Mob brain

I told myself that I wouldn't blog about the government shutdown.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a very political person.  To my untrained ear, most politics seems to fall into one of two categories; (1) arguing about things that are blatantly obvious (such as whether gays should have the same rights that straight people do), and (2) arguing about things that are so impossibly complex that a reasonable solution is probably impossible (such as how to balance the federal budget).  Given that impression, it's no wonder that most political wrangling leaves me a little baffled.

So, any opinion I might have on the government shutdown, or what to do about it, wouldn't be worth much.  But I did hear one commentary on the shutdown, and President Obama's role in it, that left me feeling like I had to respond.  It came from one Larry Klayman, the attorney who founded the right-wing organization Freedom Watch:

I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Qu'ran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.

This unusually stupid statement was made at an event called the "Million Vet March on the Memorials," which was an accurate name only if you believe the mathematical equation 200 = 1,000,000, but which did attract noted wingnuts Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz.  And when Klayman made his wacky pronouncement, the crowd went wild with glee and waved their anti-government flags they'd brought along for the occasion.

My thought was, "Are you serious?  You people still think President Obama is a Muslim?"  I thought that had finally been laid to rest along with the whole birth certificate nonsense and the question of whether Donald Trump is wearing a toupée or if a raccoon had simply crawled on top of his head and died.

But no, the whole thing is still a burning issue with these people.  Klayman apparently arrived at the position using the following logic:

1.  I don't like Barack Obama.
2.  I don't like Muslims.
Therefore:  Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Possibly augmented with a second airtight argument, to wit:

1.  Muslims have funny names.
2.  Barack Obama is a funny name.
Therefore:  Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Logicians describe two basic kinds of one-step reasoning, the modus ponens and the modus tollens.  The first is when you have an implication, and can show that the first part is true, and deduce that the second must be true ("If today is Wednesday, then tomorrow must be Thursday.  I know today is Wednesday.  Therefore I know that tomorrow will be Thursday.")  The second is the converse; if I have an implication, and the second part is false, the first must be false as well ("If it's July, the weather is warm.  It's not warm this morning.  Therefore I know it must not be July.")

Klayman appears to have invented a third mode of reasoning, the modus morons.  I guess I need to revise my notes next time I teach logic in my Critical Thinking classes.

But what gets me most about all of this is how ridiculous it is from another standpoint, which is to consider how President Obama would act if he were a Muslim.  Let's look around us at Muslim-dominated countries in the world, and see if we can see some commonalities.  Here are a few:

• Religion is overtly present pretty much everywhere you go.
• Religion drives law, policy, and jurisprudence.
• School curricula incorporate religious principles, and schools that are predominantly religious in nature are fully supported by the government.
• The holy book of the dominant religion is to be considered as literal fact.
• Women are subjected to subordinate roles, and any kind of reproductive rights issues are completely off the table.
• Homosexuality is condemned; acceptance of homosexuality is considered a sign of moral decay, to be eradicated by any means.
• Obedience to authority is one of the most fundamental virtues.
• The death penalty is justified for a variety of crimes.

So, really, folks; who does that sound more like, the Democrats or the Republicans?

I mean, okay.  Even if you think that Klayman and his idiot friends are right, and that President Obama is a Muslim, you have to admit that he's a really lousy Muslim.  I think that if he is a Muslim, he should turn in his membership card, because he's acting like...

... well, like a liberal American.  Go figure.

And even so, when Klayman said his piece about the President "putting down his Qu'ran," the people listening didn't seem to react that way.  They applauded.  They yelled for more.  Instead of doing what I would have done -- which was to laugh directly in Klayman's face and take away his microphone -- they cheered him on.

There's something, I think, that happens to people's brains when they're in mobs.  Somehow, being part of a mob makes you incapable of thinking rationally.  So maybe that's all that happened here -- one fool got up and babbled foolish stuff to the crowd, and the crowd simply agreed, because that's what crowds do.  It's like the inimitable Terry Pratchett said: "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of the stupidest person in the mob, divided by the number of people in the mob."

Considering that this particular mob contained Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Larry Klayman, I think this formula results in a small number indeed.

