There are times when reality is so obvious, so clear, so rock-solid 100% amazingly in-your-face incontrovertible, that it is beyond belief that anyone could deny it.

And yet, antivaccination groups exist.

Let me be very, very clear: they are wrong. Vaccines save lives. Vaccines save millions of lives. And not just directly, like they did by wiping out smallpox, a scourge that killed hundreds of millions of people. But also, through herd immunity, vaccines save infants too young to be vaccinated, the elderly with weak immune systems, and people whose immune systems are compromised due to chemotherapy, genetic issues, or because they are taking immunosuppressants for other illnesses (like arthritis).

Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines don’t contain dangerous levels of mercury. Vaccines don’t contain fetal tissue. Each of these – and many, many more — is misinformation spread by antivaxxers, statements that are easily proven wrong (like, in order, here, here, and here). But many antivaxxers continue to use them.

What does that say about their willingness to tell the truth?

Yesterday, in Australia, one of the most vocal antivaxxers alive, Meryl Dorey of the grossly misnamed Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), spoke at the Woodford Folk Festival about her beliefs. However, she didn’t get quite the chance she had hoped for. Once the news got out that she was invited to the festival, the group Stop AVN went into action. A protest cry went up, and the venue was changed from her speaking solo, to her participating in a panel with a series of experts — actual, real experts — on vaccines. As I write this, I have a window open on Twitter, and I’m watching the tweets using the hashtag #StopAVN flow by. It’s a thing of beauty. Dorey’s arguments are being destroyed, 140 characters at a time.

The bottom line, repeated over and over again: Vaccinations save lives. That statement of fact is so simple, so powerful, that Stop AVN put it on a banner and had it flown behind a plane at the festival.

Wonderful! My congratulations to my friends Down Under for this impressive campaign.

But we here in America cannot rest easy. We have antivaxxers here; loud, wealthy, ones, who won’t hesitate to spread the same kind of misinformation; dangerous misinformation that poses a serious health threat.

The National Vaccine Information Center is one such group. They have a long history of antivax rhetoric, remarkable only in its breathtaking inaccuracy, and their ability to get it into the mainstream. And they’re at it again: they’ve put an ad on ABC’s digital 5000 square foot screen in Times Square in New York City, a place that will be packed with people celebrating the new year. To top it all off, Jenny McCarthy — who dispenses incredibly dangerous and incredibly wrong advice about vaccinations and other health safety issues — is slated to be a guest on ABC’s New Year’s Rocking Eve with Dick Clark… and she has stated she plans to promote her dangerous nonsense on the show.

Skepchick has an excellent post about this. My friend Jamie Bernstein has started a petition on change.org to get the ad taken down. I signed it.

Again, let me be clear: these antivax groups pose a public health threat. If you don’t believe me, then read this account by someone who knows.

And if you wonder why I feel so strongly about this, then I suggest you steel yourself — seriously — and read this account written by the parents of Dana McCaffery, who lost her life to pertussis when she was four weeks old. She was too young to be vaccinated. Because vaccine rates were so low in her area, pertussis had a place to grow. She was infected, and she died.

You want to know why I feel so strongly? This is why. She is why.

Talk to your board-certified doctor about vaccines. Find out what you might need — being an adult doesn’t mean you’re exempt from childhood vaccines; you may need a booster — and if your doctor approves, then do what needs to be done.

The solution against the antivaxxers is to make sure their misinformation is countered by facts. It’s one of life’s great ironies that vaccines have helped these people live as long as they have to spread their nonsense about vaccines. We can speak up to stop them… and at the same time get vaccinated to make sure that they — that everyone – gets a chance to be wrong for a long, long time.

If schadenfreude made a noise, then you’d be hearing it pretty loudly from me right now: Kevin Trudeau — a convicted credit card fraud, and a man who made tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars by telling people he could cure their cancer using, get this, coral calcium — has lost his appeal to the federal court, and must pay $37.6 million dollars in fines.

Trudeau, who shilled this false cancer cure as a diet supplement, was ordered by a federal judge in 2008 to stop making and airing infomercials about it. I wrote about this at the time, but I kept seeing those evil infomercials on TV. I wondered about this, but now I understand: Trudeau was trying to sidestep the order by selling books about this false cure, not the supplements directly. And, he kept buying up those ad spots while appealing the order. But on November 29th of this year, the appeals court said "nope".

