Raw nonsense

Despite the fact that our modern lifestyle has increased our life expectancy to longer than it's ever been in the history of humanity, romanticizing the practices of the past is still ridiculously widespread.

People who claim that "everything causes cancer" conveniently ignore two things: first, that a good many forms of cancer would decline dramatically if we'd do things doctors recommend, like cutting out tobacco and getting vaccinated against HPV; and second, that one of the reasons cancer rates have climbed is that we're no longer dying of other stuff, like diphtheria, typhoid, measles, and smallpox.

But that kind of thinking seldom makes any inroads into the minds of people committed to anti-vaxx (or completely anti-medical) propaganda.  The levels of irrationality some of this thinking reaches are truly staggering.  I had one person comment on one of my posts -- in all apparent seriousness -- "my great-grandma never got vaccinated against anything, and she survived."

Well, of course she did.  If she'd died at age three of diphtheria, she wouldn't have been your great-grandma, now would she?

How about asking great-grandma how many of her siblings and cousins died of childhood infectious diseases -- like my grandfather's two oldest sisters, Marie-Aimée and Anne-Désée, who died five days apart at the ages of 22 and 16 -- of measles.

The person who posted that comment should win some sort of award for compressing the greatest number of fallacies into the shortest possible space.  Confirmation bias, cherry-picking, anecdotal evidence, and the post hoc fallacy, all in nine words.  Kind of impressive, actually.

Despite all this, there are huge numbers of people who want to return to what our distant ancestors did, claiming that it's "healthier" or "more natural," conveniently neglecting the fact that back then, as Thomas Hobbes so trenchantly put it, "life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The result is the kind of thing I ran into in an article in Ars Technica last week about a trend I hadn't heard of, which is to drink "raw water."  "Raw water," which you might guess from the name, is water that hasn't been filtered or treated, but is collected (or even bottled and sold) right from a spring or river or whatnot.  And predictably, what happened was that nineteen people fell ill with a diarrheal disease (specifically Campylobacter jejuni) when it turned out that their trendy "natural spring water" turned out to be just ordinary runoff from a creek drainage that had been contaminated by bacteria from bird nests.

The amount of pseudoscience you run into with this stuff is astonishing.  In researching this topic, I found people who claim that "industrially-processed water" (i.e. most tap water) has "mind-control drugs" in it, designed to turn us all into Koolaid-drinkin' sheeple, and even one that said treatment plants deliberately "alter the molecular structure of water, turning it into a toxin."

Making me wonder how, or if, these people passed high school chemistry.

I spent the summers during my twenties and thirties back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics, and I know how careful you have to be.  The clearest bubbling mountain brook can be contaminated with nasty stuff like Giardia and Salmonella, two diseases that should be high on the list of germs you never want to have inside you.  I used iodine sterilizing tablets for all the water I drank -- and I never got sick.  But I knew people who did, and as one of them vividly described it, "Having Giardia means that for three weeks you're going to be on a first-name basis with your toilet."

Which is funny until you find out that in the process, he lost twenty pounds and spent three days in the hospital hooked up to an IV so he could stay hydrated.

Look, I know our high-tech world isn't perfect.  I know about pesticides and herbicides and industrial contamination and coverups and food additives with dubious health effects.  My wife and I try as hard as we can to eat locally-sourced organic meat and produce, not to mention growing our own vegetables.  But the admittedly true statement that technology and the pharmaceuticals industry have created some problems does not equate to "therefore we should jettison everything they provide and return to the Stone Age."

Speaking of fallacies, there's another one for you: the package-deal fallacy.  You get into this stuff, it reads like the "what not to do" section of a critical thinking textbook.

So if you're inclined to switch over to "raw water," just don't.  Drinking water is treated for a reason.  Our Stone Age ancestors didn't have such great lives, and idealizing it as some kind of idyllic Garden of Eden is complete horse shit. 

Horse shit ironically being one of the things that might well be in your "raw water."

****************************************

Rage overload

It has gotten lately that I can't look at the news without repeatedly screaming, "What the hell is wrong with you people?"

And I'm not talking here about people doing bad stuff themselves, although there is certainly enough to scream about in that category, too.  I'm talking about people being willing to cast their votes for idiots, liars, moral degenerates, and people who are out-and-out batshit crazy, so that they can get into government and do bad stuff on a grander scale.

Let's start at the top, with the President of the United States.  Donald Trump has been involved in cringe-worthy stuff on a daily basis since the American electorate chose for some reason to elect a narcissistic compulsive liar to the highest office in the land, but I don't think I've cringed quite so hard as I did yesterday.  Because Trump, who when he was in kindergarten evidently never learned the rule "Don't budge," said, "Move," and shoved his way in front of the Prime Minister of Montenegro so he could be at the front of the photo-op.  And because that wasn't humiliating enough, he gave one of his typical poorly-informed, word-salad speeches at a meeting of NATO leaders -- and it was so bad that the other members laughed at him and rolled their eyes.

