So what do you do when you didn't have time to write something new? Well, you could leave the blog blank, which is anathema to me) or you could do the time-honored space-filling technique valued by bloggers everywhere once they reach a certain level of traffic.
Yep! It's one of the very rare times for an open thread on Respectful Insolence. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I did one of these.
Don't let Orac down. Take advantage of it and speak your piece! Or don't, and let the tumbleweeds roll through the ol' blog this afternoon, metaphorically speaking...
The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, discuss.
The Inquisition! (what a show!)
The Inquisition! (here we go!)
We know you're wishin'
That we'd go awaaaaaaaaaay!
But the Inquisition's here and it's here to staaaaay!
And it makes me crack up every time I think about Voltaire's Candide wondering how Pangloss got hanged at an Auto de Fe.
Auto da fe?
What's an auto da fe?
Can I just talk about anything?
Cuz in that case, I thought this was damn interesting and I am curious what people think about it.
Is this going to be replicable in service of actual parthenogenesis-related research?
It's what you oughtn't to do, but you do anyway.
Shh. Don't let the women know that they don't have a use for men anymore!
(Obviously kidding)
So what's the deal with kids these days?
Noisy, crazy,
Sloppy, lazy
Loafers!
And while we're on the subject...
One of my son's teachers had a poster on the wall with about a hundred vapid aphorisms, except they were called "100 Rules for Life" or some nonsense. A couple or three of these rules were religiously-themed. I think one of them was, "They're the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions."
This public school (USA definition, not UK for you Brits) has done a good job teaching science as science, and keeping religion out of the classroom, as long as that door is open into the hallway. (rim shot)
Would anyone here see this as a potential breach of the church/state tattered curtain?
Drat! I messed up the joke.
The poster was on the door, not the wall.
(hangs head in shame)
Well, since it's an open thread, any ideas on how to shoot down a member of ye olde Mercury Militia over on the Arstechnica boards who's trotting out a study linked on Generation Rescue, specifically http://www.generationrescue.org/pdf/james.pdf -- I'd love to be able to point to something already posted debunking it.
As it is, I've, ummm.... pointed them your way already, Orac. Heh....
Heh, I shoulda guessed. Ask for help on debunking a specific study over at a certain site with the initials "GR" and provide a link to the study -- and it gets held in moderation.
I don't blame you at all (and I shoulda thought before including the link, but I sorta wanna be able to shoot the guy down with real data -- or a source to real data).
I'd be glad for some backup over on the Arstechnica forums, tho, if anyone's bored.... :)
I think one of them was, "They're the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions."
...
Would anyone here see this as a potential breach of the church/state tattered curtain?
Definitely. I'd rather not have my child in a classroom /school advocating the Ten Commandments as "rules to live by"-- sounds perilously close to religious instruction to me.
Hey, I've got one! "The Law of Karma isn't called the Suggestion of Karma." Think the Ten Commandment pushers would enjoy a statement of a different faith listed as a "rule"?
I suppose it would be too much to ask that any poster in a school that lists "rules to live by" would be on, say, the Laws of Thermodynamics?
PalMD: Auto da fe is an old term for a ritual of public penance of condemned heretics and apostates that took place when the Spanish Inquisition or the Portuguese Inquisition had decided their punishment (that is, after the trial).
I was going to talk about Hwang and parthenogenic stem cells, but have been beaten to the punch Wonderful irony, that.
Saw the Simpsons Movie today. Laughed.
Oh, and found two copies of Darwin's Black Box in the Biology section of a local Barnes & Noble. I reshelved them in the proper section (Christianity) by author's last name. What was Barnes & Noble thinking? Nobody with an interest in biology is going to look for that book in the Biology section!
"I'll be laughing like a lunatic
that just got away.
I'll be howling like a heretic
At an auto-da-fe.
I'm gonna get you in my tent (tent tent tent tent)
where we can both experiment (ment ment ment ment)
I hope that you won't mind the stench (stench stench)
Of the sacrament.
"Tent", Bonzo Dog Band
Dawn, I think you missed the joke. Watch this.
Hey, I just realized this is a great opportunity to sneak in mention of one of the great cancer cures that Orac and the other Big Pharma minions who control this site are suppressing - oleander soup!
