Sick unto death

New from the Dangerous Nonsense department: there's a new alternative-medicine model out of Germany that claims that viruses and bacteria aren't the cause of infectious diseases.

The website linked above, which was sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, had me muttering imprecations under my breath pretty much right from the first line.  The author, Caroline Markolin, starts with a line from the famous 19th century biologist Rudolf Virchow: "If I could live my life over again, I would devote it to proving that germs seek their natural habitat -- diseased tissue -- rather than being the cause of diseased tissue."

Virchow was a brilliant pathologist and cellular biologist, but being good at some things doesn't mean you can't be dead wrong about others.  And the article conveniently fails to mention that Virchow not only disbelieved that pathogens caused diseases, he was also an ardent anti-evolutionist who considered Darwin an "ignoramus."

Be that as it may, we then are treated to quite a confection of nonsense.  Colds and flu, we're told, are actually the same thing, and are both caused by stress, not by viruses:

The common cold is linked to a "stink conflict", which can be experienced in real terms but also figuratively as "This situation stinks!" or "I've had it!". During the conflict-active phase the nasal membrane lining widens through ulceration, which is usually not noticed. In the healing phase, however, when the nasal tissue is being repaired, the nasal membrane swells up. A runny nose (healing always occurs in a fluid environment), headaches, tiredness, an elevated temperature or fever are all typical signs of a vagotonic healing process. If the cold symptoms are more severe, then this is commonly called the "flu". The claim, however, that "influenza" viruses are the culprits, has yet to be proven.

Nor has this claim, of course.  The "germ theory of disease" has over a hundred years of hard data supporting it.  This theory (if I can dignify it by that name) has a few vague generalities, a couple of ten-dollar words like "vagotonic," a photograph of a woman blowing her nose, so q.e.d., apparently.

We then find out that the "Spanish" flu of 1918-1919, that killed between 50 and 100 million people (hard numbers are difficult to come by, since the epidemic occurred during World War I, and many deaths in rural or isolated places went unrecorded), was not caused by a virus, it was caused by "stress."  People were under "territorial fear conflicts" and "death fright conflicts," and sickened from those; the acute, and frequently deadly, symptoms occurred when the body was trying to heal itself and the lung tumors caused by "stress" decomposed.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Oh, and tuberculosis and AIDS aren't caused by pathogens, either.

And don't take antibiotics.  Ever.  Because they cause cancer.  Lung cancer, Markolin tells us, isn't caused by smoking; to hell with the research, which includes a study that demonstrated that 2/3 of the people who smoke will eventually die from conditions associated with tobacco use.  Cancer is caused by "shock," she says.  In a statement that should be an odds-on favorite for the Circular Logic Award of 2015, she states, "We have to bear in mind that every diagnosis shock can potentially cause... cancer," implying that the diagnosis of cancer is what caused the cancer to appear.

But how was the cancer there to diagnose if the diagnosis caused the cancer, you may ask?  To which I respond: stress vagotonic death fight conflicts.  And fear.  Stop asking questions, because you're going to stress me out and give me a cold.

Oh, and viruses, "if they existed," would "assist in the reconstruction of... tissues."  Because evolution, for some reason.  Microbes are our friends; all disease is caused by emotional conflict.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it, how plants get infectious diseases.  Maybe my tomato plants didn't get late blight last year, maybe they were just feeling lonely and unappreciated.

But I'm certain that Markolin would have some sort of bullshit response to this, too.  Probably that humans with all of their ugly unnatural habits are causing the plants to stress out, and so the tomatoes are picking up on our conflicted quantum vibrational states and becoming sick themselves.

Nothing whatsoever to do with pathogens.  Just like colds, flu, AIDS, tuberculosis, and the bubonic plague.

The difficulty here is that there is a germ of truth (rimshot) to what she's saying.  The mind does have a role in health; stress does cause physical manifestations, probably mediated by the hormone cortisol.  But this is a far cry from saying that all disease is caused by stress, and that pathogens have nothing to do with it.

The problem with all of this is not that a crackpot has a website.  Many crackpots do.  It seems to be a favorite hobby of theirs, in fact.  The problem is that naïve people will fall for this, and fail to seek out proper medical care for curable conditions.  So it's homeopathy all over again; a claim that is entirely unsupported by research and evidence, and only believable if you fall for some hand-waving foolishness that the students in my Introductory Biology classes could debunk without even breaking a sweat.  That hasn't stopped the story, however, from being picked up by Spirit Science, so it's popping up all over woo-woo alt-med websites just in the last few days.  (If you go to the Spirit Science article, don't read the comments.  Really.  I mean it.  It will result in your spending the rest of the day curled up in a corner, whimpering softly.  If you ignore this advice, allow me to say simply that, yes, there are people in the world who are this stupid.  And they vote.)

