Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I used to write for the Huffington Post, an online news and blog collective. It was started by Arianna Huffington during the Bush Era as a response to all the far-right online media. I didn’t agree with a lot of what was on there — I am more centrist — but at the time I thought it was necessary.

Then they started to promote far-left New Age nonsense, and when it came to vaccinations, HuffPo started posting all kinds of opinions that amounted to nothing more than out-and-out health threats. While they do sometimes post a counter-argument, it’s still almost all alt-med, all the time.

Here’s the latest: a doctor named Frank Lipman is telling people not to get vaccinated against Swine Flu. Instead he says you should wash your hands a lot, eat well, and take homeopathic medicine.

Yes, seriously. And he does it while spouting quite a few of the standard antivax memes, like the flu won’t be that bad (maybe he should consult with Dr. Joe Albietz, who I’m sure would disagree) and my favorite, we don’t know how well the vaccine will work. In fact, the vaccine for Swine Flu is based on many decades of research on how vaccines are produced, and will certainly work better than Dr. Lipman’s homeopathic "medicine" which we know is just plain old water, and totally useless. I’ll note that on his own site he promotes acupuncture and chiropractic, too.

It’s the peddling of antivax rhetoric like this that drove me from HuffPo, and I’ve let them know why. I was a minor cog there, so I know it made no difference… and the proof is that they still post articles promoting procedures known to be useless. In fact, it’s worse than that, since someone might try the homeopathic water rather than get actual treatment.

So, as always, don’t listen to people like Lipman, or even to me when it comes to this stuff. Instead, go to your doctor, a board-certified and science-based doctor, and ask them about the H1N1 swine flu, and see if they recommend getting the shot. And yes, as soon as it’s available here I’ll get vaccinated, as will my wife and daughter. We talked to a real doctor about it, and we understand the threat of H1N1, and we understand what vaccines do.

Tip o’ the syringe to Dan Gilbert and Richard Saunders. Note added after I wrote this: Mike’s Weekly Skeptical Rant has also weighed in on Lipman, and Salon.com has an article excoriating HuffPo as well.

I keep wondering what kind of dumbosity people associated with the Texas Board of Education can come up with next, and I keep being surprised at the depths of teh stoopid. And this time it’s not creationism!

It’s NASA. According to Houston Chronicle blogger Eric Berger, there’s a proposal to remove Neil Armstrong’s name from social studies textbooks.

Yes, you read that correctly. The proposal was suggested by teachers and parents reviewing materials, because Armstrong "is not a scientist".

Wha wha whaaaa?

I could argue that technically that’s correct, since Armstrong’s an engineer, which is different than a research scientist. Still, he did do some modicum of science when he walked on the frakking Moon. I think maybe he should be given the benefit of the doubt on this one^*

Plus, his foot was the first planted on another world, and maybe we’re not being too tough on students to know that. And the irony that this is Texas! They have a big city there called Houston which has some NASA ties, as in "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

So, to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills review team, this one’s for you:

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to BABlogee Earl Ware

[Update: the comments below are raging, and many people seem to have missed my point. it has nothing at all to do with whether Armstrong is a scientist or not. The point I am making is that he was the first person to walk on another world! That's why I bolded that phrase in the article above. Leaving him out of the history book is madness, scientist or engineer or otherwise. And another point: I understand history books cannot cover everything that ever happened ever. But leaving this particular person out is -- stop me if you've heard this before -- madness, especially when the people thinking of leaving him out are from Texas in the first place.]

^* I’ll note, however, that Carl Sagan’s name will be left out of the textbook as well, though he was in fact a scientist, and a good one. On the other hand, without knowing his relevance to the issues discussed in the textbook I’m not too concerned about this — it’s just that the BoE’s excuse for Armstrong strikes me as a little weak given this.

[Update: Looks like The Age got it right though; quoting a scientist who calls the AVN a "vocal fringe group". Nice!]

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation just posted a dangerous and ridiculous article playing up dangers from an H1N1 vaccine, saying "it could be more dangerous than swine flu" itself.

That is utter nonsense. Go read what pediatric doctor Joe Albietz has to say on this.

The ABC article is simply atrocious, and outrageously bad journalism. They quote notorious antivaxxer Meryl Dorey — yeah, her — without barely a nod to reality (just mentioning at the very end that Dorey and her antivax network have been accused of "spreading misinformation", when in fact the truth is far richer than that simple statement). Where is an interview with a real doctor? Where are the actual numbers? Where is the link to research by real scientists showing how dangerous H1N1 is and how we know the vaccine is OK to use?

Nowhere. Shame on the ABC for posting dangerous and misleading stories like this, especially when Australian babies are dying from preventable diseases while antivaxxers go scare-mongering.

