The kakistocracy

Today I'd like to look at the state of Arizona, where this week a 4-2 decision by the state's Supreme Court made abortions illegal in any circumstance except to save a woman's life -- practically speaking, making them illegal period, because few doctors will want to risk their livelihood (or their freedom) based on whether a court will decide a particular abortion was a medical necessity.

This decision caused the state law to revert to a code passed in 1864 -- decades before women even had the right to vote.  It's an interesting historical filigree that the man who pushed the 1864 law through in the first place, then Speaker of the House for the Arizona Territory W. Claude Jones, was a notorious adulterer, philanderer, liar, and pedophile (he openly called himself a "pursuer of nubile females"), whose victims included a twelve-year old Mexican girl and a fifteen-year-old who had recently arrived with her parents from Texas.  The decision by the court is also irrespective of the fact that such restrictions are wildly unpopular; in a 2023 poll, only thirteen percent of Americans responded that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and just over sixty percent stated that the United States Supreme Court's Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v. Wade) was "a bad thing."

What's striking about this is that despite the fact that the majority of American citizens are at least pro-choice in some circumstances, they keep electing people who are somewhere to the right of Tomás de Torquemada.  Take, for example, Arizona State Senator Anthony Kern, who crowed, "Looks like our prayer team stirred up some God-haters," and led a prayer circle on the floor of the Senate in which -- I shit you not -- he "spoke in tongues."

Is it just me, or do these people sound like this?

A point I've made (many times) here in Skeptophilia is that I have no issue with what you believe, as long as you don't use those beliefs as a hammer to force others to comply.  On the other hand, I am under no obligation to refrain from saying those beliefs are ridiculous, especially when you make a point of exhibiting them in public.

Put another way: I always try to respect people, but ideas only deserve respect if they make sense and honor other people's rights.

A few days ago I saw a post on social media where a guy took exception to those of us who were making fun of Rapture-believers who thought the total eclipse on Monday was a sign of the End Times.  "Most Rapture-believers don't think that," he said (despite the fact that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene stated that the eclipse was a "sign from God to repent"), then sniffed, "People who are making fun of Rapture-believers are actually making fun of themselves."

Um, no.  We're actually making fun of the Rapture-believers.  If you hold silly beliefs, you can't blame other people for laughing.

The whole problem escalates when these people are elected to public office, and start using their bizarre worldviews to drive policy.  For example, a law in Louisiana just passed the House which would require all public school classrooms to post the Ten Commandments.  (And before you @ me about how the Ten Commandments are just guides to good behavior, and apply regardless of whether you're religious or not, allow me to remind you that the First Commandment is "I am the Lord thy God; you shall have no other gods before me.")  Another proposed bill in my former home state, HB777, would make it a criminal offense for a librarian to belong to the American Library Association -- because libraries have long stood for free access to information, which is absolutely anathema to the Far Right.  (Also because the ALA has championed the availability of books representing racial diversity and LGBTQ+ representation; apparently we can't have the world knowing there are people who aren't straight white Christians.)

I can only hope that Americans are becoming aware of the extent to which people who proudly espouse loony beliefs have taken control of the government, and that this will galvanize voters to turn out for the election this November.  I'm not talking about true conservatives (people like former congressman Joe Walsh) -- although I may not agree with him about all that much, I could have a reasonable discussion with him.  But I have zero common ground with irrational religious ideologues like current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and snarling hypocrites like Lauren Boebert, who publicly stated that she's all about "family values" and is "tired of this separation of church and state junk" but who apparently thinks it's A-OK to give her boyfriend a handjob in a public theater.

We have allowed ourselves to be controlled by a group of men and women whose outsized impact on our laws far exceeds their numbers.  We can turn this around -- but only if people get themselves to the polls.  We don't need elected officials like Anthony Kern babbling, "Ickety ackety ooh aah aah," then claiming those are God's words saying what a Very Good Boy He Is.  We need people capable of reasoned discourse, who -- even if they disagree -- can present their arguments based on facts and logic, not on some bizarre set of beliefs that make about as much sense as claiming that the universe is being controlled by a Giant Green Bunny From The Andromeda Galaxy.

Which means that we need to vote.  All of us.  Our system is far from perfect, but this year the choice is stark.  (Maybe it always is.)  The Greeks had a word for the direction we're heading: a kakistocracy, government by the worst, the most unfit, or the most unscrupulous.  Remember the quote from Plato: "The price of apathy toward public affairs is to be ruled by those who are actively evil."

Or, in the case of Anthony Kern, flat-out insane.  

