Lee's Blog

I am frequently amazed at the sheer unpleasantness of so many people on the Internet. Orac’s got another live one, for example.

This is one J. B. Handley, who runs Generation Rescue, which claims to try to help autistics in some way, but mostly seems to attack the doctors and scientists who are trying to help autistics as well as everyone else. Handley was interviewed by the New York Times, but before the article came out (I’m not sure it’s out yet), he posted a personal slam at the interviewer. Orac goes into much more detail in his patented style. Read the whole thing.

Orac criticizes him for using gutter language, which Handley doesn’t think is fair, so after a couple of hostile but printable replies, he uses … the very same gutter language.

But I wanted to reply to a specific “argument” he makes. He says this:

What did this study actuall [sic] do? Well, from the study itself:

“The age at which doses of thimerosal-containing vaccines were administered was recorded, and measures of mercury exposure by 3, 4, and 6 months of age were calculated and compared with a number of measures of childhood cognitive and behavioral development covering the period from 6 to 91 months of age.”

Plain English: They compared the TIMING, and only the TIMING, of when kids got the DTP vaccine with Thimerosal, to see if the TIMING of the shots (earlier in a child’s life) was correlated with neurological disorders.

Their conclusion:

“We could find no convincing evidence that early exposure to thimerosal had any deleterious effect on neurologic or psychological outcome when given according to an accelerated schedule. This is reassuring for developing countries that receive DTP vaccines according to the Expanded Program of Immunization schedule and where multidose vials that contain the thimerosal preservative are often the only option. In the face of the current evidence from this study and the growing literature, the dangers posed by contaminated multidose vaccine vials far outweigh any potential risk posed by thimerosal.”

Plain English:

This would be the same as saying:

We looked at smokers who began smoking at 13 with those who began smoking at 21. Their lung cancer rates were the same. So, smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer.

To look at a study that ONLY looks at vaccinated kids, and within that only looks at WHEN they got their vaccines and than say this somehow helps makes the case that vaccines do not cause autism means that you are one of the stupidest people in the history of mankind.

Well, I said his comments were initially printable, not that they were polite or sensible. But to respond to his example:

Suppose we found that the lung cancer rates were the same, but the median age at which the first group developed lung cancer was 40, and the median age for the second group was 50. If all other things are about equal (like total cigarettes smoked by the time lung cancer developed), then that would indeed suggest that smoking does cause cancer. It’s that dose-response thing that Orac has mentioned on occasion. On the other hand, if we found both groups developed presbyopia at a median age of 45, then we would reasonably conclude that in fact smoking doesn’t cause presbyopia.

In the case of the Heron study Handley mentioned, if vaccines cause brain damage that causes autism, then earlier and more frequent vaccines should cause earlier and more severe autism than later and less frequent vaccines. But that hypothesis was not borne out.

How did they get these guys to sit still for this!

Ah, ferret videos. I could watch all day.

Want. Want. Want.

Baby ferret …

So, I took this Civics Quiz. I got a 96.97 (32 out of 33) according to them. In my opinion, however, I got a hundred.

The answer that they scored as wrong was to this question:

30) Which of the following fiscal policy combinations would a government most likely follow to stimulate economic activity when the economy is in a severe recession?
A. increasing both taxes and spending
B. increasing taxes and decreasing spending
C. decreasing taxes and increasing spending
D. decreasing both taxes and spending

Their answer was C, decreasing taxes and increasing spending. My answer was A, increasing both taxes and spending. The reason is that the question was not what fiscal policy combinations would be most effective, it was what fiscal policy combinations would be most likely.

Well, in my entire lifetime, the federal government has never once, not in any year, not for any reason whatsoever, decreased spending in real or nominal terms. So that one’s a no-brainer. B and D are right out.

So the choice is whether the federal government is likely to increase or decrease taxes. Decreasing taxes will be spun as “the eeeevillll Republicans are trying to starve the federal government and the desperate poor people who depend on it, just to further enrich their plutocrat buddies”. Therefore, taxes will not be decreased. The One has stated his intention of raising taxes no matter how much harm it does to the economy, though my understanding is that he’s been advised to keep quiet about that, so it is possible that the nominal tax rates will not be raised next year. However, bracket creep will ensure that marginal rates will go up, and of course the tax rates as a whole will go up as soon as President Bush’s tax decreases expire.

So the answer to the question is A. No matter how deep the recession, no matter how badly the economy is damaged as a result, the federal government will most likely raise both taxes and spending.

I got a perfect score on the civics quiz.

I can’t stand it. I’ve got to comment on this.

One of those eeevilll atheists, Alex, says to Comfort:

“No one deserves hell. There’s simply nothing that a human could do that would justify eternal punishment.”

Comfort immediately attacks:

Alex, you have just revealed something about your character. Jeffery Dahmer raped murdered, dismembered, and then ate his victims. If one of them was your little brother, would you want Dahmer to go to Hell? Or are you quite happy (assuming that you are an atheist) for him simply to be dead.

Well, let’s think about that. Should Jeffery Dahmer burn in Hell for ever?

