Mandatory Halloween post

WARNING: The last couple of pictures may or may not be work-safe, depending upon how uptight your place of work is. (Obviously, however, this first one is perfectly unobjectionable, unless you somehow think that dogs in ghost costumes are somehow offensive.)


Happy Halloween, everyone. After the previous, more serious, Halloween post, I thought it'd be a good time for some lighter fare, some Trick or Treat...

First off, Fido has to get into the spirit of things:

Next, as part of the theme of the day, I thought I'd include some examples of Halloween costumes gone desperately wrong. For us humans, we begin with a rather interesting superhero:

Hmmm. I wonder if that's Greenwich Village. Could be. It would make sense.

Next up, we have a common Halloween costume that is totally wrong for this guy:

The King must be rolling over in his grave. The costume is also disturbingly too tight in the crotch.

Now we have one that may not be entirely work-safe, but I think that it's sufficiently over the top that it probably won't offend anyone except the very easily offended. (I think.) And, of course, men in drag have been a source of comedy at least since the days of the ancient Greeks, and hairy men playing retired Hooters girls? Comic gold!

And, finally, the most disturbing Halloween costume I have ever seen...

Hat tip to my wife, and her friends who sent her some of these pictures.

I think.

A truly offensive use of Halloween

Having been blogging for nearly a year now, one thing that's surprised me is the relative paucity of blogs relating to Holocaust denial. There are certainly many websites out there that push Holocaust denial, including CODOH, The Holocaust Historiography Project, Arthur Butz's website, The Institute for Historical Review, Carlos Porter's site, Michael A. Hoffman II's Campaign for Radical Truth in History, the Zundelsite, David Irving's site, and Fritz Berg's particularly odious Nazi Gassings site, among others. (Care should be taken before visiting some of these sites if you have a weak stomach, given that many of these sites mix anti-Semitism and white nationalist beliefs freely with their Holocaust denial, as expected. If you're at work and your company has filtering software installed, they are also likely to trigger the filters.)

But there were no Holocaust denial blogs, at least not as far as I could find--until now.

I became aware of my first actual Holocaust denial blog a few weeks ago. I had debated whether or not to write about it, mainly because I was reluctant to do anything that might raise its profile or increase its Technorati ranking by linking to it, but I think you'll see part of the reason why I decided to write about it and, in particular, why on Halloween. The blog in question is Bradley R. Smith's My Life as a Holocaust Revisionist and his other blog The Holocaust Story. The former is meant to be a more "personal" blog, while the latter is meant to discuss "serious news stories," whatever that means coming from Holocaust deniers. Smith happens to be the director of CODOH (the ironically named "Committee for the Open Debate of the Holocaust"), one of the principle purveyors of Holocaust denial literature in the U.S.

Here is the post that caught my eye:

Announcing the 2nd Annual David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge. The winner gets a $200 cash prize.

Pits of boiling human fat? Human soap? Giant "death by steaming" pressure cookers? Fountains of blood squirting from the earth?

Help us find new Holocaust stories you find macabre and ridiculous.

Included was a link to the contest page:

The winner will receive a $200 cash prize; second place will receive a $50 cash prize. Entries are to be judged on four factors:

1. Originality (search our site before entering),
2. The macabre nature of the tale,
3. Citation of the source(s) where the tale or claim has appeared, and
4. The use of the tale in official Holocaust histories. (Receive added points if your submission was used in a court of law.)

The contest deadline is Saturday, October 30, 2005. You may enter as many times as you wish, but there will be only one winning entry per person. Each contest entry is subject to verification. The winners will be announced on Sunday, October 31, 2005 (Halloween).

The prize is in honor of skeptic and founder of the Institute for Historical Review, David McCalden. All submissions become the property of the Holocaust Historiography Project, and may be published on this website.

Let's make David proud!

As it turns out, David McCalden was the founder of the Institute for Historical Review and noted for essays such as The Amazing, Rapidly Shrinking "Holocaust." He was also a purveyor of bogus "challenges," famously offering $50,000 for "proof" of the existence of Nazi homicidal gas chambers. A Holocaust survivor by the name of Mel Mermelstein accepted the challenge and the IHR reneged on the offer. Mermelstein went to court and won a $90,000 settlement, as the court concluded that he had met the terms of the challenge.

Apparently, making fun of stories from the Holocaust would apparently have made McCalden proud (he's been dead 15 years). McCalden, like many Holocaust deniers, liked to paint himself as a "skeptic," but in reality he was selective about his skepticism. Holocaust deniers love to search for dubious survivor stories to debunk. That such stories exist is not surprising, given the magnitude of the Holocaust, the number of people involved, and the trauma many of the survivors lived through. Given human nature, one would expect that some fraction of eyewitness testimony would be questionable or false. Given human nature, one also would expect that some survivors would have incomplete memories; that some might exaggerate some stories for attention or for whatever other reason; or that some would be mistaken about some events that occurred at the camps. Deniers love to debunk a few dubious witness' stories with great gusto and flourish, by implication claiming that a few examples of false or erroneous "eyewitness testimony" somehow "prove" that the Holocaust didn't happen or that it was of a much smaller magnitude than the commonly accepted history. Of course, they happily ignore the bulk of the overwhelming evidence, including (but not limited to) eyewitness testimony, the testimony and writings of the Nazis themselves, physical evidence, etc., showing that the Nazis did indeed conceive and impliment a genocidal plan to exterminate European Jewry and others they considered racial "undesirables."

Holocaust deniers also like to make a lot of hay over misconceptions that lay people might have about various specific aspects of the Holocaust and like to attack such misunderstandings with similar gusto, like cranks attacking a straw man. Bradley Smith also got my attention doing this, as he apparently noticed the same photoessay about Dachau by Pundit Guy that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. He makes a great point of attacking PunditGuy's photos of the gas chambers there:

First, the USHMM does leave visitors with the impression that there was a Nazi gas chamber at Dachau. For what it's worth, they appear to be trying to square the circle on this issue. Its website states: There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings. If they were more forthright, it would of course state that there is no credible evidince that there was a Nazi gas chamber at Dachau, as virtually no serious historian now maintains that there was such a construct at Dachau.

Second, PunditGuy has become so steeped in Holocaust "knowledge" from the media's daily pounding of the Holocaust drum that he no longer knows why he knows what he thinks he knows about the Holocaust, and turning to the high priests of the Holocaust myth is not the way to get straight information.

Ironically, this type of muddled thinking seems worse among the "elite" such as PunditGuy (my dictionary defines "pundit" as "an expert in a particular subject or field who is frequently called on to give opinions about it to the public"). If you ask the average person about Dachau or the Holocaust, you get pretty vague answers. Most persons just don't care. But self-appointed experts -- hey, they've seen Schindler's List! -- cling to Holocaust falsehoods as if they were life itself.

A word of explanation is in order here. Dachau was the oldest Nazi concentration camp, established mere weeks after Hitler became Chancellor. Unlike Treblinka, Belzec, or Sobibor, Dachau was not a death camp, although many were indeed killed there. Of course, Smith is incorrect about the existence of gas chambers at Dachau. There were indeed gas chambers designed for delousing clothing, but there were Harry Mazal has written a long essay in which he shows convincingly that there was indeed at least one gas chamber designed to kill humans, but that it is not clear whether it was ever actually used for that purpose. Smith tries to make a great to-do over whether or not Pundit Guy is sufficiently conversant in Holocaust history that he is aware of the debate over whether the gas chamber at Dachau was ever used to kill people in an effort to suggest some sort of "conspiracy" or propaganda. He does this even while pointing out that no less an entity dedicated to teaching the public about the Holocaust than the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum states flat out on its website that there is no credible evidence that the gas chambers were ever used to kill Jews!

Holocaust deniers use such obfuscations and rhetorical tricks because they don't have the evidence on their side. And, when their obfuscations won't fly, they reveal their true stripes, either by letting their anti-Semitism show or by using crude and tasteless mockery of the dead such as the "Halloween Holocaust tale challenge" Smith seems so pleased with himself about. No wonder Smith doesn't allow comments on his blog.

Spidey, say it ain't so!

Can it be?

Could Spidey have joined the dark side? Can he really be aligned with the forces of "intelligent design"?

Say it ain't so!

Maybe he needs to face The Evolver!

(Via RangelMD and Fark.com--click on images for larger versions)

Beyond giant microbes: How about the digestive system?

A couple of days ago, I mentioned a company that sells giant plush microbes. But that's not the only medical-related fluffiness you can get.

How about a knitted digestive tract, anyone?

I think it's particularly hilarious that the person labeling the picture felt compelled to label the finger pointing to the digestive tract...

(Via Boing Boing and Kevin, M.D.)

No Trek fan could have seen this coming...

...not!

The only question I have is: Why did George Takei wait so long to come out, given that he's 68 and has been with his partner for 18 years? Yes, there's still a lot of homophobia in this country, but the situation has gotten arguably much better than it was even a decade ago.

Here's a creepy Halloween story

In Delaware, I find a suitably macabre story for this Halloween season. An unfortunate 42-year-old woman committed suicide by hanging from a tree in full view of a moderately busy road. However, because of the upcoming holiday, no one paid any attention for at least three hours, because they thought her body was a Halloween decoration:

The 42-year-old woman used rope to hang herself across the street from some homes on a moderately busy road late Tuesday or early Wednesday, state police said.

The body, suspended about 15 feet above the ground, could be easily seen from passing vehicles.

State police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Oldham and neighbors said people noticed the body at breakfast time Wednesday but dismissed it as a holiday prank. Authorities were called to the scene more than three hours later.

"They thought it was a Halloween decoration," Fay Glanden, wife of Mayor William Glanden, told The (Wilmington) News Journal.

Egads, they must have some incredibly realistic-looking Halloween decorations in Frederica for such a mistake to make any sense. At least they figured it out before the corpse started to stink...

Hat tip to my sister for this one. (Yes, you can blame it on her...)

Orac the "humanist"?

You fit in with: Humanism Your ideals mostly resemble that of a Humanist. Although you do not have a lot of faith, you are devoted to making this world better, in the short time that you have to live. Humanists do not generally believe in an afterlife, and therefore, are committed to making the world a better place for themselves and future generations. 20% scientific. 80% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Orac would displeased. As the greatest computer the galaxy has ever known, being called "humanist" would be guaranteed to get on his bad side.

And what's with the "20%" science? I'm a friggin' scientist, fer cryin' out loud! Science and taking care of patients are how I make my living.

I have to conclude that this is a rather silly and frivolous test. But, because so many others seemed to be taking it, once again I couldn't resist...

Blogfather and blogchildren

A few days ago, The Commissar started making a family tree of the blogosphere, asking:

Bloggers, please leave a comment noting:

1. Your blogfather, or blogmother, as the case may be. Just one please - the one blog that, more than any other, inspired you to start blogging. Please don’t name Instapundit, unless you are on his blogchildren list. Usenet was my blogfather. My blog was a natural--excuse the term--evolution from my activities on alt.revisionism and misc.health.alternative on Usenet. I cannot name just one blog that, more than any other, inspired me to start blogging, although it was not long after I discovered the medical and science blogosphere that I decided I had to give it a try.
   
2. Don’t email me to tell me that you have no blogfather/mother. If that’s your view, that’s fine. But what I’m doing here is tracking intellectual heritage, or just strong influences. If the idea of blogging came to you fully-formed and no other blogger influenced you, I do not object. But I’m tracking lineages here. Sorry; I guess I just won't e-mail you then. However, strong influences early in my blogging included CodeBlueBlog (that is, before it went off the deep end with the Terri Schiavo case, anyway); Pharyngula (with regard to science and "intelligent design" creationism); the Cheerful Oncologist (patient stories, which I don't do nearly as much as I used to); The Millenium Project (debunking of quackery and pseudoscience); and The Examining Room of Dr. Charles (patient stories again). Of course, as you can see by browsing the early archives, I rapidly developed my own inimitable voice and finally gained blogosphere fame (if not fortune) in June after this infamous post. The reason it took such a short period of time is because I had already honed my voice on Usenet for 7-8 years before I started blogging.
   
3. Include your blog-birth-month, the month that you started blogging, if you can. December 11, 2004 at 3:06 PM EST, although my first substantive post was three hours later.
   
4. Identify your blog as Left, Right, or Other. Definitely Other, although leaning a bit right.
   
5. If you are reasonably certain that you have spawned any blog-children, mention them, too. I have no idea if I have spawned. However, now that I'm approaching my first anniversary, that means that the blog's rapidly approaching middle age; so I suppose it's possible. So, if anyone considers himself or herself one of my blogchildren, please let me know with an e-mail or a comment here.
   

This is as good a time as any to mention that it is very likely that sometime in the next month or two I will be changing blogging platforms. Those who have been around a while realize that I've said this intermittently over the last several months but have yet to actually do it. The main things holding me back are (1) laziness; (2) sheer inertia; and (3) the fact that I much prefer dedicating my limited blogging time to writing new content for this site rather than fiddling with the template (something that's probably painfully obvious from my continued use of this lame generic Blogger template and the fact that I haven't updated my "Essential Orac" sidebar in at least two months). #3 is mainly because I'm almost HTML illiterate. However, Blogger's limitations are finally starting to grate on me enough that they may finally overcome all these impediments, and I tend to look at my upcoming blog anniversary as a deadline of sorts to get off my behind and make some major changes around here, even if it means taking some days off here and there from writing fresh material over the next month and a half.

If I do make such a major change, though, I want to do it right. The theme for any future new template for this blog obviously has to be Blakes 7-inspired, given the 'nym I choose to use. Aside from that, any feedback is, as always (well, usually anyway, depending upon the level of hostility) appreciated.

"Filling up the darkest places"

Via Ahistoricality, I've come across a rather disturbing story:

A poem which praises the murder of Jews by the Nazis has been included in a book of children’s poetry to be distributed amongst schools in the UK.

The publication, entitled Great Minds, features the work of school children aged 11 to 18 who won a nationwide literary competition.

But one poem has generated outrage amongst Jewish groups, politicians and Holocaust charities for its anti-Semitic content.

The entry by the 14-year-old Gideon Taylor is apparently written from the viewpoint of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

It includes the lines "Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere, filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces."

Another part reads: "Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their manger… I'll be happy Jews have died."

The poem was one of the winners of a writing competition known as Great Minds run through the Young Writers website, with the authors and schools of winning entries awarded cash prizes. The editor defended the selection thusly:

Young Writers editor Steve Twelvetree, who also edited the book, said the poem was included as it illustrated how the writer was able to empathise with the infamous Nazi Fuehrer.

Twelvetree told the Telegraph: "From Gideon's poem and my knowledge of the National Curriculum Key Stage 3 his poem shows a good use of technical writing and he has written his poem from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.”

The editor continued: "Key Stage 3 history requires pupils to show knowledge and understanding of events and places - to show historical interpretation and to explain significance of events, people and places, all of which World War II and the Holocaust is part of.

"The poem clearly states 'I am Adolf Hitler' and it recounts a historical fact, something Young Writers and Forward Press are not willing to censor."

I'm afraid the editor is erecting a bit of a straw man here. No one is asking him to "censor" anything. They are, however, questioning Forward Press's judgment in including such an inflammatory poem in a book of creative writing by children that will be distributed to schools. Publishers make editorial decisions about what is appropriate to include in textbooks all the time and often leave out material that is controversial. (Clearly, the publisher realized that this would cause controversy, as this particular poem was the only piece of writing for which the school was not listed, although the student's name was included.) What made them decide in this particular case that including something that would clearly anger a lot of people?

I'm a bit of two minds on this one and not quite as disapproving as Ahistoricality. On the one hand, I can sort of see the value of an exercise in which a student writes a poem from Hitler's perspective, if perhaps it was a high school junior or senior level or college level class at least. For such young students, however, it might run the risk of having the student empathize a little too much with Hitler's point of view. It could work, however. A far better exercise to try to examine Hitler's motivation would be to require the reading of Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, which looks at various interpretations of Hitler's motivations or how he became so evil, ranging from his truly believing that he was doing good, serving his people, and doing Europe a great favor by ridding it of Jews to a cynical schemer whose anti-Semitism was more opportunistic. (I have a hard time believing the latter, though. Only a true believer would divert troops and resources to keep the trains to Auschwitz running on time and the gas chambers operating, instead of using all those resources to try to stop the advancing Red Army.) The book also examines (and largely debunks) other proposed explanations, such as the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry that he was ashamed of (making him, I guess, the ultimate "self-hating Jew") and the "one ball" theory. It provides a fascinating look at what might have been Hitler's motivations and, in doing so, provides an equally fascinating portrait of how historians' and people's views of Hitler's motivations and how they look at Hitler have changed over the decades.

On the other hand, I really can't see including the results of such an exercise in a book of children's poetry to be distributed to schools, and the publisher deserves a lot of the heat it is getting. As Ahistoricality pointed out, the poem included seems to be "doggerel displaying the shallowest genocidal paranoia." However, even so, I do not think the poem should be censored, as at least one of the publisher's critics seems to be arguing that it should, stating: "It's an incitement to racial hatred." In many European countries, including the U.K., "incitements to racial hatred" are illegal, subject to penalties, which implies that the person quoted wants the book censored.

Personally, I consider such censorship of alleged "hate speech" to be misguided. After all, do you want the government deciding what is and is not "hate speech"? That's yet another reason that I'm glad that we have the First Amendment to make such misguided tendencies to censor offensive speech far more difficult.

How to succeed at quackery, part 2

Prometheus has, after a long delay, finally posted part 2 of his advice for budding quacks everywhere. In this case, he explains how to exploit your niche. For me as a physician, perhaps the most relevant piece of advice is here, given how HMOs have taken financial control of most medical practices:

Whatever you do, do not make the mistake that many chiropractors are making - do not try to get your services covered by insurance plans. This is the kiss of death for "alternative" practitioners. Although getting covered by health insurance plans may yield a better cash flow for the marginal "alternative" practitioner, it is a disaster in the long run.

Just look what insurance coverage did to the "real" doctors . The ones who were getting paid in chickens (when they got paid at all) did better, but the profession as a whole ended up saddled with endless paperwork and red tape. Eventually, the insurance companies ended up telling the doctors how much they would get paid for everything they did. Makes getting paid in chickens and corn look good by comparison.

Bottom line: even if you could do it - stay away from insurance companies (this includes the biggest insurer of them all - the Government). You don't need that kind of scrutiny and you surely can do without the paperwork. After all, if you wanted to fill out forms, you would have become an accountant.

If any of your "clients" ask why you don't accept insurance, there are a number of good answers you can give:

[1] "The insurance companies are a part of the conspiracy to keep people sick - I'm trying to keep people well."

[2] "My therapies are too much on the cutting edge - insurance companies still call them 'experimental'"

[3] "Insurance company policies are too regimented - I treat my patients as individuals."

Or you can think up something that fits your particular style of business.

Indeed. Insurance companies, whether you agree with them on the specific criteria they choose to evaluate what they will pay for or not, do tend to have this nasty (for quacks, anyway) tendency to require some evidence of efficacy before they will pay for a treatment, all from a desire to minimize cost and maximize profits. On the other hand, the chiropracters' desire may not be that misguided for two reasons. First, if enough patients want it, insurance companies will often pay for a treatment, even if evidence from well-designed clinical trials for its efficacy is lacking, such as vertebroplasty or, back in the 1990's, bone marrow transplantation for more advanced breast cancer. Insurance companies will sometimes do this to prevent the loss of subscribers unhappy that they won't pay for such treatments. Second, having insurance companies reimburse you for services cloaks you with the mantle of "respectability," of being part of mainstream medicine. This is invaluable, even if it does bring with it the headaches of paperwork, the insurance company dictating how much it will pay for what procedure, etc.

Finally, of course, Prometheus insists that you emphasize these three points:

[1] All the doctors they have seen in the past were incompetent (they may have already told you this) [Orac's note: I'm not sure I like this one...]

[2] You know exactly what is wrong with them - and it's not due to anything they did, like smoking or overeating. Blaming the government or large multinational corporations can be useful at this juncture. [Orac's note: This one is absolutely key. Quacks have to convince their marks that they are somehow "poisoned" and that it is not their fault. Blaming mercury in vaccines or from amalgams is a good example of this ploy. Using various "liver flushes" and enemas are other examples of treatments based on ridding the body of undefined "toxins."]

[3] You are the only person (or one of a select few) who can cure them (or at least return them to health and the need for a life-long maintenance program).

Prometheus' article is well worth checking out.

The Twentieth Meeting of the Skeptics Circle

The Twentieth Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has been posted at The Uncredible Hallq. Take a break from the usual credulity of the blogosphere to appreciate bloggers who are trying to apply critical thinking and science to claims that desperately cry out for such treatment. Chris has done a fine job of lining up a variety of skeptical professors to teach at the College of Skepticism, all for your edification and education. Enjoy.