Shame on them.

Thanks to Stephanie McNeill for sending me the article.

I get email.

This time, it was from VoiceAmerica and LOGO, asking if I’d like to come to a conference they are sponsoring called "Celebrate Your Life!" which will be held in Phoenix in November. If you attend this conference, what can you do? Well, they provide a helpful summary:

Immerse yourself in a weekend for your mind, body and spirit. Attend powerful life-changing workshops with the country’s top authors and teachers, be guided into a pathway of transformation and personal renewal…

Wow! What kind of top authors can provide powerful life-changing workshops? Well, let’s look at two of them pictured here:

The woman in the middle does makeovers, so she’s forgiven and forgotten. But the guys bookending her…

You may recognize the man on the right: James van Praagh, a guy who claims he speaks to the dead, but actually is far more likely to be making stuff up out of the ectoplasm. Maybe he believes in what he does, but I sure don’t. You shouldn’t either. I rarely resort to ad hominems, but man, he’s icky.

The other guy is Bruce Lipton, who on the conference site is described thusly:

Bruce H Lipton, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized authority on bridging science and spirit. [...] Dr. Lipton’s groundbreaking book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles documents the amazing new awareness that is currently rewriting the science of biology and medicine awareness that the mind’s perception of the environment, not genes, controls life at the cellular level.

Oh, of course! Genes are stupid. What were we thinking? All he’s doing is overthrowing more than a half-century worth of biological science based on solid evidence such as, um… as, uhhh…

[crickets]

Hello?

Is this thing on?

[more crickets]

Yeah, OK. I figured as much. Several of the other guests have just as esteemed credentials. Some workshop titles include "Discover How the Science of Numerology Can Transform Your Life!", "An In-depth Journey to Communicating with the Archangels", and my personal favorite, "Choice Point 2012: Fractal Time And A New World Age", which I can’t even make sense of. I’ve heard all those words before, just not in that order.

So, VoiceAmerica and LOGO, thanks for sending a blindingly antiscience invitation to someone like me. You’ve maybe done some good, because I’ll happily mock you to my audience, who may very well go on to do so to theirs as well. Now a whole bunch of people know about your conference! Maybe not in the way you’d hope, though. As for me, I’ll skip your nasty little soirée and go about celebrating life the right way: acknowledging reality.

And really, you’d think that if they have gen-yoo-ine psychics on their guest list, they’d know better than to send their ads to me.

Sheesh.

And if you’re looking for People Unclear on the Concept Parts 1 – 3, they can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Those last two got misnumbered, sadly. I’ll do better next time.

On this day, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, it’s common for people to look back at what they were doing at that time, how they were involved, what they were thinking. It’s human nature to look back on big anniversaries, both happy and otherwise, and recollect.

It’s also natural to seek meaning in such acts, try to make sense of them, fit them into our view of how the world works and how it should work. Sometimes the pieces fit. Sometimes they don’t.

Today I saw once again a picture that’s been floating around the web for a few years now. It shows the Twin Towers, and the caption reads, "Science flies people to the Moon. Religion flies people into buildings." It’s an interesting quotation. It’ll guarantee enraging religious folks, while self-satisfying people who are antireligious.

But is it accurate? After all, it was science that created the airplanes, science that built those buildings, science that developed the technology to bring the two together at high velocity. You might then say yes, but religion was the pilot; it was the fundamentalist jihadic brand of Islam that guided those men to do what they did.

And I say, yes. Exactly. In this case, both science and religion were tools, used for nefarious ends.

Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality.

Religion, to those who are religious, is similar in that they believe it is a way of making sense of the world. It is of course entirely different than science in its methodology, but it holds no less thrall over the way people see reality. To someone who is very religious, there is no other way to perceive life.

In that sense, religion and science are different because to a scientist science is a tool used to help understand the world, but to the religious religion is the way to see the world.

However, religion can be a tool as well. It was used to brainwash 19 young men, to convince them to do something that countless generations of evolution have almost completely bred out of our systems: commit suicide. With fantasies of an afterlife and admonitions of the greater good, those men flew multiton jets into buildings, and changed our lives forever.

But it’s not hard to imagine things being a little different. Had those men not been subjected to that fringe religion, had they instead grown up in a more open environment, exposed to things like diversity, open-mindedness to other people’s ways of life, and the realization that they may be wrong and that all knowledge is tentative… we might not be spending this day in remembrance.

Still. They were immersed in their beliefs, told what to think, how to think. In this case, religion was a tool for abuse.

