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“Super Bull” (Human trafficking)

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After scoring three points in 43 minutes, the New England Patriots exploded for 31 points in half that time and won another Super Bowl. They refused to die, a distinction they share with Super Bowl urban legends. First, it was the notion that the unofficial national holiday was also the busiest day of the year for domestic violence. Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle shot that rumor down, but now the game is falsely associated with human trafficking.

Like the myths surrounding missing children, these are topics in which persuading people can be difficult. Missing children, battered spouses, and human trafficking are some of our most serious issues and writers must choose their words carefully or risk being seen as insensitive and alienating their audience. So to be clear, human trafficking is an abomination of utmost concern – but there is a supposed tangential element of it that is being misrepresented.

The main perpetrators of the myth are politicians, sometimes aided by irresponsible reporters and law enforcement agents.

Elected and appointed leaders in host cities and states seem in their own competition for who can make the most hyperbolic statement. U.S. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey proclaimed, “One Super Bowl after another after another has shown itself to be one of the largest events in the world where the cruelty of human trafficking goes on for several weeks.”

When he was Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott called the game, “the largest human trafficking incident in the United States.” Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels used the issue as a literal political football when he encouraged legislators to up the fines and prison terms for convicted traffickers and stipulated, “We must do it in time for the Super Bowl.”

NGOs get in on the antsy act as well. International Justice Mission members loudly declared they would rescue trafficked women at Super Bowl XLV, then quietly hoped everyone would forget about this pronouncement when they found no such victims.

The rumor has been around for at least a decade, but a 2011 report by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women showed no evidence of any host city experiencing a spike in this activity as the Super Bowl approached.

The report is six years old, but the claims made then still hold. Examinations of arrest data in Super Bowl cities have revealed no increase in arrests for kidnapping, forced prostitution, pimping, or other charges that would be associated with human trafficking.

Most recently, Reason examined the arrest records for Harris County, Texas, during last week’s Super Bowl. The logs showed no arrests for sex trafficking, soliciting a minor, pimping, promoting prostitution, compelling prostitution, or any other charges that would suggest human traffickers were competing with football fans for hotel rooms.

Faced with this, some myth proponents consider the lack of arrests as proof that publicity about crackdowns is working. But this is similar to the tale of a man who banged a drum to keep giraffes out of the city square and cited the lack of tall ungulates as proof his plan was succeeding.

Evidence of a correlation between a city hosting both the Super Bowl and an influx of human traffickers just isn’t there. Even the one time that there seemed to be, it was the result of selective evidence and correlation-causation errors.

New Jersey authorities increased their focus on human traffickers prior to Super Bowl XLVIII, and ended up rescuing 16 children – clearly a desirable result. But this operation had taken place in areas up to 30 miles from the Meadowlands and went on for MONTHS, with the announcement strategically made during game week. This was disingenuous and it only proved that an increase in arrests for any offense in any jurisdiction will happen if that’s what authorities prioritize. If Des Moines police focus on litter reduction and funnel resources into that, there will be an uptick in citations for carelessly tossing aside Big Mac wrappers.

 

 

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“Take a shot” (Vaccine dangers)

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Anti-vax arguments are heavy on the fear factor, light on the fact factor.
The most unhinged anti-vaxxers assume some sort of plot between the government, pharmaceutical executives, and Bohemian Grove. Or they insist that vaccines don’t prevent diseases, but rather cause them owing to the shedding done by the vaccinated. This point fails to address how these diseases could have existed before the advent of vaccines and the subsequent nefarious shedding. Or why those injected with the dangerous vaccine are not suffering from the disease that is being pumped into them.

But we will look today at some seemingly more reasonable arguments, usually made by those who are 90 percent anti-vax. These folks would probably would not vaccinate themselves or their children, but still paint themselves as advocates for choice while tossing out reasons why their choice would be to not vaccinate.

One of the more frequent arguments in this category is that children are receiving too many vaccines. While it is true that the number of VACCINES has increased, the number of vaccine INGREDIENTS has gone down. During World War I, children were vaccinated for smallpox, that’s it. Today, they are vaccinated against 14 diseases, which can include 26 inoculations before they turn 7. Getting three to five vaccines at once is common.

Anti-vaxxers trumpet these numbers, along with the unstated assumption that this means children today are injected with between 14 and 26 times more scary stuff than they did a century ago. Leaving aside the issue of vaccine safety, which has been addressed in other posts, let’s address the accuracy of the more scary stuff claim.

Dr. Paul Offit has noted: “Immunological challenges from today’s 14 vaccines are less than the challenge from that one vaccine given a hundred years ago. The smallpox vaccine contained about 200 viral proteins. The number of viral proteins, bacterial proteins, and complex sugars on the surface of bacteria contained in the 14 vaccines given today adds up to about 150.”

So despite receiving 13 more vaccines than what children did 100 years ago, youngsters today are receiving fewer immunological components than they did then. Plus, those additional vaccines mean no more iron lungs, no more instances of first-graders attending the funeral of their classmate who died a miserable death from measles, and far fewer toddlers doubled over with Whooping Cough.

Note that Dr. Offit spoke of the smallpox vaccine in the past tense. This is because it may be vaccination’s greatest success story, completely eradicating a disease that had killed 30 percent of those contracting it.

The elimination of smallpox and its relevance to Offit is important for another reason. Offit, who co-discovered a rotavirus vaccine that has saved millions of lives, is one of the most frequent anti-vaxxer targets. They are unable to challenge his science, so they are left with ad hominem attacks that include claiming he is a Big Pharma stooge. However, following the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, there were concerns that terrorists may get ahold of the smallpox virus and unleash it as a weapon. There were calls to reintroduce the vaccine.

