Glenn Beck, liberal indoctrination, and public schools

It's nice when your intuition is right, every once in a while.

Last week, Glenn Beck's media outlet The Blaze reported on a story out of Jacksonville, Florida.  The upshot of it was that a parent of a child who attends Cedar Hills Elementary School was "furious" to find the following note amongst his child's school work:

The father was horrified about the apparent liberal indoctrination going on here, so he checked with other parents of kids in the same class, and found that those children, too, had written the sentence down on a piece of paper.

So the dad contacted The Blaze, and the story broke.  Soon the district and the teacher who was identified as responsible, Cheryl Sabb, were receiving threats.  It flew around the internet, especially on Facebook -- a posting of it I saw had garnered over 14,000 hits, and comments such as, "I HATE those goddamn liberal public schools.  We should shut them all down," and "That teacher should be fired tomorrow, and so should the administrators who let this happen."

Anyhow, I read this, and the entire time I was thinking, "This can't be right."  Most of us teachers simply don't have time to proselytize even if we had the inclination.  And in a fourth-grade class?  Something seemed wrong here.  But as befits my stance as a skeptic, I wasn't just going to write a post and say, "Hey, this doesn't feel right to me" when I didn't have any evidence to support my point.

Lo and behold, though, I was right.  The firestorm of controversy that was generated by the story led to an investigation, and the upshot of it was that damn near the entire story reported in The Blaze was flat-out wrong.

The identified teacher, Cheryl Sabb, had nothing to do with it.  The note was part of a civics lesson on constitutional rights given to a class by a local attorney, who had instructed the children to write the sentence on a piece of paper -- and then state their opinion as to whether they agreed or disagreed with it, and craft an argument supporting their viewpoint.

Several things about this debacle appall me.  One is that no one in the chain of communication in the original story -- the father, the reporter who was contacted, the editor who approved the story for publication -- thought to do the one thing that seems ridiculously obvious to me, which is: call the teacher and find out for sure what happened.  Even the kid was apparently too dumb to understand the point of the assignment -- the whole thing could have been avoided if the kid had simply said, "No, dad, that's not what the lesson was about."  And then, The Blaze published a "followup" (it's linked at the top of the page for the original story) instead of doing what they should have done, which is publishing a retraction.  Isn't that what responsible news sources do when they screw up royally?

Oh, wait.  We're talking about The Blaze.  Never mind.

And of course, the damage is done.  Hardly anyone is circulating the actual correct information; this allows the people who hate public schools, who think they're little Liberal Indoctrination Camps, to go on living in their fantasy world.  Glenn Beck and his cronies at The Blaze have nothing to gain by retracting the story; they've long been virulently against public education, and if the reputation of the public school system was damaged by their false reporting, so much the better.

It leads me to wonder how much longer public schools will be able to survive.  Between funding cuts, increasing mandates from state agencies (including adding more worthless standardized tests), and external attacks on teachers, it's a wonder any college student in his or her right mind would choose to go into teaching.  I'm nearing the end of an (all things considered) happy career as a secondary-level science teacher, but if I were in college now, I wouldn't even consider teaching as an option.  It's a hard enough job to do well at the best of times, but with the recent changes, it's becoming next to impossible.  Some school districts can't find qualified applicants for job openings, leading them to eliminate positions, bump up class sizes, and (in some cases) hire uncertified individuals to teach children.  The result: quality goes down, criticisms increase, schools receive more pressure to change, and the whole thing goes into an ever-faster downward spiral.

I fear that the ultimate result will be the demolition of the entire system.

Which I'm sure that Glenn Beck would applaud.  But I hope he realizes what he's asking for.  Public schooling in the United States, for all of its flaws, has been an amazingly successful social experiment.  It started from the standpoint that (1) a general, broad-based education is good for everyone, and (2) all children should have the opportunity to learn, both of which ran counter to the earlier idea that only rich kids needed to be educated, and that the lower social and economic tiers were irredeemably stupid in any case.  And I would argue that our society has benefited tremendously from this experiment -- the amount of creative talent wasted in earlier centuries by the decision not to offer education to most of the boys and almost all of the girls is one of the tragedies of our past.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I am no apologist for the Department of Education; I think that many of their decisions, apropos of the oversight of the school system, are downright destructive.  But the way to effect change here is not to tear down the edifice itself.  It's to use what we've learned about successful pedagogy from the people who know -- the teachers -- to guide policy, to improve the system from the inside out.

