Anyway, if you’re Italian or know an Italian or play one on TV, then you may enjoy me making faces with Italian words flashing by underneath.

The fight is actually going well on both fronts, but, sadly, it’s claimed Simon as a victim: it’s eating up so much of his time that he can no longer write his monthly column for The Guardian. This is a shame. He’s a great writer and a voice that definitely needs to be heard. He fights the quacks, the antireality brigade, the poor thinkers, and the out-and-out frauds that occupy every crevice of medical altmeddery.

Still, he is pushing for libel reform, and I know his voice overall will not be silenced. Nor will ours. Give your support for libel reform, and make sure the forces of darkness don’t win.

Tip o’ the subluxation to Tony Piro.

Yay!

Last year, this same court ruled that evidence presented by families claiming their children were harmed by vaccines was insufficient to show that vaccines cause autism. In fact, one judge said that the families were misled by antivax physicians.

This new ruling is a good one. Medically and scientifically, it’s been known for some time that thimerosal does not cause autism. This graph makes it pretty clear:

Since the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines, autism rates have increased. The antivax movement has frothed and railed about this, but as usual reality is firmly against them. I suggest you read Australian skeptic Maggie’s take on this topic as well.

As a parent myself, I have sympathy for parents of autistic children, I really do: no parent could deny the strong urge to defend and protect their child against all threats. But because we are so strongly emotional in cases like this, we have to be ever-more vigilant about using logic, evidence, and rationality, lest we react to a problem that doesn’t exist. The parents who brought their cases to this court are, I suspect, well-meaning and desperate for answers. But the respite they seek will not be found in an imagined link between vaccinations and autism.

This movement is doing serious damage in two ways. One, it’s scaring parents unreasonably into not vaccinating their kids, putting these children and others at risk for contracting preventable diseases. But second, this whole debacle is distracting researchers against looking for the real causes behind autism. In other words, these people are fighting against their own cause.

We need real answers about autism, and the antivax movement is wasting tremendous resources that could be far, far better spent looking at the reality of the situation. Instead, they rail against phantoms, and the real victims are children, theirs and everybody’s.

The Texas State Board of Education member Don McLeroy — creationist, antireality promoter, and stander-upper to experts — was interviewed on ABC TV’s Nightline program. Give this a listen, just in case you were thinking of cutting him a break… for whatever reasons I cannot fathom.

Yes, how magnanimous of the rich white men to allow women the vote, or to give the blacks equal rights!

[If the video doesn't load for you, go to the Nightline web page and click on Thursday's listing of Texas Textbook controversy, which should be up for a few more days.]

I have been active on Twitter today mocking the new textbook standards, and a handful of people have taken me to task thinking I was mocking all Texans. That’s ridiculous; I am clearly ridiculing the ten people on the Board who rammed this revisionist nonsense through… though you may feel free to expand that to the people who support them.

And to the commenters on my original post and elsewhere defending McCarthy because there were in fact communists in America: shame on you. Seriously, shame on you. What McCarthy did — and yes, it was a witch hunt — was directly opposed to all the ideals of this nation: free speech, liberty, presumed innocence until proven guilty, and many more. He was only able to ferret out a handful of so-called communists, but even if he had been 100% successful in his efforts what he did was an abomination for anyone in this country, let alone a seated Senator in the United States Congress. He engendered fear and suspicion, a paranoia and chilling climate from which it took years to recover. He betrayed precisely what he claimed to be trying to protect, and will stand as an object lesson for future generations on what happens when our system fails so utterly.

That is, he’ll stand as that lesson for those who will listen. Clearly, some people didn’t. It’s a crying shame that this includes a majority of the Texas State Board of Education, because now it’s entirely likely the lesson will be missed by a decade’s worth of schoolchildren, too.

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Luhn of the wonderful National Center for Science Education for the link to the ABC interview.

Sometimes I hate being right.

In a 10-5 party line vote last week, the BoE rammed through a vast number of changes to the Texas state history standards, all of which conform to the über-far-right’s twisted view of reality. In these new standards, Hispanics are ignored, Black Panthers are added to provide balance to the kids learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., and get this, Thomas Jefferson was removed^*.

It’s insanity, pure and simple. The absolute and utter denial of reality generally is.

In typical McLeroy nutball fashion, he said:

"We are adding balance," said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

"Balance". Feh. As Colbert once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

The problem here isn’t one of balance, it’s of revisionism. As one of the more reality-based members of the BoE said, "They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world." As another example, the new history standards downplays and questions the separation of Church and State. And this was no accident by the religious zealots on the Board; when a more moderate Democrat tried to insert language about why the Establishment Clause was put in the Constitution, it was voted down by the Republicans.

There’s tons more. And there’s one that totally blows me away. I hope you’re ready for this — they added apologetics for the McCarthy hearings.

Yes, you read that right. They added to the standards that America was being infiltrated by Communists, and therefore McCarthy was right.

Holy crap.

So, is Texas doomed? Well, I can hope that teachers across the state will see through this sort of revisionist garbage, but I also know that bucking the standards is very difficult for educators, especially when those standards guide how tests are made, both in the schools and in statewide standardized testing.

And even worse, Texas has such a huge school system that textbook publishers will base their books in large part on the Texas standards, and these books will then be sold in other states. So these handful of ultra-conservative rabid far-right lunatics will actually be affecting the way children are taught all over the country. That means my kid. Your kids. All of them.

Congratulations, Texas State Board of Education. And thanks for dragging the rest of us down with your insanity.

My thank to everyone who sent me links about this.

[^* Update: It was Jefferson's contribution to the Enlightenment that was removed, not Jefferson himself. Sorry for any confusion there.]

Obviously, I’m conflicted about this.

If this is an impact crater (it has not yet been confirmed), it’s about 40 km (25 miles) across, making it one of the largest seen on the Earth. We haven’t been hit by a big asteroid in a long time, and erosion has erased most of the impact craters. There’s a picture of the crater on that link above, and the crater is obviously very old.

It’s fascinating to know that such a large feature can be hidden at all, but it’s sad indeed on how it got uncovered. I can hope no one would be so crass as to suggest we should continue to deforest our planet in hopes of finding more treasures, but I have seen far worse things suggested to support unrestrained mining, drilling, and polluting. I’m glad something good came of this horrific practice, but all things told, I think I’d rather it had remained tucked away among thousands of square kilometers of trees.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Ted Judah.

I believe people have the right to practice their religious beliefs… up until they start to hurt others. It has been proven over and again that prayer does nothing to heal disease over the placebo effect, while vaccinations have saved hundreds of millions of people. That’s math I can do pretty easily.

If this story is true, I certainly hope that the people involved are introduced to the inside of a jail cell for a long, long time. They can happily pray there all they want, and on the outside those children can get the vaccinations that will save their lives.