Seemingly disparate groups like anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO advocates, foodists like the Food Babe Army, and the anti-fluoride brigade, share one very important thing in common.

Wait, let me amend that.

In addition to ignorance of basic science, statistics and logic these groups share a second important characteristic.

All are cringing, whingeing communities of fear.

They are all defined by what they are afraid of and they are afraid of anything they don’t understand.

Anti-vaxxers don’t understand immunology.

Anti-GMO advocates don’t understand genetics.

Foodists don’t understand toxicology.

Ditto for the anti-fluoride brigade.

And they have chosen to band together and create an identity around that fear.

Sure they tell themselves and others that their communities are united by refusal to gullibly accept the assurances of experts, but their communities are actually united by the fear generated by their gullible acceptance of fabricated warnings from quacks and charlatans.

Consider the foodist cri de coeur: I won’t eat it if I can’t pronounce it.

What it really means is this: If I can’t pronounce it, it’s a big word. If it’s a big word, it might be technical. If it’s technical, I can’t understand it. If I can’t understand it, I fear it.

Imagine if our distant ancestors, the ones the natural living communities harken back to, had behaved in the same fearful manner.

“Fire? OMG, fire is dangerous. People could get burned. There is no way that I am cooking my meat before eating it!”

“Killing animals with spears? What if someone’s aim is off. They could kill me instead of the wild boar. No, I’ll take my chances getting in close and bashing wild animals over the head with my club.”

“Deliberately planting seeds in the ground? You have got to be kidding me! How do we know that the seeds we plant deliberately will grow into plants as safe and nutritious as the ones we gather? They might be poisoned so we better not eat them.”

Or much, much later:

“Central heating with gas? The gas could blow up!! We’ve been using fire to heat our homes for thousands of years; I’ll stick with that.”

“Electricity? That’s hard to pronounce. I’d rather sit in the dark.”

“Sorry, but there is no way I am getting on an airplane. If we were meant to fly, we’d have been born with wings.”

Sounds ridiculous, right? The innovations that make life longer and less arduous today were new and poorly understood once. That made them scary, but being scary is not the same thing as being dangerous. Once people learned more about these innovations, and observed them in action, they embraced them.

Our distant ancestors could be forgiven for fearing innovations since they had no way to understand how they worked. No one understood that cooking meat made it easier to extract more nutrients giving a competitive advantage for societies that cooked their meat over societies that continued to eat it raw. In time, the individuals that ate cooked meat out-competed everyone else, and those that ate meat raw simply died out. The technological innovation of cooking was so advantageous that we actually evolved to eat only cooked meat, the only animals to do so.

Contemporary anti-vax advocates are ignorant because of their own actions. The knowledge of how vaccines work and their efficacy is available to anyone who cares to learn. But anti-vaxxers are like those who whined that if raw meat was good enough for their ancestors, then it’s good enough for them. If natural selection were allowed to work unimpeded, they would simply die out, but not before they made other people sick as well.

Anti-GMO advocates are like the distant ancestors who may have fretted over the innovation of planting seeds in the ground. Who knew what might grow? Certainly not those fretting ancestors who didn’t understand botany, farming or the genetics of improving crop yields. But contemporary anti-GMO advocates have no excuse for their ignorance of genetics beyond their desire to remain ignorant and afraid.

The ultimate irony of course is that it is technology (the internet) that has allowed for the exploding growth of communities of fear of vaccines, food, and “chemicals.” Most of those who create and inhabit the anti-vax, food phobic, and chemical phobic communities can no better explain how their smart phones and tablets work than they can explain how vaccines and genetic modification of food works. Nonetheless, they surround themselves with high tech gadgets, wireless signals and displays that give off electro-magnetic radiation the better to transmit their fear of vaccines, food and chemicals.

The sad fact is that if it had been up to the cringing, whingeing members of these communities of fear, we’d still be living in small tribal bands in caves, eating raw meat and gathering wild grain and tubers. Fortunately, human history has been advanced by those willing to create and use technological innovation, and advanced much further still by those who made the scientific discoveries that led to the many technological advances that we use today.

Sadly, those who are afraid of technological innovations that they cannot understand are still huddling in the proverbial darkness of their internet communities of fear.

When I finished Amy Bentley’s piece about public breastfeeding on Slate I looked for the disclaimer that it was a parody.

Surely no one could take such a ridiculous fantasy seriously? But, alas, Bentley’s piece is yet another example of the ways that lactivists deliberately mangle history to support their own beliefs, albeit a particularly laughable attempt.

Bentley’s piece is titled When Breasts Became Sexy, Breast-Feeding Became Disgusting and the central contention is hilarious: the sexualization of breasts began in the 1800’s and culminated in the mid-20th Century.

Okay, let’s catch our breath from laughing so hard and try to understand what Bentley is trying to argue with that delightfully nonsensical claim.

Bentley is apparently a purveyor of the lactivist revision of history that is attempting to demonize formula while simultaneously ignoring the lived experience of millions of women.

