New world hack

You've probably heard of the Bilderberg Group, which is an annual conference of a couple of hundred  "political elite, experts from industry, finance, academia, and the media" named after the first place they met (back in 1954), the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.

They're also thought by some to be synonymous with, or at least a subcategory of, the Illuminati, and as such, the Bilderbergs are the evil, ultra-intelligent ruling elite of the New World Order who are controlling everything that goes on in all of the world's major governments, and who are so super-top-secret that they have a Wikipedia page saying where and when their next meeting is going to be held.  

Which is why I choked on my coffee yesterday morning when I read that the Bilderberg Group's site had been hacked, and a cryptic message left behind that has the conspiracy theorists experiencing multiple orgasms.  The message is the usual "we know who you are, you won't get away with this" kind of stuff, except for the fact that it has odd capitalization scattered throughout the message, leading the aforementioned so-and-sos hopping about making excited little squeaking noises about how it contains a secret encoded message.

The Hotel de Bilderberg, Oosterbeek, Netherlands [image courtesy of photographer Michiel M. Minderhoud and the Wikimedia Commons]

You can read the entire thing at the link posted in the preceding paragraph, but here's an excerpt so you can get the flavor:

Dear Bilderberg mEmBers, From NoW(), each OnE of you have 1 year (365 days) to truly work in faVor of HumaNs and not youR private interests
Each TopIc you disCuss or work you achieve thRough YoUr uber privAte meetinGs should from now benefit WORlD population and not X or Y groUp of people
OtHerWIse, we will FinD you and we Will hAck you
MiNd the cuRrent situation: We conTrol your expensive connected cars, we control your connecteD house security devices, we control your daughter laptop, we control your wife’s mobile,
we tape YoUR seCret meetings, we reAD your emaiLs, we control your faVoriTe eScort girl smartWatch, we ARe inside your beLoved banks and we Are reading YoUr assets
You wont be safe anywhere near electricty anyMore
We WiLL watch yOu, from NoW on you got to WoRk for Us, Humanity, the People

So that's pretty threatening, especially the part about controlling their favorite girl escorts.  You have to wonder how they'll do that.  Are the girl escorts remote-controlled robots?  Or do they have neural implants, so that when the Bilderberg members are in (as it were) mid-escort, the girls will suddenly start cackling in a maniacal fashion and demand passwords to their beLoved banks or they won't finish escorting them, leaving them in escortus interruptus?

But it's the potential for an encoded message that really has the conspiracy world humming.  One possible decoding of the message is included at the above website, which apparently involves conversion of the capitalized letters to hexadecimal and dividing by 3,600,000 and looking at it with your eyes squinched up, and gives you a latitude and longitude that's pretty close to the North Pole.

Which is incredibly significant, because before this, the location of the North Pole has been a highly-classified secret.  Just think of what would happen if WikiLeaks got a hold of this information, and put together the location of the North Pole with Pizzagate.  There would be massive uprisings.  Major world governments would fall.  Donald Trump would write several self-congratulatory tweets about it.

It would be, in a word, chaos.

So anyhow.  The whole thing is impressive mainly because of the fact that the Bilderberg website is probably pretty heavily protected, and the fact that hackers got into it is a little scary.  I mean, just think about it.  If they could do that, they could probably hack the sites of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.  And think of what effect that could have.

But as far as the message, I'm not convinced it contains anything of interest.  It will, however, give the conspiracy theorists something to worry at, which with luck will keep them out of trouble for a while.  And who knows?  Maybe it will induce the Bilderbergs to turn their attention to humanity's needs rather than personal gain.  Not a Bad oUtcome, You GOtta admit, RegarDless Of your opiNionS aBOut the ethics Of hacKS.

Time marches on

Happy New Year 2017 to all of my readers, and I hope this one brings you everything you hope for.  Me, I'm keeping my New Year's wishes fairly modest this year.  I'm currently working on two novels and I'd like to finish them both; I'd like to get my 5 K race time down below 27 minutes; and I'd like it if Donald Trump doesn't open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.

Other than that, I'm pretty content with the status quo.

But speaking of calendars, milestones, and benchmarks, apparently there's been a proposal to revamp our calendar.  According to a video by the Munich-based filmmakers that call themselves "Kurzgesagt" (German for "in brief"), we shouldn't be in the year 2017, we should be in 12,017.

