Culture, criticism, and Charlie Hebdo

I'm certain that all of you by now have heard about the deaths of twelve members of the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in an "apparent Islamic militant attack."

The cover of Charlie Hebdo following a 2011 firebombing of the magazine offices by Muslim extremists.  The caption says, "100 lashes with a whip if you don't die of laughter."  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The use of the word "apparent" is journalistic waffling, given that bystanders heard the gunmen shouting "Allahu akbar!" and "We have avenged the prophet Muhammad!"  The gunmen are still at large as of the time of this writing, and are the subject of a huge manhunt.

Leaders all over the world have responded to this atrocity.  Let's start with my favorite one so far, Ahmed Aboutaleb, the mayor of Rotterdam, himself a Muslim, who told the terrorists (and this is a direct quote) to "fuck off."  Here's the full quote, as translated by a friend:

It is incomprehensible that you can turn against freedom like that, but if you don't want that freedom, in heaven's name, take your suitcase and leave.  There might be a place in the world where you can be yourself and be honest about that to yourself, but don't go around killing innocent journalists.

That is so backwards, that is so incomprehensible -- disappear if you cannot find peace with the way we want to build our society here. Because we only want those people -- also all those Muslims, all those good-willing Muslims whom people are now looking to -- together, only those who are what I would call "our" society, and if you don't like this place because you don't like a bunch of humorists who are making a little newspaper, yes... how shall I put this...  how about you fuck off?

There has also, of course, been some opposite sentiment, and not just from Muslims in the Middle East.  Maori Party candidate Derek Fox of New Zealand said, basically, that slain Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier was himself responsible for the deaths:

The editor of the French magazine has paid the price for his assumption of cultural superiority and arrogance, he was the bully believing he could insult other peoples culture and with impunity and he believed he would be protected in his racism and bigotry by the French state. 

Well he was wrong.  Unfortunately, in paying the price for his arrogance he took another eleven people with him. 

Power cultures all like to use the old chestnut of freedom of speech when they choose to ridicule people who aren't exactly like them, and mostly they get away with it.

These guys liked the privilege but didn't think they'd be caught up in the ramifications - they were wrong. 

This should serve as a lesson to other people who believe they can use the power they wield by way of dominating the media to abuse and ridicule others they believe to inferior to them -- just like [in] this country.

Well, the backlash against Fox was immediate and vitriolic.  Fox was victim-blaming, people said.  National Party MP Chris Bishop said that Fox's comment was "horrific, ridiculous, (and) shameful," adding that supporting freedom of speech was not "cultural supremacy."

And people who are outraged by the murders have responded the way outraged people do; by drawing Muhammad in all sorts of vile ways and posting them on the internet, by offering insult and ridicule to Muslims of all stripes, by escalating the situation in every way imaginable.

I'm a strong believer in freedom of speech.  Words are words, and no one deserves to die for them.  However, I'm also a strong believer in the cardinal rule for human behavior, which is, "don't be an asshole."  The cartoons at Charlie Hebdo were largely banal, broad-brush attempts to ridicule an entire people, not just to lampoon particular acts that deserved lampooning.  In other words, they weren't even good political satire, they were mostly just childish barbs on the level of "Muslims are poopyheads."

Add to that the fact that my general opinion is that Islam is a counterfactual set of beliefs whose precepts suggest -- no, demand -- doing all sorts of things like killing apostates, subjugating women, and forcibly converting non-believers.  This sort of thing rightly should be intolerable to free-thinking rationalists.

It's possible to detest Islam as a belief system, to decry the actions of its adherents, to mourn the deaths of the twelve staff members of Charlie Hebdo, to support fully the right of every human to speak freely, and at the same time to wish that all people would simply treat each other with more respect and less deliberate provocation.  The world is a complex place, and humans are usually less motivated by logic than they are by emotion; trying to come up with one blanket response to any incident is bound to miss the reality by a mile.

So continue speaking out.  Continue to criticize worldviews that incite their adherents to do evil.  But also continue to treat each other with compassion, to err on the side of thinking kindly of people, to work toward understanding.  To do otherwise would be to fall into the very errors we are trying to eradicate.

Pineal pseudoscience

I often wonder why humans, as a group, are so uncomfortable remaining in ignorance about something.