So the caveat emptor principle applies here, of course.  People should be smart enough not to believe appealing nonsense about preventing the flu by becoming less stressed.  But I still feel some sympathy with the folks who are ignorant, or desperate, enough to fall for something like this, and who will suffer the consequences of that ignorance.

And as far as Markolin and her idiotic theory, I'm about done with it.  The whole thing is stressing me out, and we can't have that.

Piecing together the puzzle

I'm curious about where the human drive to solve puzzles comes from.

It's a cool thing, don't get me wrong.  But you have to wonder why it's something so many of us share.  We are driven to know things, even things that don't seem to serve any particular purpose in our lives.  The process is what's compelling; many times, the answer itself is trivial, once you find it.  But still we're pushed onward by an almost physical craving to figure stuff out.

Every few weeks I devote a day in my Critical Thinking classes to solving divergent thinking puzzles.  My rationale is that puzzle-solving is like mental calisthenics; if you want to grow your muscles, you exercise, and if you want to sharpen your intellect, you make it work.  I tell the students at the outset that they're not graded and that I don't care if they don't get to all of them by the end of the period.  You'd think that this would be license for high school students to blow it off, to spend the period chatting, but I find that this activity is one of the ones for which I almost never have to work hard to keep them engaged, despite more than once hearing kids saying things like, "This is making my brain hurt."

Here's a sample -- one of the most elegant puzzles I've ever seen:

A census taker goes to a man's house, and asks for the ages of the man's three daughters. 

The man says, "The product of their ages is 36." 

The census taker says, "That's not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay.  The sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street." 

The census taker looks out of the window at the house across the street, and says, "That's still not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay.  My oldest daughter has red hair." 

The census taker says thank you and writes down the ages of the three daughters. 

How old are they?

And yes, I just re-read this, and I didn't leave anything out.  It's solvable from what I've given you.  Give it a try!

This drive to figure things out, even things with no immediate application, reaches its apogee in two fields that are near and dear to me: science and linguistics.  In science, it takes the form of pure research, which, as a scientist friend of mine put it, is "trying to make sense of one cubic centimeter of the universe."  To be sure, a lot of pure research results in applications afterwards, but that's not usually why scientists pursue such knowledge.  The thrill of pursuit, and the satisfaction of knowing, are motivations in and of themselves.

In linguistics, it has to do with deepening our understanding of how humans communicate, with figuring out the connections between different modes of communication, and with deciphering the languages of our ancestors.  It's this last one that spurred me to write this post; just yesterday, I finished reading the phenomenal book The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox, which is the story of how three people set out, one after the other, to crack the code of Linear B.

Linear B was a writing system used in Crete 4,500 years ago, and for which neither the sound values of the characters, nor the language they encoded, was known.  This is the most difficult possible problem for a linguist; in fact, most of the time, such scripts (of which there are a handful of other examples) remain closed doors permanently.  If you neither know what sounds the letters represent, nor what language was spoken by the people who wrote them, how could you ever decipher it?

One of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos by Arthur Evans [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'd known about this amazing triumph of human perseverance and intelligence ever since I read John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B when I was in college.  I was blown away by the difficulty of the task these people undertook, and their doggedness in pursuing the quest to its end.  Chadwick's book is fascinating, but Fox's is a triumph; and you're left with the dual sense of admiration at minds that could pierce such a puzzle, and wonderment at why they felt so driven.

Because once the Linear B scripts were decoded, the tablets and inscriptions turned out to be...

... inventories.  Lists of how many jugs of olive oil and bottles of wine they had, how many arrows and spears, how many horses and cattle and sheep.  No wisdom of the ancients; no gripping sagas of heroes doing heroic things; no new insights into history.

But none of that mattered.  Because of the form that the inscriptions took, Arthur Evans, Alice Kober, and Michael Ventris realized pretty quickly that this was the sort of thing that the Linear B tablets were about.  The scholars who deciphered this mysterious script weren't after a solution because they thought the inscriptions said something profound or worth knowing; they devoted their lives to the puzzle because it was one cubic centimeter of the universe that no one had yet made sense of.

