Two for the price of one (27/6/2009)

Yes, somehow I forgot to get my flu shot earlier this year. Yes, I got the flu instead. That is why this update is late, so late in fact that it is going to be the next update as well so I can go back to bed. One of these years I will manage to get all my shots before I need them, with the only timing problem being getting over the inevitable autism before I need to do anything useful after going to the doctor. I suppose I could consider it a bright side effect that I went down with the cough and fever before I had fully recovered from last week's sprained ankle, thereby minimising my need for doctor's appointments, analgesic medication and unproductive days off from work.

Another plus is that I am taking Tamiflu (just in case I've got a touch of the swine flu), so I got to be reminded about how anti-vaccination liars describe this antiviral medication that only comes in capsules as a vaccine that is injected into infants. Not that I needed to be reminded about how they lie, of course.

Speaking of lying ... (27/6/2009)

Back in May I mentioned that the Australian Vaccination Network seemed to have forgotten that you need to be registered as a charity if you want to claim to be one. Now it seems that their valiant effort to be subsidised by Australian taxpayers has come to nought. This is how the tragedy was reported in their newsletter:

As you may or may not know, the government has refused to allow the AVN to become a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) - despite the fact that they have admitted that we qualify. Their reasoning is that people who access our information may decide not to vaccinate. The government doesn’t feel that this is in their best interests and therefore, they don’t feel we should be supported in this way. As a result, your donations can’t be tax deductible.

I want you to consider what that says carefully. Note how it says that the government admitted that they qualify but then said that they do not qualify. The fact is that any organisation which qualifies gets approval. They didn't qualify, and the reason for this is that charities are supposed to do work which benefits society and the tax deductibility of donations recognises that the organisations reduce government expenditure by providing services which would otherwise have to be provided at public expense. As the government is committed to promoting vaccination and good health it was never likely that lying about vaccines and working to increase the infection rates of serious illnesses were ever going to be considered to be appropriate activities to be subsidised through tax deductions.

If you are what you eat then I'm a fish (27/6/2009)

On my bookshelves of skeptical literature (and in the Health section of the Millenium bookshop) there are several books about food and diet, mostly to do with fad diets and myths about food. As I have diabetes I am exposed to miracle cure diets on almost a weekly basis. (The most amusing, although also idiotic, suggestion I have seen was from someone with Type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetes who brought white bread sandwiches and sponge cake for everyone to share at a picnic for people with diabetes. Apparently, you can eat anything you like if you just inject enough insulin beforehand. Did I mention that this person was almost spherical and might have been able to use less insulin if she had lost a few kilograms. Forty or fifty would have been a good start.)

When I have a few spare moments and need some cheering up I sometimes go to Cracked.com, which rather surprisingly bills itself as "America's Only Humor & Video Site, Since 1958". I'll leave the "Only" part to lawyers acting for other humorous sites, but I am really impressed with a site that has been online for eleven more years than the Internet has existed and even more years before the invention of HTML and the WWW. Perhaps I don't get the humour. Still, a lot of stuff there is very funny, and one thing I saw this week was "7 Retarded Food Myths the Internet Thinks Are True".

Here are some books:

And just to show that extreme longevity on the web doesn't protect you from Google Inappropriate Ad Syndrome (GIAS), here is what was on the top of the Cracked page when I last went there.

Darwin's legacy (27/6/2009)

With Charles Darwin's 200th birthday just past and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species coming up, this is a big year for Darwin fans. The magazine Nature is celebrating as hard as anyone, and one of their contributions is a pamphlet titled 15 Evolutionary Gems. They are encouraging everybody to distribute it and I am only too happy to comply, so you can see a copy here. Feel free to distribute it as widely as possible. The list of its contents appears below.

Inside the asylum (27/6/2009)

I'm not sure how isolated from the English-speaking world you would have to have been in the last week not to be aware that singer Michael Jackson and actor Farrah Fawcett had died. Predictably, Fred Phelps and his disgusting acolytes immediately declared that both where whoremongers and fag enablers and promised to picket their funerals. I hope that if he does turn up at either the fans can put aside their grief for a few moments in order to engage in some good old fashioned lynching. (In a wonderful moment of Schadenfreude I discovered that for a short period this week the abhorrent godhatesfags.com site had been hijacked by a pornography site. Unfortunately the next time I looked it was back in its normal, much more offensive form.)

