A Drunken Madman

As ever, in the cause of promoting skeptical thought and critical thinking while on the internet, I've been out there on the tubes causing trouble. The campaign to put Dr Rachael Dunlop into the lead of the Shorty Awards Health category has been very successful. Very successful indeed.

Of course, during the making of this very successful campaign, it's become clear that not only is Mike Adams a quack, but he's also a mass-email marketer and colluder with big business, a supporter of Scientology and their front-group CCHR, and a general butthurt whining hypocrite.

He's also the originator of a $10,000 "challenge" to anyone who can prove that the H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine is safe.

Thing is, as with all things HealthRanger, once you scratch the surface a little, the challenge is revealed to be an impossible to meet rhetorical trap designed to portray Mike Adams as a crusader willing to put his money where his mouth is, and the scientific community as unwilling to back the vaccine.

Here's a few of the problems with this challenge

Firstly, $10,000 is not a large amount of money as a reward for a challenge which would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet

I quote from Mike's conditions:


So we're looking at a total prize pool of $10 per participant, possibly less, for a 90-day trial. This is pretty small beer.

Secondly, Mike's demands cannot be met within the bounds of medical ethics. A doctor undertaking the type of study that Mike demands would be struck off for malpractice, and would deserve it.

Mike demands a Phase III placebo controlled trial. Inherent in these trials is the application of a placebo to a proportion of the participants, who will subsequently be exposed to disease risk in order to test efficacy. Medical ethics rightly state that exposing placebo groups to severe medical risk is unacceptable. Utterly unacceptable. Mike knows this, Mike's been told this repeatedly. Still, he uses it, because his followers are ignorant of this fundamental ethical restriction. Here's how vaccines are actually tested. Don't be fooled.

Third, Mike's "conditions" specify long-term side effects. While he appears magnanimous in only demanding one year of followup, this is still a significant cost, and the vaccine has not existed for a year yet, as Mike himself admits

If you have a twitter account, you've probably seen the occasional tweet flow past mentioning the Shorty Awards in the last few days. The Shorties are an independent award for the best short-form content in a number of categories, awarded annually in March.

As you might expect from our friend the internet, alt-med woo-woo, anti-vaccination nutbaggery and pseudoscience are rife, and alt-med quacks are polling high in the #health category. This is not a good thing

Luckily, skeptics to the rescue.

Doctor Rachael Dunlop, heart disease researcher, blogger, podcaster and science-based medicine campaigner, is now the subject of a campaign to take back the #health category for science-based medicine.

So. Here's what you do.

• Hit this link.
• Enter your vote in the box as per the instructions, for @DrRachie in #health.
• Remember to place your own reason after the "because" - votes without a reason are discounted later
• Hit "Tweet your vote"
• You'll be asked for your twitter credentials. Fill them in and you'll be redirected back to the shorty site
  
• Make sure your vote was accepted
• Get your followers to do the same

This last one is important. The current leading quack has nearly three times as many followers as Dr Rachie does at the moment, and is actively campaigning.

It's a small thing, but an important thing.

And don't forget, you can also nominate your own favourite skeptic or health campaigner - more than one nomination in a  category seems to be OK, check the rules if in doubt.

Finally, If you have a blog, please blog this and get the word out even further. We're on the way to #1 but we need a margin.

Help us take back the #health category for rational medicine.

[Update 23 Jan 2010: HealthRanger has been disqualified from the awards for vote fraud - a huge number of freshly-minted accounts began voting for Mike Adams soon after Dr Rachie took the lead. Shorty administrators canned his nominations in all categories not that long after. Health Ranger was, however, solidly in the lead in the #sockpuppetry category before his demise. Lulz. Mike's Butthurt reaction and sidewiki commentary can be found here]

Continuing my unhealthy obsession with the work of Half Man Half Biscuit, I give you "Totnes Bickering Fair" from the 2008 album "CSI: Ambleside", a tale of divorce, new-age and non-organics. Chords and lyrics included for HMHB fans with similar pathological obsession. Video and stuff below the fold

I appear to have solved the audio/video sync issues on my ongoing HMHB youtube project, so here's the very latest installment, recorded not half an hour ago. If I Had Possession Over Pancake Day, a short ditty from Blackwell and Crossley's 2002 Album "Cammell Laird Social Club". Enjoy. Or something.

In a continuing series, I butcher the music of Half Man Half Biscuit. This week, The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train)

I was a little drunk when I recorded this, hence the cheesy grin at the end. Audio/Video sync issues are YooToob's problem and I'm endeavouring to get them sorted out for further installments

I'd seriously never seen this argument before, but christians now seem to be coming out with this more and more often.


OK, what's hard to understand that, during the last millennium, Europe was the major colonial power, and that Europe used a christian calendar? And that we still use it because to change it would be expensive, absurd and largely pointless?

Are they really this stupid?

Yes they are

Scene: Garden of Eden. Newly built. Adam and Eve, sounding naive and newly minted, converse with God. Birdsong in background, gentle waters lapping.

 

God: So, Adam, Eve. You like it here?

Adam: Oh yeah, it's great!

Eve: Nice flowers!