That they succeeded is a testimony to this peculiar drive we have to understand the world around us, even when it seems to fall under the heading of "who cares?"  We need to know, we humans.  Wherever that urge comes from, it becomes an almost physical craving.  All three of the people whose work cracked the code were united by one trait; a desperate desire to figure things out.  Only one, in fact, had a particularly good formal background in linguistics.  The other two were an architect and a wealthy amateur historian and archaeologist.  Training wasn't the issue.  What allowed them to succeed was persistence, and methodical minds that refused to admit that a solution was out of reach.

The story is fascinating, and by turns tragic and inspirational, but by the time I was done reading it I was left with my original question; why are we driven to know stuff that seems to have no practical application whatsoever?  I completely understood how Evans, Kober, and Ventris felt, and in their place I no doubt would have felt the same way, but I'm still at a loss to explain why.  It's one of those mysterious filigrees of the human mind, which perhaps is selected for because curiosity and inquisitiveness have high survival value in the big picture, even if they sometimes push us to spend our lives bringing light to some little dark cul-de-sac of human knowledge that no one outside of the field cares, or will even hear, about.

But as the brilliant geneticist Barbara McClintock, whose decades-long persistence in solving the mystery of transposable elements ("jumping genes") eventually resulted in a Nobel Prize, put it:  "It is a tremendous joy, the whole process of finding the answer.  Just pure joy."

Welcome to the persecution party!

It's a minor mystery to me why some groups seem to enjoy appearing persecuted.

Maybe they think it's some kind of bizarre pseudo-syllogism:

• Highly moral people often find that others reject their views.
• Having your views rejected is the same as being oppressed.
• Lots of people reject my views.
• I feel oppressed by this.
• Therefore I must be highly moral.  q.e.d.

Just in the last couple of days, we've had three examples from the fanatical evangelical wing of American Christianity wherein we learn that Christians in general are a persecuted minority, because, apparently, comprising 78% of the American citizenry and nearly 100% of the people who hold public office puts Christians in danger of imminent eradication.

Let's start with Franklin Graham, who's shown himself more than once to be an angry little man unworthy of the stature conferred upon him by his name.  His father, evangelist Billy Graham, was and is a thoughtful and moral man who participated actively in the Civil Rights Movement and worked against human rights abuses in the Eastern Bloc and apartheid-era South Africa.   So even though I disagree with his theology, I've always had a grudging admiration for him as a human being. 

Franklin, though, seems like a schmuck.  Not to put too fine a point on it.

In an interview with Gordon Robertson, son of noted wingnut Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham went on and on about the upcoming "storm of persecution" that Christians are facing in the United States.  He said:

We’re going to see persecution, I believe, in this country because our president is very sympathetic to Islam and the reason I say that, Gordon, is because his father was a Muslim, gave him a Muslim name, Barack Hussein Obama.  His mother married another Muslim man, they moved to Indonesia, he went to Indonesian schools.  So, growing up his frame of reference and his influence as a young man was Islam.  It wasn’t Christianity, it was Islam. 

There are Muslims that have access to him in the White House.  Our foreign policy has a lot of influence now, from Muslims. We see the Prime Minister of Israel being snubbed by the President and by the White House and by the Democrats and it’s because of the influence of Islam.  They hate Israel and they hate Christians, and so the storm is coming, I believe, Gordon.

What makes this even more ridiculous is that when Graham was asked last month by (of all people) Bill O'Reilly if he could name some of the Muslims who are influencing the president, he couldn't come up with a single name.  Not one.

Oh, but "he knows they're there."  That's enough, apparently, to make it a fact.

Next on the persecution hit parade we have radio talk show personalities Mat Staver and Matt Barber, who were offering their opinions on the Washington state florist who was sued because she refused to sell flowers to a gay couple who were getting married.  The florist, Barronelle Stutzman, has become something of a hero amongst the ultra-religious for her actions.  She said, "You are asking me to walk in the way of a well-known betrayer, one who sold something of infinite worth for thirty pieces of silver.  That is something I will not do."

Apparently in these people's eyes selling someone out to be tortured and executed is exactly the same as selling someone flowers.

