the good old days

“Disgusted mother” commented on my anti-anti-vaccination post from months ago…

We could also discuss the aluminum, electively aborted fetal cells, calf serum, etc. in vaccines, and how vaccinations are cultured in ground up monkey kidneys and other animal byproducts. Why don’t you all start looking outside the box instead of trying so hard to stay in. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that vaccines are not good for us. Our GOVERNMENT OWNED vaccine Gaurdisil has been killing young girls. Can we say population control? Just because you can’t see through the bullshit doesn’t mean that the people who can are crazy. Knowledge is power. You should really read more.

Ma’am, it’s hardly useful to be so far outside the box that you can’t even see it.

• In an amazing coincidence, I do have the superpower of being able to see through bullshit. Yours is remarkably transparent for being heaped so high.
• Merck owns Gardasil, not the government.
• I certainly can say “population control” (can we say “pompous bitch”, hmm?), but: the 11 deaths that were claimed (with no worthwhile evidence) to be linked to Gardasil… 11 dead out of the thousands vaccinated is a ridiculously ineffective way of controlling a population, even if there was a conspiracy to control the population by murdering young girls with vaccines, which there isn’t.
• While we could discuss miscellaneous bullshit theories, I won’t, since you have only provided scary buzzwords instead of any vague semblance of evidence or facts. Find history, not histrionics, then we can talk.

Hope your kids have fun with mumps, chickenpox, diphtheria, hepatitis, and cervical cancer. Just keep them the hell away from mine while they’re playing Typhoid Mary.

What’s extra scary about this commenter: she posted from within the healthcare system. Her IP address 209.37.141.254 [gnat-corp.osfhealthcare.org] indicates she works with OSF Healthcare in Peoria, IL. She posted at 10pm, and I’m hoping that she was just visiting somebody in the hospital and used their computer, because the alternative is that she’s a night nurse. It’s disturbing that somebody so completely unqualified in basic intelligence (not to mention scientific thought) might be treating sick people in Peoria.

In the 1930’s…

Skippy Peanut Butter
Improved by HYDROGENATION

Hydrogenation? What’s that? Sounds scientifickal!

Since partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are cheaper than animal source fats, are available in a wide range of consistencies, and have other desirable characteristics (e.g., increased oxidative stability (longer shelf life))…

Improved by making it cheaper, smoother, and longer-lasting, I guess, but also full of tasty trans fats.

Originally seen at Serious Eats

A co-worker lost part of a filling in a tooth, so went to the dentist yesterday. Today he was bitching about it to another guy…

They had to take an x-ray of the teeth, and it’s just they sit you down and cover you up and take a picture and you’re done. And that part of the bill was $50!

Let’s get some perspective here. They just used extremely focused radiation in an extremely controlled fashion to take pictures of the inside of your teeth, so your problem could be correctly and thoroughly diagnosed and appropriate steps be taken to fix the tooth. That’s not worth fifty dollars? I realize fifty bucks buys a lot of cheap low-quality crap from Walmart, but is that really more important than your teeth?

Especially since he won’t even pay it himself.

I mean it’s not the money, insurance covers THAT. It’s the damn principle of the thing! FIFTY DOLLARS! DAMN!

Oh come on! Just shut up and be happy that you live in an time and country where your dentist has technology more sophisticated than pliers and elbow grease. If you’re so concerned about principle — and that principle is, apparently, the International Dental Conspiracy — tie one end of a string to a doorknob and the other to your sore tooth and get it over with DIY-style. Don’t let the International Dentist Conspiracy win.

I was chatting with a couple engineers today, and one of them mentioned that a guy he knows has a PhD, but doesn’t seem to be all that smart. “I mean, obviously he’s smart enough,” he added, “but he seems to be lacking a lot of common sense, that really surprises me.”

Somehow — and I seriously don’t know how — this morphed into “people without degrees who operate on the fringes of science have incredible, revolutionary theories which are quashed by Institutional Knowledge who don’t want things to get out.” The example one engineer gave was that everything has a natural frequency (true) which can be used to cure disease (uhhh… not true).

I mean, take the Rife Machine. The guy who invented it, he got an award for how well it worked, he could cure cancer. It was the solution, just find the right vibration and the cancer was gone. Just amazing! They paid him tons of money to buy the rights, and then they destroyed it. The medical community didn’t want that getting out!

No mention of what that award he won was. I guess that happened at the same time the pharmaceutical companies bought off the inventor of the cure for diabetes, while staging the moon landing and blowing up the World Trade Center, because big corporations will kill people for fun and profit and leave no traces of their mischief.

I can’t even get away from these people at work. I thought engineers were supposed to be clever and rational. (That’s my own version of Lab Coat Awe.) We work at a big corporation, for fuck’s sake — we know first-hand that it is nothing more than a conglomeration of dumbfuckery. They can’t figure out how to stay in business, and this is the sort of setup that can conspire to hide medical revolutions?

The high point of the authority of science was perhaps the 1950s. In those days one would see on the popular television programs a scientist wearing a white coat with license to speak authoritatively on almost any subject to do with science—and sometimes on subjects outside of science.

Case in point from None For the Road, where a professor of physiology injects rats with alcohol to illustrate drunk driving risks.