But that's not what Glenn Beck et al. want to do.  Their continual lobbing of verbal bombs at the school system has, as its aim, breaking the power of unions and remodeling teaching on conservative principles.  (Recall that the actual, verbatim stance of the Texas Republican party is that they "oppose the teaching of higher-order thinking skills, values clarification, (and) critical thinking... which have the purpose of challenging students' fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.")  And judging by the reactions I saw to the civics lesson in Jacksonville, Beck and his followers are succeeding.

I just hope that I'll be retired before the entire system collapses.

Gay vaccines and porn pheromones

As a followup to my last post, today we have two stories from people who fall clearly into the "you have no idea what you are talking about, and therefore should just shut up" department.

Both of these are people who have weighed in on the origins of homosexuality, despite the fact of having no training whatsoever in either human behavioral science or developmental genetics.  (In fact, one is a professor of law and the other one a proponent of "alternative medicine.")  To clarify right from the outset:  the scientists who have done some actual research on the topic, and who therefore are actually qualified to give an opinion, have stated unequivocally that sexual orientation is due to a variety of factors, both genetic and environmental:

Despite almost a century of psychoanalytic and psychological speculation, there is no substantive evidence to support the suggestion that the nature of parenting or early childhood experiences play any role in the formation of a person's fundamental heterosexual or homosexual orientation. It would appear that sexual orientation is biological in nature, determined by a complex interplay of genetic factors and the early uterine environment. Sexual orientation is therefore not a choice.  [Source]

Okay, that's clear enough, and certainly informs us about the ethics of discriminating against LGBT individuals, doesn't it?  But even this statement -- from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, in the UK -- isn't enough for some people, especially if they have an agenda.

Which brings us to Gian Paolo Vanoli, a purveyor of alternative medicine in Italy.  Vanoli is a prominent anti-vaxxer, who is unmoved in his ridiculous stance despite last week's deadly outbreak of measles in Wales that has thus far sickened 700 people.  And now, Vanoli has added another outcome to his list of bad effects from vaccination.  Vaccination, Vanoli says, can make you gay:

The vaccine is introduced into the child, the child then grows and tries to find its own personality, and if this is inhibited by mercury or other substances present in the vaccine which enter the brain, the child becomes gay. The problem will especially be present in the next generations, because when gays have children, the children will carry along with them the DNA of their parent’s illness. Because homosexuality is a disease, even though the WHO has decided that it is not. Who cares! The reality is that it is so. Each vaccination produces homosexuality, because it prevents the formation of one’s personality. It is a microform of autism, if you will. You will see how many gays there will be in the next generation, it will be a disaster... One of the main causes is represented by vaccines, which go against life, disturbing our mind and our spirit. The proof of that is the big increase in the number of homosexuals. Since mass vaccination began, this is the result.

And if you think that this is faceplant-inducing, wait till you hear the proclamation made recently by Judith Reisman, a professor of law at Liberty University:

As principal investigator during President Reagan’s term, I piloted the largest unbiased U.S. Department of Justice study ever conducted on pornography. Big Pornography paid millions to taint our rock-solid findings. Our study was “burned” as science confirmed the 3,500-year-old biblical reality: Pornography would have to cause pornography/sex addiction...  We’ve just been educationally and morally dumbed down enough for deviance to really catch up...

“Pornography is inducing a cultural pheromonic effect,” recording the mis-orientation of male gypsy moths.  In 1869 gypsy moths, imported to create an American silk industry, instead decimated our deciduous trees – oaks, maples and elms – and devastated our forests for the next 150 years. In the ’60s scientists found male moths mate with the female “by following her scent,” her “pheromone.”  A 1967 paper, “Insect population control by the use of sex pheromones to inhibit orientation between the sexes,” reported that scientists permeated the moth’s environment with strong, artificial female moth pheromone “This … scent overpowered the normal females ability to attract the male, and the confused males were unable to find the females.”  So, our trees got saved by what could be called olfactory moth pornography, a heavy-duty phony scent that unmanned male orientation to create an impotent moth population.

