Easy fiction vs. hard science

One of my most common reactions to woo-woos is, "What, isn't the real world cool enough for you?"

I have a decent background (although definitely in the broad-but-shallow category) in a variety of scientific fields, and I think what impresses me about each of them is how endlessly fascinating it all is.  Take your pick -- chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, geology, climatology... you could choose any one of them, and spend the rest of your life with it, and never run out of new amazing things to discover about the field.

The downside is, it's hard work.  Reality is complex.  Also, virtually any scientific field will require some level of mathematical expertise; even back in the 17th century, Galileo recognized this when he said, "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."  And this can certainly be a stumbling block.  (It was for me; my career as a physics student came to a screeching halt when I was a junior in college, largely from difficulties with the math required.  Admittedly, a fondness for partying might also have had something to do with it.)

Woo-woos, on the other hand, want it easy.  What "feels right?"  The philosophy seems to be, "Let your heart guide you.  Rationality just gets in the way."  Understanding should "come naturally" -- i.e., no struggling with textbooks, no sweating over mastering abstruse equations and complicated theories.  Just become One With The Universe, and you'll know all you need to know.

So let's contrast the two views of the world, shall we?

Last weekend I stumbled on the site "Whale/Dolphin Reiki -- Celestial Pyramid Massage," which is about as good an example of the latter viewpoint as I've ever seen.  This website, which is primarily an alt-med site (therapeutic massage, Reiki, chakras, flower essences, "emotion code," etc. -- they've got it all), has a page dedicated to one of the practitioners who claims that his/her skill (the author of the page isn't named, as far as I saw) from channeling "whale and dolphin spirits" who are in touch with, um, the entire galaxy.  Or something.

In late 2010 I started getting information during meditations from Whales and Usui Sensei, the Father of Reiki, that I would be a conduit for a type of Reiki that would be coming from Whales and Dolphins from their Source within this galaxy.  The path this would take was through Sirius.  Nothing was very specific except that each session would be tailored to the individual through a meditation before the client arrived.  I personally had issue with this as I am the type of person that needs to know what specifically is happening and how this is to proceed.  This was a leap of faith on my part to release expectations and the ego part of needing control and complete knowledge.

So, let me get this straight: you "need to know what specifically is happening," and so you decide you're in touch with an alien whale?  The answer, apparently, is "yes:"

After more meditations I was told by Usui Sensei and the Whale Guardian who is an Orca Whale that I needed to start giving free sessions to get clients in and to familiarize myself with the energies coming through and how they, the Whale and Dolphin communities,  would work with me during these sessions.  Now after many clients, meditations and communications with the Whale Guardian and others I realize that many things seem to happen during the sessions and I have to allow the energy to move through me at the direction of the Whale Guardian or the Whale or Dolphin that comes in to assist the clients.  At times I am instructed as to what crystals if any to use and placement on or around the client. 

Okay.  The "Whale Guardian" told you to use crystals, for what, exactly?

Issues that seem to be concentrated on the most are grounding and balancing of the physical body with the earth mostly with the crystalline core of the earth.  I have also been told that neuro pathways within the brain are made that opens communications within the multi-dimensional layers of the body.  In some instances more work seems to concentrate on the pineal and pituitary glands clearing and cleaning debris that has built up around these glands by food additives and pollution.  These changes increase the client’s vibration and frequency which allows acceptance physically as the earth increases in vibration and frequency.

*faceplant*

So, there you have it, then.  A whale that's in contact with the galaxy told these people to use Reiki to clean up the schmutz on your pituitary gland left there by consuming food additives.

Now, let's contrast this to some actual scientific research -- a project in Orca communication done by the Marine Mammal Research Consortium:

Killer whales extensively rely on sound for orientation, prey detection, and communication. Different types of sounds fulfill different functions for killer whales. Echolocation clicks, for example, are used for orientation and prey detection. Whistles are high-frequency sounds typically used by killer whales in social contexts, and pulsed calls are communicative sounds thought to play a role in the coordination of behaviours and maintenance of group cohesion.

