Category: Science

SHOCKER: Doctors Say Lindsay Lohan Doesn’t Actually Have Mental Disorder

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She’s not technically crazy, she’s just a part-time lesbian who sometimes makes bad decisions like driving drunk and bleaching her red hair blonde:

[T]he doctors who have evaluated Lindsay Lohan at UCLA have concluded she does not suffer from the drug or psychiatric problems that were previously diagnosed. . . .
We’re told Lindsay has been “weaned off” all of her meds — Dilaudid, Ambien, Adderall, Zoloft, Trazodone and Nexium — and has had no adverse reaction. Likewise, she has had no withdrawal issues in the alcohol department. . . .
And, we’re told Lindsay was misdiagnosed in the past with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) — which is why she started taking Adderall. The UCLA docs say LiLo does not have ADHD.
And finally, as for having psychiatric problems — again the doctors say it’s just not the case. Morningside Recovery — the rehab facility Judge Revel initially chose for Lindsay — determined she was bipolar, but the docs at UCLA say she is not.

OK, let’s take this point by point:

  • Dilaudid? — Dude, that’s a heavy-duty opium-like pain killer. Exactly what illness or infirmity was Lindsay suffering that a doctor prescribed her Dilaudid?
  • Zoloft? — This is an SSRI anti-depressant that can cause all sorts of funky side effects, including nausea, diarrhea, insomnia and increased risk of suicide. Zoloft is also “associated with sexual side effects, including arousal disorder and difficulty achieving orgasm.” Given the downside potential of SSRI treatment, no psychiatrist should prescribe this stuff unless the person is experiencing serious mood disorders that don’t respond to milder treatments.
  • ADHD and/or bipolar disorder? — Here’s your postmodern rush-to-diagnosis problem in a nutshell: People who in a less medicalized society might be described as “high strung” or “moody” are nowadays quickly diagnosed as being afflicted with a psychiatric malady requiring treatment.

God knows what would have become of me if the ADHD diagnosis had been commonplace when I was a talkative, over-energetic child. Back then, they called it “acting up” or “ants in the pants,” and teachers treated it by administering a few swift swats with a paddle.

Andrew Breitbart says he’s been diagnosed with ADHD, but it’s not a debilitating “disorder” so much as it is a personality trait that happens to fit perfectly with the rapid-fire information-processing involved in operating an Internet empire. 

If not every ADHD sufferer is a helpless basket case, neither can everyone whose moods are volatile be classified as clinically afflicted with bipolar disorder. But our medicalized culture pretends that there is a pill for every ill, so when someone like Lindsay Lohan starts experiencing stress — her parents are divorced, her Dad’s a scary wacko, she’s partied herself out of a job or two — doctors are quick to make a diagnosis and give her prescriptions.

So, it’s good news/bad news for Lindsay: The good news is, you’re not psycho. The bad news is, that bleach-blonde look is atrocious.

Puberty Is Racist!

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A new study finds U.S. girls are reaching puberty at earlier ages:

Compared to the 1997 findings from girls across the U.S., girls in the current study – especially white girls – were more developed at a younger age. As previous research has shown, there were also large differences in development based on race.
At age 7, approximately 10 percent of white girls and 23 percent of black girls had started developing breasts – compared to 5 percent of white girls and 15 percent of black girls in 1997, the authors write.
Among 8-year-olds in the study, 18 percent of white girls and 43 percent of black girls had entered puberty – an increase from around 11 percent of white girls from 1997, but the same as black girls in that year.

So, black girls were more than twice as likely to have entered puberty before age 9. Will Al Sharpton lead a protest march against puberty, which is clearly guilty of racial discrimination?

More on Sex and ‘Science’

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Judith Reisman is about to publish Sexual Sabotage, her latest and most comprehensive book on Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent research, which came to mind when I saw this Time magazine article:

Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America’s most sexually industrious. . . .
[University of Texas psychology professor David] Buss and his students say evolution has encouraged women to be more sexually active as their fertility begins to decline and as menopause approaches. . . .
To test this theory, Buss and his students asked 827 women to complete questionnaires about their sexual habits.

Three words: Self-reported data. And two more words: Volunteer bias.

These were the basic errors of Kinsey’s research: Assuming that people can be relied on to accurately report their own sexual activities, and further assuming that there is no significant difference between people who agree to participate in such a survey and people who refuse to participate.

Inevitably, then, such a research methodology produces unverified data from a sample that is not random and cannot be presumed to be representative of the general population.

Of course, as Reisman has documented, Kinsey’s work went beyond these mere methodological errors into outright abuse (including coercive interrogation of students) and fraud. Kinsey included data survey derived from prisoners, among them sex offenders and prostitutes, that was included in a study purporting to present “normal” sexual behavior. Furthermore, as Reisman points out, the overwhelming majority of Kinsey’s male surveys were conducted among civilians during World War II, at a time when most healthy young men were serving in the military, so that the sample could not possibly have been representative.