The real history of formula in the US bears no relationship to the lactivist fabrication.

Here’s a convenient chart to help you tell the difference between real history and lactivist history.

In the real history, breastfeeding was ALWAYS inconvenient, often painful, and more than occasionally led to the death of the infant from starvation when his or her mother didn’t produce enough breastmilk. Lactivist history imagines a breastfeeding paradise in every time, place and culture.

Reality is that babies whose mothers didn’t make enough milk (and up to 5% did not) starved to death. Lactivist history pretends that all women produced enough milk.

In reality, doctors invented formula to save the lives of babies whose mother were dead or did not produce enough milk. In the lactivist fantasy, corporations invented formula to profit from it.

In reality, thousand of babies died each year because their mothers fed them cow’s milk rather than breastfeed them. In the lactivist fantasy every mother loved breastfeeding.

In the real world women eagerly adopted the use of formula because they didn’t want to breastfeed. In the lactivist fantasy women were brain washed into formula feeding.

In the real world La Leche League was created by a group of devout Catholic women who believed women shouldn’t work outside the home. Lactivists routinely ignore the real history of LLL.

Bentley had just added two new fantasies to the lactivist revision of history.

In the real world women breastfed within their homes, or perhaps within the casual company of other women. In Bentley’s entirely imaginary history, women breastfed publicly. That would be the same women who weren’t allowed to show their ankles in public, were swathed in layers of corsets and fabrics, and weren’t allowed outside the home except in the company of an escort, etc.

But Bentley’s best revisionist attempt at history is her most hilarious: the idea that breasts only became sexualized with the past 200 years.

Her article would be nothing more than a punchline except for one thing: It is a slap in the face to the millions of women who wanted to breastfeed but couldn’t. It is a slap in the face to the millions of women who watched their babies starve to death. It is a slap in the face to the mothers who did then and continue now to find breastfeeding difficult, painful,  and inconvenient. It is a slap in the face to the millions of women who don’t want to share their breasts with their babies. And most of all, it is a slap in the face to the millions of women who don’t have the opportunity to breastfeed because they have to be in the workplace so that their children won’t starve to death.

Moreover, it is based on a fundamental lack of respect for women. It rests on the assumption that women are silly little things who can’t think for themselves, have no authentic feelings and are easily manipulated by corporate interests. It utterly ignores the fact that women are sexual beings who may view their breasts as sexualized, and instead substitutes the profoundly misogynist assumption that sexuality is the sole purview of men.

Bentley has unwittingly joined the sexist effort to keep women figuratively barefoot and pregnant by glamorizing their function of their reproductive organs. Whether it is natural childbirth, lactivism or attachment parenting, advocates conjure a blissful past that never existed in order to keep women in the home.

Bentley’s piece elevates the lactivist revision of history to farce. The idea that women breastfed in public is utterly absurd and indeed Bentley herself can find no examples in photographs, art, literature or anywhere else. The idea that breasts were sexualized within the past 200 years is beyond absurd.

The truth is that infant formula, like other forms of technology such as the birth control pill, and epidural anesthesia are instruments of women’s empowerment and liberation.

To Bentley and her cohorts I say this:

You cannot force us back into the home no matter how much you glamorize reproduction, no matter how much you ignore our lived experiences, and no matter how ludicrously you rewrite history!

There’s a sucker born every minute.

That was my thought when I saw the NBCNews.com piece Taco Bell and Pizza Hut Chuck Artificial Ingredients.

Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have announced they’re getting rid of artificial colors and flavors, becoming the latest national food retailers to “go natural.”

Instead of “black pepper flavor,” for instance, Taco Bell will start using actual black pepper in its seasoned beef.

Taco Bell also said it will remove trans fats and high-fructose corn syrups from most of its menu by the end of the year…

Chipotle recently said it had nearly finished removing genetically modified ingredients from its stores. Subway, the subject of an online campaign to remove an ingredient in its food also found in yoga mats, also updated its ingredient list. And in February, Nestlé pledged to replace “vanillin” in its Crunch bars with natural vanilla flavor, along with other changes to remove artificial colors and flavors.

Ahhh, the power of marketing!

But the reality is that the food from Taco Bell and Pizza Hut wasn’t healthy before and it won’t be healthy when it’s all natural. That’s because “naturalness” has nothing to do with health, no matter how much the food-phobes insist that it does.

Who are the food-phobes?

They are the quacks and charlatans who create communities of fear around food, cringing and whingeing about everything from artificial flavors to genetically modified foods.

Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are following Chipotle into attempting to convert these communities of fear into customers. As PT Barnum once said, you can’t go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

The ultimate irony, though, it that most of us would not be here if it weren’t for technology and artificial ingredients and treatments. For most of human existence, natural has been synonymous with deadly not healthy.

Deadly viruses and bacteria are all natural.

Famines are all natural.

Nutrient poor plants are all natural.

Droughts, floods, earthquakes and tornadoes are 100% natural, too.

