Marianne Williamson: dishonest and delusional

Gosh. Marianne Williamson replied to me and Orac on Twitter, to chide us for not reading her books.

It’s true. I haven’t read a whole book by Williamson, only excerpts, and they were enough to convince me she’s not a good candidate, despite her earnest, emotional appeal. Here, for example, is a Twitter thread full of specific examples from her books. They’re appalling.

Sickness is not a sign of God’s judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. If we were to think God created our sickness, how could we turn to Him for healing? That kind of baseless drivel is not worth reading in greater detail.

Or you could read Lindsay Beyerstein, who did that old-fashioned thing journalists used to do of deeply researching the history and philosophy of Williamson’s beliefs. It’s all very Christian Sciencey, and its roots can be traced back to Christian Science BS.

According to Williamson, not only is the real world an illusion, everything is an illusion, except love. God is love. We only think that we are separate from each other and separate from God – in reality, we are all one. All of our problems, including sickness, are illusory. If we could just get beyond the illusion of sickness, we wouldn’t be sick.

If sickness is all in our mind and our minds can be changed by miracles, you might assume that miracles can cure disease. “Sometimes a miracle is a change in material conditions, such as physical healing,” Williamson writes in “A Return to Love.” “At other times, it is a psychological or emotional change.” This is the bait-and-switch at the heart of Williamson’s teachings. Maybe you’ll get well, or maybe you’ll feel better about being sick, but either way, she’ll get your money.

It’s all your fault, you know. Everything. If only you’d love God, you’d be better.

At times, Williamson sounds very victim-blamey. She claims that over-identification with the physical body at the expense of the spirit places a “stress on the body that the body was not meant to carry – and that’s where sickness comes from.”

When asked whether people get cancer because of bad thoughts, Williamson is quick to say that it’s not necessarily because of their own bad thoughts. Maybe a child got cancer because of someone else’s bad thoughts, she suggests, in “A Return to Love,” arguing that perhaps some evil chemical company executive’s bad thoughts led him to poison the water supply. But that argument conflicts with her theology’s core contention: If the child’s cancer is real (and not just an illusion) and the poisoned water is the real cause, then her claim that only love is real can’t be true. Never mind that it was the chemical executive’s actions that caused the pollution, not his thoughts. Williamson claims that “disease is loveless thinking materialized,” noting that lovelessness can be collective, like racism, which does indeed harm people’s health and shorten their lives. But this doesn’t explain how children are born with diseases that have no environmental or social cause, such as cystic fibrosis.

She has a lot of excuses and is quick with denial, but she can only do that because her beliefs are so nebulous and flexible…but ultimately, they rely on the Christian notion that you are a sinner and you deserve every affliction you get.

Nope, not voting for her ever.

Doom befalls the University of Alaska

The governor has decreed a 40% cut in their budget, a devastating goal in itself. The university is trying to cope with this disaster by consolidating campuses and firing lots and lots of people. That isn’t going to save them. Look at what’s happening right now.

“It’s awful,” says Milligan-Myhre. “I had to turn away a student planning on starting in the fall because I just don’t know what the department or his degree would look like in a year or two.” She’s also encouraging her current students to graduate as soon as possible.

Imagine that you’re an Alaskan parent, planning to send a child off to college. Would you suggest the University of Alaska? No way. You’d have them send applications off to universities that are more likely to exist in four years, when they’d hope to graduate.

Imagine you’re a current student. You’d be planning to graduate as soon as possible, or to transfer elsewhere. Get out while you can, because the uncertainty is intolerable.

Enrollments are about to plummet, which is going to increase the financial hardship. 40% cuts is a torpedo below the waterline.

It’s not just teaching that is harmed, it’s the research side as well.

The budget cuts have already altered some researchers’ plans. Milligan-Myhre, who studies a native Alaskan fish called the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), has dropped out of a “once in a lifetime” ecological experiment. Dozens of researchers from across the globe plan to combine various stickleback populations in ten lakes that have previously been treated to kill all invasive fish. The idea is to track how differences in the lakes’ ecosystems influence a host of traits in the fish — from the composition of their gut microbiomes to characteristics of their brain tissue — over decades, revealing evolution in action.

