SGU Episode 359

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Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday May 30th 2012, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson.

R: Hello everyone.

S: And Jay Novella.

J: Hey Guys.

S: Evan Bernstein has the week off because he is sunning himself in Italy.

R: Ugh.

B: I am jealous.

R: But hey, look at the bright side: I'm back.

J: That's right.

S: Rebecca's back, that's true, it's a good trade.

B: Yay!

R: Back from beautiful Germany. The beautiful beaches of Germany.

J: Wha, beaches?

R: There are canals.

S: Canals.

R: There's a river, there's the Rhine.

B: You meant beer didn't you, not beaches?

R: Oh right, yeah yeah, the beautiful beers of Germany...

S: Deutschland.

R: ...that's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah, I was at a few conferences, the...

B: A few?

R: ...world skeptics' conference in Berlin and the European Atheists' Convention in Cologne. And both of them were very fun, I saw a lot of our friends, both from the US and from Europe and met a lot of really awesome people. Tons of people came up to me and said that they listen to SGU every week...

J: Oh, awesome.

R: ...so it was really cool to see some listeners in Germany.

S: Excellent.

This Day in Skepticism (1:22)

June 2, 1692 Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Found guilty, she is hanged on June 10.

R: Hey, I have a depressing This Day in Science and Skepticism.

B: Ooh, I like it.

R: On this day on June 2nd 1692, Bridget Bishop became the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials, of course in Salem, Massachusetts. And she was hanged by June 10th 1692.

S: That's a quick trial.

R: Yeah, they didn't need much apparently. There are some differing accounts of who she was really and the exact evidence against her or maybe the exact reasons why she was chosen to stand trial for witchcraft. I've seen some suggestions that maybe she owned a tavern and, you which not many women did and maybe she dressed a bit lasciviously, and maybe she was a bit outspoken.

B: Skirt, the dress above the ankles, that kind of crazy stuff? Wow.

R: Yeah, exactly.

S: Like she had a bit of red in her bodice instead of all black and white, yeah.

B: Oooh, ooh.

R: Exactly. Yeah, but apparently those are not necessarily true, there's a very good chance she did not own a tavern, that she was confused with someone else with a similar name who was married to someone who owned a tavern and also red clothing was apparently fairly common amongst the puritans. So, who knows? But the fact of the matter is that she was accused of being a witch an apparently she was quite saucy on the stand and that was enough to convict her. She was said to have owned a lot of, a number of small voodoo dolls that were found around her house.

J: (laughs)

R: She was accused of poisoning a pig.

J: She had, wait a second, wait whoa whoa. All right, first off she had just random voodoo dolls like strewn around her house.

R: Well, she's accused of yeah.

J: And then somebody actually said, during the proceedings, accused her of actually poisoning a pig.

R: Yeah and as far as I can tell, the pig didn't die, I think the pig was just acting funny and they thought that the pig had either been poisoned or bewitched apparently.

S: And apparently she was cavorting with the devil so there you go.

R: Obviously, yeah. And actually to make a connection to my trip to Germany, at the atheist convention in Cologne, we were very privileged to see Leo Igwe speak and he campaigns on the serious problem of witchcraft in Africa, mostly you know, we've talked about this before, Christian ministers who blame children and old women for witchcraft and they drive them out of their homes, they beat them, they murder them. There are even whole villages set up sometimes to take these people in, it's crazy you know, I think about this happening in the US in the 1600s, well it's still going on in Africa, so it's still, this is still a serious problem four centuries later.

S: Apparently large, well armed men in their prime don't do witchcraft.

R: No. No.

S: No, just children and old people.

R: Oddly enough, yeah it's only the people who are least able to defend themselves.

S: Ah.

News Items

Medical Zombies (4:52)

• http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/modern-medical-zombies/

S: Well let's move on, Jay and Bob, I think you're going to be particularly interested in this next news item. Apparently the zombie apocalypse has already begun.

B: I knew it.

S: Have you guys heard about this?