The reason for this proposal is that marking our calendar based upon the beginning of Christianity is a fairly arbitrary zero year, given how many people in the world aren't Christian.  Plus, having a great swatch of history marked by the calendar-running-backwards "B.C." scale is confusing and unnecessary.  So Philipp Dettmer and his friends at Kurzgesagt have suggested a new scale, and one that conveniently would only require the addition of a "1" at the beginning of our current year.

So what happened 12,017 years ago that's so special?  Dettmer says this is when the first known permanent stone building was built in the hills of southern Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, marking the point at which we began to "build a new world on top of the old one."  At that point, we set in motion the massive terraforming operation that has characterized humanity ever since.

This would mean that we would do away with the old "B.C." and "A.D." designations; all years on the calendar after that point (and thus all of recorded history) would run forward and would be "H.E." (Human Era).

Roman calendar from the 1st century B.C.E., or the 99th century H.E., whichever you prefer (image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First of all, the temple that Dettmer et al. are referencing -- Göbekli Tepe, near the town of Şanlıurfa -- was not built 12,017 years ago, it was founded around 11,150 years ago, which is a 900-odd year discrepancy.  This is according to the oldest radiocarbon dates we have from the site, so it seems like a good estimate.  So if you really do want to measure the years based on the founding of this temple, you'd have to do more than simply adding a "1" to the beginning of the current calendar year, you'd have to add 9,133, which is not nearly as convenient.

Second, I wonder if they've considered the level of conniption that would be thrown by the Religious Right if this was seriously proposed.  These, after all, are the same people who founded the War on Christmas trope, which claims (among other things) that Starbucks changing its winter cup design was the moral equivalent of strafing the Three Wise Men while they were on their way to Bethlehem.  These are also the same people who regularly send me hate mail when I use "B.C.E." and "C.E." ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era") instead of B.C. and A.D.  (One memorable one said, "You're so much in love with your lord and master Satan you can't even bear to write Christ's name in an abbreviation.  You're despicable."  Which became a lot funnier when the final sentence made me think of reading the whole thing in a Daffy Duck voice, so I did.  You should try it.)

Hell, we're the culture that couldn't even agree to switching over to using metric units.  Nope, gotta stick with feet, inches, pounds, ounces, hundredweights, and furlongs per fortnight.  'Murika!  Fuck yeah!

Then there's a third issue, which is that it's not like we don't have commemoration of other deities in other parts of our timekeeping system, such as the days (Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Freyja) and months (Januarius, Februarius, Mars, Maia, Juno).  The difference is that pretty much no one worships any of these gods any more, which in Thor's case is kind of a shame because he was a serious badass.

Of course, it's not like calendar-keeping ever was a particularly exact science.  Our current zero year (well, 1 A.D., as there's no Year Zero in the contemporary calendar) is supposed to be based on the birth of Jesus, but the problem is, the most recent scholarship on the topic -- calculated from known dates of Roman emperors' reigns and the lives of biblical figures such as Herod -- has concluded that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.  He also wasn't born on December 25, but probably some time in the spring, given that "the shepherds were tending their lambs in the fields."  The settlement on December 25 as the date for the celebration of Jesus's birth probably started some time mid-4th century, and a lot of folks think that the date was chosen because it coincided with the part of the year when the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a solstice festival associated with meals, get-togethers, and gift-giving (sound familiar?).  The idea was that if you sanctified the date by putting a Christian spin on the celebration, you could let the former pagans still have their party but pretend it was something holier.  The church fathers figured with luck, the recent converts would eventually forget about the pagan part and focus only on the holy part, which 1,700 years later still hasn't happened, given Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and Black Friday specials at Walmart.

Now, my point is not that any of the above stuff is exact, either; the spring 4 B.C. date for Jesus's birth still rests on a lot of guesswork.  It's more that our calendar-keeping isn't based on anything real as it is.  It's hard enough to keep up with the inevitable vagaries that are engendered by the fact that the Earth's rotation and revolution cycles don't line up especially well, which is why we have leap days every four years (and had a "leap second" this year -- hope you used your extra second for something productive).  Trying to make a major-scale change to calendar-keeping would be too much for us, I think.