Milligan-Myhre is using the time she would have spent on the experiment to hunt for work. “I just don’t have time to devote to this project because I’ve got to be writing my butt off the next few months,” she says. “I need to get as many papers out as I can to prep my CV for job applications, because I have no job security. [The university] can fire me with 60 days’ notice.”

That’s tough to explain to constituents because they’re just seeing an obscure little fish — it doesn’t even have commercial value — but sticklebacks are an important model system for studying evolution and development, because they are so common and diverse. Alaska is killing basic research for an undefined and self-destructive end.

The only solution is to recall the governor and about half the legislature. That’s almost impossible. The governor is making these cuts while promising to mail out large dividend checks to the general Alaskan population, so he’s basically buying support for the evisceration of Alaskan education and Alaskan health and human services.

Once again, Republicans are accusing Democrats of what they routinely do, draining the treasury to buy votes.

How to frustrate a mad scientist with two-headed dreams

I surprised myself with how much I had written about Sergio Canavero, the quack who wants to do a human head transplant. His technique is to chop the head off one body, and the body off one head, and fuse them together by slathering the stumps with ethylene glycol, a substance that dissolves cell membranes and encourages fusion. It won’t work. It can’t work. He’s been working with rats, getting improbable results that he spins into great triumphs, but no one believes him. The whole experiment is dangerous and unethical, and at best what he was going to end up with is a severed head perfused with blood from a disconnected heart. It was going to be a nightmare scenario for his patient/victim.

But he had a volunteer. A young man, Valery Spiridonov, with a serious genetic degenerative disorder that was going to gradually shut down his entire muscular system was willing to take a desperate gamble and undergo Canavero’s horrible procedure. It wasn’t going to help, only make his condition abruptly worse, but hey, he was going to take a risk for a miracle. But now something has changed, and he has withdrawn from the experiment. No, his disease wasn’t cured, and there’s still no hope for him.

Instead, Spiridonov found love.

In late 2017, Spiridonov married computer expert Anastasia Panfilova, and the couple now shares a 5-month-old son who doesn’t appear to have inherited the disease, he explained to Good Morning Britain.

“I cannot leave them without my attention, even for a few months,” he said of the time he would be away from his family if he were to go through with the operation.

Yes! Canavero was actively neglecting the human side of the equation, but Spiridonov went on living his life, despite a seriously disabling condition, and found someone he cared about and a new reason to persevere. He might be doomed, but in the face of inevitable decline he found something else to hope for.

That’s beautiful.

Now Canavero is going to have to find a new guinea pig. I hope he doesn’t.

All those scientists who defended Epstein? Go jump in a lake.

Yeah, you, Trivers and Krauss. I can’t believe you thought Epstein was a credible patron.

Now we find out he owns a $12 million ranch in New Mexico, and that he had grand plans for it.

The financier and suspected sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein told a number of scientists and confidantes he wanted to “seed the human race” with his DNA by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

He has been discussing the idea since the early 2000s at various dinners, conferences, and other gatherings, The Times reported, citing four sources familiar with his thinking. But there is no evidence he actually acted on the idea.

The idea was to impregnate 20 women at a time by inseminating them with his sperm, The New York Times reported, citing the author Jaron Lanier, who heard the account secondhand from a NASA scientist who told him about her conversation with Epstein.

We already knew he had a Creep Quotient that was pretty high, but now it’s just shot through the roof, and his estimation of the value of his DNA to the human species was repugnantly exaggerated. He must have heard that Alan Dershowitz was rivaling him for the title of King Creep, and this news had to come out to cement his position as the very worst.

I’d like to know if any of the scientists who took money from him were aware of his ludicrous plans, and if they did, why they didn’t back away from this person. Because he could offered me $10 million personally, told me about his freaky ideas, and I would have thrown the money back in his face and told him to never speak to me again.

What horrors lurk in the past of your sleepy little town?

Today’s blast from the past: I know Olalla! I’ve never been there, but I’ve passed by it and seen the signs.

