The great Louisiana gunboat conspiracy

There are two reasons that conspiracy theorists drive me crazy.

One is that they consistently accept weird, convoluted explanations for events just because those explanations favor their twisted notions about the way the world works, simultaneously ignoring a simple, rational explanation that fits all of the available evidence.  This anti-Ockham's-razor approach runs counter to any reasonable logic, but they embrace it with a vehemence that is often scary.

The second is that they're damn near impossible to argue with.  Present a counterargument to their favored theory, and you're deluded.  Laugh at them, and you're a "sheeple."  (Wait, isn't "sheeple" plural?  What's the singular, then?  "Sheeplum?")

Come up with a really good counterargument, and you must be one of... Them.

Take, for example, the article that hit the conspiracy site Liberty Federation this week about some military boats that were seen in a river near Slidell, Louisiana.  There's a video, with the tagline, "Is this part of some kind of drill or is it just normal now in the new Amerika to see armed troops patrolling public canals?"

Right.  "Amerika."  *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*  Of course it's the military wing of the New World Order, practicing their takeover maneuvers.  Merely requiring that you ignore the fact that the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School, which has been operating there for decades, is only five miles away.

So yeah, this really was just a drill, and the guys really were just ordinary military guys, which one of the commenters on the post pointed out:

We have a unit down there, been training in that area for close to 20 years. Not sure how that guy has never seen them before, we run all over the rivers and marshes (and Lake Pontchartrain) constantly. Completely normal training, guys are preparing for overseas deployment, has nothing to do with the conspiracy BS being spouted below. Not sure why they are transiting through such a populated area, we normally stay farther away from areas like that for various reasons. 

Well, one reason is probably that when they don't, the conspiracy theorists start honking like mad.  To wit, the following response:

so what is next
-shoot shoot You Americans , b.o."s agenda – to a " T " , e. holder is doing flips inside of the west/wing knowing that he is get’’n closer to controlling the whole kitten-ka-bouttle then any A.G. ever – even though it is so Un-American that it is sickening to the stomach – this is this administrations agenda , People wake the " F " UP ^ , this is Your Nation dying at a tic-toc and a tic-toc , Yes , What can We do – Do You not see that every time this administration wins in court or by a legislative mark of the pen , It is always very controversial and they will win it by – chicago bullitics – each and every time – what is it that they (this administration) could/and/would hold against You or Your’s , People it is get"n to be to that close of lose for Us Americans that Yes it could come down to You and what You had said and/or done and You may or/may not feel it was wrong , they (this administration) will find the wrongs and put the blame on You or one of Your loved One’s , People We have the devil in Our House and they know what You have forgotten , As little or as simple it was or is to You , They will see to it that it can make the difference of being a representative of the People ’ or NOT being a representative of the People , This administration is so damn evil that the devil HimSelf has to step-back and try to figure out where the evilness comes from – Since this devil himself knows what is in the winners package – There is Not enough wrapping paper and/or ribbon to put this in a package and say (F^ck You say’s Da devil) wel-come to da jungle where obama loves to be , he feels so much at home that he sends the tranny away – why would you need another pointer when ya have the likes of me – and this is coming from the one that has the wife of an tranny – oh baby it is the stiffy that gets me (says b.o.) fur — sure

I feel like this should come with some sort of Rosetta-Stone-like translation, don't you?  We need someone like the little old lady from the movie Airplane:

So, I feel duty-bound to do my best, here, although my Dumbassian is kind of rusty.  But here's my best shot at a translation of the above:

I dislike President Obama because I think that his agenda is to target American citizens, and perhaps kill them.  Attorney General Eric Holder is certainly part of this, and is so excited by the prospect that he is engaging in gymnastics.  Gosh, this sure makes me nauseated!  I wish that more Americans would be aware of their surroundings.  Every time this administration wins a court case, it angers me.  It is like what happens in Chicago.  President Obama knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake!  He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good or his thugs will murder you and your entire family!  Even Satan is appalled by how evil this administration is.  Satan would like to wrap this administration up with wrapping paper and give it as a gift.  Also, I believe that because President Obama is an African American, he would prefer to live in a tropical rain forest biome.  And his wife is a hermaphrodite.  Oh, my, yes.