Isn't that nice?  No vague, hand-waving "energies" and "vibrations;" just some real information about what whales are really doing:

Pulsed calls can be categorized into highly stereotyped call types. Different social groups within the same population have group-specific repertoires of different call types. As a result, resident killer whales in British Columbia and Alaska exhibit an intricate system of vocal dialects. The structure of these call types evolves slowly over time and is thought to be learned.

And, most importantly, it's all backed up by data -- sonograms, recordings, and behavioral observations collected over years of research.  I encourage you to peruse the site, and then come back and try to tell me that's not more interesting than the Alien Whale Crystal Massage thing.

It's not that I don't understand the temptation of easy answers.  I've found myself frustrated with how hard science can be.  I've struggled with comprehension, misunderstood things, gotten things wrong, had to go back and revise my mental model of how the world works.  More importantly, I've had to get used to admitting, "I don't know the answer to this."

Tolerating uncertainty, however, is uncomfortable for a lot of people.  For some, it's a happier solution just to embrace what "feels nice," to go along with the pleasant fiction of whale spirits communicating with aliens from Sirius, or whatever weird mythological view of the universe suits their fancy.  But I can't escape the conclusion that by doing so, they've cheated themselves of the joy that comes from catching a glimpse of the actual grandeur of what is around us -- that ecstatic moment when you say, "Yes, I understand!"

And there is no amount of comforting fiction that is worth taking in trade for that.

Crowd funding for antigravity

I've commented before how the advent of the internet has changed information transfer -- both in good ways (such as the availability of databases for quick fact-checking) and bad (such as offering a rapid, and virtually unstoppable, conduit for bullshit).  What I want to look at today is the way that the internet has changed how we view ideas and innovation -- again, in good ways and bad.

In the past, informal groups of like-minded individuals generally coalesced in some kind of formal setting -- a school, a church, a community center.  Now, there are places like Reddit where people, most of whom have never met, come together to discuss everything from gaming to world news.   This is all to the good, of course; I check several "subreddits" daily, including the ones that specialize in stories on science and skepticism.

The problem is, of course, like-minded people are... like-minded.  Groups form that seem to have the sole purpose of reinforcing the opinions that the members already had.  (And for every group, there's an equal and opposite group.  Check out "Conspiracy" and "Conspiratard" for a pair of good examples.)

Reddit isn't the only place this happens.  The same devolution into self-reinforcing silliness can even infect groups that started with the best of intents.  Take "Kickstarter," for example.

Kickstarter started out as a way for people with great ideas in any field, but who lacked the funds to see them realized, to get small donations from large numbers of people.  From their front page, the organizers of Kickstarter say,

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects.

We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, more than 3.9 million people have pledged over $577 million, funding more than 39,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now.

There's no doubt it's a groundbreaking idea.   CNN called Kickstarter "paradigm-shifting" -- which is certainly apt.  But the problem is that once you've opened up the gates to anyone, you've opened up the gates to... anyone.  The field starts widening to include people who are, to put not too fine a point on it, wingnuts.  Take the Kickstarter proposal by Peter Fred, for example, that has as its aim making an anti-gravity device:

The gravity theory that I am trying to promote has the fundamental hypothesis that gravitational phenomena is the result of transferred momentum produced by "stopped wind" a term which will be described. We already know a lot about momentum and the dynamics of wind.  Thus the fundamental idea of my theory is further interpretable in terms of familiar physics.

Of course, there's the obligatory declaration that everything we think we know about physics is wrong:

This lesson from the past seems to be lost on today's scientists who seem once again to be championing an unphysical idea that is supported by widespread observation.   The unthinking acceptance of the observationally supported "strange" and mysterious  idea that mass can warp space or that it can attract other mass has resulted in a preposterous universe where 95% of it is little understood.   This situation does not call for hordes of experimenters spending billions keeping the ancient basic mysterious hypothesis in place.  What it calls for is a lone self-financed theorists working for years the attic trying to come up with an idea that would replace the idea mass can attract other mass or warp space. 