In 1972 another paper described mating disorientation as “preventing male gypsy moths from finding mates,” using pheromones. Called the confusion method:

“An airplane scatters … pellets imbedded with the scent of the pheromone … [that] overpower the male’s ability to find the female. He is thus desensitized to the natural scent of the female by this artificially produced pheromone. … The male either becomes confused and doesn’t know which direction to turn for the female, or he becomes desensitized to the lower levels of pheromones naturally given out by the female and has no incentive to mate with her.” (emphasis added)

Gypsy moth pornography? In the trapping method, male moths looking for the female, enter traps with no exit “only to find a fatal substitute...”

So can Cynipidae desensitization tell us genius humanoids about pornographic mating desensitization, say, about pornography as Erototoxic, as the toxic form of Eros? Gosh.  [Source]

Oh.  Okay.  What?

Erototoxins?  Gay gypsy moths?  Pheromones from pornography?

I'm not sure that the most surprising thing of all isn't that this woman actually has a Ph.D. and holds a professorship.  Of course, it is at Liberty University, which isn't exactly a hotbed of erudition, and she teaches law even though her Ph.D. is in communications.  And it bears mention that she has gone on record as saying that people who view pornography suffer brain damage, and so "are no longer expressing 'free speech' and, for their own good, shouldn't be protected under the First Amendment."  Oh, and that Nazism was caused by homosexuality.

Then, there's the fact that she ended what was apparently intended to be persuasive journalism with the word "Gosh."

Anyhow, given the dubious credentials of both Reisman and Vanoli, I don't suppose we should have expected any better.  But it does make me wonder why, given the fact that most people are vaccinated and that porn is damn near ubiquitous, everyone isn't gay.

In any case, there you have it.  Another pair of individuals who should follow the "you are obviously an idiot, and therefore should just shut the hell up" rule.  But as we've seen, being blitheringly dumb doesn't seem to come along with any inhibitions against proclaiming your views in public.  Say, I wonder if there's such a thing as a "moronotoxin?"  Believing idiotic ideas causes a flood of moronotoxins in your brain, and before you know it, you're talking to the press about gay vaccines and porn pheromones.

Hey, it's possible.

Vietnamese mystery rocks, and the fear of admitting ignorance

Yesterday I ran across a story that is mostly remarkable because of the last paragraph.

Entitled "Odd Rock Covered in Unidentified Hieroglyphics Rumored to Cast Spells," the article was written by Dana Newkirk, and appeared in an online compendium of "Forteana" called Who Forted?  (The "Fort" references, for those of you unfamiliar with this peculiar little slice of Americana, come from Charles Fort, an iconic figure in the investigation of the paranormal and "anomalous phenomena" in the early 20th century.)

Anyhow, the story starts off in an ordinary fashion, for this sort of thing.  We hear about a large rock in Vietnam, covered with carvings, that was donated to the Thuong Temple in Phu Tho in 2009.  Of course, as you might expect, it isn't the anthropological or linguistic significance of the artifact that is the point of interest here; there's got to be something weird going on with said rock, and in short order we find out that the residents of Phu Tho think the rock has "the ability to cast a strange enchantment," and are staying away from the temple because they're afraid of it.

As far as what the carvings mean -- or even how old they are -- that's unknown.  "Unfortunately not much else is known about the strange rock or the ancient symbols covering its entire surface," Newkirk writes.  "Currently the province is compiling a scientific committee with the intention of studying the strange rock with the hopes of finding some answers regarding where it came from and what the strange markings might mean."

Okay.  So far, we've got a mystery rock and some superstitious people in a remote country.  Neither one is a rare commodity, and would certainly not warrant a mention by themselves.  But here's how Newkirk wraps up her article:

So, what the heck is it? A star map? Some kind of tool? Or is it just some really bored guy [sic] a few hundred years ago? We want to know what you think! Share your thoughts with us on our Facebook page, tweet us @WhoForted, or leave a comment below!

I'm pretty sure she meant "was it really just made by some bored guy a few hundred years ago," not that the rock itself was a fossilized person, but even that's not the point.  When I read the last paragraph, my immediate response was, "Why on earth is what I think even remotely relevant?"  I know nothing whatsoever about the "odd rock" except what Newkirk just told me; I can't find any mention of it anywhere except in Who Forted?  I know zilch about Southeast Asian archaeology, history, and linguistics.  My opinion on this topic would be completely worthless.

And yet, I'm sure that Newkirk will be inundated with opinions from ignorant individuals like myself.  Because -- and I have the sense that this problem is especially bad here in the United States -- everyone thinks it's their god-given right to have an opinion about everything, and to trumpet that opinion from the rooftops, regardless of how little in the way of facts they might know about the issue at hand.