So okay, maybe it doesn't make any more sense when you put it in standard English.

The problem is, there are a lot of people who think this way.  If you go over to the Conspiracy subreddit -- which I wouldn't suggest if you want to maintain your sense that humans represent intelligent life -- you will find posts even stupider than this one.  You will find posts that will make this one seem like a doctoral dissertation.  You will find posts that will make you wonder how the people who wrote them have enough brain cells to operate a computer successfully.

I live in hope, however, that the sensible people outnumber the conspiracy theorists, a hope that is bolstered by sites such as the Conspiratard subreddit, which exists solely to ridicule the ideas of people like our above marginally-coherent friend.  I also hope that the majority of the 191,000 who have subscribed to Conspiracy are only amused bystanders, much the way I listen to Alex Jones or read the columns written by Ann Coulter.

So, yeah, I'm an optimist.  It's a dicey proposition, sometimes, but still better than the alternative.

Even here in "Amerika."

Captain Odin of the spaceship Valhalla

Last night, I was working out at the gym, and one of the televisions was showing a program about a subject I know and love: Vikings.

My MA is in Scandinavian historical linguistics (yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story).  As part of my thesis research I read a good many of the sagas, some in the original Old Norse, the culmination of a passion for the subject I've had since I first found D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths when I was in elementary school.

"Odhin," by Johannes Gehrts (1901) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I was tickled when I saw the program being aired, even though I had a chill run up my spine when I noticed that it was on the History channel.  Given the name, you'd think that the History channel would show programs related to history.  You'd be wrong, although I guess the more accurate name of The Woo-Woo Bullshit channel wouldn't attract sponsors very well.

So I watched the program for a while.  And it turned out to be an episode of...

... Ancient Aliens.

I'm not making this up.  My first thought was that the contention of the show was that the Vikings were aliens, but it turns out that no, they're not saying that.  That would be ridiculous.

They're saying that the Vikings were helped by aliens.

The show featured a couple of legitimate scholars, Kirsten Wolf of the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Department of Scandinavian Studies (which, coincidentally, is where I took my courses in the Old Norse language) and Timothy Tangherlini of UCLA.  Both made coherent and academically relevant statements regarding the history and culture of the ancient Norse, which were (of course) immediately misinterpreted by the wackos who wrote the narrator's script.

"The Vikings were enormously sophisticated in terms of technology: ship-building, bridge-building, fortress-building," Wolf said, which is true, but then the narrator jumped in with, "But many researchers remain baffled at how the Vikings became so socially, politically and technologically advanced, especially while living in the cold, harsh environment of the North...  Just how were the Norse Vikings able to manage such technological and geographical feats?  Are their fortresses and journeys to unknown continents evidence that the Vikings had access to extraterrestrial knowledge?  Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and believe the proof can be found by examining the religious beliefs of this mysterious people."

Yup.  Those poor ol' scholars, always "baffled" at how "mysterious" everything is.  Good thing we have raving wingnuts like Phillip Coppens and David Hatcher Childress to weigh in on the situation and rescue us from our ignorance with conclusions such as Thor's hammer being a "kinetic weapon," Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn being "spy drones," and Odin's seat up on Hlidskjalf being "the captain's seat on a spacecraft."

I wonder if it's aerobic exercise to pound your head repeatedly into the wall, because that's what I ended up doing, watching this show.

At least that's better than what Drs. Wolf and Tangherlini most likely felt like doing.  After realizing what idiocy their names had been associated with, publicly, I'm guessing they probably both wanted to commit seppuku.

I kept watching, though, in the fashion of a person witnessing a slow-motion train wreck.  A couple of times, I actually laughed out loud, so it's probably a good thing that the gym was otherwise empty.  One of the best points came when Phillip Coppens explained that the dwarves, mentioned many times in myth collections like the Eddas, were actually...