World leaders not even trying to be subtle about laughing at Donald Trump

How's that Making America Great Again going for you these days, Trump voters?  It's turning out to be more Making America An International Laughingstock, as far as I can see.

It's not only things happening overseas that are making me wonder if I should admit that I'm an American when I visit South America this summer.  There's enough crazy shit happening right here on American soil for me to fill ten blog posts with non-stop ranting.  In the interest of brevity, let's just look at two.

First, this week lawmakers in Arizona saw fit to appoint one Sylvia Allen as chairperson of the State Education Committee.  Allen, who gives every appearance of being only marginally sane, has appeared in Skeptophilia before; first for babbling about chemtrails during a hearing about mine safety, and then for blurting out, during a hearing about laws governing concealed weapons, that all of the problems in the United States would be solved if we just made church attendance mandatory.

Oh, and did I mention that she's a young-Earth creationist?  There's that.

This, Dear Readers, is the person who will be overseeing the education of children in an entire state.

But nothing pegged my Rage-O-Meter quite as much as when I found out that Greg Gianforte had won the special election to fill the seat in the House of Representatives vacated when Ryan Zinke was appointed Secretary of the Interior.  Why is this infuriating?

Because two days ago, Gianforte assaulted a reporter.  In front of a large crowd.

Which, you'd think, would have been the end of it.  Game over, Gianforte loses.

But no.  Exit pollsters asked voters if the incident had changed their vote... and almost no one said it had.  One person even said, "It's about time our politicians start standing up to these damn reporters."

Yes.  You read that right.  This person thinks that our elected officials are justified in assaulting a person who was doing his job, which is to report to the public what our elected officials are doing.  In fact, this person apparently believes that the reporter was himself to blame for being assaulted.

So Gianforte went on to win the election by a six-point margin, with crowds cheering "You're forgiven!" when he brought up the assault in his election speech.  It's reminiscent of the comment Donald Trump made last summer, that he could "shoot someone in Times Square" and not lose a bit of his support.

Oh, and did I mention that Gianforte is also a young-Earth creationist?  There's that.

It's getting to the point that I regret it every time I look at the news, because I'm bombarded by more examples of how credulous and ignorant a significant slice of my countrymen are -- and how willing they are to overlook immorality, sociopathy, anger management issues, dishonesty, and downright looniness from the people they vote for, as long as the candidates trot out the party line.  "Values voters."  "Patriotism."  "Religious freedom."  "Small government."  "Deregulation."

And, as I mentioned earlier, "Make America Great Again."

As long as you say the magic words, it doesn't matter what you do.  The voters will still follow right behind you, mooing loudly, and pull the lever on your behalf.

Even writing this is making me have to check my blood pressure.  So I'll end this here, by simply repeating what I started with: What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Wild West travelogue

Well, I'm back, and many thanks to my patient readers for sticking around during my two-week hiatus.  I'd like to launch this week with some observations from my travels, along with a few photographs taken by my wife (who is the amazing artist Carol Bloomgarden) and me.

Our travels this year took us out into the American West, where we spent some time in the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Park.  First of all, the natural beauty is stunning; while I like to think that we live in a part of the world that has awesome scenery (upstate New York), the grandeur of scale out there is something few places in the world can match.

The Grand Teton Mountains, from near Jackson Hole, Wyoming

There are a few additional things that have always impressed me about the American West, though.  One of them is that the Yee-Haw Attitude is alive and well, both in its positive and negative senses.  There's a feeling that personal freedom is paramount, as long as what you're doing doesn't impinge upon anyone else's personal freedom.  We did a lot of geocaching out there (and if you don't know about this amazingly weird and fun hobby, check it out here) -- and one of the caches we were seeking took us across a construction site up in Glacier National Park.  We started to cross, and were approached by two construction workers.  I expected that they were going to tell us to bugger off, that we weren't allowed there -- but they said, and I quote, "Do what you like as long as you don't mess with the equipment."

As another example of this, consider speed limits.  Near urban centers, even in the west, it's the usual 55 mph.  But as you get further out into the middle of nowhere, it goes up to 60, then 65, then 75 mph, until (in central Montana) they give up entirely.  "All right, go however the hell fast you want to," they seem to say.  "We know you're going to anyhow."