For hundreds of thousands of years not a single individual died from artificial anything, but human beings died in droves. They died in childbirth; they died of bacterial and viral illness; they died being mauled and eaten by wild animals; they died of exposure to the extremes of weather and they died in natural disasters.

In 2015, in first world countries, the deaths rates prior to old age have never been lower and lifespans have never been longer. Nonetheless, people have convinced themselves that if they returned to the natural lifestyle of their ancestors they will live longer and be healthier, in direct contradiction to the unassailable fact that those ancestors were neither healthier nor longer lived.

Why? Because they have transmuted the entirely human fear of illness and death into a fear of chemistry. They don’t understand chemistry so they are afraid of “artificial” chemicals.

They are living in a world of fear of their own making by conveniently ignoring the fact that it is “artificial” ingredients and treatments have ensured that they are still here to be afraid.

I’m 56 years old, and my story is typical. I could honestly tell you that as an adult I have rarely been sick. I can only recall two times that I ever was sick enough to miss work: the first was when I had breastfeeding related mastitis and my temperature soared to 104; the second occurred because I was exposed to chickenpox and was not immune since no vaccine existed when I was a child. I missed work to protect the patients, not to protect me.

But I can also tell you that I have rarely been sick because I have relied heavily on profoundly artificial treatments and preventatives. Indeed, without them I would probably be dead.

I never faced the scourges of smallpox, diphtheria, pertussis, rubella or polio because I received vaccines.

My vision is poor because of nearsightedness. In paleolithic times I would have died being eaten by a predator or falling off a cliff that I failed to see. Instead, I have always had 20/20 vision because of glasses, made from that artificial ingredient glass. More recently, I have maintained 20/20 vision through plastic: contact lenses.

I gave birth to 4 healthy children, and never had to worry about dying in childbirth.

I was able to limit the number of pregnancies I experienced by the use of contraceptives, and therefore further reduced the risk of dying of pregnancy related complications.

When I was 40, I developed an all natural benign brain tumor that affected my vision. In nature, it would have ultimately killed me, but not until I had suffered excruciating headaches for years. Instead, I had a single treatment with radiation and it shrunk to the point where it no longer caused symptoms.

At 45 I developed all natural narrow angle glaucoma. Narrow angle is much less common than typical (wide angle) glaucoma, and is due to a structural defect in the eye. A laser was used to open channels between the anterior and posterior eye. It took 5 seconds and cured the problem. Without it, I inevitably would have become blind.

At 45 I also developed high blood pressure, now well controlled on anti-hypertensive medications.

At 50 I developed gallstones. Within months I had my gallbladder removed through the laparoscope, a procedure so simple that I went out to dinner the following night.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Nature has thrown me a bunch of health curves and I’ve caught them all with the aid of “artificial” chemicals and procedures.

As far as I’m concerned, if you are gullible enough to believe that the problem with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut was the artificial or GMO ingredients in their products, instead of the all natural fat and sugar, then Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are entitled to trick you that their products are now healthy because they are natural.

In the meantime, make mine (food, vaccines, medications) an Artificial … and make it a double!

A visitor from outer space might be forgiven for concluding that the most important part of the human body is the foreskin. It is, after all, the only part of the body that has multiple organizations devoted to its preservation in the natural state. The visitor might get the impression that the choice of circumcision is a fateful choice with profound implications for the rest of life. Therefore, it would probably come as a shock to our visitor to learn that circumcision is a religious, cosmetic and medical decision with essentially no impact beyond the benefit of reducing the risk of transmission of serious sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS.

That’s why it would be extraordinarily difficult to find a logical explanation for the anti-circ community’s involvement in a vicious divorce case, beyond a cynical attempt to hold a child hostage in an effort to drum up publicity for themselves.

As Mark Joseph Stern explains in Circumcision Armageddon:

Heather Hironimus and Dennis Nebus are fixated on their son’s foreskin. It is an obsession that has bound them together long beyond the end of their relationship. Nebus believes their 4 1/2-year-old son, Chase Ryan Nebus-Hironimus, should be circumcised for medical reasons. Hironimus believes circumcision is barbaric genital mutilation. Nebus has gone to court to get his son circumcised. Hironimus has gone to jail to prevent it. Their dispute is easily the weirdest, saddest, most disturbing battle yet in the war over circumcision.

It is profoundly disturbing on a number of different levels. First, that a mother, any mother would deprive a child of a needed medical procedure, using her child in a battle to wound a hated ex-spouse. Second, it is disturbing that an activist group would insert themselves into a bitter divorce. Third, it is disturbing that an anti-circumcision organization would acknowledge that it doesn’t merely oppose circumcision for religious or cosmetic reason, but it actually opposed circumcision for medical reasons.

Why is this an issue, let alone an issue that has drawn in outsiders:

…As part of their separation, both Hironimus and Nebus signed a formal “parenting plan” approved by a judge. One portion of this plan specified that Nebus would take Chase to be circumcised and cover the costs. At the time, Hironimus agreed to this stipulation.

