Author: VD

The mysteries of TENS

Dr. James M. Tour of Rice University confesses he simply cannot grasp what everyone at Scienceblogs and the Panda’s Thumb and Richarddawkins.net just knows to be true. Because science.

I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.

I don’t understand evolution, and I will confess that to you. Is that OK, for me to say, “I don’t understand this”? Is that all right? I know that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand anything about organic synthesis, but they understand evolution. I understand a lot about making molecules; I don’t understand evolution. And you would just say that, wow, I must be really unusual.

Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.

I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”

If you understand evolution, I am fine with that. I’m not going to try to change you – not at all. In fact, I wish I had the understanding that you have.

But about seven or eight years ago I posted on my Web site that I don’t understand. And I said, “I will buy lunch for anyone that will sit with me and explain to me evolution, and I won’t argue with you until I don’t understand something – I will ask you to clarify. But you can’t wave by and say, “This enzyme does that.” You’ve got to get down in the details of where molecules are built, for me. Nobody has come forward.

The Atheist Society contacted me. They said that they will buy the lunch, and they challenged the Atheist Society, “Go down to Houston and have lunch with this guy, and talk to him.” Nobody has come! Now remember, because I’m just going to ask, when I stop understanding what you’re talking about, I will ask. So I sincerely want to know. I would like to believe it. But I just can’t.

Now, I understand microevolution, I really do. We do this all the time in the lab. I understand this. But when you have speciation changes, when you have organs changing, when you have to have concerted lines of evolution, all happening in the same place and time – not just one line – concerted lines, all at the same place, all in the same environment … this is very hard to fathom.

I was in Israel not too long ago, talking with a bio-engineer, and [he was] describing to me the ear, and he was studying the different changes in the modulus of the ear, and I said, “How does this come about?” And he says, “Oh, Jim, you know, we all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.”

Smells like quality science. And before the usual science fetishists leap in to assert the obvious and declare: “yeah, well, that doesn’t prove God exists,” I will readily admit that it does not. But, (and here is the point), it does prove that there are very rational reasons to doubt the unevidenced assertion that “evolution is a fact”.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, I am an evolution skeptic, not an evolution denier. I do not judge the truth of the belief by the behavior of the believer, although if I did, the behavior of the evolutionary true believers would be sufficient to convince me that the existence of unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns combined is considerably more likely than fish magically turning into monkeys over time due to beneficial mutations taking advantage of the multitude of changes in the water.

The problem of engagement

Toni Weisskopf, the Baen Books editor and one of the voices of sanity in traditional SF/F publishing, provides her perspective on the inevitability of war between the rabbits of Pink SF/F and the rationalists of Blue SF/F in a guest post at Sarah’s place:

The latest fooforaws in the science fiction world have served to highlight the vast cultural divide we are seeing in the greater American culture. SF, as always, very much reflects that greater culture.

It is also nothing new. When fandom was first starting there was the “Great Exclusion Act” when a group of young, excitable, fanboys attempted to spread their political/fannish feud propaganda at the first Worldcon in New York, and were not only prevented from doing so but not allowed back into the con. All fandom was aflame with war! (The fact that this line is a cliché is also a clue that fandom is not, and never has been, a calm peaceful sea of agreement.)

The reason we have a fandom to disunite now, is because calmer heads prevailed. Bob Tucker in particular, with intelligence and humor, led fandom to the idea that it ought have nothing to do with greater world politics, but should concentrate on the thing we all loved, that being science fiction. (Mind you, his sympathies were with the ones who were excluded, but he was able to overcome his own political inclinations for the best of fandom.)

The fact that fandom as an open culture survived more than seventy years is a testament to the power of that simple, uniting concept. That we are once again looking to be rift by a political divide was perhaps inevitable. But as fandom has grown, expanded and diluted itself, we may have won the überculture wars and lost our heart.  We have not been able to transmit this central precept to new fans. Geeks are chic, but somehow we’ve let the fuggheads win.

And, from my observations, this is an inevitable consequence of the creation of any kind of fandom, from tattoos to swords to us. There is a thing people like. Thing people make initial contact with each other to discuss things and thingishness. At some point a woman (and it’s usually women, no matter what the thing) organizes gatherings, and thing fandom grows bigger and better. At some point, the people who care not about things, but merely about being a big fish in a small sea, squeeze out the thing people. Sometimes thing fandom just dies, sometimes it fissures and the process is recreated. So the fuggheads always win. The only question is how long can we delay their inevitable triumph?

Forget delaying them. I agree with what she is saying about the inevitability of the attempted infiltrations, but I very much disagree that their triumph is inevitable. We don’t have to let them in. We don’t have to let them oh-so-helpfully volunteer to make things easier for us and take those weighty responsibilities off our shoulders.

