No admission

Let's establish something right from the outset.

Vaccines do NOT cause autism.

Clear enough?  If you are in any doubt, here's a site that provides links to exhaustive studies and meta-analyses that not only show no causative relationship between vaccines and autism, but that there is not even a correlation.

I.e., Andrew Wakefield was lying, and the anti-vaxxers are willfully putting their own children at risk of potentially deadly diseases that are entirely preventable.  As I've said now about 582 times.

The reason this comes up yet again is a webpage that I've now seen posted three times, with the title, "NOW IT'S OFFICIAL: FDA Announced That Vaccines Are Causing Autism!"

The article goes on to say the following:

You may be wondering: Why some of the doctors don’t say anything about the risk of DTaP Vaccine? 

That is a question that many of us, still wondering! Maybe they just is just not convenient for them that we know about the risk of these vaccine. 

To take the vaccine debacle further, most of the mandated vaccines for infants and children, contain many of the above ingredients, which must be stopped from being injected into infants, toddlers, teens and even adults! 

It’s time for Congress to rescind the “Get out of Jail Free” card for vaccine makers and stop the aggressive onslaught of the Autism Spectrum Disorder that is depriving children of a fulfilling life and ruining families emotionally, financially, and physically to the point of parents divorcing because of the stresses of ASD in a family.

The reason that "some of the doctors" (exclusive of frauds like Andrew Wakefield) aren't saying anything about the risk of autism from DTaP and other vaccines is that there is none.  There may well be kids who were diagnosed as autistic following their vaccinations; after all, most vaccines and most autism diagnoses both occur during early childhood.  But to associate the two is the Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this."

Let me say it again: multiple studies with huge sample sizes have found that the incidence of autism is no higher in vaccinated children than it is in unvaccinated children.  And vaccinating your children will keep them getting diseases like diphtheria, which back in the days before immunization, killed children by the thousands by making them, literally, slowly suffocate to death.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So needless to say (or it should be), the FDA didn't announce any such thing.  If you bother to read the article, or (better yet) take a look at the FDA post that generated it, what you find is that the information the government published on the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) vaccine listed autism along with a dozen or so "reported adverse effects" -- but then said, and I quote, "Because these events are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequencies or to establish a causal relationship to components of Tripedia vaccine."

The important part is "reported voluntarily."  In other words, all you'd have to do is have a single parent call the FDA and lodge an official complaint that their child became autistic due to the DTaP vaccine, and it would be justifiably included on this list.  Nowhere does it says that the claim -- any of them on the list, in fact -- had been evaluated by a physician, or even confirmed to be the truth.  This isn't even at the level of anecdote.

This is at the level of "my aunt's best friend's gardener's second cousin's third-grade teacher said it was so."

If you think that I'm just a blogger with an axe to grind on this topic -- not entirely untrue, I must admit -- here's the piece that Snopes did on the subject.

It's unfortunate the FDA did that -- not that I'm in favor of suppressing information, bear you, but the last thing we (or they) really need is the anti-vaxxers to come howling out of the woodwork.  Not that they ever gave up, really, and it's amazing how much their campaign has worked, even among people who are otherwise pretty sensible.  I've seen more than one person claim they'd never get a flu shot because the year before, the vaccine gave them the flu (impossible, as the flu vaccine contains dead virus particles) and that there's no way they'd have their child receive the HPV vaccine because it can potentially cause brain damage (total bullshit, and especially horrifying given that the eradication of HPV would virtually eliminate the risk of six different particularly deadly cancers).

The message should be loud and clear.  Claiming that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits, or that the risk is even significant, is quite simply wrong.  Refusing to vaccinate your own children constitutes child endangerment, not to mention putting at risk children who can't receive vaccines for legitimate medical reasons (e.g. having a damaged immune system).

This debate is over.  It's time for the anti-vaxxers to stop screeching about coverups and shills and conspiracies by Big Pharma, and admit that they were wrong from the outset.

And along the way, admit that this has never been about evidence; it's about irrational fear and a never-say-die adherence to personal bias.

Smile, and the world smiles with you

In the menagerie of weird creatures from urban legends we have such entities as the Men in Black, Slender Man, the Black-Eyed Children, not to mention older creatures of the night such as the Evil Serial Killer With A Hook For A Hand that has been scaring the absolute shit out of kids around campfires for generations.

