YakBoy.Net

Not sure how this managed to fly under my radar for as long as it did. In my meanderings around the interwebs today I stumbled across the work of Australian producer Pogo who is making music that is pretty much custom designed to appeal to my tastes. Pogo relies almost exclusively on remixing samples to create new songs, similar to Kutiman and Emergency Broadcast Network, and specifically he seems to focus on samples from movies.

Below is the video for Alice which is made up from samples taken from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland –

(as an aside, I find this cool enough to almost justify the abomination that is Disney’s version of Alice in Wonderland)

His choice of movies from which to take samples ranges from the aforementioned Alice in Wonderland to Terminator 2 (Skynet Symphonic) to Harry Potter (Alohomora) to The King & I (Anna). He was even commissioned by Disney/Pixar to produce a track based on Up (Upular).

Many of his tracks can be downloaded from last.fm.

We had a very busy day at work yesterday, which means we spent a lot of time driving around with the radio on. Because of my partner’s political leanings I pretty much insist that we have NPR on in the ambulance. If I didn’t we’d spend the entire day listening to right wing talk radio and I would be even grumpier than I usually am at work.

The point of all this is that during one or another phases of our running around there was a segment on either NPR or BBC Worldservice (not even sure what time it was. Did I mention we were really busy?) in which they were discussing the U.S. national debt and how much of it is financed by China. One of the economists they were talking to was eager to point out that the way the economics of debt functions in today’s geopolitical landscape has become analogous to the way nuclear weapons were used during the cold war. His thesis was, more or less, that neither the U.S. nor China could really do anything that would damage the economy of the other because of the mountain of U.S. Treasury bonds that China holds. If the U.S. harms the Chinese economy then China won’t finance any more U.S. debt and if China does anything that harms the U.S. economy they would risk having the U.S. default on the ~$900 billion that the U.S. owes them, making Chinese economy worth that much less in the eyes of the rest of the world. Mutually assured economic destruction. When I heard that I immediately flashed back to a page from High Society, the second collection of the comic book Cerebus

The issue that page is taken from was originally published in the early 80s. Kinda spooky, huh?

Very close to a four-way bingo for me!

How many of these have YOU heard?

Okay America, this is exactly why you don’t take health care advice from a Playboy Bunny. There have been a couple of news items recently that I felt warranted a follow-up to my vaccine rant. First up, the work of Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor who pretty much started the whole “vaccines = autism” bunk, has been completely and utterly discredited. Like to the point that The Lancet has withdrawn his paper that first suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The Lancet editors (quoted by way of Bad Astronomer) had this to say;

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

The General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel’s findings referred to in the quote are the results of an investigation which showed Wakefield acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” when doing the research that went on to be published in The Lancet.

So there’s that. The sole scientific foundation for the antivax movement has been yanked. There is not even a scrap of a hint of validity to any of their arguments anymore.

As if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that Jenny McCarthy’s son, the one that she has spent YEARS trotting out as the poster-child for the vaccine-autism link, DIDN’T HAVE F&(*ING AUTISM IN THE FIRST PLACE!

An article in Time, for which Ms. McCarthy was interviewed, now suggest that her son has Landau-Kleffner syndrome which, if you will excuse the descent into Wikipedia,

is characterized by the sudden or gradual development of aphasia (the inability to understand or express language) and an abnormal electroencephalogram (EEG). LKS affects the parts of the brain that control comprehension and speech. The disorder usually occurs in children between the ages of 5 and 7 years. Typically, children with LKS develop normally but then lose their language skills. While many of the affected individuals have clinical seizures, some only have electrographic seizures, including electrographic status epilepticus of sleep (ESES)

Ms. McCarthy has now apparently accepted this new diagnosis and has reversed her position on vaccines, saying that she wants to see them researched more rather than getting rid of them all together and that, although her son does not and never did have autism, she will still act as a spokesperson for the disease. This after she has spent the last 7 years or so preaching the antivax gospel and even writing a book about how through the power of her love as a mother and her faith in non-traditional treatments she “cured” her son’s autism.