Me, I think if we're really going to have a meaningful calendar, we should start with the real milestone, which is the Big Bang.  Now that's a real Zero Year.  And with that thought, I'll end here, and pause only to reiterate my wish that your 13,800,002,017 A.B.B. is a special one.

Crash course

As if we needed one, there's another clickbait sort-of-sciencey-or-something site that I should warn you about.

It's called the Mother Nature Network, and it bills itself as follows:

MNN is designed for people who want to make the world a better place.  Its content is engaging, non-political, and easy-to-understand and goes well beyond traditional "green" issues — encompassing topics that include family, health, home, travel, food, and community involvement. It has been labeled “The Green CNN” by Time, “The USA Today of Sustainability” by Fast Company, “Green Machine” by Associated Press, and “one of the hottest web properties out there” by NBC News; highlighted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; selected “Best Idea” at Fortune Magazine’s Green Summit; and chosen as a “Top Pick” by Newsweek.

Well, that may be, but it makes me wonder about how Time et al. are deciding who to laud.  MNN is even a cut below I Fucking Love Science as regards to sensationalized headlines, shallow analysis of actual science stories, and the usual smattering of "the world of the bizarre" kind of articles (as an example, on of their "trending stories" is "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016").

My objection, though, is not that there's another clickbaity website that exists solely to grab ad revenue -- heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, and include sites that claim to be legitimate media, such as The Daily Mail Fail.  My main beef with these places is the misrepresentation of science.  Because, heaven also knows that given the general low comprehension of actual science by the voting public, we do not need media making it worse.

As an example, check out their story from this past Wednesday called "A Whole Other Star Is On a Crash Course With Our Solar System" by Bryan Nelson.  Well, don't actually check it out unless you want them to get another click's worth of advertising money.  But let me tell you the gist, and save you the moral dilemma.

First, what the hell is with the headline?  Is Bryan Nelson in third grade?  "A Whole Other Star?"  So, it's not Part of Another Star?  Or the Whole Same Star As Before?

But we'll let that pass.  The topic does sound alarming, doesn't it?  But when you read the text, you find that we've got a while to prepare:

[I]n around 1.35 million years, that's close to what might happen.  Scientists have been plotting the course of a rogue star, Gliese 710, which currently sits in the constellation of Serpens some 64 light years from Earth.  Turns out, it's headed straight for us.

And "close to what might happen?"  What the fuck does that even mean?  Turns out Bryan Nelson isn't really sure either:

The star isn't scheduled to collide directly with Earth, but it will be passing through our solar system's Oort Cloud, a shell of countless comets and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Sun's gravitational influence.  You might think that's a safe distance, but the star is likely to slingshot comets all over the solar system, and one of those could very well have our name on it.

So a star is going to be in our general vicinity over a million years from now, and it might disturb some comets, which are likely to get flung in toward the inner Solar System, and one of them might hit the Earth.  Or not.

But that's not all:

Scientists calculated that Gliese 710 is the star that's expected to come closest to us within the next 10 million years (which is as far ahead as scientists could project), but it's not the only close encounter.  As many as 14 other stars could come within 3 light-years distance in the next few million years, and there are numerous fainter, red dwarf stars with unknown trajectories that could be headed our way too.

So we shouldn't just worry about Gliese 710, we should also worry about other stars which might or might not come close to the Solar System in the next few million years, not to mention other stars which might or might not exist and could do indescribably bad things if they do.

"Hoag's Object" -- the remnants of a collision between two galaxies [image courtesy of NASA]

I decided to do a little research, and find out where all this stuff had come from.  I found a paper in Astronomy Letters from 2010 (i.e., actual research and not hyped silliness) called "Searching for Stars Closely Encountering the Solar System" by Vladimir V. Bobylev, and it included the following:

Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from −2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45 ± 0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 1 × 10−4, of falling into the region d < 1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.

Did you catch that?  The "nonzero probability" of Gliese 710 influencing the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud comets is 1 × 10−4.

For you non-math-types, that's one in ten thousand.

If you needed any more indication that the Mother Nature Network article was sensationalized clickbait, there you have it.

