A glowing report from Georgia

It may sound biased of me, but I think one thing should be an ironclad requirement for holding public office: an adequate understanding of science.

Yes, I know that politics doesn't always connect directly to science.  But I would respectfully submit that science as a means of knowledge, as a way of sorting fact from fiction, is such a critical capacity that no leader should be deficient in it.  Science teaches you a protocol for understanding evidence-based inference, which then can be applied to any area you like.

Add that to the fact that there are realms of policymaking that require an explicit understanding of science -- environmental, medical, and educational policy come to mind -- and this gives us a powerful reason to expect that our elected officials understand not only how science is done, but to have a basic grasp of its fundamental rules.

Instead, we have people like Georgia State RepresentativeTom Kirby (R-Loganville).

Kirby just introduced a bill into the Georgia House of Representatives that is specifically to prevent anyone from creating a glow-in-the-dark human/jellyfish hybrid.  Because evidently that's a thing that they do, down there in Georgia.  And not only do they do it, they do it often enough that Representative Kirby wants a law passed to put an end to the practice.

"We in Georgia are taking the lead on this issue," Kirby states on his website.  "Human life at all stages is precious including as an embryo.  We need to get out in front of the science and technology, before it becomes something no one wants.  The mixing of Human Embryos with Jellyfish cells to create a glow in the dark human, we say not in Georgia.  This bill is about protecting Human Life while maintaining good, valid research that does not destroy life."

What could have precipitated this?

My guess is that someone told Representative Kirby that researchers had experimented with inserting a gene for a jellyfish fluorescence protein into the embryos of cats, creating kittens with phosphorescent skin.

Glow kitties [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then, Kirby asked one of his aides, "But... could they do this with human embryos?"  And the aide said, "It's possible."  And Kirby said, "We've got to put a stop to this!"

What bugs me about this is that not only does Representative Kirby apparently have little understanding of how the process works (it has nothing to do with "mixing embryos with jellyfish cells"), he doesn't understand the point of making the glow cats in the first place.  It wasn't just to create demonic-looking cats (can you imagine waking up at night to see one of those staring at you?).  It also wasn't because scientists were thinking, "Ha ha!  Now we can create an army of Glowing Humans that will take over the world!"

The reason this research was done was primarily medical.  The problem with genetic modification is getting an inserted gene to express at the right time and place; so learning how to control the process, generating an animal that not only expressed the glowing protein, but expressed it in sufficient quantities and in one tissue only (the skin), showed that we can potentially do analogous procedures in humans.

Note that I say "analogous," not "identical."  This kind of targeted gene therapy could eliminate protein-deficiency genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency), and hemophilia.  It works on the same principle; insert the gene into human cells, along with a robust tissue-specific promoter that allows the gene to turn on in the right tissue type.  If all goes well, we could see life-threatening genetic disorders not simply treated, but eliminated.

Of course, I doubt that Representative Kirby understands that.  Anyone who is at the "human-jellyfish hybrid" stage of science comprehension is light years away from getting even the basics of how genetic research works.  

And Kirby himself admitted he didn't know what the hell he was talking about.  "I've had people tell me it is [possible], but I haven't verified that for sure," he told reporters.  "It's time we either get in front of it, or we're going to be chasing our tails."

Can I just ask you one question, Representative Kirby?  Why the fuck would you propose a bill regarding something you "haven't verified" and clearly don't have sufficient IQ to understand?

But members of Congress seldom let those sorts of considerations stand in their way.  So now we have a bill on the floor of congress in Georgia to prevent scientists from creating something that (1) they didn't intend to create anyhow, and (2) is impossible to do in the way the bill describes.  Good use of our policymakers' time and taxpayer dollars, isn't it?

I know it must be hard to be an elected official.  It's not only a job I would never want, but one for which I am clearly not qualified.  But I do have one thing going for me; when I don't know what I'm talking about, I generally shut the hell up.  

Not so, apparently, if you're in politics.  In politics, you're allowed to have an opinion about everything, whether or not you understand it.  And then you can use that opinion to craft legislation.  Once more convincing me of the necessity of demanding, as a nation, that our leaders have at least a basic comprehension of science before they start interfering with laws that govern how it's done.

