Failures of compassion

If I was asked, "What is the most important rule to follow in every situation in which you interact with your fellow humans?", I would respond, "Always be more compassionate than you think you need to be."

The inward emotion of empathy, and its outward expression of compassion, are what keep us from acting on our baser instincts -- anger, envy, lust, greed.  And compassion starts with "what would I feel in his/her place?"

However I rail against the religious at times, this principle is foundational to most of the world's religions.  Consider the passage from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12:

And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?  And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:  And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.  And the second is like, namely this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  There is none other commandment greater than these.

Which is pretty unequivocal.  And while I (understandably) question the first part, I think the second is spot on.  The Muslim tradition says likewise, in the hadith (collected stories of Mohammed).  Check out this passage from Kitab al-Kafi, volume 2:

A Bedouin came to the prophet, grabbed the stirrup of his camel and said: O the messenger of God!  Teach me something to go to heaven with it.  Prophet said: “As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them.  Now let the stirrup go!  This maxim is enough for you; go and act in accordance with it!”

I find it curious how so many of the hyperreligious remember the first bit -- about loving god -- and conveniently forget about the second.  In Islam, it is that spirit that drives the homicidal madmen in ISIS, who in Iraq are currently butchering anyone who doesn't meet their standards of holiness.  Likewise Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Nearer to home, the inability to feel empathy and act with compassion takes a different and subtler guise, but still often cloaked under a veneer of piety.  Take, for example, what Rick Wiles, host of End Times Radio, said about the Ebola epidemic:

Now this Ebola epidemic can become a global pandemic and that’s another name for plague.  It may be the great attitude adjustment that I believe is coming.  Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion. 

If Ebola becomes a global plague, you better make sure the blood of Jesus is upon you, you better make sure you have been marked by the angels so that you are protected by God.  If not, you may be a candidate to meet the Grim Reaper.

Really?  Your God of Mercy is going to visit a plague upon us, wherein we die in agony while bleeding from every orifice, just to teach us a lesson about sexual purity?

And lest you think that this is just one lone voice with no credibility, Wiles said this immediately before interviewing Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA).

Then there's John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who says that it's "god's position" that if you don't work, you should starve to death:

To those of you who are sick, to those of you who are elderly, to those of you who are disabled, we gladly support you.  To the healthy who can work but won’t work, get your nasty self off the couch and go get a job! 

America has rewarded laziness and we’ve called it welfare.  God’s position is that the man who does not work shall not eat.

Interesting.  I thought it was "god's position" that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich man to enter heaven (Matthew 19:24).  Oh, and there's the whole "give everything you have to the poor and follow me" thing, too.  (Luke 12:33).

Inconvenient, that.  Much easier to cherry-pick passages you'd rather rant about, such as the ones about homosexuality, and forget about the ones that might force you to change your lifestyle.  (Hagee's net worth, by the way, is estimated at five million dollars.)

It doesn't stop there, however.  Ultra-religious Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, who self-righteously shoves his Christian beliefs down people's throats at every turn, showed his true colors with regards to the refugee children from Central America now in camps on the US/Mexico border:

I’m hoping that my governor will utilize Article 1, Section 10, that allows a state that is being invaded — in our case more than twice as many just in recent months, more than twice as many than invaded France on D-Day with a doubling of that coming en route, on their way here now under Article 1, Section 10, the state of Texas would appear to have the right, not only to use whatever means, whether it’s troops, even using ships of war... they’d be entitled in order to stop the invasion... 

Many of the children who are coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles... we don't know what diseases they could be bringing in.

And that brings up yet another bible quote, from Matthew Chapter 25, which these people also conveniently forget:

Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’  Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’  Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.

I try not to be self-righteous myself.  I know I'm not as compassionate as I could be, that I fail, like all human beings fail, to reach the standards I set for myself.  And I need no god to tell me how to act, nor to let me know when I've fallen short.  But I do know that I am not a hypocrite, wielding a Bible or a Qu'ran in one hand and using the other to strike out at minorities, refugees, the oppressed, and people who don't believe as I do.

The whole thing brings to mind another quote, this time from Stephen Colbert, and it seems a fitting way to end:

The crystal spheres

Sometimes I run into claims that I don't consider Skeptophilia-worthy.  Most of these are websites that posit worldviews that are clearly the creation of lunatics, and as such, are hardly noteworthy.  As I've said more than once, any nut with a computer can launch a website; having one doesn't mean that what you're saying is correct, scientific, or even necessarily sane.

