What your clothing says about you

There's no woo-woo belief that is so silly that someone can't make it a whole lot sillier.

So, let's start with psychometry, the idea that people leave "psychic traces" on objects that they handle.  Supposedly, these traces are especially strong if the object was handled by someone in an elevated emotional state.  And the idea is that for psychically-sensitive people (whatever that means), those traces can be detected.

Okay, so not so different than the other kinds of psychic woo-woo -- clairvoyance, telepathy, precognitive dreams, and so forth.  But thanks to one of my sharp Critical Thinking students, we have the story of a woman named Roxanne Usleman, whose hobby is going to thrift stores so she can handle clothing and find out about the people who owned them.

Usleman is featured in a video (here), wherein she goes to Marmalade Vintage Clothing Store and leads the shop owner around making commentary.  Here is how she describes what she does:

[Clothes] communicate completely different than we do on the Earth, kind of a different language.  I work, like, as a translator, basically, as the information comes through I translate it into an Earth form, a three dimension form, where mortal beings can understand it...  When I was woke up in the middle of the night, the clothes are, like, speaking, and they have a history about them, a need to communicate something that happened.

 My own clothes don't seem to communicate anything much to me, except for occasionally the important messages "WASH ME" and "Don't you know how to use an iron?"  But maybe I just don't speak the "language."  Be that as it may, Usleman then goes on to feel up various pieces of clothing, and finds a dress about which she says the following:

Whoever had owned this before, when she had passed away this dress was near her when she had passed away.  So there's something she needs to talk about, it's as if the end of her life did not end in a positive way.  It was very sudden.  Whoever had gotten the dress after, and wore it, immediately gave it away because they didn't want the energy in it.

The shopkeeper then chimes in:

That is true.  I don't know who is the owner, but somebody bought this as a gift for my sister.  And she didn't ever wear it, she didn't want it, so she gave it to me.

And Usleman is just tickled pink about this, and squeaks, and says, "Ooh, so we have a verification!"

Because of course it couldn't be that the sister didn't like it because it's a butt-ugly dress.  No, it has to be the "energies."

Then Usleman says that last night she got a communiqué from a "Laura" and she wanders around the shop to find something that "Laura" owned.  And she finds yet another butt-ugly item, this time a bracelet shaped like a snake with red eyes, and says that this was once owned by "Laura."  Metal, Usleman explains, holds the "energy" of the first person who owned it even better than cloth does.  "Whoever buys this bracelet," Usleman says, "it will be unimaginable, the power.  It will bring them a lot of luck."

Fur, on the other hand, is more difficult, because "the animal is so strong in the fur that it's difficult to connect to the human."  Because of this, you don't pick a fur, the fur picks you.  If it's the wrong person for the fur, "the fur repels them, they'll pass right by it, they may not even see it."

What gets me about this, more than Usleman's dog-and-pony show (because that is pretty clearly all about publicity, and ultimately, money) is why anyone with an IQ that exceeds today's high temperature in Labrador would fall for it.  It's not, as the student who found it pointed out, like the clothing is going to speak up and say, "Um, excuse me.  Actually the woman who owned me was named Muriel, and she's still alive, and donated me to this shop because I am truly hideous."  Psychometry, especially of this sort, falls outside of the realm of the even potentially verifiable, given that clothing in second-hand shops doesn't usually come with a printed ownership history attached.

You really should, however, watch the video, which is under three minutes long.  Usleman's delivery is somewhere between hilarious and grating; she has a Valley-Girl-style flip upwards at the end of each sentence, as if she was asking a question when she's not?  You know?  And she also uses the word "like" a lot, which definitely adds to the overall effect.  Nevertheless, after doing a little research, I found out that she's apparently a hugely popular psychic, with a thriving business doing psychic readings (check out her website here).  On the flip side, however, she was one of the psychics whose predictions were analyzed by Stuart Robbins (see his report here), and he found, unsurprisingly, that "these 'professionals' are NOT capable of telling the future any better than you or I, and some of them are in fact far worse."

And yet, people still give her money for her "psychic abilities."  Which, frankly, baffles me.