Nebus put off the circumcision until December of 2013—when he saw Chase, then 3, urinating on his leg. A pediatrician suggested Chase’s foreskin was too tight and should be removed. Later, a urologist questioned that diagnosis, but agreed that Chase would benefit generally from a circumcision. When Nebus informed Hironimus of the impending procedure, however, Hironimus balked. Since signing the parenting plan two years earlier, Hironimus had become an intactivist—an anti-circumcision activist who believes the removal of a child’s foreskin constitutes child abuse and a human rights violation.

And what about those outsiders?

How did a local parenting dispute become the stuff of tabloid headlines? The answer lies in the tenacious community of intactivists who seized upon Hironimus’ plight as both a crusade and a publicity stunt. A group that calls itself Chase’s Guardians has sponsored a legal fund for Hironimus … They have quietly spread anti-circumcision literature throughout local libraries and strange, graphic, scaremongering memes across the Internet…

I reached out to the person who runs the Chase’s Guardians Facebook page, hoping to interview him for this story. He promptly sent back a link to a retort to my 2013 article on intactivists and wrote: “Sorry about your semi-functional penis remnant Marky.”

In other words, the Chase’s Guardians couldn’t care less about Chase and his medical issues. They are committed to what they believe to be the inherent sanctity of the intact penis no matter who is hurt in the process even if it is the owner of the foreskin in question. And therefore, they inserted themselves into a vicious parenting dispute, a dispute that cannot benefit Chase in any way.

The real issue here is two parents who despise each other using the body of their son to fight their battles. According to an AP story on the CBS News website:

Hironimus and her 4-year-old-son’s father, Dennis Nebus, have been warring for years over whether to have the boy’s foreskin removed. She initially agreed in a parenting agreement filed in court, then changed her mind, giving way to a long legal fight. Circuit and appellate judges have sided with the father.

With her legal options dwindling, Hironimus went missing in February, and ignored a judge’s order that she appear in court and give her consent for the surgery to be performed. A warrant was issued, but she wasn’t located until May 14 at a Broward County shelter where she was staying with her son.

Brought before Judge Jeffrey Gillen on Friday, Hironimus again declined to sign a consent form for the surgery, and she was advised she would remain jailed indefinitely. After the hearing recessed and she reconsidered, she reluctantly agreed to sign, sobbing as she put pen to paper.

That, of course, is not the end of it:

The woman’s mother, Mary Hironimus, said “intactivists” – anti-circumcision activists – planned to reach out to doctors around the country to urge them not to perform the circumcision.

Georganne Chapin, executive director of Intact America, which advocates against circumcision, said the images of a distraught Heather Hironimus signing the form to allow the surgery show how she was “bullied” into it and that she doesn’t truly give her consent.

“If anyone finds out the circumstances under which she signed, a doctor would be insane to carry out that surgery,” she said.

But the issue here is not, and has never been, parental consent. The issue is whether a circumcision has medical benefits for this specific child, benefits that outweigh the risk of performing the surgery on a child, risks that are greater than when he was a newborn. And that question can only be answered by medical professionals, not by a band of self-appointed foreskin fetishists whose cynicism is exceeded only by their self-absorption.

The Duggars are hypocrites.

I’m referring of course the extraordinarily fecund fundamentalist family who starred in the TLC reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting, and leveraged their fame to conduct an ongoing political hate campaign against those whose sexuality differs from theirs.

This is hardly a new development. I’ve always enjoyed the irony of a family that claimed to follow the prophet whose message was “let he who has not sinned cast the first stone” figuratively stoning just about everyone in sight.

The revelation that as a teenager their eldest son Josh Duggar sexually molested young girls including his sisters shines a harsh light on that hypocrisy. We have learned that a family of “faith” chose to protect one of their own children from punishment for a crime, repeatedly exposed their other children to the criminal, and violated the law. I have a certain amount of sympathy for them; it must be agonizing to learn that one of your children is molesting another and they would hardly be the first family who struggled to do the right thing or even figure out what is the right thing to do.

It seems to me, though, that the lesson here is not the trivial lesson that the most righteous are often hypocrites, or even the lesson that Duggar partisans prefer, that everyone is a sinner. The lesson here is one that has profound implications for American society: religious fundamentalism’s campaign to conflate sexuality and sinfulness is not merely a spectacular failure in its execution, but it is profoundly morally and ethically wrong.

The Duggars restrictive lifestyle, as well as their political efforts, are based on two assumptions that have been smashed. Their first assumption is that there is a “correct” sexuality and that those who have a different sexuality are sinners. The second assumption is that sexual sinners were led to their sin by a permissive culture; hence the cult like effort to isolate their children from the wider world and condemn them (particularly the girls and women) to a repressive, regressive and profoundly sexist existence.