Such was the case, I thought, with the site The Wild Heretic.  It seemed, at first, to be the voluble outpourings of someone who, to put not too fine a point on it, had a screw loose.  Reading his writing, I kept shaking my head, thinking he was a lone wingnut, and as such fell into the "more to be pitied than censured" category -- and that no one could possibly take what he was saying seriously.

Until I read the comments section.

I know, I know.  Normal, intelligent people should never read the comments section, because to do so leaves you the impression that 1.5 million years of human evolution has left your average Homo sapiens with the IQ of a peach pit.  But despite that, I threw caution to the wind, and surged on ahead, pessimism about my species be damned.

And there were comments.  Lots of them.  Turns out people love the stuff on The Wild Heretic.  Take, for example, his claims on his post, "There is Glass in the Sky," wherein we find out that the ancients were right; space isn't a near-vacuum.  The Earth actually is surrounded by crystal spheres.

The Flammarion engraving (1888) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's a sample from the post itself, so you can get the flavor:

The nose cone and front edges of the wings of the space shuttle are made of reinforced carbon-carbon; not used anywhere else on the vehicle (but also employed for the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles).  Reinforced carbon-carbon is carbon fiber in a matrix of graphite. The carbon fiber gives it a tensile strength of 101 ksi and also makes it less brittle than the heat resistant tiles on the rest of the shuttle.  Compare this to the roughly 65 ksi strength of aluminum which constitutes the shuttle’s frame, or the paltry 0.013 ksi of the Li-9000 ceramic tiles on the underbelly.  It also doesn’t crack at extreme temperatures (up to 2000 °C). 

Why are the nose cone and wing edges super-strengthened since there is nothing up there but a few atoms of gas?  Re-entry perhaps?  Firstly, there is hardly any atmosphere at that altitude whether going up or coming down which also opens a new can of worms regarding why the space shuttle should heat to 1650 °C when there is so little air in the upper atmosphere. 

There can be only one reason why the shuttle is reinforced at its nose and front wing edges: it must hit something hard at some point on its way up.  And looking at the numerous footage from balloons being sent into the stratosphere, we can see only black, which must mean this material is both hard and transparent. 

The only hard and transparent materials we have is glass or plastic, and glass is usually a lot more brittle than plastic, which it would need to be for the shuttle to break through.  We will also see later that it is glass rather then plastic which is in the sky... 

On re-entry, the space shuttle heats to 1650 °C at 100 km altitude. 

Why 100 km? 

Why over 1650 °C? 

At what temperature does glass (silicon dioxide) melt? You guessed it… 1600 °C.  This is why the underbelly of the space shuttle has to reach 1650 °C in order to melt the glass underneath, so it can fall through and re-enter.

At this point, I honestly thought the guy was kidding, and that this was a spoof site.  Sadly, it appears that it isn't.  He goes on to give "evidence" in the form of glassy meteorites (tektites) that, he claims, have fallen from the crystal spheres, rather in the fashion of the can light falling from the dome at the beginning of The Truman Show.  He also claims that auroras are caused by light from ionized oxygen released by the glass (silicon dioxide); that obsidian, fused sandstone from meteorite impacts, and fulgurites (melted and refrozen sand caused by lightning strikes) are actually more chunks of the crystal spheres fallen out of the sky; and that the sudden rise in temperature in the thermosphere (the layer of atmosphere above the ionosphere is because that layer is above the crystal sphere, and therefore "absorbs the infrared rays from the sun."

So there I am, reading this, and still thinking, "At least no one will believe this guy, right?"

Then I got to the comments.

Here are just a few, representing the number I could read before the cells in my prefrontal cortex started begging for mercy:

Please bear in mind how we have been brainwashed into believing false things via the ancient Solar Cult who want us to believe in aliens and that we a just a drop in the ocean of a trillion light year Universe via the Disney productions of NASA.  Follow the propaganda and fakery rather than the money. 

Fascinating thoughts/work here.  I spent most of yesterday reading and much of the night waking up with questions.  This all puts a whole new spin on Prison planet and the Earth is quarantined theories.  This glass ceiling is another sphere within the Earth sphere, right? 

Maybe the rainbow (sunbow) is just too obvious a result of the glass sky for educated people to accept, along with the embarrassment associated with it for overlooking it.  And birefringence, well, I wonder how you’d explain the offset displacement of the quadruple rainbows without a birefriengent glass material. 