What’s interesting is that Kinsey’s basic statistical errors (though not his more egregiously fraudulent methods) were identified and reported in leading social-science journals shortly after after publication of his reports — and no one in the major media seemed to care.

As Reisman has also documented, Kinsey’s work was promoted by a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign — a campaign funded, as was his “research,” by David Rockefeller’s foundations. Major media (notably including Time magazine) eagerly cooperated in this publicity effort, and Kinsey’s scientific critics were almost entirely ignored.  Reisman has persistently led the effort to expose Kinsey’s fraud, but she has similarly been ignored by most journalists, who seem unwilling to reevaluate the methods and motives of Kinseyan sexual research.

So while I’m perfectly willing to believe that women in their 40s are super-hot — hey, my wife is 46 — I am skeptical of the basic validity of the University of Texas research cited by Time. I’m especially skeptical of the claim that such data can be usefully employed as a basis for Darwinian theorizing about women’s sexual nature, ignoring every other possible influence on the reported findings and asserting that one has scientifically isolated an evolutionary genetic factor.

Needless to say, Andrew Sullivan’s colleague Chris Bodener is enthusiastically credulous. Some people would swallow a porcupine if you told them it was “science.”

To what purpose will this sort of science be employed, if not as a sort of “Darwin made me do it” excuse? How many would-be Mary Kay LeTourneaus and  Debra LaFaves will now claim that they are genetically programmed to jump the bones of jailbait boys? Are we prepared for genuinely degenerate consquences?

A Waterford mother will spend at least nine years in prison for having sex with the 14-year-old son she gave up for adoption when he was a few days old.
Aimee L. Sword, 36, apologized for her actions at her sentencing Monday in Oakland County Circuit Court, said her attorney Mitchell Ribitwer. . . .
“When she saw this boy, something just touched off in her — and it wasn’t a mother-son relationship, it was a boyfriend girlfriend relationship,” said Ribitwer, who added that Sword said she was sexually and physically abused as a child. . . .

If God doesn’t destroy America, Sodom and Gomorrah deserve an apology.

Sex, Science, Monogamy and Survival

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While checking in to see what Dave Weigel was doing at Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” — addressing the Trig Truther problem, among other things — I came across Chris Bodener’s latest post in a series, “The Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy,” which is every bit the bass-ackward exercise in Darwinian pretzel-logic that you might imagine.

Let’s begin with what should be an obvious question: Which requires more discipline to achieve, chastity or promiscuity?

We may consider it self-evident that virtue requires discipline, and discipline demands greater intellectual focus than does decadence. A major reason promiscuity has traditionally been stigmatized — and is still disdained by wise people — is that it is so frequently associated with other vices, including sloth and dishonesty. And this is true of societies as well as individuals. Ancient Rome declined in large measure because its leadership caste, once stubbornly attached to hardy virtue, became decadent and corrupt. Thorough knowledge of that history informed the concerns of the American founders most famously expressed by John Adams:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Once we elevate our gaze above the level of mere mammalian biology (the mating habits of bonobo chimps, etc.) and study the actual history of human civilizations, we can see the folly of any argument that aims at the derogation of pre-marital chastity and marital fidelity. And the “evolutionary” argument is as easily disproven as any of them.

Humans are not mere beasts, and human survival is dependent on many factors absent in the animal kingdom, where instinct suffices. For mankind to propagate, advance and flourish — to succeed as a species — requires that the young be nurtured and taught the skills, habits and beliefs that have sustained their ancestors. While it is possible for individual humans to survive anarchy, violence and poverty, it is impossible for human society to progress under such conditions.

Progress requires a sense of permanence and continuity, the notion that there is a future for which we must prepare. The integrity of the family historically has been protected by law because peace, stability and order are necessary to the general advancement and improvement of mankind’s condition.

“The cultural achievement of a people can be correlated with the degree of sexual continence they observe; and indeed is directly based upon it. Societies . . . which place no restriction . . . upon the early satisfaction of the sexual impulses, are at a ‘dead level of conception’; they possess the power of reason but they do not apply it to the world of their experience; a sense of responsibility has no place in their social vision.”
— Raymond Firth, reviewing Unwin’s Sex and Culture (1934)

After a half-century of encroaching decadence in America, we now have many soi-dissant intellectuals about whom we might well say, “a sense of responsibility has no place in their social vision.” Their misanthropic contempt for our inherited traditions is not coincidentally related to their lack of concern for our legacy to the future:

“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion— to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”
—Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979)

Faithfulness to ancient vows and a concern for long-term interests — not only one’s own interests, but the interests of one’s spouse, children and community — requires a larger vision than the puerile short-sightedness that would urge us to pursue the ultimately destructive impulses of selfish hedonism.