Atheism, anti-theism, and murder

There's this thing called the No True Scotsman fallacy.  In its more innocent forms, it manifests as a redefinition of terms if you're challenged, to obviate the possibility of your being called out as wrong.  "That's not what I meant, here's what I meant," is the message.

A more sinister form occurs when the term you're redefining has to do with ethnic, political, or religious identification.  It's this use that gives the fallacy its name; "No true Scotsman would do such a thing!" And we're seeing it right now over and over among atheists, who are struggling to understand why One Of Our Own killed three young Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, the three Chapel Hill victims [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Craig Stephen Hicks, now under arrest for the murders, calls himself an "anti-theist," a term that many atheists relish.  They not only disbelieve in god themselves, they are actively against religion, and would prefer it if religious beliefs vanished entirely.  Hicks's Facebook posts ask questions such as "why radical Christians and radical Muslims are so opposed to each others’ influence when they agree about so many ideological issues?"  He has posted and tweeted texts and pictures mocking religion, and is a fan of The Atheist Experience and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

It's easy enough to say that psychopathy does not respect lines of belief, nationality, or ethnicity, and that's true enough.  But if that's all we say -- if we call Hicks a psychopath and then turn our attention elsewhere -- we've accepted a facile explanation, and (more importantly) lost an opportunity for self-reflection.

The truth of the matter is, atheists and anti-theists are sometimes vicious and hateful in their diatribes against religion, blurring the lines between railing against the beliefs and demonizing the believers.  Consider the following quotes:

Sam Harris: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death." 

Richard Dawkins: "[I] often say Islam is the greatest force for evil today." 

Lawrence Krauss: "Maybe these odious religious thugs [Islamic religious leaders in London] will get their comeuppance?" 

Christopher Hitchens: "The death toll [in the Middle East] is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped."

Now, I've deliberately taken these quotes out of context, but that's to illustrate part of the problem; when we speak or write publicly, that's going to happen.  It is absolutely critical for public figures to be as careful as humanly possible, because there are people reading our words, and reading into our words -- and then acting on them.

I still admire people like Harris, Dawkins, Krauss, and Hitchens for their unflinching demand that the tenets of religion be questioned and its hegemony no longer accepted as a given.  But words have consequences, and when someone like Craig Hicks reads quotes like the above, and decides that the upshot is that Muslims everywhere deserve death, it is incumbent upon us not to shrug it away, but to do some serious self-analysis.

People are complex animals, and there are some who use their religious beliefs to perpetrate actions that are truly evil.  ("Jihadi John" comes to mind, the British-accented ISIS member who has been filmed beheading innocent captives.)  Most of us, though, are not that one-sided.  We have our religious beliefs (or lack of them), and they incite us to some good actions, some bad actions, and a lot that are neutral.  Most of the time we act how we act for reasons that have nothing to do with our opinion about the existence of a deity.  Most importantly, we all come to our understanding of how the universe works in our own way; problems crop up only when people start demanding that everyone take the same path at the same time.

And truthfully, even as a diehard atheist myself, I have a hard time convincing myself that the world would be a better place if religion had never existed.  Yes, I know about all of the evils perpetrated in its name.  But would we really be better off without Bach's Mass in B Minor and Tallis's Spem in Alium?  Would the world be as beautiful without Yorkminster, Rouen Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral?  Would it have been better if the temples at Angkor Wat and Karnak and Tikal and Xochicalco had never been built?  Is the comfort and solace that many derive from their religious beliefs to be dismissed as inconsequential?

More to the point, if I object to the religious trying to force their beliefs on me, why should I have the right to eradicate the beliefs of others?

These are not easy questions to answer.  And whether Hicks was acting out of pure psychopathy, or because he took various anti-theists' words about the eradication of religion as a literal command, or for some other reason entirely, is perhaps impossible to determine.  One thing is clear, however; if Hicks's irreligion was the motive for his murder of three innocent young people, that action is just as morally reprehensible as Jihadi John's use of his religion to justify the murders he's committed.