Next up on November 10 is Pooflingers Anonymous, another up-and-coming skeptical blog. I just hope that Matt has recovered from the epic task he took upon himself and recently completed. The task? Sitting through and then debunking 12--count 'em, 12!--Kent Hovind videotapes about evolution, a task he calls The Hovind Files: Lying for Jesus. Such concentrated exposure to such an enormous amount of antiscientific creationist twaddle can tax even the most dedicated skeptic. On the other hand, Matt sure made a name for himself.

I have to give Matt a lot of credit, though. Having tried to listen to the InfidelGuy's interview with Kent Hovind (iTunes required), I realize just how big a bullet Matt took for the team, skeptically speaking. That was a .44 Magnum slug! I couldn't get through more than about 15 minutes of Hovind's blathering and asking if you "came from a rock" or "came from a monkey" before I couldn't stand it anymore and had to turn it off in order to preserve what little remains of my sanity. I could feel my neurons dying after just a brief exposure. Personally, if I'm going to kill off any of the neurons in my brain, I'd rather do it in a pleasurable fashion, perhaps by drinking some good beer, rather than listening to someone like Hovind. Matt must be made of sterner (or crazier) stuff.

Finally, as always, I'm looking for hosts. If you think you'd like to host a Skeptics' Circle, drop me a line at oracknows@gmail.com. The schedule and guidelines are here and here.

Give the gift of microbes!

Sorry, but I didn't have time to write anything that substantive last night (no smart-ass comments about whether anything I ever write qualifies as "substantive"). Maybe Friday. There's something Halloween-related that I've been meaning to write about, and time's running out. In the meantime, I did find something rather amusing.

It's way too early to be thinking of Christmas. Heck, it's not even Halloween yet. Nonetheless, I may have found the perfect gift for that tough-to-buy-for person.

GIANT microbes! Says the company:

We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes - only a million times actual size!

Indeed they do, and they're pretty cool. All the nasty suspects are here.

Syphilis? Check. Rhinovirus (the common cold)? Check. Plague? Check. Epstein-Barr virus? Check. E. coli? Check. (Hmmm. E. coli looks a bit like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

I almost think I might want one...

The (other) Sox are champions

As hard as it is to believe, after 88 years, the White Sox are champions again! Too bad I'm not still in Chicago; the city must be going nuts.

What's next? Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies? Rivers and seas boiling? Forty years of darkness? Earthquakes, volcanoes? The dead rising from the grave? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria?

No, those things would only happen if the Cubs ever win.

I keep saying it: 2008. That's the Cubs' year. They have to suffer at least a century of futility. With only three years to go, why not go for it?

In the meantime, next year is reserved for the Indians. After all, they did give the Sox a scare during the last couple of months of the season, cutting their lead in the AL Central from 15 games to 1½ games.

Entrance into the hall of science

Via the Sarkar Lab Weblog:

Just what your water needs: More electrons!

As a skeptic, sometimes I'm just left shaking my head and muttering about some things that I come across. I sometimes wonder why I bother. Sometimes, I come across a scam that shows such an utter contempt for people's intelligence that it completely amazes me that anyone falls for it.

But fall for it they do.

A perfect example of this is something that a reader named Matt e-mailed me a while ago about a man named John Ellis. I had never heard of this guy before, but when I visited John Ellis' website, where he was selling something he calls the Crystal Clear Electron Water/Air Machine, it was like entering an alternate dimension, where the regular rules about logic, science, medicine, and physical lawas don't apply (at least not to his claims). You'll see why when you see the very first claim that greets a reader upon hitting his website:

If you change the properties, amazing things will happen!

Even as a senior citizen, I am stronger now than when I ranked #1 in the world in the discus because of my patented discovery!

What, pray tell, is responsible for this old geezer's fantastic health? Glad you asked! Just click on the button:

Worldwide patents show John Ellis' home WATER MACHINE is the first to permanently change water properties (they can be identified 100 years from now) with results that medical doctors can verify...

Wow, I think. What "can be identified 100 years from now"? I'm guessing he means water properties, but it's not always entirely clear. Then, particularly relevant to my specialty, Ellis makes this claim:

Fifty years ago the hydrogen bond angle in water was 108° and you rarely heard of anyone with cancer. Today, it's only 104° and, as a result, cancer is an epidemic!! By using our machine you can increase the bond angle to 114° and, unlike any other water, doctors can see an immediate change in the red blood cells under a microscope! It's truly amazing!!

Odd that they never taught me this back when I was a chemistry major or when I was taking graduate level biochemistry courses. Also odd that they never taught me in medical school that you "rarely heard of cancer" 50 years ago. One would think that such an important observation of a change in the basic chemical structure of such an important molecule as water (specifically, that the bond angle of water used to be 108° but is now only 104.5°) would be an area of intense research interest among chemists. One would also think that scientists would be intensely interested if it somehow had something to do with the etiology of cancer. Never mind that Ellis never explains what on earth the bond angle of water would have to do with cancer. And, of course, Ellis never demonstrates that you can increase the bond angle to 114°, nor does he explain why one would even want to do so. I guess you just have to enter Ellis's reality warp field to understand. Either that, or perhaps Evil Conventional Medicine™ and Big Pharma™ have, as usual, conspired to cover it up. (As an aside, if you want to know the real structure of water, in fact, more about water and its bond lengths and angles than most people would ever care to know, you can check here.)

But, blazing pathfinder that he is, eager to claim the mantle of Galileo, changing the bond angle of water isn't enough for Ellis. He claims that he "adds electrons to water." Why? Well, here's his explanation:

Ordinary distilled is the worst because KEEPING WATER AT THE BOILING POINT FOR HOURS DRIVES OFF ELECTRONS NEEDED TO LIVE... it’s biologically dead, nothing will grow, fish die... it’s NOT “distilled like in nature” and yet people drink this water?? To get around the boiling problem, we boil for ONLY SECONDS (expand) and then cool about 80 degrees (contract), repeating several times a minute, GAINING ENERGY WHILE DUPLICATING NATURE’S PROCESS!!

And:

ANY LAB will tell you, many other health promoting activities can't work without the ELECTRONS found in CHARGED WATER because OXYGEN levels have dropped to as low as 8%, in today's water molecules, they are SMALLER and CAN'T HOLD the additional donor ELECTRONS (from OXYGEN) needed to make them work!! As a result, VIRUSES and BACTERIA are mutating out of control... CAUSING almost ANY problem you can name!

Even better, on the very same page, he includes a picture, with the caption: "The above picture is a close up view of one ice cube that grew up 2 1/2 inches out of the ice tray. This is proof that electrons are present."

Bwahahahahahaha.

That's all very nice (if a pile of B.S.), but what does this have to do with all the supposed health benefits Ellis touts for water treated with his machine?

Nothing.

Ellis brags on his website about having actual U.S. Patents on his machine. He even lists the numbers, 4,612,090 ("Water degasification and distillation apparatus"), 5,203,970 ("Method for water degasification and distillation"), and 6,409,888 ("Method and apparatus for water degasification and distillation"). So I looked the patents up, and you can too just by clicking on the handy links I provided. Basically, his device appears to be a water purification and distillation unit. Not surprisingly, nowhere in the patent applications does he claim that his device "adds electrons" to water or that it changes the bond angle of water. If Ellis had made such claims, the stodgy investigators at the Patent Office would surely have expected him to provide some actual scientific evidence that his device does indeed do what he claims it does before granting a U. S. Patent. Not surprisingly, Ellis made no such claims in his application. Sadly, all the device appears to do is to produce distilled water. That's it. Certainly Ellis provides no evidence that his device in his applications (or on his website) in any way permanently changes the structure of water. (Perhaps any engineers out there who have more knowledge than me can comment about whether Ellis' machine is even a decent water purifier.) Ellis does, predictably, provide a bunch of testimonials, however.

A retired chemist named Stephen Lower has analyzed Ellis' claims in detail. Not surprisingly, he has concluded that Ellis is pushing pseudoscientific nonsense. (He also has a very nice website devoted to debunking water cluster quackery and--as he puts it--"aquascams.") But even more damning still, I think, is the condemnation Ellis has received on that most credulous of credulous altie sites (with the possible exception of Whale.to), where skepticism about alternative medicine is usually ruthlessly censored, CureZone, where he has been lambasted as a fraud and the messages haven't been censored, as criticisms of alternative medicine usually are:

John Ellis has company called Crystal Clear; they claim to make a water machine that produces energized distilled water. Its $1700 bucks. Beware of this product. No support for the product after you plunk down your money. He is a fast talker and great at selling his $1700 machine. It DOES NOT work!!! He is an asshole when you try and explain your situation and ask for your money back. He had all the time in the world to sit on the phone and sell it to us, but was too busy to settle our problem and hung up on us. The machine may make distilled water, but if you are going to get it to put in your pool or spa, don't bother. Your pool and spa will turn green. They told us we would NEVER have to put chemicals in either ever again. This turned out to be a total lie, and we got many different stories each time we called for assistance.

Of course, this person and most of the others piling on don't question the central premise behind Ellis' machine, that "energizing" water with electrons can somehow suddenly endow it with all sorts of beneficial abilities to improve health when that "energized water" is consumed. (Perhaps that's why the message wasn't censored; it wasn't questioning the health benefits of "energized" water, only whether Ellis' machine could make such water.) They're merely upset that Ellis' machine doesn't seem to do anything other than distill and purify water and that the water didn't somehow become magically resistant to algae. Well, what did they expect? That's all the patents say the device can do!

I guess what most irritates me about people like John Ellis is how low an opinion of the intelligence of the consumer they appear to have, to use such transparently pseudoscientific rubbish to sell an overpriced water purification machine. On the other hand, given the gullibility of some of his customers, it's not too hard to understand why he might have developed such contempt for them:

I beg to differ!! I got very good results from my living water machine. I talked to John Ellis about the theory behind his machine and found him engaging and informative. He's out to make a buck like most people, but he does seem to have a big part of the truth in his process that inspired me to investigate further and learn more. Although I only spoke to him over the phone, I don't feel as though he deserves the criticism leveled against him in this forum.

No wonder people like Ellis continue to make lots of money selling these sorts of devices based on ridiculously obvious pseudoscientific claims. People like "dr h2o" above guarantee it.

The horror, the horror!

The Onion's been on a roll lately, with its revelation about how unprepared Pittsburgh is for a zombie attack, and the Department of Homeland Security's plan for Halloween. This time, it sums up perfectly the attitude among too many, particularly advocates of "intelligent design."

The history of polio, told as a cartoon

Here's a history of polio, Polio: A Virus's Struggle, that is both informative and entertaining...

(Via Boing Boing)

Time for the Sox to finish the Astros off...

In an exciting game Sunday night, the White Sox pulled out their second victory over the Astros, 7-6. The whole town has caught White Sox fever (well, except for the Cubs fans). Indeed, even the famous Picasso statue at the Daley Center has gotten into the act.

Tonight the series resumes in Houston. Although I would have liked it better if the Detroit Tigers or the Cleveland Indians had made it this far, having lived in Chicago in the late 1990's, I can't help but root for the Sox to take it all this year. Not having grown up in Chicago, when I lived there, I never felt the need to take sides in the Cubs/Sox rivalry. I can therefore root for both, although I must admit to a tendency to have leaned towards the Cubs more (that was probably because I lived only two "el" stops south of Wrigley Field on the Red Line). It also probably didn't help that I had just moved from Cleveland after having lived there for 8 years and was having trouble moving my allegiance from the Tribe.

In any case, I'll be watching tonight, assuming I get home in time...

Speaking of the hapless Cubbies, they need to be next up, although I think it would be most appropriate if they waited until 2008 to take the World Series. Think of it: A century of futility broken by triumph!

This is reassuring

As a Battlestar Galactica addict, I had to take this quiz:

You scored as Capt. Lee Adama (Apollo). You have spent your life trying to life up to and impress your Dad, shame he never seemed to notice. You are a stickler for the rules. But in matters of loyalty and honour you know when they have to be broken. Capt. Lee Adama (Apollo) 81% Dr Gaius Baltar 56% CPO Galen Tyrol 50% President Laura Roslin 50% Lt. Kara Thrace (Starbuck) 50% Commander William Adama 44% Tom Zarek 38% Col. Saul Tigh 38% Number 6 31% Lt. Sharon Valerii (Boomer) 19% What New Battlestar Galactica character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Funny, I thought I might be Gaius Baltar, but, then, I guess I don't have tall, supermodel-quality blonde Cylons popping into my consciousness when it's most inconvenient. It's probably better this way. Lee may be a bit dull and nowhere near as brilliant as Baltar, but at least he's a stand-up kind of a guy, rather than a completely amoral, schemer who can't be trusted.

Whom to sue?

Heh. (I know, I'm stealing blatantly from Instapundit, but, then, don't many bloggers at one time or another?)

Now that the MMR has been cleared of having anything to do with causing autism, Nick Cohen is wondering whom he can sue (scroll to the last section) for the extra expense all those parents took to take individual vaccinations, rather than the combined MMR:

Last week's news that the MMR vaccine has nothing to do with autism is testing my self-restraint.

Ever since Andrew Wakefield published his Lancet paper in 1998, parents have been in a dreadful position. Even those of us who guessed that a large section of the supposedly adult population of the country was in the grip of a raving panic, couldn't help asking: what if Wakefield is right?

On the remote chance that he was, we paid for courses of single jabs - at £140-a-go in my case. Now it turns out the Department of Health was telling the truth all along, I'm wondering who I can sue to get my money back.

Obviously, there's Wakefield, but I doubt if he could afford to meet the damages from a class action on behalf of hundreds of thousands of parents.

The editor of the Lancet is a more tempting target. Wakefield's original research was based on a sample of just 12 children, which was too small to be meaningful, as the Lancet ought to have known. Medical journals are not the richest of institutions, however, and it would probably take only a couple of thousand single jab bills to close the Lancet down.

By contrast, the Daily Mail and Private Eye, which fed the passing frenzy with all kinds of mumbo jumbo, are loaded. I had a very pleasant lunch at the Eye recently, so I'd say we're quits. That is no reason why you shouldn't copy your bills to Ian Hislop, its editor, or Paul Dacre, the editor of the Mail, and demand prompt payment or a free lunch of your own.

I think I'll sue Channel 5 which in 2003 showed one of the most shamelessly propagandistic dramas to appear on British television. Hear the Silence took it as read that MMR caused autism and that Big Government and Big Pharma were conspiring to hide the truth.

I wonder if anyone will be able to sue RFK, Jr. Boyd Haley, or the Geiers when (as is most likely) epidemiological evidence finally conclusively shows that thimerosol in infant vaccines doesn't cause autism either. After all, the Geiers make a lot of their money representing parents in front of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Board or wanting to sue vaccine manufacturers. Turnabout would be fair play. Unfortunately, it would probably be too difficult to be practical to demonstrate specific damages for generating a general anti-vaccination hysteria based on dubious science and selective data mining.

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 5

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 5 has been posted at Hospital Impact.

RINO Sightings

This week's RINO Sightings has been posted for your edification.

"Alternative" nutrition takes the life of a baby

I don't have a problem with vegans, although I tend to view veganism as more cultish than anything else. Certainly it's possible for an adult to remain reasonably healthy on a strictly vegan diet, but it's difficult (and, for me, it would be quite unsatisfying). Other than for strictly religious or moral reasons, I could never understand why vegans will not eat dairy products, which will more easily supply certain needed proteins and fats, or even eggs, which, because they are unfertilized, are not the same as killing animals for food. However, live and let live, I usually say. The only people harmed or helped by vegan diets are those who follow them. Given that, such diets are usually personal choices and none of my business. (If only vegans considered my choice to include meats and seafood in my diet in similar terms.)

My understanding and tolerance end, however, when such diets are imposed on children, whose nutritional needs are different from those of adults. For these and other personal reasons (people who know me will know what those reasons are), stories like this just burn me up. It tells the tale of Woyah Andressohn, a 6-month old who died of starvation because the parents were raw food vegans who insisted on subjecting their children to their nutritional choices:

MIAMI (Court TV) — A 6-month-old infant seemed more like a newborn when paramedics found her gasping for air on the floor of her parents' home, an emergency responder testified Tuesday in the manslaughter trial of the child's parents.

Paramedic Fernando Castano told jurors in the case against Joseph and Lamoy Andressohn that he mistook their 7-pound, 22-inch child for a newborn as he attempted to revive her.

Woyah died about 45 minutes later from what a medical examiner later diagnosed as "accidental malnutrition," according to Castano.

By their own admission to police, the couple kept their five children on a strict diet of uncooked organic foods and juices made from wheatgrass, almonds and coconuts.

During a lunch break in Miami-Dade Criminal Court, the couple snacked on nuts and grains wrapped in leaves of kale, with an apple on the side.

The couple faces 50 years in prison on manslaughter and child endangerment charges if convicted.

Also:

The Andressohns are also standing trial on counts related to Woyah's four older siblings, who, like her, were found to be smaller than 99 percent of other children their ages, Walker said.

According to other reports, the parents also administered enemas to their children on a regular basis and would whip the older children if they ate the wrong foods. Moreover, they apparently ignored obvious signs of malnutrition. This baby was half the weight she should have been and, according to the paramedics who responded to the call when she was unresponsive, Woyah was "rail thin" with a distended belly, looking "like something you might see in a National Geographic magazine, in an African country or a Third World country." Any pediatrician who saw the child would have instantly recognized that something was seriously wrong.

I truly can't understand something like this. Leaving aside the question of whether it's possible to raise a healthy child on a vegan diet (many vegans will claim it is), there's an obvious answer for vegan parents who want to raise their children as vegans in the first year of life: breast milk! It's the perfect food for human infants, providing all the nutrition a child needs, as well as immunoglobulins that aid the child in fighting off disease. It's the best diet for the first several months of life, bar none, and then can be used to supplement the baby's diet as solid foods are slowly added. Why on earth couldn't Woyah have been fed with breast milk, if the parents objected to dairy or meat products? Indeed, pro-vegan websites advocate this very strategy, and, once the child is eating solid food, to supplement with breast milk for as long as feasible and to provide various oils in the diet to make up for the lack of fats in a vegan diet. And, if the mother can't produce enough milk, there are soy-based formulas that can be used. As some vegans who have commented on the issue have said, to stay healthy eating a raw food vegan diet requires that you really know what you're doing, particularly with children. It is apparent that the Andressohns did not. It also requires that the child be monitored closely by a pediatrician to make sure that the child is appropriately gaining weight.

People like the Andressohns seem to think that this sort of uncooked vegan diet is somehow more "natural," but in reality it probably is not. Humans are and have been omnivores for a very long time, and the earliest humans were hunter-gatherers, who lived by scavenging dead animals, hunting, and gathering fruits and vegetables. We have evolved over millions of years to get a certain proportion of our calories from meat, a high energy, high protein source of food (exactly what proportion is a subject of debate, of course). Also, raw vegan diets require quite a bit of First World sanitation to be healthy. In the absence of such sanitation and very clean conditions, they can be a vector for food-borne illnesses. That does not mean a vegan diet is not healthy, but it is probably not any more "natural" than a mixture of meat, fruits, and vegetables, the claims of its adherents notwithstanding.

Not surprisingly, the parents are crying persecution and oppression. The defense is also claiming that the child in actuality died of DiGeorge Syndrome, not starvation, based on the finding of no thymus during the autopsy. While I do not dismiss the possibility that this child had DiGeorge Syndrome, the claim sounds unconvincing because the child did not have the other abnormalities that go along with the syndrome, such as congenital heart defects (such as Tetralogy of Fallot or ventricular septal defect), cleft palate, or facial abnormalities. Also, the pathology report demonstrated the presence of T cells, meaning a thymus must have been present, and prosecutors have pointed out that malnutrition can cause the thymus to shrink greatly. In any case, whether or not the defense has a point can be easily shown by a simple genetic test. If Woyah in fact had DiGeorge Syndrome, a simple fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) should detect the characteristic microdeletion of chromosome 22 (specifically, del 22q11.2). If the deletion is not there, the child did not have DiGeorge Syndrome. Even if the child did have DiGeorge Syndrome, that would not get the parents off the hook, because this syndrome is not associated with malnutrition and the child would not have been "doomed from birth," as Ellis Rubin, a lawyer for Lamoy Andressohn has claimed.

Also countering this claim of "persecution" is the rather interesting fact that Miami-Dade County Assistant State Prosecutor Herbert Walker is himself a raw food vegan, who is not buying this defense: "A growing child such as baby Woyah needs nutrients to grow. At the end of her life, and a painful life it was, the child had practically lost all her subcutaneous fat and her body was going through auto-cannibalism because she was not getting enough nutrients." He continued: "The question is, did the parents provide the care necessary for the well-being of their five children?"

I think the answer is obvious.

Please excuse my while I vomit...