Phelps might despise Michael Jackson, but that didn't stop him from stealing one of Jackson's songs. If anyone needed any evidence of the insanity of the Westboro Baptist Church, this is it. You should watch the lot, but get the vomit bucket out for some child abuse starting at about the five-minute mark.

Have you ever wondered how the Westboro Baptists might react to a suggestion that one of their number was gay? The Australian satirical television program The Chaser's War on Everything decided to find out, and who better to accuse of a touch of fagness than the son of Saint Fred himself?

It's getting naked time again (27/6/2009)

I haven't spent the whole of the week in bed with scantily-clad maidens wiping the sweat from my fevered brow and feeding me a diet of grapes and hot lemon drink. Well, not all of it anyway. Actually, it was none of it now I come to think about it. Must have been the hallucinatory side effect of Tamiflu. I must remember to submit an adverse reaction report to whoever collects such things.

What I did do was write the next Naked Skeptic column for Australasian Science magazine. I thought that it would be unwise to work unclad, given that I had a fever from the flu and it was about 4°C outside (without allowing for wind chill), so just between you and me I have to admit that I wrote this one while fully clothed. Don't tell anyone. What you can tell everyone is that they should subscribe to this excellent magazine. As the edition with this latest column won't be on the newsstands until the end of July I will wait for a week or two before publishing it here.

Disappointment (20/6/2009)

The big event this weekend was to be a showing of the creationist film "The Voyage That Shook The World". I was looking forward to this because the movie trailer managed to run for over four seconds before an inaccuracy (some would say "lie") was presented.

The cost of entry to the film showing was to sit through a service at a small Pentecostal church, so several intrepid members of the Western Sydney Freethinkers group assembled out of the rain for some singing, some cries of "Hallelujah" and "Praise Jesus", and a couple of personal testimonies from members of the congregation. Then the bad news came - the person who was going to introduce the video had left the DVD at home and it was too far away to go back and get it. As this was supposed to be the premiere of the film it seemed to be a very careless oversight, but we got to see a video of a talk given to a creationists conference in 2003 instead. Space does not permit me to detail the errors, inconsistencies and misrepresentations of evolution offered by the speaker in the video.

A question and answer session followed, where "evolutionists" got to ask hard questions and the representatives of Creation Ministries International (nee Answers in Genesis) got to prevaricate, side step, employ non sequitur and misrepresent science. When the Holocaust was blamed on Darwin and evolution, Godwin's Law was invoked and we all went to lunch.

When I arrived I was told that one of the books on sale mentioned me. In fact, half of the book was written by me. It was an account of a debate that I unwisely entered into in 2005, an experience that taught me that people claiming to be Christians could be very deceitful indeed. As the book was being sold, not given away, I had never been sent a copy, and it was contributing to the coffers of CMI, I asked for a free copy. The man behind the table said that he would buy it for me, which wasn't exactly what I wanted. It was refreshing to reread my contribution and annoying to be reminded of the way that my opponents never once addressed the question. I was also reminded that I was criticised by the debate moderator for having 1,502 words in one of my submissions, exceeding the 1,500 word limit. The corresponding effort by the creationists included 35 links to pages on their web site but attracted no comment from the moderator, despite being the equivalent of reading several books aloud in a spoken debate with the reading time not being included in the three minute lime limit. Did I mention that the debate moderator was a creationist? (I didn't know this until after the debate had concluded. Prior knowledge of this would have affected my enthusiasm to participate).

Another thing I was reminded of was that by the third round I had given up trying to actually debate anyone. When presented with, as an example, the argument that we share a proportion of our genes with tomatoes because God wanted to make it possible for us to eat them, the only possible action for a sentient person is to retreat. I didn't think that anything would have been achieved by pointing out that this made humans the perfect food for humans.

