Children with Autism Revealed as Fakers, Apologize, Write That Sestina They've Been Withholding Out of Spite

Michael Savage, right-wing radio host, recently decreed that the majority children on the autism spectrum are not afflicted, impaired beings, but simply "screaming brats." To claim that "there is no autism epidemic" not only wholly undermines the feisty and heartfelt-savvy activism to which celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Toni Braxton sort-of-sometimes-not-really contribute, but derails what little attention this disorder grabs from anybody. How much coverage did that "Hero"-ic pixie Hayden Panettiere get for rallying to save a few whales? Compare that to how often you see an advert for autism awareness, hell, see a child with autism in public at all. Parents are embarrassed of and terrified for their children and Savage feeds into these constricting emotions with his radical exaggeration that "99 percent of the cases [are] fraudulent." A child who cognitively chooses to whine or screech in order to communicate should never be compared to a child who may not ever emit a communicative sound—and if she does, tone or volume should not be the focus of such a breakthrough.

Savage further disregards a disorder that has existed for hundreds of years, a disorder that was, until recently, considered to be hopeless in terms of progress. Would he prefer to incarcerate any person who exhibits tantrum-like or "moronic" behavior? Or, would be prefer mechanical and chemical restraint on a child so progress would never be an option? Let Savage attempt to diagnose and implement a behavior plan for why a child head-bangs until he gets rug burns on his forehead, why he is terrified of scissors, or why he does not bathe without crying. Possibly then the true moron will be identified.

Perhaps as sickening as a man who glibly insults damaged children is a country that doesn't object: Savage is still the third-most listened-to radio host in America. Protests have risen in major cities, and there is a movement to fire the man. Participation in the latter would not only relieve some of our communal nausea but alert our nation to the true devastation of developmental disabilities.

[Weiner—Savage's real name is Weiner, folks! Ha! Mock him! Mock him fast! Mock him now!—sort-of-somewhat-not-really withdrew his statement. Which, in LW's eyes, in no way recuses him from the discussion, since the job of a talkshow host has, for a decade at least, been to mirror the ugliest desires, convictions, and superstitions of his/her/Odo's listenership. Add in the fact that he actually has a fucking doctorate in something vaguely health-related, and you have to imagine that, essentially, he is either the worst doctor ever (apologies to Drs. Mengele and Moreau), or else has trained himself to not actually possess any true opinions beyond what sells ad time. Either way, apologies and retractions work (badly) when the problem derives from a moral failing; this was a deliberate dissemination of false information. As long as there is any confusion in the public sphere, this shitbag deserves no grace. —Ed.]

{from Gawker, because there's two kinds of asshole in the world, and only the good kind doesn't have kids who peddle sugar-spiked caffeinated nail-polish remover to children}

Son of a Pitch

"They just grow up and blow their elbows out so fast these days." The American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine released a report today detailing a surprising increase in the rates of ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) replacement surgery. Fully a third of all these "Tommy John" surgeries—which replace a ligament that is almost exclusively torn by throwing a baseball—were performed on kids high-school age or younger, an increase of over 20% in the last ten years.

In unrelated news, the American Association for Overbearing, Narcissistic Fathers Who Can Only Quash Their Feeling of Failure and Ennui by Living Vicariously Through Their Spawn reports that membership is up over 20% in the last ten years.

{from the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine}

Fossil Flatfish One-Up God, Look Both Down and Up on His Creation

Fossilized fish with fucked-up faces delight Darwinists, further malign Ben Stein.

In one more indication that the world is going to halibut in a handbasket, Matt Friedman, a University of Chicago grad student, identified three related fossils that may be the missing links between the suave, symmetrical fish we know and love and the flounderish, filet-able freaks known as flatfish, which have both eyes on one side of their body.

These cock-eyed beasties still have eyes on opposite sides of their head, but one has migrated towards the top of the skull, making them look like, well, idiots—but idiots that evidently gained some sort of survival advantage (Not Exactly Rocket Science speculates that the fish may have used the "normal" eye to scan the underwater environment while "its head was lifted just high enough above the surface to give [the other eye] a view").

Aside from helping better trace the tree of life, Friedman's finds help undermine the distinctly American brand of anti-intellectual sophistry known as "Intelligent Design," or I.D. In brief, this school of thought holds that the natural world is too "perfect" to have evolved by the gradual selective pressures called for by evolutionary theory, therefore must have been cut from whole cloth by a sentient being.

The crux of this argument is what's known as irreducible complexity, as promulgated by Michael Behe. The idea is that certain biological structures (Behe's baby is a certain bacterial flagellum) have no benefit to survival and reproduction unless their many parts are all interlocked. Therefore, there's no way each piece could've come about separately through natural selection and differential reproductive success.

