I touched her eyes Pressed my stained face I will never be clean again

When someone suggests that "Effect X interacts with profession", this is an admission that "We couldn't repeat the original observations of Effect X", followed by "We will look at smaller and smaller subgroups of people until we find one that does display Effect X".



So what is this Macbeth Effect? Moral contamination / threats to purity evoke a desire to wash one's hands? O RLY?

Several studies demonstrate that physical cleansing is actually efficacious to cope with threatened morality, thus demonstrating that physical and moral purity are psychologically interwoven. This so-called Macbeth effect has been explained, for example, by the conceptual metaphor theory that suggests an embodiment of the moral purity metaphor.

I think this should be called a Pilate Study.

[H/t Rolf Degen]

Another victim of Political Soundness Gone Mad

Libby Weaver bills herself as "Australia's leading nutritional biochemist", and is a "celebrity nutritionist"... this means, more-or-less, that newspappers like the Com-Post (Wellington's Paper of Note) syndicate her columnised blatherings about every superfood-du-jour because she's a celebrity, and she's a celebrity because the newspappers syndicate her columns.

So Dr Libby has a book-shaped object out! -- though judging from the size of the font, it is more a compilation of double-line-spaced tweets. From it we learn (inter alia) that a dietary folate deficiency cases Trisomy 21, a.k.a. Down's Syndrome. Challenged on this fascinating subtraction from knowledge, she has promised to amend it in the next edition, because the evidence for the link is "mixed", which is to say "imagination-based".

Research suggesting a link between folate consumption and a reduced risk of Down syndrome is "mixed" says Weaver, who will remove the reference to it from the next edition of her book.

"I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew."

"Opinion is divided on the subject."

"Oh, really?"

"Yahs. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn't."

She does not resile, however, from her belief that oral contraception depletes the body's reserves of folate [thus causing spina bifida]. This theory was abandoned way back in the 1980s because evidence, but Dr Libby has evidently been too occupied with the nutritioning and the first-name celebriting to update her antiquated medical training.

The question of error-correcting the book becomes moot if enough purchasers take up her offer of returning it for a refund. The offer was made after another aspect of Dr Libby's time-capsule education came to light... namely the fact that the 1980s was also about the last time when it was acceptable to use the racialised, pejorative term "mongolism" instead of "Down's Syndrome".

Journalists far more sympathetic towards Worst US Mass-Murderer Until Next One after discovery that he was not only white, but also Economically Insecure

No, really.



In other news, the local sheriff has incontrovertible conclusive truth that Paddock was crazy, and therefore not a true Scotsman representative of American Heartland Gunlicker Values.

Christmas Ale news NOT

Read "brewing crisis"; was expecting news item about altercations and shenanigans in the malt-based-beverages industry. Ideally, a legal clash between rival brewers both trying to copyright the "pile of poo emoji" for their beer label.

My disappointment is too deep to be fathomed.

Legal clash involving elephants

The musical genres I listen to are so hard-core, you've probably never heard of them

[H/t Leonid Schneider]

Always...uh...never...forget to check your references #3

On account of a sheltered though idyllic childhood being taught assassination skills in an apocalyptic death-cult, I was not previously appraised of the existence of the Alzheimers Disease Fund. This is one of several astroturfed charity grifts run by Florida Man, under the umbrella rubric of Project Cure, to shake the Money Tree and lobby the gubblement to stop wasting Alzheimers / Diabetes / Prostate Cancer / Heart-Disease research moneys on science, and give the dosh to shysters and Alt-Medscammers and supplement pimps instead.

Money tree, shaken

Reassuringly, the ADF does not spend all the hard-garnered donations on further fund-raising expenses and the Executive Director's $200,000 salary... a fraction is invested in Public Education, i.e. preparing on-line PDF "reports" to promote the aluminium-causes-Alzheimers garblement. "Preparing" is here used as a term of art meaning "stealing material from elsewhere and pasting it together", for "Project Cure" is aimed at the glibertarian property-rights FREEDOM demographic, an ethos known for respecting the sanctity of other people's intellectual property.

One particular patchwork caught the eye: "Aluminum in Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Neurological Disorders". Presumably this Report emerged spontaneously from the concentration of information that comprises the Intertubes for it is is devoid of authorship, but it recycles the Aluminati oeuvre of Shaw & Tomljenovic. Ref. 86 seems especially worthy of attention. A 120-page paper in Toxicology Letters? Can this be a thing?

Alas, life is full of Disappoint, and the collision between high hopes and harsh facts leads to the usual outcome. In the underachieving time-stream that we inhabit, the link resolves to a 245-word Abstract for a conference poster, on page S92 of a Special Supplement of the journal -- set aside to Proceedings of 47th Congress of the European Societies of Toxicology -- and the "S60-S179" is in fact the title of that section of the issue (Poster Sessions Day 1). Someone has been a silly bunny.

Following the Great Gazoogle on the trail of this spurious citation leads us to Patient Zero -- a 2011 exercise in cherry-picking by Tomljenovic and Shaw, published in J.Inorg.Biochem. as was the custom of the day.

To continue the horticultural metaphor, the authors' argument in that paper relied on comparing apples with oranges, with a special emphasis on apples that were clearly labelled "Do Not Compare with Oranges". But kudos to them for accurately summarising copying sentences from the Abstract.

The ganked citation and the summary of autism-causation found their way again into a 2012 Open Letter written by Tomljenovic to the legislators of Vermont, hoping to sway them against the idea of vaccines and vaccination laws.

Perhaps the "Reality inertia" of Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Field should be blamed, or else the authors had become addicted to the smell of paste, but anyway, citation and autism-causation reappeared in a 2012 paper by Tomljenovic, Dórea and Shaw (despite its ostensible focus on the use of mercury-based antibiotics in vaccines).

