Lee's Blog

I read this story, by Cyril M. Kornbluth, a long time ago (it was written in 1951 but reprinted many times). He placed the event in the far future — five hundred years from now, judging by “The Little Black Bag” which is set in about the same time. The idea is that smart prudent people have few children and stupid imprudent people have many; in previous eras the stupid imprudent people and their children would starve so they would remain a small fraction of the population, but in the modern era they all survive producing a population that becomes stupider with each generation: evolution in action.

What I believe the past few decades have demonstrated is that producing a world of morons does not require evolution. We do not know how to increase intelligence through schooling, but the U.S. educational system has clearly demonstrated how to decrease it.

So, the House of Representatives passed a bill described as comprising 1,300 to 1,500 pages (estimates vary since the actual bill does not, as it were, exist), without reading it (not that they could read it if they wanted to or had time to since it does not exist). The bill is guaranteed to destroy the economy of the U.S. and bring down most of the economies worldwide, in the interest of reducing the predicted increase in global warming. The reduction is estimated as 0.01 degrees Celsius after four decades. Meanwhile the entire nation and much of the rest of the developed world is entranced by the death of a washed-up singer.

The Marching Morons: Ur doin it rite.

More comments on the inimitable Dr. Gordon.

In respect to parents of autistic children he stated:

I support their use of HBOT, chelation and other alternatives.

This is unequivocal. He says he supports chelation. He does not say, I am not familiar with the literature on chelation, but it seems safe and could conceivably be helpful, so I don’t object to its use. He continues:

Chelation therapy has been used in pediatrics and other specialties for decades. It is a safe proven treatment.

Well, yes, that’s true. It is a relatively safe proven treatment for heavy metal toxicity, but it is not proven, or safe, for randomly inflicting on just anybody just any time their parents feel like it. There are medical indications, proven over a period of decades, for when it should be used. Plenty of drugs are like that; prescription drugs are relatively safe (no drug is perfectly safe) and proven effective for specific conditions (though many anti-vaxxers would dispute even that — but if they did dispute it, I wonder how they justify not disputing chelation therapy for any condition whatever).

A number of people objected to the characterization of chelation therapy as safe for any purpose other than treating proven heavy metal poisoning, and Dr. Gordon responded,

Kathleen, I think that the risks to chelation are overstated (data, please gentlemen and ladies!!)

Uh … he’s supporting chelation for autism, which is an off-label, unproven usage, and he thinks the risks are overstated? He doesn’t have the data at his fingertips? But Dr. Gordon continues:

Can you send me to sites or articles you respect delineating the dangers of chelation? I know it’s well-known “woo” to you all, but I’m really interested in learning more about the potential problems.

He can’t investigate this for himself? He has little patients relying on him to guide their parents in caring for them safely, and he’s going to rely on the “brainy” commenters at Respectful Insolence to find articles they “respect” to help him learn about the potential problems of a treatment he supports?

*facepalm* That’s all I can say. Or *headdesk*.

Speaking of Dr. Gordon, he hangs out on ScienceBlogs for his medical information:

As for the comments about my ignorance: Yes, I have gaps in my knowledge base and will keep coming back here to fill some them.

I mentioned that I found this troubling, and he replied:

don’t underestimate the brain power on this site.

Yeah, okay, but personally, if I go to a doctor, I would hope that he has a medical education and has kept up with the medical literature, and I would prefer that he fill in the gaps in his knowledge via continuing medical education, rather than whatever random bits various brainy people (probably not medically trained) throw out in blog comments. But maybe that’s just me.

My favorite blogger is Orac at Respectful Insolence. A commenter who shows up there sometimes is Dr. Jay Gordon, “Pediatrician to the Stars”. Dr. Gordon apparently claims that he is not anti-vaccine though I find that hard to believe based on this:

I gave a half dozen vaccines today. I gave some reluctantly but respected parents’ wishes to vaccinate.

If he’s not anti-vaccine, why would he be reluctant to vaccinate? Note that he doesn’t say, there were contra-indications in these specific cases, but the parents insisted so I went ahead (though that in itself would be a worrisome statement). Rather, he didn’t want to do it but the parents insisted. That sounds like an anti-vaxxer to me.

So yesterday, Dr. Gordon showed up in Orac’s comments again. This time, someone asked what justification he had for putting off tetanus vaccination, and he answered, incredibly:

Tetanus is not “everywhere.” It’s in Africa and other parts of the globe while we in the USA have a few dozen cases/year. I would like to see more effective tetanus vaccination there.

Various people pointed out that tetanus is everywhere (well, everywhere on Earth — they did acknowledge that there’s an entire universe out there that is not so far as we know contaminated with the tetanus organism), that it is not communicable so herd immunity does not apply, and that the only reasons the U.S. has only a few dozen deaths per year are (a) most Americans are vaccinated and (b) our medical system is really good at saving people.