COPE, Kansas, and the battle over evolution (again)

It's with a sense of "Oy, here we go again" that I must tell you that a group of parents in Kansas calling themselves COPE (Citizens for Objective Public Education) have sued the Kansas State Board of Education for adopting the Next Generation Science Standards, which explicitly endorse the teaching of evolution.

Here's the gist of the suit:

The Plaintiffs, consisting of students, parents and Kansas resident taxpayers, and a representative organization, complain that the adoption by the Defendant State Board of Education on June 11, 2013 of Next Generation Science Standards, dated April 2013 (the Standards; http://www.nextgenscience.org/) and the related Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas, (2012;
(http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165#), incorporated therein by reference (the "Framework" with the Framework and Standards referred to herein as the “F&S”) will have the effect of causing Kansas public schools to establish and endorse a non-theistic religious worldview (the “Worldview”) in violation of the Establishment, Free Exercise, and Speech Clauses of the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment.

So it's pretty much same old, same old.  They never get tired of the game, somehow, despite their repeated defeats, most tellingly the stinging slapdown they got in the Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School Board decision of 2005, which read, in part:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID [Intelligent Design] arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community...  It is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena...  ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

So, yeah.  Ouchie-wawa.  But if you're on a Holy Crusade, you never accept defeat.  So they're back at it again, with (one hopes) the same results in store for them.

What makes this more interesting, though, is a piece on the subject by the eminent neurologist, writer, and skeptic Steven Novella, in his wonderful blog NeuroLogica.  The post, entitled "Kansas Citizens Vote to Reject Science," is (of course) a thorough rebuke of the motives and rationality of COPE and any members of the judiciary who might agree with them, but it contained a passage that made me frown a little:

Science does not require non-theism. It does not even require naturalism. Science merely proceeds as if the world is naturalistic, that there is cause and effect and nothing magical that violates cause and effect. This is called methodological naturalism – science is a set of methods that work within a naturalistic framework of cause and effect.

Science is officially agnostic, however, toward any deeper philosophical conclusions about whether or not anything supernatural actual exists. It simply relegates such questions outside the sphere of science.

This does not mean that philosophers cannot rely on empirical evidence and scientific notions to argue for a naturalistic universe. That is my personal belief – the simplest explanation for why we cannot know about anything supernatural, and why science works within the assumption of naturalism, is because naturalism is actually true. But science does not require that belief.

While I agree with him insofar as his views speak of religion in general, I disagree entirely when they are applied to specific religions.  And, after all, almost no one belongs to a "religion in general."  There are religions that see no conflict whatsoever between science and a belief in god (the Unitarians, for example).  There are others which very much do.  So it's all very well to say that "science is officially agnostic... about whether or not anything supernatural exists," but when push comes to shove and science runs headlong into religion, a Southern Baptist (for example) is going to have to decide where (s)he stands on the matter.

It's a little disingenuous, I think, for Dr. Novella (however much I respect him and approve of his views) to say that mandating the teaching of evolution in public schools is outside of the purview of religion, just as religion is outside of the purview of science.  But if part of your religious belief is that god created the world in six days, six-thousand-odd years ago, then my saying that the Earth is six or so billion years old, that organisms have evolved into the forms we have today, that there was no Great Flood, and so on, certainly has religious implications.  By stating that the latter are to be taught in science classes -- and I believe, of course, that they should be -- I am stating, not so subtly, that your religion is wrong on those points.

You can surely see how both viewpoints can't be true.

So, however much we'd like to accept the Stephen Jay Gould idea of non-overlapping magisteria -- that science and religion both have their places, and those places do not intersect -- there is a significant percentage of Americans who don't see it that way.  Young-Earth creationists, in particular, are completely correct in seeing scientific statements as affecting, and in many cases negating, their religious claims.

To them, scientific statements are religious statements.  Not that science and religion have the same methods; in fact, precisely because they don't.  They have accepted the religious way of knowing as the ultimate truth -- anything that comes into conflict with that, then, must be false and evil.

Now don't get me wrong; I think the members of COPE are a bunch of irrational nitwits.  Their stance about evolution is demonstrably incorrect.  However, that doesn't mean that their claim -- that teaching their children evolution is a practice that carries with it an intrinsic statement about their religion -- is false as well.

