How decadent is your aristocracy?

Ours is getting pretty creepy. They’re buying blood from healthy young people to inject into sickly old fucks, and they’re gathering at ritzy gala events to learn how they too can become techno-vampires.

It’s called The Young Blood Project — that’s a nice ghoulish name, at least. A Florida doctor is carrying out a “clinical trial” which you can pay to be part of (a warning flag is already being thrown), in which you, if you’re old enough (hey, I qualify!) will be transfused with plasma obtained from young men and women. While I’m the right age, though, it’s apparently going to cost $285,000 to sign up. I dunno, man, get a bunch of blood or a Porsche 911 R? Decisions, decisions.

This “study” also has some serious design flaws.

Mixed but intriguing evidence in mice doesn’t yet justify testing this idea in humans, much less charging them a huge sum to sign up. And the study uses neither blinding nor a placebo group, design elements considered essential for rigorous medical research.

“There is no way under heaven that they will be able to convincingly show whether this works or this doesn’t work. It’s a trial that is designed and destined to provide no valuable information,” said Dr. Steven Joffe, a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who performs bone marrow transplants. He called the scientific hypothesis “incredibly far-fetched.”

Really, it probably isn’t going to work.

Maharaj has not published any animal studies testing the procedure he’s proposing to try in humans. He did, however, publish a paper last year documenting a study in which he infused three cancer patients with white blood cells from young donors who had been injected with G-CSF. The trial was originally intended to enroll 29 patients, but Maharaj did not answer questions about why the paper featured results from only three of them.

Asked by STAT for citations in the published literature that provide the scientific basis for his new trial, Maharaj pointed to six studies. One was conducted on human cells in lab dishes. The other five were conducted in mice; they found that, after being exposed to the blood of young mice, old mice had less abnormal thickening of their heart, grew more nervous tissue, and saw improved cognitive function, among other changes.

Man, in the old days all you needed to become a vampire was to get bitten by a creepy old fuck in a cape. Now you gotta be rich, you’ve got to shuttle to Florida once a month, you have to get all these needles, and then at the end you get to hope that maybe you’ll be able to name the camel on a cognitive assessment test.

That settles it, I’m going for the Porsche. Can one of you break the news to my wife that I’m planning to spend 10 years salary on a penismobile?

Would someone care to write a standard inclusion rider for conference speakers?

Frances McDornand gave a speech at the Oscars in which she asked everyone to include an “inclusion rider” in their contracts. Like most people around the country, I had to google it to find out what an “inclusion rider” is.

What the heck is an inclusion rider? It’s a way to make Hollywood more equitable. Actors sign contracts when they are cast in films, and they have the ability to negotiate for riders, or additional provisions. An inclusion rider is a stipulation that the minor roles of a film reflect the demography of where the film takes place, including a proportionate number of women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals and people with disabilities. Big name actors who have leverage in negotiations could put this stipulation into their contracts and drastically change representation in film.

Hey! Why don’t we have such a thing for speakers at atheist cons (maybe you do, and I just don’t know about it)? This would be so useful. You want me to speak at your event? Great! But part of the deal is that I don’t show up and discover that I’m one among a big roster of nothing but old white men.

Or maybe you don’t want me anyway, and that’s fine — but what would be really powerful is if all those popular old white men also had an “inclusion rider” in their contracts that would motivate conference organizers to be a bit more balanced in their lineups if they want Big Name Atheist to join their meeting. It might also be revealing to find out which Big Name Atheists don’t want to leverage greater inclusivity in the events they grace.

My one obstacle is ignorance. We made a big push to have reasonable harassment policies at cons a few years ago. Maybe this would be a good next step: if someone who knows the legalese to craft a basic boilerplate conference speaker contract, I’d be happy to use it and would include it in any of my agreements to speak somewhere as a requirement. If enough of us start using such a thing, conference organizers would have to accommodate to them and figure them into the speaker lineups they put together.

Or they could just start automatically rejecting speakers who expect an appropriate gender and minority balance. That would be good to know about a conference, too.