What is equally clear, however, is that we atheists have just as much of a responsibility to be careful about how we speak and write as the religious do.  And taking the disingenuous route of saying that Craig Stephen Hicks is "No True Atheist" is a complete cop-out.

Note:  Deah Barakat, one of Hicks' victims, had begun a charity to pay for dental care for Middle Eastern refugees.  If you want to donate to his charity as a way of honoring his memory and that of his wife and her sister who were slain with him, here's the link.

Bias, served warm

Of all of the logical fallacies, the most completely maddening one is confirmation bias.

This term refers to the tendency of people to accept minimal or flawed evidence without question if it supports what they already believed to be true.  And the "Ha ha, see, I told you I was right" attitude it engenders makes me want to punch a wall.  I suppose I should be more forgiving, because we're all prone to it, in some measure; we all have our preconceived notions, our unexamined biases.

But when it starts driving global science policy, it's a much, much bigger problem.

Take the piece by Christopher Booker in The Telegraph that appeared last Friday, called "The Fiddling With Temperature Data is the Biggest Scientific Scandal Ever."  In it, Booker calls into question the temperature data that scientists are using to support a near-universal consensus on global climate change.

Booker writes:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified... 

...(Paul) Homewood (of the blog Not A Lot Of People Know That) checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three.  In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).  They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken.  Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

In other words: the scientists are manipulating the data to create a global warming panic (for no apparent reason I can see), and you shouldn't trust the data itself, because it's already been fudged:

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

This article has sorted people neatly into two camps.

I've already seen the Booker article posted several times on Twitter and Facebook, usually with a snide comment along the lines of, "See?  We told you that climate change wasn't real!"  The other half of the time it's posted along with commentary that is barely printable, by people who recognize that Booker is, to put not too fine a point on it, full of shit.

Here's how John Timmer, who unlike Christopher Booker actually has a Ph.D. in (and understands) science, deflated the "Biggest Scientific Scandal Ever" over at Ars Technica:

(T)he raw data from temperature measurements around the world aren't just dumped into global temperature reconstructions as-is. Instead, they're processed first. To the more conspiracy minded, you can replace "processed" with "fraudulently manipulated to make it look warmer." 

Why do they have to be processed at all? Because almost none of the records are continuous. Weather stations have moved, they've changed the time of day where the temperature-of-record is taken, and they've replaced old thermometers with more modern equipment. All of these events create discontinuities in the record of each location, and the processing is used to get things into alignment, creating a single, unified record.

Most importantly, does this processing reflect reality, or is it really a case of "suspicious one-way adjustments?"  Timmer writes:

Does it work? The team behind the Berkeley Earth project performed a different analysis in which they didn't process to create a single record and instead treated the discontinuities as breaks that defined separate temperature records. Their results were indistinguishable from the normal analysis... 

(P)eople like Booker (and the blogger whose work he's promoting) repeatedly try to take advantage of the public's limited attention to this topic. I happen to be aware of things like Berkeley Earth and the same arguments surfacing in 2013 simply because I covered them at the time and therefore read up on them in detail. The public won't have that knowledge, so Booker's claims can sound like a damaging revelation—and completely new. 

They're not. But I'll bet that if 2015 sets a temperature record, I'll be able to rerun this story with little more than the names changed.

But I'm sure Booker, who is a notorious climate change denier and who claims that "asbestos is as harmless as talcum powder" and that evolutionary biologists "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions," knows this.  It's not like such information isn't readily available.  I found Timmer's article simply by Googling "Booker global warming debunked."

Which means, of course, that Booker is being disingenuous at best, and lying outright at worst.

Map of summed worldwide temperature anomalies over the past 60 years.  Note the proportion of red to blue on this map.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But the most terrible part of the whole thing is, as Timmer points out, what it does to the perceptions of scientists by the general public.  The people who already tended to disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change, whether for reasons of political bias or because of ignorance of the science itself, now have another piece of ammunition to lob at any lawmaker who proposes trying to do something about it.  Confirmation bias here could well be devastating.