But the truth, which the Duggars will probably never acknowledge, is that sexuality is an innate human need like hunger, the need for sleep or the need to eliminate waste. Human beings can no more control their sexual orientation or identity than they control their hunger in the absence of food. It has absolutely, positively nothing to do with culture. Culture doesn’t cause it and culture can’t prevent it. Society should not be involved in or concerned with the expression of a person’s sexual identity or urges UNLESS, and ONLY UNLESS other people are hurt by the expression of those urges.

Gay marriage and transgender individuals harm no one. Sexual molestation, in contrast, has real victims who are profoundly harmed. That’s why society has a legitimate interest in preventing and treating molesters, but it has no legitimate interest in preventing gay marriage or “treating” homosexuality.

It’s difficult to imagine that any family could have outdone the Duggars in creating a repressive regime, conflating sexuality with sinfulness, with the express purpose of isolating their children from modern culture. Despite that, their eldest son didn’t merely develop aberrant urges, but he actually acted upon them. That’s because contrary to the beliefs of religious fundamentalists, culture doesn’t cause sexual deviation, and isolation from the larger culture doesn’t do anything to prevent it.

Sexual identity, orientation and urges are purely personal, the result of genetics and personal experience. All are innate to that individual. Gay people are not gay because they are sinners; they are gay because they are born that way, and there’s nothing sinful about it.

If God doesn’t create junk, then gay people are not junk. They are no more able to change their identity and orientation than they are able to change their foot size. Laws that criminalize gay sex or gay marriage are as senseless and cruel as laws that would criminalize large feet. So why do fundamentalists persist in ascribing sexuality to sin in the larger culture? Because it satisfies another human need, the need to hate those who are different.

Religion is first and foremost about social cohesion and there’s nothing that is more likely to generate social cohesion within a group than hatred of others that is both shared and sanctified by the group. Religious fundamentalists love to hate those whose sexuality is different than theirs, and to justify that hate they insist that sexual orientation is controllable, and inherently sinful if it is different than the norm.

Apparently, the Duggars chose to approach Josh’s sexual molestation of others by viewing him as afflicted with sin in the same way that he might be afflicted with pneumonia. They chose to “treat” it with prayer and hard work, just as they might choose to treat pneumonia with antibiotics. They wouldn’t, indeed they couldn’t see that the real problem was that he expressed his sexuality in ways that hurt others, that his sexual urges might reflect the fact that he had been molested or had other psychological problems, and that both he and the girls he molested needed psychological therapy as well as access to the criminal justice system.

To acknowledge that would have meant to acknowledge that sexuality has nothing to do with inherent sinfulness or modern culture.

But then whom would they hate?

Another day, another piece of lacto-porn, another super-model kidding herself that she’s “normalizing” breastfeeding.

Nicole Trunfio, commenting on the above cover photo for Australian Elle Magazine, tells E! Online:

“There is nothing more powerful and beautiful than motherhood. The last thing I want to do is be controversial, so please take this for what it is, let us #normalizebreastfeeding there is nothing worse than a mother that is judged for feeding her hungry child in public,” she writes.

“#weareonlyhuman I’m so proud of this cover and for what it’s stands for. I obviously don’t look like this while I am breastfeeding but this stands for all women out there, whether you breastfeed or not, we gave birth, we are women, we are mothers. Thank you to ELLE for being so bold and making such an encouraging, positive and healthy statement.

Sure Nicole, just like this photo normalizes vaccines:

And like this photo normalizes policewomen:

We recognize these photos as pornography and Trunfio’s cover photo resembles them in all the details: exposure of breasts, come hither look, sexy outfit. The only difference is the props. Instead of using a hypodermic or crime tape as a prop, Trunfio uses her son.

Some commentors are thrilled.

According to Alessandra Dubin at Today.com Style:

Model Nicole Trunfio graces the June cover of Elle Australia, in a photo shot by Georges Antoni, in which she nurses her 4-month-old son. The model and first-time mom wears an open suede coat while her babe, Zion, is in the buff.

In addition to making a gorgeous image, it also makes a powerful statement, given the uniqueness of such a scene on a highly visible piece of media.

Sara Bliss, writing for Yahoo Beauty says:

The image has struck a cord on social media, with the hashtag #normalizebreastfeeding taking off. It’s especially powerful at a time when women publicly breastfeeding their children is sometimes seen as something that should be hidden away. Trunfio looks radiant, happy, relaxed. The image captures a beautiful, everyday motherhood moment (except of course the ultra-glamorous aspect, breastfeeding can be painful, exhausting, and messy).

I disagree that it normalizes breastfeeding. It does exactly what those who promote breastfeeding should be trying to avoid. It sexualizes breastfeeding instead of portraying it as what it is: a mother nourishing her child with no effort to titillate (the use of the word is not coincidental) the others around her.

If we want to normalize breastfeeding, we shouldn’t be making breastfeeding pornography. Yes, it sells magazines, and it undoubtedly gets people talking, but it hardly sending the message that should be sent:

Babies need to eat; mothers need to feed them; and they should be able to do so publicly without being harassed by sexual prudes.