So as much as I wish we would stop pussyfooting around and playing nice with these people, the Establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  At first glance, this would clearly seem to place religion in the context of a personal practice -- making any public mandate of a religious point of view illegal.  But what if, as in this case, kids are being made to learn, and to treat as truth, a viewpoint that directly contradicts their religious beliefs?

How is that itself not a religious statement?

I dunno.  Makes me glad I'm not a judge.  Despite my inclination to tell the members of COPE, "Hey, y'all just get yourselves back to the 17th century where you belong, I'm sure there are some witches y'all need to take care of back there," I'm not sure it's that easy.  I hope that this latest lawsuit goes the way of Kitzmiller vs. Dover, but however it's decided, I don't think the war is over quite yet.

Peter Gariaev, wave genetics, and the problem of being a dilettante

There's an inherent problem with skepticism, and the heart of it is that you can't be an expert in everything.

There are, in fact, damn few things that I do consider myself an expert in.  Judging by my ability to read technical, peer-reviewed papers, I can handle myself decently in the fields of evolutionary biology and population genetics (which I focused on in college, and which I teach every year) and historical linguistics (the subject of my master's degree).  Outside of that... well, I'm a dilettante.  So despite my B.S. in physics, research papers in Science on just about any topic in physics lose me after the first two sentences.  Even in biology -- a subject I've taught with (I think) at least some degree of competence for 27 years -- I am instantaneously lost in the details in scholarly papers on a variety of topics, including (but not limited to) cellular biology, physiology, ecosystem dynamics, and most of biochemistry.

Now, let me say up front that there's nothing inherently wrong about being a dilettante.  Dilettantes make good high school teachers, and my opinion is that it's more fun to be a generalist than a specialist.  Dilettantism was positively celebrated in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was the sport of gentlemen (and more than a few gentlewomen) -- some of whom have some significant and far-reaching research to their credit.

But being a generalist does bring with it a problem, and that is that it leaves you unqualified to weigh in on topics where specialized knowledge would be required to know if the person in question was even making sense.  And the specialists aren't much better off -- because even they are out of their element in all but their chosen field.

So how, as skeptics, do we make a decision about whether someone is a groundbreaking pioneer or a spouter of bullshit -- when the field in which they are making their pronouncements is less than familiar to you?

I ran into an especially good example of this a couple of days ago, when a friend asked me what I thought about Dr. Peter Gariaev.  I hadn't heard of Dr. Gariaev's research, so I did a little digging.  And what I found left me with the same impression my friend had -- his comment was that it "sounded like a bunch of woo."

But let's face it, relativity sounded like a "bunch of woo" when it was first proposed.  So did quantum mechanics.  So, honestly, did the germ theory of disease.  None of these ideas were particularly intuitive; none gained instant acceptance; all three seemed, for a while, to be blatant nonsense.  So let's look at some of Gariaev's writing, and see if he's an Einstein or a Schrödinger -- or a David Icke or a Richard C. Hoagland.

Here are a few paragraphs from Gariaev's own website about his theory, called "Wave Genetics:"

The quintessence of the wave genome theory may be represented as following: genome of the highest organisms is considered to be a bio-computer which forms the space-time grid framework of a bio-systems.

In that bio-system, as the carriers of a field epi-gene-matrix - wave fronts are being used, which are assigned by gene-holograms and so-called solitons on DNA – distinct type of acoustic and electromagnetic fields, produced by biogenetic apparatus of the organism/bio-system under consideration and being a medium of strategic regulatory data/information exchange between cells, tissues and organs of the bio-system.

It is also vital to note that the holographic grids/frameworks, which are also the elements of fluctuating structures of solitons, are, in fact, discrete simplest cases of code-originated information, anchored in chromosome continuum of an organism...


A group of scientists headed by P P Gariaev and M U Maslov, developed a theory of so called fractal representation of natural (human) and genetical languages. Within the confines of this theory it is said that the quasi-speech of DNA possesses potentially inexhaustible “supply of words” and, moreover, what had been a sentence on the scales of DNA–“texts” “phrases” or a “sentence” becomes/turns into a word or a letter on the other scale. Genetical apparatus can be viewed as the triunity of its structure-functional organization consisting of holographic, soliton and fractal structures.