Those who resort to anthropological or biological justifications for promiscuity are transparently attempting to provide a patina of scientific authority for an ideology of selfishness, urging us to adopt habits incompatible with our survival as a civilization. If we imitate the sexual habits of bonobos, we can’t complain if the result is a Culture of Savagery, characterized by inhuman cruelty.

When we see authors calling for “a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity” in the name of science, we ought to be as skeptical of their science as we are of their motives. Personally, I wouldn’t trust such people any farther than I could throw them, and the fact that Andrew Sullivan relies on such “scientists” . . . Well, that’s not exactly a strong recommendation, is it?

At any rate, monogamy is very directly related to my own personal survival. You see, Mrs. Other McCain has a kitchen full of knives, and I’ve got to sleep sometime.

From Mecca to the Moon!

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Astro-dhimmis:

[NASA chief Charles] Bolden created a firestorm after telling Al Jazeera last month that President Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and “perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering.” 

Not only are Muslims losing the space race, but Mel Brooks already beat me to the punchline:

Heartache: ‘Female Viagra’ Fails

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No little blue pills for you, ladies:

 The drug didn’t boost women’s desire any more than a placebo in two clinical trials. . .  [t]he FDA staff who reviewed the results said the so-called response rate isn’t “particularly compelling.”
In a statement posted on the FDA website, manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim maintains that flibanserin really works, while acknowledging it’s better at increasing a woman’s “global desire” than “the intensity of [her] acute episodes of desire.” That phrasing suggests the drug’s effects are, well, rather subtle.
Trouble is, flibanserin has side effects that may outweigh its tepid benefits. About 15 percent of flibanserin users in the experimental trial stopped taking the drug because of bad reactions like dizziness, nausea, anxiety and insomnia.

This means guys trying to stimulate women’s sexual desire will have to resort to old-fashioned remedies like moonlight, music, wine and diamonds. 

Meanwhile, in other scientific breakthrough news, researchers have found that being fat is bad for your sex life. Being old, poor and ugly is also bad for your sex life. But we don’t need scientific research to tell us this.

Science Validates Bible

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To a fundamentalist, there was kind of a “well, duh” reaction to this recent headline:

Studies Show Jews’ Genetic Similarity

It’s scarcely surprising to learn that members of an ethno-religious group — whose ancient scriptures advocate endogamy and proscribe marrying outside the group — would be genetically similar. What I didn’t realize, however, was that some revisionist historians have cast doubt on the Biblical geneaology of the Jews:

The two genome surveys . . . refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.

So, for those of you keeping score:

Genesis, Exodus, etc. . . . . . 1
Revisionist historians . . . .  0

UPDATE: If you go back and read Genesis, you find that when Abraham’s son was ready to marry, Abraham — a native of Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq — was horrified to think that his son Isaac would be married to a woman from one of the tribes of Canaan. So Abraham sent his servant back to Mesopotamia, where he found Rebekah — who, as it turned out, was the granddaughter of Abraham’s brother Nahor. So it was that Isaac married his own cousin or, to be geneaologically specific, his first cousin once removed. (Genesis 24.)

This custom was continued into the next generation, when Isaac forbade Jacob to marry a Canaanite woman, sending him to take a wife from “the daughters of Laban thy mother’s sister.” (Genesis 28). In one of the famous stories of the Bible, Jacob fell in love with Rachel but was tricked into also marrying her older sister Leah. Jacob fathered children by both wives, as well as by their servant girls Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 29-30). Jacob’s children were the original patriarchs of the “Twelve Tribes” of Israelites. By the time they entered Egypt, they numbered just “70 souls” but in the course of just a few generations they became so numerous that the Egyptian pharoah feared them (Exodus 1).

Given that Jacob was the ancestor of all of them, and that most of the 12 patriarchs were also the sons of Rachel and Leah — sisters who were Jacob’s cousins — then the original pattern of endogamy would have created very distinctive genetic traits among these Israelites. The sojourn in Egypt lasted 430 years (Exodus 12:40) during which they were socially distinct, marrying amongst themselves.

By the time of the first numbering at Mt. Sinai (Numbers 1), there were more than 600,000 Israelite men of military age — all descended from the line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and, for the most part, also matrilineally descended from Abraham’s family via Leah and Rachel. At any rate, all were descended from those original “70 souls” and, the custom of marrying within the group being well-established, you can see what a genetically close-knit tribe it was that made its way through the Wilderness back to Canaan.

If they increased from “70 souls” to 600,000 men of war — counting women, children and old men, certainly well more than 2 million total — in less than 500 years, these Exodus-era Israelites would have left a large, clear genetic “brand” among their descendants. Even allowing for intermarriage and assimilation of converts, the DNA traits of the patriarchs would remain clearly evident, and this is what recent research appears to verify.

Why would revisionist historians wish to imagine that this biblical geneaology was false? Why would Professor Sand assert that “Jews have no common origin”? Very simple:

Professor Sand . . . candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past.

Tough luck, Professor. I believe the word is, “Oy!”