So add that one to our list of suspect media sources, along with the usuals -- Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, Breitbart, Before It's News, and so on.  My general advice is not to go there at all.  But if you disregard this, whatever you do, don't click on "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016."  You have been warned.

Ketchup claims

It goes without saying that advertisers will do or say damn near anything to sell their products, but every once in a while a marketing campaign will backfire.  That happened this week -- and surprisingly, because enough people knew enough science to call bullshit on the claim.

The company was Hunt's, maker of ketchup and various other tomato-based products.  They launched a campaign to inform customers that they were not using GMO tomatoes, and created a commercial to tell everyone about it.  "No matter how far afield you look, you won’t find a single genetically modified tomato among our vines," the video announcer says proudly.  The camera then pans across a field of tomatoes, and the announcer says, "No GMOs in sight."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, there are no GMO tomatoes being grown anywhere in North America or Europe.  The only GMO tomato that was ever widely available was the slow-ripening "Flavr Savr" cultivar, which peaked in numbers in 1998 and a few years thereafter completely disappeared from commercial farms.  Since then, no GMO variety of tomato has ever reached the market or even been grown outside of research laboratories.

So the claim by Hunt's would be equivalent to Evian bragging that they sold only gluten-free sparkling water.  Even if there was reason to believe that GMO tomatoes had negative health effects, which they don't.

Fortunately (miracle of miracles!) the company was immediately called out on their ridiculous announcement.  One person wrote on the Hunt's feedback website, "It's terribly unfortunate you're lying to consumers, Hunt's.  GMO tomatoes are not available to the market and yet you're implying they are."  Another was even more blunt: "Way to go, Hunt's - jump on the anti-science band-wagon in order to bilk a premium from some rubes.  What's next?  Homeopathic ketchup?  I guess it's Heinz for me from now on...  I like Heinz anyway.  And science.  No fearmongering with my fries, thanks."

Of course, the underlying problem is twofold.  First, the vast majority of GMO products have been safety-tested to a fare-thee-well, and have been shown completely safe (despite the alarmist claims that get flung about periodically).  Second, we've been tinkering with the genes of both animals and plants for millennia, only doing it by selective breeding rather than direct DNA manipulation -- and we've yet to produce a crop that directly causes autism or cancer or birth defects or any of the other wild claims you hear.

And, of course, there's a third problem that is recognized less often -- that there have been direct benefits of some GMO crops that extend well beyond providing revenue to Monsanto.  GMO virus-resistant papayas saved the crop from being destroyed into commercial irrelevance by the ringspot virus; if you've eaten papaya in the United States, you've eaten a GMO.  It's hoped that a fungus called "black sigatoka" that is threatening the Cavendish banana (by far the most common cultivar) with extinction can be handled the same way; likewise the world's orange crops, under attack by huanglongbing (citrus greening disease).  Selective breeding is too slow, and requires the location of resistant strains to breed into the population -- impossible with the banana, which has no seeds and is reproduced by asexual means only, and very slow with the orange, which takes ten years or more from seedling to fruit.  Without GMO techniques, we might be enjoying the last generation of bananas and orange juice with our breakfast.

The anti-GMOers, however, are far more responsive to wild claims and fear talk than they are to facts, and every time any genetically modified crops are introduced, we undergo another round of panic.  I was pleasantly surprised, however, to see the response to the Hunt's claim.  Pinned to the wall by the facts, the company had to respond.  A spokesperson for ConAgra, which owns Hunt's, said the following:

Many people are interested in what's in their food, and we want to provide them the information they are looking for.  As a company, ConAgra Brands believes in giving people choice by offering foods that are made with and without GE ingredients. 

While it’s true that all tomatoes are non-GMO, there are tomato products that contain GE ingredients.  We recently updated many of our Hunt’s tomato products including diced and crushed to meet Non-GMO Project Verification standards, so look for the seal at shelf.

So claiming that their tomatoes (implying, of course, only their tomatoes) are non-GMO isn't at all misleading.

However, it's apparent that ConAgra and Hunt's isn't fooling anyone, any more than Evian would if they implied that only their sparkling water was gluten-free.  Amazingly enough, science for the win.

As for me, I'm going to go have another cup of coffee.  Made entirely without using spent nuclear reactor fuel.  Make sure you're safe -- demand that your coffee is certified plutonium-free.