Because outside, the world is continuing to warm, the climate to destabilize, the environment to degrade.  2014 was (despite Booker's inaccuracy-ridden screed) the warmest year on record.  The jury isn't even out any more; the world is warming up, and human activities are the cause.  We have created a positive feedback loop with the environment, in the form of warming seas and warming tundra, which is releasing methane into the atmosphere, warming us further.  Some climate scientists think we've already passed the tipping point, so perhaps Booker and his ilk are right in saying that we shouldn't do anything about climate change -- not because it's nonexistent, but because it's already too late.

But I guess it all boils down to who you believe: a journalist with a degree in history (Booker) or the views of nearly all of the trained climatologists in the world.  And if that's even a choice, then we're talking about confirmation bias on a level that might itself set world records.

The loveliest of all was the unicorn

It is probably my own lack of tolerance, empathy, and compassion that makes me laugh out loud when I hear the "arguments" people use to support biblical literalism.

I mean, they can think what they want, right?  No amount of railing by the likes of me is going to rid the world of wacko counterfactual thinking, much as I'd like to live in my own fool's paradise in thinking I'm making a dent.  So why not just ignore 'em?

Of course, I can't, as you well know if you've been following this blog for very long.  The biblical literalists still have too powerful a voice in American politics to be dismissed as inconsequential.  It'd be nice if we were in a place where Bronze-Age mythology wasn't driving legislation and educational policy, but we're not there, yet.  That's why my laugh directed at two stories I ran across yesterday rings a little hollow.

In the first, we have Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, who despite her summa cum laude bachelor's degree in chemistry and a medical doctorate from Vanderbilt, believes in unicorns because the bible says they exist.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Apparently, since the bible mentions unicorns, to disbelieve in them is to "demean god's word."  She cites Isaiah 34:7 ("And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness"), a passage that I not only find funny because of its mention of a nonexistent animal, but because of the phrase "fat with fatness."  I think this is a pretty cool use of language, and one that we should emulate.  We should say that a cow is not just big, it's "big with bigness."  The night henceforth will be described as "dark with darkness."  The ocean is "wet with wetness."

But I digress.

Mitchell says that the unicorn could have existed because there are other one-horned animals, such as the rhinoceros and the narwhal.  (Yes, I know that the narwhal's spike is a tooth, not a horn.  Mitchell doesn't let facts intrude on her explanation, and neither should you.)  Then she goes on to say that the unicorn could have been the aurochs, an extinct species of wild ox.

But oxen have two horns, you're probably thinking.  Mitchell says that this can be explained because if you look at an ox from the side, it looks like it has only one horn.  There's archaeological evidence of this, in carvings of oxen from the side "on Ashurnasirpal II’s palace relief and Esarhaddon’s stone prism," and lo, those carvings show oxen in profile with only one horn visible, as hath been revealed by Dr. Mitchell.

This ox also hath wings, which may be a problem for Dr. Mitchell's argument.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You have to wonder how Dr. Mitchell would explain that the bible also says that bats are birds (Leviticus 11:13-19), that the Earth doesn't move (Psalms 93:1), and that in one place it says that men and women were created simultaneously (Genesis 1:27) and only a few verses later, it says that god made men first (Genesis 2:7).

I dunno.  Maybe the contradictions and inaccuracies look different if you look at them from the side.

The second story comes from our old friend Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who has his knickers in a twist over a resolution in Congress to consider February 12 as "Darwin Day."  Ham, of course, thinks this is a bad idea, and has given a countersuggestion; let's call February 12 "Darwin Was Wrong Day:"

Secularists are becoming increasingly aggressive and intolerant in promoting their anti-God philosophy.  Evolutionary ideas provide the foundation for this worldview because they seemingly allow mankind the ability to explain the existence of life and the universe without God.  As Christians, we need to be bold in proclaiming the truth of God’s Word to a hurting (groaning, Romans 8:22) world.  This year, on February 12, instead of celebrating Darwin’s anti-God religion, we can take this opportunity to show the world that Darwin’s ideas about our supposed evolutionary origins were wrong, and that God’s Word is true, from the very beginning.  Let’s make February 12 Darwin Was Wrong Day and point people to the truth of God’s Word.