... the "Grays."  Yup, the same alien creatures we see in such historical documentaries as The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Here's what he said, verbatim, or near as I can recall:

Are they real dwarfs, or somehow more mythical, or whether the label “dwarf” actually stuck to them because they were somehow smaller?  And of course today, we often describe the gray alien archetype as dwarfish as well, simply because they are smaller.

Of course, Philip.  Whatever that means.  And along the same lines, I'm guessing that the trolls were the Vikings' way of describing the "Rancor" from Star Wars, and the elves were invented because J. R. R. Tolkien was a time traveling ultra-intelligent extraterrestrial being who went back to the 9th century and told the ancient Norse about Legolas et al.

But watching this show wouldn't have been the complete experience it was without a commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, he of the amazing hair, so I was positively tickled when he showed up.  Tsoukalos had this to say about Valhalla:

Valhalla was not a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations, but it might have been some type of an orbiting space station.  The reason why I’m saying this is because we have a description of Valhalla: it is an incredible description of a place that has weird attributes.

Which is such an amazing feat of logical deduction that I can hardly think of a response, other than to say that my classroom has some "weird attributes" and it is not, so far as I can tell, an "orbiting space station."

At that point, I kind of gave up, stopped staring at the television with my mouth hanging open, and went over to use the weight machines, figuring that even if my brain had been turned to cream-of-wheat, at least I could work on my biceps.

So this, my dear readers, is why I don't watch television, except for when I'm at the gym.  I should have changed the channel, really.  Next time I will -- I'll try to find something more sensible and intellectually stimulating than what the History channel has to offer.

Reruns of Gilligan's Island should fit the bill.

Next rest stop, 5.9 parsecs

New from the Hope Springs Eternal department, we have a guy from Georgia who wants to build an cultural information welcome center for aliens.

Called the Extraterrestrial Culture Center, Ed Komarek's brainchild is ambitious to say the least.  Here's what he has to say about it:

The purpose of Extraterrestrial  Cultural Centers International (ECCI) is to facilitate the integration of earth humanity into the greater extraterrestrial domain of universal stellar civilizations.  Our mission is to create an organization and facilities to accomplish this purpose.  We intend to fulfill that mission through the creation of a network of extraterrestrial cultural centers and facilities around the globe.   The emphasis will be on peaceful, mutually beneficial interrelationships sharing knowledge, understanding and love amongst all.

Which, honestly, I can't argue with, even the "stellar civilizations" part, given that I'm pretty certain that there must be alien life out there elsewhere in the cosmos.  (Whether it's intelligent life remains to be seen; and given the way humans act, sometimes, I've occasionally wondered if we might be flattering ourselves by calling our own behavior intelligent.)

Be that as it may, Komarek's grandiose plans are nothing if not well thought out.  In a piece in UFO Digest, Komarek describes his two-pronged approach to building the Culture Center:

With the publication of the Center Webpage, The First Conceptualization Phase of the Extraterrestrial Cultural Center is now almost complete and we begin to move forward on to the Second Phase; that of actualizing the Concept.   Most of us doing the conceptual work have little experience with organization and management.  We hope, now that the Conceptual Phase is ending, that a much more experienced and capable management team will join with us, to bring this Concept to reality in Phase Two. 

 

Phase Two will require high caliber business people coming on board who are capable of running a large organization and who also have the fundraising capabilities necessary to raise millions of dollars to build the Centers.   The initial task for the advanced management team is to make the Extraterrestrial Cultural Centers International a legal non-profit entity and to begin fundraising for a modest operating budget the first year.

So "Phase Two" seems like it has some inherent stumbling blocks, namely: (1) millions of dollars to build the Center; (2) millions more dollars to run and staff it; and (3) smart business people to run the whole thing.  I'm not sure that (3) isn't the biggest problem, honestly.  As we've seen many times, there is no short supply of people willing to donate large amounts of money to oddball causes, but getting your average MBA to turn down a lucrative job in Los Angeles to run a UFO welcome center seems like a losing proposition.