It's an inevitable condition if you study anything scientific.  Scientists are always pushing the edges of our knowledge, which means they have to be keenly aware of the fact that there are a lot of questions for which we simply don't have answers.  As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "You can't be a scientist if you are uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and what is unknown in the universe. .. Scientists are always 'back at the drawing board.'  If you're not 'back at the drawing board,' you're not making discoveries.  You're not doing science.  You're doing something else."

The fact remains, however, that a lot of us don't like there to be gaps in our knowledge.  And this gives rise to the tendency to fill in those gaps with pseudoscience -- with nonsense "explanations" that give a mystical twist to the places science hasn't yet been able to elucidate.

As an example, consider the pineal gland.

I still recall finding out about the pineal gland when I was in high school biology class in the tenth grade.  We were going through the endocrine system, and our teacher, Ms. Miller, said, "There's this structure in the middle of your head called the pineal gland.  It's pretty peculiar -- everyone has one, but we have no idea what it does."  This, of course, piqued my curiosity.  How could there be a structure in our own bodies that no one could explain?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In the intervening thirty-odd years, we've progressed some, but there's still a lot we don't know about this little organ.  In the journal Neuroendocrinology, physiologists M. M. Macchi and J. N. Bruce are up front about this:

Descriptions of the pineal gland date back to antiquity, but its functions in humans are still poorly understood.  In both diurnal and nocturnal vertebrates, its main product, the hormone melatonin, is synthesized and released in rhythmic fashion, during the dark portion of the day-night cycle.  Melatonin production is controlled by an endogenous circadian timing system and is also suppressed by light.  In lower vertebrates, the pineal gland is photosensitive, and is the site of a self-sustaining circadian clock. In mammals, including humans, the gland has lost direct photosensitivity, but responds to light via a multi synaptic pathway...  Although humans are not considered photoperiodic, the occurrence of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and its successful treatment with light suggest that they have retained some photoperiodic responsiveness.  In humans, exogenous melatonin has a soporific effect, but only when administered during the day or early evening, when endogenous levels are low...  A role for the pineal in human reproduction was initially hypothesized on the basis of clinical observations on the effects of pineal tumors on sexual development...  A rapidly expanding literature attests to the involvement of melatonin in immune function, with high levels promoting and low levels suppressing a number of immune system parameters.

Put simply; the pineal gland has roles in the sleep cycle, reproduction, and the immune system, but it is far from clear how it all works.

But these gaps in our understanding just cry out for someone to come and fill them with nonsense.  Which, unfortunately, is what has happened.  If you do a Google search for "pineal gland mysticism," you'll get thousands of hits, and have access to more absurd pseudoscience than you could get through in a year.  To look at only a single example, "10 Questions About the Pineal Gland That Add to the Mystery of Spirituality," from the site Truth Theory, we have the following crazy meanderings:

The pine cone shaped, pea-sized pineal gland, located in the center of the human brain, is an organ of tremendous interest these days. To many spiritual seekers it is the ‘seat of the soul‘ and the ‘third eye,’ the anatomical part of the human body that acts as our spiritual antennae, connecting us to the non-physical, spiritual planes of existence.

Right.  Because those "non-physical, spiritual planes of existence" have themselves been shown to exist.

Then, we have a list of questions we're supposed to consider.  These are only "questions" by virtue of ending with a question mark; they're intended to lead us to belief in the woo-woo claptrap that these people are peddling, and simultaneously to ignore whatever the actual scientific research says.  To wit:

Is the pineal gland the evolutionary remnant of a literal third mammalian eye that moved into the center of the brain and changed functions from gathering light to entraining rhythms in accordance with information gathered by the retina?

No, sorry.  No vertebrate has three eyes.  Next question.

Is there a connection between the spiritual promise of the pineal gland, which is shaped like a pine cone, and the Pigna, the colossal bronze pine cone statue of ancient Rome which now sits in a courtyard in the Vatican?

Yes.  It is the same connection between kidneys and kidney beans, i.e., they are shaped kind of alike.  The fact that there's a statue of a pine cone at the Vatican is weird, but irrelevant.  Nota bene: The Pope and the Dalai Lama both have a pineal gland.  So, presumably, did Mother Teresa, Confucius, Lao Tse, Jesus, Mohammed, and L. Ron Hubbard.  But given that so does Kim Kardashian, I'm guessing that this doesn't mean much, enlightenment-wise.