Lysenko, Walker, and the dangers of state-controlled science

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agrobiologist during the Stalin years, whose interest in trying to improve crop yields led him into some seriously sketchy pseudoscience.  He believed in a warped version of Lamarckism -- that plants exposed to certain environmental conditions during their lives would alter what they do to adjust to those conditions, and (furthermore) those alterations would be passed down to subsequent generations.

He not only threw away everything Mendel and Darwin had uncovered, he disbelieved in DNA as the hereditary material.  Lysenko wrote:

An immortal hereditary substance, independent of the qualitative features attending the development of the living body, directing the mortal body, but not produced by the latter - that is Weismann’s frankly idealist, essentially mystical conception, which he disguised as “Neo-Darwinism”.  Weismann’s conception has been fully accepted and, we might say, carried further by Mendelism-Morganism.

So basically, since there were no genes there to constrain the possibilities, humans could mold organisms in whatever way they chose.  "It is possible, with man’s intervention," Lysenko wrote, "to force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man.  There opens before man a broad field of activity of the greatest value to him."

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Soviet agricultural industry was ordered to use Lysenko's theories (if I can dignify them by that name) to inform their practices.  Deeper plowing of fields, for example, was said by Lysenko to induce plants' roots to delve deeper for minerals, creating deeper-rooted plants in following years and increased crop yields.  Farmers dutifully began to plow fields to a depth of five feet, requiring enormous expenditure of time and labor.

Crop yields didn't change.  But that didn't matter; Lysenko's ideas were beloved by Stalin, as they seemed to give a scientific basis to the concept of striving by the sturdy peasant stock, thus improving their own lot.  Evidence and data took a back seat to ideology.  Lysenko was given award after award and rose to the post of Director of the Institute of Genetics in the USSR's Academy of Sciences.  Scientists who followed Lysenko's lead in making up data out of whole cloth to support the state-approved model of heredity got advancements, grants, and gifts from Stalin himself.  Scientists who pointed out that Lysenko's experiments were flawed and his data doctored or fabricated outright were purged -- by some estimates 3,000 of them were fired, exiled, jailed, or executed for choosing "bourgeois science" (i.e. actual evidence-based research) over Lysenko.  His stranglehold on Soviet biological research and agricultural practice didn't cease until his retirement in 1965, by which time an entire generation of Soviet scientists had been hindered from making any progress at all.

Which brings us to Scott Walker.

Walker, you probably know, is the governor of Wisconsin, whose notoriety primarily comes from his union-busting, a failed presidential bid, and a narrow escape from losing his office to a vote recall.  But now Walker's in the news for a different reason; he is trying to out-Lysenko Lysenko by scrubbing from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources webpage every mention of the words "climate" and "climate change."

Fortunately, James Rowen of Urban Milwaukee has a screenshot of the original text and the changes made -- it's on the link provided in the preceding paragraph, and has to be seen to be believed.  Rowen writes:

Climate change censors driven by science denial and obeisance to polluters these days at the GOP-managed, Scott Walker-redefined “chamber of commerce mentality” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources are at it again. 

Not content with having already stripped content and links from an agency webpage about climate change – deletions I documented some years ago and which I have frequently referenced – the ideologues intent on scrubbing science off these pages and sowing doubt and confusion about the consensus view of experts worldwide about climate change have edited, deleted and otherwise compressed information in order to whitewash long-standing concepts and facts off a climate change page about the Great Lakes... 

It’s a continuation of Walker’s deliberate destruction of the DNR – which we also learned he is considering completely breaking apart to further hamstring and weaken public science, conservation and pollution enforcement while further playing to corporate donors and manipulating GOP base voters to help embed partisan Republican advancement and entrenchment by propagandizing that government – and especially agencies like DNR which Walker has intentionally doomed – does not work for them.

So just like in Stalin's day, we are moving toward a state-endorsed scientific party line, which non-scientists (and scientists in the pay of corporate interests or the politicians themselves) are enforcing using such sticks as censorship, funding cuts, and layoffs.  We have not yet progressed to outright purges and imprisonment, but we sure as hell have taken a large step in that direction.