Komarek is making use of all of the resources at his disposal, however, including social media.  He has a Facebook page, but when I looked at it I was a little put off by the fact that it seems to be heavily populated by people who probably should not be allowed outside unsupervised.  Here's a sampling from the first few posts on his page:

Alien Invasion Now Taken Very Seriously: Our Government Prepared For the Worst! “They May Not Come In Peace!” (Videos Include Mainstream News Footage)

Reminder * Lightship System White Ibis: What are disclosure and ET contact about? To really understand you have to go beyond the phenomenon of space and time. Higher your frequency, and meet us half way!

Jesus led the resistence [sic] to Enlil - Yahweh, the genocidal Commander of the goldmining expedition from the planet Nibiru to Earth. Jesus, from his home in France and in North America, defied Yahweh and taught 'Help the poor. Sustain the feeble. Do evil to no one. Do not covet what you do not possess. Reverence Woman, the foundation of all that is good and beautiful.'".

So. Yeah. However well-meaning Komarek is, some of his followers seem to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Or maybe that's just my narrow understanding because I haven't "highered my frequency" yet.

Anyhow, I'm not sure how I feel about all of this.  I mean, Komarek's certainly to be encouraged to do whatever floats his boat, and the whole thing seems harmless enough.  As hobbies go, spending your time drawing up plans for building roadside stops for aliens isn't really any crazier than having a fantasy football team.

It's just that the whole thing seems a little premature.  I mean, we don't even have incontrovertible evidence that extraterrestrial life exists, much less that they've ever come here; so having a massive complex designed to make them feel welcome seems kind of like an exercise in futility.

There is, of course, the possibility that it could become a tourist attraction for plain old humans, similar to the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico.  If Komarek succeeds in his alien version of "If you build it, they will come," I know I, for one, would plan a visit there.

Of course, he still has his millions of dollars to raise, and his MBAs to find, and when I checked, his Facebook page only had 592 followers, including the three people quoted above, who hardly count.  So I'm not sure how likely it is to be realized, at least in my lifetime.

It's sad, honestly, because other humorously ironic projects have actually succeeded.

I mean, they succeeded in building the George W. Bush Presidential Library, after all.

Cures for vaccination

It's with a strange twinge of conscience that I'm writing today about an alt-med woo-woo claim that I don't think we should challenge.

It popped up on the website BabyCenter Community a couple of weeks ago, but apparently has been gaining ground since then, showing up on Facebook, Twitter, and websites devoted to anti-vaxx and holistic medicine.

The claim: putting a clay plaster on a vaccination after you get back from the doctor's office will "draw out the vaccine."

The first place I saw this -- the website linked above -- posed it as a question, where it received the following answers:

It helps to pull some of the toxins back out.  Not all though.

 

apparently it is possible to remove all vaccines, infiremiere [sic] should be a day in their vaccines in order to work in a hospital, she made all her vaccination and immediately after the injection, she had everything prepare in advance, she it [sic] absorb the vaccine in his car

with a homeopath here in France It can remove inject vaccine long ago, as soon as I have more information I will send you

One person did say that it wouldn't work, that vaccines are irreversible; but another, much more authoritative respondent came back with the following:

Hello,

For mandatory vaccines that nobody escapes, there is indeed the clay poultice can reabsorb the "poison" from his injection. The method is as follows:

You buy a clay tube (health food stores) and you present to vaccination equipped with this tube, gauze and tape. Once the vaccine was injected, you go to the toilet and you put a thick layer of clay on the vaccine + gauze + tape. Keep this poultice for 2 hours and the vaccine will be almost completely absorbed by the clay.

Upon returning home, you take the natural vitamin C (Acerola C, for example) or magnesium chloride (pharmacy: A bag of 20 grams dissolved in one liter of water and take 1 glass morning, afternoon and evening up. 'to exhaustion of a liter).

So I was reading this, and I was thinking... maybe it's better we let them think this is true.

After all, then the kids will be vaccinated and protected from disease, decreasing the likelihood of outbreaks of preventable diseases; and the adults will conclude that they've won, that they fooled us silly ol' skeptics and scientists, and in consequence, they'll shut up about it and stop trying to fight mandatory vaccination laws.