Yessiree bob, this will cure what ails you. Some medical establishment tools and nervous nellies will tell you oleander is toxic, but it's all part of the cancer establishment's master conspiracy.
http://www.cancertutor.com/Cancer02/Oleander.html
http://www.tbyil.com/tips.htm
I ran across this recipe being promoted (on a certain loon-laden altie website) by someone who believes that aspartame is a deadly poison.
Enjoy (but stick to Campbell's).
"Study: Cloning fraud hid an actual advance"
What I thought after reading that headline was that it would be used to argue that Andrew Wakefield and the Geiers could be on to something after all. (Meh, not likely)
http://www.generationrescue.org/pdf/james.pdf
NotMercury (notmercury.blogspot.com) would be the best guy to help you out with that one. But generally speaking, these sorts of studies don't tell us anything about how thimerosal could be related to certain specific neurological disorders. They are trying to find a mechanism of action even though causation is very unlikely. It's a weird way of approaching the issue.
Blech, aspartame.
Anyone got good soup recommendations, I just got all four wisdom teeth removed :( . Campbell's and I are growing very close.
Orac, I got a question I been meaning to ask, if I may do so.
This might be silly, but: why do never hear about heart cancer? There seems cancer for the other parts of the body.
If we're posting alt-med links, I've always thought this blog needed more human growth hormone woo.
http://www.hghblen.com/
A couple of months ago, some guy in the park handed me a card with this website's URL on one side and a lengthy, moderately crazypants rant about Jesus on the other. And just like quantum physics, nothing goes with growth hormone like homeopathy:
Of course, the stuff they're peddling is legal, since it isn't "human growth hormone" so much as "water."
See if you can spot the problem with the reported results from their double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (aside from the fact that it was performed at a naturopathic clinic in Mexico):
http://www.hghblen.com/hgh-test-brands.htm#3
Read Project Day Lily to see how the mycoplasma incognitus is the real cause of many CFS/AIDS/Gulf War syndrome cases etc. Dr. Garth Nicolson found it in the blood of gulf war syndrome/CFS etc. patients and wrote a riveting book on it, how he found it in their blood and found out about a massive testing program, and there were several attempts on his life. It was part of the biowarfare program.
In order to prove a microbe is pathenogenic in humans you need an animal model, Nobel prize winner Robert koch discovered TB/Anthrax bacteria and developed postulates that said you had to induce disease in experiimental animals to prove your microbe was pathenogenic in humans. There is no animal model for hiv/hpv etc, (Hundreds of Chimps were injected 20 yrs ago, none got or died of AIDS) there is for mycoplasma incognitus. Dr. Shyh ching Lo the army's highest ranking scientist published much on it.
"Lo laid all his cards on the table. He had detected an organism similar to a bacteria, called a mycoplasma, in cells taken from AIDS patients. He could not find the organism in cells of healthy individuals. When he injected the organism into four silvered leaf monkeys, three quickly developed low-grade fevers. All four lost weight. All four died within seven to nine months of infection. When they were autopsied, there was Lo's mycoplasma in their brains, livers and spleens.
Lo also reported finding the mycoplasma in the damaged tissue of six HIV-negative human beings who had died from unspecified causes after suffering from suspiciously AIDS-like symptoms. "
Here's a summary of Lo's peer reviewed work. http://www.aegis.com/pubs/atn/1990/ATN09501.html
See hiv fact or fraud.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5064591712431946916
Some of the scientists that have questioned the hiv hypothesis in the past.
Dr. Luc montagnier PHd (Discoverer of HIV) said "hiv might be benign" in 1990. (HE supported the mycoplasma as a necessary co factor)
Dr. Peter Duesberg PHd UCB professor, considered worlds foremeost expert in retroviruses in the early 80's
Dr. Walter Gilbert. PHd Nobel prize winner, harvard professor of microbiology, repeatedly supported Duesberg publicly, stating the lack of an animal model made the case of HIV unproven. (Hundreds of Chimps were injected 20 years ago and none have gotten/died of AIDS)
Dr Shyh Ching Lo MD PHD Cheif of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. applauded Peter Duesberg for speaking out, Discovered a new Mycoplasma from AIDS patients/other sick people that killed every animal he injected with it.
Dr. Kary Mullis PHD Nobel prize winner, inventor of PCR.