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Dry times

Okay, just yesterday I said that I was gonna try to keep it light and stop focusing on dismal developments like pandemics and climate catastrophe.  But a paper released just yesterday in the journal Science has forced my attention away from cheerful topics back into the more serious realm of how our short-sightedness is driving large parts of the planet toward being completely uninhabitable.

The paper, "Large Contribution from Anthropogenic Warming to an Emerging North American Megadrought," by a team led by A. Park Williams of Columbia University, has an alarming enough title, but when you read the paper itself, you find that "alarming" is kind of the understatement of the century.  Here's a sampler:

Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change.  We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000–2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought.  The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming.  Anthropogenic trends in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation estimated from 31 climate models account for 47% (model interquartiles of 35 to 105%) of the 2000–2018 drought severity, pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.

There's a lot to unpack here.  First, not only is the southwestern quarter of the United States heading toward a drought worse than any in recorded history, close to 50% of its severity is directly due to human activity.  On top of that is another thing the study uncovered -- that we were misled (as it were) by the fact that the twentieth century was unusually wet, encouraging widespread settlement by humans and huge investments into agriculture in the region.  "The twentieth century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available," said study co-author Benjamin Cook, also of Columbia University, in a press release.  "It goes to show that studies like this are not just about ancient history.  They’re about problems that are already here."

"Earlier studies were largely model projections of the future," added study lead author Williams. "We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now.  We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts."

[Image courtesy of Science, Williams et al.]

Drought always brings to mind the struggles faced by farmers confronted with the vagaries of weather, but in this case, the problem is orders of magnitude worse than that.  The press release from Columbia University (linked above) mentioned that Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- two of the largest reservoirs in the southwestern United States -- are already seeing a dramatic drop in the water levels.  These provide a significant proportion of the agricultural and drinking water to a broad swath of the Southwest.  What happens when these and others are functionally dry -- too low to allow for withdrawing water for any purpose?

A combination of short-sightedness, Pollyanna-style optimism, and a stretch of unusually wet years in the twentieth century led to coastal California and sun-belt cities like Phoenix and Tucson being some of the most heavily-settled areas in the United States, and now they're in the situation that if there's a true megadrought -- something far worse and longer-lasting than the piece of it we've already seen -- there could be millions of people without adequate drinking water.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to state that the federal and state governments are simply not equipped to face a disaster on that scale.

I hate to focus on negative shit, I really do, but in this case it's too important to ignore.  I'm back to the James Burke quote I mentioned in the post two days ago -- about how we pay for insurance for other much less likely eventualities without batting an eyelash, but when it comes to insurance against climate collapse, for some reason this is considered ridiculous.  The media hasn't helped, especially disinformation specialists like Fox News who have been hammering on climate change being some kind of evil liberal hoax for at least twenty years.  Now, however, we're paying the price, which will only get steeper the longer we pretend it isn't happening.

Consider, for example, the impact of Donald Trump's firing the pandemic response team because he didn't want to spend money on something that hadn't happened yet.

So we need to sound the alarm.  Loudly.  Studies like this one should be on the desk of every lawmaker in the United States.  Yeah, some of them are likely to ignore it -- I don't think a two-by-four to the head would wake up someone as catastrophically dense as James "Snowball" Inhofe, for example -- but the tide has to turn.

Because if you think things are bad now, my sense is you ain't seen nothin' yet.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Alien ranch sale

If you think you've got problems, at least you're not trying to get rid of a huge Arizona ranch at a $1.5 million loss because you're sick and tired of being attacked by aliens.

At least that's the claim of John Edmonds, whose land in Buckeye, Arizona, about an hour and a half from Phoenix, has (he says) been the site of a huge amount of extraterrestrial activity.  He and his wife foiled an attempted kidnapping, and over the twenty years they've been there, he's killed eighteen "Grays."

With a samurai sword.

I'm torn between thinking this is idiotic and completely badass.  I mean, if I knew I was under siege by hostile aliens, I'd probably arm myself with more than a sword.  Especially if I lived in Arizona, where everyone over the age of two is packing heat.  And you'd also think the aliens would be armed, wouldn't you?  Laser pistols are a lot more accurate, long-range, than samurai swords, unless you're a Stormtrooper, in which case it probably doesn't matter either way.

What's oddest about the samurai sword thing is that the guy says he owns an AK-47, which he used to defend his family when the aliens tried to abduct his wife.  She barely escaped -- "it came down like a cone of light," Edmonds says, "and she began to rise up in to the cone...  So I grabbed my AK-47 with a double banana clip in it, went outside, and opened up."  So apparently if your spouse is being levitated into the air by a tractor beam, the solution is to fire a gun in some random direction.