Via an e-mail list I belong to, yesterday I learned of Prussian Blue, a duo of pretty 13-year old blonde twins named Lynx and Lamb who like to sing songs like Aryan Man Awake and Sacrifice (a tribute to Rudolf Hess) They're from Bakersfield, CA and have become darlings of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi circuit:

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. "They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening," said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins' father. "I'm going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would."

April home-schools the girls, teaching them her own unique perspective on everything from current to historical events. In addition, April's father surrounds the family with symbols of his beliefs — specifically the Nazi swastika. It appears on his belt buckle, on the side of his pick-up truck and he's even registered it as his cattle brand with the Bureau of Livestock Identification.

"Because it's provocative," explains April of the cattle brand, "to him he thinks it's important as a symbol of freedom of speech that he can use it as his cattle brand."

Sounds like their father is guilty of child abuse to me. One also has to wonder whether he's dropped one of those cattle brands on his head. (The Nazi Swastika, a symbol of freedom?) But, worse, the twins' popularity is growing, such that David Duke uses them to draw a crowd, and their music is being used as propaganda, with the hope that, as young fans mature, they are drawn to harder stuff:

Since they began singing, the girls have become such a force in the white nationalist movement, that David Duke — the former presidential candidate, one-time Ku-Klux-Klan grand wizard and outspoken white supremacist — uses the twins to draw a crowd.

Prussian Blue supporter Erich Gliebe, operator of one of the nation's most notorious hate music labels, Resistance Records, hopes younger performers like Lynx and Lamb will help expand the base of the White Nationalist cause.

"Eleven and 12 years old," he said, "I think that's the perfect age to start grooming kids and instill in them a strong racial identity."

Gliebe, who targets young, mainstream white rockers at music festivals like this past summer's "Ozzfest," says he uses music to get his message out.

But with names like Blue-Eyed Devils and Angry Aryans, these tunes are far more extreme than the ones sung by Lamb and Lynx.

Get a load of the lyrics to one of their songs, Aryan Man Awake:

When the man who plows the fields is driven from his lands.
When the carpenter must give away what he's built with his own hands.
When a mother's only children belong to her no more.
And black masked men with guns come bashing down the doors.
Where freedom exists for only those with darker skin.
Where lies and propaganda will never let you win.
Where symbols of your heritage are held with such contempt
And benefits of country 'cept tax are you exempt.

Aryan man awake
How much more will you take?
Turn that fear to hate
Aryan man awake.

All one can hope is that, as they get further into their teen years, they rebel a bit against their parents (as so many teenagers do) and renounce this sort of disgusting racist spew.

You know, I need to get back to medblogging and science blogging next week. This sort of stuff raises my blood pressure too much.

Orac survives

Halloween's coming up; and I thought a little holiday-themed post would do nicely. Perhaps a couple of more will appear in the next week or so, depending upon my mood...

In any case, I find my score results reassuring, should the world ever be overrun by zombies:

Official Survivor Congratulations! You scored 64%!

Whether through ferocity or quickness, you made it out. You made the right choice most of the time, but you probably screwed up somewhere. Nobody's perfect, at least you're alive.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 51% on survivalpoints

Link: The Zombie Scenario Survivor Test written by ci8db4uok on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Zombie-fighting skills may come in handy, given the woeful lack of preparedness in one of our major cities (Pittsburgh) for a full-scale zombie invasion.

Geez, if the Hitler Zombie hears about this, expect to be hearing some really stupid Nazi analogies coming out of Pittsburgh soon, rather than Madonna's latest evidence of brain damage due to the Hitler zombie's dietary choices. (Madonna said in response to a question about her new movie that features Kabbalah quite heavily: "Yeah, yeah… Strange. People get very upset about the fact that I decided to study a spiritual belief system. It's very strange. I may as well have announced that I've joined the Nazi party.")

You realize, of course, that, with Halloween approaching, it may be difficult for me to resist letting the Hitler zombie out of his crypt again, particularly since it's been two and a half months since his last appearance here. Better hope no one makes any really stupid Nazi analogies between now and October 31!

Comebacks to a cranks' favorite quote

There is a famous quotation that is a favorite of cranks every where attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Never mind that Schopenhauer probably never said this--it's nonetheless a favorite of cranks such as "intelligent design" creationism advocates, and similar statements have been attributed to many others.

Here are the responses, found in a discussion thread after a post on Pharyngula:

Response #1: That's true only for truth. There is no truth in intelligent design creationism.

Response #2: Yeah, but a lot of silly nonsense also gets laughed at and violently opposed. Undergoing stages one and two does not imply one will enter stage three.

Response #3: Is it too much to ask that ID should progress into the third stage of Schopenhauerian truth before it is taught in schools?

Response #3 is my favorite of these for "intelligent design" creationism. Response #2 is my favorite all purpose response. I'll have to remember them...

Interesting diet choice

Via various sites, I've found a rather odd set of recipes. It begins thusly:

The argument for eating Aliens

1. Aliens come here uninvited.
2. They ate Elvis.
3. They mutilate our cattle, and probe abductees by shoving probes in their rectum and performing other unspeakable acts upon unsuspecting victims.
4. They are plentiful, more plentiful than the strained seas and land resources, and they seem to be coming in increasing numbers (if you believe what some people are saying).
5. They are Kosher meat.
6. They taste good if prepared well.
7. According to some,they mess around with the Space Shuttle, when astronauts launch sattelites.
8. Their meat is safer than British Beef.

...and continues from there.

I think I'll pass, thank you very much.

Another lame justification for "intelligent design"

William Dembski has made some really weak arguments for "intelligent design" creationism, but this has to go into some sort of hall of fame for lame justifications:

At the time, Morowitz was quite taken with the biochemical and metabolic pathways in the human body and was examining possible self-organizational scenarios for how they might have emerged (for the staggering complexity of what needs to be explained, go here — click on portions of this “map” to zoom in). I asked him if he had made any progress in creating any portions of these pathways without using biogenic materials. He immediately replied, “You mean without enzymes.” I said, “yes.” He said, “no.”

I take this NO to be a huge admission and concession. Brute chemistry, as in the Miller-Urey experiment, can produce certain primitive building blocks of life. But to get anywhere beyond that, biologists studying the emergence of biological complexity invariably require biomacromolecules extracted from preexisting living systems. There appears to be no direct route through brute chemistry to the functionally integrated molecular systems that make biological organisms interesting.

This is an argument from incredulity (a. k. a. a divine fallacy) of the worst sort, with a false dilemma thrown in for good measure. The false dilemma (a. k. a. the false dichotomy) is Dembski's apparent implication that, because Dr. Morowitz (or anyone else) hasn't yet been able to reconstitute a biochemical pathway without using enzymes, it must mean that these pathways couldn't have come about by evolution. In other words, either we can somehow recreate networks of biochemical pathways in a test tube now without enzymes, or evolution must be incorrect. Never mind that he is mixing abiogenesis (how life came about from nonlife) with evolution, which says nothing about how life originally came about, only how it evolves after coming into existence. This is a favorite stupid ID trick, mainly because evolution is so well supported by the evidence but we know much less about abiogenesis, making it more speculative science. In any case, it is disingenuous to argue that, because metabolic pathways are so complex now and because they can't be reproduced in a test tube without enzymes, that God--excuse me, a "designer"--must have done it. It has taken billions of years of evolution to come up with the network of enzymes that catalyze the reactions, and scientists are developing plausible evolutionary mechanisms that could account for such pathways, despite ID advocates' claims otherwise. Just because Dembski can't imagine how such complex metabolic pathways might have developed through naturalistic processes (making them "irreducibly complex," according to his terminology), he concludes that God--sorry, I mean a "designer"--must have done it.

Arguments from incredulity stop science dead. After all, if, whenever scientists come up against a biological phenomenon that science can't yet explain, they were to automatically declare it "irreducibly complex" or invoke God--sorry again, I mean a "designer"--it would produce an attitude that science can't ever figure out the question. Invoking God or a "designer" is simply a way of throwing up one's hands and declaring a natural phenomenon too complex for us ever to understand.

Fortunately, real scientists don't behave this way.

I will, however, thank Dembski for turning me on to this über-cool link to a map of metabolic pathways. I've added it to my bookmarks.

Serious or parody?

Given the bit of doubt expressed by me and some commenters yesterday over whether the article that I was discussing was serious or a parody, I thought I'd throw out an entire blog for your consideration:

Conservatives for American Values

Consider these articles about science:

Science Is A Sham Week, Part I: The Introduction
Science Is A Sham Week, Part II: Intelligent Design
Science Is A Sham Week, Part III: Intelligent Designer
Science Is A Sham Week, Part IV: The Battle Rages
Science Is A Sham Week, Part V: The Conclusion

Serious or parody?

Maybe this will decide for sure. Or this.

OK, I know it's fairly obvious which is the correct answer to my question, but the sad thing is that it isn't always entirely obvious right away.

Dachau photoessay

Pundit Guy has posted an impressive photoessay of his recent visit to Dachau.

I may very well comment more on this either over the weekend or sometime next week. I just didn't have time last night to do the topic justice. In the meantime, there's always what I wrote about Dachau on the 60th anniversary of its liberation.

The case against "intelligent design"?

I'd go along with this...

Skeptics Circle Reminder

Just a reminder: There's one week to go before the next edition of the Skeptics' Circle. It will be held on Thursday, October 27 at The Uncredible Hallq. Get your best skeptical blogging submitted to him before Wednesday night and join us for the festivities. I suspect that, with the legal proceedings going on in Dover these days, that there will be a lot to say about some of the more ridiculous statements emanating from the pro-ID side...

And, as always, Orac sez: If you're a blogger and want to host a future edition of the Circle, drop me a line at oracknows@gmail.com. The guidelines and schedule are here, with more detailed guidelines (for the hardcore) here.

Shortsighted, not curious, and proud of it!

When I first encountered this post over at Pharyngula a couple of days ago, I wasn't planning on commenting on article to which PZ referred, even though I found it as disturbing as he did, and even though I don't have quite the same compunctions about "beating up on" a student that he does. (Humiliating students and residents for stupid answers is, alas, a longstanding tradition in medical education.) After all, PZ had already taken it on, as had Super Doomed Planet, Jason at Evolutionblog, and The Uncredible Hallq. Whatever I might say today, a couple of days later seemed superfluous. But then I thought about my college days a bit and decided that my take on this, although equally scathing to the attitudes expressed in the article, was nonetheless a bit different. But first, I feel obligated to give you a flavor of why this article was so disturbing. I sincerely hope that this is some sort of satire that misfired, but I fear that it is not.

The article, written by a journalism student named Stacey Perk and published in the Daily Iowan, is entitled On schooling's useless lessons. Rarely does one see such vapidity so proudly on display in the very first paragraphs:

I loved high school. I loved the memories I have of parties, football games, and hanging out with my friends. These are the things I have taken with me, not the useless information acquired in the classroom.

I remember complaining about how I'd never use knowledge I gained in the classroom in real life. I regretted all the time I devoted to school because, in the end, I didn't remember the algebraic equations, historical dates, or the periodic table.

Like omigod! So she loves parties and hanging out with her friends but remembers nothing of those nasty classes? It gets worse, though. I thought at first that this must be some intentionally ironic or half-satirical piece, but I still don't think it is:

A problem exists within the high-school education system: It doesn't prepare students for their careers. When I decided in high school that my major was going to be journalism, I took the only class offered by my school in hopes of learning the journalistic writing style. I didn't learn anything from that class. My teacher was not a journalism teacher; she was an English teacher. We spent every class silent reading instead of learning about the inverted pyramid.

The school system needs a reality check; most students aren't going to be mathematicians, historians, or chemists. So why do we have to take these classes? If students know at an early age what they want to do for their careers, then high schools should offer classes in that area. This would make me feel that the time I spent in the high-school classrooms wasn't a waste.

Let me get this straight. As a future journalist, you don't think that knowing some history is important? How do you plan on putting the events you report on in context for your readers? What about stories that involve some science? Don't you want to have a clue about what the issues are? How about math? How often do stories involve determining whether a politician's budget and tax promises add up?

Apparently college didn't bring any wisdom:

When I got to college, the education system did a better job of focusing on students' career goals. But even then, I found myself stressing over statistical equations and astronomy facts during my first two years. Why? I was never going to use that information. For open majors, the general-education requirements are great. For me, they were a waste of time and tuition.

Not only did the gen-ed classes waste my time and money, but they also hurt my GPA. Being forced to take classes makes them less interesting. If they aren't interesting, you won't do well in them. Statistics and astronomy bored me, so I opted not to attend class and neglected to study for them. These gen-ed classes caused my GPA to plummet.

The horror! Did it ever occur to you that perhaps by studying and committing yourself that you might raise that pesky GPA? No, it's far easier to blame the material. Did it ever occur to you that you might be put on assignments as a journalist that you fine equally uninteresting? What will you do then?

Here's a possible explanation for her attitude:

I shouldn't have to give up my dream of working at Glamour magazine because my GPA was low - all because of some stupid gen-ed classes that I was forced to take. Let's just get rid of them.

I keep hoping this is just bad satire, but keep coming back to the conclusion that it probably isn't. It's rather sad to see a future journalist fail to realize the value of a broad-based education. In fact, if any profession needs such a broad education, it's journalists!

But enough bashing Stacey. It's fun, but it's almost too easy. As Jason put it, she's just showing a bit of the petulant arrogance of youth. Life will teach her, and she will mature. Or it won't, and she'll remain vapid.

Certainly life taught me, which is my lead-in to my perspective on this issue, now that I'm over 20 years out from my college graduation. My dirty little secret is that the reason the article irritated me so is because there was probably a little bit of Stacey in me when I was in college. No, it's not the love of partying and hanging out with my friends, at least not to the extent Stacey seems to love them. (I was then, as I am now, pretty geeky and had only a relatively small circle of friends. I rarely "partied.") It was the blinkered attitude that I only needed to take classes relative to my major and career goals. It was also a bit of the same arrogance of youth that let me to take pride in being able to take the most difficult science classes and excel at them and viewing humanities courses as being somehow less worthy of my time and effort. You see, I knew I wanted to be a scientist or a physician from the very first day I entered college as a chemistry major. I also worried that, if I didn't take enough science classes or do well enough in them, that I wouldn't get into medical school or a good graduate program. This led me to be reluctant to take classes outside of my specialty, even ones that interested me. So insane was I that one year I took 17 credits in the fall semester, all but 3 of which were hard-core science classes, including graduate level biochemistry, and then did the same thing again the next semester. Talk about your lost year!

Yes, the science fascinated me, and yes I did very well in every class (well, every class other than second term organic chemistry, where I got my lowest grade ever in college, a B-; somehow my GPA survived though and they still let me get my chemistry degree). And it paid off. I got into the University of Michigan Medical School, which got around 3,000 applications every year for around 180 positions.

But by my senior year, I was starting to feel as though something was missing. I began to sense my shortsightedness, but by then it was too late to do much about it. There were only two terms left to take some nonscience classes that interested me, and that was not nearly enough time to make up for the three preceding years of relentless focus on chemistry and biology. I managed to fit in a creative writing course (the professor thought I was very good, by the way), an archaelogy course, and an English literature course. But that was it. There wasn't time for any more.

The next year, I was in medical school, and all hope of further diversifying my education was gone. Medical school is, after all, a professional school. Its purpose is to train doctors, not to provide a broad-based education. And there is so much to learn, so much information that must be mastered, that there just isn't room any more for anything unrelated to medicine. The pace is relentless, and the amount of knowledge and number of skills to acquire vast. Medical students have no choice but to develop tunnel vision. And it only gets worse during residency. True, I did go to graduate school during a break in my residency, but the focus there is almost as relentless on one's thesis project. The one good thing is that the point of graduate school in sciences is more to teach you how to think and how to apply the scientific method. Science changes so rapidly that the information we had to learn was not as important as learning how to teach ourselves, read the scientific literature, and apply it to our research. This was a relief compared to medical school, where there was a premium on mass memorization. Nonetheless, it was still highly focused, with minimal room for wandering outside of one's field.

Now that I'm on the wrong side of forty, I can't help but look back at my college days with just a twinge of regret. What I didn't appreciate then that I do now is that college can and should be one of the freest, best times of one's life, intellectually speaking. If you're fortunate enough to be able to go to college, you should take full advantage of it and not just use it to train yourself for a career, as important as that is. Regardless of what your career goals are or how rigorous your program is, in college you still have more time and freedom than you will ever have again in your life to study almost anything in addition to your future career. It's a wonderful time for experimentation and sampling of different disciplines, no matter what your major or your career goals are. You can study history, philosphy, any science, astronomy, mathematics, whatever. You can challenge your mind in ways that you never dreamt possible, if you choose to do so. But the time there so short. It doesn't seem that way at the time, when you're just leaving your teens and entering your twenties, but four years will pass almost before you know they're gone. Then it's off to either professional school, graduate school, or the "real world." Within a few more years, it's time to think about settling down, getting married, even having children. Once you've graduated from college, you'll never have as much time to explore so many different disciplines as you did in college. My biggest regret about college is that I didn't take an art class or take more literature or history courses.

College is your best chance to indulge your intellect in disciplines that you may never be exposed to again. It's your best chance to find out what really interests you. You can certainly try to do so later, but never again will you have as much time or opportunity, unless you win the lottery and can stop worrying about making a living. Never again will it be all laid out right there in front of you, ripe for the sampling. Not to take advantage of such a feast is a grave mistake. And such knowledge often comes in handy in unexpected ways. These days, I try to make up for it by indulging my interest in history and reading far more history than I ever did. Blogging may also be an expression of my desire to broaden my horizons and learn a bit about other things than medicine. Unfortunately, there is so little time. The only reasons I'm so prolific are because I'm a fast writer (at least when I'm not obsessing over the precise wording of a grant or a scientific paper I'm working on, which can lead me prodigious levels of writers' block), and because this happens to be my main hobby.

These days, I occasionally have college students majoring in various biological sciences rotating in my laboratory for credit. Some of them are pre-med students, and some want to get into a Ph.D. program, and sometimes they ask me for advice. One piece of advice I always give them is to take full advantage of their time in college by not just taking courses in biology. I encourage them to take as many courses outside of their intended field of specialty as they can fit in, the further afield from their major, the better. I tell them that there will be plenty of time to learn medicine or harder core science once they graduate to a graduate program or medical school, and there will never again be this much time or freedom to explore the world of literature, art, science, and mathematics.

Some actually seem appreciative, but some of them look at me as though I were a Martian when I tell them this.

Youth is wasted on the young.

How to debate "intelligent design" creationism advocates

Cog instructs us in the proper way to debate "intelligent design" creationism advocates.

I tell you, this guy's got a mean streak a mile wide. He's even nastier than I am...

But he's also quite amusing.

Tangled Bank #39

The latest Tangled Bank has been posted at The Questionable Authority. Go forth and check out the best science blogging from the last couple of weeks.

Unclear on the concept

Somehow I didn't find out about this story about a football coach who resigned because the school district ordered him not to lead his team in prayer at dinners before each game until several days after it had happened. Consequently, I had been debating about whether or not to write about it, its being old news and all. Then I learned that the coach rescinded his resignation before the school board could accept it and is considering legal action. That was the excuse I needed to discuss this case. (Also, I needed a brief break from medblogging, hence the topics of the last couple of days.)

Here's what happened:

But the controversy that led to Borden’s resignation actually started two weeks ago.

According to Patricia LaDuca, a spokeswoman for the district, Schools Superintendent Jo Ann Magistro started hearing rumblings on Sept. 29 about some concerns regarding Borden leading his team in prayer prior to every game.

“And not just from one source,” LaDuca said. “People from both sides of the issue were bringing this to Dr. Magistro’s attention. Students were even approaching staff members about it.”

Magistro acted quickly on the matter.

“As soon as she got the first inquiry about it, she immediately contacted Board of Education attorney Martin Pachman to find out what needed to be done,” LaDuca said. “She did her homework before she even contacted Marcus about it.”

It was a week before Pachman got back to Magistro, according to LaDuca, and when he did, he informed her that if indeed Borden was initiating a prayer with his players, he was doing so in direct violation of the guidelines set forth by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Magistro discussed the matter with Borden and later that same day:

Following the meeting, Borden, who could not be reached for comment by press time despite repeated attempts, told Magistro that he needed to think about the issue.

“He gave no indication that he wouldn’t show up for the dinner or the game,” LaDuca said.

But that is exactly what he did. While the Bear players and coaching staff met for their team dinner at 3:30 p.m. that afternoon in the high school cafeteria, Borden was not among them. Assistant coach Glenn Pazinko was left in charge, and with no information regarding the guidelines earlier explained to Borden, did not lead the players in saying grace, as they were accustomed to doing each week.

This led to some misinformation, according to LaDuca, with some parents becoming outraged, claiming the players were told not to pray.

“The kids were standing there waiting for someone to lead them in prayer, when the coach told them to sit down and eat,” she said. “Nobody told them they couldn’t pray. In fact, before the game started, the players did pray.”