But Staver and Barber, of the radio show Faith and Freedom, seem to have no problem accepting Stutzman's rather inflated opinion of the importance of her actions in the grand scheme of things.  Barber went even further than Stutzman, and issued the following dire warning:

If, God forbid ... the Supreme Court somehow defines and manufactures a constitutional so-called right to sodomy-based marriage this summer, in June, if they do that then the floodgates will be open.  There will be Christian persecution widespread across the United States and the so-called gay marriage agenda will be the sledgehammer used to crush the church and to crush religious liberty and the crush individual Christians, their finances, to ruin them.  That's what this agenda was always about and that's what we will see if the Supreme Court goes the wrong way in June.

Righty-o.  Apparently a few people finally being able to have public and official recognition of their committed relationships will lead to wild hordes of out-of-control gays running around smashing Christians with sledgehammers.

But even that is sensible as compared to what Gordon Klingenschmitt came up with.  Klingenschmitt is a member of the Colorado House of Representatives, winning in 2014 by a 70-30 margin of the popular vote even though he appears to have been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Klingenschmitt decided to weigh in on last month's murder in North Carolina of three young Muslims:

An American atheist has killed three Muslims in North Carolina because they were like Christians.  This man obviously had something against people of faith, whether they're Muslim or Christian, and the three young Muslims were sadly found shot in their homes on Tuesday.  Well, the murderer allegedly of these three young Muslim students is an atheist man named Craig Stephen Hicks, who is not just a person who doesn't believe in Islam, but he is so radically atheist that he was arrested on suspicion of three counts of first-degree murder.  Hicks is reportedly a vocal supporter of United Atheists of America, and according to his Facebook page, was a fan of television shows like The Atheist Experience, and also the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Here's a radical left-wing atheist who is going around killing people of faith.  He's posted a number of anti-religious images and messages on his Facebook page.  One of the images he posted said, and I quote, "Why radical Christians and radical Muslims are opposed to each other's influence when they agree about so many ideological issues."  So he killed the Muslims because they think like Christians.  

Wow.  Where do I start?

First, Hicks was not arrested because "he is so radically atheist," he was arrested because he almost certainly murdered three people.  It seems unlikely that he did so solely because the three were Muslim; his ex-wife, Cynthia Hurley, described Hicks as an angry and confrontational man who once watched a movie that involved a man going on a shooting rampage and found it "hilarious."

"He had no compassion at all," Hurley said about Hicks.

So Hicks was an atheist who didn't like Muslims, but he was also a violent man who is very likely to be mentally unbalanced.  He'd had repeated angry exchanges with his three victims over parking spaces, and it's thought that this might have actually been what set him off.

But Klingenschmitt doesn't like things complicated.  In a bizarre screed that should win the 2015 Pretzel Logic Award, Klingenschmitt has Hicks thinking, "Wow, these Muslims, they think just like Christians!  And Christians deserve to be killed, because that's what I found out from the Southern Poverty Law Center!  I think I'll go kill them right now."

Which may have edged out James Inhofe's Senator-with-a-Snowball act as the single stupidest thing an elected official has said so far this year.

So there you have it.  Between Obama and his invisible Muslim advisors, and crazed gays forcing florists to sell gay men flowers at sledgehammer-point, to people killing Muslims because they're so much like Christians, I give you: the evangelical pity-party talking points of the day.

Which brings me back to my original question of why this worldview is so appealing.  Is it because people are more likely to rally around the cause if they feel threatened?  It seems the only logical explanation to me.  Because by any other standard of rational discourse, these people are sounding increasingly like they've lost their minds.

Vote Tsipras for Antichrist!

As President Obama approaches the end of his second and final term, and has not taken away all of our guns, caused the downfall of America, turned us over to the Muslims, made us submit to the Mark of the Beast, or ushered in the End Times, it looks like we'll have to cast about to find out who will be the next candidate for being the Antichrist.  I mean, Obama has had a good six and a half years to bring forth the Beast With Seven Heads and the Scarlet Whore Of Babylon, and what do I see around me?  Same old, same old.

It's kind of disappointing, really.

I'm happy to say, though, that the ultra-religious wingnuts have a new focus for ranting.  Since Obama has proved himself woefully inadequate in the apocalypse department, it's nice that we have someone waiting in the wings.  His name is Alexios Tsipras, and he's the newly-elected Prime Minister of Greece.