So why he doesn't use the AK-47 to defend himself against the aliens rather than a sword, I don't know.  You may also be wondering why, if he's killed all those aliens, where the bodies are.  I know I was.  If I killed an alien (in self-defense, of course; in the interest of interstellar amity, if they Come In Peace, I'm more than happy to have them here), I'd definitely keep the body as evidence that I wasn't just a raving loon.  Edmonds says that the bodies vanish, which sounds awfully convenient.  He does have a photo in the video showing what he claims is alien blood from one of his kills, which makes me wonder why if the bodies disappear, the blood doesn't as well.

One of those extraterrestrial biological mysteries, I guess.  But Edmonds goes on to say that you have to "cut off the head, and disconnect the antennae, or they instantly 'phone home' -- even with a razor-sharp sword, it's nearly impossible to decapitate them in one swing."

As far as why the aliens are targeting him, he says it's because his ranch is so large that it gives the aliens room to "open up portals... that are large enough for triangular crafts, wings, or orb-like shapes to pass through."

"These objects leave the space around the ranch, and other objects pass through the portals in the other direction," Edmonds adds.

Despite his success at fighting off the invaders, Edmonds hasn't come away unscathed.  He says the Grays gave him scars (which you can see on the video I linked above), not to mention "symptoms like radiation poisoning."  More troubling, though, is his claim that the previous owners "simply disappeared -- all their stuff was still in the house, leading to speculation that they were in fact abducted by extraterrestrials."  So I guess it's understandable that he's fed up, although it does bring up the question of who sold him the ranch.  He and his wife are selling, and are asking five million dollars for it -- a million and a half less than what he says it's valued at.

If I had the money, I'd definitely buy it.  For one thing, I love Arizona and have always wanted to live in the desert.  Especially now, when we're sitting here in upstate New York in the middle of the "polar vortex," and the current wind chill is -25 F.  For another, I would love to have first-hand evidence of extraterrestrial life.  I'd appreciate it if they wouldn't abduct my wife, though, because I kind of am attached to her, you know?

But hey, if they Come In Peace, they're welcome.  I wouldn't even object if they wanted to take over the government.  Couldn't be worse than what we currently have.

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In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Woo-woo world update

Yesterday's political post resulted in five people calling me a "libtard snowflake" (or the equivalent), a recommendation to "shut the fuck up until I get past my brainwashing," a person who said he was going to laugh after November 6 when "the leftist assholes like [me] are going down in flames," and one email that I was a "partisan hack working for the disinformation specialists."  The result is that today, we'll consider a different set of issues, to wit:

• Do ghosts hug each other in the afterlife?
• If you were strapped for cash, could you count on an angel to give you a hundred bucks?
• What would you do if you saw a UFO that made "sci-fi noises" and made your dog "go mental?"

Apparently the answers are, respectively:

• Yes.
• Yes, and your two pals would also get a hundred bucks each.
• Report it to the local newspaper, who would treat it as fact.  Of course.

You're probably wondering about the details by now, so allow me to elaborate.  The first story comes out of Lincolnshire, England, specifically Revesby Abbey, a Cistercian monastery that dates back to 1143.  Ron Bowers was conducting a "paranormal investigation" of the Abbey because of its reputation for being haunted, and he snapped a photograph that should be encouraging to any of us who are not looking forward to the idea of an afterlife with no cuddling.  Here's the photo:

Which looks, at a stretch, like a couple hugging.  So Bowers turned the image into its negative, because there's nothing like noodling with the image if it doesn't show you what you want:

And I have to admit it's a little spooky, although as I've pointed out before, pareidolia works even on people who know what it is and realize that their sensory/perceptive systems are being fooled.

Bowers, on the other hand, is all in.  "I thought I could hear a rustling in bushes behind me before the capture of what looks like an embracing couple which led me to think it could be someone in the physical [sic]," Bowers said.  "At first, I thought it was one figure, but within a few seconds I realized it could be two – one with an arm around the other.  The arm is very prominent, and it looks like two people embracing, it looks like they are in love...  It’s nice to believe that love continues.  It’s a lovely picture and who knows maybe there is a love story there.  For me it’s a little more of a confirmation that our lives continue or that our energies can return to our favorite places.  If it is possible that we are energy, it could return to our favorite places, like homes, pubs, maybe schools and other locations.  I don’t believe I have ever had something so intimate as that picture."