Well, I'm not sure we secularists are "aggressive and intolerant" about evolution so much as we are "right."  To return to the point I began with, it's hard not to be intolerant when (1) you have mountains of evidence on your side, and (2) the people arguing against you are determined to have their views drive national policy.

A funny thing happens, though, when you put the Mitchell story and the Ham story together.  We have the former putting forth the loony view that all of the inaccuracies and contradictions in the bible can be resolved and explained (and the ones I mentioned are only scratching the surface), along with a demand that everyone believe that the bible is literally, word-for-word true anyhow (and should be used as a primary source in science classrooms).

It's to be hoped, however, that more and more people are realizing how impossible it is to reconcile the contradictions, and that therefore biblical literalism fails right at the starting gate.  Maybe that's why people like Mitchell and Ham are becoming more strident; they sense that they're losing ground.

Or maybe they're just "crazy with craziness."

The random comment department

Two news stories I came across this weekend are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, a paper in the Journal of Advertising, by Ioannis Kareklas, Darrel Muehling, and T. J. Weber of Washington State University, tells a frightening but unsurprising story.  Their study shows that people who are presented with data about vaccination safety are more likely to consider online comments from random individuals as credible than they are information from institutions like the Center for Disease Control.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's how the experiment was set up:

Participants were led to believe that the pro-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while the anti-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the National Vaccine Information Council (NVIC). Both PSAs were designed to look like they appeared on each organization's respective website to enhance validity. 

The PSAs were followed by comments from fictitious online commenters who either expressed pro- or anti-vaccination viewpoints. Participants weren't told anything about who the commenters were, and unisex names were used to avoid potential gender biases.

The researchers then presented participants with a questionnaire to determine how (or if) their views on vaccination had changed.

"The results kind of blew us away," said Kareklas in a press release.  "People were trusting the random online commenters just as much as the PSA itself."

Which, as I said, is disheartening but unsurprising, given that people like Jenny McCarthy are the public version of a Random Online Commenter.

Kareklas et al. followed this up with a second study, to see if the commenters were believed even more strongly if they were identified as doctors (as opposed to one of two other professions).  The commenters who were self-identified doctors had an even stronger effect -- i.e., they outweighed the CDC information even more.

Which explains "Dr." Andrew Wakefield.

And this brings me to the second story, which comes out of Kansas -- where a bill has been introduced into the legislature that would prevent professionals from mentioning their titles or credentials in opinion articles and letters to the editor.

The story about how House Bill 2234 was introduced is interesting in and of itself.  The bill was offered into committee by Representative Virgil Peck (R-Tyro), but Peck initially denied having done so.

"I introduce bills in committee sometimes when I’m asked out of courtesy," Peck said.  "It’s not because I have any skin in the game or I care about it.  I’m not even sure I introduced it, but if he said I did, I did."

Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.  "Not even sure" what bills they introduce regarding issues they don't care about.

While on the one hand, the Kareklas study does point out the danger -- if someone thinks you're a doctor (for example), they're more likely to be swayed by your comments even if you're wrong -- in what universe is the public better off not knowing the background of the person whose words they're reading?

Representative John Carmichael (D-Wichita) nailed it.  With regards to the bill, he said, "If you are in fact a professor at The University of Kansas, that is part of your identity and part of your resume.  To muzzle an academic in identifying him or herself, and their accomplishment, not only does it have the effect of denying them their right to free speech, it also denies the public the right to understand who is commenting and what their, perhaps, bias or interest might be."

And that last bit is the important part.  My views on education -- which I throw out frequently and often vehemently -- are clearly affected by the fact that I'm a public school teacher.  Whether that makes me more or less credible would, I suppose, depend on your viewpoint.  But how on earth would you be better informed by not knowing what my profession is, by having less information with which to evaluate what I've said?