As the court papers say:

The protections, unfortunately, were too weak: Trudeau aired infomercials in violation of the order at least 32,000 times. He should not now be surprised that he must pay for the loss he caused. At a minimum, it was easily within the district court’s discretion to conclude that he should. And $37.6 million correctly measures the loss. The figure is conservative — it only considers sales from the 800-number, not sales in bookstores carrying his "As Seen on TV" titles…

Wow, so he only violated a court order 32,000 times. But wait, there’s more! Apparently, there’s not a lot of real info in those books; they just funnel people to a web site urging them to spend hundreds of dollars for the products he sells. So how much money do you think he really made?

The court also instituted a $2 million bond in case he tries to make more infomercials. It doesn’t stop him from placing ads or writing books, just from bilking people using those long-form late night infomercials:

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I recently posted a lengthy analysis of the fiscal year 2012 budget Congress and the President approved for NASA. I didn’t mention it then because it was off-topic, but in the press release for the funding bill, they list bullet points of "Important Policy Items". I took a screen grab of the last item listed, and the note below it:

Perhaps I’m the only one who sees irony in a bullet point saying Congress won’t appropriate $322M for an NOAA climate change service, while then immediately below it noting how the natural disasters that have befallen this country have required " historic levels of relief and recovery assistance", necessitating $2.3 billion in relief funds. Hmmm.

[Note: While it can be hard to pin any one natural disaster like a hurricane, heat wave, or snow storm on climate change, as we warm up we will see more things like those. I want my tax dollars to go to more scientific investigation by NOAA and other agencies. But then, I'm not funded in any way by the oil industry, and my only motivation is the open and honest investigation of the world around us since it might just save our species.]

[Note II: DeSmogBlog digs a bit deeper into this, and has some curious comments about climate-contrarian Congresscritters who kaboshed this.]

Everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another. If you haven’t had it yourself, the odds are extremely high you know someone who has, and who has died from it. I’ve lost loved ones to cancer, and it’s awful; it can take years filled with tests, hope, lack of hope, expensive therapy… and in the end the odds are what they are. It all makes for desperate times for those involved, with an emotional distress level that is beyond my ability to describe.

There are people out there who claim they can cure cancer, or have therapies that can mediate it. Some of these people are simply con artists, ready to swoop in as soon as they smell blood in the water, vermin that they are. Others are honest but wrong, thinking they have stumbled on some therapy that no one else has found. However, time and again, when these alternative methods are tested rigorously using controlled, properly done studies, they are shown not to work. In general this does not stop people from making the claims, however.

In Houston, Texas, is a man named Stanislaw Burzynski. He claims he has a method for treating cancer. He calls it antineoplaston therapy. However, according to the National Cancer Institute, “No randomized, controlled trials showing the effectiveness of antineoplastons have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.” That’s a bad sign. Furthermore, the FDA has not approved of antineoplaston therapy for use. Also telling is that “… other investigators have not been able to obtain the same results reported by Dr. Burzynski and his team”. Yet, despite this, Burzynski charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for people to get his therapy — though he has to say they’re participating in research trials, since the FDA won’t allow him to use his ideas as an actual treatment.

Those are red flags, to be sure.

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Geez, this again? Seriously?

Two years ago, someone hacked into a University of East Anglia server and anonymously posted thousands of emails from climate scientists. Quickly dubbed "Climategate", global warming deniers jumped on this, trying to show that these scientists were engaging in fraudulent activities. However, it was clear to anyone familiar with how research is done that this was complete and utter bilge; the scientists were not trying to hide anything, were not trying to trick anyone, and were not trying to falsely exaggerate the dangers of climate change.

I wrote about this when it happened and then again quickly thereafter, showing this was just noise. Accusations of fraud were leveled at climate scientist Michael Mann, but time and again he was exonerated: like this time, and then this time, and then this time, and of course this time, and then my favorite, this time.

Climategate was widely denounced as a manufactured controversy, except, of course, by denialists. Because they denied it. That’s axiomatic.

