A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, and truly staggering amounts of caffeine, which misleadingly does not include "demons" on the ingredients list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no. Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost...  People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous [sic] Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks.  Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal. Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit just last week saying that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forté, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Taking the devil for a spin

Sometimes I think the fringe-y parts of the Religious Right stay up at night, and while the rest of us are doing something constructive like sleeping or fooling around with our Significant Others or snacking on the leftover pizza or watching reruns of Sherlock, they're surfing the web looking for things to be outraged about.

The thing is, I can't imagine how this can be much fun.  I don't enjoy being outraged, myself, and in fact sometimes deliberately avoid reading the news because I'd rather not spend the next six hours trying to fend off apoplexy.  But from the behavior of many of these folks, it seems like they positively relish the opportunity to rant and rave about the latest thing the evil secularists are doing to hasten the End Times and play right into the hands of Satan.

The latest thing to get the wacko SuperChristians' knickers in a twist is, of all things, the "Fidget Spinner."  Myself, I thought these things were innocent little devices intended to help people with attention issues concentrate by giving their hands something to do, much the way my younger son's more enlightened teachers used to let him work on making chain mail while he was listening to the lesson.  (I kid you not; in his first two years in high school, he made an entire chain mail shirt, weighing over fifty pounds, made from over 5,000 steel rings.)

So my general feeling about Fidget Spinners is that they're a clever tool to help people who problems focusing.  But no.

The Fidget Spinner is an evil device imported directly from the Pits of Hell.

Apparently what got these nutjobs in an uproar is that when you hold the Spinner, your thumb and forefinger make a circle and your other three fingers stick out, which is clearly a Satanic symbol, except when it means "okay."  The sign, we're told, represents 666, the Number of the Beast from the Book of Revelation:

If you grab the newest gadget released into the slave camp, what's called "a fidget spinner", you"ll notice that you're instantly making the famous 666 masonic gang sign. Now 666 isn't really the sign of the devil but is simply an equation of 6+6+6=18. Inside an ancient symbol based code (called gematria), all numbers have to be reduced to 1 digit by simply adding the digits together, so 18 is really 1+8=9... 

So when you see a "9", which is what the 666 hand symbol really is, you're seeing an ancient gang sign that shouts........."what you think is different here isn't different at all. It just looks different to give you an illusion of choice, but the outcome is always the same no matter what....and that outcome is always what we want."

No, what I'm shouting is, "This is about the only shape your hand can make when you pick something up between your thumb and forefinger, you fucking loon."

But that kind of argument never stops people like this, who call Fidget Spinners "the Devil's Yo-Yo."  Which, you have to admit, would make a killer name for a band.

I'm happy to say that there are Christians who are pointing this out for the nonsense it is.  Over at the site Hello Christian, they address the question "Are Fidget Spinners Satanic?" directly, and come to the answer, "No."  They do warn, however, that Spinners are dangerous, citing an incident wherein a boy threw his Spinner into the air and it came back down and hit him in the head.

Of course, the same results could have been achieved with a bowling ball, and I don't see anyone warning people about the dangers of those.

Anyhow: there's nothing evil about Fidget Spinners, and I hope that the wingnuts who are currently running around in circles making alarmed little squeaking noises will calm down.  It'll only be temporary, of course, because tonight they'll be back online, scouring the interwebz for another thing to freak out about.  It's a losing battle.

Skin deep

We were talking in my AP Biology class yesterday about the potential for skin damage from exposure to ultraviolet light.  Later in the day,  a student sent me a YouTube video called "How the Sun Sees You" that uses a UV-sensitive camera to see the sun damage on people's skin (and also illustrates that sunscreen does work, given that it looks an opaque black when filmed in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum).

All of which is well and good, but then I scrolled down to the comments section, which I know I should never do, and I found the following.  Spelling and grammar are as written, so I don't use up my "sic" allotment all in one go:

First off everyone has to stop believing that Melanin a.k.a. Carbon protects us from u.v. rays.  Carbon in the skin actually absorbs ultraviolet rays in a process that is now being called Ultrafast Internal Conversion.  Not one person has mentioned this..  The Elemental Compound for C Carbon is 666.  6 Electrons 6 Neutrons 6 Protons.  The origins of the 666.  The Catholics call It "the mark of beast" which is code for "mark of the our destroyers"  We all know that Carbon is the building blocks of life.  Carbon defines life therefore us Moors who are incorrectly referred to as "Black People" are the building blocks for Human life and biology.  This is true because no one else on the planet possesses the levels of Carbon in the body and brain quite like The Moors. (remember a moor is a black man or women)  In other words, us "Black people" are and forever will be The genetic template for the Human being.  Black ppl we are Human In it's truest form.  Of course there are plenty lies circulating the damn truth.  All non black people are merely human hybrids.  All races were genetically engineered from the supreme Human.  Clones much?  DARK POWER!!

