Our Lady of the Holy Television Screen

My friend Mark was working on a home improvement project, and generating a great quantity of dust.  After working for some hours, he went into his living room, and found the following eerie image in the dust patterns on the screen of his television:

The bit of the image in the lower right-hand corner looked, to Mark's eye, like a woman holding a baby, and he immediately thought, "Hey, look!  It's Mary and Jesus!"  And, of course, he had to send the image to me.

Fortunately, however, Mark is also an electrical engineer, and knew what had happened.  While he was working on his project, his kids had been watching television, and had paused the DVD they were watching for a long time.  The cathode-ray tube in the television, bombarding the screen with positively-charged particles to create the same image for ten minutes or so, had left a residual pattern in the dust that had adhered to the screen.  All he was seeing was the ghostly afterimage of the last bit of the film his kids had been watching before they turned the DVD player off.

Ah, natural explanations.  They're wonderful things.

Of course, not everyone looks for such explanations.  Some people don't even seem to want to look for them.  Take Bishop David Ricken, of the Roman Catholic diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Bishop Ricken was one of a group of Catholic theologians who investigated the site of an alleged miracle -- a chapel in Champion, Wisconsin, where in 1859 a Belgian immigrant named Adele Brise supposedly saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary.  The chapel, and Brise's nearby grave, have become a mecca for believers, who think that their being at the site of the miracle will somehow heal disease.

But it's not the beliefs of the devout pilgrims I want to look at here; it's the actions of Bishop Ricken and his group, who after an inquiry into the claim decided that it was true, and certified the chapel as the site of a miracle.

And my question is: how on earth would you certify that a miracle had occurred over 150 years ago?  Brise herself is long dead; anyone who knew Brise is also long dead.  All we have are written records of her story.  How can that constitute evidence, even in the least scientific definition of the word?

Interestingly, an article at Catholic.org describing the claim (read the whole thing here) states that Brise's claim is the only "validated" appearance of the Virgin Mary in the United States; two others supposed visitations, at Necedah, Wisconsin and Bayside, New York, were investigated by the church and "found to be false."  How, pray tell, do you tell a false claim of something for which you have only anecdotal evidence from a true one?

In any case, the apparition Brise claims she saw -- of a shining woman in white who told Brise to "gather the children in this wild country, and teach them what they need for salvation" -- led her to become a Franciscan nun, and later to found a Catholic school.  So it's pretty clear that Brise herself thought she'd seen Mary, if her later actions are any indication.

But lots of people do lots of things for specious reasons, or no particular reason at all -- there's no way now, even if you believe in the basic tenets of the Catholic religion, to verify her claim based on any reasonable criteria for certainty.  This didn't stop Ricken, of course, and nor does it seem to dissuade the hundreds of pilgrims who go to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help to search for healing.

It's all too easy to fool the human brain -- given the deep-seated need by the devout to see the object of their worship, coupled with the lengths this sometimes drives them to -- self-imposed sleep deprivation, fasting, and other forms of denial of bodily needs -- it does not take much of a stretch to attribute such visions to hallucination.  And just as in the case of Mark's apparition of Mary and Jesus on his television screen, the natural explanation certainly is a more plausible version of what happened, however Ricken and his trio of theologian friends think they can certify the veracity of a claim from 150 years ago for which there is no tangible evidence whatsoever.

Breaking the speed limit

When researchers at CERN announced last week that it appeared that they had found an instance of a neutrino traveling faster than the speed of light, it was only a matter of time before the woo-woos got involved.

I just didn't realize that "a matter of time" was measured in milliseconds.

Here is a sampling of some of the responses to this announcement that I found on various webpages the day the findings were released.  These are direct quotes, and no, I didn't make any of them up.

"This finally proves a mechanism for faster than light travel of information, and shows how telepathy could work."

"Aliens have had this technology for millennia.  Hopefully this will shut up all the skeptics when they talk about 'vast interstellar spaces' as if this would be a problem for a technologically advanced species."

"Faster than light particles (tachyons) travel backwards in time.  There will be tachyon pulse (reverse chronometry) in the future which will help us visit the distant past.  This is only the beginning."

"So what?  Quantum entanglement is faster than light, too.  It's all the same thing."

"There never has been an 'ultimate speed limit' on the ethereal realm.  Einstein's artificial distinction has begun to crumble."