Then there's this:

Why is the pineal gland the only organ in the human body that calcifies and solidifies with age?... Why is it that following the methods of pineal gland decalcification and cleansing often bring genuine results to people who are seeking heightened spiritual experience, and why do these practices often result in people being able to more easily remember dreams and lead them to feel more connected to ‘source?’

Well, first of all, your pineal gland is not the only structure in your bodies that calcifies with age.  Your cartilage does the same thing (well, some of it does); the process in the skeletal system is called "ossification," and is perfectly natural.  Woo-woos have long claimed that pineal gland calcification is caused by fluoride in tap water and toothpaste, because if you failed high school chemistry, you are apparently allowed to claim that calcium phosphate (the material that is deposited in organs that calcify) is the same thing as fluoride.

Oh, and we're not the only organisms that experience pineal gland calcification.  It's been observed in foxes, rats, and turkeys, and none of them as far as I know brush their teeth (or in the case of turkeys, their beaks).

On the other hand, maybe that's why you so seldom see enlightened turkeys.  I dunno.

And one more thing; pineal gland calcification is almost certainly irreversible, and harmless.  Don't waste your money on quack remedies that are supposed to scrub the crusty deposits from your pineal gland, because they are useless at best (like drinking vinegar) and toxic at worst (such as consuming neem oil, which is used as a pesticide and can cause nausea, vomiting, headaches, and seizures).

Of course, no article like this would be complete without a dig at the people who actually know what they're talking about:

However, to many scientists and rigid materialist thinkers, it is strictly an endocrine gland responsible for the secretion of the hormone melatonin, a substance which, among other things, aids in the regulation of our circadian rhythms.

Oh, those boring rigid materialists!  Always insisting that there be evidence for stuff!

The bottom line is: we still don't know a lot about the pineal gland, but that's no excuse to make shit up.  Let yourself not know something.  Better yet, read some actual scientific papers.  You'll learn stuff, which is cool.  In the long haul, it'll make you less likely to fall for absurd pseudoscientific nonsense of all sorts.  You might even turn into a "rigid materialist," which sounds way scarier than it actually is.

Saving the aliens

Someone really should talk to Ken Ham about how to do PR, because in the last year or so, he's really mucked things up.

First, we have the ongoing foolishness surrounding "Ark Encounter," his project to reconstruct Noah's Ark, at the scale of the original (as it were).  Ham is determined to have his employees sign a contract requiring them to espouse a belief in Christian fundamentalism, which is clearly against Kentucky state law given that he's receiving state tax breaks for the project.  The results:

1. He lost his tax breaks, causing him to pitch a fit and blame us pesky, meddling atheists, who obviously are responsible for the enforcement of state laws.
2. He's pretty much demonstrated that the Ark story is a complete fabrication, given that it's taking huge work crews several years to make "Ark Encounter," while the bible says the whole thing was done in a couple of weeks by a 600-year-old dude and his kids.
3. Even if he does finish it, despite these setbacks, it's to be hoped that the majority of people visiting it would come away with the impression that there's no way you could fit pairs of all nine million species of organisms on Earth on a boat that size.

So he's not really accomplishing much but wasting a lot of money and making what amounts to the International Museum of Credulity.

And earlier last year we had his ill-advised attempt to debate Bill Nye on the topic of creationism, which brought to mind the battle between King Arthur and the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail.  I kept expecting Ham to shout, "I'm invincible!" and Nye to respond, "You're a loony."  Apparently even the Christians thought Ham got trounced, with the polls giving Nye the victory by a 9-1 margin.

But far be it from Ken Ham to stop there.  He's the kind of guy who reaches rock bottom, and starts to dig.  Ham just wrote, over at his site Answers in Genesis, a post that would make me think he was engaging in an elaborate act of self-parody if I didn't know better.

In this post, he explains that we should stop searching for alien life, because even if it does exist, it's damned anyway.

I'm not making this up.  Ham writes:

The Bible, in sharp contrast to the secular worldview, teaches that earth was specially created, that it is unique and the focus of God’s attention (Isaiah 66:1 and Psalm 115:16). Life did not evolve but was specially created by God, as Genesis clearly teaches. Christians certainly shouldn’t expect alien life to be cropping up across the universe.