Offit was the only member of the CDC’s advisory panel to encourage caution on this and who voted against reintroduction. He felt the risks outweighed the rewards since there had been no new smallpox cases. Had he been the Big Pharma whore that anti-vaxxers portray him as, he would have used his position to help the industry makes hundreds of millions of dollars selling superfluous inoculations.

Another anti-vaxxer claim is that children are too young to be vaccinated. But Offit noted that babies are bombarded with bacteria the second they enter the delivery room.

“People have about 100 trillion bacteria living on their skin as well as on the lining of their nose, throat, and intestines,” he said. “Each of these bacteria contain between 2,000 and 6,000 immunological components, to which children make an immune response. They make large quantities of immunoglobulins every day to prevent these colonizing bacteria from causing harm. Vaccines are a drop in the ocean of what children encounter and manage every day. The proof that young children can respond to these vaccines is that many of the diseases that commonly crippled or killed young children have been virtually eliminated.”

Which brings us to the final argument, that some vaccines are unnecessary.
This argument is an example of vaccines being a victim of their success. Rubella, diphtheria, and polio are almost unheard of in the United States, so some wonder why we are still vaccinating for them.

We do so because these diseases exist elsewhere, and were a person to experience exposure to them overseas, they could return and spread the disease. This is especially true if the exposed person entered an area where there was a cluster of unvaccinated persons fondly recalling the golden era when children received just one shot.

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“Devil may scare” (Satanic Panic)

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There is Sasquatch, Yeti, Nessie, and dozens of less-celebrated cryptos. But the most enduring monster whose existence has yet to be verified is Beelzebub, the devil, Lucifer, Apollyon, Satan, the Dark Lord. This many-monikered beast, unlike the rest of the monsters, is indirectly responsible for much misery.   

Now, for being the embodiment of evil, the cloven-hoofed one has never harmed anybody himself. But there have been some who committed atrocities in his name, such as Richard Ramirez who went on a spree of break-ins, rapes, and murders with an inverted pentagram tattooed on his palm. There were a few others who did similar deeds, but the most frequent Satanic byproduct are baseless accusations made against someone.

Those took place in 17th Century Salem and continue today with Pizzagate. I saw one online poster who claimed that 800,000 children are snatched each year by Satanists. She was basing the figure on information provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited children. But she was basing the reason for their disappearance on negative evidence, wild speculation, and filling in the sizable gaps with her agenda. While about 2,000 children a day are reported missing, this figure includes children who show up 45 minutes later to announce they had taken the scenic route home from school. It includes those who got hurt while hiking and are rescued four days later. It includes runaways, children who are abandoned by their parents, and those who are kidnapped by noncustodial mothers or fathers. Just 1.4 percent of missing children are taken by strangers, and most of these kidnappers worship another deity besides Satan or no deity at all.

So even if five percent of the kidnappers were Satanists, this means that six children are year are taken by devil worshippers, not 800,000. The poster had made the preposterous claim to bolster the case for her belief in Pizzagate – a tale twisted and bizarre even by the ridiculous standards of conspiracy theorists. This theory has expanded to potentially include any pizza joint, any business adjacent to a pizza joint, and anyone who even once patronizes these establishments. All this is said to be part of a nationwide kidnapping and child rape ring, led by Lucifer his Satanic sidekicks, Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

This is a new twist on an ancient idea. The devil figured prominently in Paradise Lost. New Testament writers blamed him for sending a herd of pigs over a cliff and for causing people to fling themselves into a fire. He even appears to win an argument with the archangel Michael over an unspecified issue regarding Moses’ corpse in Jude –  perhaps the most unhinged, bizarre, paranoid, threatening, rambling, and doomsday-desiring book in the Bible. And though it was likely due to a translation error, Satan makes one cameo in the Old Testament when God permits him to destroy Job. The horned one even takes the blame for future carnage and calamity, in Revelation.

But our focus will be relatively modern. Anton LaVey penned the Satanic Bible in the 1960s and become a cult celebrity. He played the devil in Rosemary’s Baby in the 1970s, a decade that also gave us The Exorcist, The Omen, and cattle mutilations that some pegged on Satanists.

In 1972, Mike Warnke wrote a book in which he claimed to have previously been a Satanic high priest, a position from which he witnessed mandatory blood sacrifices, ritual rape, and child abuse. A few years later, Michelle Smith wrote Michelle Remembers, in which she insisted the she recalled seeing children kept in cages, adults having fingers sliced off, and even baby sacrifices. Neither Warnke nor Smith could provide any names and were unable to lead police to any perpetrators, victims, or corpses. This set the tone for what was to come: Over-the-top claims followed by panic and sometimes false convictions, but never a capture of any felonious Satanists.  

Onto the 1980s, lowlighted by Geraldo specials and the almost-requisite inclusion of the adjective “Satanic” before the phrase “heavy metal band.” This, even though for every genuinely Satanic band like Deicide, there were 100 Judas Priests, for whom 666 was just another number. And for all the panic about devil worshippers, the damage was actually being done by child-molesting Catholic priests and Christian televangelists caught in a series of scandals.

A few wayward derelicts may have dabbled in the dark arts and performed a few silly rituals, but most were doing it for the thrill of being iconoclastic outcasts, not because they were truly evil. For instance, when I was 20, I saw a truck that had been spray painted with the slogan, “Kill For Satin.” It had been thrown on there by a hoodlum who was either linguistically-challenged or who was showing unusual fealty to smooth fabric.  

To be clear, there were about half a dozen murders attributed to demons’ minions in the 70s and 80s, but this was uncovered by means of traditional law enforcement and confessions, not from the revelations of someone privy to the inner workings of Satanic cults or from daytime talk show investigations.