There’s no need to hold up a dome.  The dome rests on the atmosphere as a final ice build of helium and other light elements in a sort of fully expanded sort of dormant state, which is the reason it became ice, anyway. 

It’s a ground build up of super dense matter that expands from the bottom to the top in a push on push motion.  There is no pull, except in the word we use to view what we see as pull. The truth is, nothing pulls – it pushes.  No gravity needed.  Gravity simply does not exist.

And don't even get me started about The Wild Heretic's next post, wherein he considers the possibility that the Moon, stars, and planets are "mirages," and the Sun is an "artificial construct."  The name of the post?

"Is the Sun a Light-Bulb?"

I don't find it that bothersome that this guy obviously has no background in atmospheric science, astronomy, physics, or geology, and yet feels driven to expound upon them as if he actually knew what he was talking about.  I'm not even that upset by his pointing the conspiracy-theory-finger at NASA and the rest of the scientific community; how else is he supposed to bolster his zero-evidence theories if he doesn't claim that the rest of the world of science is in league against him?

What does bother me is that he has a following.  No, "bother" is the wrong word; "amaze" is closer to the mark.  Can it really be that there are this many people out there who reject all of science, and who think that the crystal-spheres-cadre from the 15th century are actually the ones who got it right?

But then I thought about the creationists, who believe that a bunch of Bronze-Age sheepherders had a better take on the origins of life, the universe, and everything than the best minds of the 21st century.

And suddenly it didn't seem so amazing any more.

Katy of the Illuminati

As a blogger, I get some funny spam sometimes.

The one recently that made me laugh the hardest was an email invitation to join the Illuminati, which I include below, verbatim:

WELCOME TO THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ILLUMINATI.
Are you a business man, politician, musical, student
and you want to be rich, powerful and be famous in life.
You can achieve your dreams by beaning [sic] a member of
the illuminati. With this all your dreams and heart
desire can be fully accomplish, if you really want to be a member of the great illuminati then you can contact
destinysmart11@gmail.com or call+2348104933655

My favorite part was that I could achieve my dreams by beaning a member of the Illuminati, because honestly, that seems to have no downside that I can see.

The whole ultra-secret conspiracy worldview, wherein the puppet strings are being pulled by some super-powerful cadre of initiates and adepts, is a popular trope of fiction.  It's part of the universe of The X Files; it was a theme in just about every one of David Lynch's movies and television shows; it was a central plot element in Umberto Eco's amazing novel Foucault's Pendulum.

But still, there's that important word "fiction" there that a lot of people don't seem to focus on.

Which is why I'm reasonably certain that pop singer Katy Perry is trolling the gullible in her latest publicity stunt, in which she is saying that she'd like to join the Illuminati herself.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole thing started, unsurprisingly, with Alex Jones, who at this point should probably not be allowed outside unsupervised.  Following Perry's performance of her song "Dark Horse" at this year's Grammy Awards, Jones commented that it amounted to "an Illuminati priestess conduct(ing) a witchcraft ceremony in front of the entire world."

Well, far be it from an entertainer to lose an opportunity like that.  Following Brendan Behan's dictum that there is no such thing as bad publicity, Perry stirred up things further in an interview last week with Rolling Stone.

"If the Illuminati exist, I would like to be invited," Perry said.  "I see all that shit and I’m like: 'Come on, let me in! I want to be in the club.'"

Indeed.  If I could be part of a magical secret society that had the key to the ultimate power of the universe, I'd want in, too, notwithstanding the fact that there's no particular reason the Illuminati would want a 50-something science nerd with no other obvious qualifications as a member.

That she was trolling Jones et al. became apparent later in the interview, though.  "It sounds crazy," Perry admitted.  "Weird people on the internet that have nothing to do find, like, strange triangles in your hand motions...  I guess you’ve made it when they think you’re in the Illuminati.  But I believe in aliens, so if people want to believe in Illuminati, great."

Which is the right attitude, all things considered.  But honestly, if there is any truth to this, I doubt that getting in would be as easy as making a specific hand gesture in public, or responding to a spam email.  Because, you know, if the Illuminati exist, they're probably a little more thoughtful about their admission policies than that.  What I find endlessly funny about Alex Jones and his followers is that they think the world is being run by people who are super-intelligent and secretive and evil, and simultaneously so stupid that their identities and motives could be figured out by a clown like Alex Jones.