At 5:50 p.m., East Brunswick Athletic Director Frank Noppenberger received an e-mail from Borden in which he resigned his position as head coach. In that e-mail, the coach informed the longtime AD that his resignation was effective immediately, and was apologetic that it couldn’t wait until the end of the season.

Unfortunately, Noppenberger did not know about the e-mail until after the game, leaving the players and fans in the dark regarding Borden’s decision to resign. While Pazinko went on to lead the Bears during their 21-0 loss to Sayreville, Borden’s decision not to address his players before the game left many players confused and disappointed, according to LaDuca.

The story actually made national headlines, being reported by ESPN and the Chicago Tribune, among others. Bordon was unapologetic, saying that he resigned on principle and that he had made the right decision.

Well, apparently he's reversed himself:

East Brunswick High School football coach Marcus Borden, who stepped down on Oct. 7 hours after school officials told him he could no longer initiate or participate in team prayer, rescinded his resignation and returned to his players yesterday.

Borden, who had until Thursday — the next Board of Education meeting — to rescind his resignation, said the abrupt reversal of field should not be construed as a change in his game plan.

"I have strong beliefs and principles," Borden said. "I don't want anybody to think that I backed down on them."

Borden's lawyer, Ronald J. Riccio, rescinded the coach's 10-day-old resignation in a letter to school board attorney Martin Pachman. A constitutional law expert and former dean of Seton Hall Law School, Riccio is representing Borden pro bono through the university's Center For Social Justice.

"You can't fight the fight unless you're in the ring," Riccio said, explaining why he advised Borden to return to the sidelines. "He is making sure that his ability to challenge the district's policy remains alive. You can't challenge something if it no longer injures you."

Apparently Borden has had some second thoughts and has been persuaded that his not being allowed to lead his team in prayer somehow violates his First Amendment rights. It is not. He is perfectly free to practice his Catholic faith publicly and proselytize to his heart's content outside of his job. He just can't lead prayers while on the job. I can't imagine how the legal action he is considering would go anywhere.

Before I go on, let's get one thing straight here. From everything I can gather from the news reports. Borden sounds like a hell of a great guy. He's a hell of a coach, and his players respect and admire him. He is the AFCA's 2004 national Power of Influence Award winner and has received USA Today magazine's 2003 national Caring Coach of the Year award. He also founded the Snapple Bowl, a charity all-star high school football game that has raised more than $150,000 for physically and mentally impaired children. Nonetheless, he's wrong about this one thing. I would hope that even a highly religious person like Borden could see why it is a bad idea for an authority figure, a representative of the state like a teacher and a football coach, to lead prayers in state-sponsored events.

What I find particularly interesting about this story is where it happened. East Brunswick, like much of central Jersey, is highly diverse. In fact, East Brunswick has a very large Jewish population, so much so that it is not at all uncommon to see advertisements for houses for sale emphasize that they are within walking distance of a synagogue, so that observant Jews can walk to temple on the Sabbath. There are also very large Indian and Pakistani populations in this area, with lesser--but still significant--Chinese populations here, mainly because of nearby Rutgers University and a number of large pharmaceutical companies in the area. Indeed, it is not at all unusual to see Sikhs wearing turbans working at various establishments in the area, particularly convenience stores and gas stations.

It's surprising that, in the bluest part of one of the bluest of the blue states, an area that is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic in its politics, this is even an issue. You'd expect this sort of thing to be happening in the South or even parts of the Midwest, but not in central New Jersey. And, even in New Jersey, public sentiment is much more in favor of the coach's stand than of the school's:

According to LaDuca, the board has been inundated with e-mails from people supporting Borden, many of whom feel he should be able to pray with his team, even though it violates federal law, and would subject the district to litigation.

There have not been many messages supporting Magistro’s actions.

Worse, the students who initially expressed their concerns about Borden have been taunted and bullied by Borden's supporters, despite an effort by the school to educate

The fact that it is happening in East Brunswick and that the vast majority of people appear to be lining up behind the coach shows how little people understand how the Constitutional prohibition against the establishment of religion protects all of us. Representatives of the state leading groups of students in prayer is a clear violation of the Establishment clause. Oddly enough, via Atheism Guide, I came across an evangelical Christian writing at the extremely conservative WorldNet Daily (usually not dubbed "Wingnut Daily" for nothing) about having to endure a pregame Buddhist prayer actually nails why state-sponsored prayer is a threat to our freedom of religion:

Coming from a fairly traditional Southern upbringing, I was not at all initially surprised when a voice came over the PA and asked everyone to rise for the invocation. I had been through this same ritual at many other high-school events and thought nothing of it, so to our feet my wife and I stood, bowed our heads, and prepared to partake of the prayer. But to our extreme dismay, the clergyman who took the microphone and began to pray was not a Protestant minister or a Catholic priest, but a Buddhist priest who proceeded to offer up prayers and intonations to god-head figures that our tradition held to be pagan.

We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions. I am sorry to say that in the confusion of the moment we chose the easier path and elected to continue to stand in silence so as not to create a scene or ill will among those who were seated nearby.

As I thought through the incident over the next few days I supposed that the duty of offering the pre-game prayer rotated through the local clergy and we just happened to arrive on the night that the responsibility fell to the Buddhist priest. However, after inquiring I learned that due to the predominance of Buddhist and Shinto adherents in this town, it was the normal practice to have a member of one these faiths offer the pre-game prayer, and Christian clergy were never included.

Although this story sounds a little dubious to me, even if not true it drives the point home. Or imagine another scenario: You are a football player. You are right on the borderline of getting to play or warming the bench. Some games you play; some games you warm the bench. Like most players, you want to get in the game, but to get in the game you have to impress your coach. Now, add this to the mix: You are a Buddhist or believe in some other non-Judeo-Christian religious belief system, like Shintoism. Or you're an atheist. Praying to the Judeo-Christian God is highly offensive to you, for whatever reason. Now, imagine this: At the dinner before each game, your coach leads the team in a prayer. It is claimed that you are perfectly free not to participate. But are you really? How many teenagers, desperate for approval of their coach, would have the intestinal fortitude to draw attention to themselves by refusing to participate, risking the disapproval of the man who decides whether or not they get to play or not or even whether or not they are good enough to be on the team?

But don't listen to me; listen to the same evangelical Christian above:

We often advocate the practice of Judeo-Christian rituals in America's public schools by hiding behind the excuse that they are voluntary and any student who doesn't wish to participate can simply remained seated and silent. Oh that this were true. But if I, as a mature adult, would be so confounded and uncomfortable when faced with the decision of observing and standing on my own religious principals or run the risk of offending the majority crowd, I can only imagine what thoughts and confusion must run through the head of the typical child or teenager, for whom peer acceptance is one of the highest ideals.

Unfortunately, the very observation that in one of the most strongly liberal and Democratic parts of the U.S., public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of someone like Coach Borden, who flouts the separation of church and state, shows that the U.S. has a long way to go in understanding why this separation is necessary to protect freedom of religion (or from religion) for all. One can only imagine how such a scenario would play out in Mississippi or Arkansas.

A perfect geek meme for me

I admit it.

I've been a little too quick to jump on certain meme bandwagons, but this one that I came across on Pharyngula is too good to pass up. It's Scalzi's list of the most influential SF movies of all time, and I'm supposed to put the ones I've seen in bold. I would actually quibble about several of these movies, but that would be fodder for another post. In the meantime, here we go (with occasional comments by me):

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (I loved this movie)
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a highly overrated film, IMHO)
Contact (also highly overrated)
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2)
The Matrix
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (the best Trek film, perhaps the best Trek, period)
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later (OK, but also overrated)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)

Hmmm. 38/50, or 76%. Not a bad geek score. It may even have been 39, because, thanks to my mother's love of old Flash Gordon serials, I may well have seen the one listed above. I just don't remember for sure.

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 4

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 4 has been posted at Diabetes Mine. Once more, it's time to check out the best of the medical blogosphere.

Neo-Nazis in Toledo

This story concerns me mainly because my wife's family comes from the Toledo area, leading me to have developed a passing familiarity with the city. Granted, most of my wife's family lives in small towns and rural areas west of the city beyond the airport; so I can't consider myself to know the city well. However, having grown up in Detroit, I've come to view Toledo as a kindred city, once thriving but now down-and-out, but still scrappy.

As regular readers know, I have an interest in the Holocaust and the sort of extremism that led to it. Twenty-five years ago, Jake Blues famously said in The Blues Brothers, "I hate Illinois Nazis." Well, I hate more than just Illinois Nazis, but Nazi-ism in all its forms. Today, I hate Ohio Nazis (like the ones in the picture above), and with good reason. On Saturday, a planned march by Neo-Nazis in North Toledo against "black crime" provoked a riot. A group called the National Socialist Movement claimed to be "protesting" black gangs' alleged harrassment of white residents. Counter demonstrators gathered at the planned site of the Nazi rally, and, before the march could even start, the mood turned ugly, as this account describes:

Shortly after 10 a.m., when a dispatcher reported that gang members wearing colors were gathering along Stickney, Central, and Ketcham avenues, Chief Navarre began to worry.

“This is not going to be pretty,” he predicted. “I’m starting to get a pretty bad feeling.”

Residents in the neighborhood had even earlier signs of trouble.

Ramon Perez, a Lagrange Village Council member, said he was canvassing the neighborhood for days before the planned march.

“Even Friday night, at Bronson and Stickney, that’s all we were hearing: ‘We’re taking this place down.’”

Though police had feared there could be violence — they initially brought in 150 extra officers — they expected any trouble would be between the Nazi marchers and protesters. And initially, that appeared to be a possibility.

Around 11 a.m. yesterday, about 15 Nazis had gathered next to the east side of Woodward High School, holding signs and chanting things like “white pride, not hate.” They carried homemade signs, such as, “White People Unite! Fight For Your Race.

A crowd of about 300 counter-protesters across the street from them also shouted: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, this Nazi hate has got to go.” Their signs included, “Black and White Unite” and “No Racists in Toledo.

John Haynes, 22, a black North Toledo resident wearing a Dallas Cowboys football jersey, said the Nazis were “crazy for coming down here and starting all this.”

As he watched them from across the street, he observed that “they’re lucky there’s a lot of police around, or they’d get hurt. There ain’t no problem here” between the races.

The National Socialist Movement, who call themselves “America’s Nazi Party,” said they came to Toledo because of “black criminal behavior,” according to Bill White, a spokesman from the group who lives in Roanoke, Va.

He said the spark for their visit was a dispute between a white North Toledo man and black North Toledo woman who are neighbors.

By 11:15 a.m., police had already reported rocks flying. Along Stickney Avenue, as mounted patrol officers pushed back the crowd off the sidewalk, angry residents screamed at passing police.

“Which side are you on?” shrieked one woman. “I don’t see you pushing any Nazis back!”...

By noon, the Nazis were pretty much out of the picture. Police canceled the march after reports began to trickle in of violence breaking out along the planned march route.

The chief declared: “It’s over. It’s done. Get ‘em back in their cars and get them the heck outta here.”

“They accomplished what they wanted,” Sheriff Telb said of the Nazi group. “They got chaos.”

Indeed they did. Toledo suffered riots on a scale not seen since the 1960's, and images of the chaos, looting, and violence were beamed around the world. The crowd then turned on police, angered that they were arresting rioters rather than neo-Nazis, and the looting and rioting continued through the afternoon. A more detailed timeline of what happened is here.

This sort of reaction to racist scum like the Nazis is exactly the wrong reaction. It is exactly what these racist pinheads were hoping to provoke when they decided to march. In fact, it was probably more than they were hoping for. Chances are, the Nazis were hoping for a confrontation, but not something so out of hand that their own lives could be in danger despite police protection. Nontheless, the violence perpetrated mostly by gangs in response to their planned march gives them a perfect incident to use to propagate their racist view of blacks as violent and criminal. I don't know if Andrew was right when he said that the gangs probably "boosted neo-Nazi membership a bit this weekend," but they sure didn't hurt their recruiting efforts any.

So what is a better reaction? In my mind, there are two more appropriate reactions to these twits: ignore them or ridicule. The former is probably the best in most circumstances, at least in this country where neo-Nazi marches numbering more than a couple dozen skinheads are rare. Ridicule is also effective, because--let's face it--these guys are, if you look at them closely, very, very silly. Yes, their views are odious and despicable, but they themselves are quite ridiculous, dressing up like Nazi stormtroopers and bleeting about "white pride"--which is why ridicule is appropriate. But the pathe of ridicule is more risky, because it takes a commitment to nonviolence, an ability to resist provocation, and the discipline not to let the creeps get under your skin, none of which are associated with gangs. All it takes is a handful of loose cannons to cause a confrontation to escalate and ruin everything, which is why ignoring these clowns is probably the safer path.

The sad thing is, on the very morning of the riots, a Toledo Blade editorial issued a plea which seems prescient now and, if heeded, could have prevented this tragedy:

Young black people, let me be blunt: The march by hate groups in North Toledo today is aimed at you. Don't give them the time of day. Please.

If the hate groups can upset you enough to cause you to react and get arrested, or cause you to show an outburst of violence, then they will have accomplished their goal.

Don't give them that satisfaction, no matter how upset they might make you, and believe me, their words can make a minority pretty upset. You are not what they say you are, so stay home, do something else, or go to some worthwhile community function instead.

And:

People of every race and all ages should know that the hate groups' putrid outbursts are intended to incite their audiences, and they are especially designed to prompt gang members to react.

Let me tell you up front, young people, what the group says can upset you, but don't let it. If hate groups have any skill, it's knowing how to stir up communities.

They have taken a dispute between a neighboring black woman and a white man and caused it to mushroom. At the march, police will stand between observers and the nationalists as the latter spew vitriol intended to provoke angry reactions.

Avoid the event. Your presence will not change the groups' minds. Telling them where they are wrong and urging them to move toward civility and harmony will not persuade them to change their minds, either.

Sadly, this plea fell on deaf ears. The racist twits got what they wanted, and Toledo got a big black eye. Again. (This poor city just can't seem to catch a break.) There are times when hatred must be confronted (such as when hate groups themselves start the violence, rather than just provoking it), and there are times when making sure its intentionally provacative cries of victimization and rage fall on deaf ears is the best course. This was one of those latter times. Hate-filled racists like these Nazis, as odious as their message is, do have a First Amendment right to speak and to protest (something that those who complained about the City of Toledo allowing the Nazis to march and those who used the provocation of the Nazi rally as justification to loot and riot appear not to comprehend). However, the First Amendment does not guarantee them an audience. Too bad the rioters gave these poseurs and thugs a far bigger audience than they could ever have hoped for.

ADDENDUM: According to a story this morning, apparently Toledo gangs had even called a truce in the days before the march, in order to present a united front against the neo-Nazis.

Babylon 5 fans, watch this now

As a die-hard Babylon 5 fan, I found this quite entertaining, despite its geekiness.

Or perhaps my liking this video is evidence of just how geeky I am.

Stem cell quackery

I've asked myself before why I still bother to read the Huffington Post from time to time. Even more strange is my propensity to check out even odder things, like the New York Times Style Magazine, while reading the Sunday New York Times. Perhaps it's a morbid sense of amusement at the waifish, suitably runway-weary appearing, Photoshopped models in bizarre outfits in even more bizarre settings, the articles dedicated to conspicuous consumption of clothing and jewelry that I cannot afford, even though I make quite a healthy salary. Or maybe it's the oh-so-trendy tone of many of the articles. Who knows?

Occasionally, though, in all the fluffery, I find an article that actually interests me for reasons other than the bemusement it causes me that so many people could be so concerned with such silly-looking clothing. So it was this Sunday, when I came across an article entitled The Stem Cell:

Although she is just 32, with skin like eggshell and a waterfall of ice-blond hair, Antonina Babosiuk recently found herself noticing certain changes: a roughening of the skin on her face, for instance, and a waning of her ability to shake off jet lag. As vice president of an international jewelry company, Babosiuk follows a brisk schedule, logging regular flights to Hong Kong to buy pearls and to Kyrgyzstan, where she inspects rings and bracelets produced at the company's 400-person factory. Fearing that the long days were taking their toll on her appearance, Babosiuk secured an appointment at Beauty Plaza, a high-end Moscow spa, where she received an injection of stem cells that had been extracted from her own fat and multiplied in a petri dish. The treatment, which cost her roughly $20,000, has become increasingly popular among wealthy Muscovites as a kind of cure-all - one with a reputation for boosting energy and generally restoring the youthful vibrance lost with age. There have also been scattered reports of remarkable effects, from a superhuman ability to go without sleep to white hair that abruptly returns to its original black.

Well that sent my skeptical antennae twitching right there! Stem cells are not easy to isolate, purify, and expand. To successfully cultivate them requires a great deal of expertise, and these cells are easily contaminated with fibroblasts, immune cells, and other non-stem cells. I know, as I've been looking into cultivating endothelial progenitor cells (a type of vascular stem cell) as part of my research. I'd be very surprised if Babosiuk is in actuality getting her own stem cells. One wonders how Beauty Plaza assures its clients that it is actually doing what it says it is doing. Most likely, it's through a lot of hand-waving and pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo designed to sound impressive to the lay person. Not surprisingly, gullible rich people fall for the hype, hook, line, and sinker:

Babosiuk experienced nothing so dramatic, but one or two months after her visit to Beauty Plaza, she noticed that her hair was more lustrous and that her skin had become softer. "It looks more fresh," she explains. She was so satisfied that she persuaded her husband, a 42-year-old Russian businessman, to have the injections as well. "Stem cells are like vitamins," Babosiuk says cheerfully. "That's why I come in here. If I don't make something for my health, I will look 40 tomorrow."

Can you say confirmation bias? Sure, I knew you could. And paying $20,000 a pop for these injections is strong motivation to look for any sign that reinforces one's belief that the treatment is working. After all, one wouldn't want to be forced to admit one is paying so much money for a worthless treatment that probably doesn't even contain any actual adult stem cells, would one? (I'm also sure that her "fresher" skin and "more lustrous" hair have nothing whatsoever to do with any of the other beauty treatments she is no doubt getting from the Beauty Plaza.) I tell you, I'm in the wrong business. Why slave away doing actual science when you could make $20,000 a pop injecting something--it's not clear what--into wealthy, vain, aging Muscovites?

It should not be surprising that stem cells would be a hot new area for dubious treatments and even outright quackery, which to me is what the Beauty Plaza seems to be offering. They're in the news. They're controversial. They're a hot area of research, with several states, including California and New Jersey, vying to become national or even world centers for research and South Korea making a name for itself as a stem cell-friendly venue for biotech. In theory at least, stem cells do have great potential to treat a variety of diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, cancer, and a wide variety of degenerative diseases. In the more far-out scenarios, if the totipotential nature of embryonic stem cells can be mastered, they could even be used to generate replacement organs for use in organ failure without the need for transplant and the attendant risk of rejection and need for lifelong immunosuppressive therapy. And, yes, perhaps they may even have utility in letting us indulge our vanity and ward off the effects of aging.

But very little of this potential has been realized yet, and it will take years, perhaps decades, to determine what stem cells can and cannot do. At present, stem cells are only commonly used in bone marrow transplantation to treat hematopoietic malignancies. However, there have been reports of possible utility in spinal cord injury (in mice and a couple of human reports), repairing heart muscle damaged by heart attacks (mice and humans), but wide applicability is a long way off and potential complications are unknown. Not that any such concerns stop Dr. Alexander Teplyashin, the proprietor of the Beauty Plaza:

Cheerful and heavyset, with thinning gray-black hair, soulful eyes and a single deep crease on his forehead, Teplyashin is, by his own account, a serious researcher. "Beauty Plaza is the first private scientific institute in Russia to work with stem cells," he claims with a genteel wave of his cigarette. He points to a certificate of participation from a stem-cell conference in Boston, at which he and collaborators presented research showing that stem cells could be isolated from the epidermis. The clinic, he notes, is even outfitted with machines for separating stem cells from the far more numerous fat cells in which they are embedded, as well as an incubator, for growing the cultures. At Teplyashin's request, an assistant slips a culture dish under a microscope, revealing an image of a dozen long-tailed cells, including some, doubled like butterfly wings and stippled with two black dots, in the process of dividing.

Of course, short of analyzing a syringe, there's no way to know whether Teplyashin is injecting his patients with stem cells. But he maintains that he began using them in 2001 and has been experimenting since 1999, shortly after his father died of a degenerative nervous-system disease.