On Saturday Night Live, Jon Lovitz portrayed a devil who made failed attempts at wickedness, while the Church Lady chastised her guests for being under Satan’s spell. Indeed, much of this had a comic edge to it, but there was a much darker side that featured many ruined lives. Not ruined by Satanic cult members, who killed very few, and who certainly represented a microscopic percentage of the homicidal maniacs. Rather, innocent lives were ruined by the collective hysteria of parents, press, and prosecutors. The result was the loss of freedom for innocent persons accused of kidnapping, torture, sexual abuse and murder.

This Satanic Panic was an example of a moral panic, which Blake Smith of Skeptoid defines as “a cultural event wherein people become hypervigilant to a threat to the status quo and tend to throw reason and rationality out in favor of seeking protection from the perceived threat at all costs.”

A recent moral panic example would be last year’s glut of clown sightings. Past examples include the 1920s Red Scare, which was a virtual Commie lovefest compared to the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy hearings 30 years later.

With regard to the Satanic Panic, it promoted the notion that organized cults of Luciferians were clandestinely controlling childcare facilities and using their positions to molest, murder, dismember, and torment. 

The most infamous case was the McMartin Daycare trial. Judy Johnson’s 2-year-old son had a reddened rectum and trouble using the toilet, two facts which convinced her he was being molested at the daycare center. Other parents were asked to look for evidence this was happening to their children as well.

Toddlers barely old enough to talk were coached into giving the “correct” answer and, eager to please adults, did so. The paranoia was so extreme that Johnson even claimed her son had reported seeing daycare members fly about the room and many persons believed this. There were reports of secret tunnels and rail tracks beneath the daycare center that would transport the children to other buildings to be tortured and molested. Hot air balloons were offered as another means of transportation, though this would seemingly be superfluous for someone who could fly. Despite the ease with which such ideas as hot air balloon rental and subterranean transportation could be checked out, this wasn’t about logic or facts, it was about fear and revenge.

None of the McMartin defendants were convicted and some were never even formally charged, but some still spent years in jail, unable to pay the seven-figure bail amounts that were also part of the panic. It was at the time the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history and it was all based on such notions as flying Satanic daycare workers.

This injustice was not enough to slow the paranoia. Dan and Fran Keller spent 20 years in prison after being convicted of molesting children at their daycare center in Oak Hill, Texas. Transportation again figured prominently in the case, with the victims allegedly flown out of the country to be molested in a Satanic orgy perpetrated by Mexican soldiers before being shuttled back in time to be picked up by their parents. Other claims were babies used as shark food and children being forced to watch the sacrificial slaughter of kittens and puppies. The Kellers were released when the doctor who had provided the only physical evidence at their trial recanted.

In both daycare cases, children ages 2 to 5 were asked leading questions and praised when they gave the desired response. They were even allowed to mix with each other in between giving testimonies and were encouraged to collaborate and come to shared conclusions.

A bizarre false confession led to another conviction, this time of Paul Igraham, whose daughter accused him of sexual abuse. Imgram was a committed Pentecostal who had no memory of the alleged attacks, but surmised that a demon must have seized control of him.

So when his daughter claimed to have been in ceremonies in which 25 babies were sacrificed and in which she was raped 800 times, he figured it must be true and that the devil made him do it. There was no physical evidence or other witnesses despite these horrors being allegedly being perpetrated by a large cult over many years. No matter in the era of the Satanic Panic, and Ingraham spent two decades in prison.

While these devilish tales took place in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Pizzagate shows that the notion still has life. When it comes to getting people to act irrationally and believe the farfetched, few things can match the fear that the devil inspires. As our spray painting buddy would put it, “Satin rules!”

 

  

   

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“Wishing wellness” (Cleveland Clinic)

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Last month, the director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Center, Daniel Neides, publicly condemned vaccines. This brought a quick response from clinic leadership that vaccination is effective and that Neides would be disciplined.

Good for them. However, the Clinic has become synonymous with the embrace of supplementary, alternative, and complementary medicine (SCAM). It makes an exception for the anti-vax positon not because it is a dangerous notion, but because of public relations and profit reasons.

The Neides screed was bad publicity for the Clinic because, despite the terrifying increase in anti-vaccine illogic, pro-vaxxers remain strongly in the majority. As to the profit motive, the academic and medical institutions that embrace SCAM tout it as an avenue for offering more choices to the customers. But the only alternative to taking a vaccine is to not take it. There is, for instance, no sage root recipe that these institution’s resident witch doctors offer to prevent Whooping Cough. Even hard-core anti-vaxxers usually have no product to sell, but instead encourage allowing children to “naturally” encounter typhus, mumps, and polio.

So while distancing his organization from Neides’ proclamation, Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove makes it clear that he and his doctors will continue to embrace SCAM.

He parrots one of the most hackneyed SCAM lines about mainstream doctors failing to practice preventive medicine. He writes, “Smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise were the leading factors that placed patients under my scalpel.” Clearly, no one would counter by recommending a steady diet of cigarettes, pork rinds, and the couch, so Cosgrove seems to take a reasonable position. 

However, he next writes, “The goal of the Wellness Institute is to focus on health care, not just sick care. Historically, health care has not done a good job of promoting disease prevention.”

Most untrue, insists Dr. Steven Novella of the Yale University Medical School. He writes, “All of the principles of preventive medicine, including the risks of smoking, the benefits of exercise, and the relationship of nutrition and diet to health and disease, were discovered and promoted within the paradigm of mainstream scientific medicine.”

Not only is Cosgrove’s accusation false, he uses that position as a justification for embracing quackery. To wit, Cosgrove wrote, “Acupuncture, yoga, Chinese herbal medicine, guided imagery, and relaxation techniques have scientific backing. We have heard from our patients that they want more than conventional medicine can offer and we believe it is best that they undertake these alternative therapies under the guidance of their Cleveland Clinic physician.”