But just for the record, if I'm wrong, and there are any Illuminati reading this, I just made a triangular hand motion, so I'm expecting my Welcome Letter to arrive in the mail this week.  Does being an Illuminatus give you discounts at restaurants?  You know, like AARP?  If so, I think it's worth it just for that alone.

Ebola, epidemics, and the danger of making decisions out of fear

The news has been filled in the last couple of weeks with stories about the ongoing epidemic of Ebola fever in west Africa.  And certainly, there's a lot here that's newsworthy.  An emerging virus, long known for lightning-fast outbreaks that killed whole villages deep in the jungle and then disappeared as fast as it came, has finally appeared in two large cities, Conakry, Guinea and Monrovia, Liberia.  The disease itself is terrifying; it has a mortality rate of between 60% and 90%, depending on the strain, and kills victims when their blood stops clotting, causing them to "bleed out."

Which, unfortunately, is exactly what it sounds like, and about which I won't say anything further out of respect for my more sensitive readers.

The Ebola virus [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This epidemic has two of the features that tend to make people overestimate risk: (1) it's gruesome; and (2) it's novel.  We react most strongly to things that are new, unfamiliar, and scary, and Ebola certainly qualifies.  And it is a regrettable feature of human nature that when our fear centers are engaged, we make dumb decisions.

Let's start with the desperate desire on the part of people who are scared by the virus to protect themselves against it, although the current state of affairs is that there is no vaccine, and no way to prevent catching it except by avoiding close contact with ill individuals.  This hasn't stopped the hucksters from seeing this as an opportunity to extract money from the gullible.  Starting with the site Essential Oils For the Win!, which makes the bizarre claim that we "shouldn't be scared of Ebola" because "it can be treated with the proper essential oil."

Well, it's true that there's probably no real reason to be scared of Ebola unless you're planning on a visit to west Africa, but I would invite the owner of this website to go there himself armed only with a vial of lavender oil, and see how confident he feels then.  That the author of the website has a slim grasp of science, and probably reality as well, is reinforced by the diagram wherein we're shown that essential oils work because unlike conventional medicines, they are good at "penetrating cell walls."

So it's reassuring to know that your tomato plants and petunias won't get Ebola.  As for us, being animals, our cells don't even have cell walls, so I'm thinking that I'd rather see what the actual scientists come up with.

Which definitely does not include the homeopaths, who are also weighing in.  No worries, they say... according to an article at The Daily Kos, they already have their "remedies" at the ready!

Dr. Gail Derin studied the symptoms of Ebola Zaire, the most deadly of the three that can infect human beings. Dr. Vickie Menear, M.D. and homeopath, found that the remedy that most closely fit the symptoms of the 1914 "flu" virus, Crolatus horridus, also fits the Ebola virus nearly 95% symptom-wise! Thanks go to these doctors for coming up with the following remedies:
1. Crolatus horridus (rattlesnake venom) 2. Bothrops (yellow viper) 3. Lachesis (bushmaster snake) 4. Phosphorus 5. Mercurius Corrosivus

Yup.  Here's their logic: because the venom of "Crolatus horridus" is 95% fatal, and so was the Spanish flu, and so is Ebola Zaire, the venom must be useful for treating Ebola.  Only, of course, if you dilute it until all the venom is gone.

I only have three objections to this:

1. I'm assuming you're talking about the timber rattlesnake, which is in the genus "Crotalus," not "Crolatus."  And the Spanish flu occurred in 1918, not 1914.  But those may be minor points.
2. Many other things have a very high fatality rate, including gunshots to the head.  Does this mean you could also add a sixth "remedy" for Ebola, Essentius Leadus Bulletus, made by shaking up bullets in water and diluting it a gazillion times?
3. Are you people insane?

 The fear tactics didn't stop with loony cures, though; the politicians began to weigh in, and (of course) attempt use the whole thing to score political capital.  And once again, they are targeting people who are thinking with their adrenal glands rather than their brains.  No one is as good at that as the inimitable Michele Bachmann, who instead of fading into richly-deserved obscurity, has kept herself center stage with commentary like this:

People from Yemen, Iran, Iraq and other terrorist nations are making their way up through America’s southern border because they see that it’s a green light, they can easily get in.  Not only people with potentially terrorist activities, but also very dangerous weapons are going to cross our border in addition to very dangerous drugs, and also life-threatening diseases, potentially including Ebola and other diseases like that... 