NOVA already demonstrated that Behe is full of shit, and used pretty pretty computer graphics to do so. (LW will link to the "Judgment Day" episode whenever possible, as I.D. is the genital herpes of the scientific establishment—impossible to get rid of and prone to ruining everyone's fun)

Nonetheless, flatfish have often been held up as another indication of irreducible complexity, since, until now, there was no series of fossils showing an eye slowly and steadily making its way across animal after animal to join up with its counterpart on the other side. Friedman's find shows that—and for the love of finches, this should be obvious already—just because we haven't found something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Indeed, these protobut not only existed, they'd already been examined and blown off. Friedman found the benchmark fossils in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and that fact is, in itself, indicative of a subtler but in some ways more important philosophical victory by the epistemological traditions of science over I.D.

I.D. is, in itself, uncurious. It forms an end to inquiry, an end to searching. It provides little motivation to rifle through stacks of dusty rocks in Austria, because what's your journal article going to be, "Fossil finds confirm the continued non-deadness of God"? For all its inherent undertones of Eternity (a perk of the whole God job), it ends up being the nontheistic traditions of science that sketch out a neverending road of inquiry, an edifice constantly being built. It affirms the idea that pleasure can be found in process of drawing the world, one rock at the time.

Whereas the supposed superiority of I.D. comes from its ability to answer everything, in total, right now, so everyone can go about the more important things like inheriting various winds or some shit like that.

{from Nature (the magazine) News, and dramatized in Lunar Weight's debut production, "Inherit the Wino," showing every third Tuesday afternoon at the New Jersey Turnpike's very own Vince Lombardi Rest Area}

If Alan Turing Were Alive Today, He'd Probably Still Be Dead

Lunar Weight celebrates Alan Turing's 96th birthday.

Why 96th, you may ask? Well, because for those familiar with non-decimal number systems, 96 translates as 1100000 in binary, and 60 in hex. 1100000 ÷ 60 = 18333 1/3, which according to Kabbalistic tradition, prognostically indicates that Lunar Weight totally forgot Turing's 95th birthday last June 24th, and will undoubtedly forget his 97th next June 24th.

Turing's legacy largely involves being the father of the digital computer (this honor is, in some ways, misappropriated, but the people being robbed of the title are Polish, and they're used to that kind of shit), without which Emily Gould wouldn't be inexplicably famous and the rest of us would be forced to date, write novels, or otherwise exist in real life. But there's another, darker (as opposed to dorker) side to his legacy—Turing was one of the great martyrs to Western homophobia.

Yes, Alan Turing was openly blind, err, gay, possibly out of an activist instinct—the same activist instinct that led him to stand up so tenaciously for the idea of machine cognition as being potentially equivalent to human—or possibly from the same affable cluelessness that makes scientists the Beanie Babies of the ivory tower. Regardless, despite his tireless efforts to break Nazi codes during WWII, and the resultant reduction in British sauerkraut consumption and Jew-killing in the ensuing decade, Turing was tried for indecency and chemically castrated with estrogen. Eventually, disgraced and unlaid and possessing of boobies, he killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

Now, however, as the United States slowly, grudgingly swings towards the idea that gays are people too (or at least California and New York are swinging that way, which are the bits that count; Massachusetts, too, but no one's given a shit what they did since they got bored with burning witches), it's worth noting that what's at stake is not something as cosmetic as the right for Martha Stewart and Modern Bride to exploit a further 15% of the population. What's at stake is a concerted, legal-system-sanctioned effort to reject one of the most persistent and ascientific interpersonal prejudices in Western history.

Let's leave aside the inevitable gay-brain-difference studies, which are a classic instance of a neuropsychological "finding" completely devoid of practical significance beyond "look! See?" dickery. If the idea of rational thought has one end, it's that immaterial conclusions—such as ones indicating that homosexuality is somehow harmful, in need of "fixing," or, for that matter, inevitably synonymous with sweeping (former LW roomies, you know who you are)—can be debunked, cast aside. If any one facet of the classic '50s ideal of progress is worth carrying, it's that things that make no sense can eventually be revealed to make no sense. Homophobia is one of these; as Turing's story suggest, in at least some small realms, rationality might possibly save a life.

{yet there's a footnote here, a counterargument that is still self-aggrandizing in the way that tickles LW's smugbones: note that the British government kindly tried to "fix" Turing. This, too, was somehow informed by an idea of rationality and progress—albeit based on a model that was already well on its way to being debunked, gratzi Signore Kinsey. If only there had been some outside observers around back then to say, "Well, now, that's fucking stupid..." and then link to BoingBoing}