If we want to normalize breastfeeding, we shouldn’t be posting lacto-porn on magazine covers. We should be providing every woman with the opportunity to breastfeed wherever and whenever her baby needs to be fed.

Using breasts to sell magazines doesn’t normalize breastfeeding; it normalizes the sexism of using breasts to sell magazines.

Forget organic vegetables. Forget raw milk. Scientists have made a revolutionary new discovery of an amazing miracle cure: raw communication!

That’s right, folks, raw communication reduces death rates from cancer, heart disease, immune disorders and pregnancy! But wait, there’s more! Raw communication prevents pertussis, measles and a host of other diseases! And — this is the best part — it even prevents autism!

What is raw communication?

According to Professor Cy N. Tist, raw communication is communication as nature intended.

Tist explains that human beings were designed to communicate by speech, face to face. Communication over long distances, especially using technology is unnatural and demonstrably dangerous.

The chief health risks come from blogs, Facebook pages and message boards, 3 profoundly unnatural ways to receive information. The technology itself is implicated with easy access to computers, hand held devices and wi-fi being the biggest risk factors. Studies show that diseases like autism have increased dramatically, in direct proportion to the equally dramatic increase in alternative health bloggers.

Don’t believe me? Check out the three graphs below:

In each case — autism caused by vaccines, pertussis and homebirth deaths — the incidence of the health complication rises in direct correlation with the number of alternative health blogs found on the internet.

If that isn’t proof, I don’t know what is!

Prof. Tist has shown that both producers and consumers of artificial communication are harmed. That’s a critical point. Not only do those who blog, message and Facebook post about alternative health experience an increase in these diseases, but those who read the blogs, messages and Facebook posts do too.

Big Business knows all about the close association between artificial communication and deadly health problems, but they profit from charging huge fees for internet access so there’s no way they will be honest about the connection. Think of the amount of money they would lose if consumers of alternative health learned about the dangers of blogs, message boards, and Facebook posts. It’s hardly surprising that Big Business does not want you to know about the benefits of raw communication.

But you don’t have to be one of the unfortunate sheeple who get their health information from artificial communication.

Here’s an example:

How should you decide whether to vaccinate your children?

You could rely on alternative health bloggers and B-movie starlets like Jenny McCarthy, but that’s artificial communication and leads to an increase in cases of pertussis, measles and other vaccine preventable illness. OR, you could engage in raw communication, direct face to face communication with a doctor. It’s pretty obvious that raw communication is far safer than highly processed, high tech internet communication.

If you want to see a dramatic increase in your health and longevity, resolve to consume only raw communication. Raw communication is 100% natural, from their lips to your ears communication. Of course, if you need to communicate over long distances, you can shout or, for really long distances you can use a low tech alternative: two paper cups connected by a string.

Try raw communication for one month. You will save hundreds of dollars on internet fees, computers and mobile devices AND your health will improve.

Forget homeopathy. Forget chiropractic. Switch to all natural raw communication and start improving your health today!

They say that everything old is new again and that is certainly true in the world of alternative health. One of the axiomatic premises of contemporary alternative health puts its believers behind the times … by approximately 500 years.

A fundamental premise held by believers in alternative health is that we are swimming in a world of toxins and those toxins are causing disease. Like most premises in alternative health it has no basis in scientific fact; makes intuitive sense only if you are ignorant of medicine, science and statistics; and speaks to primitive fears and impulses.

The preoccupation with “toxins” is a direct lineal descendant of the obsession with evil humours and miasmas as causes of disease. It is hardly surprising that prior to the invention of the microscope the real causes of disease went undiscovered. The idea that disease is caused by tiny organisms that invade the body is not amenable to discovery in the absence of scientific instruments and scientific reasoning. And it goes without saying that the same people who were unaware that bacteria and viruses cause disease could not possibly imagine chromosomal defects, inborn errors of metabolism or genetic predispositions to disease.

Instead, people imagined that diseases were caused by excess evil humours, substances that were named, but never seen or identified in any way accessible to the senses. It was recognized that some diseases were contagious, and in that case, people invoked the idea of “miasmas” that somehow transmitted disease.

Even religion got into the act. Rather than attributing disease to evil humors of miasmas, religious authorities often claimed that disease was attributable to evil demons or to sin itself.

These theories shared several important features. The evil humours, miasmas, etc. were invisible, but all around us. They constantly threatened people, and those people had no way of fending off the threat. Indeed, they were often completely unaware of the threat that was actively harming them.

Evil humours, miasmas, demons, etc. were put to rest by the germ theory of disease. That was the first big breakthrough in our understanding that each disease was separate and has its own specific cause. The search for causes has taken us beyond bacteria and viruses, through errors of metabolism and chromosomal aberrations, right down to the level of the gene itself. We now understand that tiny defects in individual genes can cause disease or can increase the propensity to a specific disease.