And most of all, we don’t have to sit back and lament the fact that they’ve taken over and ruined the organizations and institutions that we used to love. We can walk away without looking back, leave them to their inevitable implosion, and build new and better ones. But we have to learn from the failures of our predecessors. When the bureaucrats and the activists and the whiners start in with their usual routine about access and fairness and reaching out, we need to kick THEM out, not foolishly listen to them and let in the destroyers.

Don’t throw pearls before swine. Don’t attempt to engage rationally with madmen and fools.

Disarmament is always dumb

I’m only surprised that it took the Ukrainians almost a quarter of a century to regret their unilateral disarmament. Did they learn nothing from the fate of Czechoslovakia 52 years before?

Ukraine may have to arm itself with nuclear weapons if the United States and other world powers refuse to enforce a security pact that obligates them to reverse the Moscow-backed takeover of Crimea, a member of the Ukraine parliament told USA TODAY.

The United States, Great Britain and Russia agreed in a pact “to assure Ukraine’s territorial integrity” in return for Ukraine giving up a nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union after declaring independence in 1991, said Pavlo Rizanenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament.

“We gave up nuclear weapons because of this agreement,” said Rizanenko, a member of the Udar Party headed by Vitali Klitschko, a candidate for president. “Now there’s a strong sentiment in Ukraine that we made a big mistake.”

Perhaps the biggest cost of America’s strategically foolish intervention in Ukraine is the way it will put an end to any attempt to get Iran, North Korea, or any other country that doesn’t want to be invaded, occupied, or partitioned to give up their nuclear ambitions. The lesson being taught is this: never give up your nukes.

Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Signed and Limited Edition: Freehold

In honor of the tenth anniversary of its first publication, Mike Z. Williamson and Baen Books are offering a signed hardcover limited edition of Freehold, the first in his Freehold Universe series. It is now available for preorder, so if you are a fan of my mortal enemy and occasional bete noire, M-Zed, this would be the time to act before they run out.

There is no “ADHD”

A doctor with more than 50 years of medical practice asserts that ADHD is an umbrella of symptoms, not a disease in itself. And he also declares that the treatment can be considerably worse than many of the underlying causes.

Back in the Seventies, I believed in ADHD. It seemed to explain the attention issues that affected so many children. But over the years I’ve come to realise that the symptoms actually had a whole range of underlying causes that were being ignored because of the knee-jerk diagnosis of ADHD. As I argue in my new book on the subject – which has generated a furious controversy in America, where I work as a behavioural neurologist – we’ve become stuck in a cycle of misdiagnosis of ADHD and over-prescription of stimulants such as Ritalin. Only by properly investigating, identifying and treating these causes can we help our patients.

In the case of the 13-year-old boy, I ordered a series of blood tests. These showed he had an iron deficiency: after school, while his mother was out at work, he binged on junk food that was high in sugar but low in iron.

Iron deficiency (anaemia) causes physical fatigue, poor attention and concentration, and memory problems. As soon as his iron intake improved, with iron pills and more fish, fruit, vegetables and nuts, his performance and behaviour improved hugely, too.

The ADHD diagnosis and the stimulants had masked the real problem, as is so often the case. In France, a study in 2004 found 84 per cent of children diagnosed with ADHD were iron deficient, compared with 18 per cent of ‘non-ADHD’ children. Yet time and time again, doctors miss the real problems – some serious, some easily correctable – by automatically reaching for the ADHD label.

In my book, I identify more than 20 causes of the symptoms that are called ADHD…. Many ADHD patients have other conditions, such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These are said to ‘co-exist’ with ADHD, but in my view they’re the actual cause of the ‘ADHD’ symptoms. Treat them and you will treat the ADHD.

Failing to treat them and pumping the patient with stimulants instead only makes things worse. The side-effects of stimulants include reduced appetite (dangerous for children, who need a good diet), sleep disturbance (tiredness can exacerbate attention problems), anxiety, irritability, depressed moods, delayed puberty and, in adults, sexual problems (such as erectile dysfunction). And long-term use of stimulants makes people resistant to them, meaning they need higher and higher doses. The drugs can damage memory and concentration, and have even been linked to reduced life expectancy and suicide. Yet stimulants are being prescribed more and more frequently, creating a health time bomb and neglecting the real causes of the problems.

A seven-year-old girl was brought to me because she was disruptive in class, fidgeted and talked loudly. She had been diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Adderall (similar to Ritalin), but it caused sleeping problems that made her more disruptive.

