the last minute…won’t work. All talks and panels will be sponsored by an FtB member, who will be able to pull the plug on you. So don’t waste your time or ours.

Copulins?

Over on We Hunted the Mammoth, there’s a discussion of this odd post by one of those Men Going Their Own Way about copulins — which are apparently sex pheromones secreted by the vagina. This was the first I ever heard of them, which gave me a moment’s panic. I am a biology professor, and I do teach human physiology, and here was this phenomenon I’d never encountered before? Worrisome. But only for a moment. There are a lot of details I know nothing about, so maybe this was an opportunity to learn something new.

I’ve got a small collection of physiology and neuroscience texts, so I checked there first. Nope, unheard of term, nowhere in any of their indices.

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You found the capslock key once, can you find it again?

This rant pushes a lot of my buttons: ALL CAPS, the pre-declaration that some might find it offensive, the dishonesty, the pseudo-piety that makes forcing your beliefs on others a requirement, and that the idea of leaving people alone is an intrusion on your rights. And of course, it’s the War On Christmas.

capslockxmas

Look, raving nutter, I don’t believe in Jesus. You can’t demand that I accept your wacky myth in order to enjoy a day off in December. You believe in Jesus. I don’t have the power to rummage around in your head and change that — you can believe the 25th of December is your special day to love Jesus even more, and I’m just going to shrug and say, “OK. Knock yourself out, guy.”

If you want to believe that Armistice Day celebrates the time Jesus put flowers in soldiers’ rifles, go right ahead; you want to celebrate Arbor Day by praising Jesus’ wood, fine; if you think the 4th of July honors the day Jesus visited Philadelphia, you get to. You can tell people “Merry Christmas” on Halloween if you want, there’s no law against it. That I choose not to believe your bullshit is not an infringement of your rights.

Besides, you’re probably doing Christmas wrong. There’s supposed to be lutefisk and lefse, and krumkake for dessert, and if you don’t recite the Lord’s Prayer in Norwegian, you’re going to Hell. If you don’t agree, then apparently you are waging war on my Christmas.

Christ, they’re doing it again

It’s a sequel, God’s Not Dead 2 (but Professor Jeffery Radisson is).

Like the first one, the heart of this already terribad movie is a ginned-up controversy. Philosophy professors do not force students to sign pledges of belief, and there is no prohibition against citing the Bible as a literary and sociologically-relevant text. Even us noisy militant atheists don’t argue that you have no right to believe as you want.

The movie is going to be more invented oppression to fit the persecution complex of Christians. It’ll probably make a bucket of money, while getting abysmal reviews and making the rational, honest part of society puke into buckets.

Unhappy apes tend to gather in groups and groom each other

12-Steps

If you think we aren’t apes, how do you explain the popularity of Alcoholics Anonymous? Lance Dodes takes a sobering look at the data behind the success of 12-step programs. The short answer: they don’t work, and they do harm.

There is a large body of evidence now looking at AA success rate, and the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent. Most people don’t seem to know that because it’s not widely publicized. … There are some studies that have claimed to show scientifically that AA is useful. These studies are riddled with scientific errors and they say no more than what we knew to begin with, which is that AA has probably the worst success rate in all of medicine.

It’s not only that AA has a 5 to 10 percent success rate; if it was successful and was neutral the rest of the time, we’d say OK. But it’s harmful to the 90 percent who don’t do well. And it’s harmful for several important reasons. One of them is that everyone believes that AA is the right treatment. AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.

I was most entertained by the commenter on that article who attempted to rebut those claims. Read this, and wonder:

I’m a recovering addict/alcoholic with over 5 years of continuous sobriety. I attend AA meetings regularly, and I take exception to Dr. Dodes statement, “AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.” I have never attended a meeting where this sentiment was expressed. The AA Big Book says, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.” It does not claim any infallibility on the part of the 12 steps. I’ve heard it said around the tables many times that the success rate is around 5%.

So he’s actually confirming exactly what Dodes said: low success rate, and AA says the 95% failures don’t count because they didn’t “thoroughly follow” the path.

AA should be a subject of great interest to atheists, because it demonstrates a common phenomenon: vast numbers of people gladly and even desperately following a pattern of behaviors that do nothing to help them, and are even proven ineffective. Sound familiar?

Bangladesh government ministers: irresponsible, corrupt, or ignorant?

You may have heard that there have been more murders in Bangladesh — once again, fanatics are butchering atheists, and people who publish atheist works, with machetes. You may think this is unconscionable, that these are barbaric acts, but don’t you worry. Representatives of the government of Bangladesh have made a statement.

Yesterday’s attacks are isolated incidents and such attacks also occur in other countries of the world.

Really? I’m an atheist blogger. Should I be worried that someone will break into my house and chop me to death? I don’t think so.

As for the isolated incidents claim…that’s a very strange thing to say about a series of murders, for which there is a published hit list. It’s also very strange to say when the latest killing of Faisal Arefin Dipan, and attempted murders of Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, Tareque Rahim, and Ranadipam Basu were synchronized and coordinated. It’s also strange when religiously motivated terrorists are claiming credit and threatening to kill again.

These secular and atheist publishers waged war against religion of Islam in every possible ways, it said, threatening to annihilate anyone who would dare stand against Islam.

Planned, coordinated, openly intended to intimidate critics of religion…but the government has decided that these are just isolated incidents? I don’t think you need to be Sherlock Holmes to be able to connect the dots on these cases. Maybe we should loan Bangladesh a couple of 9 year old kids who’ve played the game Clue to help them figure it out. As a special bonus, they could probably help Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal find his own ass.

I feel a bit bottled up

shotglass

Maybe I should run down to the store and pick up a laxative. Maybe I’ll get a bottle of this homeopathic stuff…can’t hurt. Hey, maybe I’ll pick up a case. Yvette d’Entremont recommends CVS’s homeopathic constipation relief.

The bottle, which listed 20 percent alcohol as an inactive ingredient, is sold over the counter with no age requirements. One of the NBC4 I-Team producers recorded her teen daughter buying the product without any questions asked.

“It’s really just alcohol and water,” d’Entremont said.

Yay homeopathy!

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