But fear and superstition never die and the alternative health community has used that fear and superstition to resurrected primitive beliefs. It is axiomatic in the alternative health community that disease is caused by evil humours and miasmas. They just don’t call it that anymore; they call it “toxins.”

Toxins serve the same explanatory purpose as evil humours and miasmas. They are invisible, but all around us. They constantly threaten people, often people who unaware of their very existence. They are no longer viewed as evil in themselves, but it is axiomatic that they have be released into our environment by “evil” corporations.

There’s just one problem. “Toxins” are a figment of the imagination, in the exact same way that evil humours and miasmas were figments of the imagination.

Poisons exist, of course, but their existence is hardly a secret, and their actions are well known. Most poisons are naturally based, derived from plants or animals. Indeed, the chemicals responsible for more diseases than any others are nicotine (tobacco), alcohol (yeast) and opiates (poppies).

Nonetheless, alternative health advocates persist in subscribing to primitive theories of disease. For those who have limited understanding of science, primitive theories apparently make more sense.

Hence the obsession with “toxins” in foods, in vaccines, even “toxins” arising in the body itself. The height of idiocy is the belief in “detoxifying” diets and colon cleansing. The human body does not produce “toxins.” That’s just a superstition of the alternative health community. The waste products produced by the human body are easily metabolized by organs such as the liver, and excreted by organs specifically evolved for that purpose such as the kidneys and liver.

Alternative health practitioners are nothing more than quacks and charlatans and their “remedies” are nothing more than snake oil. The fact that anyone in this day and age still believes in such crackpot theories is a tribute to the power of ignorance and superstition.

Evil humours and miasmas have not died, they’ve simply been reincarnated as “toxins.”

Adapted from a piece that first appeared in August 2009.

What if I told you that if an individual fish hatching from one of a billion eggs in the ocean simply ate right, exercised and practiced situational awareness, he or she could reliably live out a full natural lifespan?

You’d laugh, right?

You’d laugh because fish, like every living thing — animal, plant or protist — is subject to complex forces over which it has no control. It is subject to the whims of genetics, the results of mutations, the appetites of the other fish around it, the weather, the list is nearly endless. The idea that eating right and exercising, or any other simple plan, could ensure a long life free of disease or disability for a fish is nothing short of absurd.

It’s nothing short of absurd for human beings, too. That’s because they are subject to the same forces as all other living things. That’s why you should beware anyone who offers simple solutions to living out a natural lifespan. Human health is extremely complex, because human beings are extremely complex, and any simple solutions are reliably guaranteed to be wrong.

True, human beings have technology that can keep us from being prey for wild animals, can protect us in large part from freezing to death, and in first world countries our luck and technology protect us from starving to death. Our technology protects us from those central realities of the life of our ancient and not so ancient ancestors. We even have antibiotics that can keep us from being prey to wild bacteria and viruses, anesthesia and surgery that can keep us from being felled by routine internal failings like appendicitis, and the preventive technology of modern obstetrics that can reduce the naturally high death toll of childbirth. But although technology, through routine use has come to be seen as simple, it is quite complex in reality.

That’s why any time anyone offers you a simple solution for staying healthy and living out a full natural lifespan, you should run in the opposite direction. They may mean well; they may believe (desperately!) what they are saying, but they are inevitably wrong.

Eating right (“nutrition”) is the key to long life, safe childbirth, and freedom from viral and bacterial disease? If only! It can no more guarantee long healthy life to us than to a fish.

Popping vitamins and supplements, boosting your microbiome, avoiding GMOs and non-organic food is the key to long life, safe childbirth and freedom from viral and bacterial disease? If only. Those things can no more guarntee long healthy life to us than to a fish.

Essential oils, cranio-sacral therapy and homeopathy is the key to long life, safe childbirth and freedom from viral and bacterial disease? If only. Those things can no more guarntee long healthy life to us than to a fish.

Why? Because we, like fish, and all living things, are products of evolution and evolution leads to the survival of the fittest, NOT the survival of everyone.

In contrast, the central conceit of all pseudoscientific health movements, from anti-vax to homebirth, from organic food to demonizing sugar, from restriction diets to essential oils, from raw milk to fear of GMOs, is the belief that everyone who is currently alive is perfectly adapted to avoid all health dangers and live to be 80 or older.

The sad, incontrovertible, unavoidable truth is that we are not perfectly adapted for our current environment or for ANY environment. There is literally no such thing as a living thing that is perfectly adapted, and, in any case, there is no such thing as an environment that is static. The environment is constantly changing offering better or worse odds of survival depending on the organism’s genetic legacy.

So why do people persist in believing that there are simple ways to guarantee health? For the exact same reason they continue to believe in life after death; because the alternative is too scary. Just as it is too frightening to contemplate our demise, it is too frightening to contemplate that we are subject to the vagaries of genetics, bacterial and viral predation, and simple bad luck.