B: Yeah, I'm speaking, I'm podcasting right now from my safe house 200 feet underground.

S: (laughs)

B: So I'm good.

R: I knew I should have moved to Connecticut.

(laughter)

J: Bob, your proposed safe house would be so epic.

B: (laughs)

S: Well in Miami, police officers came upon a grizzly scene where one naked man was eating the face of another naked man and the police officer told the cannibal to stop, he said stop eating that man's face. The man refused, he just kept, in an apparent rage, just kept eating the other man's face, so the cop shot him. The man still didn't stop, he continued to engorge himself on the other man and then the cop had to shoot him four more times and finally killed him.

B: The head shot got him, right?

R: Jeez.

S: Reports indicate that it was five shots to the chest.

R: Wow.

B: Ah.

S: Took him down.

R: Was it meth? It seems like a meth thing.

J: Not really.

S: It's in that ballpark, in that ballpark. SO the news reports I believe have been a little inaccurate, somehow the meme of LSD, like a new form of LSD or an LSD like drug got out, but that's not, that's inconsistent with the reports and this is in the same articles, saying that it's a street drug called bath salts.

R: Oh, yeah.

S: That is, apparently the main component is a stimulant, a methamphetamine like drug called mephedrone. So it's not in the LSD class, it's in the methamphetamine class. And one of the side effects if you like really OD on the stuff is that it can raise your body temperature which might explain...

B: Hence the nakedness.

S: Yeah, why the man was naked.

J: Yep.

R: Aaah.

S: You take all your clothes off because you just feel really hot.

B: And extreme hunger or psychosis apparently.

S: Yeah, yeah kind of a bad combination. Extreme paranoia, delusions, agitation.

J: Did you see pictures of the two people?

S: Yep.

R: No, I don't want to see that.

J: Well, no no. Not afterwards, they didn't show their corpses.

S: They're not showing photos of, it was a homeless like 60 year old homeless man who, by the name of Ronald Popo. A lot of the news articles are not showing pictures of him post attack but they do describe the pictures and apparently his eyes were eaten out, his nose was eaten off.

B: Oh!

S: Just his beard was left.

J: There are a few things in here that ask for more information like the homeless man who I believe was about, what 65 years old, why was he lying there, how did that happen? How did that guy come to just lie there while his face was being...

S: Well he was physically subdued and barely conscious according to reports. So the guy attacked him, Rudi Eugine is the younger man, 31 who was eating, you know the eater in this exchange, he apparently attacked, beat up and subdued the homeless guy and then ate his face.

J: Well, as sad as that whole story is, I mean it's horrifying and profoundly disturbing, the thing that actually bothered me the most was the health ranger's interpretation of this whole fiasco.

S: Yeah, yeah.

J: And Steve, you blogged about this right?

S: Yeah, so you know, Mike Adams, who is a conspiracy nut and also a promoter of all kinds of dubious "alternative" treatments wrote an article about this now clearly, in my impression, his article was mostly tongue-in-cheek, saying that the zombie apocalypse has started because he writes this way. I'm fine with the use of satire and metaphor etc., but he writes in a way that makes it confusing like where he's drawing the line between what he means and what is metaphor or satire, and I think that's deliberate because that enables him to cater to the conspiracy theory mongering community, different people could read into it whatever level they wish so the people who visit his website just for the alternative medicine can say oh it was all metaphor and the conspiracy nuts can say oh no this is real, he really means it, all in the same article.

B: Wow, that's a good trick.

S: Yeah, so here's one, the quote where I think he's really getting to the meat of the point he's trying to make. He says

Humans who subject themselves to fluoride, aspartame, psychiatric drugs, vaccines and street drugs end up

S: this is his emphasis

lobotomizing their higher brains. Vaccines, for starters, cause extreme neurological damage, and some vaccines are actually made of aggressive viruses designed to "eat" targeted regions of the brain, resulting in a biological lobotomy.

J: Yeah I mean like that is...

B: Isn't he just making that shit up?

S: Yeah, he's just making it up.