Alexios Tsipras [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Admire the impressive new features of this latest incarnation of the Minion Of The Evil One:

• He is a self-proclaimed atheist, and instead of taking his oath of office in god's name, he "took it in his own name" (as the wingnuts are putting it; actually, he took a civil oath rather than a religious one).
• He is young and charismatic.
• He has already met with the Pope to discuss a peace deal for the Middle East.
• He is a Greek man of Jewish descent.
• He was born on July 28, 1974, which that year fell on the Tisha B’Av (9th of Av) on the Jewish calendar.  This is the day on which many Jewish calamities occurred, including the destruction of first and second temples and the eviction of Jews from England in the year 1290 and from Spain in 1492.

Says Terry James, over at Rapture Ready:

There has surfaced, in my view at least, an archetype of the leader to come who will be the first beast of Revelation 13.  This generation is not yet in the Tribulation, but is experiencing precursors to that last seven years that makes us know that a time of unprecedented troubles is just ahead.  Likewise, a leader has arisen from the area of the reviving Roman Empire, one whose emergence makes the observant Bible prophecy student suspect ever more assuredly that Antichrist is waiting in the shadows of the immediate future. 

Any such leader rising suddenly and dramatically out of the very nucleus of what was ancient Rome justifiably raises the eyebrows of Bible prophecy students.  The visible, physical reactions of those who have put him on his pedestal are quite interesting… glassy eyes filled with tears of joy, as they looked worshipfully at the man on whom they are hanging their hopes.  As a matter of fact, the slogan for [Tsipras's] campaign was “Hope is coming!” 

I think we are looking at an archetype of the man whose name will add up to six hundred, three score and six.

The problem is, Tsipras is hardly the first person who has been a contender for being the Antichrist.  Just in my lifetime, we've had:

• Pope John Paul I
• Pope John Paul II
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Pope Francis I
• Ayatollah Khomeini
• President Clinton
• Muammar Qaddafi
• King Juan Carlos of Spain
• Javier Solana (former Secretary General of both NATO and of the EU) 
• Prince Charles of England (who would be kind of a derpy Antichrist, if you ask me)
• Hafez al-Assad (former dictator of Syria)
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Ronald Reagan

No, I'm not kidding about Reagan.  There were nutjobs during Reagan's presidency who seriously suggested he might be the Antichrist, mostly because each of the parts of his full name, Ronald Wilson Reagan, had six letters.  (Get it?  666?  Get it?)

And do you know what all of these guys have in common?  They were not the Antichrist.

The End Times crowd has had an exactly zero batting average, thus far.  And if you go back in history, you find that ever since apocalyptic prophecies became all the rage back in the 4th century, people have been going through conniptions trying to figure out (1) when it all was going to happen, and (2) the identities of the major players.  Yes, I know that "no one knows the hour," and all that sort of thing, but that hasn't slowed them down any.  They've also pointed their fingers at every single Pope since the Reformation, Charlemagne, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Oliver Cromwell, Hitler, Mussolini, and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, the last-mentioned having the honor of being the only female Antichrist I'm aware of.

And still they've been wrong every time.

So I'm worried that Prime Minister Tsipras isn't going to be it, either.  Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of waiting.  Things have been a bit boring around here lately, so a good apocalypse could be kind of entertaining.  The Book of Revelation, which I've read in its entirety perhaps three or four times, has always seemed to me to be the product of a bad acid trip, and the events described therein certainly would be more fun than the boring litany of corrupt politicians and know-it-all talking heads who seem to make up most of the news, lately.

So I say: bring it on, Prime Minister Tsipras.  Let's see your guns, dude.  We've been disappointed about a thousand times already; don't make me add your name to the above list.

A case of the blues

This post is brought to you by the color blue.

But not to worry: this is not about the damned dress, about which I have heard enough in the past week to last me several lifetimes.  This is about a different viral story, and one that has even less scientific validity than the whole what-color-is-this-dress thing.

I refer to a claim I've seen multiple times in the last few days that claims that because ancient languages had no word for the color blue, that they were unable to see blue.  Or, more accurately, that "blue" didn't exist in their mental and linguistic framework, so they were unable to see the difference between blue and colors that were nearby on the color wheel (especially green).  This, they say, explains Homer's "wine-dark seas," a metaphor I've always thought was as strange as it was evocative.  Kevin Loria, author of the article in question, writes:

In 1858, a scholar named William Gladstone, who later became the Prime Minister of Great Britain, noticed that this wasn't the only strange color description. Though the poet spends page after page describing the intricate details of clothing, armor, weaponry, facial features, animals, and more, his references to color are strange. Iron and sheep are violet, honey is green. 