Well, first, folks, I want you to know how much it took out of me to read all of this, not to mention copying all of the above quotes, which were selected from reams of such nonsense.  It leaves me feeling in need of some kind of mental restorative.  But being that it's too early for a shot of scotch and the coffee's not done brewing, I will just have to suck it up and soldier on with this post.

Second: are these people really safe to let outside unsupervised?  I mean, really.

Okay, let's clarify a few things, and leave behind telepathy and reverse chronometry (whatever the hell that is), and look at what really happened.  Here are the facts in the speed-limit-breaking neutrino case:

1)  The neutrino in question was clocked traveling 0.002% faster than the speed of light.  To put things in perspective, this would be like a cop pulling you over for driving 55.001 miles per hour in a 55 mile-per-hour zone.  So it's not like we're talking "Warp 8, Mr. Sulu," or anything.

2)  The potential for experimental error is enormous.  One of the questions that came up at the seminar where the results were reported was whether the moon's pull on the terrestrial crust was sufficient to warp the geologic plates and cause an error in the distance measurement.  With a small deviation from predictions like this, the likelihood that it is an unaccounted-for confounding factor is astronomically high.

3)  Also, it bears mention that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is one of the most comprehensively-tested ideas in all of physics.  While it's possible that Einstein could have missed something, it's not really all that probable -- experimental error is far more likely.  All of the hype that "this would rewrite the physics texts if it's verified" is correct, but still, I'm with Michio Kaku, who said about the findings, "I'm still putting my money on Einstein."

Regarding all of the woo-woos, it really amazes me that they have the guts to blather on about a topic about which they clearly are ignorant.  It's not that I'm claiming to know everything; there are many subjects on which I know absolutely nothing.  Take football, for example.  If I started babbling about the Boston Celtics' chances of winning the World Series this year, I'd probably end up making a fool of myself, so I leave such matters to people who actually know what they're talking about.

The aforementioned woo-woos, however, seem to have no such inhibitions, and in fact proudly trumpet their lack of knowledge in public forums.  And if they're challenged by someone who clearly has more knowledge than they do, they react with indignation.  One such poster, when confronted by a person who sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, used the Shakespeare card.  "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," he retorted.  By which, I think, he meant that any damnfool thing the woo-woos say has to be true, because Shakespeare said so.

Anyhow, the whole thing is kind of maddening.  And I predict that within six months it will be found that this measurement resulted from some kind of experimental inaccuracy, and will be withdrawn.  Nevertheless, I will end on a hopeful note, with my all-time favorite limerick:

There was a young woman named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

Heated discussion

BBC News reported yesterday that Ireland has documented its first case of Spontaneous Human Combustion.

Michael Faherty, 76, of Ballybane, Galway, was found burned to death on December 22, 2010.  Investigators noted that Faherty's body was completely incinerated, and while there was damage to the living room in which the body was found, the body itself was clearly the source of the flame.  No trace of accelerants was found, and there was nothing suggesting foul play.  After a nine-month inquiry into the case, the inquest was finally held last week, and Dr. Ciaran McLoughlin ruled that Faherty's death was caused by Spontaneous Human Combustion.

SHC has been the subject of a lot of speculation, and there are a few cases that seem to admit no other explanation -- most notably the famous case of Mary Reeser, who died in 1951 in St. Petersburg, Florida.  Reeser was found by her landlady to have been consumed to ashes, along with the armchair in which she was seated.  The only part of her body remaining was a few of her bones, and her left foot, still encased in a slipper.  Just as in Faherty's case, the room she was in showed little damage -- candles had melted into puddles of wax, and a mirror had warped and cracked from the heat -- but once again, the flames seemed to have arisen from her body.

Other instances of alleged SHC exist, some more believable than others.  One of the others is the case Maybelle Andrews, who supposedly suddenly spouted flame on the floor of a crowded dance hall in 1938 and was burned to ashes in five minutes in front of her horrified dance partner, leading to a new and macabre definition of the phrase "hot date."  However, investigators have tried to substantiate this claim and found that it seems to be spun from whole cloth, probably by writers for the questionable journal Fate in the 1950s.  Andrews herself seems to be entirely fictional, and the story apparently cobbled together from various other tales of uncertain pedigree.

And some of the attempted explanations I've seen don't help much, either.  More than one website I looked at attributed SHC to causes that were clearly pseudoscientific bunk, such as the one that said that one possibility was that "Electrical fields that exist within the human body might be capable of 'short circuiting' somehow, causing some sort of atomic chain reaction that could generate tremendous internal heat."  This is only marginally more plausible than the one that said that SHC was clearly the result of "visitation by malevolent spirits, and a resulting violent discharge of the victim's psychic life energy."