So the antivaxers don’t even really have their celebrity spokesperson anymore. Their entire position has been shown to have derived from a deliberate lie (from Wakefield) and wild speculation based on a flawed initial premise (from McCarthy).

The worst part of this whole fiasco is that it won’t make any difference. The antivax crowd is already in full-on tinfoil hat mode. The Lancet pulling the article and the Practise Board’s condemnation of Wakefield’s work will just be seen as the big evil drug companies flexing their muscle to silence their critics. I’m not sure what spin they’ll put on Jenny McCarthy backing away from touting the evils of vaccines but I’m sure they’ll think of something. This, to me, is the surest sign of the irrationality of the anitvaxers (or the 9/11 truthers or the Obama birth certificate people or the moon-landing-was-fake crowd for that matter). There is no amount of contrary evidence that will convince these people that they are wrong. Anything that reinforces their beliefs is immediately given iron-clad credence no matter how flimsy or anecdotal it might be, but anything contrary is discarded out of hand because it is clearly just part of the conspiracy/cover-up.

So how about you do us all a favor, Jenny, and just shut the fuck up. You’ve done enough damage already.

So this is hardly timely seeing as how The Book of Eli has come, and pretty much gone, from theaters already but that eases my conscience about writing an INCREDIBLY SPOILERIFIC critique of the film.

Over all I think the movie is a prime example of not being able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It was adequately directed by the Hughes Brothers and it has a surprisingly good cast with Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman and Ray Stevenson but the story was so painful that the whole thing was, for me, borderline unwatchable.

The story, in brief, involves Eli (Denzel Washington) trudging across a stereotypical post-apocalyptic wasteland safeguarding a book and seeking for the one place he can take it where it will be safe. The book, of course, turns out to be the last surviving copy of The Bible anywhere in the world. It seems that after the (poorly defined) events that brought about the apocalypse rampaging mobs went around murdering Christians and destroying every single copy of The Bible. We are told that The Bible was specifically targeted and because of that no one in the current generation has any familiarity with even the most basic of Christian concepts.

This set-up is the start of my objection to the film. The idea that the overwhelmingly dominant religion in the U.S. could, in the span of a single generation, be stamped out so thoroughly that a young woman would stumble trying to remember the word “amen” goes well beyond suspension of disbelief. It is, however, exactly the kind of persecution complex reinforcement that the Christian right loves. It showed them exactly the kind of scenario that they dream about; the world has been destroyed by the godless liberals who did everything they could to destroy good Christian values with the result that there is only one truly good person left in the world (who just happens to be the one that has access to The Bible).

After escaping the clutches of the evil Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who is desperately seeking a copy of The Bible so he can use the power of its overwhelming persuasiveness to deceive the masses of humanity and tighten his grip on power, Eli finally fights his way to San Fransisco where there is a small bastion of civilization being set up, including a printing press. There is a shot at the end of the movie, after a copy of Eli’s Bible has been printed that shows a shelf full of books from other great religions that has a conspicuous gap right in the center of the shelf. The Bible is lovingly placed on the shelf with the implication that now things can finally be set right and made complete.

Much as Red Dawn became a sort of rallying movie for the hardcore anti-communist cold warrior survivalists in the 80s The Book of Eli has a huge potential to become a rallying movie for Christian conservative social warriors in the 10s. Seeing this movie must have been like a masturbatory fantasy for the Christian right and their adoption of it has already begun. Former Saturday Night Live actress Victoria Jackson (who, for those who may be unaware has been off-the-rails crazy and a darling of the Christian right for years now) said that the movie “changed her life”. I get the impression that The Book of Eli is viewed as kind of a documentary from the future by these people. All their fears and reactionary behaviors are justified because when the liberals finally destroy the world the first ones they’re going to target will be the Christians in spite of the fact that only Christian values will be able to restore civilization.