So, that's today's contribution from the world of woo-woo.  I'd like to give a shout-out to the student who sent me Usleman's video; this young lady has a truly fine skeptical mind, of the kind that is a pleasure to teach.  As for me, it's time to go get ready for work.  My clothes are communicating with me.  Right now they're saying, "Hey!  You!  You can't just sit around in your bathrobe all day, messing about on the computer!  Get your lazy ass in gear!  But please take a shower before you put us on, okay?  Yeah.  Thanks."

Damn snarky clothes.  Maybe I'll switch to wearing fur, if I can find one that wants me.

The straight scoop

As part of our ongoing inquiry into why people believe in irrational, counterfactual nonsense, last week we looked at a study that showed that if people read nasty comments in an online opinion piece, it caused them to hold onto their preexisting opinion more strongly.  Today, we'll consider a study that shows that not only does an obnoxious screed not change someone's mind, facts don't, either.

R. Kelly Garrett, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, recently released the results of an investigation into how people react when they are told that something they'd just read was wrong.  He and his team gave test subjects a story about who has access to private health records, but the story had several false statements inserted into it -- for example, that hospital administrators, health insurers, and government officials had unrestricted access to your medical information.

The group was then split in three.  One-third was given, immediately after reading the article, a second article from FactCheck.org that showed that the inserted statements were wrong.  A second group was given the correction after spending three minutes doing an unrelated task.  The third group was not given the correction at all.

Unsurprisingly, the three-minute waiting period had little effect on whether or not the reader ended up believing the false information, and the people who did not receive correction showed the strongest residual belief in the incorrect statements.  What was interesting, though, was how the data shifted when you looked at the individuals who received correction, and split those into two groups -- ones who at the beginning of the study identified themselves as supportive of electronic health records, and ones that were against them.  The ones who thought that electronic health records were a good idea were very quick to accept correction, and to learn that the scary statements about unrestricted access were false; those who already believed that electronic medical recordkeeping was a bad idea did not budge, even when shown evidence that what they'd been told was false.  Instead, Garrett said, the test subjects doubted the source of the correction itself.

 "Real-time corrections do have some positive effect, but it is mostly with people who were predisposed to reject the false claim anyway," Garrett said.  "The problem with trying to correct false information is that some people want to believe it, and simply telling them it is false won’t convince them."

That doesn't mean we should give up, Garrett said.  "Correcting misperceptions is really a persuasion task.  You have to convince people that, while there are competing claims, one claim is clearly more accurate."  He also said that it provides a cautionary note about rumors in the political arena.  "We would anticipate that systems like Dispute Finder would do little to change the beliefs of the roughly one in six Americans who, despite exhaustive news coverage and fact checking, continue to question whether President Obama was born in the U.S."

He summed up his study as showing that "Humans aren’t vessels into which you can just pour accurate information."

While this is a purely natural result -- it's understandable that it would take a lot of convincing to change someone's mind on an issue (s)he felt strongly about -- it's a little disheartening.  It's no wonder, then, that the conspiracy-theorists seem so deaf to reason, that the anti-vaxers and anti-GMO crowd don't budge even in the face of scientific study after scientific study, and that the woo-woos respond to rational argument with the equivalent of "la-la-la-la-la, not listening."  It makes the job of the people at sites like FactCheck and Snopes that much harder.

Not to mention mine.  And it also explains a good bit of the hate mail I get.

Seeing red

This morning I ran into a story in The Daily Mail that describes a new policy in Uplands Manor Primary School in Smethwick, West Midlands, England.  To wit: teachers are no longer allowed to mark papers using red ink.  All papers are to be corrected using a soothing color of green.  And while Uplands headmaster Ken Ridge denies that the decision was made because "red is negative," they're just the last in a long line of schools who have made this decision for exactly that reason.  In fact, in 2009 teachers across Australia were urged by government officials to stop using red because it is "perceived as aggressive" and could lead to students becoming "demoralized."  [Source]

Now, as a veteran educator (26 years and counting) my first thought was; how fragile, exactly, do they think that the human psyche is?  There is an increasing tendency, both in education and in parenting (which, now that I think of it, really amount to the same thing), to use an "I'm OK, you're OK, everyone's pretty doggone OK" approach.  Don't tell a kid he's gotten a question wrong; focus on the fact that he had fewer misspelled words in his answer than last time.  Don't tell a kid he's failed; tell him that he "needs some improvement."  Don't score on correct answers, score on effort.