I find this whole thing intensely irritating, because I run into it almost on a daily basis.  For example, just a couple of weeks ago, I was asked by a friend, "What do you think the federal government should do about the sequester?"  I responded, "I have no idea.  I don't know nearly enough about economics or politics to weigh in."  My friend frowned and laughed at the same time and said, "Come on.  You must have some kind of opinion."

No, actually I don't.  And if I did, it wouldn't mean anything.  I'm pretty aware of the topics about which I am ignorant, and I try my hardest not to pretend I'm well-informed about them; and I don't have any particular problem with saying, even to my students, "I don't know the answer to that."  (In my classes, I usually follow it up with, "... but I'll look into it and see if I can find an answer for you.")  But I find that a lot of people are acutely uncomfortable with admitting ignorance, and feel the need to have an opinion on topics for which they should simply withhold judgment until they actually know what they're talking about.

I wonder if perhaps this is one of the negative outcomes of living in a representative democracy.  We have a "one person, one vote" system, in which my vote and the vote of the greatest genius in the country have exactly the same weight and the same effect on the outcome.  (Which, honestly, I am all in favor of.)  But this has the untoward consequence of giving people the impression that because every person's vote is worth the same amount, everyone's opinion is worth the same amount.  Which it clearly is not.  To make it even more obvious: if I were to talk to Stephen Hawking, and I were to say, "Professor Hawking, let me tell you what my views are on quantum physics," he would not be obliged to listen to me, and in fact would be well within his rights to tell me to piss off.  Democracy is a lovely model for governance,  but makes no sense at all when it comes to ideas.

Unfortunately, this whole thing pervades our thought processes all the way to the top, and is why we have people like Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Representative Paul Broun of Georgia blathering on about how evolution is "unproven" and "controversial," even though from their comments it's pretty evident that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about.  And I find this especially appalling given that both men have reasonably decent science backgrounds -- Jindal has a B.S. in biology from Brown University, and Broun a medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia, so they should both know better.  Despite that, in the stories I linked (which you should definitely check out), Jindal says that creationism should be taught in public schools because we want kids exposed to "the best facts" and "the best science."  Broun was even more blunt, calling evolution "lies straight from the pit of hell."

Can anyone tell me why either of these men's opinions is in the least relevant, when they evidently have no knowledge about the topic upon which they are expounding?

So no, I won't tell you my opinion about the sequester, or about the Vietnamese mystery rock.  It wouldn't mean anything if I did.  And I might be prone to a lot of mistakes, but bloviating on a subject about which I am ignorant is one I try my best to avoid.

This always reminds me of the wonderful quote by Isaac Asimov, which seems a fitting way to end this post:

Silencing Alex Jones

Okay, I'm not going to beat around the bush, here.  Let's cut right to the chase.

Alex Jones needs to shut the hell up.

Before the dust even settled after Monday's horrific bombing at the Boston Marathon, Alex Jones and his wacko followers were claiming that the government had planted the bombs.  Here's a direct quote of his tweet from Monday, shortly after the story broke:

Our hearts go out to those that are hurt or killed #Boston marathon – but this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag

And immediately afterwards, the following was making the rounds on Facebook:

Man, Jones et al. must think these conspirators are idiots.  Can't you imagine it?  Evil, Boris-and-Natasha types, but from our own government, concoct this big secret plan to blow up people at the Boston Marathon -- and then they slip up and post about it on the internet three days early.

Oopsie! 

How dumb would you have to be?  And yet... to Jones, these are the ultra-intelligent supervillains who are running everything.

Oh, and why do Jones and his knuckle-dragging True Believers think the government planted the bombs on Monday?  Because (1) it was Tax Day; and (2) so that the Transportation Safety Authority and other government agencies would have justification to clamp down and Deny Us Our Rights.

Same as the Newtown Massacre.  Same as Jared Loughner shooting up the crowd in Tucson, Arizona.  Same as the theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado.  Same as the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Same as 9/11.

In Jones' bizarro world, bad things don't sometimes just... happen.  Crazy people don't sometimes get hold of guns and kill people.  Religious extremists don't just slaughter innocents because of their warped view of what god wants them to do.  No; it all has to be the Big Bad Government, who in Jones' mythological view of the universe has replaced Satan as the root of all evil.

