The Accidental Weblog

I’ve a little limited sympathy for folk—parents especially—who get all antsy about big medicine, Big Science™ injecting stuff into their little darlings, or who start shopping around for alternative ‘cures’ when told by their doctor there isn’t one that actually works yet.

Not so much in the former case, especially, that I still don’t want to smack ‘em sometimes, mind. Please to read up on herd immunity, and why it’s not all about you, and mebbe read up a bit, too, on some of the symptoms and hazards of the rather miserable pathogens you’ve probably never even experienced firsthand, thanks to vaccination programs (and this, too, is probably part of the problem: when the programs work so well and people actually don’t realize what a bloody miserable deal things like whooping cough and polio can be, sure, they get complacent, tho’ I digress.)

In the latter case—those parents whose children have conditions for which treatment options are limited or of limited efficacy or for which there simply are no treatment options—and who then turn to various quacks who’ll sell ‘em a ‘cure’ anyway, my contempt is, I think, rather more focused on the cons, not the parents. Like the faith healers mentioned a few articles back, there’s something intensely revolting about that general form of scam and those who make money from it.

Anyway, still: the anxieties people have about this stuff, fine, I get that, a bit, I think. It’s a big, complicated world, and the biosciences are especially complicated. So there’s something naturally seductive, I’m sure, about folk selling various quack remedies they also tout as ‘natural’, especially…

Ah, as it’s just so much less scary, that ‘natural’ stuff, right? As opposed to images of cold, clean, clinical labs staffed by folk in white coats playing around in scary ways with DNA or some damned thing (the mandatory mad scientist B-movie cliché goes here: ‘You are meddling with things that ought not be meddled with!’), well, as opposed to this, you get these warm fuzzy images of a possibly grandmotherly woman who runs a health food store, bakes apple pies, cools ‘em on the windowsill, then injects those into your little darlings…

… well, she injects that or bleach. Either way…

Bleach, right? That’s not scary. Just a nice, friendly industrial-strength product you use in higher dilutions to make your clothes whiter, and which, if you spill even those concentrations on your skin, you’d better run to the fucking cold water tap and wash it off while you still have your skin on.

The mind boggles. Seriously. Word to the wise: take this lil’ example and keep it in mind. The point being: saying ‘ZOMG! Scary big science is scary; let’s trust instead this passionate dear running her own little business of alternative ‘cures’ and assuring us it’s somehow not about the money’ is, too often, jumping away from the slightly scary to the genuinely dangerous.

As, normally, sure, the only real damage alt med does is to your bank account (tho’ that too can be considerable), as the ‘cures’ are mostly placebo. Take homeopathy, for instance: while it might distract you from taking a cure that might actually do something, otherwise, the only actual active damage the ‘preparations’ themselves could possibly do you would be if you took enough of ‘em at once to induce water intoxication.

And then there’s shit like this. Which, on balance, I wish were just placebo.

(/See also the original article at Science-based medicine.)

… y’know, the one for the unwanted pregnancies, abortion services rendered, STD treatments…

… not to mention additional costs to the larger system due to people who, under the stress of unwanted pregnancies, drop out of school or otherwise generally find their young lives under significantly greater pressure.

Yeah, James Moore, you shameless panderer. Let’s talk turkey: the truth is, you just wanted to toss a bone to your Brylcreem Brigade base, and who gives a rat’s ass whose lives it screws up, right?

And seriously, you and that small gaggle of the endlessly dazed who wrote in to protest the exhibit: how spectacularly stupid can you be? Let’s get this straight: do you really think a science museum exhibit is a bad way for your kids to learn about sex?

So what’s the plan, here? Tell ‘em that’s off limits and hope they get it from internet porn, mebbe?

‘Cos, news flash, dearies: that’s how it’s going to work. So I think, seriously, ‘mongst the folk who might be passing along a little info, the lot up at 1867 St. Laurent were probably one of your better options.

So, yeah, pal, you and the slope-foreheaded CFRA listeners who wrote in on a script to complain, winding up with the exhibit now being that much less accessible to those it was actually meant to reach: expect a bill.