All of which is kind of funny, because our rental car was a Chevy Spark.  If you are unfamiliar with this car, all I can say is that the Chevy Spark is to cars as a pug is to dogs -- small, stubby, cute in a squashed sort of way, and not really particularly well adapted for any useful purpose.  I think that the Spark got its name from the fact that "spark" represents the energy level of which the engine is capable.  I noted that the speedometer went up to 120 mph, which was grimly amusing, because I don't think the Spark could go 120 mph if you dropped it off a cliff.  It went downhill like a boss, but going up (for example) Logan Pass involved lots of encouraging words from us and lots of nasty looks from the drivers of the cars who were in line behind us going 14 mph and who wanted for some reason to get to their destination that day.

Our Chevy Spark, recovering from a long climb

Of course, I spent a lot of time indulging in my favorite hobby, which is birdwatching.  Much of my behavior illustrated Dave Barry's contention that there is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness.  For example, we were at the LeHardy Rapids on the Yellowstone River, a site of amazing beauty, and there was also a rainbow trout run going on, which is pretty spectacular to see.  But my wife had spotted a Harlequin Duck, a bird I'd never seen, sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream.   The following conversation ensued:

Other tourist:  Wow!  This place is gorgeous! 

Me:  Look.  There's the duck. 

Other tourist:  That water is so blue!  And the trees!  And look at all of the trout in the river! 

Me:  But there's the duck. 

Other tourist:  Yellowstone is one of the natural wonders of the world! 

Me:  I know.  That's one incredible duck.

The duck in question

Which is not to say that I didn't appreciate other stuff.  In particular, Yellowstone is an astonishing place, to the point of parts of it being kind of surreal.  The hot springs, especially, which look like some amateur artist decided to use up all of their supply of brightly-colored acrylics in painting a nature scene.  If you ever get a chance to go to Yellowstone, the must-see (in my opinion) isn't Old Faithful, but Grand Prismatic Spring, which is colored by minerals and brilliantly pigmented bacteria:

Speaking of Yellowstone, it was in the forefront of my mind to consider the possibility of eruption of the hotspot/supervolcano that lies underneath Yellowstone Caldera, largely because over the last couple of years the woo-woos have been running around making little squeaking noises about how an eruption is imminent and you can tell because the bison and elk are fleeing from the park in terror, and also because the evil US government is evacuating the place and herding everyone into FEMA camps.  Well, we saw lots of people who weren't being held prisoner in FEMA camps, not to mention hundreds of bison, and I can say first-hand that the bison showed no evidence of fleeing in terror.  Most of them were simply moseying about in terror, or even snoozing in terror.

A bison, standing around munching on grass in terror

It did occur to me, though, that these might be suicidal bison, who realized that the volcano was going to blow and decided to stick around because they were depressed and wanted to end it all.  And in fact, "Meh, fuck it" seemed to be a common attitude amongst the wildlife we saw.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise the main cause of death in Yellowstone wouldn't be people getting vaporized by a volcanic eruption, but tourists being killed in messy ways because of sheer stupidity.  I have never seen so many people who evidently do not understand that "hot spring" means "so hot that it will boil your skin off," and "wild animal" means "animal that could easily kill you if it wanted to."  A former student of mine, who has worked in the national parks, told me that just a few weeks ago, a guy tried to put his son on the back of an elk so that his wife could take a photograph, and elk bucked and kicked the father in the head.

And killed him.

We didn't see anyone get killed in Yellowstone, but it wasn't for want of trying.  We saw one woman who was jumping up and down in front of a bison, waving her arms and shouting, "Hello, bison!  Hello, pretty bison!" so that it would turn its head for a picture with her.  When it refused to cooperate, she laughed and said, "Bye-bye, pretty bison!" and scampered off.  But the worst was when we saw a bear by the side of the road...

... a grizzly bear.

Okay, I took a picture of it, but using my zoom, and from the safety of my car.  But there were dozens of people who got out of their cars.  Despite the fact that this is clearly the most dangerous animal in the park, and is unpredictable.  And huge.  Which is why you're supposed to carry a whistle and pepper spray with you whenever you hike in the area.

You do know how to tell the different kinds of bear scat apart, right?  Black bears eat a lot of fruit, so black bear poop contains seeds and stems.  Brown bear poop often contains fish bones.  Grizzly bear poop, on the other hand, contains whistles and smells like pepper.

But that didn't stop people from acting like complete raving morons, running up to the wild animals and stepping on unstable ground over boiling hot lakes, despite the multitude of signs and warnings that were everywhere.  And I'm sure that if something bad had happened, the last thing that would have gone through these tourists' minds before being mauled and/or cooked to death would have been, "Why didn't someone warn me of the danger?"

But despite all that, the trip was amazing, and I highly recommend it to any of you who like to travel.  Traveling is, I think, the most eye-opening experience out there, and the natural world is full of beautiful, stunning, awe-inspiring places to visit.

And lots of really incredible ducks.