Cosgrove does not provide us with any clinical trials or studies to support his claims about scientific backing. Acupuncture is in fact based on the quite unscientific notion of qi flowing through meridians. Yoga works well for increasing flexibility and can be an intense workout, but there is nothing to suggest it fights or prevents disease and sickness. Guided imagery and relaxation might well make one more mellow, but these techniques have no value when it comes to fending off eczema, dyspepsia, backaches, or any other condition.

Herbs might help in some situations, but ascertaining what effect they can have requires clinical trials and double blind studies, followed by an isolating of the active ingredient and putting it in cream, pill, or syrup form. Just swallowing some jasmine in hopes it will relieve rheumatism is guesswork.

As far as it being what the patients want, most businesses should indeed match their products with their customers’ desires. But medicine is an exception because the focus should be on making persons healthier. Doctors should strongly encourage patients to take what they need, not give them whatever unproven treatment they want. 

Cosgrove, however, happily does the latter. For instance, he embraces energy medicine, praising these “methods of healing that involve balancing and restoring the body’s natural energies for the purposes of increasing vitality, balancing emotions, and improving health.”

This describes vitalism, which reputable medicine discarded with the advent of Germ Theory. The clinic website specifically praises the Eastern faith healing practice or Reiki since its customers “find it helpful.” Promoting unscientific healing with anecdotes like this is a SCAM staple, and the clinic’s patients suffer for this line of thinking.

Cosgrove’s reason for offering these treatments is that “doing so is justified by the magnitude of the disease challenge.” Not so, says Novella.

“Needing to prevent disease does not justify embracing pseudoscience,” he writes. “As we solve simpler medical problems, we are left with more and more complex ones. This requires an increased dedication to medicine that works. We know what is safe and effective because of careful, rigorous, thorough, and unbiased assessment of all available evidence.”

Indeed. The standard for determining what works remains laboratory research, clinical trials, and the metadata of double blind studies. Despite Cosgrove’s insistence, that standard has not been changed to include a feel-good embrace of acupuncture, Reiki, untested herbs, and ocean sound CDs.

 

 

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“Helicopter apparent” (Abydos temple image)

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Pharaohs received luxurious accommodations during their lifetimes and even nicer surroundings once they died. In the case of 13th Century BCE ruler Seti I, a mortuary temple was built for him in Abydos.

This site would be little-known outside of Egyptology and anthropology circles were it not for a creative interpretation of part of the inscription on its walls. Some consider it evidence that ancient Egyptians had conquered flight in the form of helicopters. Here is the image, seen in the top row, second apophenia manifestation on the left:

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The image could also be said to resemble a locust but no one is going to recruit fervent supporters with that kind of hypothesis. Few of the believers credit the Egyptians with inventing the helicopter, but feel this was the work of extraterrestrial beings, time travelers, Atlanteans, or Nephilim. The seeming flying machine is an example of an Out Of Place Artifact. These are apparent anachronisms that believers in time travel, creationism, ancient astronauts, Atlantis, or Alternate Chronologies use to bolster their claims. These artifacts usually have a reasonable, scientific explanation, but if they don’t, it still requires implementing the Appeal to Ignorance fallacy to credit the artifact as evidence for one’s belief.

The temple was both a manifestation of and monument to Seti’s ego. He began constructing it to honor himself and to have a place for his followers to worship him and Osiris after he died. Seti never finished, with that job falling to his son, Ramesses II. This slacker young’un did lazy work that including hasty chiseling, plastering over old inscriptions, and making modifications using plaster infill. This altering of the original inscription, along with erosion, made the image what it is today.

Where some see a helicopter, Egyptologists see a filled and re-carved titulary, which is a common site in pharaoh temples. However, there may be a bit of fraud at work as well. The photos that appear on believer sites look to have been digitally altered to make the inscription (or helicopter) look more uniform than it is. Unretouched photos appear to show more clearly  that one name has been carved over another.

A substantial strike against the notion of flying pharaohs is that the machine that would carry them is seen in this temple no place else in ancient Egyptian literature, artwork, or hieroglyphics. Egyptians built the Sphinx and pyramids and made great advances in agriculture, justice systems, and written language. They were proud of all this and to think they would have managed flight without celebrating it their art and historical records is unlikely. Additionally, aircrafts require fuel, specialized parts, and factories and there is no evidence any of those existed in Egypt 4,000 years ago.

Also, Seti I led his country in several wars and this technology would have allowed Egypt to conquer anyone while suffering no casualties. There would have been no reason to not use this capability then, nor any reason to abandon the technology.

The case that the hieroglyphic helicopter is instead a carved-over name is substantial and there are innumerable examples of the same practice at other sites throughout Egypt. In this case, the naming convention of Ramesses II was carved over his father’s and, combined with four millennia of wind, sand, and neglect, created an image somewhat resembling a helicopter.

My position as a skeptic is a strong reason for me to embrace this explanation. But I will concede another incentive. Unless ancestry.com has led me astray, Seti I and Ramesses II were my ancestors, 119 and 118 generations back, respectively. That means I have a case for getting my name carved into the walls.

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“No guts, no gory” (Leaky Gut Syndrome)

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Leaky Gut Syndrome is a made-up malady in which germs and toxins allegedly enter the bloodstream through porous bowels, creating multitudinous health problems.

While some minor bowel conditions can be caused by increased intestinal permeability (“a leaky gut”), there is little evidence to suggest this permeability causes the significant medical issues some attribute to it. No scientific research indicates that Leaky Gut Syndrome exists or that the treatments recommended by alt-med peddlers would alleviate the symptoms they associate with it.