This theory allows a refined quantitative comparison of symbolic structure of any texts including genetical. Thereby a possibility has been wide open to approach a deciphering of a lexicon of one’s own gene-code, and accordingly, more accurate composition of algorithms of addressing a genome of a human with an aim of potentially any type of programming of one’s vital activity such as treatment, increasing one’s life expectancy and so on and so forth.

Empirical tests of wave genetic theory in the light of “speech” characteristics of DNA demonstrate strategically correct stance and direction of the research.

Made it through all that?  There's lots more, but it all pretty much sounds like what you just read.  Lots of use of words like "holographic" and "fractal" and "soliton;" not much in the way of data.  As far as his qualifications, Gariaev himself apparently has a Ph.D., even though nowhere could I find any mention of where it's from.  To be fair, this may just be that his biographical details aren't widely known outside of his native Russia.  So given that, is there a way we can parse his research, despite not being molecular biologists ourselves?  (Well, maybe some of my readers are, but I'm not.) 

When I run across something like this, the first thing I look for is to see where he's been published.  And when you look at his publications list, an interesting pattern emerges.  Back in the early 1990s, Gariaev was publishing in what seem to be reputable, peer-reviewed journals -- the Journal of the Society of Optical Engineering and Laser Physics, for example.  Even back then, though, you could see what appears to be a trend toward oddball interpretations of science, with his solo paper "DNA as source of new kind of God 'knowledge'" (published in the Act and Facts/Impact series, N12, pp. 7-11).  I'm just going off the title, here -- I wasn't able to find the paper itself -- but unless he was using the term "God knowledge" metaphorically, which doesn't seem very likely in a scholarly paper, I think this one already shows that he'd gone off the beam.

Since then, though, he's not had a single publication in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, with the exception of a 2002 paper in the International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems.  His other publications have appeared in places like the Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions (and lest you think that I'm being too harsh, here, a quick survey of other articles they'd published include one having to do with using "Qigong" to treat cancer, one trying to use quantum mechanics to explain telepathy, and one called "A Scientific Validation of Planetary Consciousness"). 

Other papers by Gariaev have appeared in DNA Decipher Journal -- which just this summer published a paper called "Quantum Intelligent Design in Contrast to Mindless Materialists' Evolution."

Mercy me.

So, if Gariaev is the next Einstein, why no papers in Nature or Science?

Why, too, is he cited all over -- but only in places of highly dubious reputation, like Above Top Secret and Godlike Productions?

And don't start with me about how he is a Maverick and a Pioneer and the other scientists hate him and are suppressing his work because it is too revolutionary.  C'mon, now.  How many careers were made based on the ground broken by the likes of Einstein and Schrödinger?  Peter Higgs just won the Nobel Prize, for fuck's sake.

I may not be an expert in biophysics; but I do know that if Gariaev really had shown (as he has claimed) that "genetic traits can be changed, activated and disactivated by use of resonant waves, beamed at the DNA" and that this was going to allow humans "to regrow vital internal organs, in vivo, without the requirement of difficult, dangerous and expensive surgical procedures," then he'd be elbowing Higgs out of the way to get to Stockholm.

So we can, as generalists (or as specialists outside our particular specialty) still use the principles of skepticism to come to some sort of judgment about what we read.  Fortunate for me; a dilettante I always have been, and (I'm afraid) a dilettante I always will be.  If it weren't possible for us to think through such situations, we'd fall prey to just about every crazy claim that came along.

Some of us still do, of course -- which is why it's absolutely critical to train your brain to be, well, absolutely critical.

Winged Chupacabras and naked Sasquatches

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we're keeping our eyes on two stories that will be of interest to cryptozoology buffs.

First, from Chicxulub Puerto, in the state of Yucatán, Mexico, there are reports of an "unknown big, black, ugly, and winged creature" that is terrorizing innocent citizens.

The Yucatán Times reports that a gas station worker named Alejandra was attacked last week, but that she's not the only one.  The same creature has been seen in the middle of the town, and Alejandra's coworker Julio has reported that he's heard strange whistling noises coming from the lagoon.