(Psst. Science conferences, too. Any event where there exists a more desirable class of speakers — use your power to promote more diversity.)

EST+Scientology+Ayn Rand? Sign me up!

If I wanted to build a horrible chimeric religion to get rich, that would probably be a profitable combo…but I’d have to be totally rotten at the core to be able to do it. Just like Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, who founded a cult called variously NXIVM or the Knife of Aristotle.

There are innumerable articles on NXIVM and Raniere that are worth your time, including this 2010 piece in Vanity Fair that claims Raniere took advantage of several wealthy heiresses, among other alleged victims. What everyone seems to agree on is that NXIVM shares DNA with Scientology, but mostly appears to be a direct descendant of the ‘70s self-investment movement EST. Most in my age range know about EST from its appearance in recent seasons of FX’s The Americans. NXIVM goes a step further than either, with ex-members reporting harems, color-coded hierarchy dress codes, deep sexism, and other assorted basic bitch cult moves—especially litigation against journalists and anti-Raniere voices. There’s also a website devoted to tracking the group, which seems like it shouldn’t be alone in this. After all, Raniere has been on the cover of Forbes magazine. He’s not hiding from anything.

So NXIVM focuses on internal truth and a re-prioritized set of internal ethics, mostly ripped from the objectivist pages of Ayn Rand, which I think solves the mystery of “Why fake news?”

Talk about your unholy hybrids…it’s terrifying that people actually fall for this kind of poison.

I despise quacks

I can sort of see the twisted logic behind the claim that cancer is good.

  • If cancer were an indicator of an underlying systemic problem, rather than the problem itself;

  • If cancers were easily treatable;

  • If cancers weren’t a massive cause of pain and death;

Then yes, cancer would be great! You get a lump in your breast, you start pooping blood, you have been coughing up slime and can’t catch your breath…why, happy day, that means you have to go take a big swig of orange juice and all your problems would go away, breasts would be instantly perky, rainbows will shine out of your ass, and you’ll be off running marathons.

The only problem is that none of those premises are true. Just ask someone who has cancer. Cancer isn’t a symptom, it’s the disease. Only quacks claim that cancer can be easily cured. And if all it took was changing your diet to cure it, how do you account for the millions of people who died in terrible agony from it?

The person spreading these damnable lies is a Canadian naturopath, Brittany Auerbach, who calls herself “Montreal Healthy Girl”. Her article on this is a case study in the arrogance of ignorance.

Cancer is not a disease that came from ‘out there’, you did not ‘catch it’ and there is no need for the powerless self-pitying of ” how can this happen to me, I am so unlucky!”. By understanding the actual physiology behind what cancer really is, it makes knowing the true ‘cure’ pretty simple and straight-forward.

She thinks she understands the physiology of cancer. In the next paragraph, she demonstrates that she doesn’t.

It is imperative that we understand one point: the human body is alkaline by design and acidic by function. It fights for homeostasis and works every minute of every living moment to keep our blood Ph at an alkaline 7.2-7.4. The body is meant to thrive on oxygen and alkaline minerals, we cannot survive without them. All foods and substances that are healthiest for us leave an alkaline residue and alkaline minerals in the body. Healthy tissues are oxygen-rich and loaded with alkaline nutrient stores that the body can use to neutralize the acids that are produced by everyday activities like walking, having sex, digestion, breathing, etc. When the body is rich in alkaline nutrients and rich in oxygen, it is disease-free and optimally functional. When the body becomes too acidic, the cells close themselves off by encasing themselves with alkaline minerals to protect the blood from becoming very acid (which would result in death). By closing themselves off, these cells begin to be unable to absorb alkaline nutrients or oxygen and basically turn anaerobic and cancerous. It is the same process that a bacteria undertakes: when blood supply and oxygen is cut off and acidity increases, they morph into ‘superbugs’, ones that can thrive and grow in the even the most undesirable of environments. AH thanks to acidic antibiotics!

I’ve seen this before. There’s a whole industry of quacks who reduce every ailment to one simple thing, pH, and make these silly arguments about an imbalance of hydrogen ions. At least the ancients argued for four humors that needed balancing, these loons have reduced it to just one. The “pH Miracle” scam has been going on for decades.