The fish swimming amid the school who ends up eaten by the predator could not have averted his fate by eating better, exercising more, gobbling supplements, using essential oils or getting “adjusted” by a cranio-sacral therapist. He got eaten because he wasn’t the fittest fish in the school.

Similarly, the human being who dies in childbirth, gets cancer or succumbs to tetanus could not have averted his fate by eating better, exercising more, gobbling supplements, using essential oils or getting “adjusted” by a cranio-sacral therapist. Those things happened because he or she wasn’t the fittest individual in the specific situation in which he or she ended up.

The reason people are diseased, disabled or die prematurely is not because we have used technology to fool and anger Mother Nature and we can eat and exercise our way back. The real reason is we are living things subject to the same evolutionary laws as every other animal, plant or protist. We can’t all be the fittest and even those who are the fittest in one environment can turn out to be unfit in a different environment.

Yes, complex, sophisticated technology can and does avert the evolutionary decree, but simple solutions are utterly useless. Indeed simple solutions may be worse than useless, since their very ease and simplicity can fool us into rejecting the highly technological measures that actually work.

Alternative health is nothing more than glorified wishful thinking and it has as much chance of preventing disease, saving your life or guaranteeing a full lifespan for you as it does for a fish; none at all. Beware of those who claim that there is an easy way to avoid disease disability and death. They are lying to themselves first and foremost, and therefore they are lying to you.

Wife bonuses? Really?

That was my thought after reading Wednesday Martin’s brilliant New York Times plug, Poor Little Rich Women, for her forthcoming book, Primates of Park Avenue.

And then there were the wife bonuses.

I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice in this tribe.

A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks…

I initially read the piece with the clinical interest of someone who also has a forthcoming book and will be publicizing it in the months ahead. My first thought was that Martin had stumbled upon and skillfully exploited publicity gold; could there be anything more fraught then the idea of paying sophisticated, highly educated, wealthy stay at home mothers a wife bonus for services rendered? Sure enough, today’s papers and blogs are filled with commentary on wife bonuses, and, therefore, even more publicity for Martin and her book.

There’s just one problem. I can’t find any evidence that Martin’s claim is real.

I happen to be a member of the demographic that Martin is describing, women with advanced degrees who stay home while their husbands are remunerated at high powered jobs. Admittedly I’ve never lived on Park Avenue, nor do I hobnob with the ultra-rich, but I’m acquainted with bankers and fund managers and I’ve never heard of a wife bonus or anything that could be construed as a wife bonus.

Apparently no one else has ever heard of wife bonuses, either. I can’t find any reference to them on the internet prior to 48 hours ago. According to Danielle Pacquette of The Washington Post Wonk Blog notes that there is no credible research or data that supports the existence of wife bonuses:

The wealthiest couples often foster staggeringly unequal partnerships, said Jacqueline Newman, managing partner at Berkman, Bottger, Newman & Rodd…

The “Wall Street wives,” as Newman calls them, have prenuptial agreements that ensure, say, generous bank accounts funded for living expenses. But they’ve never mentioned a wife bonus, or any contractual reward for the domestic achievements Martin describes.

“The clients I have would be thoroughly offended by that phrase,” Newman said. “They pour so much work into raising their families. They’re in charge of managing the household, all the players involved. Often their husbands travel and don’t want them to work.”

And:

Raoul Lionel Felder, a divorce attorney who has practiced in New York for 50 years … has never encountered a legal version of the wife bonus — and, he said,”Upper East Side women are a specialty.”

Moreover, this is not the first difficult to prove publicity bombshell that Martin has dropped while promoting her book. Back in August 2013, Martin claimed that the wealthy families that she was studying hired disabled people as tour guides to help them cut the famously long lines at Disney World.

insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” said social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, who caught wind of the underground network while doing research for her upcoming book “Primates of Park Avenue.”

“Who wants a speed pass when you can use your black-market handicapped guide to circumvent the lines all together?” she said.

“So when you’re doing it, you’re affirming that you are one of the privileged insiders who has and shares this information.”

Other news outlets found ads on Craigslist for disabled people offering to accompany families to help them cut the lines, but most were freelancers charging far less than the $1000/day claimed by Martin. Moreover, answering ads on Craiglist hardly marks anyone as an insider, let alone a privileged insider as Martin described.

How curious that Martin has claimed to discover not one, but two separate publicity bombshells that aren’t confirmed by other evidence.

I’m a cynical person. I can believe just about anything, including the existence of wife bonuses IF someone presents real evidence, not what they supposedly observed among anonymous friends. Without actual evidence, and no one seems to have any, my cynicism leads me to suspect that Martin may made it up to sell books.

The discussion we should be having is not about wife bonuses among the wealthy, since they don’t exist, but about real and pressing inequities in relationships of everyone else. The real problem is that women who work don’t get paid the same as men who work, not that extraordinarily wealthy women who don’t work might (or might not) get a bonus for staying home.

Extraordinarily wealthy women who stay home are not “poor little rich women,” no matter how many books Martin might sell by pretending they are.