Lysenko died forty years ago, but his propaganda-based, anti-science spirit lives on.  My hope is that because of the greater transparency and freedom of information afforded by the internet, moves like Walker's scrubbing of the Department of Natural Resources website will not be shrouded in secrecy the way that Stalin's and Lysenko's actions were.  But it behooves us all to remain aware, watchful, and vigilant, because you can just as easily see it slipping under the radar -- and for the claws of partisan politics to sink so deeply into scientific research that it will, as it did in the USSR, take generations to repair the damage.

Nuance and overgeneralization

A post I saw on Twitter yesterday called to mind one of my particular pet peeves, which is blaming a person's general assholery on belonging to a particular political party, religion, ethnic group, or nationality.

This particular example was referencing a comment by Hussam Ayloush, executive board member of the California Democratic Party and executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, about the wreck of a Russian jet Christmas morning that killed 92 people.

Ayloush tweeted, "I'm sad about the crashed Russian jet.  The TU-154 could have carried up to 180 military personnel instead of 92!"

The response I saw on Twitter said, and I quote: "Democratic party leader wishes for more dead in Russian crash.  Typical nasty liberal hypocrisy."

Hussam Ayloush [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, first of all, I haven't seen anyone, Democrat or Republican or anyone else, defending Ayloush's statement.  Indeed, the backlash from all sides has been pretty strident, to the point that Ayloush deleted the original tweet and followed it up with a piss-poor half-apology: "Deleted an earlier tweet I posted abt a Russian military jet that crashed on way to Syria before knowing it included non-combatants."

Because that evidently makes it okay that he wished more innocent people dead.

What galled me about the "nasty liberal hypocrisy" tweet, though, was that it somehow implies that Ayloush speaks for all liberals, a claim that five minutes of research would have put to rest.  Ayloush has made inflammatory statements before, and been roundly criticized for it -- that the United States was directly responsible for 9/11, that Islam should prevail over all other ideologies, and that the U.S. government under Donald Trump needed to be overthrown.  (If you want exact wording or citations on any of these, you can find them at the link provided above.)

It's not that you couldn't find liberals who might agree with any or all of those; it's that those are hardly standard liberal talking points.  It would have at least made a modicum of sense if the person who posted the remark had attributed Ayloush's statement with his being the director of CAIR -- a Saudi-funded group that has ties to radical Islamic extremism.

But no, this individual wanted to use it to slam liberals in general, so apparently any blunt weapon will do.

It's not just liberals that this applies to, of course.  Conservatives get tarred with one brush just as often.  All it takes is one Republican to be found in violation of an ethical standard or law, and the crowing starts immediately about how inherently crooked Republicans are.

I'm sorry, but life is just not that simple.  If you want obvious villains and heroes, stick to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.  To understand real people, with all their combinations of virtues and vices, requires a little more nuanced view -- especially if you're trying to characterize entire groups.

All ministers aren't guilty of hypocritical false piety just because Jimmy Swaggart was.  All Catholic priests aren't child molesters just because Gilbert Gauthé was.  All atheists don't hold religious people in contempt just because some do.  All religious people aren't anti-intellectual and anti-science just because some are.  If it comforts you to make blanket judgments based upon the actions of a few and forthwith stop thinking, knock yourself out -- but make no mistake about it, you will be wrong 99% of the time.

So yes, Hussam Ayloush shows every sign of being an asshole, and if I were on the California Democratic Party Executive Board, I'd want to have a serious discussion about why he's a member.  But assholery is no respecter of political party, religion, or any other demographic you want to pick.  If you want to call Ayloush out for his horrible statement, I'll be right there with you.  But when you start claiming that his ugly invective is representative of close to 50% of American citizens, I'm calling bullshit.

The dose makes the poison

One of the most fundamental concepts in pharmacology and/or toxicology is the dose-response curve, which gives a graphic representation of how the human body responds to varying doses of chemicals.  Something that is often poorly understood by laypeople, but becomes obvious if you study the topic at any length, is that there are some substances (e.g. lead) which are unsafe at any dose, and others that are necessary at low doses but toxic at high ones (e.g. table salt).  Further complicating the matter is that some substances bioaccumulate -- small doses over a long period of time can cause a toxic increase in the body tissues.  Elemental mercury, for example, doesn't get excreted readily, so even small amounts over a long period can result in harm (giving rise to "mad hatter syndrome" if sufficient quantities are ingested).  Others are water-soluble and quickly cleared by the kidneys, so it takes a great deal more to result in harm (e.g. vitamin C).