Dr. Stephen Barrett at Quackwatch writes that these treatments include dietary supplements, probiotics, and herbal concoctions. If one prefers ambiguity in their treatment plan, one alt-med practitioner recommends “restoring good balance.” Others suggest fad diets, such as gluten-free, low-sugar, no-diary, and anti-fungal varieties. Others diets contain restrictions, such as never having proteins and starch at the same meal. It’s now a hamburger OR fries for you, bud. Also, while a few folks have problems caused by gluten or lactose, most people do not and eliminating these from a diet may cause nutritional deficiencies and do more harm than good.

Promoters insist these remedies will combat Leaky Gut Syndrome symptoms like bloating, gas, cramps, inflammatory bowel disease, fatigue, joint pain, moodiness, weakened immunity, irritability, sleeplessness, eczema, psoriasis, arthritis, lupus, migraines, multiple sclerosis, depression, and even autism. Dr. James Gray, a University of British Columbia gastroenterologist, has noted that the idea of one syndrome causing such disparate afflictions is preposterous. “One diagnosis that explains arthritis, IBD, skin problems, fatigue, and more seems fictional,” he said. “Even more unrealistic is that all of these symptoms will go away if the patient just takes a few supplements and avoids certain nutritious foods.”  

Physicians sometimes detect increased intestinal permeability in those with Crohn’s disease or celiac and in patients receiving chemotherapy or who regularly consume alcohol or take aspirin. Celiac sufferers who attack their hangover with Excedrin must really be at risk. However, intestinal permeability is a symptom of these ailments, not the cause, and the only thing the permeability might lead to is an inflammation of the bowel walls. It won’t cause skin to redden or joints to ache.

Still, some patients who try these methods begin to feel better. That’s usually because of the health benefits of a sensible diet. One of the diets recommends limiting sweets and increasing the intake of bright-colored veggies and legumes. Replacing ice cream sandwiches and Pop-Tarts with green peppers and red beans is apt to make you feel better. But if a person really has a medical condition, treating a faux one with improved eating habits will cause the patient to delay seeking help for what truly ails them. And unless one has a sickness that necessitates removing a nutritious food from one’s diet, doing so is inadvisable. Such a suggestion is a good sign the speaker has no idea what he or she is talking about. And a certain giveaway is if they suggest the only way to improve the situation is to buy their herbs, shakes, and supplements.

Some alt-med practitioners give patients a test to determine if they have intestinal permeability by measuring levels of two indigestible sugars in their urine. Gray says it is unlikely to work but even if it does, is useless for establishing the legitimacy of the syndrome: “Using this test to diagnose Leaky Gut Syndrome would be like ordering a test to look for blood in the stool of someone with IBD and using a positive test result to prove that the bloody stools caused some other mysterious disease that in turn caused the IBD.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Mark Crislip at Science Based Medicine notes the complete lack of reference to Leaky Gut Syndrome on PubMed, indicating the corresponding dearth of clinical trials that have validated this condition and treatments for it. So if needing double blind studies and published papers to support an assertion that the syndrome exists, you’re out of luck. But if anecdotes from self-styled mavericks are what you want, we can set you up. 

Paleohacks.com, for instance, blames Leaky Gut Syndrome for causing “bad things.” The use of such medical terminology may explain why this work has yet to be published in scientific journals. Or perhaps it’s because where one would normally include the results of a double blind study, we instead learn that the syndrome’s existence is “backed by so much anecdotal evidence it is hard to ignore.” Either the author or his 8-year-old son crafted this nifty diagram to show how the Syndrome progresses:

arrows

The author writes that if toxins get through the intestines, the next line of defense is the liver, and if that fails, the conditions described in this post will result. But if your liver fails, your situation is more serious than insomnia or a headache. And if trying to establish that a medical condition exists, you need more than campfire stories about bad thingies.

 

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“Reactionary Principle” (Anti-GMO planks)


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Arguments against GMOs fall into two main categories. The first warns of potential harm for tampering in nature’s domain. The second is to level an accusation that, while possibly true, also applies to conventional and organic crops and therefore is not a good reason to oppose genetic modification.

Some anti-GMO types are extreme enough to be dangerous, such as when Greenpeace eco-terrorists destroyed farmers’ fields in the Philippines. Worse, activists convinced Namibian and Zimbabwean governments to prohibit import of GMO corn during a famine. An organic food enthusiast featured on Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! defended this by saying that if the victims lived, the GMOs would have given them three heads.

While not making that claim, professor Nassim Taleb warns of unspecified dangers that GMOs may bring. One of GMO’s most zealous opponents, Taleb mostly confines himself mostly to Twitter and Facebook. He was scheduled to debate Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey but backed out a week before. Had Bailey been afforded the chance to debate, he may have raised these points, which he did in a Reason column about the cancellation:

  • “In 2014, a group of Italian biologists did a comprehensive review of the last 10 years of research on biotech crops that encompassed 1,783 different scientific studies. These studies dealt with such concerns as the crops’ impacts on natural biodiversity, the possibility that they’ll exchange genes with wild relatives, and their effects on the health of people and other animals. In the review, the biologists concluded that the scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazard directly connected with the use of GM crops.”
  • “In a 2014 meta-analysis of 147 studies, a team of German researchers reported that the global adoption of genetically modified crops has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37 percent, increased crop yields by 22 percent, and increased farmer profits by 68 percent. They conclude that there is robust evidence of GM crop benefits for farmers in developed and developing countries.”

Taleb would have been very unlikely to have answered these points with facts or contemplation. He lashes out at anyone who disagrees with him and calls opponents “non-thinking animals.” His recommendation for debating GMO proponents is not to cite a scientific study or raise a point related to the chemistry of agriculture. Rather, he advises his followers to “deeply insult them” and “get them angry.”