But things go wrong in the progress of science and technology. If you see the space shuttle crashing, you can see that these guys in the white coats don’t always get it right.

So, in something of an overreaction, the lab coat in today’s world is seen as a reason to automatically distrust whatever an “expert” says. (I blame the get-rats-drunk scientists for part of this, because, well, they got rats drunk.)

Of course, science isn’t perfect or omniscient. There are no instant revelations — just a gradual process of discovery, refinement of theories, and discussion over interpretation of results. That doesn’t make science useless or completely wrong, nor does it make philosophy or amateur guesswork more trustworthy.

Quotations borrowed from Scientists Know Better Than You — Even When They’re Wrong.

I read an article this morning about an outbreak of pertussis in a California school which resulted in closing school to try to control the epidemic. Apparently, it’s a school where only about half the students have the normal required round of vaccinations; most parents had opted-out (presumably due to fears of autism).

This drives me up the wall. Autism is not caused by vaccines. The thimerasol (mercury-based preservative), which was initially blamed, has been out of vaccines for years now; multiple scientific studies show that the rate of autism has risen since then. Now anti-vaccinationists rely on the bugaboo of “toxins” without bothering to define them — no science, just fearmongering. Thus whooping cough is able to spread.

Pertussis isn’t just a “bad cough”, it’s agonizing. Similarly, chicken pox isn’t just a week of itching, it’s a ticket to shingles (agonizing pain, again). Polio is crippling (FDR wasn’t in a wheelchair for fun). Rubella causes dreadful complications in pregnant women. Diphtheria kills. Smallpox kills. I’m not a fan of putting all sorts of weird stuff in my kids bodies — I buy organic food, for example — but fuck, letting them die instead? Kinda defeats the purpose.

Modern medicine works. Let it. And in the meantime, keep your “wholesome” unvaccinated children the hell away from me and my family.

UPDATE: Bad Astronomy Blog was ranting about this at the same time I was today

For years as a child, I didn’t really understand the Morton Salt slogan, “When it rains, it pours.” I thought it was a strange reference to the familiar idiom: after a long spell of nothing happening, then everything happens at once. What this had to do with table salt, who knows.

However, looking at some of their old ads today made me realize they were saying “when it’s raining outside [or just humid], your Morton Salt will still pour from the shaker.” That was one of those “OHHHHhhhh…” moments… followed closely by a “well, duh” moment.

One of their 1926 ads (see left) brought home another weird point: goiters. Most children who manage to stay awake through elementary school health class learn that very small quantities of iodine are vital to the health of the thyroid gland; without it, it will swell and you’ll have a big goiter in your neck. To the modern student, this is weird and strange. But in the 1920’s, goiters were a lot more common, and Morton’s inclusion of iodine was a pretty good innovation.

(On a related note, I always considered gout to be one of those diseases gone by the wayside, back in the age of Ben Franklin — but a few guys in the factory here have it. Weird!)

We’ll probably be visiting Chicago in the next couple months, and we’ll get to drive by the big MORTON SALT factory with the famous girl-under-umbrella spilling her salt all over the place. Poor kid, she’ll get home and Mother will be furious that the salt is all gone and now the family will all get goiters because the iodized salt is all over the street…

Some idiocy never goes away. It lies in wait for Quantum Mechanics to make it plausible. One of ten reasons to choose homeopathy instead of something effective:

(10) The medicine of the future

With over 6000 homeopathic medicines in existence and new homeopathic medicines being discovered all the time, Homeopathy is a growing art. However unlike allopathic medicine that takes drugs off the market every year as new side-effects are discovered, homeopaths still use the same medicines they were using 200 years ago with new medicines to broaden their scope. Scientists are only now discovering breakthroughs in quantum physics that helps us to develop a deeper understanding of homeopathy, as it was used 200 years ago.

Uh, so, it hasn’t changed in 200 years, but it’s the medicine of the future because you need modern science to be able to explain lie about how it supposedly works?

I am thoroughly bored by “experts” claiming that quantum mechanics proves their point. It doesn’t prove any of your theories about psychics, positive thinking, homeopathy, it’s just another bunch of big words that SOUNDS magical and therefore it what must be what makes magic work!

Medicine of the future, my ass.

Via Skepchicks. Or visit the World Homeopathy Awareness Week site itself if you want to experience the full, unadulterated beauty of their illogic — but isn’t homeopathy MORE effective when it’s diluted by hundreds of skeptical bloggers?

Poor mid-century America. They had to settle for Thorazine, when what they really wanted was:


Turns out the ads were for Ontario Colleges, emphasizing the choices they give to students.

Luckily, Obay isn’t real. Sure, you want what’s best for your kids, but when it comes to post-secondary education, pushing them to do what you want isn’t right. Explore all the options at ontariocolleges.ca

What I find funniest about the situation is the few people who thought Obay was a real product. Pretty clear there’s just too much drug advertising out there…

I can’t make this stuff up. Seriously, I can’t. My mind doesn’t warp that way.

Lysol: because nothing says “sexy” like “smelling like a kitchen floor”, unless perhaps it’s “causing severe chemical burns on the genitals.”

One point in favor of Ye Olde Crazy Days: the 1936 work Facts and Frauds in Woman’s Hygiene was just as against this idea as I am (read the chapter online here). Unfortunately, the above advertisement was from 1948…