I just ran into a new member of the zoo yesterday, thanks to crypto-maven Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe.  Called "Grinning Man," he's a tall guy in an old-fashioned suit and fedora, with a creepy smile on his face.  His skin is supposedly "plastic-like," so believers think he's only masquerading as a human.  Redfern says he's an operative of the Men in Black; me, I'm thinking more of The Gentlemen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

But Grinning Man isn't followed around by guys with long, flailing arms who rip your ribcage open and steal your heart.  Apparently, Grinning Man just kind of stands there... grinning.  Thus the name. Redfern tells the tale of a California family who saw a UFO while out driving, and the following day had a visitor.  He writes:

It was while one of the teenage children was sat [sic] on the porch and playing music that she caught sight of a man on the other side of the road.  He was dressed completely in black, aside from a white shirt.  He even wore black gloves, on what was a bright, summer day.  The girl was particularly disturbed by the fact that the man sported a weird grin and was staring right at her.  So unsettled was she that she went back into the home and told her father of what had just happened.  He quickly went to the door but – no surprise – the smiling MIB was gone.

John Keel, of "Mothman" fame, describes another encounter, this one near Point Pleasant, West Virginia (home of the original Mothman story):

[A] sewing machine salesman claims to have been stopped on a highway by a strange looking automobile.  A man appeared from a hatch on the side of the vehicle, and a tall, bald man wearing a blue metallic suit approached the man.  He could see the "man" had "slightly elongated" eyes and a demented grin that could be seen glinting in the cars headlights.  The grinning man identified himself as Indrid Cold, and the two had a bizarre telepathic conversation before the entity left, saying they would see each other again.

"Indrid Cold," eh?  A cousin of Mr. Freeze, perhaps?

Now that I think of it, the resemblance is pretty striking.

But unlike Mr. Freeze, "Indrid Cold" was a true alien, Keel said:

The salesman, Woodrow Derenberger, would go on to claim that Indrid Cold would visit him, and would reveal that he was an alien from a planet called Lanulos, situated in another galaxy.  Derenberger claimed to have visited Cold on his homeworld, and met many other beings like Indrid Cold in his travels.  He would write a book about his experiences, but would lose his job, his wife and some say his sanity in the years after, dying in 1990, some saying his obsession with his grinning friend cost him his life.

So that's kind of unfortunate.

Once again, we have the common thread that Grinning Man doesn't seem to do anything.  He doesn't freeze people, he doesn't abduct their children (like Slender Man), he doesn't threaten to kill them if they talk to the authorities (like the Men in Black), etc.  So as extraterrestrial villains go, he's pretty lame, although I have to say in all honesty that if I looked out of my window at night and saw a creepy, pasty-faced guy in a fedora grinning back at me, I'd probably have an aneurysm, so I guess that counts for something, evil-wise.

Anyhow, that's latest member of the Pantheon of Creepiness.  As I've mentioned before, it's kind of amazing that given how long I've been writing Skeptophilia (seven years as of last November), I still run into weird beliefs I'd never heard of before.  I still think for pure terror, you can't beat the Black-eyed Children, which is why I'm writing a trilogy of novels based on the legend (the first, Lines of Sight, is coming out in 2019).

But maybe I'm thinking about this wrong.  Maybe Grinning Man is grinning because he is planning something he hasn't carried out yet.  If so, he'd better get at it, because Derenberger's encounter with "Indrid Cold" happened back in the 1960s.  If he wants people to keep being scared of him, he probably should wipe the silly smile off his face and get on with it.

Start your day with kindness

When I was in my twenties, my parents got into watching the television series Cops.

Me, I never could see the draw.  The plot was the same every time:

• Bad guys do bad stuff.
• Cops get involved.
• Bad guys get arrested or shot.  Or both.
• Repeat x100.

I like my entertainment to have a little more in the way of unexpected twists.  But that's just me, apparently.

Anyhow, there came a point that Cops went into syndication, and on one station, it played every single night.  And my parents had it on.

Every single night.

At this point, I should explain that my parents, especially my mother, had a tremendous suspicion of the unknown.  If there's a word that means the opposite of "adventurous," that was my mom.  As an example, when I made my first trip overseas -- a one-month cross-country hike of England, from Blackpool to Whitby -- her last words to me on the night before I left were, "Don't trust anyone."