My guess is that he's probably injecting fibroblasts isolated and cultured from his clients' fat, but who knows? If I were a client, I'd want to see the cell surface antigen profile of the cells, to determine whether they really are stem cells or not. Of course, I wouldn't be a client in the first place because I wouldn't be inclined to try such an unproven (and extremely expensive) "therapy" just to get rid of a few wrinkles. Also, even if what Teplyashin is injecting are indeed real adult stem cells, such treatments are not without potential drawbacks and complications. For one thing, stem cells tend to aggregate around sites of injury, making it impossible (at least now) to control where intravenous injections of such cells end up:

While Babosiuk has been pleased with the effect of the shots, stem-cell researchers in the United States seem dubious. "An intravenous injection of cells - euch," says Evan Snyder, the director of the Stem Cells and Regeneration Program at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif. One problem, Snyder notes, is that you can't control where cells go once you put them in the bloodstream. Given the propensity of stem cells to aggregate around a site of injury, moreover, there's no reason the injected cells couldn't all end up migrating to a cut on your finger. At $35,000 a shot, that would amount to an extraordinarily expensive Band-Aid.

Worse, these cells could result in tumors:

Among others, Dr. Amit Patel, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, worries about darker possibilities. Because there's no way to control where the stem cells go once they're injected, they may end up causing more problems than they cure. Mice bred to have stomach ulcers, for instance, were shown to have a higher incidence of cancer formation at the site of the sores, because stem cells aggregate at those lesions. Adding more stem cells might increase that risk. Likewise, Patel points out, a patient could have a small, undetected tumor growing in the liver or a lung, in which case the injection of stem cells might actually accelerate the cancer.

"Even when I do direct injections to the heart, the majority of the cells don't stay there," Patel says. "Once the cells are in your bloodstream, who knows where they're going to land."

Indeed, one Russian tycoon, after receiving a fetal stem cell injection, developed pea-sized tumors all over his face and legs.

It may evoke a sense of schadenfreude and amusement to watch hyper-rich marks waste huge sums of money on such nonsense in pursuit of fighting the inevitable ravages of time, but it is not amusing to see desperate people with serious and debilitating diseases like multiple sclerosis to waste their precious money in response to the quacks' hype. For example, Svetlana Galiyeva was also a client of the Beauty Plaza, and she is not wealthy:

When Svetlana Galiyeva found a clinic offering to treat her multiple sclerosis with embryonic stem cells, she grabbed the opportunity. Twenty-thousand dollars later she is still in a wheelchair and desperate. And there is no proof her injections had anything to do with stem cells.

Like other forms of quackery, stem cell quackery does its worst harm offering false hope to patients in the worst straits.

Lest one think this sort of premature selling of "stem cell therapy" outside of clinical trials as a seemingly magic elixir to treat all sort of diseases despite the present lack of scientific evidence for efficacy in humans and lack of hard knowledge about potential complications is limited to beauty spas catering to wealthy Russian oligarchs, I would point out that Switzerland has a biotech company called Advanced Cell Therapeutics, offering umbilical cord stem cell "treatments" in Geneva, Spain, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Bombay, and (how appropriate) Tijuana, Mexico. Its website quotes Christopher Reeve and lists a bunch of "case reports," which in reality appear to be nothing more than self-reported testimonials and patient-rated levels of "improvement," with little or no reported objective measurements reported. Yet, on such thin gruel, this company sells what it calls with unintentional irony "ethical" umbilical cord stem cell therapy, while presenting these disclaimers on its website: "Cord Blood Stem Cell therapy (CBSCT) is not a US FDA approved procedure and is in no way to be construed or presented as a cure for any condition, degenerative disease or injury" and "Significant Clinical Benefits from CBSCT cannot be guaranteed. Information on this site or in any ACT literature should not be construed to represent a guarantee or claim for a cure or clinical benefit to any disease or injury. CBSCT does not serve as a substitute for a participant’s current medical care and prescribed treatment modalities. Nor is CBSCT intended to serve as a preventive measure, treatment or cure of any condition, degenerative disease or injury."

Does anyone see the disconnect here? How is it "ethical" to sell stem cell therapy to patients with the implicit claim that it can help all sorts of conditions when the company itself seems to be admitting in its disclaimer that its own claims are dubious? And why on earth should anyone pay this company for its product when the company itself admits that it is not "intended to serve as a preventative measure, treatment, or cure of any condition, degenerative disease, or injury"? If its stem cell therapy isn't intended as one of these things, then what good is it, really?

The U.S., of course, hasn't been left out. For example, in California, there is a company called Medra, Inc., run by a Malibu psychiatrist named William C. Rader, M.D., who claims to be able to treat Alzheimer's disease, autism (gee, I wonder if he does chelation, too), cancer, cerebral palsy, and a number of other diseases. For $25,000 (paid in advance), Medra will arrange for treatment at a clinic in the Dominican Republic. Other companies offering "stem cell therapy" are discussed here.

The bottom line is that stem cell research, although potentially holding great promise for many diseases, is nowhere near ready for prime time yet. The data presently available regarding its potential uses and efficacy come primarily from preclinical cell culture and animal studies, with the occasional human case report. Worse, we do not yet know the potential complications of their use, the worst of which may be cancer. Until a lot more research is done, offering "stem cell therapy"--whether it be in the form of embryonic, fetal, or adult stem cells or whether they be injected intravenously or subcutaneously--outside the context of a properly designed, controlled, and supervised clinical trial is incredibly premature at best and quackery at worst.

Excellent

Woo-hoo!

The White Sox have made into the World Series! Although I tend to be more of an Indians and Tigers fan, given my sojourn in Chicago, I can't help but be rooting for the Sox to go all the way.

Next year, the Tribe!

Unfortunately, I have no idea when my hometown team the Tigers will ever be in contention again...

Friday Top Ten Random Tunes

I haven't done this in a while, so I figured I'm due. Besides, I feel like a brief break from the usual topics (don't worry, they'll return next week). Also, I've been on a bit of a music purchasing tear the last three weeks or so, such that I haven't even listened to all my new purchases yet. So, although the usual practice is to do this on Fridays, contrarian that I am, I choose to do it on Saturday instead. Take your iTunes library (or whatever MP3 playing software you happen to use), select your entire music library, and set the player to "shuffle" or "random" play. Then list the first ten tunes that play.

So, without further ado, here are mine:

1. Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind
2. Joy Division, Day of the Lords
3. The Yardbirds, Hot House of Omagararshid
4. Led Zeppelin, Dazed and Confused
5. The Cult, Medicine Train
6. The Rolling Stones, Salt of the Earth
7. Prefab Sprout, Faron
8. The Clash, London Calling
9. David Bowie, Telling Lies
10. Marvin Gaye, Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
    

Interesting mix. It looks as though I'm in a bit of a classic rock mood. (Yes, sadly, my beloved Clash now qualify as "classic rock," although I'm not sure about Joy Division, the Cult, or Prefab Sprout.)

Speaking of classic rock, though, I happened to pick up the new Rolling Stones album, A Bigger Bang. Not having purchased a new Stones album since the 1980's sometime (I believe it was the rather lame Dirty Work that finally did it for me--although I have replaced many of the vinyl copies of classics, like Exile on Main Street, with CDs since then), I was swayed by the positive reviews and a couple of songs that were getting some radio play.

And you know what? A Bigger Bang is good. Real good. Surprisingly good. In fact, it's the best that the Stones have put out since Tattoo You in 1981. The only things that keep it from surpassing Tattoo You are a lack of one or two instant classic songs (Start Me Up, Waiting on a Friend, and Little T & A were such songs from Tattoo You, for example) and the lack of some restraint on which songs to include. This is the Stones' longest album since Exile on Main Street (a two-album set back in the days of vinyl), and it shouldn't have been. For example, the album would have been stronger without trifles like She Saw Me Coming. And, for all the minor controversy it caused among rightwingers when the album was released, Sweet Neocon just plain sucks, with embarrassingly inane lyrics fused to a lame melody that lurches along seemingly endlessly. And, no, it has nothing to do with the song's politics, which I tend to sympathize with. It's just a bad song.

On the plus side, Rough Justice, Let Me Slow Down, and Look What the Cat Dragged In are satisfying old school Stones rockers. Back of My Hand is the kind of nasty blues number that the Stones haven't done this well since Ventilator Blues on Exile or even Stray Cat Blues on Beggars Banquet, and Rain Fall Down is a nice little funky number. Streets of Love and This Place Is Empty are nice little Stones-style ballads.

True, this album doesn't really break any new ground, but, really, did anyone expect it too? There are certain bands and performers that one looks to for going into new and unexpected directions (David Bowie and Radiohead, for example), and there are others that one just expects to do what they do and keep doing it well, with only minor changes and slow evolution (AC/DC, for example). The Stones have tended towards the latter category since the 1970's (the last time they shook up their sound being in 1978 with Some Girls) and there's really nothing wrong with that. Besides, most of the members of the Stones are at the age when most of us are thinking about retiring; yet they somehow found it within themselves to put out their most vital album in a quarter century.

Over the next couple of weeks, I think I'll have to review a couple of other of my purchases, because I've found a couple of real gems that I had previously been unaware of. It's also getting close to the time when I think about putting together my list for the top ten best albums of the year, as I did last year...

For all you Biblical literalists out there

Lonely? Need a wife?

Well, as always, the Bible has the answer with its Top 15 Biblical Way to Acquire a Wife.

I'm not sure I'd pick #8, though:

Cut off 200 foreskins off of your future father-in-law's enemies and get his daughter for a wife.
-- David (I Samuel 18:27)

Well, fundamentalists do say that the Bible should be taken literally, but they are rather selective about which parts they mean. On the other hand, these particular fundamentalists do seem to have a bit of sense of humor about the Bible, which is unusual. Looking at the rest of their site is a bit disturbing, though. One can't help but wish they had a similar sense of humor about the loopier stuff they advocate. After all, if they can recognize that the ways men acquired wives in the list above shouldn't be applied to today's living, why can't they recognize other parts of the Bible that should be considered allegorical rather than literal?

Interesting...

Taking the Republican Loyalty Quiz, I find:

Your score is 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. You are a moderate. You agree with Republicans on some issues and Democrats on others, while rejecting the blind, naked partisanship of both sides. You base your vote on issues rather than ideology and principle rather than party, which makes you the quintessential swing voter the media loves to fawn over.

Actually, I tend to lean a little more conservative than that, but let's see what the Democratic Loyalty Quiz says:

Your score is 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. You are a moderate Democrat. You agree with Democrats more often than not, but have misgivings about some of their positions on key social issues, as well as their ability to defend the country. You remain supportive for now, but if Democrats keep moving to the left and taking their cues from people like Michael Moore, you may decide to jump off that crazy train.

Uh-oh. My RINO membership could be in jeopardy...

Best comment of the week (last week, that is)

In my post from last week about quackery, a commenter by the 'nym of decrepitoldfool provided me with the best pithy comment about alt-med that I've heard in a long time:

"Alternative medicine" is just an alternative to having a fuller, richer checking account.

Damn. I wish I'd said that!

Although I can't take credit for it, there's another one I'd add, though:

What do you call "alternative medicine" that works?

Medicine!

More pharmaceutical company promotional weirdness

Very early on in this blog, I wrote a post that would forever alter its history, entitled Weird stuff doctors get from pharmaceutical representatives.

Why did this post alter the history of this (then) young blog forever?

Why, it unwittingly introduced the character that unexpectedly went on to play a large role in the development of this blog and ultimately become its de facto mascot, EneMan, of course!

But EneMan is by no means the only strange pharmaceutical company promotional product. No, not at all. In fact, I found one that may be just as strange, albeit in a very different way:


(Yes, I realize that I probably should have taken it out of its plastic bag before trying to take a picture of it to keep shine down, but if I did that then it might have lost its value as a collector's item--or we would have had to actually pop the popcorn. I'm not sure which would have been worse.)

In any case, it's exactly what you think it is: Risperdal microwave popcorn! No need for you to know how or where I found out about this lovely product, but I just have one question: Who thought it would be a good idea to label microwave popcorn with the name of an antipsychotic drug? I don't get the promotional tie-in myself. EneMan has an obvious relationship to the product he is promoting, but what does microwave popcorn have to do with schizophrenia?

Ah, well, at least the package assures us that the popcorn "contains no active drug."

Imagine my relief.

If intelligent design prevails?

The Highest School is vision of what high school might be like if "intelligent design" creationism advocates prevail. In such a school, they don't just "teach the controversy" of "intelligent design" creationism, but they teach a lot of other "controversies" that aren't. After all, why limit the teaching of one religion-inspired pseudoscience with no scientific evidence to support it as being a equal "alternative" viewpoint to an established science with 150 years worth of evidence from multiple disciplines to supporit when you could teach other ideologically motivated pseudohistory or pseudoscience as equal "alternative" viewpoints as well?

The Highest School explains it this way:

Highest School is an organization dedicated to making sure that our children are exposed to all sides of scientific and historical issues, and not condemned to hear just what an elite group of special interests wants them to hear.

It would also teach other "ways of knowing" than the scientific method, because of its "failings":

Let's look at another famous failure of science. When people started bringing the first meteorites to scientists, claiming that the rocks fell from the sky, scientists thought the idea completely ridiculous. "Rocks can't fall from the sky," said the scientists, and encouraged the poor ignorant folks to put their rocks back in their heads from whence the came. Eventually it was proven that the rocks did indeed fall from the sky, showing once again that the scientists didn't know what they were talking about. But did the scientists change their minds? Well, yes they did, but only after the evidence was so significant that they really had no choice.

Consider the Highest School's approach to American History:

It would be bad enough if schools limited their restrictions on the truth to the space program, but there are many areas of historical "fact" that experts call into question. For example:

• Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman who shot President Kennedy. There is copious argument on this subject, and the number of people involved in Kennedy's assassination likely rivals the population of some countries.
• The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise. Many experts agree that the U.S. government knew about it all along but wanted the attack to succeed so that it would get people upset enough that a war with Japan would be popular, giving the government an excuse to go to war with Nazi Germany.
• You have to pay federal income taxes. On the contrary, many people do not pay income taxes by simply declaring themselves residents of a state instead of the country. According to some books, it's not only legal but it might also teach you something about the American judicial system.
• Columbus discovered America. Actually, Native Americans were here first, and if you ask any LDS member they will tell you that Native Americans are descendents of the lost tribe of Israel, so really the Jews discovered America.
• President is the most powerful elected office in the country. It's the highest ranked elected office in the country, but there is plenty of evidence that the President really has no power because he is completely beholden to the Trilateral Commission.
• American Idol isn't fixed. Seriously, does anyone believe this?

There are many, many more examples we could cite, but what would be the point? Special interests have a hammerlock on history, and we have to tip it over and let the truth spill out.

Or what about such a school's approach to the Holocaust:

These "Holocaust revisionists" point out that the testimony of tens of thousands of "survivors" of the Nazi camps is purely anecdotal and therefore not compelling. They note that historians do not agree on the number of people who died in the Holocaust, and if historians cannot agree on the details of their theory, the whole theory must be called into question. Revisionists also gain some measure of legitimacy from the fact that some countries fear their view of history so much that they have made it illegal to even discuss.

But, some ask, why should our children be exposed to doubt about such an important subject? True, legitimate historians believe that the Holocaust occurred, but our children deserve the chance to weigh the evidence and make up their own minds instead of leaving such an important subject to the "experts." But how can young ones do that when the "fact" of the Holocaust is taught as an accepted historical truth, without giving equal weight to all of the questions and objections that revisionists have brought to the table?

Let's look at an example to illustrate this point. I think we all agree that creationism and critiques of evolution need to be part of every child's public-school education. Well, Holocaust revisionism has just as much right to be heard in our schools as creationism! Consider these similarities. Creationism and Holocaust revisionism are both:

• Discussed in great detail in copious books and newsletters written by strongly opinioned individuals who have a degree in something.
• Supported by logic and reason custom tailored to support their conclusion.
• Promoted by individuals who are careful to deemphasize the religion-oriented roots of their beliefs, preferring to discuss the matter solely on scientific grounds.
• Popular with certain groups of Americans but oppressed because they are in conflict with "accepted" theories.

There are also significant gaps in records of what happened to people during World War II. Historians might, for example, have evidence that a certain person lived in Poland, and evidence that this same person died in a concentration camp, but unless there are specific records of the route that person took to get to the camp, how can it be proven that he was sent there? It is agreed that mass graves were found, as were the remains of large ovens, and that there are thousands of photographs that seem to verify elements of the Holocaust theory, but really is this gargantuan mountain of evidence enough for us to conclude that the Holocaust happened with enough certainty to tell our children about it? Of course not.

We should remember that, if ID advocates want schools to "teach the controversy" of "intelligent design" creationism, how long would it be before other nonexistent controversies are considered fair game? Why ID and not "alternate" versions of American or Holocaust history? The scary thing is that the Highest School doesn't always sound like the parody that it is intended to be, not because it isn't a parody but rather because it seems to hit a little too close to home the direction that education today seems to be going.

The Nineteenth Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle

The Nineteenth Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has been called to order at Time to Lean. Let's give Kelly a hand for overcoming great adversity to put together another fine collection of skeptical blogging, hosted by, well, I'll let Kelly tell the tale:

Hear ye, hear ye! Welcome, all you bums and rabblerowsers to the 19th Skeptic's Circle, hosted by me, carny and reformed convict, Bill "Leatherface" Jones, which features many skeptical acts all over the midway!


Says Leatherface, haggard, complete with the stench of vodka, "There was some grift over at Time to Lean, but I got something up my sleeve for those hooligans who did the crime: Cold, mean skepticism served with a wrinkled face and a furrowed brow. Step right up if you dare to compete, you marks....you townies! What are you...chicken?"

Kelly's right. Skepticism really is a dish best served up cold.

Before I rush off to the O.R., let me just mention that next up for the Twentieth Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is The Uncredible Hallq. He'll be here in a fortnight with another collection of the best skepticism the blogosphere has to offer.

The schedule of past and future Meetings of the Skeptics' Circle is here. If you think you have what it takes to host, drop me a line at oracknows@gmail.com.

That about sums it up

Pat Oliphant comes a little too close for comfort...

Overlooked again....

Via Kevin, M.D., I found this Wall Street Journal article on medical blogs (alternate link here). A bunch of old stalwarts are featured, including (among others) DB's Medical Rants, Kevin, M.D. (of course!), Medpundit, Rangel, MD, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure (a fellow surgeon!), The Cheerful Oncologist, GruntDoc and the creator of Grand Rounds, Blogborygmi (although the article apparently mistakenly credits Sneezingpo.com with Grand Rounds).

Congratulations, all. You deserve it.

But, alas, no Respectful Insolence yet. What's a guy gotta do to break into the hallowed company of those who were mentioned? After all, I don't know of any other academic surgeon with a blog, much less one that averages just shy of 1,000 visits a day. Heck, as I approach my first anniversary, I'm reaching blog middle age.

Heck, it makes me wonder: Could EneMan have chased Laura Landro (the reporter who wrote the story) away? Or maybe it was the Hitler Zombie.

Nahhhhh. Couldn't be.

Ah, well. It keeps me hungry. No complacency here.

For you bird fans out there

The latest edition of the blog carnival dedicated to birds and bird watching, I and the Bird, has been posted at Science and Sarcasm. Who knew there were so many bloggers writing about birds?

Speaking of Science and Sarcasm, I thought that was my blog...

Anyway, next time around, the host will be a regular on my blogroll, Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life on October 27.

The monster returns

I'm bummed.

It began a few weeks ago. After getting back from vacation, I was sitting in my office, not in the least bit please to be back, arduously climbing the pile of reports and journals that had accumulated on my desk like a mini-Mount Everest that required me to be Sir Edmund Hillary, my mind wandering during the drudgery, wondering how on earth my partners, who, not having to run a lab, are much busier than I am clinically, can deal with what surely must much bigger piles of paper and many more clinic dictations and operative notes than I. Of course, they don't have to deal with massive grant applications, but I can't figure out if that balances things out or not. In any case, I was nearing the end of the pile when I came across a dictation from Radiation Oncology about a patient of mine. I was just going to glance at it and leave it for later, assuming that it was just a clinic note about the patient's standard adjuvant therapy, when I remembered something. I had operated on this patient a while ago (I'll call her Mrs. X). Her adjuvant therapy was over. She shouldn't be seeing a radiation oncologist anymore

I read the note.

Ah, shit! I thought, as I slumped back into my chair.

Mrs. X had shown up in my office last year complaining of a large mass under her harm. On examination, she had a 5 cm mass that was either in the axilla or the axillary tail of her breast and appeared to be fixed to the chest wall, making it inoperable, stage IIIB. Once again, I marveled at the power of denial. Surely this thing had been palpable for a long time. Surely she must have been aware of it. Finally it must have gotten so large that she had to seek attention. By this time, she surely knew what it was, at least at a subconscious level. I knew she knew. Yet the ritual dance went on nonetheless, in which I did a core needle biopsy of the mass, pretending that there was a chance that it was something other than what we both knew that it was.

Not surprisingly, it was. Breast cancer. It wasn't clear if it was an involved axillary lymph node or if this was the primary. It actually didn't really matter much which it was. Because her tumor was not operable, after proving the diagnosis, I ended up referring her to a medical oncologist for neoadjuvant chemotherapy to try to shrink the tumor to the point where it could be surgically removed. I strongly suspected that she probably had metastatic disease, but all of her studies showed no evidence of disease outside of that mass, although an MRI did confirm what my physical exam showed, that the mass was infiltrating the chest wall. So she went to my favorite medical oncologist, who gave her six cycles of chemotherapy over several months.