Today the little town of Olalla, a ferry’s ride across Puget Sound from Seattle, is a mostly forgotten place, the handful of dilapidated buildings a testament to the hardscrabble farmers, loggers and fisherman who once tried to make a living among the blackberry vines and Douglas firs. But in the 1910s, Olalla was briefly on the front page of international newspapers for a murder trial the likes of which the region has never seen before or since.

I don’t know if there is a ferry to Olalla, though…it’s on the other side of Vashon Island, and I’ve only gone by it by looping south around the sound and up towards Bremerton. It’s a sleepy quiet place.

But oh yeah, there was a famous murder there? It was before my time, and I certainly never heard about anything exciting in Olalla.

…Hazzard attracted her fair share of patients. One was Daisey Maud Haglund, a Norwegian immigrant who died in 1908 after fasting for 50 days under Hazzard’s care. Haglund left behind a three-year-old son, Ivar, who would later go on to open the successful Seattle-based seafood restaurant chain that bears his name. But the best-remembered of Hazzard’s patients are a pair of British sisters named Claire and Dorothea (known as Dora) Williamson, the orphaned daughters of a well-to-do English army officer.

Wow, I’ve been to Ivar’s Acres of Clams, and I recall those frequent commercials on TV in my youth. His mother died? How?

It’s a shocking story. “Dr” Linda Hazzard was one of those quacks with a cure-all treatment for all kinds of ailments, and she had a “clinic” where her patients got a really cheaply implemented method: she starved them. No food but a thin vegetable broth, with enemas.

The institute’s countryside setting appealed to the sisters almost as much as the purported medical benefits of Hazzard’s regimen. They dreamed of horses grazing the fields, and vegetable broths made with produce fresh from nearby farms. But when the women reached Seattle in February 1911 after signing up for treatment, they were told the sanitarium in Olalla wasn’t quite ready. Instead, Hazzard set them up in apartment on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, where she began feeding them a broth made from canned tomatoes. A cup of it twice a day, and no more. They were given hours-long enemas in the bathtub, which was covered with canvas supports when the girls started to faint during their treatment.

By the time the Williamsons were transferred to the Hazzard home in Olalla two months later, they weighed about 70 pounds, according to one worried neighbor.

It was a very effective treatment. After the patient was thoroughly debilitated, Hazzard drained their bank accounts until they died. When the law caught up to her over the emaciated corpses of her victims, she was convicted of manslaughter and served a two year sentence, and later built a sanitarium in Olalla.

These kinds of nightmares can be found everywhere, I guess — it’s how Stephen King made a fortune, inventing bizarre histories for normal towns.

Nothing like that could have happened in Morris, Minnesota, could it?

Oh, right. I’m sitting next door to an old Indian school. Worse things probably occurred here than I can imagine.

LABORATORY INCIDENT!

One of my students dropped a petri dish full of newly emerged spiderlings at approximately 10:15am on 31 July 2019. Containment was breached. Occupants of the dish saw their opportunity and immediately began ballooning, rappelling down from the desktop, and generally making a concerted escape. The air was full of tiny baby spiders on invisible strands of silk wafting about; the authorities made an effort to retrieve the escapees, which mainly consisted of staring cross-eyed into the air and trying to snare balloon thread with paintbrushes and fingers. Many were recovered, but others remain at large.

After I was done laughing, I faced a dilemma. Do I report this to the biology safety officer? I err on the side of caution, and immediately explain the situation to the official in charge, who happens to be me.

Me: Scores of baby Parasteatoda tepidariorum have launched themselves into the air in a mad bid for freedom!

Safety officer: Are they harmless, cute, and adorable?

Me: Yes, very.

SO: Quick, release a bottle of fruit flies so the little rascals don’t go hungry!

Also, we captured some of the escapees into different petri dishes, which effectively reduces the population density of the newborns. Good way to redistribute the surplus population.

My colleagues are going to be wishing I went back to zebrafish. The occasional flood now looks benign.

The Republican party has always been the racist party

Not to claim the Democrats are flawless, but these newly released tapes of Ronald Reagan and Nixon are revealing. Also unsurprising.

“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said in newly unearthed tapes published by The Atlantic.

Nixon replied, “Yeah.”