I kind of doubt that this was screenwriter Gary Whitta’s intention when he wrote the film. He hasn’t written many other movies, but his past resume does include scripts for Star Trek: Voyager and Futurama in addition to having been the editor for both the British and U.S. editions of PC Gamer which doesn’t scream “Christian radical” to me. Intentions aside though he may very well have written the right wing’s version of Idiocracy.

Catch up time for a bit. The whole Seattle Geekly thing has been filling up a great deal of spare time but it continues to be enjoyable.

In spite of my best intentions on writing something here I am being completely hypnotized by King Tut Unwrapped on the Discovery channel. I’ve been a sucker for this kind of thing since the King Tut exhibit that came to the Seattle Art Museum back in 1978. I would have been 7 at the time that I saw it but I still remember it quite well.

Screw it, I’m going to have to pick this up again later.

Just a quick thought on the nature of the difference between book learning and experience (and with that lead in I wish I had something more profound to follow it up with).

If your creatinine is higher than your white blood cell count, you’re probably fucked.

The two values have no real relationship exactly. Any first year nursing student would be able to tell you that the level of one doesn’t directly affect the other in any way.

But anyone who has been around actual patients and has looked at a few lab results over the years will immediately know that pretty much no matter what is causing the normal ratio of the two values to be inverted, things are not going well.

One of our local hospitals was having their H1N1 vaccination clinic for employees yesterday and they were nice enough to hand out doses to my partner and I even though we are not at all hospital employees. The infection control nurse who was running the clinic told me she had no problem with giving us the vaccine because a) we spend a lot of time at their facility and b) we take away patients that they want to get rid of. She felt it was in their best interests to keep us healthy. I have been reassured somewhat by the reports of huge long lines at clinics offering the H1N1 vaccine to the public but there is still a disturbing amount of antivax misinformation and propaganda in the press.

Alert visitors to YakBoy.Net will notice the new widget on the right sidebar. This is using data from the Jenny McCarthy Body Count project. The ambulatory brain farts that spout the dangers of having children vaccinated are accomplishing nothing but driving those numbers up and Jenny McCarthy is, of course, one of the more prominent public faces of that particular brand of idiocy. It never fails to amaze me how many people are willing to ignore the mountains of research done by reputable scientists and take the word of an airhead whose main achievement in life was being Playmate of the Year in 1994. McCarthy is a strong proponent of the idea that childhood vaccinations are linked to any number of health problems, most commonly autism. The connection between vaccinations and autism is based almost exclusively on the work of Andrew Wakefield, a Canadian trained surgeon, who published a study in 1998 that showed a possible link between MMR vaccines and autism spectrum disorders. The antivax people continue to site this study in spite of the fact that there is good evidence that much of his work was faked.

Antivaxers also like to point to the close relation in timing between vaccinations and the onset of autism. Spend any amount of time looking at antivax wharrgarbl (a passtime I do not recommend) and you will inevitably see stories of parents with children who were developing normally until they got their 12 or 24 month vaccinations and then all of a sudden they started exhibiting signs of autism. Well guess what? The typical age of onset for autism, whether or not a child has been vaccinated, is somewhere around 12 to 24 months.

This is yet another example of the inability of people in general to make the distinction between correlation and causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, as the pretentious Latin speaking logic snobs say. After this, therefore because of this. The antivax crowd has fallen into this trap and it seems to be nearly impossible to get them out. In their minds, because the onset of autism often comes close after the time that a child was vaccinated, the vaccines must be causing the autism.

In that vein, I would just like to point out that there is a strong correlation between the decline of Jenny McCarthy’s acting career and her decision in 1998 to have her breast implants removed. Using the logic favored by the antivaxers one can use that point of information to draw some unflattering conclusions about the source of Ms. McCarthy’s “talent”.

The point to all this is that the claims of those opposed to vaccination have been repeatedly and decisively shown to be nothing more than the lowest grade of bunk. As I mentioned above, there are a large number of parents with autistic children that are absolutely certain of the causal relation between vaccinations and their child’s disability. I feel for the parents of these children but the plural of “anecdote” is not “data” and the actual data show that there is absolutely zero connection.

Caek.

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