When she came back, she was changed. Yes, the mass had melted to a fraction of its prior diameter and become unstuck from the chest wall. Indeed, it was so small that I was concerned that it might disappear and not be easily found at the time of surgery. But she had lost her hair and her cheeks were sunken. But she was still potentially curable, even if the odds weren't that hot. So I operated on her. Not surprisingly, there was residual tumor left, but less than we expected. She then underwent radiation. I hadn't seen her in a while, but the last time I did she was doing fine.

But, always, lurking beneath the surface, was the monster, like a shark circling the survivor of a shipwreck. And I knew there was a high probability that the monster would return. If Mrs. X acknowledged how much at risk she was, she didn't show it. I knew I had told her. Knowing her medical oncologist, I'm sure he too had told her and that he probably had even put a percentage risk on her odds of recurrence in five years. Stage IIIB is about as high a stage of breast cancer that still has a reasonable chance of "cure," but the chance isn't that great.

And now, several months later, I learned that the monster had indeed returned.

According to the note, about a month and a half before, she had noticed headaches and dizziness that became persistent. She saw her oncologist, and a CT scan of her head revealed brain metastases. She was hospitalized and underwent an urgent course of steroids and whole brain radiation therapy. Her condition improved. But her prognosis was grim.

The other day, I was reminded of her again by the confluence of two things. First, a relative of hers showed up in my clinic with a breast complaint. Fortunately, it didn't appear to be anything to be concerned about. However, she informed me that Mrs. X had been recently hospitalized because of leptomeningeal involvement with tumor and was receiving intrathecal chemotherapy. Unfortunately, involvement of the meninges with tumor portends mean survival of only four weeks without treatment and only six months even with aggressive treatment. Then, as if to drive home to me the triumph of her cancer, waiting for me on my desk the next day was another note from her radiation oncologist describing her neurologic deficits (mainly leg weakness, but, fortunately, no bowel or bladder complaints) and the plan for her to receive intrathecal chemotherapy and then radiation to the lower spinal cord. This lovely woman who is only in her 50's and had been looking forward to watching grandchildren grow up was dying, and there was nothing that could be done stop it.

Doctors are supposed to keep a certain distance from their patients. It's necessary in order to try to remain objective and not to let personal feelings interfere with our clinical judgment. At least that's the story, and we generally stick to it, whether it's always true or not. Some specialities try that objectivity more than others, because of a close bond that becomes inevitable. Medical oncology, for example, is such a specialty, because it often involves prolonged courses of treatment and followup for several years for a condition that, like a monster under the water, can return when you least expect it to do your patient in. Medical oncologists, however, unfortunately have more experience dealing with death up close and personal. They have more experience telling a patient that there is no longer any chance of cure, that the best medicine can offer is to try to ease their symptoms as they deteriorate. Surgical oncologists rarely have to do that, the exception being surgeons who deal with particularly nasty malignancies like pancreatic cancer. Frequently, patients are sent to them to be evaluated for surgery. If the surgeon deems a patient's tumor resectable, they have a chance (albeit small) of living five more years. If the surgeon deems the tumor inoperable, that's it.

Also, for surgeons it tends to be a bit different. We tend not see the patient as many times or for as long a period of time. There are differences, of course, depending upon what tumors we specialize in (surgeons specializing in GI malignancies, for example, can forge relationships with patients as long lasting and as strong as those of any medical oncologist), but for the most part it's true. We are used to appearing like the cavalry, to rush the patient off to surgery, vanquish the evil tumor by ripping it out and contemptuously dropping it triumphantly into a bucket, and save the patient's life. Then, after the patient recovers, we discharge him or her into the care of the medical oncologist and then only occasionally see the patient again. Occasionally, we have the patient with early stage breast cancer who unexpectedly recurs metastatic disease and are shocked (or even go into denial ourselves), but such cases tend to be anomalies. It's hard not to occasionally fall into the trap of thinking that all the tumors we successfully remove will behave like early stage, favorable tumors. Even in a case like Mrs. X, whose tumor was locally advanced and had only a modest chance of ultimate cure, when we successfully remove the tumor with negative surgical margins, we still think that we have "cured" the patient. We have to. Surgery is the primary tool we have to offer, and to have to admit that it offers only a small chance of cure to such patients is hateful to us, even though in the deepest recesses of our minds we know the true odds. But deep down, we know that, despite the apparent admission of defeat from the tumor as it shrinks in response to the onslaught of chemicals administered, that cancer is a clever and persistent foe that can all too often weather everything we can send at it, hunkering down in microscopic deposits in the bone, the brain, the liver, the lung, or elsewhere, waiting for a chance to return.

Skepticism is a dish best served cold--like vengeance

Great news. Kelly is going to host this week's Skeptics' Circle after all. She has Time to Lean up and running again, albeit still missing many posts (kind of like the Enterprise running only on impulse power). It turns out her soon-to-be ex deleted her blog and messed with her e-mail accounts. I did not reveal this last night for privacy reasons, but now that she's mentioned it on her own blog I no longer feel constrained from openly wondering what kind of a petty little lame-ass would do something like that.

Fortunately, Kelly's a trooper and plans on continuing. Unfortunately, if you sent her an entry last night, she may not have gotten it. I've forwarded everything sent to me on to Kelly, but that doesn't necessarily mean she got it. So, if you sent in your submission last night or this morning, you might want to consider sending it again. Help her get back up to warp speed again.

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 3

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 3 has been posted at Doulicia. As usual, good stuff.

Skeptics' Circle emergency announcement

This week's host of the Skeptics' Circle, Kelly, has informed me that she is having serious technical difficulties with her blog, Time to Lean, which is presently inaccessible and may have even been deleted. More details will be forthcoming as I learn them, and there may come a need to change the venue of the Circle this week.

In the meantime, in the 45 hours or so remaining before the deadline, if you have not done so already, please send your entries to Kelly at kellyann0198@yahoo.com or to me at oracknows@gmail.com.

Deepak Chopra misunderstands skepticism

Why, oh, why, do I still occasionally check out the Huffington Post? It's been full of antivaccination conspiracy-mongering almost since the day of its very inception, and it's the first place I ever encountered Jay Gordon, the pediatrician whose "skepticism" about vaccines is laced with insinuations that the results of any study that is any way supported by pharmaceutical companies should be ignored (regardless of the quality of, oh, the actual study design and data) and that any investigator who accepts funding from big pharma must be hopelessly compromised. It's been a booster of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s dubious and unfounded conspiracy-mongering regarding vaccines and autism.

So I gave it up for a while. But, for some reason that I can't figure out, occasionally I can't resist going back. I must be a glutton for punishment, you know, reading things that make me want to tear my hair out.

So it was today, when I came across an article by resident advocate of Aruveda and New Ager Deepak Chopra, entitled, Gadflies Without a Sting: The Downside of Skepticism, which is in essence an extended rant against skepticism. Michael Shermer has already answered some of his charges with a lovely, positive essay entitled The Power of Positive Skepticism. What more could be said, after the master skeptic himself has responded to Chopra's attacks? Well, at the risk of the hubris of incorrectly thinking myself in Shermer's league when it comes to defining the nature of modern skepticism, perhaps a bit more. For, in an apparent desire to remain unrelentingly positive and thus not fall victim to the very charges against skeptics that Chopra made, Shermer has let some of Chopra's charges slide more or less unanswered.

Dr. Chopra starts out with five main complaints about skepticism. He begins:

I cannot otherwise explain why being skeptical, without any additional positive contribution, is considered somehow admirable. I dislike skepticism when it sits by the road and shoots down any traveler trying to take a different way. I oppose skepticism when it turns destructive, using disdainful dismissiveness as its chief tactic.

Dr. Chopra seems to be confused about what skepticism means. I would agree that unreasonable or unrelentingly negative skepticism is not a desirable trait. I would also agree with Michael Shermer that there does exist a variety of skeptic that is unrelentingly negative, but in my experience such skeptics are in the relative minority, albeit a vocal minority. However, distinguishing healthy from unhealthy skepticism doesn't appear to be what Dr. Chopra has in mind:

Let me speak personally here as a target of skeptical critiques:

1. I have rarely met a skeptic who didn’t use ad hominem attacks.

Interesting. I have come across many "nonskeptics" who are quite eager to launch ad hominem attacks. Indeed, I've come across a number of believers in alternative medicine who even launch pre-emptive ad hominem attacks in order to try to poison the well and discredit skeptics in advance. However, I rather suspect that Dr. Chopra is being somewhat disingenuous here. He seems to be confusing attacks on what one says or what one advocates with attacks on one's person. Sometimes they are one in the same. More often they are not. Michael Shermer himself took pains to point out how he insisted that no personal attacks be made on Dr. Chopra in an issue of The Skeptic. He only insisted upon a skeptical evaluation of Chopra's ideas on quantum consciousness and healing. I try to do the same when examining unsupported claims. True, when irritated at having to point out the same straw men and fallacies used by alties and "intelligent design" advocates over and over again, I can get a bit testy, but I usually try not to.

2. Skeptics generally leap to the conclusion that I am naive, self-deluded, or simply unread in the sciences.

Well, actually, no. Most of us don't "leap" to that conclusion. We read Dr. Chopra's own writings and then arrive naturally at that conclusion based on his own words. For example, PZ Myers (whom Dr. Chopra would no doubt accuse of ad hominems) took what Dr. Chopra recently wrote about evolution apart point by point on science and the facts when he was indiscrete enough to wander into writing in support of intelligent design. True, PZ did throw in a bit of dismissive and insulting language, which was probably not strictly necessary, but, even if you leave aside the dismissive language, PZ showed in excruciating detail that Dr. Chopra did not know what he was talking about with regards to evolution. I probably wouldn't have done it in quite as sarcastic a fashion, but PZ was correct on the science and Dr. Chopra was not. PZ was also rather testy at having to refute the same fallacies yet again.

3. Skeptics rarely examine the shaky assumptions of their own position.

Give me a break. The very nature of skepticism is to examine the assumptions of one's own position. That is also, not surprisingly, the very nature of science. As for whether those assumptions are "shaky," certainly nothing Dr. Chopra has written have demonstrated that to be so.

4. Skeptics believe that doubt is a positive attribute. (Skeptics in person can be appealing, usually in a kind of quirky misanthropic way, although most come off as self-important petty naysayers who try everyone’s patience.)

Doubt is a positive attribute for many things. For example, doubt is positive when dealing with a real estate agent or a used car salesman--or other situations in which claims are made that may not be true. I doubt that even Dr. Chopra would disagree. Of course, it depends on what Dr. Chopra means by "doubt." "Doubt" is not the same thing as "skepticism." There are rational doubts and irrational doubts. Skepticism, in my view, is doubt that is based on reason, evidence (or lack thereof), and with good foundation, rather than fear, negativity, or other irrational reasons. Skepticism is rational doubt. As many credophiles do, Dr. Chopra equates rational with irrational doubt and tries to equate irrational doubt with skepticism. Rational doubt in science prevents scientists from accepting obviously implausible or impossible explanations for natural phenomena.

Besides, believers in pseudoscience actually like skepticism, as long as it's skepticism about the "right" things, such as big pharma, drugs, or current "scientific dogma." However, they don't like it quite so much when skepticism is turned on their beliefs, or, as Michael Shermer put it, they like to say “I’m a skeptic too, but…,” where skepticism is fine as long as it is someone else’s codswallop under the microscope. Those of us in the science biz, however, are used to having our ideas and hypotheses challenged, sometimes strongly or even brutally. It's part and parcel of the give-and-take of ideas. You have to have a thick skin. Believers like Dr. Chopra tend not to have such a thick skin.

5. Worst of all, skeptics take pride in defending the status quo and condemn the kind of open-minded inquiry that peers into the unknown.

This is the point where Dr. Chopra is most incorrect, at least in science. There's a saying popular among scientists: "Be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out." Open-mindedness is essential to science, but it must be tempered with rational skepticism based on knowledge of has gone before.

Let's take a look at a recent example that is being trumpeted by "intelligent design" creationism advocates like William Dembski and other advocates of pseudoscience as "mavericks" showing how screwed up the establishment supposedly was. The example is the recent award of the Nobel Prize to Robin Warren and Barry Marshall for showing that the bacterium H. pylori is the cause of most duodenal ulcers. To hear it from the alties and ID advocates, this is an example of how how bad conventional science can be. It's even been presented as an example of science not being about "consensus," of how mavericks are often scorned. Yes, Marshall and Warren's ideas were severely criticized when they first presented their hypotheses about the cause of ulcers being bacterial in many people. Then a funny thing happened. They did experiments. They gathered more data. The data was convincing. Other investigators started to wonder if maybe Marshall and Warren were correct. Curious, more investigators started looking into the possible connection and finding the same thing. Over a decade, momentum gathered, until, by the early 1990's, there was a paradigm shift and a new scientific consensus developed. Warren and Marshall's observations and skepticism about prevailing dogma about peptic ulcer disease led to a revolution. But it was a revolution based on data and experimentation. The vast majority of "mavericks" turn out to be wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. When they are right and ultimately vindicated, however, they are sometimes spectacularly correct, like Warren and Marshall.

If Deepak Chopra thinks that scientists don't value questioning the prevailing dogma, he should read the Nobel Prize Committee's comments regarding Warren and Marshall, in which the Committee praised their tenacity and willingness to challenge existing prevailing dogmas. Scientists do value those who challenge existing dogma--if they can deliver the evidence to support the challenge convincingly. In fact, it was for questioning scientific dogma and proving to be correct that Warren and Marshall won the Nobel Prize! In the meantime, those who would challenge existing science have to be able to run the necessary gauntlet of skepticism that keeps incorrect conclusions from taking root for long. Most of that skepticism is rational skepticism. Some of it, admittedly, is irrational. (Scientists are human, too, and can become more enamored of their own ideas than they should be or too entrenched in dogmatic thinking.) But, if the scientist challenging existing dogma has the goods, eventually he or she will be acknowledged as being correct, and a new scientific consensus will emerge. It's messy, yes. It can sometimes take decades or even longer. It's occasionally brutal. Sometimes scientists don't live long enough to see their ideas accepted. Most challengers will not be Galileo. Most will be incorrect and ultimately forgotten by history. (To paraphrase a saying, it is not enough to claim the mantle of Galileo. One must also be right.) But those who turn out to be correct and thereby radically alter or overturn existing theory to produce a new and useful theory earn fame that lasts long after their deaths. Even more importantly, they achieve the satisfaction of unraveling a mystery of nature or developing a new treatment that can help millions. And no scientist ever achieved this without expressing skepticism about existing dogma.

Science and critical thinking, properly applied, are forms of positive skepticism. Dr. Chopra only fears and attacks them because they are an impediment to his way of thinking. However, it is only by passing through such impediments and challenges that ideas prove themselves worthy of long-term acceptance.

RINO Sightings

The latest RINO Sightings has been posted at the Environmental Republican.

Eugenics and involuntary euthanasia

As longtime readers know, I've had a longstanding interest in the Holocaust. A precursor of the Holocaust was known as the T4 euthanasia program. This was a program in which as many as 200,000 people deemed "useless eaters" or "life unworthy of life" were "euthanized" (a euphemism for "murdered," actually) by a variety of means, including starvation, overdoses of narcotics, poisoning, and early prototypes of gas chambers later used to to such lethal effect. The T4 program, which ran from 1939 to 1941, when Hitler ordered a temporary halt to the program due to protests from churches and the victims' families, provided the development and proving grounds for methods of mass murder that would later be expanded to the industrialized killings of millions from 1941 until the end of the war. Indeed, Josef Mengele himself learned his trade in this program. Of course, even this "temporary halt" was nothing of the sort. The program continued in secret.

A recent article got me thinking about the T4 program again. Why it did so will become apparent in a moment, but first I would like to list a few quotes from the article. They are quotes justifying the "euthanasia" of the "feebleminded" from around the appropriate time period:

1. But I am in favor of euthanasia for those hopeless ones who should never have been born – Nature’s mistakes.
2. So the place for euthanasia, I believe, is for the completely hopeless defective: nature’s mistake; something we hustle out of sight, which should never have been seen at all. These should be relieved the burden of living, because for them the burden of living at no time can produce any good thing at all. . . . For us to allow them to continue such a living is sheer sentimentality, and cruel too; we deny them as much solace as we give our stricken horse. Here we may most kindly kill, and have no fear of error.
3. ...to release the soul from its misshapen body which only defeats in this world the soul’s powers and gifts is surely to exchange, on that soul’s behalf, bondage for freedom.
4. A third variety of reaction results from an accusing sense of obligation on the part of the parents towards the defective creature they have caused to be born. The extreme devotion and care bestowed upon the defective child, even with sacrifice of advantages for its normal brothers and sisters is a matter of common observation. This position is understandable, but to the impersonal observer may appear to partake of the morbid. Disposal by euthanasia of their idiot offspring would perhaps unbearably magnify the parents’ sense of guilt.
5. It is submitted that the state of mind of the parents of an idiot may as fairly become a subject of psychiatric concern as the interrelationships in the families of psychotic patients, and the unwholesome reactions stand as much in need of correction in one case as in the other.
6. It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified. Parents who have seen the difficult life of a crippled or feeble-minded child must be convinced that, though they may have a moral obligation to care for the unfortunate creature, the broader public should not be obligated...to assume the enormous costs that long-term institutionalization might entail.
   

Here's an interesting question for you. What is the source for each of those quotes? They are all consistent with the rationales that Nazis used to argue for "euthanasia," namely not wasting society's resources and the supposed "mercy" that killing such children would be. They all date to the 1930's and early 1940's. They all sound as though they came from Third Reich eugenicists.

All but one of them didn't come from the Third Reich, however. Here are the sources:

1. Kennedy, F. (1942) The problem of social control of the congenital sterilization, euthanasia. Am. J. Psychiatry, 99, 13–16.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Anonymous (1942) Euthanasia. Am. J. Psychiatry, 99, 141–3.
5. Ibid.
6. Pamphlet published by Dr. Heilig, representative of the Nazi Physicians' League. From: Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygeine: Medicine Under the Nazis, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 183
   

Yes, the first five quotes come from Americans, the first three from neurologist Foster Kennedy, in an article based on a speech he gave to the American Psychiatric Association in May 1941. The fourth and fifth quote come from an editorial published in the same issue and seem to be considering parents who might object to the killing of their "feeble-minded" children as being worthy of "psychiatric concern." These are all discussed in a fascinating article that appeared a recent issue of History of Psychiatry. (Found via Autism Diva and Mind Hacks.)

Also appearing in the same 1942 journal was an editorial against the killing of the "feebleminded" written by Leo Kanner. Yes, that Leo Kanner, the one who published the first major work describing the condition now known as autism in 1943. Indeed, as part of his argument against involuntary euthanasia of such children, he correctly invoked the Nazis, asking rhetorically, "Shall we psychiatrists take our cue from the Nazi Gestapo?" He did, however, comment that "sterilization is often a desirable procedure" for "persons intellectually or emotionally unfit to rear children," although he did object to sterilization performed "solely on the basis of the I.Q." Even though there was a "point-counterpoint" sort of debate in this journal, it should also be remembered that the journal itself came down on the side of Kennedy, not Kanner.

When looking back at the atrocities of the Nazi regime in the name of eliminating undesirables from the Volk, it is important to realize that the ideas the fueled their quest to kill those deemed burdens on society were not unique to Germany. Far from it. As this 1942 journal shows, advocacy of various types of eugenic measures was widespread in the U.S., including among the most elite physicians in the nation. True, no one was advocating selective breeding or the killing of "lesser races" in the service of producing a "master race," as the Nazis were, but there was a disturbing similarity in the thinking of the medical elite in the U.S. with that of Nazi advocates of racial hygeine. As the History of Psychiatry article points out:

It is surprising that a debate on murder could have appeared in the most prominent psychiatric journal in the USA at the time. But as historians have noted, eugenic sterilization was legally sanctioned in the USA long before the Nazi sterilization law of 1933. The logical progression from sterilization (killing presumed genes) to ‘euthanasia’ (killing presumed gene carriers) occurred much more slowly in the USA, but accelerated in the early 1940s under German influence. The progression from sterilization to killing is ‘logical’ because, once it has been established that the state should actively participate in preventing the reproduction of ‘genetically undesirable’ people through compulsory sterilization, it eventually seems more ‘efficient’ to wipe out the alleged gene carriers themselves. In a chilling and prophetic statement in 1923, Swedish Member of Parliament and sterilization opponent Carl Lindhagen asked, ‘Why shall we only deprive these persons, of no use to society or even for themselves, the ability of reproduction? Is it not even kinder to take their lives? This kind of dubious reasoning will be the outcome of the methods proposed today’.