It’s not difficult to create a list of both good and bad things both science and religion have brought us. Such lists have been debated and used as bludgeons for years, so I won’t belabor them here. The point is, as tools, science and religion are neither good nor evil. They can be used either way.

Note that I am not saying any particular religion is right, or even that any of them accurately portrays the Universe for what it is — it should be clear by now I don’t think that at all. As a tool to seek truth in the Universe, I don’t think religion works very well. But as a framework for many people, and as tool to inspire them, its motivational abilities are without question. For good or for ill.

I’m not necessarily trying to make any grand point here. All I’m doing is making an aside, if you will, a mumbled comment amidst all the rhetoric that will no doubt fly today about moderate versus fundamentalist religion, about atheism versus religion, about us versus them, and this versus that.

In the hand of a carpenter a hammer can build a house, and in the hand of a madman it can stave in a skull.

Which will you be today?

The skeptic ‘net is buzzing because it’s been reported that a young Toronto woman has died apparently investigating a reportedly haunted building.

I know some folks will want to use this to say that belief in the paranormal can kill you, and so on, but we have to resist that thought. For one thing, it’s pretty silly. Of all the paranormal beliefs that do harm in our society, a belief in ghosts is just about the least likely to do physical harm (though it can do great harm otherwise). Plus, the reports are sketchy; perhaps she was a skeptic and investigating the claims critically. Even if that’s not the case, it’s not hard to see something just like that happening, and the results would be the same. If it did, would you now claim that skepticism kills?

Irrational beliefs despite a lack of evidence bug me too, but they’re no reason to make false correlations. We have to be skeptical even of our own skepticism, and how we apply it.

Before reading any further, PLEASE read my post on religion and politics. I’ve had lots of people wondering why an astronomy blog is not only about astronomy. That post will clear things up.]

Yesterday I wrote an empassioned article about the mainstreaming of ridiculous and frankly crazy rhetoric from extremely fringe groups, people who think Obama is literally like Hitler, yet are being treated as if their opinions are well-reasoned and worthy of debate.

I made myself pretty clear, I thought. My rant was not against Republicans in general, for example. The main thrust of my post was not taking on any political party — yes, I did take a swipe at Bush, but that was not because he was a Republican, it was because he was clearly and provably antiscience, and again that was secondary at best to my main point. I do not say anywhere in that post that if you disagree with Obama, or if you’re opposed to what’s in his speech, then you’re a whackjob (though I do think you’d be wrong).

What I was saying is that nutsoid fringe craziness is getting way too much airtime and consideration, and is being presented as a reasonable stance. The people making claims that Obama is Hitler and the like are not very different from people who say they have alien babies, or that the Apollo landings were faked. They are way off the path of reality, and most people in this country and this planet know that. Putting people like that on TV and engaging them (except the way Barney Frank did) makes rational discourse nearly impossible, as it lowers the signal to noise ratio to essentially zero. We have real trouble in this country, and we need real debate. Pandering to the fringe makes that impossible, and many media outlets are simply trying to foment discord and perhaps push their own agenda.

Yet many of the comments left on my blog, on Twitter, on other blogs, and on Digg are just adding to the noise. They accuse me of being an Obama sycophant, or of denying people’s freedom of speech. These claims are patently false, and obviously wrong to anyone who actually read what I wrote, instead of reading their own blind prejudices into my words.

Examples abound. This guy got what I said completely wrong, and says I’m claiming we should have more Obama. He seems to think I am rah-rahing Obama (I did in fact support the speech, but — repeat after me — that’s not what the post I wrote was about). This guy calls me an idiot, though he never really says why. I assume he thinks it’s obvious, but the irony in his words is not hard to find. This guy accuses me of attacking straw men, then creates a cornfield full of ‘em.

Noise, noise, noise.

I could debunk these point-by-point, but it doesn’t matter. I certainly can’t reason with people who don’t want to be reasonable, and for people who are reasonable the flaws are easy to see.

To be clear and succinct: my point was not about political parties. It wasn’t about liberals, or conservatives (I have issues with liberal commentators such as Randi Rhodes, for example, as well as with neocons like Rush Limbaugh; opposite ends of the political spectrum and both just as often as far from reality as the other). It wasn’t about other speeches in the past. It wasn’t even really about the content of Obama’s speech, though I agree with it, and the speech’s content was what the craziness was about.

My post was about clearly lunatic rhetoric being taken as reasonable discourse, and how that demeans real discussions of real problems. I can’t make it any simpler than that.

The very fact that so many people chose to ignore this basic premise of what I wrote and to spin, fold, and mutilate it to increase the noise in the conversation ironically proves my point. And to them I say: Those of us who are reality-based see through you, and you are the very people we won’t let drag us down.