Dr. Richard Strohamn PHd UCB Berkely Microbiology Professor
From amazon review of Duesberg's book
The following points, which I gleaned from reading Duesberg's Inventing the AIDS virus, appear to eviscerate the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS:
1) The pathogenesis of HIV -- whether and how it leads to AIDS -- has never been demonstrated empirically; most troubling is that the data violate all three of Koch's postulates... [taken from pps. 174-186]
2) Postulate #1: The microbe must be found in all cases of the disease. The problem is no study has ever established the necessary presence of HIV in patients or in the diseased tissue in particular; moreover, there are thousands of people with AIDS-defining diseases who do not test positive for HIV. (The CDC invented a new label for such cases, idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia. )
3) Postulate #2: The microbe must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture. HIV has never been purified from any one patient in the usual way; the virus has appeared in the lab only after taking millions of white blood cells from an HIV positive person and reactivating the virus by shocking the cells into awakening the dormant HIV. The virus is only present in a small fraction of t cells, Robert Gallo admitted about 1 in 10,000. Even then, the reactivated HIV doesn t necessarily infect the remaining cells in the culture, so the virus is hard to maintain in lab cultures.
4) Postulate #3: The purified germ must cause the disease again in another host. Injecting blood from AIDS patients into closely related species, such as chimpanzees, has failed to induce AIDS, even after 10 plus years (since 1984). Accidental or natural HIV infection of humans (e.g., healthcare workers, blood transfusion recipients) has also failed to yield a later AIDS diagnosis, in the absence of AIDS "treatment" in the form of prescription medication. Finally, where is the vaccine for HIV that would prevent AIDS? Vaccines work by tricking the body into producing antibodies to the virus to prevent reinfection. HIV positive individuals already have antibodies to the virus, so of course, logically, that dormant virus cannot lead to later disease, making a vaccine moot.
5) There is no precedent for a "slow virus" that invades (causing few if any symptoms upon initial infection), lies dormant for long periods of time to later cause serious illness in the absence of reactivation of the virus.
6) There are so-called long-term survivors who are HIV positive but never develop AIDS (and they don't do recreational drugs or take the prescribed treatment).
7) The HIV test checks for the presence of antibodies, which at best (because of the issue of cross-reactions) indicate that the person has been previously exposed to the virus. It says nothing about current infection. Moreover, a strong antibody response normally means immunity to the virus.
8) HIV tests are notoriously unreliable, and people can get falsely positive outcomes for lots of reasons (e.g., being pregnant, having the flu or a flu shot).
9) Not all viruses cause disease, and some, like HIV, are harmless passenger viruses that show up in epidemiological studies as correlated with AIDS.
10) Accordingly, longitudinal studies have documented lowered white-blood cell counts precede HIV infection, which seems to preclude a causal role for HIV in suppressing immune functioning.
11) No study has established the sexual transmissibility of HIV; statistically, it takes, on average, more than 1,000 instances of sexual intercourse with an HIV positive person to contract HIV (or 250,000 instances of intercourse with people whose HIV status is not known). (These statistics are drawn from Padian's 1997 study of female sexual partners of male HIV positive hemophiliacs; zero instances of transmission were found, despite a lot of unsafe sex. Furthermore, the direction of female-to-male transmission is estimated to be even greater--about 1 in 10,000.) Most STDs, like gonorrhea or syphilis, are transmitted at a rate of 1 in 2. Most STDs quickly spread to both genders, and are rampant among teenagers; neither is the case with HIV.
12) In the US and Europe, AIDS cases are overwhelmingly concentrated in a few high-risk groups (gay men with a history of heavy drug use, intravenous drug users, chronic users of drugs that were not injected, babies of hard-core drug using women, and hemophiliacs who have taken unpurified blood clotting factor and/or who have taken AZT); if AIDS were infectious, then it would be distributed more evenly without regard to demographic factors.
13) AIDS diseases tend to be specific to various high-risk groups. For example, gay men (who tend to use nitrate inhalants) overwhelmingly developed pulmonary Kaposi's sarcoma; cocaine users tend to get pneumonia; heroin users tend to get tuberculosis; hemophiliacs taking unpurified blood clotting factor tend to get pneumonia; "AIDS" diseases in Africa tend to be the same diseases that are common to the region (TB, malaria, 'Slim' disease, a synonym for 'wasting' which is apparently taken to be synonymous with AIDS by the locals), etc.;
14) In Africa, "AIDS" is distributed fairly evenly between the sexes (often slightly more prevalent among women), but is defined differently than in the US or Europe. In Africa, where HIV tests are generally too expensive to use, one can be considered to have "AIDS" (by World Health Organization standards) if three of the following symptoms are observed: weight loss of greater than 10% in the last two months, fever, diarrhea, persistent cough, itchy rash. These symptoms also correspond to local diseases -- such as tuberculosis and malaria -- that are a common result of poor nutrition, poor sanitation, and unsafe drinking water. At any rate, people are not dying in Africa in greater numbers than they ever have and the populations of most African countries are still increasing at a rapid rate. Claiming AIDS makes relief money flow. Unfortunately, money that should be spent to create safe water sources, improve sanitation, and support local food production are instead being spent on "help" in the form of useless condoms, abstinence-education programs, or distribution of anti-retrovirals and infant formula.