It’s like you lot are always preaching, tho’ clearly without much understanding the same: actions have consequences.

So one Ms. Jessica Ahlquist has been getting some pretty shitty email ‘n tweets of late, since that whole ACLU case in Rhode Island earlier this year.

I figured I’d wear this today in solidarity. Sure, I’ve generally not been much into activist wear. And, honestly, much as I’m pretty visible with my opinions on stuff like this on the net, I tend to keep it a little more on the not-quite-as-visible in real life.

Normally. But y’know, I think mebbe this whole image of an insanely gutsy high school student having to put up with shit like that is kinda, well, y’know…

Well, putting me to shame, pretty much.

So, seriously, I think I can afford to do this much. It’s kinda in the ‘least I could do’ category, even, wearing one shirt with a hardly obvious message to my two errands outside the home office today… And, I mean, it ain’t like they usually make death threats for that sorta thing around here, after all.

Oh, also, to the hammerheads who pull charming crap like that: congratulations. You have successfully dragged someone else that little bit further out of the closet. Well done.

There’s much that’s funny in Randi’s exposé of Popoff and Co., back some years now. I still get a bit of a giggle, just trying to picture the expression on Elizabeth Popoff’s face as she’s realizing the audience member her husband had just ‘cured’ of uterine cancer was not, in fact, a woman. If you’re looking for a laugh, it’s worth revisiting, sure.

But then, there’s also stuff less funny. Like a small boy on crutches and his parents, who’d come to several shows in a row, hoping for a miracle. But, regrettably, and as you may have noticed, faith healers and the gods they claim to serve generally prefer to ‘cure’ conditions rather less graphically visible than those. So, well…

Look, you already know how this ends, right?

… Those crutches were aluminum, badly worn and bent, and the boy’s legs were terribly twisted. These three people told me they’d driven for eight hours to get to this Popoff meeting, the fifth—and last—one that they could afford to attend, always trying to get to the stage for healing, but always being held back behind the security barrier where Popoff’s minions placed them if they were obviously not the sort of disabled person who could at least show some small sign of fake recovery to please the audience and raise Popoff financial “love gifts.”

A film crew from a local TV station had accompanied me, and we witnessed the usual farce inside the auditorium, then went outside to interview the victims as they left. We saw the family slowly going to their beat-up old car, tears streaming down their faces, shaking with sobs since they’d failed—again—to receive a miracle.

The cameraman placed the lens cap on his camera. “Sorry, I can’t do this,” he said. I just nodded in assent, and as far as I know, none of that footage was ever used.

So, also on the subject of Joseph Smith and No Man Knows My History, I happened to read this interview on the PBS site of one Michael Coe, an anthropologist and expert on the Maya, who thus knows a fair bit about the people who inhabited the same part of Mexico and Central American where Mormon scholars say the events of the ‘Book of Mormon’ took place…

… and honestly, I find it a bit weird. Coe’s a secular scholar who’s also read Brodie, and who also happens to know as a consequence of his field of study how utterly flaky Smith’s bizarre claims about North American prehistory are revealed to be against the actual archaeological evidence, and who concludes, obviously enough, that Smith was full of it. Furthermore, and kinda interestingly, he mirrors quite exactly my supposition on Smith’s thinking, and, more generally, my suspicion about how characters of this ilk may frequently proceed:

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Fox News is full of shit. Again.

(/I suppose I could also just write ‘still’, as opposed to ‘again’, there.)

… Hitler, that’s who!

Seriously, if someone pulls a line of that form on the net, in general, you can assume they’re being facetious. And, indeed, with the right setup, it could actually be funny.

Random sample:

‘You know who else flossed their teeth? Hitler, that’s who!’*

But when someone actually pays for a billboard campaign to pull this…

Well, seriously, guys, that’s just above and beyond. A bit much, even…

But hey, let’s give it up for the Heartland Institute, all the same. If only all comics were so dedicated to their craft.

(*/Also: try this in person at your dentist’s office, for extra lulz.)