To which I say: bullshit.

Self esteem, in my experience, doesn't come from people telling you over and over that you are competent when you're not.  It doesn't come from any number of self esteem building exercises.  It doesn't come from having your papers graded using soothing pastel tones.  It comes from striving for mastery, from achieving what you thought you might not be able to achieve, from being successful in worthwhile endeavors.  As far as I can see, all that happens when you tell a kid over and over that he's amazingly wonderful regardless of his behavior or academic performance is that he becomes insulated from the real world, develops a sense of entitlement, and decides that anything he does will be good enough for praise.  One of the most socially maladjusted teens I've ever seen came from a family where he was told, at every turn, that he was not only brilliant, that he was more brilliant than any of his peers, and that (in fact) he was so brilliant that the public schools were not doing him justice.  Having taught this young man (twice) I can say that he is plenty smart, but not so smart as all that, and there were a number of times when his "I'm so bright that you have nothing useful to teach me" attitude was shown to be, in fact, false.  This truth notwithstanding, he continued in this general frame of mind right up until graduation, and his first comeuppance -- possibly in his entire life -- came in the form of rejections from the fairly prestigious colleges he had applied to.  This devastated him (understandably) -- when had he ever been told, by anyone, that he wasn't good enough?

The sad truth about human society is that it's a pretty rough place at times.  We do our children no favors by overprotecting them when they don't win the race, when they don't pass the test; as hard as it is, it's better to say, "if it's important to you, what can you do to do better next time?" rather than "races and tests aren't important."  They say that adversity builds character; and within reason, that platitude is true.  For all of the struggle my son went through, trying to learn how to socialize in middle school, he gained more by my saying, "I love you, be strong, I know it's hard but you need to keep trying," than he would have if I'd said, "those people are all stupid, you're better than them, you don't need them."

It's a fine line.  We want (both as teachers and as parents) to see children in an environment where they can succeed.  This success shouldn't be too horribly difficult to achieve; but it's as bad to make it too easy, because then it is perceived as worthless.  How to strike that balance is no easy task for teachers, especially in these days of large class sizes and (very) heterogeneous populations.  And when kids don't succeed, it's important to understand that there are three possibilities for why that happened: (1) The teacher didn't adequately teach the concept. In my experience, this is uncommon, but it does happen, and a skilled teacher should be willing to own up and reteach if necessary.  (2) The student is placed incorrectly, and the task was either too difficult for a student of his/her ability or the student has outside issues that are interfering with his/her ability to succeed. When this happens, school administration should address either getting help for the student, or changing his/her placement.  (3) The student didn't put enough time or effort into mastery (or the right type of effort). This seems to me to be the most common of the three.

And when this happens, the right solution is not to grade in Gentle Green, or to tell the student that "your right answers were great!" and ignore the wrong ones.  The right solution is to tell the student, with gentleness and compassion, that (s)he can do better, and to give advice as to how that might be accomplished.  The genuine pleasure on the face of a student who has struggled, and then done really well on a worthwhile assignment, is a thousand times more authentic than any number of insincere positive reinforcements, gold stars for everyone, and self-esteem building exercises.

E. coli, Mike Walsworth, and the Straw Man fallacy

I think the most maddening of all of the logical fallacies is the Straw Man.

In case you're not familiar with this particular infuriating ploy, the Straw Man fallacy is when the individual you're arguing with knocks down an oversimplified (or exaggerated, or flat-out incorrect) characterization of your position, and then forthwith declares that (s)he has won the argument.  Ann Coulter, that living embodiment of specious thinking, is the past master of the Straw Man; she is notorious for taking the weakest (or most extreme) viewpoints of American liberals, demonstrating that those are incorrect, and concluding from this that all Democrats (i.e. around 50% of Americans) are blithering morons.