Sorry, I'm not buying either of those explanations, and not just because both of them are unscientific horse waste.  As with many of these sorts of claims, any kind of rational inquiry into SHC is clouded by the vast amount of nonsense, misinformation, and outright fabrications that have been tangled up with the whole subject.  Five minutes' worth of research showed me that one person whose name I saw on more than one list of "victims of SHC" - Phyllis Newcombe - is actually documented in records as having been the victim of burns sustained when her dress caught fire accidentally, and she died not because she was "consumed to ashes" in the usual fashion, but of sepsis from an infection some days later.  (Read about the case here.)  Other names on typical lists of victims are from hundreds of years ago, or are simply lacking in documentation.

So, just like with other Amazing Unexplained Mysteries, a lot of cases of SHC seem to be either (1) fiction, or (2) entirely explainable without recourse to any sort of woo-woo Violent Discharges of Psychic Energy.  But this does leave a handful of cases that are well enough documented that they aren't easily dismissed -- and this includes Reeser's case, and the more recent case of Faherty.  How can these be accounted for?

It turns out that, as odd as it might seem, there is in fact a plausible natural explanation for SHC.  Studies have shown that if a deep burn occurs from a natural trigger (a match, a dropped cigarette, or an upset candle), and the triggering flame is able to burn through the upper layers of skin, it can ignite the fat layer underneath -- and fat burns quite well, generating enough heat to burn the entire body.  (I don't even want to know how they studied this, and in fact I'm trying hard right now not to think too much about it.)  So, as weird and tragic as SHC is, there's a completely reasonable scientific explanation for it -- as, I believe, there is for damn near everything.

Conspiracy theories and the fall of the Twin Towers

Christen Simensen, a materials scientist with Norwegian research firm SINTEF, has provided a scientific explanation of how collision with jets brought down the Twin Towers.  [Source]

In a recent paper in the journal Aluminum International Today, Simensen describes how the jet fuel alone could have heated up the aluminum in the fuselage to its melting point.  The molten aluminum would have reacted with water from the sprinkler system, generating hydrogen gas, an explosion, and a rapid heating to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit -- sufficient to melt the steel girders, resulting in the building's collapse.

This, Simensen claims, should put to rest all of the claims by conspiracy theorists that 9/11 was an "inside job," as it convincingly explains all of the observed data, including the explosions that preceded the collapse of the building.  These explosions are some of the main points in arguments made by people who think that someone -- variously claimed to be the Bush administration, the Bilderburg Group, the Illuminati, the Jews, and probably a whole host of others -- planted bombs in the Twin Towers, prior to the airplane collisions, to assure that the buildings would fall.

To which I say: Mr. Simensen, you are an optimist.

Conspiracy theorists have no respect for data, logic, and science.  I would not hesitate to guess that the conspiracy theorists you think will be silenced by your paper will now only squawk the louder, and claim that you were paid to write what you did.  That's the trouble with folks who believe in conspiracies; if you argue with them, they merely shake their heads and add you to the list of Conspirators.

Coincidentally, last Thursday Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is in New York City for a meeting of the UN General Assembly, met with reporters from the Associated Press, and stated that "as an engineer," he thinks it is impossible for two planes to have brought down the Twin Towers.  He stopped short of claiming the the US government was complicit in the catastrophe, but that was clearly what he was implying.  I seriously doubt that Ahmadinejad would be at all convinced by Simensen's paper -- given that he considers the Holocaust a "mythical claim" that the Jews fabricated in order to facilitate the creation of Israel.  Believe me, if you can discount tens of thousands of photographs, records, and first-hand accounts of a catastrophe that killed six million, you can certainly ignore an argument in Aluminum International Today.

Conspiracy theories are kind of like taking the idea of confirmation bias and running off the cliff with it.  Confirmation bias, you may remember from yesterday's post, is when you already have decided what you believe, so you exaggerate the importance of tiny bits of evidence in favor of your claim, and ignore mountains of evidence against it.  Proponents of conspiracy theories take it a step further; they look on a complete lack of evidence as a point in their favor.  "Of course there's no hard evidence," they say.  "They're a wily bunch, those conspirators.  They wouldn't just leave evidence hanging around."