Now President Obama is trying to bring all of those foreign nationals, those illegal aliens to the country and he has said that he will put them in the foster care system.  That's more kids that you can see how - we can't imagine doing this, but if you have a hospital and they are going to get millions of dollars in government grants if they can conduct medical research on somebody, and a Ward of the state can't say 'no,' a little kid can't say 'no' if they're a Ward of the state; so here you could have this institution getting millions of dollars from our government to do medical experimentation and a kid can't even say 'no.'  It's sick.

So, let's see if we can parse this.  People from the Middle East are coming in across the border between the United States in Mexico, and they did so by coming via Liberia, where they picked up Ebola, and they're going to pass that disease along to innocent Americans, but some of the kids got infected along the way, and now President Obama is going to place them in medical facilities where they will be experimented upon in unimaginably cruel ways.

Is it just me, or does Michele Bachmann seem to have a quarter-cup of PopRocks where the rest of us have a brain?

 What I find ironic, here, is that people are flying into a panic over a disease that (1) is rather hard to catch, and (2) has caused only 500 deaths thus far.  I say "only" to highlight the contrast with another disease, measles -- which according to the World Health Organization, killed 122,000 people in 2012 and is set to break that record this year, despite the fact that it is completely preventable by a safe and effective vaccine.

Oh, but we've all heard of measles.  So it can't be that bad, right?

And if you are still unconvinced that vaccination is the best way to go -- swayed, perhaps, by claims that the most recent measles outbreaks in the United States were among the vaccinated -- take a look at this brilliant explanation over at The LymphoSite, which explains why even if vaccines have some side effects and sometimes do not work, we still should all be vaccinated.

All of which re-emphasizes that we're better off considering actual facts, and listening to actual scientists, rather than falling prey to hucksters or listening to loons like Michele Bachmann.  Which means engaging our brains, and trying to think past our fears.

The last gasp

I have a question this morning: is it a good sign when people defending counterfactual or morally reprehensible claims start resorting to idiotic arguments?

I kind of think the answer is "yes."  If you look at our history, there are many examples of humanity shedding prejudices, oppression, and cruelty.  At first, those things are taken for granted, and are so entrenched that no one questions them (publicly, at least).  Opposition builds, but at first is quelled by "don't be foolish, we've always done it this way."  Once the people favoring the bad old system realize the opposition isn't backing down -- i.e., the system status quo is losing -- they become desperate, sometimes violent.

And toward the end, all that is left is a few wacko extremists, spouting off ridiculous nonsense that would only appeal to other wacko extremists.  After that, the bubble bursts, and lo!  Social sea-change has occurred.

I'm neither a historian nor a social scientist, so I can't say this with any kind of academic certainty, but from what I've read, many of the biggest social changes -- the breaking of the church's control over governments in Europe, the improvement in race relations and civil rights in the United States and elsewhere, our acceptance of the science as a way of knowing -- have followed this pattern.

If I'm right, we are on the cusp of a change in our attitudes toward homosexuality.

I say this because when you consider what has been written and said recently on the topic, most of it boils down on analysis to bizarre paranoia.  Take, for example, what Renew America columnist A. J. Castellitto wrote this week:

If one were determined to take down America; if it were not possible by force; the secret weapon would come from a surprising place.... 

From out of the closet... 

Based on the expressed concerns and priorities of the current administration, it's almost as if they are living in an alternate universe.  In fact, one could argue that both the media and our president have been willfully negligent (considering alternative media reports of increased persecution and hostility against Christians worldwide).  Meanwhile, religious conservatives, especially those of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, have been experiencing a hostility of a different sort, pertaining to their reluctance to embrace non-traditional marriage. 

However, if we take it back to the "hypothetical," it would seem as if the same-sex marriage phenomenon has proven an exceptionally effective tool in uprooting our fundamental foundations. 

When applied to the "takeover" agenda, it could be perceived that American homosexuals are merely commie pawns unknowingly being used for the hat-trick trifecta destruction of freedom, faith, family..... 

What if individuals with same sex desires are merely being held up and exploited as objects of intolerance? What if they are just the means to a much greater and darker end-game agenda.....?

Yeah.  Right.  What?

Now we're supposed to be against gay marriage because all gay people are secretly communists?  Or, maybe, that they're being manipulated by communists?  It's hard to tell what he's talking about, frankly.  It sounds a bit like he's run out of any reasonable arguments (not that there were many to start with), and just figured that it was time for some shock tactics.  "I know!  Let's link the gays to the communists!  That'll get people's hackles raised!"