This horrible person also doesn’t just claim that cancer is a minor inconvenience, she’s also going to blame antibiotics for magically morphing bacteria into antibiotic resistant superbugs.

In fact, she has a treatment for everything! She can cure cancer, all viruses, all bacterial infections, alcoholism, ADD, and a whole raft of imaginary problems! She’s a fraud, but she’s got a successful scam going.

I was reminded of the Dunning-Kruger effect while browsing Brittany’s website. Ignorant people do not have empty minds; rather, their brain is filled with inaccurate information they believe to be true. And the Dunning-Kruger effect is the fact that many of these people actually think they have superior knowledge. If a fool knew they were a fool, they would not be dangerous. But a fool who thinks he is a genius, that is problematic. With videos that can reach up to half a million people, Brittany “MontrealHealthyGirl” Auerbach can do a lot of damage. She has more YouTube subscribers (over 106,000) than the Food Babe (38,566), though her Facebook and Twitter followers are dwarfed by her American counterpart.

If you’re listening to these lying phonies, you need to stop. She may be a fool, but she’s successfully milking a hundred thousand other fools.

I’m sensing a theme here

I just noticed something on Facebook. They have this pane titled “Suggested Groups” where they recommend stuff based on your browsing habits, I guess, and there were two of them being pushed at me. Here are their logos.

Is it just me, or do you see it too?

Several of those guys pictured are dead. One, Neil deGrasse Tyson, doesn’t want to be associated with movement atheism. But that isn’t what bothers me most.

One problem is that they’re all guys, every one, except for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They couldn’t be bothered to copy and paste a picture of Susan Jacoby or Annie Laurie Gaylor or Madalyn Murray O’Hair or Margaret Downey in there — heck, not even Ayn Rand, but maybe that would be too revealing of their political philosophy. If you wanted to demonstrate that atheism is a boys’ club, all you have to do is look at how they advertise themselves.

But another big problem is how much of a cult of personality this whole movement is becoming. All that matters is who you know, how compatible you are with that gang of 5 to 10 men who are the big names, and your ideas don’t matter otherwise. It’s all about conformity. You need to be centrist or right of center (or dead, if you’re liberal), and if you’re not, you’ve got to accommodate yourself to the status quo. You’ve got to be a man. It helps to be vigorously anti-Muslim, again part of that right-of-center bias. You should be white, but they’re happy to bring in a few tokens, even if they don’t ask to be part of this mess. It’s all part of the marketing of establishment atheism, which is going to be built around people you like, rather than ideas that challenge the culture. It’s a brand now.

It’s also focused on the past. Aww, aren’t you pinin’ for the days of George Carlin and Carl Sagan, when the atheist boys’ club could be all rational and shit without some girl or social scientist or somethin’ coming along and putting a damper on the party with complexity and exposing your underlying assumptions?

Don’t need no history, social studies, art, music, foreign languages, and communications!

Unbelievable.

So history, social studies, art, music, foreign languages, and communications are all “fat”, total wastes of time.

If you’re like me, you have no idea who Bryan Caplan is, so you’ll have to look him up on Wikipedia (see? It is useful). There you’ll learn that he is an economist, a field that I notice is not on his list of useless ideas, coincidentally. But you will also discover this revelation.

After having long shed a youthful infatuation with the works of Russian American writer Ayn Rand and her philosophical system of Objectivism, in 2004 Caplan wrote in his essay ‘An Intellectual Biography’, “I rejected Christianity because I determined that it was, to be blunt, idiotic. I rejected Objectivism and Austrianism, in contrast, as mixtures of deep truths and unfortunate mistakes. Let me begin with the deep truths. The Objectivists were right to insist that reality is objective, human reason able to grasp it, and scepticism without merit. They correctly hold that humans have free will, morality is objective, and the pursuit of self-interest typically morally right.”

Oh. A godless Randian. Is anyone surprised?

I guess I can kiss my wikipedia page goodbye

Another of the casualties of the various schisms within skepticism and atheism speaks out. Hayley Stevens has long been exasperated with movement skepticism, and she explains why.