So, maybe there is a time that it's better to let the woo-woos continue in their beliefs, especially when one particular woo-woo belief cancels out the ill effects of another one.

But I do say this with some degree of guilty feelings.  Because, after all, the whole approach of a skeptic should be to follow wherever the evidence leads, to try to promote clear thinking and the scientific approach for one and all, and in any situation where the scientific approach applies.

Here, though... maybe we should let them have their clay poultices and acerola detox cleanses and homeopathic anti-vaccine remedies.  Let 'em think they've beaten the system.

And hope like hell that their children grow up to understand science better than the parents did.

A matter of trust

I had something of an epiphany yesterday regarding what's wrong with American public schools.

This light-bulb-moment occurred because of two unrelated incidents, one of them banal to the point of almost being funny, the other considerably more serious.

The first occurred because there is something wrong with the "heater" in my classroom.  I use the quotation marks because despite the fact that this is upstate New York and we've been having cooler weather for almost a month now, this machine has been pumping out continuously cold air into my room.  Yesterday morning it was quite chilly outside, and my room was almost at the seeing-your-own-breath stage.  So I took my digital thermometer, and first wandered around my classroom (getting an average temperature of around 61 F, warmest near the exit into the hallway); the air coming from the "heater" registered 58 F.

So I let the fellow who is the head of buildings, grounds, and maintenance know.  In short order I got back a curt note that my room was actually between 70 and 75 F, and the air coming out of the "heater" was at a comfortable 68.  "No, you're wrong," was the gist of the email.  "You're actually warm."

Or perhaps this is part of the new "Common Core" math, that 61 = 72 and 58 = 68.  I dunno.

Much more troubling was an exchange I had last week with an administrator regarding the implementation of "scripted modules," a new-and-improved way of micromanaging classroom teachers by giving them day-by-day lesson plans with pre-prepared problem sets and assignments, and scripts that are to be read to the students verbatim (some of them even tell the teacher what to answer if students ask particular questions).  Apparently, this administrator has gotten a good deal of flak over these modules, with complaints that they are rigid, lock teachers into going at a particular speed regardless of whether that speed is appropriate for their classes, and rob teachers of the creative parts of their job.  So the administrator sent a broadside email to the entire staff -- not only to the teachers affected, or the ones who had complained -- telling us that the modules were fine, that any frustration we felt was just that we were clinging to old ways of doing things and didn't like change, and that the new modular approach didn't take away any creativity from the act of teaching.

Well, I wasn't going to let that pass, so I answered as follows:

Dear _________,

I considered not responding to this, as the whole “module” thing has yet to affect me directly, but after some thought I decided that I could not let it go.

The whole idea of handing a professional educator a script is profoundly insulting.  The implication, despite your statement that it is not meant to replace the art of creative teaching, is that the policymakers and educational researchers know better how to instruct children than the people who have devoted their lives to the profession, who know the children in their classes personally and their curricula thoroughly.  This DOES take the creativity out of teaching, and that fact is not changed by your simply stating that it doesn’t.

More and more, we are being mandated to approach educating children by the factory model – everything done lockstep, everything converted to numbers and trends and statistics.  If it can be quantified, it exists; if it can’t, it doesn’t.  The mechanization of education robs it of its joy for teachers, and more importantly, for students.  All of the pretests and post-tests and standardized exams are simply providing a bunch of specious, meaningless numbers so that the policy wonks in Albany (and elsewhere) can pat themselves on the back and tell themselves that they’ve accomplished something.  I have yet to see any of these “value-added models” provide anything but percentage values whose error bars approach 100%.

And, on a personal note: you can consider this my official refusal to teach from a module, should one come down the line for any of the courses that I teach.  And the day that I am mandated, by you or by any other administrator, to read from a script in my classes will be my last day on the job.

Cordially,

gb

I have yet to receive any response to this email.

Well, the whole thing has been weighing considerably on my mind in the last few days, and yesterday -- in between rubbing my hands together to restore blood flow to my fingers -- I realized that the two incidents really came from the same fundamental source.

A lack of trust.