The Kareklas study and the bill introduced by Virgil "What Bill Did I Just Introduce?" Peck highlight one tremendously important thing, however; the general public is incredibly bad at critical reading.  One of the most important things you can do, when you read (or listen to) media, is to weigh what's being said against the facts and evidence, and consider the possibility of bias and appeal to authority.  The Kareklas study shows that we're pretty terrible at the former, and the Kansas bill proposes to eliminate our ability even to attempt the latter.

All making it even more important that children be taught critical thinking skills.  Because if adults don't consider information from the Center for Disease Control to have more credibility than opinions coming from an online commenter, there's something seriously wrong.

A miscalculation of scale

In the first pages of Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, a woman out walking her dog in rural Maine stubs her toe on an object protruding from the ground, and when she kneels down to see what it is, she sees that it is a curved bit of metal that can't be pried loose.  It seems to extend indefinitely as she digs away the loose soil around it.

It turns out to be [spoiler alert] the upper edge of an enormous spaceship that crash landed on Earth millions of years ago, embedding itself nose-downward, and eventually being buried by geological processes until only a little bit of it was above ground.

Kind of an interesting mental picture, isn't it?  A spaceship collides with Earth, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (or random people walking their dogs) ages later.  It does, however, bring to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the Roswell incident: "A super-intelligent alien species knows how to cross the galaxy, but then they can't even land the damn spaceship?  If they're that incompetent, maybe they should just go home."

I bring all this up because of a recent discovery in Russia.  Some coal miners, working at a mine in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia, unearthed a strange object that they claim is an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  Boris Glazkov, who found the object, said, "have to say it wasn't hard to see as it was really distinctive and large.  I've never seen anything like this object, which is obviously not natural, out here in the middle of nowhere before.  It is a real mystery."

The Kuzbassrazrezugol Mining Company, Glazkov's employer, confirmed discovery of the object, saying it was discovered at a depth of forty meters.  And everyone associated with the find is in agreement; what we have here is a crashed flying saucer.

So without further ado, let's take a look:

Pretty strange, eh?  You can see why I thought of The Tommyknockers.  Imagine this thing making a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, carrying its panicked alien crew hurtling toward the Earth, then burying itself deep in the ground, killing all that were aboard.

But then the object's discoverers provided a second photograph, one that gave us perhaps a little more information than they intended:

Interesting how big it looks when you have no way of knowing how big it actually is.

And this reminded me of a second book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.  In particular, I recalled a passage about a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy... 

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

So the miners who discovered this thing must believe that alien races are really tiny, if that's their spaceship.  Makes you wonder what we've been so afraid of, all this time.  If the aliens show up, waving around their itty-bitty laser pistols, we could just step on 'em.

And of course, there's a completely natural explanation for this thing.  It's what's called a "concretion" -- a symmetrical glob of sedimentary deposits that have become cemented together.  They can look pretty peculiar:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that doesn't mean they're evidence of aliens.

Also, if this was a "flying saucer," wouldn't it be made out of something other than rock?  But maybe this was a Stone Age spaceship.  Maybe instead of laser pistols, the little aliens inside brandished clubs and flint knives.

Of course, we could still step on 'em.

So that's our latest non-evidence for aliens out of Siberia.  Kind of a pity, really.  It would have been cool if it had been real.  However, I'd prefer it if such a discovery wasn't followed by what happened in The Tommyknockers.  Without giving away any more of the plot, let me remind you that it's a Stephen King novel.  So suffices to say that Bad Shit Happens.  So maybe we should all be glad that what the Russian coal miners discovered was just a big round rock.

Crusader mentality

When I hear people make ridiculous and deliberately inflammatory statements, sometimes I have to resist the temptation to grab them by the shoulders and yell, "Will you listen to what you're saying?"

Not, of course, that it would be likely to do any good.  Although it may sound cynical, I think a lot of these people aren't reacting thoughtlessly and out of anger, which although it may not excuse rage-filled diatribes, certainly would make them understandable.  I think that a lot of these folks are saying and writing these things in a cold, calculated fashion, in order to make others angry, so as to incite their followers toward some political end.

Take, for example, the piece that ran yesterday in Top Right News, entitled "OUTRAGE: Obama Equates Christianity with ISIS at Prayer Breakfast."  Now, before we get to the commentary, let's see what the president said that got these people so stirred up:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place.  Remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  And our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often were justified in the name of Christ.