He then goes on to explain what he believes to be the real mechanism causing the pull of gravity, which is that cool air is "attracted to" warm air, causing lift.  To illustrate this, he uses the following diagram, which apparently comes from a middle school Earth Science text, with some added clumsy application of Photoshop:

 Note that he has simply blurred out the return arrows, showing the complete movement of air in the convection cell -- so that it looks like some mysterious force is making the cool air over the ocean move toward the warm air on land.  (For those of you who haven't had any atmospheric science, what's actually happening is that the warm air is rising because of a change in density, and the cool air from the ocean is being pulled in to replace it; the reverse happens at high altitudes, creating an "overturning" of air between the land and the ocean.)

So, what's my problem with this?  A crank has a silly idea.  Big deal.

Well, the big deal is that it was launched two weeks ago and he's already raised almost $500, presumably donated by people whose training in physics ended in sixth grade.  As with the Conspiracy subreddit, wingnuts attract other wingnuts.  Now, I know that he's unlikely to reach his goal ($15,000), and by the policy of Kickstarter, if the goal isn't reached no one loses their money.  But my worry is twofold: first, dumb ideas gain credibility by appearing here; and second, Kickstarter itself loses credibility by hosting them.

Maybe I should temper this, however, with the admission that the same kind of altered approach has changed the publishing industry -- and has allowed me to e-publish my own fiction (note the handsome lineup of book covers on the right of your screen, ready for your Kindle or Nook).  And while this change has, in some sense, opened the floodgates to people publishing garbage, it has offered an entrée to talented writers who became frustrated with the gatekeeping aspect of the old agent/publishing editor route.  And there's a Darwinian aspect to all this; lousy novels can't compete with good ones, and get lost in the morass of self-published manuscripts after having sold copies only to the writer's significant other, parents, and best friend.  Likewise, ideas such as the aforementioned antigravity device simply don't get enough money to launch.

So maybe the fact that the bad ideas on Kickstarter won't get funded is its saving grace.  I have to admit that there have been some cool projects that have succeeded; consider the 3-D Pen (you should definitely watch the video on this one), the workout shirt that changes color to show your muscle activity, and, of course the Cthulhu knitted ski mask:

Also comes in "Slime of R'lyeh green."

So there you are.  Look around at some of the Kickstarter projects -- there are some really interesting ones.  Whatever else you might say about it, Kickstarter is a unique approach to funding innovation, just as e-publishing is to writing, and Reddit is to the formation of intellectual communities.  And if each of those things comes with a downside, what doesn't?  It's just another feature of our technological evolution, an outcome of human intelligence that never fails to fascinate and surprise me.

Psychic cat energy clearing services

A frequent reader of Skeptophilia complained to me a couple of days ago that he might need to stop reading my blog, because every time he did, his blood pressure spiked out of sheer indignation at the level of idiocy that some humans are capable of.  "You either need to stop making so much sense," he wrote to me, "or you have to start blogging about kittens."

Be careful what you wish for.

Figure 1:  A kitten.

Prompted by his comment, and with a little bit of research, I discovered the page, "Psychic Cats Are Probably More Common Than Other Psychic Animals," which launches us off onto our topic for today.

The author of the page starts us out with a good question, to wit: How can we know that cats are psychic?  The answer comes in two parts: (1) because we own cats, and they sure seem psychic to us; and (2) the ancient Egyptians liked cats a lot.  Also, we have the inarguable fact that cats are nocturnal:

Then there's the long association of cats with witches as their 'familiars'. Actually, witches had a whole range of 'familiars', but it is only the cats which are remembered.  Cats go out at night and roam around in the moonlight.  In other words, cats are 'different'. They have something which sets them apart.