The second story comes from Dreamy Draw Mountain in Arizona, where three college students from Phoenix were on a hike a few weeks ago, and had a big surprise.  The students, Allisa Miller, Jen Vickman, and Kassi Sanchez, had started out the day poorly, sleeping through their alarms, and getting up to find that it was hot out.

Which makes me wonder what they expected, in Phoenix.

"Like we didn’t want to hike," said Sanchez, whom I dearly hope isn't majoring in communication.  "Like something we had to do almost forced fun."

Despite this devastatingly tragic start, they persevered where weaker individuals would have given up, and made it up the mountain trail.  And when they got near the top, they saw...

... Jesus.

Or an angel, or something.  They don't seem all that sure, themselves.  "We just see a silhouette of this man, it looks like he has long hair and he’s in a robe," said Miller.  "He was like right there on the top of the mountain.  We were all just kinda shocked, we just kinda sat there."

So they went up toward him, but he vanished.  Near where he was, they found an envelope stuck between two rocks.  They opened it, and found a long, rambling note quoting the bible and various Christian rock singers, signed, I shit you not, "J."  And with the note were three one-hundred-dollar bills, one for each of them.

It's a miracle!  A visitation from Jesus, who evidently stopped by the Pearly Gates National Bank on his way to Arizona!

Or maybe it's a poorly-thought-out publicity stunt.  I'll let you decide.

The last story comes from Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, England, where an "unnamed eyewitness" reports seeing a UFO close-up while out walking his dog.

"The UFO was hovering about 50 foot [sic] away from me, but we could not smell fuel or anything, I was shocked that it did not hit our house," he told a reporter for the Stroud News & Journal.  "It seemed like it was trying to fly below the radar, so it could avoid being scanned - at the time my dog was going mental at it... it looked like a huge tube with intricate ship-style rivets...  When I came across it coming through the forest I thought it must be a plane or hot air balloon, but it was clearly not and it was making sci-fi-like sounds.  Before it shot off into the clouds at immense speed the engines turned bright white, I've never seen anything like it."

Although he had his cellphone with him, he was "too shocked to take a photograph" of it.  Because of course he was.

This is apparently the second UFO sighting near Stonehouse in the past two weeks, which makes me wonder why they have all the luck.  I would love to see a UFO, or a ghost or Bigfoot or whatnot, and here I sit.  And I guarantee that I wouldn't miss an opportunity to take a photograph if I did.  I'd even remember to take my cellphone camera off the "auto-blur" setting.

So that's the news from the Wide World of Woo-Woo this week.  Affectionate ghosts, cash-dispensing messiahs, and UFOs that make "sci-fi-like" sounds and are held together with rivets.  I think we can all agree that this is preferable to a lot of silly stories about politics and neuroscience and genetics and so on.  Stories about ghosts and angels and UFOs don't result in my getting death threats or being called a "fucking ultra-left-wing looser [sic]."  Which is a little off-putting.  If you know any ghosts, you might want to mention that I could use a hug.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

The Phoenix devil

At present I've been sent a link five times to a claim that someone near Phoenix, Arizona took a photograph of Satan.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the photo:

A couple of the people who sent it to me appended messages along the lines of, "Hoo boy.  Look at what people are claiming now."  Two, however, had more noteworthy commentary, which I reproduce in toto below.

Photo submitter #1:

You like to scoff about the evil in the world, and claim that our souls aren't in peril.  Satan walks among us.  Unbelievers like you will be the first to be dragged to Hell.

Photo submitter #2:

People like Mr. Skeptic doubt evidence for the supernatural when its [sic] right in front of your face.  I wonder what would happen if you saw this with your own eyes.  Would you keep doubting then?  It's easy for Armchair Skeptics to sit in their living rooms and say no, but as soon as you go out in the world you learn that its [sic] not that simple.

Well, predictably, I'm not impressed.  To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson (who in the original quote was talking about UFOs) there probably is an "add demon" function on Photoshop.  My general opinion is pretty consistent with the following:

However, the bigger question is why I'm a Scoffing Armchair Skeptic about such matters more has to do with Ockham's Razor.  Ockham's Razor is rightly called a rule of thumb -- something which isn't 100% true but is still a pretty damn good guide to understanding.  The original formulation comes from William of Ockham, a 14th century monk and philosopher, who phrased it as "Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate" (Don't multiply entities without necessity), but a more modern phrasing is "All other things being equal, of competing hypotheses, choose the one that requires the least assumptions."  (It must be pointed out that Ockham himself was hardly a scientific rationalist; he's also the one who said, "Only faith gives us access to theological truths.  The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover."  So while Ockham's Razor is a great idea, I doubt I'd have agreed with him on much else.)