Dr. Gordon replied:

I know that C. tetani bacteria are not just in Africa and that the disease is not communicable . . . but, there are very few cases in America and hundreds of thousands of fatal cases in Africa. It doesn’t take much thought to realize we should focus on getting the vaccines and the education to countries whose population is actually threatened by the disease.

Uh, right. Most people in the U.S. are vaccinated against tetanus, so we should let the rest, and all young children, go without vaccination while we “focus on getting the vaccines and the education to countries whose population is actually threatened by the disease.” And, then, as Americans start to die in large numbers from tetanus because they aren’t vaccinated, why, then we’ll vaccinate them because then the population will be actually threatened. And once most people are vaccinated, the death rate will go way down in the U.S., and we can stop vaccinating again until it goes up. Perfect!

On what possible basis could someone who makes Dr. Gordon’s argument claim not to be anti-vaccine? I thought he was building up his practice by catering to anti-vaxxers, cynically figuring that he can look like the good guy by not vaccinating, while relying on herd immunity to protect his patients. But if he won’t even vaccinate for tetanus, where herd immunity doesn’t apply, well … perhaps I’ll just finish this sentence by saying that I believe him to be an anti-vaxxer whatever he says.

In the series of posts called “What’s love got to do with it?”, most recently this one, I’ve argued at (great) length that I don’t think legalizing same-sex marriage will solve the personal, social, and religious issues that it’s touted as solving, and that the existing benefits (and responsibilities) of marriage either should be eliminated or could be imposed through a contractual mechanism with the same effect.

So why would anyone object to same-sex marriage? You could make marriage a contractual matter, or you can produce the same effect by legalized same-sex marriage. Essentially all you’re doing is applying a tag, right? And if people want the marriage tag, well, go for it!

Right now, if there are two adults living together down the street from me, and they introduce themselves as married, it’s not like I’m going to demand to see the marriage license. If they happen to be of the same sex, then there are only a limited number of States in which they could have obtained that marriage license, but it’s not like I’m going to grill them about the legalities. If they say they are married, then I will treat them as such. Any reasonable person would. (And someone who objected to same-sex marriage in principle would not treat them as such regardless of whether they have an actual marriage license, as I have pointed out previously in this series.)

So, what difference does it make if the people who introduce themselves as married have a marriage license or have a private contract that they keep in a safe deposit box somewhere?

The difference is that if they have a marriage license, then the State knows about their arrangement. It has to know.

Contracts, on the other hand, are private. Unless it becomes necessary to go to the Courts for interpretation or enforcement, no one outside of the contracting couple need know of the terms or even the existence of the contract.

But who cares whether the State knows about the arrangement?

Many years ago — maybe as early as the late 1980s — I read a book by Thomas Sowell in which he observed that the reason there were so many Jews in Germany when Hitler rose to power was that Germany was one of the least-bad European countries for Jews just prior to that time. And when I thought about it, that was credible. A fair number of scientists who were Jews fled Germany as Hitler rose to power, which implies that, while there was antisemitic prejudice, still Jews were able to get good educations in Germany at the time. Dr. Sowell finished by commenting somberly that if Nazism could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere.

I have never forgotten Dr. Sowell’s words, and that is the reason I think that, instead of enacting same-sex marriage, we should get the State out of the marriage business altogether. I don’t think it is a good idea to have official records of who belongs to a same-sex couple. When things get bad — and I have a feeling things are going to get very bad — people look around for someone to blame. A good orator could point them at homosexuals, particularly if very religious people were already angry that their beliefs had been trampled on in the drive for same-sex marriage. In that case, official records pointing out practicing homosexuals could well act as death warrants, whereas private contracts and clergy records would be less likely to fall into the hands of the mob and endanger the individuals involved.

So that’s why I think the issue of same-sex marriage should cause us to stop, ponder whether the current institution of marriage really even qualifies for the name, ponder whether the current tax system is really just in a world where a lot of people don’t live in nuclear families, ask ourselves whether we really should be recording people’s sexual histories — and come up with the solution of getting the State out of the marriage business altogether.

(Almost) finishing up (finally!) with comments on “What’s love got to do with it?” on Accept No Substitutes, I move on to the legal aspects:

Legal: A binding contract which carries with it tax consequences, legal rights, responsibilities, and termination clauses.

Mephistopheles continued this thought in greater detail in “Here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine”, wherein he listed a number of legal effects of marriage

• a quick way for one (or in some jurisdictions, both) parties to change her (sometimes his) legal name
• a different set of tables on income taxes
• a presumption of parenthood for children (unless proven otherwise)
• a defense against having to testify against another person in a court of law, sometimes
• a default way of passing on someone’s assets after death
• a way to expedite someone’s application to come to or remain in the country
• a default power of attorney
• a default combining of assets and incomes

The thing to notice about this list is that, except for the presumption of parenthood, none of these effects is strictly unique to marriage. Even the defense against having to testify against another isn’t unique to marriage; there are laws that protect attorneys and psychiatrists from having to testify against their clients/patients.