How about we ask Alex’s (hypothetical) little brother what he thinks? Admittedly he’s dead, but if we can torture a dead murderer, I don’t see why we can’t question a dead victim. So we go looking for Alex’s little brother, but the search is short because there’s only two places to look: Heaven and Hell.

Suppose we find him in Heaven. He is experiencing utter, unimaginable, complete and eternal bliss. Whatever suffering he had on Earth cannot distress him as that would make his bliss incomplete. He has no lingering pains from his injuries, no nightmares, no panic attacks thinking that his attacker might return. Dahmer’s actions trouble him less than the brush of a gnat’s wing. Why should he care whether Dahmer is tortured for his deeds?

Suppose instead that we find Alex’s little brother in Hell. Now he is experiencing monstrous, unthinkable, unspeakable, eternal torment. Compared to what he is suffering, the merely finite injury done to him by Dahmer is less than the brush of a gnat’s wing. Why should he care if Dahmer is tortured? Indeed, if his opinion made any difference, which it obviously would not, he might want Dahmer’s suffering to be limited since that might imply that his own suffering might be limited as well.

In other words, if you accept the notions of Heaven and Hell, eternal punishment cannot be justified by Man’s inhumanity to Man.

But Comfort goes on:

How about Hitler? Where would you like him to end up? Are you happy also for him to be dead? Then that reveals something about your attitude to six million dead Jews. Have you no desire for retribution? Doesn’t their blood cry out for justice? Perhaps you should go and see the movie “The Boy in Striped Pajamas.” Maybe it will do something for you.

“Doesn’t their blood cry out for justice?”

Yes, it does, but infinite torture is not in fact justice. Indeed, even finite torture may not be justice. Imagine if Hitler had been taken alive, and Roosevelt had proposed slowly and scientifically torturing him to death over a period of decades. A fair number of good people would likely have cheered, but a lot of other good people would have been revolted by the concept. Not so very long ago, torturing people to death for their crimes was accepted behavior worldwide. Now, in large part thanks to Christianity, most people of the West don’t accept that.

But let’s say we did accept torture as a form of justice. How long should Hitler be tortured for one death? And remember that this torture is magical, so he cannot pass out, cannot die, cannot become so brutalized as to lose his sense of self — must in fact experience every single second of the torture. Would a hundred years do? No? How about a thousand? No? How about ten thousand? That covers all the history of civilization. Hundreds of generations are born and grow old and die; empires rise and fall and are forgotten; cities grow and decay and crumble to dust — and still Hitler is being tortured for that one death — the death of a person who would not have lived more than a century in any case.

Is that not enough? I think it is. But if you don’t, make it a million years. Make it a billion (single-celled organisms ooze along the mud for half a billion years, then multi-cellular organisms evolve, find their way out of the sea, grow into mighty dinosaurs that die off, grow again into large mammals that ultimately develop brains and take over the world — and still Hitler is being tortured for that one death). It doesn’t make any difference what the number is. If your choice is a finite number, then six million times your choice is still a finite number, and when Hitler has suffered all of that, he still has an eternity of agony to endure.

No, I don’t think infinite torture is justified even for Hitler, even for Stalin — for anyone. We are finite beings. The harm we do is finite. If the punishment is proportional, it too must be finite.

This isn’t even commenting on the fact that Comfort thinks those six million Jews are burning in Hell alongside Hitler for eternity. And he’s okay with that. They didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, after all. (It is probably evident that I am not okay with that.)

I think Comfort has resolved the question of “Can God perform an evil act?” by replying “God cannot perform an evil act because any act He may perform is by definition good, even if it is blatantly, horrifically evil according to the moral code He has implanted in us.” I prefer the answer that “God can perform an evil act but He won’t perform an evil act because He is the ultimate good.” Therefore, I do not believe in infinite torture in Hell.

There seems to be some question as to whether The One and the Democrats intend to openly confiscate existing 401k plans, or merely “encourage” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) their holders to roll them over into “guaranteed retirement accounts” run, of course, by the federal government. Whether or not they openly confiscate the existing plans, they intend to kill them going forward and substitute a “forced savings” of 5% of income, in exchange for a “guaranteed” 3% income on the “savings”. The government will take care of you in your retirement!

Oh.

This sounds strangely like the promises made about Social Security. It was going to be invested, as the guaranteed retirement accounts are, and it was going to pay for itself. Of course, it was invested precisely the way the guaranteed retirement accounts will be, by buying government bonds. In other words, the government puts an IOU in the guaranteed retirement account and then spends the money like a drunken sailor (which is an insult to drunken sailors, actually). When it comes time to pay, well, you get whatever they can scrape up from the current taxes.

This action should have been predictable, of course. Ponzi schemes always fail eventually (see today’s news for an example), and Social Security has been failing for a long time. The only reason it’s managed to keep going this long is that people are forced at gunpoint to invest, which has not historically been possible for most schemers to achieve. However, as the Ponzi scheme fails catastrophically, it has been historically the norm for the schemer to sneak off, leaving the investors holding the bag, and start another one.