So naturally I thought, "Well, that's a viewpoint I've never run into before."  (I also thought, "I hope this person is on medication" and "this is what it looks like when someone fails high school biology.")  But I did some research, and I found out that this is not the claim of a lone wacko.  This is the claim of a large number of wackos.  There's a whole school of thought (although I hesitate to use either word in this context) that revolves around the contention that people of African descent are superior because they have lots more carbon in them.

Take, for example, the page "Carbon & Melanin Secret of Secrets" over at the amazingly wacky site Godlike Productions.  In it, we find a wall of text that can be summarized as follows:

• Carbon is some seriously mystical stuff.  Besides the 6-6-6 thing mentioned above, it has four bonds that are shaped like a swastika.
• It also has something to do with the Buddhist "om," the Christian cross, and the Greek letters alpha and omega.
• Melanin is dark.  So is carbon.  Therefore melanin is carbon.
• Melanin is the "key to life" and is the "organizing molecule for living systems."
• Melanin is an ordinary conductor, a semiconductor, and a superconductor.  Don't ask me how it can be all three at the same time.
• Satan and Saturn are the same thing.
• Because the symbol for carbon is C, and the symbol for cytosine (one of the nitrogenous bases in DNA) is C, they're the same thing.  It couldn't be because in English, both of them have names that start with "c."
• Some other weird stuff about DMT and alchemy and prophecies that frankly I couldn't read because my eyes were spinning.

I read this whole thing with an expression like this:

What bothers me most about all of this is not that crazy people are making shit up.  That's what crazy people do, after all.  What bothers me is that apparently this claim has gotten some traction amongst people who want justification for believing that dark-skinned humans are intrinsically better than light-skinned humans, and who cannot even be bothered to take a look at the Wikipedia page for melanin, wherein we find that melanin isn't carbon.  It contains carbon, but after all, so does chalk, which last I looked was white.

The ironic thing is that when you talk to actual anthropologists and geneticists, most of 'em will tell you that the biological basis for race is tenuous at best.  Race is a cultural phenomenon, not a genetic one.  If you want your mind blown on this topic, consider the following quote from Alan Goodman:

Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much genetic variation showed up at three different levels. 

One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-groups within that purported race. 

So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua? 

And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic diversity of the world. 

Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one to say that race actually explains very little of human variation...

But, for the most part, you know that the basic human plan is really the basic human plan, and is found almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical cues... And, in fact, though, these may happen to be a few of the things that do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story is told by looking at genes under the skin.

Which should really inform us about how we treat people who don't look like us, shouldn't it?  We're all human.  We have a vast overlap in our genetics, even if you choose two people who look very different from each other.  And at our cores, most of us want the same things -- food, shelter, love, security, compassion.  When we start claiming that people of different ethnicities deserve different levels of privilege, we're engaging in a mindset that is not only destructive, it's counterfactual.

And that applies to all racists equally, whether they're neo-nazis or cranks who claim that anyone without much melanin in their skin is an evil hybrid clone.

A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, caffeine, and various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, which misleadingly does not list "demons" on the ingredient list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no.  Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost... People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks. Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal.  Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit just yesterday saying that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forté, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive. 

Tax return of the Beast

Well, it's happened again.  Another person has refused to handle a piece of official paper because it was stamped with the number 666.

In November 2011 we had the story about Georgia factory worker Billy E. Hyatt, who refused to wear a badge that said "666 Days Without An Accident."  He was fired, but basically claimed that his soul was more important than his job -- apparently he really, truly thought that if he pinned the badge on, then Satan would have burst upward though the floor, spurting flame and laughing maniacally, and dragged him off to hell.  (You have to wonder how he explained that this didn't happen to all of the hundreds of other workers who were cheerfully wearing the Mark of the Beast for the day.)

Hyatt, incidentally, was eventually rehired with back pay, after a court found that the company he worked for had infringed upon his religious freedom.

Now, though, we have federal law involved, and you have to wonder how this will play out.

Just last week, Clarksville (Tennessee) maintenance worker Walter Slonopas quit his job and is saying he will refuse to file his taxes after receiving a W-2 form stamped with the number 666.  [Source]  Slonopas, a born-again Christian (as if I even needed to mention that), said that the choice was go to work, or go to hell.

"If you accept that number, you sell your soul to the devil," he said in an interview with The Tennessean.

Interestingly, this isn't Slonopas' first encounter with the Number Of Evil.  When he was hired in April 2011, and was given a number to use to clock in, he was supposed to be given the number 668, but the human resources department at his company (Contech Casting, Inc.) miswrote it as 666.  Slonopas complained, and was reissued a new number.

Man, Satan must really want this guy.