But you've never seen an example of the Straw Man fallacy like the one I'm about to show you.

Zach Kopplin, a young man from my home state of Louisiana who has become a champion for the teaching of evolutionary biology in public school science classes, posted a video on YouTube, showing a discussion between Louisiana Senator Mike Walsworth and a high school science teacher on the floor of the state senate.  Walsworth asks the teacher if there are any experiments that have been done that demonstrate Darwinian evolution in action.  The teacher responds that there have, and proceeds to describe Richard Lenski's elegant experiment with the bacteria E. coli, in which a population of E. coli were sampled over decades, and the samples frozen, with the (unfrozen) remainder subjected to various environmental factors as selecting agents -- and at the end of the decades-long project, all of the bacteria, the various frozen ones and the ones that had been allowed to continue growing, were compared.  (Estimates are that in the duration of the experiment, over 50,000 generations of bacteria had occurred.)  Guess what?  The lineage had changed demonstrably, with novel genes cropping up (including one that allowed one branch of the "family" to metabolize citric acid).  There you are: evolution in action.

And then Senator Walsworth asked the teacher if any of the bacteria had evolved into a human.  (It may have been my imagination that immediately afterward, Senator Walsworth added, "Herp derp hurr!")

The teacher, of course, responded "No."  And one lady in the audience did a highly amusing forehead-smack.  But you could just about hear all of the creationists in the audience responding, "Well, ha!  There you go, then!  I guess Senator Walsworth showed you." 

You'd think that the transparency of this particular Straw Man would be so obvious that no one could possibly fall for it.  But this sort of response is frequent enough that you have to wonder if creationists attend special Straw Man Training Workshops in order to learn how to perform it as obnoxiously as possible.  I've had conversations with creationists (I won't dignify them with the name "arguments"), and have been asked questions like, "Have you ever seen a cat give birth to a squid?  Well, okay, then!  (Herp derp hurr.)"  You can trot out all of the evidence you want, all of the examples of evolution being directly observed in the field or in the lab, but if you can't show me an animal evolving, in one generation, into an animal from a whole different freakin' phylum, I'm not buying it.

But of course, that last statement is the crux of the matter, isn't it?  "I'm not buying it."  I've already decided what I believe (note, "believe;" not "understand").  Nothing you can do can change that.  If you establish your definitions and evidence, I'll just shift my ground so that it redefines the terms.  (Yet another fallacy, the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.)  Show me experiments that support your theory, I'll ask why those experiments didn't do something entirely different, and then sit back with a cheesy grin on my face and claim I won.

The sad fact is, by some estimates 30% of Americans do think that this constitutes "winning."  And you may think this is a tad harsh, but it's my considered opinion that anyone who is that incapable of understanding the basics of critical thinking (not to mention the basics of biology, chemistry, and scientific induction) should not be entrusted to cast a vote.

Which, now that I come to think of it, explains Mike Walsworth's presence in the Louisiana senate.

Which of these things is not like the other?

So, today we're going to play a version of "Bluff the Listener" (from one of my favorite NPR shows, "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me").  I've got three stories to tell you.  Two of them are convincing spoofs; the third is real (well, at least in the sense that the person making the claim is serious about it).  Your task: identify which are spoofs and which is the legitimate story.

Story 1: The Grave's a Fine and Private Place, But None, I Think, Do There Embrace...

In previous posts, we've considered cases where people have believed that they were vampires, werewolves, and human/alien hybrids; here, we have a site for people who believe they're ghosts.  And apparently, even if you're a ghost, it doesn't mean that you don't need romance in your... um... life.

The site "Ghost Singles" bills itself as "The Best Dating Site for Dead Singles," and has a database of profiles you can peruse.  You enter a bit about yourself ("I am a MALE GHOST seeking a FEMALE GHOST"), an age range you're looking for (between 18 and 180 years old), and can specify what sort of death you want your prospective lover to have had (the choices are "sudden," "mysterious," "tragic," and "horrible").  Then, you are shown the profiles that fit your specifications.