Actually, I see way more possums out at night than I do cats, and I don't think that anyone is arguing that possums are psychic.  But there were no Ancient Egyptian Possum Gods, so maybe that's the difference.

In any case, these folks are really invested in cats being psychic because they have a business in "geomancy," which is figuring out through ESP if a location has negative or positive Quantum Energy Frequency Vibrations, and then "clearing" it of any bad ones so that the negative energies won't infest your aura.  Or something like that.  It's hard to tell, frankly, because most of their explanations sound like this:

Sometimes saying that we do earth energy healing is a shorthand way of saying that we work with a variety of different energies.  If you have read some of the other pages on this site, you will realize that there are a variety of different energies to be found in any environment. Therefore, to say that geomancy or space clearing is only involved in earth energy healing is somewhat misleading.  Obviously (I hope!), you will recognize the need to keep your environment clear of those energies which can affect you negatively.

Oh!  Sure!  That makes it completely clear!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"

At this point, you may be wondering what the cats have to do with it.  I know I was.  The whole cat angle comes from the fact that you can apparently use your cat to figure out which parts of your house have bad energies:

Energetically speaking, cats tend to be drawn to places noxious to humans. Therefore, they can be useful indicators of such areas, simply by observing them.  However, they also appear, from what we have been discovering with our own cats, that they also act as transformers of negative energy in some fashion.  As we became more and more involved in house clearing, and tackled more and more difficult places, so we found that our cats are of greater help.  For instance, they sit with us, or on the plan of the place we are working on and wander away when we are finished.

I can say with some degree of assurance that from observing my own cats, Puck and Geronimo, "sitting around looking bored" and then "wandering away to be bored elsewhere" are both activities at which they excel.  It also bears mention, however, that my cats are not exactly your textbook Fluffy Kitty:

Figure 2: What neither of my cats looks even remotely like.

Puck's physical appearance makes her look like she's got a screw loose, an impression which is helped out by the fact that she's got one broken fang and frequently walks around with her tongue sticking part way out.  She's really quite a sweet-natured cat, but even people who like cats think she looks slightly demented.  Geronimo, on the other hand, is generally pissed off at the entire world.  Sometimes he just sits there and stares at me, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits.  It's unnerving.  He would have made a good witch's familiar, if he had been able to find a witch who was in his league, evil-wise, which would have been a challenge.

Oh, and did I mention that both of these cats are black?  I'm sure that's relevant, somehow.

The "Psychic Cats" page ends with a question, which certainly seems like a good one:

If cats are attracted to your house, to you and you have many of them, you need to look at why that is. Is it because they are protecting you?

To which I can only answer: if you think that your cats are protecting you, you might want to ask yourself who you would rather have by your side if an armed burglar broke into your house -- Brutus the Rottweiler, or Mr. Fluffums the Persian Cat?

So anyhow, I'm pretty sure that my cats aren't psychic.  For one thing, if they actually were psychic, I doubt they'd let our neurotic border collie, Doolin, push them around.  Plus, I'm guessing that they'd use mind-control to get something better than dry cat food for dinner.  And as far as being "drawn to places that are noxious to humans," Geronimo's favorite spot is on top of our hot tub.  So unless somehow the hot tub has become a Reservoir Of Negative Energy, I'm thinking that he's only sitting there because it's warm.  The upshot of it all is that in my experience, cats are kind of useless.  They're sort of like home decor items that run up vet bills and poop in a box in the corner of the laundry room.

So, that's our in-depth analysis of feline psychics.   And to the reader who wanted a kitten post, I hope you're satisfied at what you've done.  I suspect I've just unleashed a torrent of hate mail from (1) people who love cats and resent my criticizing them, (2) people who believe in psychic abilities and resent my poking fun at them, and (3) people who own psychic cats and simply hate my guts.  But it's a risk I'm willing to take.  As a blogger, you have to be responsive to your readers.  Even given the criticism I sometimes get, they're still an easier audience than Geronimo, who looks like he would happily claw my eyes out even though I feed him every day.

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.