Look, it's not that I'm some sort of apologist for everything our government does.  I am well aware that we've pulled some really shady stuff, sometimes, and our projected self-image as the Global Good Guy is frequently unwarranted.  But using a tragedy like Monday's bombing as fodder for your delusional worldview, and then to trumpet that worldview publicly in order to make money, is a slap in the face to the people who survived the bombing (many of them with dreadful injuries), and to the families of the victims who died.

And it's time that we stand up and tell Alex Jones, as the leader of the pack, to shut up.

Toward that end: here is a list of the sixty AM and FM radio stations that carry his show.  Take a moment to look through the list, and then send a letter or an email to the stations of your choice and ask them to drop their sponsorship of this asshole.  He needs to have his forum taken away.

Of course, if it happens, he'll just claim that the government is trying to silence him.  But that won't matter much if no one is listening any more.

The stories we tell ourselves

Often, when I respond to a piece of art work, it's because of the stories that it evokes in my brain.

When I was in college, and took an art appreciation class, I fell in love with Édouard Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  And it wasn't because of any knowledge of French Impressionism, and how Manet's work fit into the artistic movements of the time; nor was it really about the style, or the skill of the painter, although those certainly played a role in the capacity of the painting to touch me.  The whole thing was about emotion, and how it brought stories bubbling up from the depths of my brain.

Who is this girl with the despairing expression?  I imagined her as a country girl who'd come to the city, allured by its lights and excitement, and is having to support herself as a barmaid -- and now she's there, trapped and disillusioned, her mind and her heart a million miles away.  The painting struck me then as terribly sad.  And it still does.

All of this comes up because of a conversation I had with a friend who is working toward his Ph.D. in philosophy.  His dissertation is on the subject of phenomenological idealism, which is (as far as I understand it) the idea that the universe is a construct of the mind -- that reality is solely experiential, and may or may not have any external existence.  (Kant said that we "cannot approach the thing in itself" -- all we know is our experience of it, so that's what reality is.)

Anyhow, my friend told me a bit about what he's studying.  I did try my best to understand it, although I don't know how successful I was -- and it must be admitted that I am not entirely certain I have the brains required for such an esoteric subject.  But insofar as I understood him, I found myself disagreeing with him almost completely.

That said, I'm not going to try to craft an argument against idealism.  For one thing, I am wildly unqualified to do so.  My background in philosophy is thin at best, and my attempts at understanding classical philosophy in college were, on the whole, failures.  What interests me more is the immediate reaction I had to my friend's description of his philosophical stance.  It wasn't an argument; it was purely an emotional reaction that, if I put it into words, was simply, "Oh, now, come on.  That can't be right."

So I started thinking about why people respond the way they do to belief systems.  Why, apart from "I was taught that way growing up," does anyone believe in a particular view of the universe?  Why does a theistic model appeal to some, and others find it repellent?  Why do I find materialism "self-evident" (which it clearly is not -- from what my philosopher friend has told me, it's no more self-evident than any other view of the world)?  Why, within a particular religious worldview, do some of us gravitate toward viewing the deity as harsh and legalistic, and others as gentle, kind, and forgiving?

I suspect that it all comes down to the emotional reactions we have.  I'd bet that very few of us ever do the kind of analysis of our concept of the universe that my friend has done; for the vast bulk of humanity, "it feels right" is about as far as we get.

And I can lump myself in with that unthinking majority.  I'm drawn to the mechanistic, predictable, external reality of materialism, but not because I have any cogent arguments that that worldview is correct and the others are false.  I accept it because it's a solution to understanding the world that I can live with (and that's even considering the bizarre, non-intuitive bits, like quantum mechanics).  But for all that, I can't prove that this view is the right one.  Being locked inside my own skull, even the solipsist's answer -- that he, alone, in the world exists, and everything else is the product of his mind -- is irrefutable.  Why don't I believe that, then?  Because it doesn't "seem right."  Hardly a rigorous argument.

Now, I still think you can make mistakes; once you've accepted a rationalist view of the world (for example), you can still commit errors of logic, misevaluate evidence, come to erroneous conclusions.  But why is the rationalist worldview itself right?  You can't argue that it is, using logic -- because to accept that logic is valid, you already have to accept that rationalism works.  It's pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.   The only reason to accept rationalism is because it somehow, on a gut level, makes sense to you that this is the way the world works.