Nothing is ever going to change because Skepticism has several large problems that it will fail to ever address effectively:

  1. the movement often allows irrational people to be elevated to positions of power from which they’re almost untouchable when it comes to criticism
  2. the skeptic movement is full of creepy men who don’t know how to behave appropriately around other people and they won’t go away.
  3. the skeptic movement is full of the kind of people who support these bad people unquestioningly.
  4. the skeptic movement is full of echo-chambers in which specific versions of truth are created and from which any information that counters this is shot down and, sometimes, even censored.

That first problem is a common one in new institutions. The skill set to be a good charismatic public representative rarely involves the skill set that is required to be a good, fair manager. Most college professors, myself included, would be totally incompetent in the role of university chancellor…but academia at least has a career path through administration that leads to better training in administrative roles. If you’re a skeptic/atheist who writes a best-selling book, presto, you’re the head of a foundation. That’s often a recipe for catastrophe.

Her second point is true of everything. I can’t single out skepticism for that at all…although the habit of these movements in promoting people well above their competence means the creepy guys get power and never learn to restrain themselves.

The third point…oh, boy is that true. Take a look at the promotional materials for far too many cons and presentations: all any impresario has to do is make a poster with the name of one of the handful of popular speakers in a gigantic bold font, with the date, time, and place below, and the audience will appear. They don’t even care what he (note: they’re all “he”) will say, what the purpose of the talk is about, what issues will be discussed. It doesn’t even need a title anymore. Lesser beings within the movement still have to announce a subject for their talks, but we’ve built a movement around personalities rather than ideas lately.

As for the fourth point, Stevens expands on it herself.

That final point is why I started this article by mentioning Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia — the self-appointed information masters of Wikipedia who operate from within a private internet forum and seem to focus on two things:

  1. working exhaustively to edit paranormal/supernatural related articles
  2. working exhaustively to edit the Wikipedia profiles of Skeptic celebrities, including people who are terrible people and criminals.

It is my opinion that their brand of skepticism is not the good kind. Recently, the Centre for Inquiry (CFI) appointed the head of the ‘Guerrilla Skepticism’ group, Susan Gerbic, as a Fellow which shocked me for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I don’t think Gerbic and her team of editors are very good champions of the skeptic movement. Secondly, when Dr Karen Stollznow spoke out about her experiences of harassment at the hands of a colleague at CFI, Gerbic’s son wore a t-shirt which stated he was on the “team” of the accused, to a lecture that Stollznow was delivering at an event. Secondly, it was Gerbic who added the photo to Wikipedia of Harriett Hall wearing an anti-skepchick t-shirt at TAM.

It’s a good thing to have motivated people monitoring Wikipedia for supernatural nonsense, demanding some empirical rigor in articles. I approve of that. I’m not at all keen on the idea of a group of people who feel it is their mission in life to scrub all the blemishes off of their favorite skeptic celebrities, or worse, to slant articles to favor their preferred regressive skeptics.

For example, the “team” Gerbic’s son favored was “Team Radford” — there was quite a conflict within the movement over Radford’s contemptible behavior towards Karen Stollznow, and his lawsuit to silence her. He’s also been a denialist of the existence of the influence of stereotyping of the sexes, and a champion of the most trivial claims of evolutionary psychology.

But take a look at Radford’s wikipedia page. It’s huge. Every minor accomplishment is a triumph.

Did you know he “solved the mystery of the ‘Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost'”? He debunked the White Witch of Rose Hall! He’s also the world’s foremost expert on the Chupacabra. Yay. These feats of ‘brilliance’ are described at tedious length.

That he’s a serial harasser, that he once posted photos of himself in bed with a woman so he could leverage a lawsuit, that he pressured that woman to surrender and settle a suit in his favor by threatening to hound her through her pregnancy and labor, that he threatened to sue me unless I released evidence of a conspiracy (I did!), that he threatened to sue Rebecca Watson, that he belittles rape statistics, that thinks girls have a biological preference for pink, that he likes to bully four-year-old girls (and loses) — none of that is anywhere in his Wikipedia page. The guy is a toxic mess, but his wiki entry has been buffed to a high gloss.