I know about correlation not implying causation and all, but I can't help but wonder how much her view of the world as a scary, unsafe place was reinforced by watching a television show that every single night showed the worst of humanity.  I'm guessing the causation probably goes both ways -- she gravitated toward the series because she already had that attitude, and the series acted to reinforce the attitude, and round and round it went.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Whatever the cause, her lack of comprehension of how I could possibly want to travel to Dangerous Foreign Countries Inhabited By Dangerous Foreign People (like the English, for fuck's sake) only got worse as she got older.  When we took our first trip to Ecuador back in 2001, not only going to (gasp!) South America, but (1) doing so three months after 9/11, and (2) bringing along both of our sons, at that point ages 11 and 13, she was aghast, but at least knew by then that it'd be futile to try to talk me out of it.

This all comes up because of a study published a couple of months ago in the Journal of Applied Psychology called, "Rude Color Glasses: The Contaminating Effects of Witnessed Morning Rudeness on Perceptions and Behaviors Throughout the Workday."  While on first glance, the study may not seem to have much to do with an overall perception of the world as dangerous, the two are connected.  The study shows pretty clearly that the behavior we are exposed to (or expose ourselves to) colors how we see everything -- and that the effect can last far beyond the time immediately after the incident in question.  The authors write:

Using an experimental experience sampling design, we investigate how witnessing morning rudeness influences workers’ subsequent perceptions and behaviors throughout the workday.  We posit that a single exposure to rudeness in the morning can contaminate employees’ perceptions of subsequent social interactions leading them to perceive greater workplace rudeness throughout their workday.  We expect that these contaminated perceptions will have important ramifications for employees’ work behaviors.  In a 10-day study of 81 professional and managerial employees, we find that witnessed morning rudeness leads to greater perceptions of workplace rudeness throughout the workday and that those perceptions, in turn, predict lower task performance and goal progress and greater interaction avoidance and psychological withdrawal.

I can vouch for this from my own personal experience.  When I get to school and the first thing I'm faced with is an obnoxious email or a surly student -- both, fortunately, uncommon occurrences -- I'm set up to be grouchy and irritable for the rest of the day.

However.  I've found that the reverse is also true.  When I'm in a sour mood and something unexpectedly good happens, my frame of mind can flip just as quickly.  All of which is yet another indication that we should strive to be as polite and kind as we can; you never know whose life you may be touching.

And I think the same thing applies more globally to the people, media, and general context we're exposed to every day.  If you allow yourself to be constantly bombarded by rudeness, negativity, and bad news, it's kind of inevitable that you'll eventually get swallowed up by it.

I'm not trying to turn us into some modern-day version of Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's Candide -- smiling blandly and chanting, "Everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds."  We shouldn't blind ourselves to the ills of society.  But it's equally important to keep in mind that the vast majority of people are kind, compassionate, and friendly.  You certainly aren't going to do yourself or the world any favors by allowing yourself to be driven to the conclusion that humanity is irredeemably evil.

As author Ken Keyes put it, "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

Transwarp nonsense

In today's science news, we have a paper called "Rapid Genetic and Developmental Morphological Changes from Extreme Celerity," from the American Research Journal of Biosciences, by Lewis Zimmerman et al., which describes some unexpected consequences to living beings who are accelerated rapidly.

Turns out that the results are nothing short of terrifying.  Traveling at extreme accelerations and velocities triggers a parallel acceleration in mutations within the test subjects' DNA.  In other words, evolution speeds up, with a resulting change in their physical forms.  If they then reproduce (which they did), their offspring maintain those altered traits, and end up looking nothing like the original organisms did.

I hope by this point you're saying, "Hang on a moment..."  Some of my fellow Trekkies might be adding, "Wasn't that the plot of the Star Trek Voyager episode 'Threshold,' wherein Captain Janeway and Tom Paris are exposed to "transwarp" speeds (higher than Warp 10), and mutate into slimy-looking half-human/half-tadpoles, proceed to have some hot sex that I don't even want to think about, and generate several very skeevy looking babies?  Which they decide to abandon on a jungle planet after an 'antiproton beam' returns their DNA (and their bodies) to human form, instead of doing what an antiproton beam would actually do, namely making them explode in a burst of gamma rays?"

If that's what you said, you're exactly correct, and that resemblance is no coincidence.  Zimmerman wrote up his scholarly paper based on the plot of the Voyager episode, listing himself and six Starfleet officers as the authors, and submitted it to ten journals that had the reputation of being "predatory" -- i.e., pay-to-play.  It was rejected six times, but four journals accepted it, and one -- the aforementioned American Research Journal of Biosciences -- actually published it.