Harmless enough statement, you'd think.  "Don't use your religion to justify atrocities; it's been done before.  It was wrong then when they did it, and it's wrong now when ISIS does it."  Hard to see how anyone would argue with that.

But Obama made two mistakes: (1) he mentioned Christians, and (2) he's Obama.  So naturally, the backlash was instantaneous and vitriolic.  Here's a bit of the response from Top Right News:

Muslims began the slave trade in Africa — and still enslave people today.  ISIS is enslaving Yazidi Christians in Iraq and Syria.  Slavery ended here in 1865, and it was a devout Christian, William Wilberforce who began the abolitionist movement that ended slavery in the UK and US.

So, what you're saying is, the evil Muslims forced the Americans own slaves?  The nice Christian Americans struggled against it, only keeping slaves because they had no choice (and probably treating them as members of the family the whole time)?  Until finally good ol' Wilberforce threw off that evil Islamic menace and got Lincoln to free the slaves?

How ignorant of history are you? To take only one example, read what was written by James Henry Thornwell, the leader of the South Carolina Presbyterian Churches, in 1861:

Is slavery, then, a sin?...  Now, we venture to assert that if men had drawn their conclusions upon this subject only from the Bible, it would no more have entered into any human head to denounce slavery as a sin than to denounce monarchy, aristocracy, or poverty.  The truth is, men have listened to what they falsely considered as primitive intuitions, or as necessary deductions from primitive cognitions, and then have gone to the Bible to confirm their crotchets of their vain philosophy.  They have gone there determined to find a particular result, and the consequence is that they leave with having made, instead of having interpreted, Scripture.  Slavery is no new thing.  It has not only existed for aged in the world but it has existed, under every dispensation of the covenant of grace, in the Church of God.

Slavery is condoned over and over in the bible -- even going so far as to say that slaves should obey their masters "in fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5).

But Top Right News isn't done yet; they claim that the Crusades were also the fault of the Muslims, that "the Crusades were a direct response to Islamic jihad," with the clear implication that the Crusaders were pure of heart and soul, only doing what was right to "free the Holy Land" from the Muslims.

Funny thing, then, that the Crusaders spent a good bit of time on the way to Jerusalem hacking at Christians who were less than orthodox, and also the Jews, who seemed to have a way of getting the short end of the stick from everyone.  Godfrey de Bouillon, one of the exemplars of the Crusader mentality, famously vowed that he "would not set out for the Crusade until he had avenged the crucifixion by spilling the blood of the Jews, declaring that he could not tolerate that even one man calling himself a Jew should continue to live."  All through what is now Germany the Crusaders slaughtered every heretic and Jew they could find, sometimes with the complicity of local bishops, and sometimes against their orders (the bishops of Cologne and Mainz paid de Bouillon 500 pieces of silver to persuade him to leave their towns alone, which de Bouillon did).

Murder of Jews during the First Crusade, from Bible Moralisée [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Look, I'm not saying that the Muslim caliphate that was ruling Jerusalem at the time was a bunch of nice guys.  But the Crusaders were, by and large, narrow-minded, violent, hyper-pious, obsessive, bigoted assholes.  Painting the Crusades as a justified "response to Islamic jihad" is idiotic.

Of course, the uncredited writer for Top Right News who wrote the piece about Obama's speech probably doesn't care about silly little things like "facts."  All (s)he cares about is turning the Rage Parade against Obama by whatever means necessary.  And as we've seen more than once, this is manifesting as a manufactured and imaginary persecution of Christians in the United States, despite the fact that 3/4 of Americans are self-professed Christians (including the president!), and Christians enjoy an unchallenged hegemony in every political office in the land.

The whole issue here really boils down to "not lying."  Whatever you believe politically, you gain nothing by (1) twisting the words of your opponent to mean something that they obviously didn't mean, and (2) inventing history to support your contention.  It may inflame your supporters, but to the rest of us, it looks more like you have no justification for your stance other than screed, ad hominem, and outright falsehoods.