How prophetic were Lindhagen's words!

It was only the postwar revelation of all the atrocities the Nazis committed in the name of eugenics and racial hygeine that utterly discredited this sort of thinking in the U.S. Yet, at the eve of our entry into the war, in the most prestigious psychiatric journal in the U.S., prominent physicians were debating, in essence, whether the Nazi approach to dealing with severely disabled children was the correct one, with at least as many prominent neurologists and psychiatrists arguing that it was as arguing that it was not. (Indeed, early in his regime, Hitler himself spoke approvingly of the compulsory sterilization programs that had been implemented in several states in the U.S. by the 1930's.) We should not forget that, particularly in an era in which the genetic basis of psychiatric diseases are being discovered, lest history repeat itself.

Ah, college!

Anyone ever play garbage Jenga? You know, where he who knocks it over has to take it out? I bet you have if you're a guy and roomed with other guys while in college...

A rare political post

One week ago today, while I was in Chicago, I had the pleasure of going to dinner with my sisters and their significant others. As is not uncommon, the discussion turned a little political. As has happened in the past a few times before, my younger sister's SO accused me of being a liberal but being afraid to admit it. What irritates the hell out of me about such accusations is not being called a "liberal," but rather the implication that I would be somehow too self-deluded or too craven to admit such a change. It's the same reason the occasional similar charge that I'm an atheist but just won't admit it yet also irritates me.

I realize, of course, that yanking my chain a bit was probably what he was shooting for when he made that accusation, and that's just part of the whole give-and-take of our occasionally contentious jousting. Yes, there is no doubt that I'm not as "conservative" as I used to be (whatever the hell the word "conservative" means anymore these days), thanks to the theocrats and free spenders who have taken over today's "conservative" movement. However, by no stretch of the imagination could I be considered a liberal. At least so I thought and still think. Indeed, over the last few years, I've tended to like to look at myself as an old-school conservative, such as the kind that Kung Fu Monkey described in I Miss Republicans, a fiscal conservative with libertarian tendencies who's a realist. (I tend to agree with David Touretzky when he said, "I'm a libertarian with a small L. The Big-L libertarians are anarchist loons.")

So what's an aggrieved conservative and RINO to do when faced with such a charge?

Why, take a pointless Internet politics test, of course! And the results are...

You are a Social Liberal (63% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (63% permissive) You are best described as a: Centrist Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

There, now. Isn't it nice when a silly web political test confirms what you've said about yourself all along, that I tend to be fiscally conservative but more liberal in social areas? And it's even consistent with the results of the other silly web political quiz that I took back in March. I bet it's even scientific!

The bottom line is that "traditional" political descriptions of right and left seem to be breaking down these days. They were always rather simplistic to begin with, but with the group in power today they've become totally inadequate to describe what is going on now. We now have an ostensibly "conservative" President who does some of the most un-conservative things you can imagine. He creates huge new entitlements and bureaucracies, while promoting government intrusion into the private business of citizens through the Patriot Act. He has launched a preemptive war under the most dubious of rationales and committed this nation to a massive nation-building project, leaving our military stretched so thin that we'd better hope like hell that nothing bad happens requiring a major troop commitment elsewhere. He spends our tax dollars like the proverbial drunken sailor, and keeps running up enormous deficits through a combination of massive spending and massive tax cuts, going from record surpluses to record deficits in record time. Instead of limiting the power of the federal government, he has presided over a massive expansion of its reach. Robert Samuelson got it right when he said that "Bush has taken the most self-serving aspect of modern liberalism (its instinct to buy public support with massive government handouts) and fused it with the most self-serving instinct of modern conservatism (its instinct to buy support with massive tax cuts)." Meanwhile, in a historic reversal, it is the Democrats who have become the party of fiscal responsibility and sanity. Worse, now that Republicans have had control of the House for over a decade, they have become just as complacent and corrupt as the Democrats were before they were so justly kicked out in 1994.

Is it any wonder my political leanings seem a little confused from time to time?

Well, now, that was relatively easy. What might not be so easy is if I ever decide to take on the other contentious topic that we had a somewhat heated discussion about. Fortunately it wasn't about politics. Unfortunately, it was about faith.

ADDENDUM: I just noticed that, for some reason, the graphs come out looking different on Safari than they do using Firefox. On Firefox, I'm at about a 45° angle towards the Libertarian end, near the the edge of the "centrist" circle. On Safari, the graph puts me right on the horizontal axis, even slightly below it. The Firefox version of the graph is closer to my true leanings. Hmmm. I wonder if it's a nefarious plot by Apple....

I'm going to have to see how the results render on a PC using IE...

The New England Journal of Medicine blows an opportunity

I don’t know what it is, but most of the journals I subscribe to always seem to arrive on the same day or two, and my secretary puts them in a big pile in my “In” box. Sometimes, when I’m busy and don’t get a chance to peruse them and decide which articles are worthy of attention, they pile up quite impressively in a surprisingly brief period of time. Today, oddly enough, I happened to have some time to plow through the backlog of journals, and that is when I picked up the October 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, fresh off the presses.

And almost dropped it when I saw the Table of Contents. Could it be?

Yest it could, right there, and article entitled Faith Healers and Physicians—Teaching Pseudoscience by Mandate, by Robert S. Schwartz, M.D., a deputy editor of the NEJM. Finally, I thought, an article in a prominent medical journal that makes a connection between teaching pseudoscience like "intelligent design" creationism and quackery. It started with a snarky tone appropriate for addressing attempts by activists to promote the teaching of ID in public schools. Still, it's not a tone that I normally associate with NEJM articles:

In the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, Frank Morgan plays five roles. In one of them, he is a flimflam hawker of trivia traveling across the plains of Kansas in a horse-drawn wagon. In another, he is the wizard who, concealed by a curtain, manipulates a machine that controls all of Oz. Now, more than 65 years later, another pitchman is rolling across Kansas, but unlike Morgan's bumbling peddler of trinkets and dreams, the new one has no interest in such trifles. It is an articulate and sophisticated anti-evolution movement called "intelligent design." At its core is the idea that a supernatural being — a hidden wizard — has a hidden hand in shaping the living world.

I like it. I might have to steal it someday and use it for my own nefarious ends. So far, so good, I thought, happy to see a major medical journal stand up for science against pseudoscience. I continued reading, hoping that Dr. Schwartz was working towards the point that I hoped he was working towards. He was:

The debate has been prominent in the press and major scientific journals, but it has not been featured in medical journals, nor has it been discussed publicly by leaders of academic medicine or professional medical societies. Some might ask why physicians should care about how we educate our children, and what difference it would make to medicine if we taught children intelligent design as a counterweight to evolution — which, according to the proponents of intelligent design, is a mere theory. But acquiescing to this anti-science movement would have far-reaching consequences for the development of future generations of physicians, for the likelihood of discovering new therapies, and for understanding health and disease.

Exactly. Dr. Schwartz hit the nail right on the head. Even leaving aside the more specific arguments of how the theory of evolution helps us understand human disease and pathogens, acquiescing to anti-science would indeed have far-reaching negative impacts on a variety of areas. Moreover, I was rather surprised that Dr. Schwartz even appeared to understand the wedge strategy. In the article, although he did not refer to it explicitly by that name, he did point out the origins of “intelligent design” creationism in old-fashioned Biblical creationism. And he goes right to the heart of why ID is not science. Unfortunately, in doing so, he then went on to make a huge fumble along the way, blowing an opportunity to show exactly how the acceptance of such pseudoscience by physicians and in medical schools might have negative consequences for our understanding of disease and translation of basic scientific discoveries in the laboratory into new therapies for patients:

Some of the supporters of intelligent design are knowledgeable and sophisticated. Phillip Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the founders and financial backers of the intelligent design movement, can accurately pinpoint many problems that the theory of evolution has not come close to solving. His criticisms have merit, and his focus on precisely those things that we do not yet know blocks any rational dialogue. But Johnson and his followers always end up in the same blind alley: the problems are too complex to be explained by any proposition other than the existence of an intelligent designer.

Uh-oh. He didn't say what I thought he said about Phillip Johnson, did he?

He did, unfortunately.

PZ will probably grate his teeth even more than I did when he reads the part about Johnson’s criticisms having “merit” (if he happens to see this, that is), but, believe it or not, attributing "merit" to Johnson's arrogant puffery isn’t the biggest fumble Dr. Schwartz makes. Has Dr. Schwartz ever actually read Johnson's writings about evolution? If he did, he should have realized that in actuality Johnson's "criticisms of Darwin" are standard creationist fallacies, based on straw men, quote mining (here, too) and misstatements of what the theory of evolution says, supported by no science. Although Dr. Schwartz is correct about the “blind alley” ID inevitably leads into, he missed a huge opportunity here to point out in the pages of the most widely read peer-reviewed medical journal in the nation exactly how a lack of scientific and critical thinking with respect to one pseudoscience can often be symptom of a lack of scientific and critical thinking with respect to everything, particularly other pseudoscience. Why? As it turns out, Phillip Johnson is also deeply involved with HIV/AIDS denialism, the same pseudoscientific quackery that recently resulted in the death of a child of a high profile AIDS denialist. Indeed, Johnson is a signatory to an open letter that states:

It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group diseases called AIDS. Many biochemical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken.

If you don’t believe me about Johnson's AIDS denialist credentials, go to the Virus Myth site, where he and his writings are prominently featured. Note that the mother of the child who died from her negligence is on its Board of Directors. Consider this lovely fisking of one of Johnson’s more crackpot writings about AIDS, so much like his writings about evolution and "intelligent design." Indeed, Ed Brayton has quipped:

I think he [Johnson] just takes the same article and changes the enemy du jour from "the Darwinian establishment" to "the HIV establishment" or "the AIDS establishment". Phil Johnson is nothing if not a consistent tilter-against-windmills. Whoever he's against, it's a grand conspiracy to hide the truth and, naturally, he's got the Truth™ that the hidebound orthodoxy won't let you hear.

That about sums Johnson up rather nicely. In any case, this lost opportunity damned near sinks the article. How could a deputy editor of the NEJM fail to mention such an important point about how credulous thinking about evolution goes hand in hand with credulous thinking about medical science? Phillip Johnson is a poster boy for exactly the sort of thinking that we don't want to see in our medical students and residents. He is Exhibit A of how poor critical thinking skills and lack of understanding of the scientific method can go hand-in-hand with the acceptance of multiple types of pseudoscience. Dr. Schwartz must be either unaware of Phillip Johnson’s opinions and activism with regards to HIV, or he must have chosen to ignore the topic. (I'm not sure which explanation for this lapse would be worse.) Given the huge problem of non-evidence-based medicine and even outright quackery, Dr. Schwartz could have asked the question: Do you want future generations of doctors to be credulous with regards to the claims of pseudoscientists and quacks? Letting pseudoscience into the science classroom under the guise of a legitimate "alternative to evolution" is certainly one way to undermine a student's ability to learn the scientific method. Not a good thing for future doctors!

Fortunately, Dr. Schwartz tries to redeem himself in the remainder of the article, pointing out that the confusion between faith and science at the highest levels of public education "can hardly be an asset to the pool of applicants to medical schools and graduate schools in the sciences," asking:

What would it mean to take intelligent design seriously at the medical school level? Its proponents tell us that gaps in our knowledge of how living organisms evolved vitiate the theory of evolution. Might we conclude, then, that the cancer cell and its evolution are so complex that a creative designer must be the cause of cancer? But if the designer created cancer, is it against the hidden hand's will to find a cure for cancer? Is it in accord with the plan of the intelligent designer to receive a treatment for cancer? After all, a Jehovah's Witness would rather die than receive a blood transfusion. Yet today more than ever, the profession needs physicians who can channel scientific discoveries to the sick. What effect will pseudoscience-by-fiat have on medical progress?

I think we probably know the answer to that one. Imagine someone like Phillip Johnson as a physician. That's a scary thought if you're a patient. Worse, imagine Johnson as faculty at a medical school. That's even scarier to me as faculty. Yes, it's possible to have a solid grounding in critical thinking in one area but not in others, but if the state mandates the teaching of a pseudoscience in the classes that are prerequisites for medical school, it cannot bode well for the grounding of future medical students in the scientific method and an understanding of basic biology. Indeed, it would tend to blur the line between science and pseudoscience, leading to the scary proposition of more doctors who are like Johnson (Dr. Lorraine Day or Dr. Roy Kerry, for example). We physicians already have more than enough quacks and pseudoscientists, which is why we should be doing everything possible to teach and encourage critical thinking and science education in medical school, college, and, yes, high school. The last thing we need is more pseudoscience in our profession! But what to do? Dr. Schwartz has an idea:

If we accept the premise that it is not in the long-term interest of medicine to disguise a faith-based belief as a scientific discipline and indoctrinate future physicians and scientists in a creed that thwarts the science of medicine, what can physicians do now? It seems to me that leaders of professional societies and prominent academicians should start speaking up. At the local level, doctors are prominent and respected. They serve on school boards, and some hold public office. They are influential teachers. Many have religious affiliations, and they surely know the difference between faith and science. Engaging in a public debate about intelligent design is probably not a good idea; any debate about faith and belief will surely end inconclusively. More desirable are education and acting to protect the profession and the public from pseudoscience. The main need now is to begin to understand what the debate is about and to consider its consequences for the future of medicine.

I’m not so sure that I can be as sanguine about physicians' ability to identify the difference between faith and science. The longer I’ve been involved in rebutting “intelligent design” creationism, the more I’ve come to realize that there are actually quite a few doctors who buy into it, or who at least seem to think there’s no harm in teaching it in science class as an “alternative theory” to evolution. One prominent example is Bill Frist, a Harvard-educated cardiac surgeon, who just happens to be the Senate Majority Leader. It is still unclear to me whether he endorsed the teaching of ID out of political expediency or a genuine lack of understanding of why ID has not yet risen to the level of science, it's not entirely clear. However, in any case, he succeeded at one of the most difficult surgical specialties there is, cardiac surgery, a specialty steeped in science and a detailed understanding of human physiology and anatomy (mixed, as are all surgical specials, with the art of actually operating), but apparently never developed a sufficient understanding of the scientific method to recognize religion-inspired pseudoscience when he sees it.

Dr. Schwartz is correct that we as physicians, particularly academic physicians responsible for training the next generation of doctors, should do what we can now. What that means for me is two things: First, any students who rotate in my lab get personal instruction from me in the scientific method and how to evaluate clinical trials. Second, when I'm teaching medical students and residents, I try to inculcate in them the concepts and habit of critical thinking. Just the other day, in fact, I spent some time educating the current group of residents and medical students on our service about what confirmation bias is. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that not one of them had the slightest clue what I was talking about. I can only hope the lesson sinks in.

A Blogger-delayed Tangled Bank #38 plug

Bummer.

Blogger was acting up all night, and I couldn't get into my blog during my usual prime blogging time (9-10 PM). For a while I was worried that my blog was gone (I'd heard of such things happening to others), until I happened to notice that it wasn't just Respectful Insolence that was inaccessible. I couldn't get into any Blogspot blogs at all! Then I remembered something about an announcement about planned database maintenance tonight. Still, the time Blogger chooses for these things is most annoying.

Fortunately, things seem to be working now, which allows me to post a plug for Tangled Bank #38, which has been posted at Living the Scientific Life. You need go no further to get your fix of the best science blogging from the last couple of weeks in one neat package.

One week left before the next Skeptics' Circle

Here's my first reminder. There's one week left before the deadline for the next Skeptics' Circle, which is being hosted by Nurse Kelly at Time to Lean. Because she hasn't been blogging for a while due to vacation and working on her "top secret covert ops blog" (which she could just as easily have used for the Skeptics' Circle, but then I guess it wouldn't be "top secret" anymore), I thought I'd spread the word a bit.

Send her your best skeptical blogging to Kelly by next Wednesday evening (October 12) and then join her next Thursday for a heapin' helpin' of some serious (and not-so-serious) skepticism and critical thinking.

Here are the schedule and some more guidelines.

Discovery Institute: I told you so!

Via Pharyngula and Gibberish, I've learned that it would appear that Cardinal Schönborn, the Cardinal who stirred up such a storm by seeming to embrace intelligent design creationism in July, has recanted his previous apparent support:

A senior Roman Catholic cardinal seen as a champion of intelligent design against Darwin’s explanation of life has described the theory of evolution as “one of the very great works of intellectual history.”

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn said he could believe both in divine creation and in evolution because one was a question of religion and the other of science, two realms that complemented rather than contradicted each other.

Schoenborn’s view, presented in a lecture published by his office on Tuesday, tempered earlier statements that seemed to ally the Roman Catholic Church with U.S. conservatives campaigning against the teaching of evolution in public schools.

He continued:

“Without a doubt, Darwin pulled off quite a feat with his main work and it remains one of the very great works of intellectual history,” Schoenborn declared in a lecture in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna on Sunday. “I see no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, under one condition — that the limits of a scientific theory are respected.”

Science studies what is observable, and scientists overstep the boundaries of their discipline when they conclude evolution proves there was no creator, said the cardinal, 60, a top Church doctrinal expert and close associate of Pope Benedict XVI.

“It is fully reasonable to assume some sense or design even if the scientific method demands restrictions that shut out this question,” said the cardinal.

Particularly interesting is that Shönborn appears to be saying what most scientists have been saying all along: Science is limited to studying what is observable and measurable. If it can't be measured or somehow observed, science has little to say about it. Whether or not God exists is outside its purview, and evolutionary theory does not preclude the existence of a God. And he's right. Barring the appearance of God with a host of heavenly angels in an undeniable display of power that can't be explained by naturalistic phenomenon, science can never prove or disprove whether God exists.

So, to the Discovery Institute, Michael Behe, and all the other "intelligent design" creationism advocates who thought that Schönborn's statement would give you more respectability or that it suggested that you might be getting a powerful new ally in your never-ending fight to give your brand of religion-based pseudoscience the imprimatur of science and get it taught in public schools without having to do the actual heavy lifting of producing, oh, actual evidence to get scientists to take you seriously, I say:

I hate to say I told you so when I told you that his remarks meant little or nothing with regards to the official position of the Church regarding evolution or any impending change thereof, but I told you so. (Oh, who am I kidding? I love to tell you "I told you so.")

Cardinal Shönborn's position was never really a significant departure from long-standing Church doctrine with respect to the acceptance of the science of evolution as being compatible with Church teachings, as laid down by Pius XII fifty years ago and reinforced by John Paul II. As I said before:

As a Catholic myself (albeit the stereotypical lapsed one), I wouldn’t worry that much about this editorial if I were you. ID advocates are reading far more into than is probably there and crowing about it way more than is justified. The Catholic Church has, ever since Pius XII reconciled the Church with evolution 50 years ago, has always preached a sort of “theistic” evolution that’s not all that different from intelligent design.

And:

In essence, the Catholic Church has generally taken the view that evolution and faith are not incompatible and that God used evolution as the process that would inevitably lead to the creation of plants, animals, and humans. It's usually left the science behind evolution to biologists and the teaching of science to those trained in biology. (Perhaps its encounter with Galileo finally taught it something, even if it took a few hundred years for the lesson to sink in.) Indeed, in Catholic high schools, you will find evolution taught as science in science classes and A.P. biology classes with nary a whisper about God or design (although certainly you will hear mentions of them them in catechism classes), and in pulpits you will occasionally hear a priest mention evolution. However, unless things have changed since I stopped going to Mass regularly, I've yet to see one mention a "designer's" influence on creation as anything other than a matter of faith and belief.

The Catholic Church's view of evolution has for a long time been in essence a bit of a mix between intelligent design and theistic evolution. The difference between the Catholic Church and the fundamentalists presently pushing ID and trying to get it taught as "science" that is a valid alternative to the current theory of evolution is that the Catholic Church seems to have become somewhat better at recognizing the line between religion and faith and, at least for the last 50 years or so, has not insisted on trying to blur that line. Whatever others may think of the Catholic Church or its doctrines, in the realm of science at least, it seems to have taken the lessons of its persecution of Galileo to heart. This "retraction" (which really isn't a retraction) by Cardinal Shönborn shows how little the DI and its fellow travellers understand the Catholic Chuch. As I have said before, there does not have to be an inherent incompatibility between belief and accepting evolution as valid science, and Cardinal Shönborn appears to agree.

Can Bill O'Reilly possibly be any more ignorant?

Apparently not. Apparently his ignorance and arrogance know few bounds.