No, we're told; what you're experiencing, what you're thinking, what you're feeling, isn't real.  Your perspective is skewed.  We know better than you do.  Despite the fact that you were hired for your professional expertise, and know how to run a classroom (and, presumably, read a thermometer), your viewpoint is invalid.

Here, let me tell you what reality is.

A study conducted cooperatively by Working Families and Unum Insurance Group of worker satisfaction and productivity found that trust was the single most important factor in both employee well-being and the performance of the organization as a whole.  Susanne Jacobs, consultant and lead researcher on the study, said:

Truly understanding how individuals are motivated at work provides not just the gateway to optimal performance, something sought by every organization, but also an environment where every person can flourish.

Trust and psychological well-being are the answer; the equation to reach that answer starts with individual and team resilience, plus the eight drivers of trust (belonging, recognition, significance, fairness, challenge, autonomy, security, and purpose), together with a workplace that is built to support every human being within it. We know the solution and we know the tools, so let’s put it into practice.

A 2011 study by D. Keith Denton of Missouri State University's Department of Management supports that view.  Trust, clarity, and openness are critical, Denton concluded, after evaluating productivity and worker satisfaction at a variety of different businesses.  Denton said:

Companies with high-trust levels give employees unvarnished information about company's performance and explain the rationale behind management decisions. They are also unafraid of sharing bad news and admitting mistakes.  Lack of good communication leads to distrust, dissatisfaction, cynicism and turnover.

If there is a high level of engagement, the leader can expect that members of the group will express their feelings, concerns, opinions and thoughts more openly.  Conversely, if trust is low, members are more likely to be evasive, competitive, devious, defensive or uncertain in their actions with one another.

Contrast that with the current atmosphere in public schools, where teachers are trusted so little that we are now being micromanaged on the moment-by-moment level -- told, in effect, what to say and how long a time we have in which to say it.  Students are subjected, over and over, to high-stakes examinations to make certain they are reaching some preset, externally-determined bar.  We are trusted so little that at the end of the year, we are not allowed to grade our own final exams for fear that we'll alter student papers to boost their scores and make ourselves look more effective.

The contention by the anti-public-school cadre has been, all along, that teachers aren't professionals, that (in Bill Gates' words) "the educational system is broken."  I think that's absolute rubbish.  The teachers I know, with very few exceptions, are competent, caring, and intelligent, know their subjects deeply, and understand how to communicate their knowledge to students.  In an ironic twist that seems lost on most of the people in charge, we are instituting a model for education that doesn't work and evaluating the old model on its failure -- in effect, breaking the system to show how broken it was.

My own tolerance for this nonsense is, quite frankly, nearing its limit.  I am honestly not sure I can do this job much longer.  I am still passionate about the subject I teach; I still enjoy my students, and the daily act of teaching them about science.  Watching the light bulbs go on, when kids suddenly comprehend an especially difficult concept that they have struggled to master, is still one of the most rewarding things I know of.

But it is honestly hard to go to work, on a daily basis, knowing that in the most fundamental way, I am not trusted to do competently the job I have been tasked with.  The optimist in me keeps hoping that the establishment will begin to listen to the people who are speaking out against the current trends -- most notably Diane Ravitch, whose lucid and articulate indictment of such legislation as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top leaves little room for argument.

But the pessimist in me has, at the moment, a far louder voice.  I fear that things will get a great deal worse before they get better.  And if they do, they will do so without my participation.  I always thought that I would be one of those teachers that would have to be pushed out of the door at age 70, still eager to meet the new crowd of kids in September; the last few days, I'm wondering how I can make it to Thanksgiving.

Calling all angels

If there's one thing we've learned, over the years, it's that you can never go wrong with a business plan that involves combining lots of different crazy ideas in new ways.

That must be the principle guiding one Doreen Virtue, who has pioneered a technique she calls "Angel Therapy."

"Angel Therapy" combines New-Age woo-woo wackiness with religious woo-woo wackiness, and adds a touch of divination wackiness to boot, and comes up with something stunningly loony.