J: Yeah, it's patently made up, that's the epitome of I need something dramatic in my blog, let me just make it up on the spot.

S: But apparently he believes this level of nonsense. This, you see this paragraph I think he's dead serious about it, he is an anti-government conspiracy mongering anti-medical establishment, anti-science in my opinion, nut-job.

J: I would love to see his reference for that statement.

S: Right. Yeah what, so there are not vaccines that are made of aggressive viruses, most vaccines don't have intact organisms in them, either viruses or bacteria, they have pieces, just like proteins. Those that are live virus vaccines have attenuated viruses, the exact opposite of aggressive, they are bred to be not aggressive, to not be virulent. They're a weakened form of the virus that the body can easily fend off, and certainly there's no vaccine that has a virus in it that eats your brain, that is designed to eat your brain and cause a biological lobotomy. That is made up fear-mongering nonsense.

J: There's a segment in his blog where he calls it the zombification of America and he goes through a list of things that he's bringing to your attention as the reader that he thinks are bricks in the wall of this slow movement towards making everybody in the United States a, you know he's not saying a literal zombie, like a flesh-eating zombie of course. He's talking more about how we're being physically or emotional and mentally handicapped by the environment, by the drugs that we're on and all this stuff and there's just things in here like I actually have to ask you Steve, because I'm not sure what parts of this you think he's joking about and what parts would you consider serious, like I'll just read a couple of these and you can let me know here. The one about sleep-driving where people are reported to be sleep-driving and then they suddenly wake up and find themselves driving, I thought that was a reference to Ambien right?

S: Uh, there are some medications that cause parasomnias in some patients, like Ambien, that's been reported.

J: But the fact that he brings that up as a brick in the wall here just seems utterly ridiculous to me, you know we've read about drugs that can do this and there's a lot of people taking a lot of sleep medication and the numbers of these events are going to go up but no way does that point to any kind of detuning of someone's intelligence or there's something that's going to deprive them of their higher intelligence.

B: I think the reason he brought it up is that it just goes to support his point of, you know having an example of Americans, of people in some sort of altered state of consciousness and going about their daily lives, it's just tailor-made for that kind of idea

J: It's a big stretch.

B: and he just threw it in like yeah look, see? It was kind of a tame example of what he's talking about but it's just so stupid.

J: Again, he goes into the complete lack of intelligent questioning about events where the official government explanation makes absolutely no sense, 9/11, the killing of Bin Laden, etc. Now, I don't know how that's a brick in the wall. It's an example of the lack of intelligence according to him, which I of course don't agree with.

S: Yeah.

J: That's not really proving any point there, he's just bringing up more of his BS.

S: He's tying together these disparate threads that are filtered through his conspiracy view of reality and that's what conspiracy theorists do, right? They take these little threads and tie them together, weave them together into their conspiracy narrative. That's what he's doing.

B: Yeah, you don't see that connection, but I see that connection.

S: Yeah, you don't see that connection because you're a zombie, you're a metaphorical zombie because you drink fluoridated water. I mean that's right out of the movies, right? I mean the government conspiracy!

R: My precious bodily fluids.

S: Yeah it's precious bodily fluids level.

B: Aspartame!

S: Aspartame, again there's no evidence that there's any neurological effects from fluoride or from aspartame or from vaccines, you know street drugs are the only thing on his list where yeah, you can actually cause altered states of consciousness and brain damage from abusing these drugs. Yeah, don't abuse street drugs.

J: How about this one where he says the rise of a whole new generation of mumbling neurologically damaged children who are now routinely seen out in public. Many of these children are of course vaccine damaged. I mean this guy really, he's up there man, he's trying to jockey himself into the number one anti-vax position. These comments are ridiculous.