In any case, the Demon of Phoenix certainly is more easily explainable as a hoax than it is that Satan for some reason descended upon southern Arizona, posed for a blurry snapshot, and then disappeared without doing anything else or being seen by anyone else.  So the second submitter is, in a sense, quite right; I would be much more likely to believe that it was real if I did see it with my own eyes.  Just looking at the photograph, here in my Comfortable Armchair, I'm still saying "Nah."

Of course, being dragged to hell would do it, too.  Nothing like a little fire and brimstone to convince one of the reality of a situation.  But until that happens, you can still put me in the "Mr. Skeptic" column.

Gays, god, and forest fires

Many of you have undoubtedly been following the news of the horrific wildfires, last week in Colorado and this week in Arizona.  Thus far these fires have cost millions of dollars in damages and at least 21 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite firefighting team who died this weekend in a blaze near Phoenix.

These fires are thought to have multiple causes.  The southwest saw record or near-record temperatures last week, coupled with low rainfall.  Some people also attribute the severity of the fires, especially in Colorado, to the population explosion of the pine bark beetle, which has killed huge stands of ponderosa pines all through the Rocky Mountains.  But in so attributing the fires to these reasons, people are ignoring the role of the most powerful natural-disaster-creating force known to man:

Gays.

Yes, gays.  According to Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner, the recent fires are god's wrath against the people of Colorado for their liberal attitudes toward homosexuality.

In an interview on Generations Radio, the two ministers were clearly in agreement about what was going on here.  Said Buehner, "Why Colorado Springs?  Understand that Colorado itself is a state that is begging for God's judgment.  How did we do that?...  Our legislative session opened up this year and their very first order of business, their most pressing order of business..."  Swanson then interrupted with, "... they could hardly wait, they could hardly wait..."  And Buehner finished, "Like the first day, was to pass a Civil Union Bill, which is an uncivil bill."

And, of course, the whole thing wouldn't be complete without some mention of gay guys kissing, in this case State Senate Majority Leader Mark Ferrendino kissing his partner when they found out that the Civil Union Bill had passed, a photograph of which appeared on the front page of the Denver Post.  Said Swanson:

"When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago?  Does God read the Denver Post?  Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post?  He gets it.  God gets the Denver Post."

Delivered right to His Almighty Doorstep, I'm sure.

Then, the question came up as to why, if god was trying to smite Colorado for supporting gays, the fires hit the religious and conservative areas near Colorado Springs, rather than far more liberal bastions of Denver or Boulder.  Buehner said, "Judgment begins in the House of God," as if that made complete sense, and added that the fact that god hadn't yet destroyed the entire state was an "act of grace."
 
What strikes me about all of this is that god, for all of his supposedly omnipotent smiting power, so often chooses to smite parts of the world with disasters that they pretty much already had happening beforehand.  He sends earthquakes to places that are on fault lines and near subduction zones, hurricanes to the Gulf Coast and US Atlantic Seaboard, tornadoes to the American midwest, and catastrophic forest fires to the southwestern United States and the arid parts of southern Europe.  Funny thing, that.  If I didn't know better, I would think that this meant that these events are purely... natural.

The other thing that crosses my mind, here, is that if gays really are behind all of this, maybe they should flex their muscles a little.  Hey, if you have this kind of power, why not enjoy it, especially since god's aim seems to be a bit off?  You guys could be the next generation of Mad Scientists -- but instead of rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally before firing up your Laser Cannons, all you do is stand around and kiss, and god smites, say, Omaha.

It'd be even better if you could figure out how to target this force a little better.  Wouldn't it be cool if, for example, you could kiss and have god send a tornado to destroy the Westboro Baptist Church?  If I thought that would happen, I would happily kiss a guy, and I'm not even gay.

So anyhow, that's today's news from the Wacko Fringe Religion Department.  As I've pointed out before, however crazy this stuff sounds to nonbelievers -- and even, I hope, to most sensible Christians -- it really is completely consistent with the behavior of god as laid out in the Old Testament.  So these guys, however they seem like they're in dire need of jackets with extra long sleeves, are actually just preaching what the Holy Book says.

I'm not saying it's sensible, mind you.  I still think the folks who believe this stuff are crazy as bedbugs.  All I'm saying is that it's consistent.

Anyhow, I guess I'll wind things up here.  It's time for me to go take a shower and get dressed, which will offer me several more opportunities to break some Old Testament rules.  Maybe if I wear a shirt woven from two different kinds of thread (such an important rule that it was mentioned twice, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11) then god will smite Ann Coulter.

Hey, it's worth a try.