The whole thing reminds me of the story of the man whose friend, every time he came for a visit, would stop in the doorway, put his hands together as if in prayer, and intone, "May this house be safe from tigers."  After this had happened several times, the man said to his friend, "Why do you keep doing that?  It's pointless.  I've never seen any tigers.  There's probably not a tiger within a thousand miles of here."

The friend smiled.  "It works well, doesn't it?"

Deconstructing Wah!

Yesterday, I received a mailing from The Omega Institute, of Rhinebeck, New York, suggesting that I might be interested in taking some of their classes. 

Frankly, I suspect that I'd last six hours there before security guards escorted me off the premises for guffawing at the staff.  I first started receiving mailings from them because I was interested in their art and writing intensives, but (as I found out on my first perusal of their catalog) at least half of their offerings are seriously woo-woo.   One I particularly enjoyed reading about is the use of music in healing, taught by a woman named Wah!   (The exclamation point is not me being emphatic; it's part of her name.)  What would possess someone to change her name to Wah! is a mystery in and of itself, but I did go to her website and listen to some of her music, and what I heard seemed to fall into the Overwrought, Therapy-Session-Gone-Horribly-Wrong School of Music.   I didn't find it particularly healing, myself, but maybe the point was that it was healing to her -- I don't honestly know.

A more interesting example, however, are the workshops offered by a fellow named John Perkins that claim to teach you how to shape-shift.   From the description of one of these workshops:

We have entered a time prophesied by many cultures for shapeshifting into higher consciousness.  Polynesian shamans shapeshift through oceans, Amazon warriors transform into anacondas, and Andean birdpeople and Tibetan monks bilocate across mountains.  These shamans have taught John Perkins that shapeshifting - the ability to alter form at will - can be used to create positive change.

Well, okay.  I'm willing to accept that some Amazonian shamans believed that they could become anacondas.   I'm also all too willing to accept that certain other, fairly gullible, Amazonian natives believed that the shamans were becoming anacondas.  But this demands the question, doesn't it, of whether they actually are becoming anacondas.   Some of the disciples of the woo-woo will respond with something like, "reality is what you think it is."  Which works just fine until reality in the form of a baseball bat wallops you in the forehead, at which point you can think it doesn't exist, you can in fact think that you're an Andean birdperson, but what you really will be is a confused, non-Andean, ordinary person with a concussion and a big old dent in your head.

It is amazing the lengths to which the woo-woos of the world will go to support their beliefs.  My wife Carol, in her nursing program, had to take a course in "alternatives to traditional medicine."  Her own take on this was that if it had been about the role of belief in the efficacy of medicine, that would have been fine; but they didn't stop there.  They started out with therapies for which there is at least some experimental support (such as acupuncture) and from there took a flying leap out into the void, landing amongst such ridiculous and discredited ideas as homeopathy, chakras, and healing through crystal energies.  This last one led to a spectacle that was (according to Carol) acutely embarrassing to watch, wherein the teacher held a crystal hanging from a string over a student's head, to show that the crystal could pick up the student's "life energy" and begin to swing of its own volition.  There was no response from the crystal (surprise!!!) for some minutes, while the students sat fidgeting and looking at each other, but after about ten minutes the crystal moved.  Hallelujah!  The theory is vindicated!

All of which brings up the subject of confirmation bias.  This is when you've already decided on your conclusion, and you therefore only pay attention to any evidence (however minuscule) that confirms your idea, and everything else is ignored.  Any movement of the crystal had to be due to the subject's energy field -- other hypotheses (such as that the teacher's arm was getting a bit tired after holding the crystal up there for ten minutes, and he moved his hand a little, causing the crystal to swing) are not even acknowledged.

You see what you want to see.  And, if you're lucky, you get to make a bunch of poor college students sit there while you're doing it.

So far, I am sounding awfully self-confident, as I have a tendency to do.   But if I'm being totally honest, I have to look at my own ideas in the same light.   One of the great myths of the last hundred years is, I think, that somehow everyone is biased except for the scientists -- that the scientists have this blinding clarity of vision, that they are objective and unbiased and therefore have cornered the market on truth.  While there are probably scientists who believe this, the truth of the matter is that most scientists are well aware of their biases.   We, too, see what we want to see.  First, we have to believe that the scientific way of knowing leads us closer to the truth -- which statement, of course, you can't prove.   Furthermore, if you're a researcher, you're not approaching a question with a completely open mind; you already have (at least to some extent) figured out what you think is going on, and so when you design your measurement equipment and your experimental protocol, you do so in a way to find what you think it is that you're going to find.   If there's something else going on, you might not even see it -- unless you're extraordinarily lucky.   Perhaps that's why serious paradigm shifts have so often happened because of some random piece of evidence, from an unexpected source, that someone (often by accident) notices.   It's how Kepler found out that planetary orbits are elliptical; it's how plate tectonics was discovered; it's how penicillin was discovered.   (Witness yesterday's announcement that physicists at CERN may have found a particle that can move faster than the speed of light -- a finding that, if confirmed, will knock out one of the major underpinnings of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.)