15) The thirty or so diseases combined under the AIDS umbrella in most wealthy countries are so vastly different that only the presence of HIV unites them. They don't even all involve the immune system (e.g., Kaposi's sarcoma, lymphoma, and cervical cancer) despite the name AIDS -- which stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Even worse, the same disease gets classified one way if the person is HIV negative (e.g., tuberculosis) and another way if the person is HIV positive (e.g., AIDS). As another example, if a person has Kaposi's sarcoma but is not HIV positive, then they are simply categorized as having cancer. This practice artificially conflates AIDS with HIV, making the correlation appear much stronger than it is.
16) The Centers for Disease Control has changed the definition of AIDS several times, always including more diseases in the AIDS umbrella. Each time a disease is added, more people are included as having "AIDS" or, if they died, are added to the AIDS mortality rate. Some diseases, like cervical cancer, appear to have been added merely to increase the number of women with AIDS, and had the impact of doctoring the statistics to make AIDS appear infectious -- as if it is spreading to females. In 1993, the definition was even included to add one non-disease condition abnormal CD4 cell counts without an AIDS defining illness; the majority of new AIDS diagnoses are in this category of people who may be perfectly healthy at the time of diagnosis. This addition served to instantly double the number of "AIDS" cases.
17) HIV is a retrovirus that depends on the cells it invades to stay alive; it is illogical to suppose that retroviruses kill cells; retroviruses, according to Duesberg, are normally transmitted harmlessly from mother to child, too;
18) HIV is an old virus, yet the proportion of people in the population who are HIV positive (about 1 million in the US population, 36 million worldwide) has not deviated since first tested in 1984;
19) The hypothesis that HIV leads to AIDS is incompatible with the fact that the prevalence of HIV-infected people has stayed constant while the incidence of AIDS cases rapidly spiked and then fell (in the 1990's). If HIV causes AIDS, then the number of HIV infections should have similarly peaked at some point prior to the peak in AIDS cases.
20) The spike in AIDS deaths corresponds to AZT prescription. AZT is a DNA-chain terminator developed and abandoned as too deadly for even short-term treatment of cancer. Like all chemotherapy, AZT kills cells. (Let's examine the logic -- HIV is supposed to kill cells, so let's treat it by administering a drug that kills cells. WTF?) People who take AZT tend to get AIDS; when people stop taking the prescription, they tend to spontaneously go into remission. Other AIDS drugs work similarly, and are now being given to pregnant women and newborn infants to "fight" a harmless disease that hurts no one. But the so-called cure is toxic.
---
Over a half a million people have died already of AIDS -- which appears to be a collection of illnesses brought about by some combination of recreational drugs, poor nutrition, and/or medically prescribed drugs to treat the very disease, immune suppression, the drugs themselves induce. Of the two hypotheses about AIDS, the toxicity hypothesis accounts for a greater amount of disparate data than the HIV hypothesis does. The HIV hypothesis does not even come close.
The weird part of this story is how the announcement of a premature, untested hypothesis (made jointly by NIH scientist Robert Gallo and Heath & Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler at a press conference in 1984) snowballed into the current multi-billion-dollar-a-year AIDS industry. Duesberg's chapters on the politics of science, the CDC, NIH, & FDA, are fascinating. The story of the CDC's origins and their "intelligence officers" was truly scary. Most of all, the stories of scientists turning their backs on disinterested scholarship read like something out of the old Soviet-bloc countries. There was an astonishing closing of ranks, with AIDS dissidents expelled from the scientific community as social deviates, "deniers" (as in Holocaust deniers). AIDS dissidents were (and still are) denied grants to study alternative hypotheses, they were denied publication in journals, and were even denied the opportunity to debate in public. (Were it not for tenure, I'm sure they would have all lost their jobs.) This is not how science is supposed to work. And when the mainstream media bothers to cover the issue at all, the controversy is treated with ad hominem arguments at best. Reminds me of how people who merely question the official account of 9/11 are treated -- ostracized but not properly confronted and debated.