G: Good, glad you like it. Took me days.

A: I'm quite fond of the trees.

E: Oh yeah, just look at the trees.

G: Yes, I like them myself, and speaking of trees, before I let you alone there's just one thing.

A: OK. What?

E: Oooh! Butterfly!

G: There's this one thing, right?

A: Ok....

G: There's a tree over there. With fruit on it

A: The big one?

G: Yes, the big one.

E: Right. It is big, isn't it?

G: Yes. Well, don't eat the fruit of it. It's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It'll give you the knowledge of good and evil, and nobody wants that. Seriously guys. Knowledge of good and evil, not cool. OK? You don't have it now, you'll have it if you eat the fruit, end of story. No eating the fruit. This is important.

A: OK god! Just one question though.

G: Anything for you, Adam my lad!

A: Well, why shouldn't we eat the fruit, God?

 

[uncomfortable  pause]

 

G: Because, well... it would give you knowledge, and you'd be disobeying me, and that's what we call "bad".

A: Yeah, you said, but what does "bad" mean?

G: Well, you know, bad. Naughty.

E: Nope, don't get it.

A: Me either

G: Immoral?

A: Nope, don't know about that

G: Malignant?

E: Doesn't mean anything to me....

G: Iniquitous? Injurious?

A: Don't get it.

G: Execrable?

E:  Err...

G: Pernicious!

A: Sorry, that's not helping

G: OK... Err...  Nefarious. Damnable. Villainous?

E: Nope

G: What about.... Evil? You know, the opposite of good?

A: Look, God, we don't know what any of that is...

G: Don't you two idiots know anything???

 

[short pause]

 

A: Well, no.

E: We don't

G: (exasperated): Look, I can't stand around here all day explaining it to you, sort it out for yourselves

A: OK god, see you later

E: Byyyeeeee!

 

[pause, god leaves]

 

E: Why can't we eat that fruit again Adam?

A: buggered if I know.

 

And that's exactly how it went.

So, original sin, right? How did Adam and Eve know it was a bad thing to eat the fruit if they had no idea what good and evil were? The knowledge of relative value judgements is a requirement in discriminating between a good and bad outcome.

How, then, would they know it wasn't a good thing to eat the fruit?

Because god told them not to?

Ah, but there's no way of knowing if disobeying god is a bad thing. they have no knowledge of good and evil, remember?

Because God, In Genesis 2, tells Adam he will surely die?

Well, no. The serpent says "of course you won't die" in Genesis 3, and again, there is no way for Adam and Eve to know that believing this is a bad thing. They have no knowledge of good or evil yet.

But shouldn't they believe god over a snake? Again, they have no way of making that judgement. And it appears the snake was smarter than this god guy, anyway. Besides, the snake is talking to Eve. God told Adam about the tree and the whole dying thing before she came along. Seriously. Even if she was able to make the good/bad judgement, she wouldn't be choosing between the word of god and the word of a snake.

And you know what else? God put the serpent there, and put the fruit there, and put the humans there. And made sure the humans were curious, dumb, gullible, and had a taste for fruit. And that they lacked the necessary mental faculty to follow the rules.

It's that beardy guy's fault that these elements came together.

It's exactly as if I'd put my dog into a room with a delicious biscuit, then punished him for eating it when I went away. For ever. And his descendents.

Three options:

1. God is dumb
2. God is an evil troll
3. God doesn't exist and it's all a fairytale

Duh.

Ruth Gledhill writes the "Articles of Faith" blog for the UK's Times newspaper. I've subscribed to her column for a while now, because as an activist atheist, it's always good to see what's going on around the world in the area of "faith".

One of the problems* with Ruth is, though, that occasionally, she just doesn't get it.

Take this headline, for example.

Happy 'atheist bus' children are Christians

Oh, Ruth! That's ironic! Those silly atheists have done a bus ad featuring children, but they're actually christians! Ho ho ho! Oh, those atheists, oh so wrong.

Trouble is, here's what the ad actually says

So in one fell swoop, Ruth Gledhill entirely ignores the point of the advertisement and labels the children concerned "christians".  I don't know, do I really have to explain this? The ad is not claiming that they are atheist children, agnostic children, buddhist children or, for fuck's sake, satanist children. The point is that they are kids who should be allowed to grow up and then choose their own label, for themselves. Not have one thrust upon them by a sanctimonious religious affairs journalist.

This, perhaps, is why classic journalists shouldn't have blogs. Had Ruth tried to get this into her newspaper, an editor or subeditor would have looked at it and said...

"But Ruth, you've completely missed the point of the ad".

.... and promply pulled the story.

But Ruth has a blog, so we all get to see her getting it wrong.

Thanks for the laugh, Ruth.

* the other problem is that she has a major boner for christianity, and lacks objectivity as a result. A little more rational balance may be nice from a prominent national journalist.

Laurence Krauss is my new hero.

Explains curvature of space and higher-dimensonal geometry exactly the way I explain it in the pub - with triangles on spheres. Also touches on Hilbert's Hotel, a brilliant insight into the concept of infinity. Recommended watch. MAKE yourself an hour of free time so you can watch this. Seriously.