Science doesn't proceed by clear, logical little steps, by people adding brick after brick to an edifice whose plan is already well known and laid out on the table.   Like most of the other things in this world, it proceeds by jerky fits and starts, false turns, and backtracking.  The "scientific method" no more explains how we've accrued the knowledge we have than "life energies" explain the movement of a crystal hanging from a string.

So then, why am I a scientist?  Why don't I just go and join Wah! and John Perkins?   (Just think, I could come up with a pretentious single syllable name, with a punctuation mark, too!   I think I'd be "Huh?")   For me, the single strength of science as a world view is its ability to self-correct.  You claim that plate tectonics exists?  Okay -- anyone with the equipment, time, and inclination can go out there and verify the evidence themselves.  If an experiment is not found to be repeatable (such as the "cold fusion" debacle), it's not explained away with some foolishness like "the energy fields were being interfered with by the chakras of your aura" -- the whole idea is simply abandoned.   The procedures, equipment, and outcomes are out there for peer review, and if they are found wanting, the theory is modified, altered, or scrapped entirely.

Try that with the healing energy of music.   I bet if several of you were sick, and I played some of Wah!'s music for you, some of you would get better.  Some of you might get sicker.   (I suspect I'd be in the latter category.)  And for those of you who got well, how could we be certain that it was the music that was responsible?  Because Wah! says so?  Because the idea that music could have a healing energy appeals to you?  If I've learned anything in my fifty years on this planet, it's that there seems to be no connection between ideas I find appealing and ideas that are true -- if anything, the opposite seems to be the case.

Anyhow, as usual, I've probably pissed off large quantities of people who are into homeopathy, crystal energies, numerology, astrology, faith healing, and so on.  But I'm reminded of a quote from (of all people) C. S. Lewis, whose wonderful character Mr. MacPhee said in That Hideous Strength, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I'll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

To which I say, "hear, hear."  On the other hand, if I get visited tonight by an anaconda, I suppose it will serve me right.

The ley of the land

I ran into the idea of ley lines fifteen years ago on a trip to the UK.  I spent a month in the summer of 1995 hiking in the north of England, visiting old cathedrals and monastery ruins, and while I was at Rievaulx Abbey, I had a chance meeting with an English woman who said that if you connected the positions of holy sites on a map with straight lines, it made a pattern.

"They sited monasteries, cloisters, and cathedrals where they did because they were places of power," she said.  "The ley lines are channels of psychic energy, and where they intersect, it creates a kind of vortex.  The ancients felt this, and that's why they built monuments there, and later churches and abbeys."

Couldn't it, I asked her, also have to do with building in places where there was good access to water, and perhaps pre-existing roads?

"I suppose that also might have had something to do with it," she said, sounding doubtful.

For all her claims of the antiquity of this idea, the concept of ley lines is less than a hundred years old, and at first, it had nothing to do with anything psychic.  Alfred Watkins, an amateur archaeologist, noted in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track how often multiple sites of archaeological or historical relevance lay upon the same straight lines, and he coined the term "ley lines" to describe this phenomenon.  He suggested that the reason was for ease of road-building -- especially in the southern half of England, where the terrain is mostly gentle, a straight line connecting several population centers is the smartest way site roads and settlements.  It wasn't until 48 years later that noted woo-woo John Michell, author of The View Over Atlantis, took Watkins' ley lines and connected them to the Chinese idea of feng shui and came up with the theory that ley lines were rivers of psychic energy, and the intersections ("nodes") were places of power.

The interesting thing is that Watkins himself wasn't even right, appealing though the idea is.  Mathematician David George Kendall and others have used a technique called shape analysis to demonstrate that the occurrence of straight-line connections between archaeological sites in England is no greater than you would expect from chance.  Put simply, a densely-settled place like England has so many sites of historical relevance that if you are allowed to pick and choose, you can find any number of lines that intersect, or at least clip, interesting places.

Take a look, for example, at the following diagram (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

This image shows 137 randomly-placed points.  A computer program was employed to find all of the straight-line connections of four or more points -- and it found eighty of them!