Then, of course, we have Rick Santorum, who can always be counted on for a loony commentary:  "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.  You have the right to anything...  In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality.  That's not to pick on homosexuality.  It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.  It is one thing."

Sure.  Because two consenting adults having sex is exactly the same as cheating on your spouse, or victimizing a child or an animal, and will lead to having "the right to anything."

Just two days ago, Santorum said what may be his most mystifying pronouncement on the issue yet, with the claim that legalizing gay marriage will lead to more single mothers raising children.  Yeah, Rick?  How's that supposed to work?  Because, you know, gay sex has a 100% success rate in not leading to conception.

Maybe he never took biology in high school.  Probably trying to avoid that uncomfortable unit on evolution, but he missed the chapter on human reproduction as well.

In all seriousness, though, I think a lot of this furor harkens back to the Puritan days:

For some reason, these people can't stand it that folks might be having sex because it's fun, and that therefore there might be other valid expressions of our sex drive than making babies.  And not only do they feel that this should apply to their own lives -- to which I say, well, okay, if you want to live like that, fine, but kind of sucks to be you -- but they feel the desperate need to force everyone else to conform to the same rigid standards.

But my hope is that this last, bizarre outpouring of lunacy might signal the fact that we are on the verge of a cultural shift.  A Gallup poll found in May that American support of gay marriage had reached a new high of 55%.  This certainly seems like a foundational change to me, and one that might well be unstoppable.

And high time.  What consenting adults do in their bedrooms is absolutely no business of mine, nor of A. J. Castellitto's or Rick Santorum's.  It does not devalue my marriage to my wife; it does not increase the likelihood of pedophilia or bestiality; it does not alter people's political beliefs; it does not rip up the fabric of society.

All it does is give loving adults the right to express that love publicly without fear of repercussion, and have the social benefits that have been conferred to married straight people since the dawn of the institution.

And there honestly is no rational argument against that.

Burn your way to better health

At what point does a publication become so filled with dangerous misinformation that the powers-that-be should step in and shut it down?

I'm all for freedom of speech, and everything, and definitely in favor of people educating themselves sufficiently that they won't fall for ridiculous bullshit.  But still: the media has a responsibility to police themselves, and failing that, to have the rug pulled out from under them.

If such a line does exist -- and I am no expert in jurisprudence who could state the legality of such a move -- then the site Natural News has surely crossed it.  They have become the prime source of bogus "health news," promoting every form of medically-related lunacy, from detox to homeopathy to herbal cures for everything from cancer to depression.

Take a look at their latest salvo, entitled, "What They Won't Tell You: The Sun Is a Full-Spectrum Medicine That Can Heal Cancer."  In it, author Paul Fassa tells us that contrary to conventional wisdom, you are not putting yourself at risk by exposing your skin to the sun; you are giving yourself "healing medicine."  "Truth is," Fassa writes, "we've been systematically lied to about the sun and skin cancer for years...  How many know that there is no definitive proof that the sun alone causes skin cancer?"

Other than, of course, this exhaustive report from the National Cancer Institute.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

He quotes a "naturopathic doctor," David Mihalovic, as support:  "Those that have attempted to convince the world that the Sun, the Earth's primary source of energy and life causes cancer, have done so with malicious intent to deceive the masses into retreating from the one thing that can prevent disease."  Righty-o.  So let me respond with a quote of my own, from the Wikipedia page on "naturopathy:" "Naturopathic medicine is replete with pseudoscientific, ineffective, unethical, and possibly dangerous practices...  Naturopathy lacks an adequate scientific basis, and it is rejected by the medical community...  The scope of practice varies widely between jurisdictions, and naturopaths in some unregulated jurisdictions may use the Naturopathic Doctor designation or other titles regardless of level of education."

Which might seem like an ad hominem, but I don't really care.

What is as certain as anything can be in science is the connection between blistering sunburns, especially in children, and later incidence of melanoma, the most deadly kind of skin cancer.  (Here's one source that lays it out pretty explicitly.)  Instead, Natural News is promoting a combination of misinformation, outright error, and paranoia so extreme that as I read the article I kept wondering if I was reading something from The Onion.  "The reality is that the vast majority of people, including doctors, have been duped into believing the myth that the sun is toxic, carcinogenic and a deadly health hazard," Fassa writes.  "That's why most people slavishly and lavishly slather toxic sunscreens on their skin whenever they anticipate direct contact with the sun's rays.  But in fact, most conventional sunscreens are cancer-causing biohazards.  Meanwhile, the multi-billion-dollar cancer industry and the billion-dollar toxic sunscreen industry are making hay with this hoax."