That kind of willful blindness is one reason I am so over the skeptic movement.

It’s great that we have a dedicated group of watchmen keeping an eye on wikipedia to prevent supernatural crap from leaking in, but who watches the watchmen? They’ve got some strong biases, but they don’t have the discipline to prevent that from dribbling in.

Aron Ra vs. Kent Hovind, tonight

Tonight, at 7pm EST, Aron Ra is going to engage Kent Hovind on this YouTube channel.

I’ll probably tune in, but here’s a hint for future debates: tell me what the question is. This is two personalities clashing in public, and that’s all I know. Without a good sharp question, I know exactly what Hovind is going to do — it’s going to be a smarmy Gish Gallop with Hovind skittering all over the place, and Aron marching along behind, stomping out lies as fast as he can, and both will declare victory at the end.

It would also be good to have a forceful moderator who shuts down either side if they start drifting off topic…but if we don’t have a solid topic ahead of time, they won’t be able to do that.

The Ark Park and Creation “Museum” are raising their admission prices

They were overpriced to begin with, but they’re raising adult ticket prices by a few bucks anyway. That’s not what they emphasize, of course. They’ve got two marketing tactics.

One is that they’ve lowered prices a bit for young people…but at the same time, they’ve gotten rid of group discounts. I suspect it looks good on paper, but the busloads of kids from the nearby vacation bible school will probably be paying the same amount or more. Still, Quiverful Families will praise the Lord for this change.

The other tactic is laughable. They compare their prices to Disney World. Oh, sure, they’re comparable — in one, you enter a big wooden box which contains fake animals in more wooden boxes with Sunday School lessons on the walls, and in the other…well, does Disney World have papier mache models of dinosaurs, and do they sell postcards and plaques explaining that incest was OK in the Bible? No? Then no contest. And look, the lines are shorter at Answers in Genesis!

Disney’s parks and AiG’s attractions are, in a sense, competing for a family’s time for vacation, offering the best possible quality in all they and we do. However, you can spend many hours waiting in long lines for short rides at amusement parks. At our Ark and museum, however, you can easily spend a full day or two at each location, experiencing edu-tainment all day and rarely standing in a long line.

Watch this silly video of kids discovering that they get to go to Disneyland, and imagine replacing the words “Disneyland” with “AiG’s edu-tainment attractions”. I don’t think they’d get quite the same reaction.

They’d probably rather go to summer school.

A study in hiding truth behind a lie

Steven Pinker’s latest book — which I have no interest in ever reading, despite the fact that it’s getting reviewed all over the place — contains some interesting exercises in glossing over ugly truths.

You know, in everything I’ve ever read on the Tuskegee syphilis study — and there are lots of books and papers on the subject — no one ever suggested that the doctors infected the patients with syphilis. They didn’t need to. The truth was damned horrifying. The doctors in that study intentionally neglected to treat a treatable disease, allowing it to run its terrible course, just to see what would happen. They also failed to give the patients the information that would allow them to elect to go to a different doctor for treatment, because that would have defeated their purpose of watching spirochetes eat the brains of black people.

There is nothing forgivable in the facts of the story. Scientists watched human beings suffer and die to sate their sick curiosity and to get a few publications. It did not generate new knowledge, because we already had lots of information on the course of the disease. The information did not prevent harm to anyone, because we had an effective treatment already.

But hey, let’s put a happy spin on it! At least they didn’t intentionally infect anyone with the disease. There, it doesn’t sound as awful now, does it? It could have been so much worse! We can take this approach to everything. Sure, the US bombed villages in Viet Nam with napalm and Agent Orange and high explosives, but at least we didn’t nuke them. See how good and progressive we are? Oh, yeah, we may have prisoners held without due process in Gitmo, and we may have tortured them a little bit, but at least we didn’t infect them with syphilis or shoot them out of cannons or throw them into vats of acid. We could have, but because we didn’t, you need to respect our restraint and our growing humanity.