It's a little like my experience with art.  A Bar at the Folies-Bergère appeals to me because of the emotions that it evokes, and the tales I tell myself about it.  I wonder if the same is true in the larger sense -- that we are drawn to a worldview not because it is logically defensible, but simply because it allows us to sleep at night.  Beyond that, all we do is tell each other stories, and hope like hell that no one asks us too many questions.

The pharmaceutical greenhouse

Three hundred years ago, a lot of the medicines that were used to treat human conditions were identified using the "Doctrine of Signatures."  The idea was, if something -- especially a part of a plant -- looked like a human body part, it must be useful for treating diseases of that part.  It also gave a lot of plants their names; most of the plants that have names that end in "wort" (from the Old English wyrt meaning "herb") come from this idea, and it's why we have plants like lungwort, spleenwort, liverwort, ribwort, bladderwort, navelwort, and nipplewort.  And, for the record, I didn't make any of these up.  It's also why a lot of plants have scientific names that come from human body parts, such as the orchid.  Orchis is Greek for "testicle."

I didn't make that up, either.

I should probably mention at this juncture that a lot of the patients who were treated using the Doctrine of Signatures died.  It did lead to the discovery of some plants that did have important therapeutic use -- such as digitalis -- but more often than not, the various worts are useless, and some are actually toxic.  So it's a good thing for those doctors that they lived before the concept of "malpractice lawsuit" was invented.

The problem is, some purveyors of "natural medicines" are still using the same sort of argument today, and people are still falling for it.  Take the whole "pine pollen extract" thing that has been making the rounds lately.  Given that pollen is the male spore of a plant, and produces the sperm cells, guess what they say it's used for?  Yup!  Got it in one!

Raw pine pollen is the richest seedbed of testosterone derived from plants; since it is the male sperm of pine trees, it fosters plush growth in all living creatures, from trees and plants, to animals, to humans. Some experts claim that pine pollen is an ingredient in certain pharmaceuticals designed to treat low testosterone levels in both men and women.  [Source]

I'm not sure if I want to experience "plush growth," myself.  The whole thing reminds me way too much of the Moss Guy from the movie Creepshow.

Be that as it may, is there any evidence that pine pollen actually works to make you, um, Stiff Like The Mighty Pine Tree?  The answer seems to be "not much."  I did a fairly intensive search, and found one source that said that I should use it because my "manhood is grumbling with hunger... for nature's invincible transmitter of life energy;" another that said that pine pollen is "adaptogenic, so it will cater to exactly what your body needs and treat any area of distress;" and a third that said that after a pine pollen cocktail, you might radiate so many Sex Vibes that you'll end up having your leg humped for 45 minutes by a female dog.  Although why that's a selling point, I have no idea.

Then, of course, you have your anti-aging cream made from "raspberry plant stem cells," which works because "(p)lant stem cells are equipped with regenerative properties, and can 'self-renew.' They can either form a large reservoir of unspecialized cells, or upon stimulation grow into 'differentiated' plant elements and become a new root, leaf, flower or other part of the plant."  I'm assuming that they're talking in some vague way about parenchyma, the unspecialized tissue that all plants have (and which is usually used for starch storage, as "filler" cells in stems, and for regrowing damaged tissue).  The idea here being, I suppose, that if plants have cells that regenerate organs, if you smear those cells on your face, you'll regenerate youthful skin, or something.

It bears mention that I also looked for any peer-reviewed research that showed any results for either pine pollen or "raspberry plant stem cells," either for or against.  No luck.  My sense is that the people who are selling this stuff are making up the whole thing as they go along.  So, who knows?  Maybe the next big seller will be a kiwi fruit extract for male pattern baldness, I dunno.

So, anyway, that's our modern-day answer to the Doctrine of Signatures.  In today's litigious society, though, sellers of snake oil have to be a little more careful than the people who sold Decoction of Lungwort for bronchitis three hundred years ago.  This is why, on virtually all of these products, you'll see a tiny little label that says "Not intended to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent any disease or ailment."  Which will protect their asses quite nicely.  No application of Salve of Buttockwort needed.

Okay, I did make that one up.

Opening your mind to mummified baby aliens

Well, the targeted ad software has done it again.