For example, I looked at the profile for "DeadGrrrrl," age 94, wherein we find out the following:

Hi guys! My real name is Dorothy, and I'm from West Virginia. Do I say where I'm from as where I was born or where I died LOL?

ANYWAY, I used to like to sew, and miss it so bad! I also miss honey butter like nothing else.

I used to miss my cat until she died. That was like seventy years ago, and then she was fun to have back around. Now she disappears for like a decade at a time, then comes back for a few years. Don't ask me what a dead cat's doing. Hey, I thought they had 9 lives! lol!!

Anyway, shoot me a message! XXOO

I don't know about you, but if I wasn't married, I would be tempted.  I'm a sucker for a woman who likes cats and honey butter and says "LOL" a lot.


 Story 2: Sun, Stand Thou Still Over Gibeon

There's been a lot of hoopla over how the biblical account of creation (and subsequent history) of the Earth contradicts the scientific account.  And, as we've seen so many times, the whole thing turns on giving more credence to the words of an allegedly infallible book than to mountains of hard, factual evidence.  So if you're going to discount anything that runs counter to the bible, why not go all the way?

That's the main point of the webpage "Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine."  We start out with the relevant bible verses:

"He has fixed the earth firm, immovable." (1 Chronicles 16:30)
"Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm …" (Psalm 93:1)
"Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken." (Psalm 104:5)
"…who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast…" (Isaiah 45:18)
"The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." (Ecclesiastes 1:5)
"Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." (Joshua 10, 12-13)

Once those foundations are laid down, we only have to consider the following to see where all of this is going:

Indeed, it was this Copernican heliocentricity concept that gradually broke the back of Bible credibility as the source of Absolute Truth in Christendom. Once the Copernican Revolution had conquered the physical sciences of Astronomy and Physics and put down deep roots in Universities and lower schools everywhere, it was only a matter of time until the Biological sciences launched the Darwinian Revolution.

And the final nail in the coffin of heliocentrism comes from Ken Ham, from Answers in Genesis:

…[S]omething well known to high-school physics students, but apparently not to bibliosceptics—that it’s valid to describe motion from any reference frame.

The only possible conclusion: if you're not a Satan-led, foaming-at-the-mouth piece of liberal atheist scum, you'll immediately return to believing that the Earth lies at the center of the entire universe, and everything, even the distant stars and galaxies, revolve around it, as is revealed in the scriptures.


Story 3:  Fetch, Fido!  Fetch!

Many of us feel a strong connection to our furry friends, and sometimes have the sense that they know what we're thinking.  My dogs, for example, have an uncanny knack for knowing when I'm about to feed them, and immediately go into a whirling, hyperdestructive vortex of zero-IQ canine energy as soon as the food bag rustles.

So it was only a matter of time before some psychic decided that canine telepathy was real, and began to make use of it...

... even going so far as to make her dogs her official business partners.

Linda Lancashire, a professional psychic from Heanor (Derbyshire, England), now employs her two poodles, Hilda and Tallulah, in her clairvoyant readings.  The dogs, whom Lancashire refers to as "The Lulas," sit on the couch while she's talking to a client, and they pick up on the thoughts that the client is having, and relay them to Lancashire by woofing and pawing at her.

Each dog has her specialty.  Tallulah, in particular, picks up on relationship issues, and has been known to communicate to Lancashire, "Listen, Mummy, this lady is not happy."  Hilda, on the other paw, is more of a specialist in money and health matters.

Lancashire and her psychic poodles have quite a following, and although she states she has "incredible integrity (about) working confidentially," she mentioned that she has clients that include celebrities, politicians, and professional athletes.

Her fee runs to £40 per hour-long session, which seems pretty reasonable, given that she has to split it three ways.


Are you ready for the answers?

Story 1:  Almost certainly a spoof.  This story was dug up by a pair of very alert students who have been some of my best investigative reporters (they were the ones, for example, who informed me about the Flying Men of Colorado).  While I couldn't find anywhere on the Ghost Singles site that explicitly stated that it was a spoof, there are enough bits that are obviously played for laughs that there's no way it can be serious, such as the fact that one of the female ghosts on the database calls herself "GreatBeyondBabe."  (The vampires, werewolves, and human/alien hybrids, however, are dead serious.)