However, like a bacterium festering away someplace dank and fetid, Climategate is poised to infect reality once again: The Guardian is reporting that a second cache of stolen emails has been released anonymously, and once again the cries of conspiracy are being heard. However, it looks like these emails aren’t really new, and were simply from the original stolen batch, but were held back until today. Mind you, the emails from the first Climategate were released right before a big climate conference, in an obvious attempt to derail it in the media. This new batch was released days before a similar conference, in what appears to be a similar propaganda move.

[UPDATE: Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) has called on the US intelligence community to investigate who stole these emails. I think this is the right move. We still don't know who did this two years ago, and I'd be fascinated to see who was behind it. H/T Michael Mann on Twitter.]

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I get mail. Some good, some bad, some cryptic. In the past few days I’ve gotten some of the latter; people telling me I should take a look at the new DC Comics reboot of "Mister Terrific", a super-genius superhero who uses science and intellect to defeat the forces of evil.

The thing is, nobody would tell me why. OK, I figured, I’ll check it out when I get a chance.

Then I got another email, this time from my pal Eric Wallace, who writes for the TV show "Eureka". And who, it so happens, writes "Mister Terrific"! He asked me if I’d like to get a copy of the first couple of issues, and not being a complete idiot, I said yes.

I got them in the mail the other day, and sat down to read them. By the time I got to the end of the first issue, all the cryptic notes became clear to me. It’s because of this panel, where Michael Holt (aka Mister Terrific) is holding a fund raiser for a politician:

Ha! Perfect!

And does it sound familiar? It should. Unfortunately, this exact scene has precedent in reality. Too bad there’s no genius billionaire superhero science-enthusiast IRL who could do this.

Of course, on the next page, a mind-control device makes Holt want to kill the Senator. But it is a comic book.

And "Mister Terrific" looks like a pretty good book. I’ll note that since it’s a reboot, I’m walking in to the middle of what looks like a lot of back story, but that’s going to be true of most big-title books these days. That’s OK though. It’s the science in comic books that I love, from Bose-Einstein condensates (fact) to the ninth dimension (fiction, kinda)… and even to the politician who supports it (fact? Fiction? Hmmm).

Tomorrow, November 8, the 400-meter-wide asteroid 2005 YU55 will glide past the Earth, missing us by a very comfortable margin of 320,000 kilometers (200,000 miles). This distance is three-quarters of the way to the Moon, and is in fact so far that you’ll need a decent telescope to see it at all.

However, I’m starting to see rumors that the asteroid will have an effect on us. I expected this — it happens every time there’s a decent-sized rock that whizzes past us. That’s why I wrote a post about it a few months back, but I want to follow up on it. Why? I’m getting wind of some folks worried about YU55, including a couple of notes on Twitter saying there are people blaming Saturday’s earthquake in Oklahoma on YU55!

Let me be clear: no asteroid, YU55 or otherwise, can cause earthquakes as they pass. Even Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, would have to practically skim the top of our atmosphere to have any real effect on us. YU55 is dinky, and will miss us by 25 times the diameter of the Earth!

And c’mon: why would it shake up Oklahoma? Japan, Turkey, Chile, California — there are dozens of seismically active spots on Earth that are more prone to earthquakes. Someone claiming an asteroid causing one in Oklahoma should set off alarm bells in your head^*.

I’m sure there will be other claims as well. People will squeeze whatever they can out of this event. I saw it happen in 2008 when a similarly-sized rock, 2007 TU24, passed by us at a distance of more than half a million kilometers. Things got so ridiculous with the doomsday scaremongering back then that I made a video to alleviate fears. I’ve embedded it here; all you need to do is replace "2007 TU24" with "2005 YU55", and the 530,000 km miss by 320,000 kilometers, and all the stuff I said back then still applies.

And for those of you still prone to worry, let me add this: I was right. And when was the last time an end-of-the-world doom crier was right?

Let me give you a hint: Never.

Not that this will stop them. There’re two things I know for sure: they’ll never admit they were wrong, and there will always be something else. The next asteroid, the next full Moon, the next star they think will explode, a pole shift, whatever.

As long as people aren’t familiar with the reality of the situation, there will be fearmongers to take advantage of the situation. That’s a big reason I do what I do, and why I have to do what I do.

Image credit: NASA/Cornell/Arecibo

^* You’d think at least they’d claim it was last week’s solar flare that did it; after all, it’s Oklahoma, where the solar wind comes sweepin’ down the plain…