Physician, don't heal yourself (20/6/2009)

One of the myths of alternative medicine is that the cure for cancer has been known for a long time but the cure is suppressed to preserve the "trillion dollar" cut, burn and poison industry. (Of course there are many mutually exclusive causes and cures for cancer offered by quacks, but why should anyone expect consistency and honesty from these people?) The conspiracy requires doctors, nurses, employees of pharmaceutical companies, university researchers, employees of charities which raise funds for research or palliation and a whole host of other people to allow themselves and their loved ones to die of cancer in order to protect the secret and the money. That this is absurd should be obvious to even the most brain-dead follower of quackery, but unfortunately people who can believe in the curative powers of magic water or energy-transforming hand waving are inclined to believe anything.

Australia has a system called the Order of Australia which exists to honour citizens who have made significant contributions to society. The awards are announced on two days in the year, Australia Day (January 26) and the quaintly named Queen's Birthday (generally the first or second Monday in June). The list of recipients is a very closely guarded secret, and the newspapers of the relevant days receive heavy scrutiny by those who think they might have received a mention. An exception to the secrecy was made this year when the Prime Minister visited one of the recipients a few days before the date to present him with his medal. The reason that this was done was that the recipient was not expected to live until the official announcement date.

The person in question was Dr Chris O'Brien, a cancer researcher who had been diagnosed with cancer in 2006. He died on June 4, and his death was front-page news across the country, and politicians, dignitaries and ordinary folk of all persuasions expressed their sympathy and queued for his state funeral. He will be memorialised by the Lifehouse research centre, which is expected to be completed in the next three years.

The idea that Dr O'Brien knew that a cure existed but chose to die instead of breaking ranks with the medical industry is not just insulting to Chris O'Brien and his family. It is insulting to the doctors who worked with him and those who gave him medical advice It is insulting to the countless doctors and researchers throughout the world who are working to find answers. It is insulting to the intelligence of people who can think.

There is not one quack in the world with a guaranteed cure for cancer who has contributed a millionth of a percent of what Dr O'Brien gave to humanity. There is not one who would be missed for a nanosecond after they died.

Non-physician, heal yourself (20/6/2009)

Early in the week I fell over while walking down the street, resulting in the destruction of a perfectly good pair of trousers, a skinned left knee, and a badly twisted right ankle. I have been limping around with the ankle strapped ever since. I decided to apply the homeopathic principle of Like Cures Like so I have been treating it with a 30C preparation of concrete, and as the path was damp I have also been using a 20X preparation of rain water. It has been getting a little better each day, so I guess the homeopathy must be working. Someone said "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" to me, but as I have forgotten most of the Latin I learned at school I didn't know what they were talking about. One of the songs at the church service mentioned above included the words "Jesus heals the lame", but my ankle felt the same afterwards so I assume that Jesus was either having a day off or wasn't fixing atheists that day.

Let's attack some children (20/6/2009)

The Australian Vaccination Network is asking for money to let them run some of their lies in a paper called Sydney's Child, a publication directed, as the name suggests, at parents of young children. AVN states that they are going to be partially funded for the advertisement by Generation Rescue, a prominent US anti-vaccination liar outfit. If you think that these people don't tell lies, look at the image below, extracted from an advertisement that Generation Rescue ran earlier this year. See where it says "[Autism]"? The square brackets are there because the word "autism" did not appear in the statement made by the court. (You can see the full advertisement here.) This was not a case of autism, but that didn't stop Generation Rescue lying about it. That is what they do.

I was told this week that parents suing pharmaceutical companies over "vaccine damage" to their children have been advised by their lawyers not to use the word "autism" in any claim. The corollary to this is that the lack of the word "autism" in any court finding is evidence that vaccines cause autism. Similar thinking would have vaccines causing car accidents, amblyopia, hangnails, fin rot on pet goldfish and flooding in Bangladesh, because none of these are mentioned by the courts either. And people keep asking me why I call anti-vaccination liars "liars".

Get your credit cards ready (20/6/2009)

TThe 2009 Australian Skeptics Convention will be held in Brisbane in November. Full details will be here and on the Australian Skeptics site shortly, but all that fans of The Millenium Project need to know is that I will be speaking at the convention on the topic of the psychology of belief. Get out your diaries and pencil in November 27 to 29.