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the subject isn't simple.  But if you're going to read anything on toxins and (especially) vaccines, you damn well better do your homework, or you're likely to get suckered by articles like the incredibly bullshit-dense "The 7 Most Dangerous Vaccines Injected Into Humans and Exactly Why They Cause More Harm Than Good" that appeared over at Natural News a few days ago.

The article, written by S. D. Wells, would be the same tired old "chemicals = bad" nonsense trotted out by damn near everyone in the alt-med world, from Vani "Food Babe" Hari to Mike "Health Ranger" Adams, except for the fact that Wells starts going into specifics about which chemicals in vaccines are bad, why, and at which doses.  Which is unfortunate for Wells, because any time these people slide over into analysis of the facts, they immediately start making claims that anyone who passed high school chemistry would know immediately are false.

Let's start with my favorite line in the whole thing, which is how the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine contains sodium chloride, which "raises blood pressure and inhibits muscle contraction and growth."  Yes, sodium chloride, i.e., plain old table salt.  He also tells us that another vaccine, Gardasil, contains this dreaded toxin at nearly 10 micrograms.  If you can imagine.

For comparison purposes, the Recommended Daily Allowance for salt is 4 grams.  To save you from doing the math, this means that the Gardasil vaccine contains 1/400,000th of the salt you ordinarily get from your food.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait!  There's more!"  Gardasil also contains 35 micrograms of sodium borate, which Wells tells us is a chemical used to kill cockroaches.  What he doesn't tell us is that borate is another micronutrient in the human diet, and is only toxic at huge doses -- at least huge compared to what's in Gardasil.  Again consulting the Recommended Daily Allowance tables, the RDA for boron is 1 to 6 milligrams -- about a hundred times what you get from Gardasil.

Wells doesn't just mislead and/or lie outright about the chemical constituents of vaccines, he lies about their side effects.  Gardasil, we're told, has horrific results; he says, "many girls who get the HPV vaccine beginning at age 9 for a sexually transmitted disease (diseases they dont [sic] have) go into immediate anaphylactic shock and some into comas and die."  Which is simply untrue; a study in 2012 of 189,000 girls who had been inoculated with Gardasil showed that the most common side effect was same-day syncope (i.e., they fainted), and even that was uncommon.  If that's not enough, a study of a million girls in Denmark was so side-effect free that the authors concluded that there was “no evidence supporting associations between exposure to qHPV vaccine and autoimmune, neurological, and venous thromboembolic adverse events."

But back to Wells.  Another horror he trots out is monosodium glutamate in the MMR vaccine.  If you're wondering if this is the same chemical that's used for a flavoring in Chinese food, yup, that's it.  It's also the sodium salt of one of the most common naturally occurring amino acids, and is found in tomatoes and cheese, not to mention General Tso's chicken, in quantities that are orders of magnitude more than are in the vaccination.  Then we have polysorbate 80, which Wells claims causes sterility even though it's used as an emulsifier in ice cream and a study on rats who were fed polysorbate 80 at a quantity of 0.5% of their body weight per day showed no adverse effects whatsoever.

I did get a good belly laugh at Wells's horrified statement that the swine flu vaccine contains "inactivated H1N1 virus."  After I finished laughing, I shouted at the computer screen, "How the fuck do you think vaccines are made, you nimrod?  What do you think they contain?  Holy water and magic berries?"

Then we have the wizened old claims about vaccines and mercury, even though the only vaccines that still contain thimerosal (a mercury-based stabilizer) are multivalent flu vaccines, and the stabilizer breaks down quickly to ethylmercury which is quickly cleared from the body by the kidneys.  (A lot of the confusion over mercury toxicity comes from mistaking this compound for methylmercury, which is toxic, bioaccumulates, and causes progressive nerve damage.)

And so on and so forth.  It's the same old, same old, really, but this was such an amazingly dumb example of anti-vaxx rhetoric that I thought it worth debunking.  As for me, I'm going to go look up the dose-response curve for bullshit, because I think reading Wells's article may have given me a fatal dose.