Story 2:  Spoof.  This one was identified as a spoof by the wonderful site RationalWiki on its page "List of Examples of Poe's Law."  However, one of the websites that is cited on the Anti-Heliocentrism page -- FixedEarth.com -- is, as far as I can tell, real.  And scary as hell.

Story 3:  Real.  "Linda Lancashire" is a real person, and her dogs, Hilda and Tallulah, are real as well.  And apparently Ms. Lancashire really, truly believes that her dogs act as psychic relays, and has made them full business partners.  And the quote about Tallulah telling her about the "unhappy lady" was not made up.

How did you do?  I'm glad if you won, because it means that you show fine perspicacity and critical thinking skills.  I am not, however, going to record your voicemail message.  Carl Kasell, I'm not.

Battleground Texas, and the war over public schools

"We just want teachers to teach the controversy."

"Teachers should not be indoctrinating students with either viewpoint; they should teach students how to think, not what to think."

"Present both sides of the question, and let students decide."

These are the rallying cries of the ongoing push by young-earth creationists to insinuate their views into science classrooms nationwide.  And on the surface, it all sounds Fair And Balanced, doesn't it?  It paints the scientists as the narrow-minded ones, the ones who would love nothing better than to pull the wool over students' eyes, the ones who give only their own skewed viewpoint and pretend that it is the truth.

A report was just issued yesterday by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund that shows this claim to be the bullshit it is -- that once allowed a foothold in the public schools, evangelical Christians subvert, indoctrinate, and ignore any kind of standards for critical thinking.  If you have ever been tempted by the evenhanded-appearing "teach the controversy" rhetoric, consider this.

In 2007, lawmakers in Texas passed a bill that encouraged public school teachers to include in their curricula courses about the "influence of the bible in history and literature."  Once again, this sounds like it's fair enough, doesn't it?  After all, the bible has had an immense effect on history (most of it bad, in my opinion), and ignoring the role of religion in shaping culture is absurd.  But this gave the zealots just the foothold they needed.  According to the report from TFNEF, which was authored by a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, the 57 public school districts and three charter schools that introduced bible-based courses into state-funded curricula accomplished the following:

• Using instructional materials that teach that racial diversity can be traced back to Noah's sons
• Implementing courses that describe the Rapture as a likely future event, and discuss whether it will occur before or after the return of Jesus and his thousand-year reign on Earth
• Using materials that portray Judaism as a "flawed belief system" that is completed and transcended by Christianity
• Using materials that explicitly state that the bible is the inerrant word of god, and compare conventional historical timelines with those in the bible -- concluding, of course, that the bible is more accurate
• Using "textbooks" that explicitly evangelize -- one of them states, in its preface, "May this study be of value to you. May you fully come to believe that 'Jesus is the Christ, the son of God.'  And may you have ‘life in His name.'"
• Teaching that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and that evolution is a "discredited theory"
• Implementing courses that require the extensive memorization of bible verses
• Using such highly-rigorous support materials as Hanna-Barbera cartoons on biblical stories and a "documentary" claiming that UFO/alien sightings are angels

Outraged?  I sincerely hope so.  I also hope that this will show what I've claimed all along -- that the motives of these religious extremists have nothing whatsoever to do with balance, whatever they claim to the contrary.  They see this issue as a holy war, being fought on the battlefield of the public school system, with the minds, hearts, and souls of innocent children at stake.  We rationalists, atheists, secularists, and evolutionists are the enemy, motivated by Satan, and we are to be fought at every turn, by whatever means are necessary.

So, I will reiterate what I've said so many times; this is not about rational argument.  These people are not interested in argument except insofar as it can introduce into people's minds the incorrect impression that there is doubt about evolution and the antiquity of the Earth.  In fact, these zealots cannot be argued with at all -- not by any reasonable definition of the word "argument" -- because they do not accept evidential grounds as the means to support a proposition.  And they will never, ever give up, because to them, giving up is letting Satan win.