With this non-existent 120-page paper so firmly established in the literature, its appearance in the Alzheimers Disease Fund report was inevitable.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian authors of the original Poster expanded it into a 2013 published paper. This has not yet been cited in the Aluminati literature, as the original claims of elevated Aluminium levels in 12 autistic children were replaced with measurements for one child of the twelve [who had elevated Cr and Ar levels as well as Al, suggesting a diet that left much to be desired].

The most recent sightings of that ganked "S60-S179" pagination are also from 2013. First a Shaw-Tomljenovic paper in the Aluminati-friendly journal Immunologic Research:

Then again in Immunologic Research, a "Guest Editorial" coauthored by Yehuda Shoenfeld, who is an editor of the journal, so where the Guest status comes from is anyone's guess. Just saying, there is a lot to be learned from reading papers rather than cut-and-pasting other people's Reference lists.

Look at the Editorial itself. Just look at it. Is that the World's Worst Metaphor, or the Worst Metaphor EVAH! ?

Evidently autoimmune diseases have a collective soul, or possibly a cardigan at risk of unraveling. Also there is a chess game in progress: in which the disease is the bishop, its pathogenesis is the rook, and they are pitted against the knight, which is the treatment. This is not the version of chess I am accustomed to, so it is just as well that 'we are adding new rules to the game'. At the same time the situation is a puzzle, one in dire need of new dowels, and this is the point where my grasp of the narrative went all thumbless. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU METAPHOR, people.

[H/t WiseWoman]

---------------------------------------------------------------

Second-Worst Metaphor sighting from the same authors (though in a French rheumatology journal):

...BONUS: When a mendacious publicity-whore like RFK Feckin' Jr turns out to have higher standards of scholarly probity, it's time to reconsider one's life-choices and where one went wrong.

The wonder of the tundra #3: Adventures in the book trade

Wait, what? Five days after the nominal date for arriving on the shelves ($140 reduced 15% to $119), a book remains unavailable from the publisher or the usual on-line sources... but Tundra Books can provide a second-hand copy marked down to £282. Perhaps on-demand publication has advanced to the stage of printing used copies.

The book-shaped artefact in question was to have been the subject of a footnote or an Updatage to a recent Riddled episode, but TL;DW. It is totally a sober, balanced weighing of evidence and not a regurging of stovepiped antivax mendacity, despite the second editor's tendency to regard vaccines as the modern equivalent of the Holocaust.

Library pixies ejecting an unwanted book

The Riddled staff are wondering about the market sector that Elsevier thought they were targetting. It may be that they were under the impression that they were handling a scholarly compilation of recent advances on a topic of academic contention, rife with vying researchers who would be queuing for their copies -- or urging university libraries to acquire them. The Riddled library pixies were scornful of this suggestion. $119 is a lot to pay for a 480-page trade paperback with a shiny cover, which is to say an overpriced airport novel. Even if Controversies in Vaccine Safety had included ten detailed exegeses of the intellectual debate, it would still be plenty to pay for a ten-gloss battle.

A due Diligence

Due diligence would have disabused Elsevier of that notion. Contributors to the tome include Vinu Arumugham (on "Vaccine Induced Allergies") whose scholarly credentials consist of falsely presenting himself as a med. student, and paying the egregious shitweasels at OMICS to place on-line one of his essays in cherry-picking. Other, similar exercises are self-published -- if that is the correct term for "listed at Researchgate".

Arumugham's keystone dictum is that all food allergies ensue from prior exposure to the food proteins that Big Pharma adds to vaccines, although this is accompanied by a bodyguard of ad-hoc secondary hypotheses designed to shelter it from harsh disconfirming facts. He has promoted the resulting belief system on discussion boards and skeptic blogs across the Interlattice, with the nyms of APV and Vinucube [possibly chosen as a hommage to the legendary TimeCube]. The commentariat at Respectful Insolence have watched the evolution of his scholium of thought from the beginning, with the multiplication of auxiliary hypotheses... they hope that success will not spoil him, and that he will remember his roots now that he has busted through into the Big Time.

Big Time

More detail on other contributors here and at OggiScienza. But we shouldn't forego the opportunity to point and laugh at David Lewis, Wakefield acolyte who provides the closing Chapter 27 (on "The role of institutional scientific misconduct").

Lewis is best-known for pimping a set of bowel-biopsy pathology reports that had somehow been left in his possession, in the belief that they would vindicate Wakefield's "MMR-Vaccine-causes-autism" grift, when in fact they provided proof of his fraud (for this well-meaning dumb-arsed exercise in rat-fucking, Lewis is respected in antivax circles as a 'whistle-blower'). He put the cherry atop his reputation by arguing that journalist Brian Deer is really a cats-puppet and a sock-paw for Big Pharma's war aganst Wakefield -- for there was no way that a mere journalist could understand so well the medical complexities of the accusations against Wakefield.
Lewis' own qualification is in sewage management.

You can't buy that book here, sir

Ideally, then, Brian Deer would be the reviewer for Controversies. But as was noted supra, publication has been delayed... for a few weeks, according to one supplier, though the publishers have elsewhere been quoted as intending a permanent delay.

There remains only the mystery of Tundra Books' used copy for sale. Nick Brown has reported another occurrence of this Amazon affiliate -- a residential address in Seville -- trying to sell a purportedly-used but marked-up copy of a book not yet in physical existence. This seems to be part of their business model.

One possible explanation involves the words "stupidity tax"... a scam that only becomes apparent when there are no extant copies of the new copies they on-sell, ostensibly pre-loved and doubled in price. But I prefer to believe that they are borrowing (or will borrow at some point in the future) the Riddled time machine.