He reserves most of his venom for University of Florida horticulturist Kevin Folta, as Folta has arguably done more to raise the profile of GMO safety than anyone else. When Folta offered to discuss GMOs over pizza and beer, Taleb refused and called Folta a “lowly individual” and a “disgusting fellow.” He also leveled the Monsanto shill accusation at him, even though Folta has never received a dime from the company. Taleb based this on Folta attending a conference which Monsanto helped pay for. Of course, even if Monsanto was paying Folta $10 million per annum that would have no bearing on whether what he was saying about GMOs was true.

Folta has hosted many podcasts and given hundreds of presentations on GMOs, and Taleb has never highlighted a possible error in Folta’s conclusions. Being unable to attack the science, he attacks the scientist, and as we’ve seen, the 56-year old Taleb does so in a manner benefiting a petulant grade schooler not getting his way on the playground.

Taleb pretty much concedes there are no known dangers and his beef with GMOs is based on the precautionary principle. He feels they are too much of a danger to take a chance with. Exactly why he thinks that is anyone’s guess. A Twitter user who requested from Taleb more information on how the precautionary principle would apply to GMOs was told to “fuck off.” 

When applying the precautionary principle, the danger would actually seem to be in ignoring GMOs’ proven and potential benefits. As we have seen with the African famines, failing to take advantage of the technology can be fatal. Also, genetic modification saved the Hawaiian papaya, has given us synthetic insulin, and could prevent Third World blindness if bureaucratic roadblocks to Golden Rice could be overcome. GMOs also give farmers better crop yields and reduce the need for fertilizer and pesticides.

Then there’s the work of 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaugm, whom the Nobel Committee credited with saving one billions persons from starvation. He did so by pioneering the use of hybrid and genetically modified crops through the development of strains that could thrive in arid places without pesticides or herbicides. Why would anyone oppose this substantial technological progress? Let’s look at some of the arguments raised by Greenpeace and counters to them.

  1. The insertion of foreign genes can produce proteins that may prove toxic or allergenic.

Response: One of the main reasons research is done is to ensure food with toxins and allergens don’t reach the market. When a prospective genetically-modified food is shown to produce these, they cannot be sold.

  1. Scientists add genes that confer resistance to common antibiotics.

Response: What is actually happening is that researchers are making crops resistant to harmful bacteria by incorporating the right toxins into the crop. This eliminates the need to apply the toxin in pesticide form.

  1. Genetically engineered crops represent new and potentially invasive forms of life.

Response: All plant species are potentially invasive, which is why farmers apply sound management techniques. While invasive species sometimes occurs, this can happen with crops that are genetically modified, traditional, or organic.

  1. Non-GMO stocks are contaminated due to cross pollination, either through seeds being carried or by being mixed up during handling. 

Response: This has always been true of all plants. Cross pollination has nothing to do with GMOs. Calling it “contamination” when it happens with GMOs is unnecessarily raising the alarm about a normal process that has always been part of agriculture.

  1. Because genetically engineered seeds are patented, the seed company can maintain strict control over how the seeds are used.

Response: This is true of all patented products and irrelevant to the safety or efficiency of GMOs.

A final argument is that GMOs are unnatural. But so too is all food, which has been modified for millennia. Food crops have always been hybridized, but with traditional methods there was a limit as to how different the species could be. With genetic modification, scientists can move individual genes from one species to almost any other. The goal is select specific genes that possess a desirable trait such as disease immunity or the ability to thrive in dry conditions and transfer it to another plant. Genetic modification allows this to be done much quicker and with much more control.

While these are all solid facts, fear sometimes wins out, with resulting famine, crop vandalism, and import bans. We largely don’t have those issues in the United States. But I see orange juice in the grocery store labeled “non-GMO,” even though this is a redundancy since there are no genetically-modified oranges. These labels are slapped on many other foods that have no GMO counterpart and the only reason is to take advantage of the fear. For reference, the only GMO crops sold in the United States are corn, sugar beets, soybeans, papayas, canola, arctic apples, alfalfa, cotton, innate potatoes, and summer squash. So Taleb could have had that pizza and beer without having to worry about growing three heads.

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“Planet 9 from Outer Space” (Nibiru apocalypse)


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This year’s end of the world will take place in October. There have been predictions about the end since humans became capable of contemplating their mortality. So far, the doomsayers’ all-time winning percentage is .000.

Recent panicky prognostications have included Harold Camping in 2011, the Mayan brouhaha a year later, and John Hagee’s Blood Moons in 2016, all three of which we are still here to ridicule. The latest doomsday centers on the planet Nibiru and the brown dwarf it orbits, Nemesis.

The primary promoter of this notion is David Meade, author of Planet X, the 2017 Arrival. This terrifying tome informs us that this fall will see Nibiru and Nemesis barrel toward Earth. Neither of them will necessarily collide with our planet, but their gravitational pull will lead to massive sinkholes, firestorms, typhoons, and other cataclysmic unpleasantries. Life on Earth will come to an end. The fatal flaw in this idea is the complete lack of evidence for the existence for Nibiru or Nemesis.

Space features so many fascinating phenomenon like dark matter, antimatter, bizarre exoplanets, gravity waves, quasars, and black holes that it’s unfortunate some feel the need to fabricate awesomeness. But such an incentive prompted Zecharia Sitchin to concoct the Nibiru tale in 1976. A self-declared expert in the Sumerian language, Sitchin deduced that some Sumerian writings referenced Nibiru. Through his idiosyncratic translation, Sitchin figured out that Nibiruians resemble three-foot tall humanoids. About 500,000 years ago, they bopped over to Africa to mine gold. While they liked being able to access this precious metal, they disliked the associated work. So they genetically altered our ancient ancestors and used the resultant species as slave labor. So while they (or at least their planet) is coming to destroy us, we can’t be too angry since we wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for them.