I bring all this up for two reasons.

First, in the current atmosphere of distrust by laypeople of scientists and science in general, we seriously don't need this.  Given that we have a president and a significant slice of his administration who doubt the existence of climate change (although I'm fully aware that there's a money motive for this disbelief, further confounding matters), the last thing we want is some journal whose editorial board -- if it even exists -- accepting bullshit articles that are recycled plots from Star Trek.

Paris and Janeway's bouncing baby tadpoles

Second, this is a bit of a caveat to anyone who is her/himself engaged in academic pursuits to be very, very careful of source reliability.  It used to be, back in the Middle Ages when I was in graduate school, that all you had to do was make sure that the journal you were referencing looked as if it were requiring things like peer review and explicit publication of conflicts of interest.  Later on, as long as the website address said ".edu" or ".org," they probably were okay.

Now?  Just having a fancy name like "American Research Journal of Biosciences" is no guarantee of reliability.  You can't just download a pdf of an academic paper, give a quick look to its source listings and citations, and assume it's reasonably valid.  Because what Zimmerman's little prank shows is that predatory journals don't give a rat's ass what they publish, as long as the authors are willing to pay for the privilege.  And the vast majority of them aren't going to be blitheringly obvious fakes like the "Extreme Celerity" paper was.  Most of them are likely to be papers that were rejected during peer review for things like design flaws, inappropriate controls, or more subtle problems such as "p-hacking" -- things you might not notice at a quick read.

It's sad, but the problem isn't going away.  As soon as there's a lucrative market for something like pay-to-play academic publishing, it's going to continue to churn out trash.  What Zimmerman's paper shows is that you can't simply assume that if something's in a journal, it made it through peer review.  The truth is that there are hundreds of predatory journals out there, and it's incumbent upon anyone using scientific research, or even reading it, to make certain what you're looking at has been through a rigorous vetting process before reaching print.

Kind of a shame, really, and not just from the standpoint of muddying the waters of scientific research.  I've been hoping for faster-than-light travel ever since I was a kid watching Lost in Space.  Hell, I'd take Warp 1, much less Warp 10.  I'm not eager to be turned into a slimy tadpole creature, but if I could visit other star systems, it's a risk I'm willing to take.  And after all, if I do get mutated, I can always rely on a handy beam of antiprotons to bring me back to my original form.

Ain't no sunshine

Because we evidently don't have enough to worry about, now we have news that a rogue dead star has entered our Solar System and is eating the Sun.

I'm not making this up, but the person who made the claim, one Dr. Claudia Albers, almost certainly is.  She once worked for the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, but resigned last July for unspecified reasons.  I suspect it must have been that her department chair found out she'd gotten her Ph.D. from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Factory, but that's just a guess.

My reason for saying this is that Dr. Albers doesn't sound like a physicist, she sounds like a complete loon.  Here are her own words regarding the imminent catastrophe:

They are old or dead stars - I never said they were planets - they are stars draining the Sun of energy.  It is likely a huge system of old dead suns that have come to the Sun and been affecting it.  They are making plasma connections with the Sun and can make the Sun go dark, the Sun is getting weaker...  

These objects are causing changes in the solar system that cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.  Earth appears to have captured one of these objects - there are crustal displacements on Earth... 

It is not a passing system, it is in orbit around the Earth.  It is a huge system of stars attracted to the Sun and that stays close to the Sun once it is in our solar system.  I recently discovered they may have gone from the Sun to planets and that may be why Jupiter went from 16 satellites to 69, it must have captured something... 

It seems that the object is here and it is not alone because there is evidence that there are many of these objects in the inner solar system and they have been coming in towards the Sun for many years.

As you might expect, she accuses NASA of covering the whole thing up.  "If there is nothing to hide," Albers says, "then give us the real time view of the Sun – if there is nothing to hide then open it up, why do you only give us little snippets with a huge delay?"  Because clearly the only possible explanation there could be for why NASA isn't opening up all of its digital images to scrutiny is that a gigantic dead star is feeding on the Sun and they don't want you to know about it.

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

 Of course, the above claim brought up questions as to whether this rogue star is the same as "Nibiru," the mysterious "Planet X" that has been a favorite of woo-woos for years.  Said wingnuts have claimed over and over that Nibiru is coming, and that it's going to wreak havoc on the Earth, but then it never shows up.  Just as well.  We're wreaking enough havoc down here on our own, lately.

