In the course of such sneering, one of them conflated creationists, Tea Partiers, and birthers, saying that Tea Partiers believe all sorts of impossible things, such as that the President is a Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorist and the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

Uh, no. That the Earth is only 6,000 years old is impossible. That is to say, if that were true, pretty much all of our scientific discoveries of the past couple of centuries, and a large chunk of known history, would have to be completely wrong. That is as near impossible as it is possible to get.

That the President is a Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorist is extremely unlikely but not impossible. Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorists do exist, after all, so in the exceedingly unlikely case that the President somehow turned out to be one of them, that would not invalidate any scientific discovery or any history except the personal histories of a few individual human beings. That possibility dos not belong in the same category as a 6,000 year old Earth.

Actually, I think the possibility that the President is a Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorist belongs more in the same category as the possibility that the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt next year. It’s erupted before, so we know the possibility exists, but I’m not moving to the Southern Hemisphere to escape it

The defenders of CAM like to whine that of course they can’t afford to do proper randomized placebo-controlled double-blinded trials, and the scientific community won’t fund those trials, and it’s just all very unfair because people are dying for lack of that proof.

This is bogus**, and defenders of science should hit them with that every time they whine about it.

CAM defenders claim to have cancer cure rates for all cancers upwards of 90%. If this is the case, they can prove it to the complete satisfaction of anybody (including the Nobel Prize committee) very easily and cheaply, just doing what they do now. All they need to do is pick one of the truly horrible cancers — pancreatic, for instance — and report two-year survival for a reasonably large group, say one hundred patients.

Two-year survival percentages for pancreatic cancer are in the single digits for all patients, regardless of age, medical condition, and treatment (though survival is lower without treatment, of course). Therefore it doesn’t matter whether people are randomly assigned to the CAM treatment or not, or whether there’s a control group, since there are no known variables that would make much difference in survival. The natural history of the disease serves as the control group.

Similarly, there’s no need for any patients to receive a placebo. Placebos may make a difference in how the patient feels about the situation, maybe in the pain or discomfort he suffers, but they make very little difference in survival. If placebos kept cancer patients alive, oncologists would have lots more surviving patients.

Likewise, there’s no need for blinding either side, if the measure is “Patient is alive” vs. “Patient is dead”. Barring fraud, there are very few doubtful cases where one might be inclined to score a patient as alive or dead based on one’s presuppositions about the effectiveness of treatment.

In short, to prove that a CAM cancer treatment works, the practitioner should proceed as follows:

• Line up a hundred or so pancreatic cancer patients.
• Make sure they are properly evaluated by a conventional oncologist, so there can be no question of their diagnosis.
• Document irrevocably their identifying information, so there can be no doubt as to who was in the original group***.
• Treat them according to the CAM protocol.

If, after two years, ninety of the group are still alive (as we would expect given the claims of CAM practitioners), then the treatment undeniably must have worked. There simply are no known confounding factors, biasing influences, or other treatments that could have produced that result.

And if CAM defenders don’t push for this simple demonstration … well, we know what that means.

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* I.e., pseudo-scientific.
** Simon Singh got in trouble for using that word …
*** I would put all the info in one big document then encrypt it using public/private keys, burn the encrypted document on CDs, and then ship it off to national health services, insurance companies, individual oncologists, mass media, bloggers, and anyone else I could think of. But then, I think in computer terms. The point of encrypting is that the patients’ private information isn’t revealed to the world. Part of setting up the test is that the patients agree that after two years their info can be revealed. Since they don’t expect to be around in two years, it seems to me that they’d be willing. After two years, you reveal the private key so anyone who wants to can verify that the surviving patients really do represent 90% of the original group.

This has had 2,478,074 viewings as of noon on Saturday, June 19. I wonder how many million it will get to before the election.

Update: I should clarify that I was not convinced by the mitochondrial DNA absence of evidence.

No living human being has been found with mDNA sufficiently different from the rest of us to suggest that he or she has Neandertal mDNA. But all that proves is that no Neandertal female left descendants that have continued down to the present in the purely female line. When you consider how few varieties of mDNA there are among the billions of people now living, that must be true of the vast majority of women who were living at that time, Neandertal or sapiens. It does not prove that no Neandertal woman has descendants of any kind living today.

Just as mDNA is passed in the maternal line, the Y-chromosome is passed in the paternal line, and there are no known cases of men today who carry a Y-chromosome that is suspected of being a Neandertal chromosome. But that just proves that no Neandertal man has descendants in the purely male line, which is equally true of the vast majority of men living in that time.

But again, I’m thrilled to learn that I’m part Neandertal.

One of the points that Walter Williams makes repeatedly is that individuals cannot afford to engage in systematic (society-wide) discrimination. He argues that systematic discrimination has to be enforced by the government, or it will fail.

Dr. Williams points out that, in apartheid South Africa, there were laws restricting the kinds of jobs blacks could hold — and white employers were charged with and convicted of violating those laws. Why did white employers take that risk? Because it was in their individual interest to employ the best available workers in the jobs for which they were best suited. It is only government — which has no concern for the bottom line — which can demand and enforce the inefficiency of refusing to place the best workers in the right jobs.