So we've started out well, here.  Forget what the silly old scientists say, let's rely on a book written by a bunch of superstitious Bronze Age nomads instead.  What do scientists know, anyway?  They have a "secular worldview," which is code, of course.  It means "wrong."

Then he gets to the meat of the post, to wit:

And I do believe there can’t be other intelligent beings in outer space because of the meaning of the gospel.  You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe.  This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation.  One day, the whole universe will be judged by fire, and there will be a new heavens and earth.  God’s Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the “Godman,” to be our relative, and to be the perfect sacrifice for sin—the Savior of mankind. 

Jesus did not become the “GodKlingon” or the “GodMartian”!  Only descendants of Adam can be saved. 

So, let me get this straight.  There can't be aliens, because god wouldn't have created aliens and then allowed them to be damned because of someone else's actions (Adam and Eve eating the apple, etc.), and we know there was no GodKlingon because the bible says so.  But Ken, this raises a rather awkward question: isn't that actually what you're saying god is doing right here on Earth?  Adam and Eve ate the apple, and that results in everyone on Earth being damned for eternity?

I didn't eat the apple, for criminy's sake.  I don't even like apples.

So the whole thing boils down to humanity being damned because of one action by our alleged distant ancestors.  Unless, apparently, you accept that our sins are forgiven, because god sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself.  Or something like that.

Ham then ends with a bang:

We need to start proclaiming the authority of God’s Word from the very first verse—even on the subject of alien life!

To boldly pray where no one has prayed before!

This latest salvo seems to elevate Ham from "buffoon" to "laughingstock."  I just cannot fathom how anyone, even the devout, can take this guy seriously any more.  He's done a big favor for us atheists, however; he's demonstrated that you can't accept biblical literalism without engaging in amazing amounts of pretzel logic, and ignoring not only cosmology, geology, and evolutionary biology, but practical considerations such as who the sons of Adam and Eve married, and how Noah got kangaroos back to Australia after the flood receded, not to mention where all the water went.

Myself, I would love it if intelligent alien life were discovered.  It's been a hope of mine ever since I was old enough to consider the question.  And now I have yet another reason to be excited about the work being done at SETI.  For one thing, it'd be fun to see Ken Ham have to eat his words.  For another, it'd be fun to have some aliens to keep me company down in hell.

Unless they're Vogons.  Their poetry really sucks.  To have to listen to that for all eternity would certainly be right up there with being Thrown Into The Fiery Furnace, enjoyment-wise.

Standardized incompetence

Why is it that the people trying to "fix the education system" seem hell-bent on making it worse?

It's a mysterious phenomenon.  There is now a mountain of evidence that (for example) standardized test scores are unreliable measures of both student progress and teacher competence, and yet we are increasingly using exactly those metrics for gauging both.  In my home state of New York, 20% of my "final grade" as a teacher is mandated to come from high-stakes standardized tests (in my case, the Living Environment Regents Exam, which may be the most poorly-constructed exam I've ever seen).

So given that we've had incontrovertible evidence that it's a bad idea to put the futures of our students and the careers of our teachers in the hands of the corporations who are paid big bucks to write ineffective standardized tests, what do you think would make sense, as a next step?

1. Reduce the emphasis on those tests, and go with measures devised to assess growth, creativity, and critical thinking.
2. Make the standardized test scores have an even higher impact by giving them more weight in end-year assessments for both students and teachers.

If you went for option #2, all I can say is, you understand the system of educational oversight all too well.  This latest idiotic idea was proposed by New York Chancellor of Schools Merryl Tisch, who wants test scores to trump everything else, including the evaluations of teachers done by competent school administrators.

In Tisch's own words, she proposes to:

... (e)liminate the locally selected measures subcomponent, established through local collective bargaining. The data reveal that the locally-negotiated process for assigning points and setting targets in this subcomponent do not differentiate performance in terms of the composite ratings that teachers and principals receive. Instead, assign 40 percentage points to student growth on State assessments and other comparable measures of student growth – including performance-based assessments.

And what is her rationale for proposing this?  It is, she says, because too many teachers were rated as competent by the previous metric.  The number rated "ineffective," Tisch said, was simply too low.  In other words: if the metric says that most teachers are doing their jobs, then the metric has to be inaccurate.