But Albers says that no, this isn't Nibiru.  "There is no evidence this system is the same system that came through before," she said.

At that point, I gave the computer the head-tilt of puzzlement, similar to what my dog does when I give him an unreasonable and/or unintelligible command, such as to stop eating my shoe and gnaw instead on one of his 1,385 chew toys.  What does she mean, "the same system that came through before?"  I think I'd have been aware if a humongous exoplanet had suddenly swooped down and caused massive planetary-wide destruction.  It's hard to imagine missing that.

Be that as it may, Albers says that this time it's really serious, that the rogue dead star is feeding, vampire-like, on the energy from the Sun, and pretty soon the Sun will run out and go dark, which will kind of suck.  I mean, that's what happened at the end of Star Wars Episode Number Who the Hell Can Keep Track: The Force Awakens, wherein Kylo Ren et al. turned on a machine that sucked all the energy out of a star, but instead of the planet that orbited it turning immediately into a gigantic popsicle, it was still warm enough for Kylo and Rey to leap about and get into a protracted light saber battle.

So heaven knows we don't want that.  The good news is that João A. P. Rodrigues, head of the University of Witwatersrand School of Physics, was pretty unequivocal that Dr. Albers is talking out of her ass.  He didn't put it that way, of course.  "The University supports the freedom of people to hold and discuss contrarian views," Rodrigues said.  "However, insofar as the sciences are concerned the principles of the scientific method must guide the process.  Debate outside this framework constitutes bad science and the University distances itself from such practice."

Which is academic-speak for "You're talking out of your ass."

Anyhow, I'm not worried.  I figure we have more pressing matters to worry about right now, such as how to keep Donald Trump from opening the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.  Although I have to admit that the Sun has seemed pretty weak and cool lately.  But that may be because I live in the famed "four-season climate" of upstate New York -- "almost winter," "winter," "still winter," and "road construction."

Black coffee

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I now have an even lower opinion of humanity than I did before.

It's not the first time this has happened, of course, and won't be the last.  It's kind of an occupational hazard when your daily task is to comb the interwebz for crazy woo-woo ideas.  But this one is kind of in a league of its own.

Or maybe I'm just fed up.

The claim I'm referring to is that now we're being told that if you want to be healthy, you need to drink a charcoal latté.

I'm not making this up.  A recipe I saw -- and there are apparently dozens -- includes coffee, cashew milk (can't use dairy products), date syrup (can't use sugar), and powdered activated charcoal, to make "the chicest drink on the market."  Myself, I have a hard time imagining how this wouldn't taste like licking a barbecue grill that had been drizzled with honey, but chacun à son goût.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Thus far, all we have is a weird new food craze, not inherently weirder than Fireball-flavored bagels and ice cream sundaes topped with chili-coated grasshoppers.  What makes the charcoal latté claim stand out is that the people pushing it are not only claiming it tastes good, but that it will "detox" you.

So we're adding a nice dollop of quack alternative medicine to our morning unusually black coffee.  As I've pointed out maybe 397 times before, if you are healthy, there is absolutely no need to "detox" because your kidneys and liver are "detoxing" you just fine as you sit there.  Plus, the whole thing is based on vague and poorly-understood science anyhow; I have never found a single person recommending "detox" who could name a specific toxin that the procedure eliminates, much less one that wasn't being eliminated naturally via your excretory system.

It gets worse, though, because here we're not talking about adding ground-up organic papaya seeds and Mongolian yak milk to your coffee; we're talking about activated charcoal, a substance with a legitimate medical purpose -- it is used in cases of poisoning to absorb toxic substances from a person's digestive tract.  Or an animal's, which I know because of our border collie Doolin, who ate a dozen exquisite and expensive chocolate truffles after swiping them from the kitchen counter, and had to have activated charcoal forced down her throat, following which she puked up charcoal and partially-digested chocolate all over the back seat of my wife's brand-new Mini Cooper.

It's moments like this that I question why anyone in their right mind would own a dog.

But I digress.

The reason the activated charcoal thing is a terrible idea is that it is absorptive -- not only of toxins you may have inadvertently swallowed, but of biologically-active substances of all sorts.  Such as any medications you may take.  So in an ill-advised attempt to flush unspecified and most likely nonexistent toxins from your body, you stand a good chance of binding and inactivating your medicines.

I.e., substances you're taking because they've been prescribed by someone who actually understands organic chemistry and human physiology.