To my mind, it would be far better to bypass the argument about same-sex marriage by making these legal effects equally available to all — regardless of desire or lack thereof to marry. In particular, I have deep doubts about the “a different set of tables on income [also estate] taxes.”

Seriously. If two people live together, share a household, pool their money, provide moral and physical support for each other, I see no reason why they should be treated differently depending on whether they wish to engage in marital relations (to be delicate). When I was working in a law office, one of our cases was a man who had lived his whole life with his widowed mother. He was her sole support. Why were they disadvantaged in taxes vis-a-vis a couple who have been married for a week?

We also had a case where a woman had died and her widower and sister were good friends and continued to view each other as “family”. But the law regarded them as utterly unrelated, so when he left his estate to her, the State of Oklahoma and the United States penalized her as heavily as if he’d left his estate to the girl who was nice to him at the drug store. (Before he died, we thought of suggesting that either they should marry or he should adopt her but it was clear that the first suggestion was out for religious reasons and they were not interested in the second.)

I would avoid the problem of discriminatory estate taxes by eliminating them for all but the very largest of estates and then removing the marriage exemption. If keeping large estates together is bad, then it’s bad whether you give the estate to your children or to your spouse. In fact, it’s probably worse if you give it to your spouse, who can remarry after your death and pass it on to the new spouse, who can later remarry and pass it on to yet another, and so keep it together perhaps for decades longer than if multiple children had received it. There is, after all, no requirement that a spouse be anywhere near your own age.

I also think one could eliminate “chain” immigration by virtue of marriage, which Mephistopheles mentions. I think here the law could be made both stricter and fairer by removing the “marriage” entanglement. An employer who wants to bring in an immigrant employee has to prove that they will continue to employ the person. Likewise there could be some provision that any person who wanted to bring in any immigrant could be required to enter into a legally binding agreement with the government to provide that person with a home and monetary support, regardless of whether they are “married” in the eyes of the State or anyone else.

[And at this point Windows Vista blue-screened and I had to pick up the thread of thought the next morning ... good thing WordPress was auto-saving.]

I think I’ll go on with this in a new post, as this one is getting long.

Christopher Lee has been knighted. As an American, I naturally think knighthoods and such are antiquated relics of the Middle Ages, but they’re fun anyway, and it’s nice that he was so honored.

My mother greatly admired Christopher Lee. She met him once in person. My memory is a little vague since I was only seven at the time, but I think he was performing in a play and she met him back stage. I do remember her remarking on how tall he was. He is 6′5″ tall, more than a foot taller than she was.

My mother used to take us to the Dusk-to-Dawn horror festivals at the local drive-ins, so I got to see Christopher Lee in many, many Hammer Films.

My mother shared his birthday, along with Vincent Price, which she thought was a neat little personal connection.

In case anyone wonders, I’m not named after him. Lee is a common name in my mother’s family.

Continuing with comments on “What’s love got to do with it?” on Accept No Substitutes, I move on to the religious aspects:

3. Religious: The mystical joining of individuals, typically as ordained by the appropriate deity or deities, surrounded by ceremonies and prayers, carrying with it various supernatural risks and allowing certain benefits.

In the United States, at least, the State has no right to dictate religious beliefs to anyone. The most it can do is prohibit practices that are harmful to others (the State outlaws human sacrifice no matter how willing the victim nor how important the sacrifice is thought to be). If a religious institution contends that homosexuality is a grave sin, well, that’s up to them. Offensive as it may be to others, such beliefs cannot be prohibited.

(Not in the United States and not at the moment, anyway. In Canada, a Christian pastor was enjoined from ever again expressing anything disparaging about homosexuality, in public or even in private email, on pain of being held in contempt of court and fined or imprisoned. He was also ordered, again on pain of being held in contempt of court, to preach a sermon which according to his beliefs was utterly false and harmful to the souls of those who heard it. Although I disagree with his belief, I find that sort of assault on someone’s freedom of conscience to be absolutely reprehensible.)

Suppose same-sex marriage is legalized. Does that mean religious authorities would be compelled to officiate at rites for same sex couples? No, that would be an assault on their freedom of conscience. It is already the case that the State says two people may legally marry and religious authorities say they may not (last I heard, Catholic priests would not officiate at the marriages of divorced individuals, unless the prior marriage were annulled in the Church). In that case, the two people find another religious official (maybe in another sect) or get married before a justice of the peace.