We do agree about one thing, though.  This is war.  And it's one that that the rationalists damn well better commit themselves to winning.  There are countries in the world that are run on the precepts of religion, where questioning the paradigm is considered evil, where antiquated ideas from a human-written book are considered to be infallible.  To name a few: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mali, Algeria.

Oh, wait, that's not fair, you may be saying... that's because those governments base their laws in the precepts from the Qu'ran.  The bible is different, right?

Read the book of Leviticus, and write down how many of the statutes listed therein you'd be willing to live under as legal mandates.  Then come back and we'll talk.

Real vs. fake astrology

Astrology is not, unfortunately, limited to the western world.  People have looked to the sky for portents, not just in Europe and the Americas, for millennia.  There's a tale from Chinese history that over four thousand years ago, two astrologers, Ho and Hsi, were executed by the emperor for failing to predict a solar eclipse (that their other predictions were correct, I doubt, but that's a big one to miss given that astrologers are supposed to have their eyes in the sky all the time).

India has its own astrological tradition, based in the Vedas, the sacred writings of the Hindu religion.  And like many of these beliefs, they have persisted up to today.  Vedic astrology is still so popular that courses in it are taught in several Indian universities.  And I'm not just talking about looking at the beliefs from an anthropological perspective; no, they're taught as if they were science (which I find appalling).  In particular, the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party has championed the study of astrology as science, with one of their most outspoken leaders, former Minister of Human Resources Murli Manohar Joshi, stating that he wanted to see universities come up with grant proposals for ways to "rejuvenate the science of Vedic astrology in India," and then "export it to the world."  [Source]

As if we don't have enough ridiculous woo-woo ideas of our own around here already.

Now, however, Joshi and others of the BJP are trying to introduce legislation that would require astrologers to register with state authorities.  Joshi himself was the keynote speaker at the 4th International Astrological Conference in Karnataka, where he made the announcement.  The Karnataka Astrologers' Association, who hosted the conference, are fully in favor of this, which is a little puzzling; you would think that such a move would be as popular as the time that legislation was passed in Romania requiring witches to pay income tax.

But no, the KAA and other such groups are solidly behind this move.  Why, you might ask?

The answer: because this will help to sort out "real astrologers" from "fake astrologers."

I'm not making this up.  The vice president of the KAA has gone on record as stating that these fake astrologers put forth "mindless prophecies," that damage "the reputation of astrology, which is traditionally viewed as a science."

Oh.  I see.  And the "real astrologers" put forth what kind of prophecies, again?

It would be entertaining to have the KAA host a contest, where a "real astrologer" and a "fake astrologer" both make predictions based on the stars, and wait to see which one comes true.  My own analysis of the position of the planet Saturn relative to the constellation Orion has indicated that both of them would fail miserably, an outcome that would confirm my belief that all of astrology, be it Vedic, Chinese, or the horoscope from the New York Times, is patent horse waste.

Of course, the sad fact is that it's pretty unlikely that (1) the KAA would agree to any such thing, or that (2) true believers would stop believing even if such a contest had the results I predicted.  Astrology is far too subject to such errors in thinking as the dart-thrower's bias -- the tendency of people to notice the hits and ignore the misses.  And the astrologers themselves often engage in a form of the Texas sharpshooter's fallacy -- where they call attention to past correct predictions, and conveniently fail to mention all the ones they missed.  (The name of the fallacy comes from a story of a Texas man who had bullseyes painted on his barn wall, and each one had a bullet hole exactly in the center.  It turned out that he'd shot the holes first, and then painted the bullseyes around them afterwards.)

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out.  Will the "real astrologers" have to present a document certifying that they've taken Vedic astrology course work at one of the Indian universities that offers it?  Will they have to undergo a rigorous exam testing their knowledge of the rules of the game?  The worst part of it all is that if this legislation succeeds, it will amount to a major world government lending credence to the superstitious beliefs of a bunch of charlatans, and further confusing the gullible public about what science actually is.

But of course, since we have the Institute for Creation Research right here in the US doing the same thing, and doing their level best to influence public policy, perhaps I shouldn't point fingers.