The documents also revealed that Nibiru exists in the remotest outskirts of the solar system, but swings by Earth every 3,600 years. That means only about one in 50 generations will experience this celestial visit, but of course, our generation is that one. That’s the way doomsdays and prophecies work. Be they aficionados of Nibiru, Nostradamus, Edward Cayce, or Revelation, believers almost never predict that something will happen 100 or 1,000 years from now. It has to be in their lifetimes or it loses all excitement and meaning. Also, by exposing these coming apocalypses, doomsayers feel some control over it. They can build bunkers, warn others, and get right with a god or alien species in hopes this obsequiousness will save them.

Sitchin was a rare exception to the rule about not picking a doomsday date beyond their lifespan. When a few folks tried to fuse the Mayan and Nibiru doomsdays, he rejected this and said Earth would last until 3012. That saved him from them the public humiliation of failure that his fellow seers suffer.

Setting a date for the apocalypse has its good and bad points. Few persons would have paid attention to the Camping and Mayan predictions if they had been treated like a movie and announced that they were “coming soon.” Pinning down a specific time is more likely to generate publicity, sell books and DVDs, and attract YouTube viewers. The drawback comes the day after when there is indeed a day after. However, this is not the fatal flaw that a rational person would expect it to be. When the end doesn’t come, few believers see this as a failing. Rather, it was just a minor mathematical miscalculation or even evidence that the believers’ conduct leading up to the day placated the god, alien invader, or heavenly body that was going to annihilate us.

Camping recalculated and gave us another date, which his followers accepted. After her followers emerged from their bunkers on Dec. 22, 1954, Marian Keech reassured them that their piety had saved the world, as the extraterrestrial army backed off when it saw there were still some good Earthlings left. Blood Moons came and went, yet Hagee devotees are still snagging his latest book about the approaching end, which now includes the TRUE date. While it is incredible that failed seers get away with this, those they are bamboozling have a strong incentive to let them. Otherwise, their time spent prepping, praying, meditating, telepathically communicating, and giving away possessions would have been wasted.

Sitchin’s creation was floundering in 1995 when alien communicator and psychic Nancy Lieder announced the planet was about to collide with Earth. This fueled a renewed interest and other annihilation-by-Nibiru claims surfaced in 2003, 2012, and 2015. Today, Meade tells us that Nibiru and Nemesis are hidden at the far end of the solar system and following large oval paths, meaning we will be unable to detect them until it is too late.

“This system is not aligned with our solar system’s ecliptic, but is coming to us from an oblique angle and toward our South Pole,” he tried to explain. “This observation is difficult, unless you’re flying at a high altitude over South America with an excellent camera.”

Or maybe if you had a powerful telescope, like the kinds at NASA at Mount Palomar, neither of which have astronomers reporting these celestial bodies. But telescopes would only be needed if Nibiru was staying put. Were it on its way, a clear view of the night sky would suffice. The Washington Post quoted NASA astrophysicist David Morrison as saying, “There are no pictures or astronomical observations of Nibiru, but a planet nine months away from crashing into Earth, cruising within the inner solar system, would be visible to the naked eye.”

Meanwhile, Meade asserts that, “The elite are frantically building bunkers and the public is being kept in the dark to avoid panic.” This is contradictory because, without the ability to see or detect Nibiru, how would the elite know there was something to avoid?

Still, Meade claims “overwhelming” evidence in the form of increased numbers of volcanoes and earthquakes, never bothering to substantiate that this is occurring or explaining how that would prove a planet has left its orbit and will destroy us.

If wanting to know more, Meade’s book is available on Amazon for $13. But I suggest waiting a  year, when it should be considerably cheaper. 

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“Free WiFi rot” (Electromagnetic hysteria)


wifi2

The Truth About Cancer website is a clearinghouse for pseudoscience and quack cures that provides enough fodder for 10 posts, but we will concentrate today on its claim that WiFi causes cancer. The main promoter of this idea is Lloyd Burrell, a man whose online biography informs us that he “was running a successful small business when one day in 2002 he began to feel unwell when using his cell phone.” Burrell claimed he noticed this happened whenever he was near his phone, computer, or other type of electromagnetic device.

Critical thinkers will recognize as post hoc reasoning, but rather than trying to find out if there was a connection, Burrell merely assumed there was and, per the website, “has made it his life mission to raise awareness about the dangers of electromagnetic fields.”

There are indeed dangers associated with electromagnetic fields. For example a gamma ray burst from close enough could end life on Earth, although Universe Today reassures us that “astronomers have observed all the nearby gamma ray burst candidates, and none seem to be close enough or oriented to point their death beams at our planet.”

But there are still Earth-bound hazards, with the danger increasing the shorter the EMF wavelength gets. Going across the spectrum, we start with the longest waves, radio, then proceed to microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma ray.

WiFi operates in the microwave portion, while the danger only starts toward the high end of ultraviolet light, when skin cancer becomes a risk. That’s because that’s the point on the EMF spectrum where ionizing begins. WiFi, meanwhile, is on the non-ionizing end by a wide margin.

Extensive exposure to ionizing radiation is the only type we need fret over, as even low exposure over time can significantly increase one’s risk. That’s why X-ray patients are covered with lead shields while the operator giving the X-ray (and 15 others that day and every other day) steps out of the room when the electromagnetic radiation is released.

Phoning your spouse to let them know your X-ray appointment is over requires significantly less radiation exposure than what the X-ray emitted, and more importantly, the cellphone’s radiation is non-ionizing.

But Burrell and many others have convinced persons they are at risk for cancer, especially of the brain, for repeated use of phones and other WiFi devices. Truth About Cancer is correct when it writes, “A multitude of studies found damage and cancer promotion from high frequency electromagnetic fields.” But it leaves out that none of the products whose use it is campaigning against are low frequency devices. Also, none of these websites or advertisements offer a biological mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation would induce tumors.