"All this information combined with the fact that many domestic animals have been found dead and dismembered lately in Chicxulub and surrounding areas, are generating the rumor that the 'Chupacabras' might be on the loose in this part of the State of Yucatán," said the writer for the Times. 

Admit it.  You knew it'd be Chupacabras.

This one doesn't have wings.  Maybe it's a different species of Chupacabra.

So it seems like once again we're confronted with a mystery beast who has been seen only by a couple of people, plus reports of noises that could have any number of explanations, plus some animal deaths that could be from a variety of causes.  Myself, I don't think this amounts to much, but then, I have to admit that it takes a lot to convince me.

Apparently, it was also a considerable task to convince a Washington County, Oregon man that he wasn't a Sasquatch.

KOMO News reports that 58-year-old Jeff McDonald, of Banks, Oregon, was out hunting last Thursday, when he was accosted by a naked man who proceeded to hit McDonald with a rock.

When McDonald, predictably, objected to this, the man, who has been identified as 20-year-old Linus Norgren, also of Banks, started yelling that he was the last of a long line of Sasquatches.

Okay, that explains your behavior entirely, Mr. Norgren.

An Oregonian Not-squatch

So anyway, McDonald fought off the rampaging non-Bigfoot bravely, despite the fact that Norgren continued to pelt rocks at him, and at one point, tried to strangle McDonald with a piece of clothing.  McDonald eventually triumphed, although he suffered broken fingers, bruises, and an eye injury (happily, he's expected to make a full recovery).  Once Norgren was subdued, McDonald held him at bay with his hunting rifle and blew a whistle until deputies arrived.

Norgren is now being held on charges of strangulation, assault, and menacing, with the bail set at $250,000.  Apparently the sheriff's office has looked into his antecedents, and found that he's not a Sasquatch at all, but the son of a "well-known mushroom picker."

So that clears that up, and perhaps explains Norgren's bizarre behavior.

And that's our news from the cryptozoological world,  unless you count the fact that Melba Ketchum is still at it, trying to convince the world that her Sasquatch Genome Project is producing valid science.  Her latest attempt garnered her an interview on that stalwart bastion of support for scientific research...

...Fox News.

I'm not making this up.  You should check it out.  Fox News takes every opportunity to claim that intelligent design is real and climate change is false, and then interviews a Sasquatch researcher whose results have been discredited at every turn.

Which, now that I think of it, makes some sense, doesn't it?

Moon tracks

My friend and fellow blogger Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math, which you should all check out) recently sent me a couple of links that are interesting by virtue of what they almost certainly won't accomplish.

Jesus Diaz, writing for Gizmodo, tells about a question he asked to Grey Hautaluoma, of the NASA Department of Public Affairs.  Diaz asked if the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was going to be taking photographs of the lunar landing sites.  Hautaluoma responded, "Yes, it will. We don't have a timeline yet for viewing the Apollo sites, but it will be in the near future."

And Diaz, in his Gizmodo piece, said, "Suck it up, conspiracy theorists, because soon your cuckoo stories about the US simulating the Moon landings will be over forever."

And sure enough, eventually the LRO did get photographs sharp enough to do that.  Here is one:

 The lines are the paths of the LRV (the "Moon Buggy") and the paths of footprints of the astronauts!

The problem is, there is no way this is going to silence the conspiracy theorists.  Nothing will.

There is a saying that is widely used amongst skeptics, that "you can't logic your way out of a position that you didn't logic your way into."  Now, let me be up front that I don't think that's always true.  Logic, and inductive reasoning, are marvelous ways to bootstrap yourself up out of error, and none of us came into this world pre-fitted with a logical view of the world.  Erroneous ideas, after all, are easy to come by -- our perceptual apparatus is notorious for getting it wrong, and between that and wishful thinking out of fear or desire, it's no wonder we sometimes don't see the world as it is.

But the aforementioned cliché does get it right in one sense; if on some level you don't buy logic and evidence as the sine qua non of understanding, then you and I aren't even speaking the same language.  It's why it is generally futile to argue with the devoutly religious.  Faith is, at its heart, not a logical process.  We're not accepting the same basis for how you "know" something, and pretty quickly the argument devolves into either pointless bickering or "well, you can believe what you like, of course."