She also proposes monetary incentives for "high-performing teachers" and "teachers taking leadership roles," thus pitting one teacher against another in terms of who gets the highest-performing classes.

Let me take my own situation as an example.  This year, I am teaching only one section of Regents Biology (which I steadfastly refuse to call "Living Environment," largely because the last "paradigm shift" we had in New York State was called "Raising the Bar," and they "raised the bar" in my course by renaming it, which was considered raising the bar because "Living Environment" has more letters than "Biology" does).  In our school, primarily because of staffing and financial issues, we have gone to a model of dealing with special-needs students called "co-teaching."  Co-teaching allows the district to put virtually all of the "classified" (i.e. special education) students together in one class, and then to assign a special education co-teacher to be in the classroom with the subject-area teacher.

This year, I got the "co-taught" class.  Half of my 24 students are "classified."  In this class, I have students who read on the fifth grade level.  I have students who have behavioral disabilities.  I have an autistic child who shuts down whenever things get stressful, which averages four days out of five.  I have ten students who have yet to pass a single quiz this year, despite extra help from myself and the co-teacher, and "modifications" (i.e., quizzes that have been adjusted to be easier to pass).

This is one of the classes on which I will be evaluated this year.  What do you think my chance of being rated "effective" is going to be?  If there was a monetary incentive this year, I'd be unwise to make advanced plans for spending it.

Don't get me wrong.  I love the kids in that class.  They are, by and large, sweet, cooperative, funny, and earnest.  My co-teacher is a wonderful educator, and we have a great working relationship.  But to call the two of us incompetent because we can't get this group of kids to pass the state assessment is to ignore the reality that we cannot treat teachers like factory workers, and kids like widgets that have to be made to a particular specification.

The ironic piece of all of this is how completely obvious this is to anyone who has spent any time in a public school, and how mysterious it all seems to the people in charge.  Merryl Tisch, for example, has in her career spent only seven years teaching children -- and these were years spent in wealthy private schools.  I would humbly suggest that perhaps, wild idea though it may be, we should have the people in charge of public education be individuals who have devoted their lives to teaching children, of all sorts of backgrounds, in public schools.

I would also humbly suggest that Ms. Tisch doesn't know what the hell she's doing.  Nor did our former Commissioner, John King, who oversaw both the APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) and Common Core implementation disasters that have taken place in New York over the last couple of years.  But since in government, you can't screw something up badly enough to stop you from getting promoted, King is now going to work as a top assistant to U. S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

How have we gotten here, to treating teachers like untrustworthy assembly-line workers, and children like little cookie-cutter images?  It doesn't take being a teacher to see how absurd the latter is; anyone who has children of their own knows that they develop at different rates, excel at different things, have different problems, different stumbling blocks.  The idea that anyone could take a random group of tenth graders (for example), and get them to the same place at the same time, is moronic.

And the idea that if the kids aren't all at the same place at the same time by the end of the year, it's the teacher's fault, is somewhere beyond moronic, in that ethereal realm that there really isn't a word in the English language to describe.

I think the answer about how we got here is twofold.  First, people want a uniform product.  That 1950s-mentality, construction-line model is sunk deep into the American psyche.  And if we can't achieve it, we naturally look around for scapegoats.  Teachers are convenient in that regard, aren't they?

The second reason, though, is more pernicious, and it is, to state it bluntly, the almighty dollar.  It's financially expedient to blame the teachers, turn everything into numbers, and act as if those numbers mean something real.  By doing so, you (1) pretend that the problem is fixable without actually changing anything substantive; (2) frustrate the absolute hell out of experienced teachers, who then get out of the profession, saving districts money; (3) avoid considering solutions that might truly work, like reducing class sizes, creating classrooms with differentiated instruction to better meet the needs of children with different abilities and challenges, and allowing schools to beef up programs that encourage creativity, such as music and art.

Nope.  That's not the way, say policy wonks like Tisch.  Test the little buggers to a fare-thee-well, because that somehow will tell you what is really going on, both with the kids and with the teachers who are trying their best to teach them, despite larger classes, less funding, and more absurd busy-work from state agencies.  Reduce funding via state taxes, and simultaneously put a cap on local levies, thus forcing school boards into the Hobson's choice of cutting virtually the only thing they have control over, which is staffing.  (And guess what goes first?  The aforementioned "non-core" subjects like art and music.)