It's my own fault, really.  I shoulda known that having two posts in a row about aliens was a bad idea.  On the other hand, it'd be nice if the software that chooses ads for my blog would give the same weight to words like "bullshit," "nonsense," "foolishness," and "wingnut" as it does to "aliens," "UFOs," "psychics," and "ghosts."

In any case, almost as soon as I hit "Publish" on the second post, I began to get reports from friends who are regular readers, informing me of a couple of ads that keep popping up that are... interesting.

The first one is entitled "16 Powerful Extraterrestrials Message to Humanity," which tells us that having a conversation with an alien is easy:

What if it was possible to have a conversation with a highly advanced, benevolent extraterrestrial being? What kind of wisdom would this entity have for humanity?

Extraterrestrials do not need to land on your front lawn to share their wisdom. There are other, more subtle, yet far more effective ways to convey their very important messages.

Its been happening for quite some time. We invite you to open your mind…

My general feeling is that these folks' minds are so open that their brains fell out, but maybe I'm just not highly advanced enough to understand all this.

So, what if I was to open up my consciousness to aliens?  What would I learn?  Here's a sampler:

Many of these should resonate with you, here are a few:

• Consciousness creates matter.
• Each individual creates his or her own reality through thoughts, beliefs and expectations.
• There is no death. Consciousness exists forever.
• We all are one, from the same divine source.
• We are spiritual beings but have chosen to exist as physical humans.
• In this life there are no victims, only opportunities to evolve.
• We can control reality through the powers of the Universal Mind.
• Our spiritual purpose is to choose from selfishness or altruism.
• Souls reincarnate to eventually experience God-realization.
• Feelings & Intuition are more important as a source of guidance than intellect.
• We are here to remember what we already know.
• Physical reality is an illusion.
• Light cannot exist without the dark. One cannot understand one thing unless he or she understands its opposite.
• God is self-experiential, in that it is the nature of the Universe to experience itself.
• God is not fear-inducing or vengeful, only our parental projections onto God are.
• The very best way to maximize your evolution while on this planet is through regular meditation.

The extraterrestrials messages are amazing! It feels like I already naturally knew some of these.

Consciousness creates matter, and physical reality is an illusion, eh?  Let me just throw a rock at your head and see if you still believe that afterwards.

And the whole thing about "evolution" just torques the hell out of me.  Can we get one thing straight, here?  Thinking you are in contact with an alien isn't evolution, it's a symptom of a mild mental illness.

But if my obviously poorly-evolved reality doesn't convince you, you can buy what they're selling (of course they're selling something) -- "Equi-Sync Brain Wave Meditation Software."  Starting at only $58.  Heckuva deal.


The second ad was a promo for an upcoming film release for something called Sirius.  I didn't know about it, so I did some research, and found this.  It turns out that the premise of the film -- which alleges to be a documentary, i.e., true -- goes something like this:

UFOs have been in contact with humans throughout history.  The military knows all about this, and is trying to stop us from finding out about it because the aliens have promised us an unlimited source of free energy, and that would be bad for the military.  For some reason.  There's a baby alien that has been discovered, that looks like this:

Its DNA has been analyzed, and it has been shown to be extraterrestrial in origin.

Now, you'd think that'd be enough.  But no, there's more:

The director of the film, Amardeep Kaleka, made it public that he was raising funds for his show along with Steven Greer, of the UFO Disclosure Project -- and shortly after, Kaleka's father was killed in the Sikh Temple shooting near Milwaukee.  Was the government trying to shut Kaleka up by killing one of his family members?

*cue scary music*

In a word: no.  The killer, Michael Page, was a white supremacist.  End of story.  As far as the other claims: according to some skeptics who've looked at the photographs, the "baby alien" is almost certainly a mummified baby spider monkey; given that we have no alien DNA to compare it to, the assertion that a certain sample of DNA is "extraterrestrial in origin" is ridiculous; and there's no such thing as "free energy," as the Second Law of Thermodynamics is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.

But of course, I predict that this won't affect the movie's success one little bit.  I predict that people will love Sirius, with the result that more "baby alien" websites will pop up everywhere, and I'll be hearing about it for the next ten years.

Anyhow, that's all I've got for today.  I encourage you to keep your eyes on the ads on my blog -- in my estimation, they've missed the target far more often than they've hit it.  Maybe one day they'll improve the software, and I'll start getting ads for books by Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson videos.  Now that I could "open my mind" to.