Silence indeed equals death; silence about the true causes of AIDS, silence about the purported cure shoved down our throats, shoved down the throats of our loved ones. The tide is turning. When the dust clears, when the lawsuits are done, the CDC, NIH, and the FDA will have to be dismantled. If there is a just world, then these people, the pharmaceutical industry, and the greedy, craven scientists who propagated all these lies all this time will be tried for crimes against humanity.
Duesberg is a hero and should be treated as such; I'm sure he'd be the last to want that though, as he seems rather modest, an "accidental" hero if ever there was one.
Other items to check out, by another hero:
Farber, C. (April, 2006). Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science. Harper s Magazine. (available online at harpers.org)
Farber, C. (2006). Serious adverse events: An uncensored history of AIDS. Melville House.
http://www.projectdaylily.com/
Here is the link for riveting story of how garth and nancy nicolson found Lo's mycoplasma incognitus by pcr in the blood of gulf war vets, and how they found out is was part of the biowarfare program.
C. Birbeck,
I just got here and saw your post. If I may...
Why you never hear about them--they're very uncommon, compared to other types of cancer. Primary tumors (arising within the heart) are very rare; metastatic tumors (spread to the heart from other locations) are sometimes seen, and more often than primary cancers, but again, they're rare occurences.
Just to clarify, I know what an auto da fe is (auto de fe in medieval Spanish, auto da fe in Portugese and usually English). It was just a set up for the next line in the song.
And BTW, mycoplasma icognita? WTF???
It's not a silly question, and another related question is why do some parts of the human prostate get cancer and other parts don't?
Different kinds of tissues, by which I mean here tissues with different embryonic origins, have different susceptibilities to cancer. One part of the prostate (the part that the doctor can, er, access during the exam) develops from endodermal tissue, and is at risk for carcinoma.
The cardiac muscle of the heart, like the more forward part of the prostate which does not get carcinoma, derives from mesodermal tissue, which is just not as structurally or functionally susceptible as endoderm-derived tissue. That's why, as BG points out, cancers that originate in the heart are so uncommon.
They can, of course, get blocked or invaded from a nearby or metastatic tumor, but they not very prone to be the original site. It's not impossible--there are other kinds of cancer than carcinoma--but sketched in very broad outline, their respective embryonic origins are just associated with very different propensities for developing cancer.
Hya ya go. This is about as offtopic as you can get. Waddaya want? It's an open thread.
Excerpt:
So Hwang could have made a useful discovery and got credit for it if he hadn't been so busy fabricating evidence for something else that he didn't notice.
It almost seems there would be a moral here.
Perhaps the Duchess could state one. I'll have to settle, for the moment, for
"Fortune favors the prepared mind."
--Louis Pasteur
noticing that it seems to matter what kind of preparation you do.
Warren, your spam poetry is far more interesting than mine.
Aspartame. Nasty stuff... if you are sensitive to it. Instant migraine. Toxic? So is DHMO.
oooooooooh orac called me a total "woo" on another site! Cant you guys come up with anything else? Cant debate, just name call! Dr. shyh ching Lo is one of the only scientists since koch to discover a microbe that induced disease in experimental animals, the animals that died only had a weak antibody response when near death, so PCR is the way to detect this microbe, not antibody testing.
Orac, I think you are a total "woo" to be honest, your pet microbes that are barely detectable and have ever extending 40 year window periods, no animal models like HPV. BUt merck supported it so you must as well. Wake up and smell the coffee.
I called you a woo because HIV/AIDS denialism is woo.
Aye, Joseph, I ended up seeing some direct debunking of that study at NotMercury's place and referenced that. Also, based on his take on it, I was able to point out that "gee, megadoses of thimerosol did damage. Amazing -- megadoses of anything aren't good for ya," and then related it to the infamous saccharine/cancer link wherein the rats that got cancer were given doses equivalent to several pounds of the stuff per day for a human.
It did help indeed.
I'd like to see someone pull together a collection of stories about what happens when parents don't vaccinate, or if there is something like that already -- point me towards it, please?
Might I recommend either of these for your Friday woo?
F Cup cookies in Japan
A page on the "miracle herb" in them, Pueraria mirifica