I had her eyesight tested and she was found to be significantly near-sighted: her disruptive behaviour in class stemmed from boredom, brought about by the fact she could not see the board properly. Once she was given glasses, her behaviour improved almost overnight. She no longer had ‘ADHD’ – or rather, she never had it in the first place. Similarly, many ‘distracted’ children who stare out of the window, are, in fact, suffering from eye strain and need glasses, not stimulants.

No one has ever believed that having little kids snort cocaine and smoke meth was a good idea. So how did anyone ever come to buy into the idiot concept that giving them speed was medically sound?

I always considered “ADHD” to be complete BS. One boy with a supposed case of it was magically cured and never had any trouble controlling his behavior around me after I picked him up by the throat and told him that if he ever kicked me again, I’d rip his balls off and feed them to him.

The ignorance of Cosmos

As expected, the science fetishists are cooing happily over the latest media foray into demonstrable ignorance of religious history:

Here’s the thing: Even “Cosmos” points out that Bruno had no scientific basis for his theories. “His vision of the cosmos was a lucky guess,” says Tyson. So why is the long-dead philosopher important enough to rate hero status? That would be because “Cosmos” takes his case as one of “martyrdom.”

What “Cosmos” does not point out to its audiences that the Catholic Church didn’t really care about Bruno’s views on the Earth moving around the Sun. His crimes — the ones for which he was executed — were theological. Several actual scientists in this period happily investigated the ideas of Copernicus’ theories without running into trouble. Even Galileo only got in trouble when he published books that directly mocked the Church’s adherence to the Earth being at the center.

Why does this matter?

So what if Giordano Bruno wasn’t a scientist and wasn’t executed for science? There are three big reasons why this does, in fact, matter and why it hurts “Cosmos” to get it wrong.

1. To borrow one of Tyson’s famous quotes, the good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. The same goes for history. Getting the history of science wrong hurts science itself. Why believe the science if other parts of the show are inaccurate?

2. Making Bruno into a martyr for science basically makes 100 years of historical research useless. The idea of Giordano Bruno as a scientific hero only originated in the 19th century, when he was championed by several historians. Since then, most have classified him as a philosopher sharing dangerous ideas in a dangerous time.

3. It’s an unstated goal of “Cosmos” to champion science and scientific reasoning over superstition and religious dogmatism. But you’re not going to win over anyone by vilifying religion in the face of science. Add in Bruno flying into space in an overtly crucifixion stance almost seems like giving religion the finger. You don’t win arguments that way, “Cosmos.”

The strange thing is that the science fetishists are always talking about a hypothetical religious ignorance of science while openly demonstrating their own ignorance of history, in particular, the history of the very religion they denigrate on false bases. At least one atheist is aware of the historical illiteracy of his co-irreligionists:

One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who has the lack of common sense to hang around on atheist discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing….

It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the
people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply
picked this [bullsh–] up from other websites and popular books and
collapse as soon as you hit them with some hard evidence. I love to
totally stump them by asking them to present me with the name of one –
just one – scientist burned, persecuted or oppressed for their science
in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually
try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing
considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have
failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently
so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil
Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too
scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of
Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger
Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley,
William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of
Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and
ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages
without molestation from the Church, my opponents have usually run away
to hide and scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong….

Cosmos must have him groaning with despair.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND

Castalia had already announced that we would be publishing John C. Wright’s collection of essays, TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, which will be published in April. Today we are absolutely delighted to be able to say that we will also be publishing AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, a collection of four novellas set in the Night Land of William Hope Hodgson.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is the first of five novels and novellas written by Mr. Wright to be published by Castalia House. It clocks in at 116,500 words and will be priced at $4.99. We will release the English ebook later this month; the German translation is already underway with an anticipated July release. We also expect to publish a hardcover version this summer.

Apologies to those waiting for THE ALTAR OF HATE, but we are delaying it until April in favor of Mr. Wright’s book. It will be sent to the pre-release reviewers in a few weeks.

Speaking as a reader and as a fan, I can say that the Night Land novellas are spectacular. They combine the intelligence and gigantic scale of Iain M. Banks with the eldritch forboding of H.P. Lovecraft, but with a humane soul that is alien to either of the two late authors.

The failure of easy debt-money

Remember, the size of the contraction tends to be determined by the size of the expansion:

The amount of debt globally has soared more than 40 percent to $100 trillion since the first signs of the financial crisis as governments borrowed to pull their economies out of recession and companies took advantage of record low interest rates, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

The $30 trillion increase from $70 trillion between mid-2007 and mid-2013 compares with a $3.86 trillion decline in the value of equities to $53.8 trillion in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The jump in debt as measured by the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS in its quarterly review is almost twice the U.S.’s gross domestic product.

Borrowing has soared as central banks suppress benchmark interest rates to spur growth after the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapsed and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy sent the world into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yields on all types of bonds, from governments to corporates and mortgages, average about 2 percent, down from more than 4.8 percent in 2007, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Broad Market Index.