So, even if you eliminate all of the woo-woo trappings from the idea, it seems like the whole concept of "sacred sites" falling along straight lines is attributable to coincidence.  A pity, really.  I have always wondered if our house was at the intersection of two ley lines.  I was all prepared to use Intersections of Psychic Energy Channels and Nodes of Power Vortexes to explain why my digital alarm clock runs fast and why the dryer keeps eating my socks.

Facts, lies, slant, and politics

Why are we willing to accept that in politics, facts don't matter?

Let's say that in my biology classes, I told the students that eating yogurt was directly linked to male pattern baldness, and that studies had shown that raspberry yogurt was the worst -- eating one serving of raspberry yogurt per week boosted your risk of hair loss by 50%.  Then, a student does some research, and finds that this statement is, in fact, false, that no such studies have ever been done, and that yogurt-eaters are just as likely to keep their hair as anyone else.  And I respond:  "Well, it was true to the best of my knowledge at the time.  And in any case, we all agree that male pattern baldness is still a serious problem that we need to address."

I suspect I'd be shown the door by the principal, tolerant man though he is -- if the students and their parents hadn't run me out of town first.

Politics, however, seems to give you an immediate gloss of immunity from telling the truth.  Witness the much-publicized claim by Michele Bachmann that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation.  In an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today, she related a story about a "crying mother" who had come up to her, and spoken about her daughter:

"She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.  It can have very dangerous side effects," Bachmann said.  "This is the very real concern, and people have to draw their own conclusions."

Well, this incident may have actually occurred, but of course there turns out to be no connection whatsoever between the HPV vaccine (or any other vaccine) and mental retardation.  Like any medicine, it can have side effects, but these are infrequent, seldom severe, and are in any case are far outweighed by the protection the vaccine provides.  In the case of the HPV vaccine, the CDC reports that of the 35 million doses that have been administered, there have been 18,000 reports of side effects, of which 92% were classified as "non-serious" -- and none of the serious side effects included mental retardation.  To save you from having to do the math, that's a rate of serious side effects of a little more than 0.004%.

Then, we had Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina claiming that substance abuse was widespread at government facilities.  She was giving a speech in favor of her plan to introduce drug testing as a requirement before the jobless could collect unemployment.  In defense of her plan, she made the statement that substance abuse was an "epidemic," and that at South Carolina's Savannah River Nuclear Power Facility, "... of everyone they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test."

Government officials who oversee the site immediately said, quote, "What the hell?" and demanded that Haley retract the statement.  A spokesperson for the Department of Energy brought forth records proving that (1) they don't drug test people during interviews, only after they are offered a job; (2) the rate of failure of people offered jobs at the Savannah River site is under 1%; and (3) passing a drug test is a condition of employment, so that less-than-1% never began work there in the first place.  Haley at first tried to defend her claim, but when the demands to retract grew louder, she said, and I quote:  "I've never felt like I had to back up what people tell me.  You assume you're given good information."

Please note here that I am deliberately not addressing the points that either Bachmann or Haley were trying to make -- whether it is a good idea to force parents of pre-teen girls to be vaccinated for HPV, or whether it is a good idea to require mandatory drug testing as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits.  My point here is, if you think something is a good idea, shouldn't you have actual factual reasons for your belief, and not just half-truths, exaggerations, and outright fabrications?  Why would you stand up in public, with its virtually instantaneous access to fact-checking via the internet, and make patently erroneous statements?  And confronted with incontrovertible evidence that you had said something incorrect, why wouldn't you stand up and say, "I was wrong.  The statement I made was completely non-factual, and for that I apologize."?

Politics seems to be one of the only venues around where people can make up facts and statistics as they go along, continue to defend them when confronted, and still somehow maintain credibility with their supporters.  In fact, their supporters are sometimes so vehement in their defense that they question the facts themselves, as if facts had a political spin, as if the CDC (for example) based its statistics on some kind of political agenda.  In one of the infrequent political arguments I've been in -- I tend to avoid them like the plague, as I find them generally pointless in every sense of the word -- I was accused of believing the "slanted liberal spin machine" because I quoted statistics that (1) were a matter of public record, and (2) had been verified by FactCheck.org.

The whole thing demands that I say it bluntly: facts matter.  What conclusions you draw from those facts are up to you.  But the data is available to all, and is the same for everyone, and data has no political bias.  I have more than once quoted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but it bears saying again: "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."