And the same is true of conspiracy theorists.  Theirs is a different non-logical basis for understanding, but as with the devoutly religious, it has little to nothing to do with evidence.  The foundational idea for the conspiracy theorists is that there is a giant disinformation campaign on the part of Someone (the government, the Illuminati, the Reptilians, the Russians, the Muslims, the Vatican, the Jews -- or some combination thereof).  Because of that, you can't trust anything that comes from them or from anyone in cahoots with them (which, after all, could be anyone).

After that, there is nothing you can do.  Nothing will ever convince them, because any evidence you bring out -- such as the above photograph of the Moon's surface -- will be judged as altered, Photoshopped, faked.  If you claim that you've analyzed the photograph and it shows no signs of having been doctored, the response is, "They're a pretty clever bunch, those Conspirators."  If you insist, you're considered a dupe or a pawn.  If you really insist, you must be... one of them.

So with conspiracy theorists as with the Borg, Resistance Is Futile.  That's why conspiracy theorists are the only group of people I enjoy arguing with less than I enjoy arguing with Young-Earth Creationists.  The creationists are at least demonstrably wrong.

With the conspiracy theorists, you can't demonstrate anything.

So the LRO photographs, unfortunately, haven't accomplished much, and the Moon-Landings-Were-Faked crowd is still going strong.  I continue to hope that one day they'll give it up and admit their mistakes, but the only way that will happen is if they change their criterion for belief to "whatever the evidence supports."

It could happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

Marked by fate

I'd really like to understand better what drives people to embrace divination.

Well, not why, precisely.  To some extent, I get why.  People are anxious about the future; they want to know what is in store for them.  They want to understand their family members, lovers, friends, and themselves better.  I can certainly empathize with the desire to get information about matters that are hidden or inaccessible or mysterious.

What I don't get is how people can actually think that it works.  I mean, take the most common divination tool -- astrology.  Whenever I hear someone try to explain how astrology works, often using quasi-scientific terminology, I can't help but laugh at how ridiculous it all sounds.  Astrology, Tarot, palmistry, the I Ching, and more obscure forms -- casting runes, looking at the entrails of slaughtered animals, throwing down handfuls of bones or sticks and reading the patterns -- none of them have ever seemed to me to have the slightest connection with reality.  All rely on a combination of wishful thinking, confirmation bias, and dart-thrower's bias for their (seeming) successes.

Today, however, I ran into one I'd never heard of before.  Called Tung Shing (or Tung Shu), it's a divination method that tells your future based on the position of moles on your face.

Myself, I just thought that moles were little unsightly blobs of melanin, harmless at best and harbingers of skin cancer at worst.  But little did I know that there's a whole school of divination that determines your fate based upon your particular collection of birthmarks.

For example, a mole at position #4 (low center on the forehead) tells you the following:

You are an impulsive person, often acting with a flamboyance that gives you charisma and a sparkling personality, but you can be difficult when there are too many opinions. You tend to be rather argumentative, but never to the point of holding grudges. This mole tends to give you an explosive temper and should you decide to remove it, you will find yourself becoming calmer and more at peace with the world.

So not only do the moles tell you about your personality -- but unlike other forecasts of your fate, this one is something you can change with a half-hour visit to the dermatologist.  Reminds me of the line from the wonderful Laurie Anderson song, "The Monkey's Paw:"  "Oh, I went into the Body Shop, and I said to the guy, 'I want stereo F/M, and stars on my teeth; and take this mole off my back, and put it on my cheek!  And while you're at it, why don't you give me some of those high-heel feet."

Little did Laurie imagine that by doing that, she'd be adding a spot at position #24, which would change her as follows:

You will achieve fame and fortune in your young age and you are advised to use this period to safeguard your old age, as people with moles here tend to have a harder life as they get older.

So that sounds pretty good. 

And of course, I'm sure you're all wondering about where I fit in with all of this.  I have a mole underneath my right eyebrow, at position #7.  So let's check the Tung Sheng:

Moles under the eyebrows indicate arguments within the extended family that cause you grief and unhappiness.  This will affect your work and livelihood.  It is advisable to settle any differences you have with your relatives if you want peace of mind to move ahead.