I think it will be hard, really, for Christian sects to come around on same-sex marriage. Mephistopheles mentions that some feel “anything that prevents a same-sex couple from marrying is the equivalent of anti-miscegenation laws”, and the Christian churches did come around on miscegenation — hardly any of them still object — but I really don’t think same-sex marriage is entirely comparable to the miscegenation issue. The Bible doesn’t clearly come out and say “miscegenation is sinful” so believers in the Bible could, however reluctantly, accept that miscegenation was okay in the eyes of God and that prior objections really were just based on prejudice. The Bible does clearly come out and say that homosexuality is sinful, more than once, and I really don’t see how believers in the Bible could realistically turn around and say that objecting to same-sex marriage is really just a matter of prejudice.

It’s not to say that such a change is impossible — Christians don’t abide by all of the restrictions in the Bible, such as not eating pork — but I think it will be hard for the religious establishment to change its view on this. I think the most one could expect is the sort of “render unto Caesar” attitude that Catholics have toward divorce: “Yeah, the State has this institution of same-sex marriage, and it has legal effects in the eyes of the State, but we don’t recognize it as valid.”

I express no opinion about most religions other than Christianity, as I don’t pretend to be very familiar with them, but I do think it will be even harder to Muslims to come around since in many parts of the Middle East homosexuality is still a capital crime, based on passages of the Koran, and it would be even harder for Muslims to say, “well, it looks like we are required to kill anyone who practices homosexuality, but really it doesn’t mean that.”

I don’t think changes in the law are going to have any immediate beneficial effects on the religious view of homosexuality, and indeed I can see changes in the law actually hardening the religious view. It appears to me that that is already happening (”We’re under siege! Our age-old beliefs and values are under attack by the evil atheists! Cling to them more tightly!”) In the long run, I think most Christian sects will come around, but the long run is a long time, and even then there will be hold-outs. So, regardless of the law, people who are hurt and angry because their religious authorities call them sinful and refuse them the marriage sacrament are going to remain hurt and angry for a long, long time.

Richard Dawkins:

If we refused ever to use a word like “true”, how could we conduct our day-to-day conversations? Or fill in a census form: “What is your sex?” “The hypothesis that I am male has not so far been falsified, but let me just check again”.

Stephen J. Gould:

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

During the recent dust-up about Daniel Hauser and his parents’ refusal to permit the chemotherapy that would very probably save his life, there were a lot of comments basically to the effect that there are safe and effective “natural” treatments for cancer (Hauser’s mother claimed a 100% chance of a cure by such treatments) which Big Pharma and the medical profession in general have been covering up to protect their lucrative policy of burning, slashing, and poisoning their patients.

Sure.

I personally have known two doctors who died of cancer, two more who lost spouses to cancer, and one who lost a parent to cancer. And that’s just doctors that I know and whose histories I know. Did they all know about safe and effective “natural” treatments for cancer? Did they all just sit back and die, or let their loved ones die, to protect the incomes of other people? None of these doctors were oncologists; it didn’t benefit them personally to suppress natural cures.

So maybe they themselves didn’t know about the safe and effective “natural” treatments? Maybe only the cancer researchers, oncologists, radiologists, pharmacists, Big Pharma executives, and similar vile people are in the know?

But then, let’s talk about Orac himself. He recently lost his mother-in-law to cancer. Did he know there was a cure, but he didn’t provide it to her because he needed to protect his livelihood? If so, all I can say is, he’d better hope he doesn’t talk in his sleep.

For that matter, since Orac is a cancer researcher, what does he do all day? Does he know there’s a cure that he has to be careful not to find? Does he carefully redirect all research into what he knows to be dead ends? Is he, in fact, spending his entire professional career deliberately failing to find what he knows to exist? What kind of person would do that? And it can’t be just him; every cancer researcher must be deliberately going down blind alleys their entire professional career — if they know about the cure. What keeps all of them — every last one of them — from going public? (“Ooh, ooh, I know! Death threats from Big Pharma!” And no one’s heard of the letter hidden away to be mailed upon the person’s death? No one’s ever read Firestarter on how to deal with a big and ruthless organization trying to shut you up?)

Well, maybe cancer researchers don’t know about the cure. Maybe only the Big Pharma executives know. But how are they keeping a lid on it? How are they suppressing research all over the planet? How are they preventing government-run health systems from seeking out the one true Cure For All Cancers? After all, the cure is known to some and it can’t require a huge research effort to find, since it’s all natural and besides there hasn’t been a huge research effort that found it.

All I can say is, I must be wasting my time programming for the financial industry. I want to get into programming for Big Pharma. They must have some really great data mining software — in many languages no less — to keep track of every researcher everywhere so that those who start down a productive path can be derailed or, ahem, eliminated.

Hmm, I wonder what the death rate is for bright young idealistic cancer researchers. It must be very high. Should some enterprising reporter check into that? Being sure, of course, to make the fact of the investigation very widely known.