But the wonks keep rising to the top, and the teachers keep saying this sort of thing, and keep getting ignored.  To pay attention to us would be to admit that we're on the wrong course, and have been on the wrong course for some time.  Which would mean that our educational leaders have achieved a score of...

... ineffective.  And we can't have that, right?

Of course, right.

Orange dwarf catastrophe

It's no great insight that the media likes sensationalized stories, and that a lot of them (including, sadly, some major news outlets) have the attitude that facts don't matter much as long as they can keep readers reading.

What is more frustrating is the way the readers themselves become complicit in this dissemination of bullshit.  Now that we have the interwebz, sending along ridiculous "news" stories takes only a click. And before you know it, you have people believing that humanity is going to be wiped out because the Solar System is going to be destroyed during a collision with an orange dwarf star.

The original study, by astronomer Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, is interesting enough.  Astronomers have long known that the stars move relative to each other; this means that the constellations aren't fixed, and that millions of years from now, a time traveler from today wouldn't recognize any of the current star patterns.  (I still remember my first encounter with this idea, on Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when I was a freshman in college.  Seeing the animation of the movements of the stars in the Big Dipper was one of those moments when I realized, "I really want to know more about science!")

So it's not too surprising that some stars will get closer to the Sun over time.  And Bailer-Jones found that two orange dwarf stars are predicted to make relatively close approaches -- HIP 85605 could get as close as 0.13 light years, and GL 710 could make a pass of 0.32 light years.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Cool stuff.  But the media, unfortunately, is not content simply to report the facts.  Because that, somehow, would be boring.  This research has been picked up by a number of different online news sources, and one and all, they focus on the fact that this "close pass" might wipe us all out by gravitationally dislodging comets from the Oort Cloud, resulting in a "rain of comets," some of which could, perhaps, collide with the Earth.

Notice how many times I said "could" and "might" in the previous two paragraphs?  Bailer-Jones is up front about her study being speculative; the upper bounds for the pass distance of the two stars are 0.65 light years and 1.44 light years, respectively.  To put things in perspective; the closest estimate of HIP 85605 to the Sun was 0.13 light years, right?  Well, Pluto is 13 light hours from the Sun.  So this means that even at its closest, HIP 85605 will be 9,000 times further away than Pluto.

Next, let's consider the likelihood of a disruption of comets leading to a "rain of comets" and the certainty of a devastating Earth strike.  Let's assume that we do have a bunch of comets swooping inwards from the near pass of these stars.  What kind of target does Earth represent?

The issue here is scale, of course, and the amount of the Solar System that is (virtually) empty space. The best analogy I have run across is that if you shrank the entire Solar System down to a circle with a radius of 1,000 meters, with the orbit of Pluto as its perimeter, then the Earth would be about 7 meters from the center.

And it would be the size of a peppercorn.

So it's not exactly a huge target.  Yes, a comet or two could strike the Earth, as they have repeatedly during Earth's history.  No, it would not cause a rain of death.

But those aren't the only misrepresentations in the "news" story.  Not only has Bailer-Jones's research been sensationalized, it's had information added to it that is outright false.  In the above-linked story, which is no worse than the various other versions I've seen (i.e., I didn't pick this one because it was especially bad; they were all bad), here are some direct quotes, with commentary:

Apparently, the comets are made of rocks, dust and organic materials.

Actually, comets are mostly ice, a fact which has been known for decades and would have been immediately apparent had the author bothered to consult Wikipedia.

(T)he gravity [of the stars] can attract comets into the inner solar system and the passing comets might harshly affect Earth's atmosphere due to the powerful ultraviolet radiation that the comets might cause.

Ultraviolet radiation from what source, pray?  Comets aren't giant orbiting tanning lamps, for fuck's sake.

(A) small number of the alleged stars might explode like supernova while passing through the Oort Cloud.

Oh noes!  Not alleged stars explode like supernova!  That sound bad!

The Hip 85605 might reach the solar system in 0.13 to 0.65 light years away, while the GL 710 might take around 0.32 to 1.44 light years.