Unlike in the Hyatt case, Slonopas says that he doesn't want his job back, because if he took it it would appear that he valued his job more than his faith.  "God is more important than money," he said, and added that he was sure that god would take care of him and his wife until he could find a new job.

As usual, I'm of two minds as to how to respond to all of this.  On the one hand, I'm all for the basic rule of "don't be an asshole."  Don't go out of your way to upset people, just on principle; respect others' rights to think differently than you do.

But there comes a time, I think, that people have to stop caving in to the crazy demands of zealots that everyone has to handle their Bronze Age mythology with kid gloves, that we all have to act as if it were true.  When will we start simply demanding that people act rationally?  "I'm sorry, Mr. Slonopas, if you don't file your taxes, you will be fined, just like any other American -- just because your W-2 was stamped with a number that gives you the heebie-jeebies doesn't mean that superstition trumps US tax law."

But my fear is that we, as a society, are still too afraid of religion to let that happen.  Courts, although designed to be as fair as possible, are run by humans and are subject to cultural and societal pressures.  If I were a betting man, I'd bet that any challenge to Mr. Slonopas' stance in the legal system will be found in his favor, on the basis of "religious freedom."

Which, despite my general "don't be an asshole" philosophy, leaves me feeling like this:

Microchips, Obamacare, and the Mark of the Beast

Well, another election season is over, and Barack Obama has been given another four years to enact his vision of where the United States should head.  He won't have much time to rest on his laurels -- he's got a lot of work to do if he's going to achieve his chief goals, including creating one million new manufacturing jobs, recruiting 100,000 new science and math teachers, reducing oil imports by half, reducing the deficit, ending US involvement in Afghanistan, and implanting the Mark of the Beast on every American citizen so that he can initiate the End Times as predicted in biblical prophecy.

Well, okay, the last one isn't one of his stated goals, per se.  But you'd think it was, to listen to Paul Begley, the evangelical preacher who in a video clip entitled "Americans!  Prepare to Be Microchipped!" claims that there is a provision in Obamacare to implant RFID chips in everyone, and that corresponds to the Mark of the Beast described in Revelation 13:16-18: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.  Here is wisdom.  Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

The fact is, Obamacare contains no such provision; there is a provision to microchip pacemakers and other implantable medical devices, so that a patient's medical information could be quickly accessible via a scan if the device fails.  But Begley says that no, this isn't all, that this is just a smokescreen for the actual intent of the bill, which is to tag everyone in the US, and ultimately, everyone in the world.

The whole "Mark of the Beast" thing is mighty popular with evangelicals.  It's been discussed by biblical literalists for decades, resulting in speculation that it corresponds to credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, GPS tags in cellphones, UPC codes on items in stores, scannable chips in passports, and a variety of other things.  And once they get the wind up about this stuff, they tend to get awfully suspicious.  One guy I know seriously believes that the DMV is using a microchip implanted in your driver's license to follow your every move, as if (1) they had the staff and technology actually to accomplish this for every person in the US who has a driver's license, (2) the workers in the DMV actually cared where you are on a minute-to-minute basis,  and (3) they didn't have better things to do, such as attending surliness training seminars and taking important coffee breaks when the line for license renewal gets too long.

In any case, the key point, to evangelicals, is that some person will end up getting the number "666" as his/her Mark, and that person will be the Antichrist, or the Beast with Seven Horns, or the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, or possibly all three at the same time.  It's hard to be sure, frankly.  I've read the Book of Revelation more than once, and my general impression is that it sounds like the result of a bad acid trip, so I'm not entirely certain I understand the finer details.  Be that as it may, the evangelicals take the whole 666 thing pretty seriously, to the point where a worker in Georgia last year refused to wear a badge for a day that said "666 days without an accident" for fear that he would be nabbed instantaneously by Satan and dragged off to hell.  (He was fired, sued the company, and was then rehired with back pay.)

Paul Begley, though, thinks he has the whole thing figured out, and that the End Times will start in March 2013 with Obamacare mandating chip implantation in everyone.  (If you looked at the link, note the highly alarming picture of someone using a barcode reader on a blank-eyed guy's forehead.  If that doesn't convince you... well, don't make me use the word "sheeple" in your general direction.)

So, anyhow.  I hope all of you people who voted for Obama knew what you were getting into.  If you don't, you'll figure out all too soon -- March 2013 is right around the corner.  That is, of course, provided we survive the Mayan Apocalypse on December 21, 2012, an event I am positively looking forward to.  (I'm thinking of getting a shirt to wear on December 21 that says, "The Mayans Had An Apocalypse, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.")  So I guess this gives us something to look forward to after the Apocalypse is over -- at least those of us who aren't eaten by zombies, or whatever other special offers the Mayans have in mind.  Me, I'm already considering my strategy, and I think I have a good one, which I have outlined below.