Radiation is associated with 1950s Sci Fi movies and theoretical meltdowns at nuclear power plants that would render adjacent areas uninhabitable. But it has a much-less sinister side that includes sunlight and Walkie Talkies. Radiation even helps Dr. Oz broadcast a satellite TV program about WiFi dangers. 

But if Oz were telling the truth, we would be seeing an exponential increase in brain cancer. Twenty years ago, cell phone use in, say, grocery stores was anomalous. Today, not taking a cell phone to the grocery store is the anomaly. Yet during this time, brain cancer rates have remained steady, even though we have become even more slavishly devoted to phones and other ever-present technology like iPads, personal computers, video-game consoles, and digital audio players.

Still, Oz, Joseph Mercola, Mike Adams, and others churn out misinformation about the supposed connection between these products and cancer, which perpetrates a self-replicating cycle. The more people that share articles about WiFi dangers, the more ad revenue is generated, and the more incentive these websites have to instill more unjustified worry.

The people who believe them and act on these fears give themselves the illusion of control. We also see this when people refrain from swimming after eating, refuse to sit close to the TV, or look for that non-GMO label.

By believing WiFi dangers are real, people have something to avoid and a hazard to guard against. So they follow Burrell’s recommendation to buy “Low EMF Routers” even though this is a redundancy that describes all routers. Also for sell are EMF shields, radiation meters, WiFi harmonizers, neutralizers, and similarly silly counter-weapons. The emissions they seek to protect from are incredibly low and the only way these devices will make a person’s exposure even less is if the persons goes to the store to buy these shields, and is therefore are away from their home modem.   

Meanwhile, radiationeducation.com suggests having your children write a radiation-free snail mail letter to your wireless-happy neighbors. The recommended message reads, “Our mom discovered that we are getting WiFi coming into our house and our bedrooms because of our neighbor’s wireless Internet service. Radiation hurts me. Please consider the effect of your choices. We are begging you to consider switching your Internet access to something hard wired, like cable or dial up, instead of wireless.”

While the overarching idea behind all this is to avoid health problems, this last recommendation would likely be counterproductive. Falsely accusing someone of harming children would be pushing it, but telling someone to use dial-up, that could definitely get your hurt.  

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“Sugar kookies” (Fructose dangers)

corn-homer-donut

Our distant ancestors who dined on a true Paleo diet had no control over how much sugar they consumed. Whatever amount occurred naturally in the wild plants they found while foraging or in the animals they corralled provided their daily intake by happenstance.

The first sugarcane cultivation probably began in New Guinea 10,000 years ago but sugar only came to be a European food ingredient in the 11th Century. Then European powers established sugarcane plantations in the Americas in the 16th Century and by the end of the 19th Century sugar consumption had skyrocketed. According to Scientific American, this included a whopping 1,500 percent increase in England.

Today, sugar is added to most processed foods and I for one sprinkle it liberally on my Shredded Wheat. In fact, I find it improves the taste of whatever it’s added to except for iced tea, where it transforms a right dandy drink into a plum awful one.

But some say all this sweetness has a sour impact on our health. Pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig and journalists Gary Taubes and Mark Bittman have argued that sugar is a toxin that hampers our organs and disrupts hormones. They equate sugar with obesity, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular disease. Taubes called it “uniquely toxic” and “the principal cause of the chronic diseases that are most likely to kill us.” He even equated sugar consumption with smoking, but for this to be true, even half a teaspoon per week would have to be detrimental since there is no amount of tobacco use that can be deemed safe.

There are different types of sugar, the best-known being the white granular table variety, sucrose. When alarming claims such as those in the previous sentence are made, the speakers are referring to the fructose form. That’s because the role of metabolizing fructose is handled almost entirely by the liver and eating exceptionally large amounts of fructose will tax the organ most responsible for exorcising toxins. Overburdening the liver produces uric acid, which leads to gout, kidney stones, and high blood pressure.

Bad stuff, indeed, and a good reason to limit the intake of fructose, but an insufficient reason to declare it the primary cause of disease. Dose matters. Concern about fructose is based primarily on studies in which persons consumed 300 milligrams a day, about five times what most persons ingest and equal to about eight sodas. Other studies involved subjects for whom high-fructose foods and drinks were almost the entire diet. Very few persons not being tested for this specifically would consume massive amounts of fructose while avoiding all glucose and other non-fructose forms of sugar, so this study has little bearing on reality.

There have also been rat studies that suggest fructose causes harm, but these are flawed for a different reason. Scientists have learned that rodents metabolize fructose in a vastly different way than humans do. Our livers convert less than one percent of consumed fructose into fats, while rats convert fructose into fat at a rate 50 times that.  So while the studies show that fructose consumption leads to clogged arteries, fatty livers, and insulin resistance in rats, it is not logical to conclude that humans would suffer the same fate for the occasional blueberry Pop-Tarts. 

In an interview with the Evolving Health Science blog, Dr. John Sievenpiper said, “A lot of this debate has been underpinned by the animal literature and ecological studies without recognizing the flaws and translating that information into real-world human scenarios. The problem has really been with someone like Lustig who can run through the pathways at very impressive clip and can convince someone that, OK, there’s so much biological plausibility, it must be true.”

But when Sievenpiper analyzed the effect of normal fructose consumption on humans, he learned there was none of the reason for worry the Sugar Kill Gang suggests. In his meta-analyses of dozens of studies on humans, he found typical fructose consumption resulted in no harmful effects on body weight, blood pressure, or uric acid production. Additionally, Archer Daniels Midland scientists collected data from more than 25,000 persons for seven years and found no connection between fructose consumption and levels of triglycerides, cholesterol, or uric acid. So moderate fructose consumption is fine. And one can safely ingest even higher levels of other sugars without any negative impact beyond spoiling tea.