This is really remarkable considering that the USA’s total credit market debt has only increased from $52.9 trillion to $59.0 trillion. The reason that so few people recognize what is happening is that the scale is an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE bigger than the Great Depression.

Irony

Perhaps if he had said something to this effect back in 2008, the problem might have been addressed, if not necessarily averted:

George Soros, the billionaire investor, believes the banking sector is a “parasite” holding back the economic recovery and an “incestuous” relationship with regulators means little has been done to resolve the issues behind the 2008 crisis.

“The banking sector is acting as a parasite on the real economy,” Mr Soros said in his new book “The Tragedy of the European Union”.

“The profitability of the finance industry has been excessive. For a while 35pc of all corporate profits in the United Kingdom and the United States came from the financial sector. That’s absurd.”

Mr Soros outlined how the problems that caused the Eurozone economic crisis remain largely unresolved.

“Very little has been done to correct the excess leverage in the European banking system. The equity in the banks relative to their balance sheets is wafer thin, and that makes them very vulnerable. The issue of “too big to fail” has not been solved at all.”

I don’t recall Mr. Soros opposing the 2008 banking bailout. It’s not as if the intrinsically parasitical nature of the finance industry is news to anyone of Mr. Soros’s stature and occupation. No economy can expect to grow as long as a significant percentage of the profits produced are skimmed by the monetary middlemen, for the obvious reason that the middlemen produce nothing.

The international hypocrite

No one can reasonably take the US position on Crimean self-determination seriously anymore. Even the New York Times appears to be uncomfortable with the Obama administration’s anti-democratic actions:

They wanted to break away from a country they considered hostile. The central government cried foul, calling it a violation of international law. But with the help of a powerful foreign military, they succeeded in severing ties.

The Kosovars’ secession from Serbia in 1999 drove a deep wedge between the United States and Russia that soured relations for years. Washington supported Kosovo’s bid for independence, culminating in 2008, while Moscow saw it as an infringement of Serbia’s sovereignty.

Now 15 years later, the former Cold War rivals again find themselves at odds, but this time they have effectively switched sides: Russia loudly proclaims Crimea’s right to break off from Ukraine while the United States calls it illegitimate. The showdown in Ukraine has revived a centuries-old debate over the right of self-determination versus the territorial integrity of nation-states.

The clash in Crimea is hardly an exact parallel of the Kosovo episode, especially with Russian troops occupying the peninsula as it calls a March 16 referendum to dissolve ties with Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Though the United States intervened militarily in Kosovo, it did not do so to take the territory for itself. But the current case underscores once again that for all of the articulation of grand principles, the acceptability of regions breaking away often depends on the circumstances.

Consider the different American views of recent bids for independence.
Chechnya? No.
East Timor? Yes.
Abkhazia? No.
South Sudan? Yes.
Palestine? It’s complicated.

It is an acutely delicate subject in the West, where Britain wants to keep Scotland and Spain wants to keep Catalonia.

And the USA murdered hundreds of thousands in order to forcibly “keep the Union together” and deny the sovereign Southern States their right to self-determination. This has not escaped the attention of the world’s second-rate powers, some of whom have indicated support for the Russian position:

Indian officials have told Telegraph India that, in the
newspaper’s words, Delhi is “convinced that the West’s tacit support for
a series of attempted coups against democratically elected governments —
in Egypt, Thailand and now Ukraine — has only weakened democratic roots
in these countries.”

This is the cost of sacrificing principles for pragmatism. You don’t get to claim the moral high ground anymore and no one is going to view you as the good guy. Russia is acting perfectly within its rights: it has permission to station as many as 25,000 troops in the Crimea. Not only that, but its actions are far more in accord with legitimate democratic rule than those of the anti-democratic USA and EU, who are complicit in overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected government as well as installing an unelected prime minister in Italy.

This comment from Zerohedge may explain the real reason for the drama in the Ukraine:

According to the staff of the “Borispol” airport in Ukraine, four large armed trucks and two cargo minivan Volkswagen without license plates arrived to the airport and parked near a transport aircraft at the end of one of runways. About fifteen people in black uniform, wearing masks and bullet-proof vests came out of these vans. Some of them were armed with assault rifles. These people have moved more than 40 heavy boxes from the trucks into the aircraft…. Later, one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Revenue and Taxes reported that, according to his information, last night, at the order of one of the “new Ukrainian leaders” the entire gold reserve of Ukraine has been sent to in the United States. 

If true, that seizure should permit the Federal Reserve to stave off the collapse of the markets for a little while longer. A lot of the recent international activity looks disturbingly like pre-positioning for economic collapse.