Senator endorses discredited book that claims chemical treats autism, cancer

The undermining of science has given people like this more of a voice. US leadership has got to the point where science is largely disregarded and leaders just impose whatever they think is true regardless of facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson

lots of _oofs_ while reading his page. ron, i was not familiar with your game.

“The House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021, Capitol Attack revealed that Johnson's aide Sean Riley texted Chris Hodgson, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, to request that Johnson personally give Pence an envelope containing alternate electors for Michigan and Wisconsin, which were later determined to be fraudulent. Hodgson refused to do so. In March 2022, Johnson's campaign hired Pam Travis as a full-time aide, although she had signed a statement as one of Wisconsin's ten "fake electors," who challenged the legitimacy of the state's delegation to the Electoral College. While walking outside the Capitol and pretending to be on a phone call, Johnson claimed he was not aware of the contents of the envelope.”

They always say "more research is needed", overlooking the extensive research already done. At concentrations required for antimicrobial effects, chlorine dioxide poses serious toxicity risks - endangering the patient rather than helping them. You’d think these same people would have been dismissed after pushing ivermectin during COVID, but here we are.

I know its an over used cliche but we are living through Idiocracy.

Are we sure his coauthor is Jenna McCarthy? Also, the article was impressive in how it kept getting worse. A good reminder I need to donate to ProPublica.

The USA has contracted a bad case of stupidity.

  “Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians.
   Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from?  They don't fall out of the sky.
   They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families,
   American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities,
   and they are elected by American citizens.
   
   This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
   If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good;
   you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans.
  
   So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public.
   Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'”
  
   - George Carlin

This will continue to happen so long as two things continue to exist:

1) diseases and conditions refractory to treatment or cure by modern medicine

2) expenses related to medical care being born by Americans at a personal level

If you look at other countries, there are absolutely people in positions of power who still push quack medicine because of 1), but 2) creates an extra incentive for desperate or overeager people to try quack medicine.

> The action, he’s said, makes him unemployable, even though he still has a license

Well I guess you cannot be too stupid to be in Congress. The place were unemployable people end up.

I half-jokingly believe that MAHA is the answer the Fermi Paradox.

As technology/civilization progresses gains become more demanding, it requires a species to exploit increasingly subtler, smaller-scale and longer-term aspects of reality itself. Feedback loops go from hours to months to decades. An abacus is large and accessible to all, a relay switch is still large but not very accessible, basic lithography already requires very fine control of light and EUV processes are just insane. It's not just that things get smaller, but the timelines get longer and you have to start relying on very specific analytical work to achieve anything. Whether computing, medicine, energy, etc, everything is subject to this trend.

Our brains haven't evolved for this kind of work, and being able to perform it is probably just a happy accident. To a lot of people small, subtle, long-term effects just aren't real. Only macro-scale effects and short feedback loops are real, which is why the current MAHA health crazy is heavily focused on weights, food etc. Simple things they can understand and control. A graph of infection rates between control and experimental groups are not real. Graphs of carbon concentrations are not real, graphs in general are not real. All that stuff is "fake email jobs".

There's no reason to think our savannah-produced monkey brains can cope with the demands of technology so advanced that we become "aliens".

Trying to ban these people always seems like a terrible idea, it just leads to the inevitable claims that they must be right because the government is after them.

In the case of ivermectin, because it's relatively safe (In human doses, not horse doses) it would have been interesting to see how conspiracy theorists reacted if the government just gave it to anyone that requested it.

In case you wanted more information than the headline, here's the subhead:

Wisconsin's Ron Johnson has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation. Now he's giving credence to assertions about the therapeutic powers of chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant and deodorizer.

> He’s promoted disproven treatments for COVID-19 and claimed, without evidence, that athletes are “dropping dead on the field” after getting the COVID-19 vaccination.

It’s interesting how prevalent lies and claims without evidence have become. And one lie gives another one the space to be accepted. At risk of making a claim without evidence myself, I feel like there is some link between claiming Haitians are eating dogs and claiming that athletes are dying after vaccination.

Another aspect is some lies have a small truth. Like maybe the claim that an athlete died after vaccination has one example. But that doesn’t mean it is true in general or that the athlete didn’t have some special situation. I see a lot of generalizations casually tossed around these days, especially in American politics.