Ninth graders in Earth Science learn that a light year is a measure of distance, not time, a point that seems to have escaped the author, making me wonder how he ever got chosen to write a science story.  To be fair, unit confusion also plagued the writers of Star Wars, wherein we famously had Han Solo boasting that the Millennium Falcon had done the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs," which would be like saying that your car was so fast that you went to the grocery store in less than five miles.  (Of course, there are Star Wars apologists who have talked themselves into thinking that the scriptwriters had some kind of fancy time-travel space-warp relativity thing in mind when they wrote it.  Myself, I think they just didn't know what a parsec is.)

And of course, it's only midway through the article that we find out when this catastrophe is predicted to happen:

1.3 million years from now.

So, to boil it all down:

Two small stars might, or might not, pass 9,000 times further away from the Sun than Pluto is, some millions of years in the future.  This could increase the number of comets entering the inner Solar System, generating a somewhat higher likelihood of a comet striking Earth.

But that version of the story wouldn't have induced so many people to read it and pass it along, would it?  Nope.  So they add sensationalized nonsense to it, so as to make it better clickbait.

At least it's still better than the post I saw on social media yesterday, wherein someone asked for help for a school project their child is doing regarding why the stars were created.  The responses included that god had made them "to rule the night with the moon," "to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years," and "to declare god's glory."  The scholarly references given were the Book of Genesis and Psalm 19.

But hey, if you're going to buy into non-science, I guess you should go all the way, right?

Geopolitical let's-pretend

When secular types think of instances of the religious demanding that we treat counterfactual beliefs as if they were real, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the ongoing non-debate over creationism being taught in public schools.

I call it a "non-debate" because there really is no basis for argument.  Either you accept the scientific method -- in which case the evidence for the evolutionary model is overwhelming -- or you don't.  If you don't, then debate is fruitless, because the two sides aren't even accepting the same basic ground rules for how we know something is true.

But this is hardly the only example.  We just got another striking case of the religious claiming that the world is other than it is, and demanding that everyone else simply play along, in the decision by Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of Harper-Collins, to publish maps of the Middle East without including Israel.

I'm not making this up, although I wish I were.  A representative for Collins Bartholomew said that if they included Israel on maps in atlases destined for classrooms in the Middle East, it would be "unacceptable to Muslim customers" and "not in line with local preferences."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In other words: because the majority of Muslims in the Middle East would like it if Israel didn't exist, they not only get to pretend it doesn't exist, they have a major book publisher playing along in the charade.

Apparently, Collins Bartholomew's defense for the decision was that if they'd included Israel, no one in the Middle East would have bought the atlases.  Or else, they would only have allowed them in the country if each one of them had the name "Israel" crossed out with a black marker, a practice that apparently really happens.

The first group to object to the expectation that everyone pretend that the world is other than it is was the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, which should make it an odds-on contender for the Irony Award 2015.  "The publication of this atlas will confirm Israel’s belief that there exists a hostility towards their country from parts of the Arab world,” said Bishop Declan Lang, chairman of the Bishops' Conference Department of International Affairs.  "It will not help to build up a spirit of trust leading to peaceful co-existence."

Which could be a direct quote from the writings of St. Obvious of Duh.  I think the Israelis already know that, Bishop Lang.

The question, of course, is whether people in other countries are willing to play along.  Yes, we get that a lot of you people in the Middle East don't like Israel.  Yes, you can put your hands over your eyes and play let's-pretend.  But the rest of the world doesn't have to pat you on the back and say, "Of course, dear, of course bad nasty Israel doesn't exist.  I checked under the bed and in the closet, and I didn't see it anywhere.  Don't pay attention to the big black mark on the map.  It doesn't mean anything."

Now, understand me; I'm not making a statement one way or the other about who is right and who is wrong in the perpetual state of conflict in the Middle East.  My general feeling, non-political-type that I am, is that the situation is so complex that assigning blame would be a fruitless task.  The whole area is so rife with issues of poverty, territorial claims, religious frictions, ethnic frictions, militarism, and arguments based on hereditary rights, that any attempt to divide the players into Good Guys and Bad Guys is doomed to failure right from the outset.

But the Catholic Bishops' Conference is right about one thing; the situation isn't going to be helped by publishing companies pandering to people's desperation that a counterfactual worldview be reality.  The proper response -- both to the Muslims who object to Israel being in atlases, and to the creationists who object to evolution being taught in public school science classes -- is "suck it up and deal."