S: Yeah, you know it's interesting because you think, the fact that he's combining really off the wall conspiracy theory stuff with the standard unscientific alternative medicine promotion might be an advantage to defenders of science-based medicine because you might think well at least he's exposing the thought process here, you know people who see these two things together will go oh OK well, how much legitimacy could there be to the alternative medicine stuff he's promoting when he's also promoting this conspiracy nonsense? But reading the comments, people easily compartmentalise that. They go, oh yeah. They just ignore the conspiracy stuff, that's just him, he just writes that way but they just completely buy into his anti-medical-establishment, natural medicine, alternative medicine nonsense and not seeing, yeah these are the products of the same unscientific lack of critical thinking process that this guy's engaged in. I concluded my blog saying you know, ironically not using your higher brain, which is what he's talking about, is exactly what he's engaging in, he actually even says that he at some "deep gut level" people realise that our civilised world is crumbling. I'd say yeah, you're thinking with your gut, you're thinking with your...

R: Oooh yeah, that's where the higher brain function happens, right at the gut level.

S: Yeah, you're thinking with your primitive brain, you're not engaging your meta-cognitive practices that are in the higher brain that you're now lamenting the so-called loss of. It's supremely ironic in my opinion.

J: I mean he's against everything.

S: Anything that makes sense.

J: He comments on the next thing here, aspartame, which he claims pickles the brain in formaldehyde. And then he said, he goes, continues to be consumed in ridiculously high quantities through diet sodas, which you know OK, that's legitimate, a lot of people are drinking a lot of diet soda.

S: You would have to drink 60 litres a day every day to overwhelm your body's ability to metabolise aspartame.

J: Yeah, but that's science and I'm sorry but that doesn't belong here.

S: He says the aspartame gets metabolised into formaldehyde which pickles the brain.

R: Yeah, how does that happen?

S: Well it does happen, but a lot of foods we metabolise get metabolised into formaldehyde. It just happens to be one step in a chemical chain of metabolism. Chemicals get changed from A to B to C to D. Somewhere in that chain is formaldehyde, it's a transitional phase on the way to water and carbon dioxide.

R: Right, it doesn't fill up your brain.

S: No!

R: Pickle it like it's in a jar.

S: And other foods, foods he would call natural also get metabolised into much higher amounts of formaldehyde, it's a natural part of our bodies' metabolism. It's there at certain levels in the background all the time, aspartame is no different.

J: Oh yeah!?

S: But that's a perfect example of how you could pull out a little factoid and distort it and spin it into a conspiracy theory without putting it into the proper context that actually makes sense and that is all that he does, that's what he does.

J: He finished that statement about aspartame with, have you ever noticed that people who drink a lot of diet soda are also the most brain-numbed people around?

S: Yeah, it's confirmation bias.

R: What?

J: (laughs) Rebecca, right? You just keep going and literally Rebecca I haven't skipped on, I'm going right down his list, I'm not cherry picking this happens to be them in their order right here, I can keep going but you know we'd be here all night.

R: No, that's OK I've heard enough.

B: We get the idea.

Science of Reruns (18:01)

• http://www.newswise.com/articles/the-science-of-re-runs-why-we-watch-our-favorite-episode-of-a-tv-show-or-listen-to-a-favorite-song-over-and-over-again

Leakey on Evolution (27:35)

• http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16053/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=wHXB1rot

Who's That Noisy? (34:35)

Answer to last week: L Ron Hubbard

Questions and Emails (35:52)

Local Darkmatter Followup ()

Dear Rouges, Thought you might find this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4033 interesting given your use of the Moni Bidin paper's claims of finding no evidence for nearby dark matter in science or fiction. Unsurprisingly perhaps, a more thorough analysis of the data actually shows evidence for dark matter in quantities consistent with current models. I enjoy the show very much. Cheers, Paul Hatchman

Interview with with Debbie Feldman (40:06)

• http://www.deborahfeldman.com/

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Science or Fiction (62:27)

Item number one. A new study confirms the popular belief that old people can be identified by their smell. Item number two. A new analysis indicates that children are more imaginative in their play today than they were 20 years ago. And item number three. Updated data indicate that American brain size continues to slowly decrease over historical time.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (82:14)

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

- Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)

References