I think this was the point that my blood pressure rose to dangerous levels, because I am absolutely sick unto death of people yammering about the evils of Big Pharma and Big Medicine as if they were some kind of Illuminati-based death cult.  Could the medical system in the United States be reformed and improved?  Of course.  Is it an evil institution that is trying to make us all sick so as to keep itself in business?  Come on.  We are, right now, one of the healthiest societies the world have ever seen.  Our longevity and quality of life have risen steadily.  On a more personal level, I owe my life to "Big Pharma;" if my mother had not been given the RhoGAM injection when she was pregnant with me, I would almost certainly be dead of Rh-incompatibility syndrome...

... like my older sister, who was born before "Big Pharma" developed the injection, and who only lived ten days.

On some level, of course, this all falls under caveat emptor.  If you are sufficiently ignorant, gullible, or paranoid that you buy what sites like Natural News are selling, then sucks to be you.  The government, I suppose, is not in the business of protecting people from their own stupidity.  But at the same time, that isn't honestly a very ethical position, and there's part of me -- free speech be damned -- that would love it if there was a way for some kind of media watchdog to step in, and shut down what has become a conduit not only for bullshit, but for dangerous (possibly deadly) misinformation.

Ecological micro-management

Even if I sometimes present a rather cynical front, I really have a deep belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature.  Most of us, most of the time, mean well.  All we want is to have our basic needs met; food, shelter, companionship, security.  Despite what you see on the nightly news -- news that has been selected deliberately to be eye-catching, i.e., usually violent or upsetting -- the vast majority of the human race is peaceful, caring, and kind.

That said, we do have a regrettable tendency to suffer from hubris, mainly with respect to the rest of the inhabitants on Earth.  We often feel like we have the right to twist the environment and its non-human inhabitants to our own desires, and expect that because of our big brains we should be able to predict all outcomes (and avoid any negative ones).  Burn fossil fuels, increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?  Pshaw, how could that cause a problem?  Overhunt, overfish, feed the world with big industrial farms that require millions of tons of fertilizer each year just to remain productive?  No problem.  We have to eat, right?

Of course, right.

Few people think all that deeply about how interlocked the ecosystem is, and how complex.  You cannot affect one piece of it without affecting them all, often in unpredictable ways.  We are dealing with multi-variable analysis of a system we only partly understand, and acting as though we should be able to control it, acting as though we are somehow outside the system ourselves.

A vivid demonstration of this came in the early 1990s with the inauguration of Biosphere 2, the fascinating (and forward-thinking) ecology project in the Arizona desert, which consisted of a huge dome housing a variety of ecosystems.  It was constructed, and populated with plants and animals, so as to be self-sustaining, just as the Earth's system ("Biosphere 1") is.  Chemists, biologists, and ecologists combined their knowledge in the planning process, trying to get the initial balance exactly correct.  Then, in 1991, eight human scientists agreed to be locked inside the dome for two years, with no access to anything that wasn't locked in there with them.

Biosphere 2 experienced problems right from the get-go, and eventually the mission had to be cancelled:

Biosphere 2 suffered from CO2 levels that "fluctuated wildly" and most of the vertebrate species and all of the pollinating insects died.  Insect pests, like cockroaches, boomed.  In practice, ants, a companion to one of the tree species (Cecropia) in the Rain Forest, had been introduced.  By 1993 the tramp ant species Paratrechina longicornis, local to the area, had been unintentionally sealed in and had come to dominate...  [A] number of pollinating insects were lost to ant predation and several bird species were lost.

The oxygen inside the facility, which began at 20.9%, fell at a steady pace and after 16 months was down to 14.5%.  This is equivalent to the oxygen availability at an elevation of 4,080 meters (13,400 ft)...  A mystery accompanied the oxygen decline: the corresponding increase in carbon dioxide did not appear. This concealed the underlying process until an investigation by Jeff Severinghaus and Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory using isotopic analysis showed that carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete inside Biosphere 2 to form calcium carbonate, thereby sequestering both carbon and oxygen.

Now, I'm not criticizing the experiment, mind you; we learned a tremendous amount from it.  It's just that I think it serves primarily as an illustration that we don't know nearly enough to undertake ecomanagement on a large scale.