In this case, the U.S. Government cannot sneak off and start another one, so they’re just starting another one “in place” as it were. This one will pull another 5% of income into their maw (initially of course — the tax will inevitably go up because it’s the only way to keep the Ponzi scheme going). Like Social Security and Medicare, they intend this to be a stealth tax, as people may honestly believe early on that they actually have a guaranteed retirement. (I have met elderly people who genuinely believed that their Social Security was the result of their contributions.) I don’t think the trick will work as well this time, though. Too many of us know that the FICA “contribution” is just a tax used to buy votes from the elderly.

A musical tribute to Tiktaalik

This is a reaction to a post on Pharyngula as of December 1st. It took me a little while to get to it because this clueless creationist is so incredible. PZ warned his readers to turn on their webcams so he could see their reactions … well, I don’t have a webcam but I’ll try to reconstruct my reactions as best I can.

This little passage is quoted from Ray Comfort, famous for explaining that the banana proves intelligent design. Which it sort of does, since the domestic banana which we all know and love is the product of artificial selection by human beings, and is rather different from the wild banana. Anyway, here’s his incredible statement, with my reactions as best I remember them. This technique is called fisking, I believe.

Darwin theorized

Will you give poor old Darwin a rest already? He was a great scientist, but he’s been dead for a long time and science has marched on since his death. His great insight — evolution by natural selection — is what he’s most famous for, but he had other theories, some good, some … not so good. The question is whether you can honestly say “modern biologists theorize”. But, okay, we’ll go on.

that mankind (both male and female)

Darwin would have said “mankind” and assumed that his audience know this meant “both male and female”, but the language has changed over time and today we’d be more likely to say “humankind” instead.

evolved alongside each other

Very good! Since evolution is the result of changes in gene frequency within a population, the whole population evolves together over generations. It is not possible for a single individual to “evolve” as so many Forties science fiction stories depicted.

over millions of years,

Again, very good! I’ve noticed that creationists tend to think that scientists have the same cramped notion of time as they themselves do, so for a creationist to acknowledge that scientists theorize that humankind (or something like humankind) has been around for millions of years is admirable.

both reproducing after their own kind

Well … you need both sexes to reproduce and they produce offspring very similar (but not identical) to themselves. That is indeed part of Darwin’s theory. Kind of a weird way to put it, but okay.

before the ability to physically have sex evolved.

Uh … wait. I must have misread that.

“before the ability to physically have sex evolved.”

No, that’s really what it says.

Is this supposed to be gibberish? How could they be male and female if they lacked the ability to physically have sex? Having sex kind of defines male and female, after all.

Did Darwin have some theory about this? I sure don’t remember it in The Origin.

So reproducing “after their kind” must mean females producing females and males producing males? This makes no sense to me.

They did this through “asexuality” (”without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”).

If they were asexual, they were not male or female. Can’t he even read? I mean, putting aside the silliness of supposing that there were a bunch of asexual primates running around Africa for millions of years.

How did they reproduce “through ‘asexuality’” anyway? That’s like saying they reproduced through greenness.

Each of them split in half (”Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).”

What?! Has he lost his mind? Human beings reproducing by splitting in half? I’m sitting here looking at a convenient human body (my own) and trying to work out how you could divide it in half — along any plane — and have even one viable organism left over, much less two.

Ask A Scientist, Biology Archive, http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99927.htm.)

The cited page is real. But Comfort really should have read more than the first eight words of the answer. This is a discussion of bacteria and the like. It is not a discussion of human beings, or even mammals. Or even vertebrates.

Comfort’s position is so absurd that one is led to wonder if he was being deliberately obtuse. However, he went back later and changed it slightly:

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved in their pre-human state alongside each other over millions of years

apparently in response to the many comments observing that human beings are not bacteria and have not been bacteria for rather more than a few million years. Adding the “pre-human state” language allows him to claim that he wasn’t really misrepresenting what Darwin (or any modern biologist) theorized.

Well, yes, the original single-celled precursors of animal life were, indeed, technically pre-human. However, that’s rather more absurd than saying that a newborn baby is “pre-retirement-age”.

This is a long post for a single moronic paragraph. I could go on and on about Comfort’s idiotic web site. And perhaps I will … but not today.

Following Orac’s lead, I went over to check out Carol Alt’s wisdom. For one thing, I assume she has a really good editor for “her” books, as her writing is quite painful to read. I’m guessing she has a spell-checker since the words are mostly spelled correctly. The grammar and sentence construction are, however, excruciating.

Anyway, here is her wisdom on organic cherries (everything including capitalization unaltered from original):

like this assistant told me this summer while working with me on my film “twist the cap”

she said she worked in an organic cherry orchid-but the cherries were not organic.

I said how did you do that?

she said, we only said the cherries were organic so that we could collect more money for them. but really, to grow organic is too expensive….

imagine?

The cherries were not organic.

For some reason I am suffering a flashback to BladeRunner, the scene where the dancer explains that, of course her snake is not a live snake; how could she afford a live snake? To “grow organic” is too expensive so we manufacture cherries in a vat …