And Reagan went on to say, “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”

In a subsequent conversation with Secretary of State William Rogers, Nixon echoed Reagan’s sentiments in his description of the African delegates: “Reagan called me last night, and I didn’t talk to him until this morning, but he is, of course, outraged. And I found out what outraged him, and I find this is typical of a lot of people: They saw it on television and, he said, ‘These cannibals jumping up and down and all that.’ And apparently it was a pretty grotesque picture.”

Jesus. Nixon was terrible. Reagan was terrible. I’m skipping over a few more Republican presidents, but Trump is terrible. That these people got elected also tells us that the electorate is terrible.

Hey! Skepticon is next week!

You can still make it, you just have to get yourself to St Louis, it’s free.

In addition to the fabulous named people on the Skepticon schedule, I’m going to be doing one of the workshops on Friday, at 1pm. That’s the only one I know so far, which is a shame, because all the others will be far more interesting, I’m sure. I’m planning to introduce attendees to cladistic terminology and have them build phylogenetic trees from some data…oh god, you’re already falling asleep. Then don’t come! There’ll be lots of fun and intellectually stimulating activities and talks going on! Go to the comedy show, or the dance!

I’ll just sit my lonely hotel room and think about evolution, very deeply. Or maybe I’ll go spider-hunting around the venue. Maybe I should do a spontaneous spider workshop, alone, outside, just for me — don’t be alarmed if you see a strange man lurking in the bushes outside your room.

Devious racists are experts at hiding

Angela Saini, whose book Superior: The Return of Race Science does an effective job trashing racist pseudoscience, has an article in Scientific American summarizing the problem. A lot of it has to do with the poisonous crap on the Internet.

As the media landscape flattens, drawing audiences away from traditional outlets to a plethora of online ones, those with outdated views have found themselves elevated from the lonely shadows into the light. They have moved on from letters in green ink and pulled up a seat alongside reputable writers and academics. The internet has opened the door to racists and sexists, and they have happily walked in. They’re trampling over our carpets with their grubby shoes even as we offer them a drink. They have normalized extremism, pseudoscience and crackpottery.

The blame can be spread widely. Social media corporations, such as Twitter and Facebook, have allowed racist networks to proliferate. Recent research from Western Sydney University, looking at a decade of cyber-racism, has shown that race-hate groups are sophisticated and creative in disseminating racist propaganda to their followers online. The Gab social network and the journal Psych seem to have been set up expressly to give these elements their own unfiltered space. Online magazines such as Breitbart, and the companies that advertise through them, are complicit in presenting a glossy front to bigotry. And then comes the second tier of publicity when, even if only in outrage and disbelief, this content is shared online. This, in turn, has infected mainstream political discourse, lowering the tone a little further every day.

This stuff has been around for ages — a hundred years ago it was in the form of eugenics, it morphed into The Pioneer Fund (established in 1937, a rather telling decade), in the 60s I was exposed to it via the John Birch Society and William Buckley, and we’re still battling it now. It’s just metastasized into a thousand little online outlets, all vying to put up a veneer of respectability over a dungheap of bad ideas.

I feel like Saini could have just said “Quillette!” in 144 point bold Impact font, it’s the same thing. They try desperately to pretend that they hold a legitimate scientific position, when they’re just the Daily Stormer with a facade to shield them from hate crime status.

Not at my university!

Yes at my university. Every college has this problem: a subset of students are privileged young men who have been fed a lie by the media, that college is a free-for-all where you get to lose your virginity and meet hot horny girls, and they act on that vision. Then they’re nestled in a domain where college administrators are struggling to keep enrollments up and keep politicians, who are mostly older men, content, and who don’t want the horrible nasty boy-children to make the front page, so they swaddle everything in a bureaucracy and do as little as possible.

They failed at the University of Minnesota, and not only did wretched serial rapist Daniel Drill-Mellum eventually get convicted, but his story got big attention from the news. After years of this jerk preying on women at fraternity parties (shut down all the fraternities, please), after being accused multiple times by multiple women and walking away, he finally got sent to prison for 6 years.

(Warning: Account of one of his rapes below the fold)

[Read more…]