Likewise, Dr. Williams points to the segregated buses in the South, and observes that the bus companies resisted segregation — they fought the laws requiring segregation, and when they lost, they disobeyed the laws until they were threatened with legal action. Why would they refuse to humiliate black people when the law not only allowed but required it? Because those black people were their customers, and they didn’t want to drive off their customers. Only a government can ignore the bottom line and deliberately humiliate a class of people regardless of the economic effect.

Getting back to the TEA Party, the tea-partiers wish to reduce the scope of government and increase the scope of individual decision-making. This makes systematic discrimination more difficult rather than less, which would not be a desirable outcome for white supremacists.

You may reply that systematic discrimination is illegal in the United States, and indeed that the Federal Government is hostile to the goals of white supremacists. Well sure it is … now. But what basis is there for the Federal Government to be hostile to the goals of white supremacists? What reason is there for systematic discrimination to be illegal?

It has long been thought that the Constitution demands equal rights under the law, but we have seen that the Constitution is, well, less honored than previously. It is not self-executing. If all three branches get together and decide that, say, freedom of speech means freedom to say what the law allows when the law allows it, to those whom the law allows to hear it (McCain-Feingold) … well, there’s not much left of the Constitution, is there?

So what is there to stop the Federal Government from deciding that “equal rights under the law” means dramatically different rights for different groups? Can that happen?

The insane spending currently engaged in by Congress can end only in disaster. I do not know what the disaster will be, though I think Zimbabwean-style inflation is the probable end-game. Whatever the ultimate disaster, with a black President, don’t you think the white supremacists would seize the opportunity — the same opportunity a certain dictator of the 20th century seized — to blame all of the nation’s troubles on a specific racial group? Don’t you think they would be in an exceedingly strong position to take power? And once they were in power, with the nation in turmoil and the precedent established that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are not in fact guaranteed … how long would equality under the law last?

The tea-partiers want to avert the looming disaster by reining in spending. They want to re-establish the principle that the United States is a Constitutional republic. Why on Earth would white supremacists support the tea-partiers? On the contrary, I would expect white supremacists to be the most enthusiastic supporters of the Federal Government’s race to ruin.

First raven quotes a report that many young adults are leaving Christian churches when they grow up, and adds,

What implies this is that xianity is on the skids in the USA. Making creationism a litmus test works both ways. If people have to believe that mythology is real and hating science is a requirement, some will just drop the religion. Mostly the best and brightest.

By my reckoning, based on the ARIS surveys, between 1 and 2 million people leave the religion every year. These days between the xian terrorist MD assassins, the Catholic child rape problem, and the Hutaree xian militia wannabe cop killers, xianity is providing quite the wind at the back for this exodus.

I don’t know about you, but “xian” for Christian strikes me as a deliberate insult. Mind you, I’m not even a believer, but this offends me. Yes, people sometimes used to write Xmas for Christmas, but that initial letter is not an X in our alphabet, it is a Chi in the Greek alphabet and so is correctly used as an abbreviation for Christ. Using a lowercase x is plain and simply wrong since there is no connection between lowercase x and “Christ”. And I think people like raven know that and do it intentionally.

Continuing, raven goes on to quote one (count ‘em, one) Catholic Cardinal saying atheists are “sub-human”. (Well, he’s scum. That doesn’t mean the whole Catholic Church is scum.) raven then adds,

This isn’t going to go over well. The No Religions are now 24% of the US population, 72 million people, the largest sect if they were a sect. Humans have a very predictable response when they are attacked, insulted, and demonized. Right back at them.

Yep, that’s quite true. And the people who are regularly called death cultists and accused of wanting to overthrow the United States, by people like raven, also have that very same very predictable response when they are attacked, insulted, and demonized. But strangely, raven doesn’t grasp that.

Amusingly, a few hours before raven started the comments above, John Kwok observed

The Tea Party Movement started in February 2009. Only within the last few months has it opted to align itself to the Republican Party. So, just on the face of it, I am quite confident that it will resist any “fundamentalist take over”. Most Tea Party Movement activists tend to be fellow Libertarian in their outlook and couldn’t care less about Xian concerns with regards to abortion, stem cell research, etc. etc.:

And, just minutes after raven correctly observed that “Humans have a very predictable response when they are attacked, insulted, and demonized”, Mike in Ontario, NY, responds to John Kwok,

Spontaneous? Grass-roots? Pffft. John, you’re talking out your arse on this one. The teabaggers are being promoted from “below” by white supremacist organizations who are mainstreaming their Xian terrorism via friendly mouthpieces like Faux Noise, Whirled Nut Doily, Dredge, etc. Stop trying to portray the new white power movement as being something actually sensible, credible, or even popular. The fringers are getting a lot of play right now, but they’re just being manipulated with divisive ploys and white suburban race paranoia. Restoring civil liberties? WTF are you smoking, Kwok? You sound like a YEC’er when you speak of the ‘baggers.

Yep, nothing improves dialog like impugning people’s motives without basis, calling them racists without evidence, and consistently using a crude sexual slur to refer to them. And of course they won’t respond in the predictable fashion … right?