Jesus in Japan

Every once in a while, I'll run into an off-the-wall claim that admits of no particularly obvious explanation.  For example: have you heard about the town of Shingō, Japan, in Aomori Prefecture on the northern tip of the island of Honshu?  If you have, I'll bet it's for one reason:

It's where Jesus was buried.

There's a sign there that identifies the burial site:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

According to the claim, Jesus skipped town on the eve of the crucifixion, leaving his brother Isukiri to be tortured and executed in his place.  Isukiri makes no appearance in the bible, the people of Shingō admit; that's because he was intended to take Jesus's place right from the get-go, and needed to keep his identity secret.  The claim also helpfully explains the years of Jesus's life before his public ministry started, at age 30 or so.

He was in Japan, of course.

How he got to Japan from Israel is never really explained.  Last I looked, they're not all that close together, and in between lie such special attractions as the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and Siberia.  But despite all this, Jesus made the trip three times -- on the way out when he was a twenty-something, then back to Jerusalem when he started preaching, and then a final time to get out of what Pontius Pilate et al. had planned for him.

So while things didn't end so well for Isukiri, Jesus made out pretty well.  He married a local girl, became a rice farmer, fathered three children, and lived to the ripe old age of either 106 or 114, depending on who you believe.

And because he had progeny, some of his descendants still live there in Shingō.  The Sawaguchi family, specifically, claims descent from Jesus, something that they don't seem to think is all that amazing.  Jesus, they say, didn't perform any miracles once he arrived in Shingō.  He just settled down to be a nice guy and a solid citizen of the village.  Which takes some of the gravitas out of being a direct lineal descendant of the Son of God.

I find all of this pretty peculiar.  What could possibly be the origin of this story?  It seems to have started with Kyomaro Takenouchi, who in 1935 announced that he had found some ancient manuscripts that tell the whole story.  (They also, apparently, tell about Atlantis and the fact that humans are descended from aliens.  But another time for that, perhaps.)  There's an Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents, which explains them thusly:

More than 2,000 years ago, the Takenouchi Documents were rewritten by Takenouchino Matori (Hegurimo Matori) into modern Japanese characters Kana mixed with Chinese characters. The original documents were believed to have been written in Divine characters. 

The historical facts recorded in the Takenouchi Documents are extraordinary. Among them are the Sumera-Mikoto came to Earth from a higher world on Ameno-ukifune, the world government was located in Japan and the Sumera-Mikoto unified the world. The great holy masters of the world, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Shakyamuni Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tsu were born from the five-colored races which branched off from the Japanese race and all went to Japan for study and training. These facts may seem absurd and contrary to our prevailing understanding of world history. However, the archaeological research of recent years has gradually revealed the true existence of ultra ancient civilizations which are all mentioned in the Takenouchi Documents.

Some serious ethnocentrism, here.  All the cool holy people came from Japan, or at least studied there.  Got it.

Of course, it's not like we can study the documents themselves.  The originals were confiscated by government officials during World War II, and subsequently destroyed in an air raid.  Which, of course, is simultaneously unfortunate for the skeptics and convenient for the true believers.  And it leaves the Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents free to say any damn thing they want to about them.

But there's more to it than just some probably spurious documents, and the tale seems to predate Takenouchi's "discovery."  What's more interesting is that not only do the people in Shingō mostly seem to accept the story as true, they participate in some curious rituals -- such as marking newborns' foreheads with black crosses, and sewing "Star of David-like patterns onto babies' clothing."  All, if you believe the tale, a cultural memory from 2,000 years ago.

Even so, I'm not buying it.  Cultural contamination, whether deliberate or unwitting, is simply too easy to do (consider two examples I've looked at here at Skeptophilia -- the cult of John Frum and the Sirius B story from the Dogon).  Which is more likely -- that Jesus Christ made three trips to and from Japan, on foot, or that in the late 19th or early 20th century some Christian guy from the West ended up in Shingō and got the whole crazy tale started?

In any case, it's made for a considerable tourist attraction.

[image courtesy of photographer Jason Hill and the Creative Commons]

So that's our weird claim for the day.  Jesus in Japan, and the crucifixion of Isukiri, Jesus's less-known, and extremely unlucky, brother.  If I'm ever in Japan, I'll make a point of checking it out.  At least it's safer for tourists than visiting Jerusalem, these days.