So my recommendation: have at it with the chili-coated grasshoppers, but avoid the charcoal lattés.  I feel ridiculous even having to say this, but apparently it's become a "thing," and once someone is a "thing," you know that all the trend geeks are just going to have to try it.  Which, I suppose, is just another example of natural selection in action.

Bee all, end all

Why in the hell are people still listening to Gwyneth Paltrow on health-related matters?

It's a rhetorical question, really.  People still reject the commentary of experts and embrace the opinions of the drastically unqualified in a lot of realms other than medicine.  But when it comes to mistakes that can kill you quickly and painfully, taking bad medical advice really can't be beat.  Which is what a 55-year-old woman found out when she underwent a Paltrow-approved procedure called "bee acupuncture," and proceeded to die of anaphylactic shock.

If you're wondering if "bee acupuncture" can possibly be what it sounds like -- yes, it is.  I didn't know about it, either, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an article about it a couple of days ago.  The way it works is a "practitioner" holds a live bee in forceps, and puts it on your skin, squeezing the bee until it gets pissed off and stings you.  In a 2016 article in the New York Times, Paltrow said it's a wonderful therapy:

[G]enerally, I'm open to anything.  I've been stung by bees.  It's a thousands of years old treatment called apitherapy.  People use it to get rid of inflammation and scarring.  It's actually pretty incredible if you research it.  But man, it's painful.

Then she tells us about something called a "sound bath," wherein you lie back and expose your body to "different frequencies" to "achieve a meditative state."  "That may even be too hippie for me," Paltrow said.

But back to the bees.  There's no particularly convincing evidence that acupuncture by itself works; there have been studies that show a higher-than-placebo improvement rate in patients subjected to acupuncture, and some pretty convincing evidence that any improvement is due to endogenous opioids produced in response to someone sticking a needle into your skin.  So I'm still doubtful about the whole thing.

Then you bring bees into the picture, and you add the whole extra frisson of the possibility of dying of an allergic reaction.  If you're curious, the woman who died of anaphylaxis after her bee treatment had been stung before -- this was her twenty-fifth bee acupuncture session -- and never had a problem other than localized swelling.  This time, her blood pressure dropped, she went into shock, started gasping for breath -- and because she wasn't receiving this quasi-medical treatment in a hospital or clinic, had to wait for thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive.  They treated her with an epi-pen, but the damage was too great.  She lingered in the hospital for a few weeks, but never regained consciousness, and ultimately succumbed to multiple organ failure triggered by the reaction to the venom.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So this brings up my initial question, which is why the hell you'd take the medical advice of a woman whose main qualifications for dispensing such dubious wisdom is being rich enough to start her own "natural health and alternative medicine" company.  There seems to be a huge drift in this country toward distrusting experts (i.e. the people who have actually put in the time to understand the subject in question) and trust instead overconfident laypeople whose stock in trade is folksy "that seems like it should work" anecdote and wacko quack remedies.  In fact, the outcome of the presidential election can be looked at as a rejection of expertise -- replacing people who were career politicians who, whatever else you can say about them, know how government works with people whose philosophy can be summed up as "wing it, hope for the best, and when shit blows up, claim that everything is okay and that it's Obama's fault anyhow."

At this point, I'm beginning to shrug my shoulders when I hear about people who injure themselves after falling for Paltrow's nonsense, and instead simply saying, "Natural selection at work."  It sounds harsh, and I'm normally more compassionate than that, but honestly, I don't see much difference between this and the folks who still take up smoking even though the medical establishment showed that smoking causes lung cancer fifty-odd years ago.  If you're dumb enough to do it anyhow, then you deserve what you get.

But it does make me wonder how far Paltrow and others like her are going to have to step over the line before the FDA will say, "I don't care if you say 'This product is not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose any medical condition' on the packaging, you're killing people and you fucking well need to stop."  (Okay, the FDA probably wouldn't phrase it like that, which is why I don't work for the FDA.)

In any case, let me make it clear, for anyone still considering buying products from "Goop:" you're doing so at your own risk.  Gwyneth Paltrow is not a medical professional, nor even a well-informed layperson, she's a nut who jumps on any bandwagon that sounds appealing, and markets highly-priced and dubiously effective health aids that have not been rigorously tested for efficacy or safety.

In other words: caveat emptor.  But in this time, the buyer might have to beware of bodily injury or death.