Well, hell.  Doesn't that just figure.

Actually, I'm not really worried.  For one thing, I get along with my extended family pretty well, at least the ones who don't mind my eccentricities.  For another, I'm of the general opinion that divination is nonsense.  However nice it would be to get a bead on the future from cards or bones or lines on our palms or moles on our faces, any "information" we'd get that way that wasn't simply wrong would be so sketchy and vague as to be useless.   You'll find out about the future soon enough anyway -- you'll just have to travel into it at a rate of one minute per minute, like everyone else.

Allegedly, the Tung Shing also tells you how to find out the weight of your soul, although I haven't been able to find out any details of how it's done.  But regardless, that's just cool.  I wonder, do all souls weigh the same?  Is having a big soul genetic, kind of like the big-nose gene that seems to run in my family?  Or do devout people have more massive souls?

If that's true, we might need a pretty sensitive scale to measure mine.

The problem with Michele

Today I'm going to ask two questions that are probably going to rub some people the wrong way:

1)  Does there come a time when a political figure's statements become so completely loony that they should be removed from public office?
and
2)  Is there a point where "being religious" crosses the line into being a mental illness?

If the answer to both of those is "yes," then it seems like Michele Bachmann may be the index case.

(Photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons and photographer Gage Skidmore)

She's already distinguished herself by making statements that are completely batshit crazy, to wit:

About President Obama:  "He has a perpetual magic wand and nobody's given him a spanking yet and taken it out of his hand."

About natural disasters:  "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'"

About the men who framed the Constitution:  "We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."

About gay rights:  "And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it."

On climate change:  "[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said she has even said she is trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that 2,000 years ago."

On minimum wage:  "If we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level."

But now, she seems to have crossed some kind of threshold of insanity in a recent interview on the Christian radio show Understanding the Times.  She implied that President Obama is Muslim (he isn't), and that he's working hand-in-glove with Al Qaeda in Syria (he isn't), but it only got worse from there.  Here's the relevant quote:

This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists.  Now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history.

Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.  When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.

I... okay.  What?

I'll say, as I've said before, that I have no issue with people believing what they like, as long as they don't try to push their beliefs on others, or decide that it's okay to lop folks' heads off with a machete if they disagree.  But... this woman is an elected official.  She helps to frame policy.  She is speaking publicly, and influencing people.  For cryin' in the sink, she is on the House Intelligence Committee, which should somehow have made it into Alanis Morissette's song about irony.

And there she still sits, babbling on about leaves on fig trees and End Time Prophecies and the days being like the days of Noah (not to mention basically making up her "facts" as she goes along; I swear, if the woman said the sky was blue, the probability of it being some other color is nearly 100%).  A lot of her detractors just laugh -- there are whole websites dedicated to "crazy things Michele Bachmann has said."  But at some point, don't we have to say, "Okay, time to step down and get some psychological evaluation?

Worst of all, she is going to other countries, on the public dime, and making idiotic statements that should embarrass every American -- such as her recent trip to Egypt, with fellow raving wingnut Louie Gohmert, where in a speech that should go down in the annals of condescension, she said, "We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed here for the people in Egypt.  We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed around the world.   We stand against this great evil.  We are not for them.  We remember who caused 9/11 in America.  We remember who it was that killed three thousand brave Americans.  We have not forgotten."

Allow me to point out that 9/11 was perpetrated by Saudi nationals who had been living in Afghanistan.  But one Scary Mooslim is pretty much like any other Scary Mooslim, right, Michele?

Now, I'm the first to admit I'm no expert in politics.  It's why I tend to stay out of political discussions entirely, except where they cross into areas I do know something about (such as evolutionary biology).  But we seem to have here an example of someone who has so clearly lost whatever grip on reality she ever had that she is unfit for public office.

I know it can't be easy to remove someone from an elected position, especially since she hasn't done anything explicitly wrong except for being a complete wackmobile.  And the good news is that I learned on her website that she won't be seeking reelection.  But heaven help us, that leaves another year's worth of damage to our global reputation that she can potentially do.

Makes you almost pine for the days of Ronald Reagan, doesn't it?