The idea is that all we have to do to heal ourselves from our various ills is to listen to the angels who are trying to get in touch with us, and who are being blocked by our disbelief.  Apparently, like Peter Pan, all you have to do in order to fly is to believe hard enough.

Here's how Virtue herself explains it:

Angel Therapy is a non-denominational spiritual healing method that involves working with a person's guardian angels and archangels, to heal and harmonize every aspect of life. Angel Therapy also helps you to more clearly receive Divine Guidance from the Creator and angels.

Everyone has guardian angels, and these angels perform God's will of peace for us all. When we open ourselves to hear our angels' messages, every aspect of our lives become more peaceful. Many of Doreen’s resources will provide you with more information on this subject, including her books Angel Therapy and Angel Medicine, and the Connecting with Your Angels Kit.

Naturally, I was curious as to what a "kit" would look like that would allow you to Connect With Angels.  Would it contain a pair of walkie-talkies?  A celestial cellphone?  Maybe just a pair of tin cans with a string attached?  But no, all the kits I saw on her website mostly contained things like "Indigo Angel Oracle Cards,"  which is a Tarot-card-style divination deck intended for "indigo people," whom the sales pitch describes as "strong-willed, intuitive leaders with innate spiritual skills."

Who also have indigo-colored auras.  If you were looking for a diagnostic to determine if this was you.

Predictably, this all sounds like a lot of nonsense to me, but there are testimonials out the wazoo singing Virtue's praises up to the heavens (presumably giving her own collection of angels something to cheer about).  For example, Susan Stevenson, a hypnotherapist who specializes in past-life regression (thus adding yet another wacko belief to the list), has this to say:

My life seems to be teeming with angelic connections, and the momentum is building. Have you noticed this in your own life? Angelic reminders that they are with us- 'whispers' in our ear, 'taps' on the shoulder, brushes of air across your skin or changes in air pressure, 'flutters' from deep inside, glints of light and color- all these gentle hints to pay closer attention to their presence. Think back- have you been paying attention, listening, responding? I know I certainly have been. Doreen Virtue, Ph.D., in her newest book "Angel Therapy", says that this increased activity is directly related to the approaching millennium.

Isn't it already the new millennium?  Or do we have to wait until the year 3,000 to see what the angels are all in a tizzy about?

And of course, Stevenson's description of how the angels are communicating -- "flutters from inside," and so on -- could be damn near anything.  A "flutter from inside" could mean that you just saw a cute individual of your preferred gender.  It could mean you just realized that you left for work without your wallet.

It could mean that you're coming down with stomach flu.

So how you react to said "flutter" is pretty much random, isn't it?  If you decide that it's an angel talking to you (or maybe a demon, in the latter-mentioned instance), and your life is being supernaturally guided, all you're doing is putting a wishful-thinking twist on an event that is wildly open to interpretation and almost certainly has nothing to do with anyone trying to communicate with you.

It's a common drive, though, isn't it?  All around us we see chaos, random stuff happening to folks for no apparent reason.  Some good, some bad -- some really bad.  No apparent pattern to any of it.

And people don't like that.

I was just discussing with a student of mine yesterday how much woo-woo-ism comes out of a rejection of this notion of chaos.  A child is diagnosed as autistic -- the anti-vaxxers want there to be a reason, and settle on the measles vaccination as the culprit.  A loved one develops Parkinson's disease, and you look up into the sky -- and see chemtrails.  A person has severe, life-threatening allergies -- and lays the blame on GMOs.

We don't like it that there are limits to our understanding, that there are aspects of life that we can't control, can't explain.  Chaos, to put it bluntly, is freakin' scary.  How comforting, then, to think that there are angels there beside us -- and that if we just learn to listen hard enough, and want it bad enough, that they can heal us, comfort us, take away our anxieties.

But how callous of people like Doreen Virtue to turn a profit from that desire.

Curtain call for Harry Houdini

One thing you have to admire about woo-woos is their persistence.