All of this is simply a preamble to my thoughts about an article sent to me by a friend, called "The Radical Plan to Eliminate Earth's Predatory Species."  In it, we hear the proposal by a British philosopher, David Pearce, who believes that because predation of all sorts causes suffering to sentient beings, we have a moral obligation to eliminate predators if we can.

[image courtesy of photographer Colin M. L. Burnett and the Wikimedia Commons]

Pretty radical.  Pearce says:

Sentient beings shouldn't harm each other.  This utopian-sounding vision is ancient.  Gautama Buddha said "May all that have life be delivered from suffering".  The Bible prophesies that the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the lamb.  Today, Jains sweep the ground in front of their feet rather than unwittingly tread on an insect. 

My own conceptual framework and ethics are secular — more Bentham than Buddha.  I think we should use biotechnology to rewrite our genetic source code; recalibrate the hedonic treadmill; shut down factory farms and slaughterhouses; and systematically help sentient beings rather than harm them... 

Humans already massively "interfere" with Nature in countless ways ranging from uncontrolled habitat-destruction to captive breeding programs for big cats to "rewilding".  Within the next few decades, every cubic metre of the planet will be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control.  On current trends, large nonhuman terrestrial vertebrates will be extinct outside our wildlife parks by mid-century.  So the question arises.  What principle(s) should govern our stewardship of the rest of the living world?  How many of the traditional horrors of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" should we promote and perpetuate?  Alternatively, insofar we want to preserve traditional forms of Darwinian life, should we aim for an ethic of compassionate stewardship instead.  Cognitively, nonhuman animals are akin to small children.  They need caring for as such.

In answer to the inevitable charge of hubris, Pearce responds:

Inevitably, critics talk of "hubris".  Humans shouldn't "play God."  What right have humans to impose our values on members of another race or species?  The charge is seductive but misplaced.  There is no anthropomorphism here, no imposition of human values on alien minds.  Human and nonhuman animals are alike in an ethically critical respect.  The pleasure-pain axis is universal to sentient life.  No sentient being wants to be harmed — to be asphyxiated, dismembered, or eaten alive.  The wishes of a terrified toddler or a fleeing zebra to flourish unmolested are not open to doubt even in the absence of the verbal capacity to say so.

My criticism of Pearce's proposal -- which, he says, should be accomplished by genetic manipulation, selective breeding, and monitoring of animal populations with microchips -- does not rest on any high-flown philosophy.  It has, in fact, little to do with morals or values.  He is correct that we are already "playing god," and have been for millennia, with our selective breeding and large-scale ecological manipulation for food production and living space.  What I question is purely pragmatic; if we don't know enough to manage even a three-acre simulated biosphere, using the skills, insight, and planning of the world's best ecologists, how in the hell do we think we're smart enough to micromanage the entire globe?

Pearce's motivation, and ultimate goal -- eliminating pain and suffering, even from less-cognitively-developed animals like insects -- is, on one level, laudable.  I've been a biologist long enough that I can consider an incident like a cheetah killing an antelope as positive in the larger sense of keeping the eco-community in balance.  At the same time, I'm compassionate enough that I feel sorry for the antelope, and pity the victim for the fear and pain that it experienced as its life ended.  That emotional reaction is not sufficient, however, to fool me into thinking that we as a species know enough to overturn the predator-prey interaction, evolved for billions of years, in some sort of misguided attempt to make things better.

Pearce says, "A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won't be that we've run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents — for reasons unknown — will have chosen to preserve it.
"  I think this is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong.  The hubris of his position is not that presumes human moral superiority; it is that it presumes a far greater comprehension of this planet's systems than we have, or are likely to have in the foreseeable future, even considering the expansion of our scientific understanding over the last couple of centuries.

Our ecological management of the world is rife with examples of actions undertaken with the best of intentions, and which had drastic and unexpected consequences.  Pearce might well label me as immoral for accepting the inevitability of predation, and therefore suffering, in the world; but his position -- that we could use our scientific and technological capacities to eliminate it -- isn't just the words of an optimist who makes Pollyanna look like a cynic.  It exemplifies the attitude that got us to the disastrous place where we currently are -- in the beginning of the Sixth Great Extinction, facing radical climate change, facing the collapse of the ocean's fisheries -- all resulting from the stance that "we know what we're doing."

Only Pearce's vision, of micromanagement of the whole world, goes one step beyond blind eco-optimism; it puts us in the position of pulling all of the Earth's strings.  And, I believe, it opens up the possibility of fucking things up on a scale the likes of which we've never seen before.