As evidence of this, on The O'Reilly Factor last night, he seemed to be claiming that it was the U.S. Army that committed the infamous Nazi war crime of the Malmédy massacre. This massacre occurred during the Battle of the Bulge on December 17, 1944, when elements of Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper fought the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion and defeated the Americans after a brief battle. About 150 of the American P.OW.'s were disarmed and made to stand in a field near the crossroads. A tank and a truck pulled up, and an SS officer pulled out a pistol and started shooting prisoners, after which other German soldiers joined in with machine guns. No one knows why. Some American soldiers ran and managed to escape into the nearby woods, but around 72-84 of the prisoners were killed. Some of the prisoners feigned death, but German soldiers moved among the fallen, shooting or beating to death with rifle butts any who showed signs of life. An American patrol discovered the massacre that night, and news of it spread quickly among Allied troops and shocked the conscience of the civilized world; that is, until the liberation of the camps revealed the full extent of Nazi crimes to all. It also served as a rallying cry for U.S. troops as they drove back the Germans in the Bulge.

Via McCarthy.vg, here's the transcript of O'Reilly interviewing General Wesley Clark on October 3:

CLARK: No, I don't know what it's about, Bill. Because the United States Army that I served in proudly for 34 years, we did not beat up and torture prisoners.

O'REILLY: General, with all respect, there were atrocities in Vietnam.

CLARK: Yes. And they were trials and they were punished.

O'REILLY: And World War II and World War I and the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.

CLARK: They were not by the chain of command.

O'REILLY: Yes, they were.

CLARK: No, they weren't. No they weren't.

O'REILLY: Lieutenant Callie and Medina in Vietnam?

CLARK: They were not condoned by the chain of command. Those guys were court martialed.

O'REILLY: With all due respect...

CLARK: ... all the way up the chain of command.

O'REILLY: General, you need to look at the Malmady (ph) massacre in World War II and the 82nd Airborne.

However, as Crooks and Liars and Jamie have pointed out, the transcript has been edited. This is what O'Reilly really said:

General, you need to look at the Malmedy massacre in World War Two, and the 82nd Airborne that did it!

Yes, there was a little of Clark and O'Reilly talking at the same time, but it was quite obvious what O'Reilly said. Don't believe me? Fortunately, Jamie has kindly kept a video clip (on his blog) and nice MPEG that prove it. Watch them. There is no doubt. (By the way, like another fellow alt.revisionism veteran Andrew Mathis, Jamie is quite active in combatting Holocaust denial on The Holocaust History Project.)

The sad thing is, O'Reilly probably doesn't realize how idiotic his statement was and, in his insufferable arrogance, would probably would never admit his error even if it were definitively pointed out to him. (Or, if he did admit his mistake, he would probably still manage to attack and blame those criticizing him.) He probably thought that the Malmédy massacre was something different, perhaps Americans massacring German soldiers, but, through his mind-numbing ignorance ended up, in essence, accusing the U.S. Army of massacring its own men during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II!

How's that for supporting our troops? What a guy. Kinda makes me feel all choked up--mainly because it makes me feel like vomiting.

Grand Rounds, Volume 2, No. 2

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 2 has been posted at the Haversian Canal. Lots of good stuff, as always. Enjoy.

How to succeed at quackery?

I wish I had thought of it first, but fortunately for you, my readers Prometheus did: How to Succeed at Quackery Without Even Trying (Part 1). It's a must-read for anyone interested in skepticism with regards to the claims of alternative medicine. If you like the Respectful Insolence Orac lays down, you'll love this. An excerpt:

Ambiguity and vagueness are the greatest assets for a budding quack. When you pick your niche, be sure to find a disorder that is poorly defined or difficult to diagnose. Disorders that are not recognized by allopaths are excellent choices, since there is no way that anyone can accuse you of misdiagnosing them. The best are disorders that are purely imaginary, since the marks will be so appreciative when you don’t say that it’s “all in their head”.

Think long and hard before choosing a disorder that has a well-established and unambiguous diagnosis, unless you are willing to put in the time to convince people that the accepted diagnostic criteria are wrong. If you are just starting out, this may be too much work – save it for when you are an established quack. At all costs, avoid disorders that the mark can diagnose themselves – promising a “cure” for freckles will mean that you actually have to deliver on your promise. It is much better to pick complaints that are vague and subjective, like fatigue, malaise or depression.

Good choices: Chronic fatigue, Autism, Gulf War Syndrome

Bad choices: Fractures, Angina, Pneumonia

Indeed. However, I would have one minor nit to pick. Quacks are actually more than happy to take on some diseases that are well-established and have fairly unambiguous diagnostic criteria. For example, chelationists push their unproven "treatment" for atherosclerotic vascular and coronary artery disease. They'll even claim that it can save patients the need for bypass surgery. (Of course, they also push it for diseases like autism as well, with sometimes catastrophic results. Given the wide number of diseases for which chelation is advocated, I sometimes wonder if there is a disease that chelation can't cure!) Another problem is that a couple of the diseases that Prometheus lists as bad choices may not be as unambigous to diagnose as he implies. For example, angina isn't always a straightforward diagnosis (hence the ability of alties to get away with advocating chelation for heart disease). However, Prometheus is correct in that these diseases are more straightforward than diseases such as chronic fatigue sydrome or Gulf War Syndrome. He is also quite correct that vague diseases whose diagnositic criteria are not rock solid are better for quacks and that diseases for which conventional medicine doesn't have a good treatment are best of all.

I would also point out one additional "niche" that can be filled by a huge number of quacks: cancers that are primarily treated surgically. Take, for example, breast cancer. As a regular on misc.health.alternative named Dr. Peter Moran, an Australian surgeon, has pointed out, most breast cancers, even moderate sized ones, are cured surgically. (For small, stage I tumors this is even more frequently the case.) Indeed, up to 50% of women with breast cancer treated with lumpectomy alone will remain cancer free with no further treatment at 12 years. Sentinel lymph node biopsy or axillary dissection can define stage and identify patients at high risk of recurrence who would be be likely to benefit from more aggressive chemotherapy, but neither is strictly necessary for cure in early stage node-negative breast cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy reduce the rates of recurrence. Without radiation therapy, for example, breast cancers treated with lumpectomy alone will recur in the breast 25-40% of the time. However, that means that most women treated with lumpectomy alone will not recur in the breast. In addition, estrogen blockade with Tamoxifen can significantly improve long-term survival over surgery alone in women whose tumors are estrogen receptor positive, as can chemotherapy in high risk patients, but these are adjuvant therapies, not the primary therapy. In some cases, particularly for early stage breast cancer, the absolute survival benefit from chemotherapy as a percentage is measured in the low single digits.

This is the reason quacks can get away with persuading women to forego chemotherapy and/or radiation often enough to make believers of some women like Sandra, resulting in their enthusiastic "testimonials." Dr. Moran put it quite well in relating an e-mail exchange that he had with a woman with breast cancer who claimed to have "cured" herself with alternative medical treatments:

Sandra: I cured myself of BC 5 years ago-- turned down all conventional therapy. Former RN too. there are many like me-- I have a long list of others who have down the same. The tide is turning . Please try not to discourage others. -------- RN"

PM: Tell me more about your history. I assume you had an excision-biopsy?

Sandra: Why?

PM: I take it from this response that you did have an excision biopsy, and if so, it is not true that you had no conventional medical treatment.

Sandra: No excisional biopsy! I won't waste my time with you. Please do not email again-- I will delete. I talk to many women's groups and have a strong medical background. Your approach is very sad and must be dscouraging to women you come in contact with. End fo discussion!

Of course, "Sandra" had indeed had an excisional biopsy, as her own "testimonial" on the Internet revealed. The reason Dr. Moran asked this is because an excisional biopsy that happens to get the entire tumor is, for all practical purposes, a lumpectomy. It has in essence treated the cancer surgically. Consequently, it was the excisional biopsy that cured Sandra, not any alternative medicine regime she took. Indeed, you will find that virtually all women who claim that alternative medicine "cured" them had at least an excisional biopsy, if not a formal lumpectomy (which takes more tissue in an attempt to get a generous margin of normal tissue around the tumor).

As I have discussed in detail before, women who undergo lumpectomy and then decide to forgo chemotherapy and radiation in favor of alternative therapies tend to attribute their survival to the "alternative" therapy, not to the surgery:

When such patients are in a good prognosis group, where recurrence is uncommon, or have a more advanced tumor but are lucky enough not to recur, often they attribute their survival not to the primary surgery, but rather to whatever alternative therapy they have decided to take, even though it almost certainly had nothing to do with their survival. To them, it was the alternative medicine that "saved" them, not good old-fashioned surgery. In contrast, women who opt for alternative therapy and then recur obviously don't provide good testimonials to sell alternative medicine, which is why you almost never hear about them.

Unfortunately, because we do not yet have good enough prognostic indicators to tell exactly who will and will not benefit from more aggressive treatment, this means that many women are treated to save the lives of a relatively few. However, we are doing better, as the evolution of breast cancer treatment has been almost continually towards less aggressive surgical treatment (modified radical mastectomy instead of radical mastectomy, lumpectomy instead of mastectomy, sentinel lymph node biopsy instead of axillary dissection). The next frontier will be identifying women who do not need chemotherapy because they have low risk disease or those who may need even more aggressive chemotherapy because they are at high risk of relapse. Most women who provide these "alternative medicine" testimonials happen to be either the ones who have self-selected themselves to be at low risk or the patients at high risk of relapse who happened to be lucky. Not infrequently, they are patients who prematurely declare themselves "cured." Most breast cancer recurrences, whether local or metastatic, occur within five years, but there is still a significant relapse rate at 10 years and even later.

The bottom line is that early stage breast cancer, because it is so treatable and usually has such a good prognosis, is as fertile a niche for quacks as any that Prometheus has mentioned, because most patients will do pretty well. It is important to remember that many alternative medical treatments are not necessarily quackery and that, indeed, some might have utility in improving quality of life. However, none have yet been shown to provide a survival benefit in well-designed clinical trials. Unfortunately, though, there are too many "healers" out there who claims to be able to "cure" cancers without any plausible scientific rationale or clinical evidence to suggest that their methods do anything of the sort.

That little nit picking aside, I can't wait for Part 2 of Prometheus' series...

RINO Sightings: Reports from the RINO agents

A most unusual RINO Sightings has been posted at The Strata-sphere. I thought I was looking at a Skeptics' Circle entry about alien abductions, but it turns out I wasn't.

Oh, well, there goes one idea for Skeptics' Circle hosting...

Better late than never: Ask EneMan!

I was away at a training conference in Chicago over the weekend and then flew back Saturday night--only to be on call yesterday! The good news is that I got to see my sisters and visit one of my favorite restaurants in Chicago. The bad news is that, unfortunately, there was no time for blogging. (Yeah, yeah, I know. I could have planned ahead so that his appearance was ready to post on the first of the month; that, however, would have required too much foresight.) Now, fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), I had an idea that is a natural extension of our Flushing Hero's last appearance. Introducing, for the first time, an occasional feature (which just means that I don't plan on necessarily doing it every month--unless, of course, I feel like it):

Ask EneMan!

Dear EneMan:

I've been having some crampy right upper quadrant abdominal pain over the last few months. It's not consistent, but seems to be most often provoked by eating, especially when I hit McDonald's for a nice, tasty Big Mac and fries. Sometimes it's pretty bad; sometimes it's just discomfort. A friend of mine told me it sounds like gallstones and recommended that I start doing "liver flushes." He was really enthusiastic about them, but I have my doubts. These "flushes" seem to involve drinking a lot of juices, olive oil, Epsom salts, and grapefruit in a strategy to make me poop a lot and flush out the stones from the liver and gallbladder, along with toxins. Supposedly, the stones will come right out in my poop and I won't need surgery!

I figured, given your purpose in life, you'd know whether there was anything to this treatment. So tell me, EneMan, does it do any good? Does it work to get rid of gallstones? Help! I'm really afraid of needing surgery!

Signed,
Stoned and Crampy


Dear Stoned and Crampy:

My goodness. Sorry to hear about your pain. It really sucks to have cramps like that. Fortunately, I'm a bit of an expert in things that cleanse the colon.

First, you really need to see a real doctor. Does your friend have "M.D." after his name? Is he a general surgeon or a gastroenterologist? Or is he just some guy who thinks he knows what he's talking about? No doubt he gave you a lot of testimonials as "evidence" his favored remedy works, rather than actual scientific studies or well-designed clinical trials. You may indeed have gallstones, but there are lots of things that can cause upper abdominal pain. You shouldn't just assume that it's gallstones, even if the symptomatology seems to point to gallstones as the most likely culprit. Go see your doctor forthwith! You might need surgery for symptomatic cholelithiasis, but these days its usually done through a laparoscope and is much less painful than in years past. Or you may not even need surgery. However, you're not going to find out either by writing to a walking, talking, giant Fleets enema or by listening to some friend of yours with no medical training. You need to see a real doctor, get a real history and physical done, some lab work, and an ultrasound of your abdomen.

One thing I can tell you, though, is that these "liver flushes" or "cleanses" are, if you'll excuse the term, a load of bullshit (or, in your case Stoned and Crampy shit). The idea seems to be that, by provoking a lot of colon activity, you can somehow "flush out" the supposed "toxins" or "stones" in the liver and gallbladder. And, indeed, these "liver flushing" regimens will provoke a lot of colon activity, as they often use large quantities of olive oil, flaxseed oil, frequently mixed with epsom salts and various fruit juices. (Heck, they probably provoke more colon activity than I myself can.) Sometimes the protocols will even tell you to take coffee enemas, much like the ones Orac warned about months ago.

As "evidence," liver flush proponents seem strangely proud to display rather disgusting pictures of things that they picked out of their poop. Don't ask me why these people are so obsessed with their own waste! Their fascination with feces puts even me to shame, and I have an attachment on my head designed to--well, best not to speak of it. They will claim that these things are "liver stones" or "gallstones" (or even "parasites").

What you will never find is an actual well-designed clinical trial that shows that any of this actually works to remove gallstones. Here's what my bud Orac once recommended as an easy and relatively inexpensive pilot trial that could be done to test the claims of these "liver cleansers" empirically:

All you would need to do such a pilot study is a interested and/or sympathetic radiologist to team up with a "healer" who has an ultrasound machine--and, of course, the will to document symptoms, physical examination, diagnosis, pre-flush stone load in the gallbladder, and post-flush stone load in the gallbladder rigorously.

Neat, clean (well, given the nature of a "liver flush," not really so clean, but you get what I mean), and not that difficult to do. To make it even more rigorous, you could even limit it to only people with ultrasound-documented symptomatic gallstones; randomize them into two groups, one group getting the flushes, one group not; and see whether you find more such "stones" in the stools of the treated group compared to the controls. You could then of course analyze these "stones" to see if they are real gallstones. It should come as no surprise to any skeptic, though, that you will never find such a trial supporting the contention that these flushes remove liver or gallstones, at least not in the peer-reviewed medical literature. If such a trial existed and supported the effectiveness of flushes at removing gallstones and liver stones, you just know the alties would be trumpeting it! They don't. Instead they trumpet testimonials and disgusting pictures. And they make all sorts of claims for these "flushes," as well, such as the ability to make allergies disappear and purge "toxins," even mercury. (I wonder if there will be a turf war between the liver flushers and the chelationists.)

One complaint was that "healers" don't have access to CT scans. Orac answered thusly:

"Healers" don't need a CT machine. They just need an ultrasound machine, which is less expensive by a factor of at least 25-50. Ultrasound machines have become quite ubiquitous, as the price has fallen dramatically (and the quality has increased dramatically) in recent years. Virtually every OB/GYN practice that does prenatal care has at least one in their office. Many general surgeons have them now, too; as do most big emergency rooms. They now make portable ultrasound machines that fit into briefcases....Heck, you can find ultrasound machines in very poor parts of China and India, where, unfortunately, they are used to determine the sex of fetuses, so that parents can abort females they don't want. So don't tell me alt-med "healers" can't get access to basic ultrasound machines. I don't buy it for one minute, particularly since I've seen ads from such "healers" claiming to use ultrasound as part of their approach.

Quite true. Some of those alties are raking in the bucks from the rubes, but they always plead poverty when it comes to spending a little of that green to do a real clinical trial.

But, you ask, what are those truly disgusting "stones" that colon flush advocates strain out of their own poop and display proudly as "evidence" that these "liver flushes" work? A group in New Zealand recently contributed to the Lancet a case report that gives an idea of what they probably are:

A 40-year-old woman was referred to the outpatient clinic with a 3-month history of recurrent severe right hypochondrial pain after fatty food. [EneMan's note: Here "hypochondrial" means "below the ribcage, not "hypochondriac."] Abdominal ultrasound showed multiple 1–2 mm gallstones in the gallbladder.

She had recently followed a “liver cleansing” regime on the advice of a herbalist. This regime consisted of free intake of apple and vegetable juice until 1800 h, but no food, followed by the consumption of 600 mL of olive oil and 300 mL of lemon juice over several hours. This activity resulted in the painless passage of multiple semisolid green “stones” per rectum in the early hours of the next morning. She collected them, stored them in the freezer, and presented them in the clinic.

Microscopic examination of our patient's stones revealed that they lacked any crystalline structure, melted to an oily green liquid after 10 min at 40°C, and contained no cholesterol, bilirubin, or calcium by established wet chemical methods. Traditional faecal fat extraction techniques indicated that the stones contained fatty acids that required acid hydrolysis to give free fatty acids before extraction into ether. These fatty acids accounted for 75% of the original material.

Experimentation revealed that mixing equal volumes of oleic acid (the major component of olive oil) and lemon juice produced several semi solid white balls after the addition of a small volume of a potassium hydroxide solution. On air drying at room temperature, these balls became quite solid and hard.

We conclude, therefore, that these green “stones” resulted from the action of gastric lipases on the simple and mixed triacylglycerols that make up olive oil, yielding long chain carboxylic acids (mainly oleic acid). This process was followed by saponification into large insoluble micelles of potassium carboxylates (lemon juice contains a high concentration of potassium) or “soap stones”.

So it would appear that it is in reality the flush that probably produces the "stones" these alties are fishing out! It makes perfect sense, if you think about it. These protocols usually involve fasting and then drinking a as much as a half liter or more of olive oil at one time. That could easily provide the conditions for this sort of reaction to take place.

What's the harm, you ask, if some alties regularly purge themselves and think that it somehow improves their liver health? You should know from things I've said before why! I abhor anything that can screw up your colon, as you should know, and purging like this can most certainly do that! Even colon cleanse advocates acknowledge it implicitly, even as they tout its supposed health benefits. Look at some of these warnings from altie liver flush protocols themselves. Remember, this isn't me, Orac, or some other skeptic; this is the colon flush advocates themselves:

Warning: if you take everything at once, you will almost surely barf and be very mad at me for telling you about this protocol.

Or this:

Webmaster WARNING:

This recipe is included here for information purposes only!

This recipe is rather extreme, because the amount of oil is EXTREME (2 cups), and the amount of juice to be taken in a short period of time is also extreme! If you are new to liver cleansing, I urge you to first try Hulda Clark's recipe, which is very potent, but all you need is 1/2 cup of olive oil. If you are liver cleansing veteran, and you like to explore your limits, then this cleansing recipe may just be the right for you to try! You may get very sick after consuming 2 cups of olive oil. 1/2 cup or up to a 1 cup of oil happened to be more then enough for most people! You have been warned!

And, finally, look at this variation:

The most dangerous part of a traditional liver flush is a deep abdominal massage used to push the blood and lymph through the system. Only an expert can perform this procedure. With more than the usual amount of pressure and force, the therapist reaches two or three inches under the rib cage, and massages the liver, gently pushing the blood and lymph toward the intestines. This technique cannot be applied to the obese, and can be especially painful to those with a muscular physique. Even for people with loose skin, the technique is inevitably painful and leaves colorful bruises.

Why on earth would anyone want to "explore their limits" with respect to liver cleansing or to subject themselves to such a procedure, I have no idea. What I do to a person's colon is really very mild in comparison to this. I tell you, these people are so oddly convinced that their body is so full of toxins that must be purged, that I think they must be taking a cue from General Jack D. Ripper and his fanatical desire to protect his "purity of essence." To them, the external environment and the human body must seem vile things, full of nastiness, toxins, and all manner of unnameable evils that must be expunged. It sounds more religious than scientific to me!

But I've dwelt on this rather disgusting topic long enough. It's October and Halloween is coming up. Time for me to strut my stuff. Sorry I'm late, but Orac seemed to think that learning about partial breast irradiation, visiting his sisters in Chicago while he happened to be there, and taking care of patients on call yesterday were all more important things to do than helping me get my monthly appearance ready to post on time! Geez.

October 2002


October 2004


October 2005

And, as always, here is a list of every appearance of EneMan since the very beginning:

September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
EneMan's first appearance (December 2004)

The History Carnival #17

While I was away and on call, I happened to miss the 17th Edition of the History Carnival, which has been posted at The Apocalyptic Historian (great name for a blog, by the way--maybe I should change the name of my blog to Apocalyptic Insolence).

There's some great stuff there. Check it out.

The First Circus of the Spineless

The first ever Circus of the Spineless has been posted at milkriverblog, and it is indeed a three ring circus! Check it out....

Who knew invertebrates could generate so much interest?