The "spirit mediums," especially.  They just never seem to give up.  Now, of course, the ones who have the profit motive in mind have a good reason for keeping up the game; it's no wonder that people like Sylvia Browne, Theresa Caputo, and "Psychic Sally" Morgan still insist that their alleged powers are real.  Any sign of hesitancy about whether they really are getting in touch with dear departed Aunt Bertha, even in the face of accusations of fraud, would stop the paychecks from rolling in post-haste.

Still, that doesn't explain a good many of the others, who are really, earnestly trying to contact the other side, for no great gains financially, and despite failure after failure to do so.  To some extent, they're probably powered by wishful thinking, of course.  Who amongst us hasn't wanted to hear from some long-lost loved one, or just to obtain evidence that life goes on after death?

You'd think that year after year, decade after decade, of flimsy evidence at best, would convince even those die-hards.

But no.  Which probably explains why a group in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is meeting again this year on Halloween to try to summon the dead spirit of Harry Houdini.

Houdini died on Halloween 87 years ago, in 1926, and (according to the article) a séance has been held every year on the anniversary of his death to see if the famous magician will come back to have a few words with the living.  Leading this year's attempt is Alan Hatfield, a spirit medium from Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia.  "My specialty is EVP — electronic voice phenomena," Hatfield said.  "I've been to the Titanic site twice and recorded voices there and at Deadman's Island and other places through the years."

What is ironic about all of this is that Houdini himself was something of a skeptic.  He started out believing in the afterlife -- according to his biography, William Kalush and Larry Sloman's The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero, Houdini first launched into a quest for communication with the dead after he lost his mother, and (perhaps not coincidentally) shortly thereafter entered a correspondence with Arthur Conan Doyle.  Despite Conan Doyle's celebration of the power of logic and rationalism in the person of his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, he was something of a nut about spiritualism himself, and toward the end of his life got involved in a great deal of woo-woo silliness, most famously the Cottingley Fairies hoax.

So Houdini asked Conan Doyle for some recommendations for good mediums.  Conan Doyle, delighted, obliged.  But after visiting them -- giving them, in my view, their best shot at convincing him -- Houdini was unimpressed.  One of them, Mrs. Annie Brittain -- whom Conan Doyle considered the best of the lot -- was especially disappointing.  "Mrs. Brittain was not convincing," Houdini later wrote.  "Simply kept talking in general.  'Saw' things she heard about.  One spirit was supposed to bring me flowers on stage.  All this is ridiculous stuff."

In the end, Houdini had no honest choice but to become a debunker.  It's the fate of a lot of stage magicians; they know how easy it is to fool people, and are quick to catch charlatans at their game.  The New York Times later spoke about Houdini's "merciless exposure of miracle-mongers who claim to be endowed with mysterious powers," and nominated him for the Seybert Commission, an academic group who studied claims of the paranormal with a skeptical attitude.  He intended to coauthor a book called The Cancer of Superstition with none other than H. P. Lovecraft -- a project that had to be altered because of Houdini's death, with C. M. Eddy taking Houdini's place.

Interestingly, Houdini himself proposed a test of the claim that there was an afterlife.  He proposed to his wife that after his death, if he was able, he would transmit a message to her in code that said "Rosabelle, believe."  The code was known only to Houdini and his wife.  In 1936 -- ten years after his death -- his wife finally gave up, and put out the candle she'd kept burning next to his photograph.  "Ten years is enough for any man," she is reported to have said on the occasion.

Odd, then, that the spiritualists are still at it, 77 years later.  Like I said, they never give up.

Now, understand that I don't know there isn't an afterlife, and there are some claims of hauntings that I find interesting, at the very least.  And no one would be happier than me to find out that death wasn't the end.  (Depending, of course, on which version of the afterlife you go for.  My vote would be for Valhalla, which sounds awesome.)  But it does very much seem like however you look at it, 87 years with no results is a long time to wait before deciding that there's nothing there to see.

So thanks to my friend and fellow blogger, Andrew Butters of Potato Chip Math, for the lead on this story.  And if you're in Halifax on Halloween, see if you can get tickets to the live performance that evening.  I'd love to hear about it.  And who knows?  Maybe this will be the year something will happen.  Hope springs eternal, apparently, especially if you're a woo-woo.