So Gladstone decided to count the color references in the book. And while black is mentioned almost 200 times and white around 100, other colors are rare. Red is mentioned fewer than 15 times, and yellow and green fewer than 10. Gladstone started looking at other ancient Greek texts, and noticed the same thing — there was never anything described as "blue." The word didn't even exist. 

It seemed the Greeks lived in murky and muddy world, devoid of color, mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow.

Loria goes on to tell us about the studies of a linguist named Lazarus Geiger, who found that there was also no word for blue in ancient Hebrew, Icelandic, Chinese, and Sanskrit.

The conclusion?  Our ability to see blue is a recent innovation -- and has to do with our having a linguistic category to put it in.  Without a linguistic category, we can't discriminate between blue and other colors.

There are two problems, of increasing severity, with this hypothesis.

The first is that this is a specific case of what is called the Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- that our experience of the world depends on our having a linguistic framework for it, and without that framework, we are unable to conceptualize categories for things.

The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has a difficulty -- which is that it doesn't square with what we know about either physiology or language evolution.  In the case of color discrimination, the fact is that in the absence of a physiological impairment (e.g. colorblindness), most people have similar neural responses to observing colored regions.  There are a small number of people, mostly female, who are tetrachromats -- they have four, instead of three, color-sensing pigments in the retinas of their eyes, and have a much better sense of color discrimination than we trichromats do.  But the physiology would argue that mostly we all experience color the same way.

The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, apropos of color discrimination, fails on a second level, however; Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found, back in the 1960s, that languages have a very predictable order in which they add color words to their lexicon.  It goes like this:

1. All languages contain terms for black and white (or "dark" and "light").
2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange, and/or gray.

This agrees with the way our eyes perceive color, in terms of the peaks of cone sensitivity. It is surmised that the greater the necessity to differentiate between different colors -- for example, in determining the difference between poisonous fruits and edible ones in a rain forest -- the greater the complexity of words for different shades and hues.  In the ancient world, understandably enough, you coined words for things that had survival value, and pretty much ignored everything else.

But what about Loria's claim that many ancient languages didn't have words for blue? This brings us to the second problem with the article -- which is that this is simply an untrue statement.

The ancient Greeks had the word κυανός, which means "dark blue" -- specifically the color of the mineral azurite, which was highly prized for jewelry and statuary.  It's the root of our word "cyan."  And the Greeks weren't the only ones; the Hebrews had the word t'chalet, as in Numbers 15:38:

Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue.

Even today, the tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, is always decorated in blue.  (And it is no coincidence that the Israeli flag is blue and white.)

What about Old Icelandic?  They had the word blár, which meant, you guessed, it, "blue."  It's no new innovation, either; it's used in the 10th century Hrana saga hrings (The Saga Cycle of Hrani), in which we have the line, "Sýndi Hrani, hversu hún hafði rifit af honum klæði, og svo var hann víða blár go marinn," meaning, "Hrani showed that she had torn off his clothes, and he was widely blue and bruised."  (What?  It's an Icelandic saga.  You thought it was going to be about bunnies and rainbows?)

And I don't know any Chinese or Sanskrit, but I'd bet they had words for blue, too.  One of the most prized gemstones in the ancient world was lapis lazuli -- and according to an article posted at the website of the Gemological Institute of America:

Historians believe the link between humans and lapis lazuli stretches back more than 6,500 years. The gem was treasured by the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. They valued it for its vivid, exquisite color, and prized it as much as they prized other blue gems like sapphire and turquoise.

Hard to imagine why our distant ancestors would have done this if they saw blue stones as, in Loria's words, "muddy and murky... mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow."

[image courtesy of photographer Hannes Grobe and the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole premise is false, and it's based on zero biological evidence.  But that hasn't stopped it from being widely circulated, because as we've seen more than once, a curious and entertaining claim gets passed about even if it's entirely baseless.

I'll end here.  I'm feeling rather blue after all of this debunking business, and not gray or metallic at all.  And I suspect I'd feel that way even if I didn't have a word for it.

A recall-the-idiots clause

There should be some kind of provision for removing from office politicians who unequivocally demonstrate that they are morons.

Being in public office is highly demanding, requires thinking on one's feet, and necessitates having a working knowledge of a great many different areas.  So I'm not expecting perfection, here.  Everyone makes missteps, and our leaders are no exception.  They should not be excoriated just for uttering a gaffe here or there.

But sometimes, there are examples of idiocy so egregious that they really should prompt a recall of some kind.  We need to be led by the best minds we have -- and if politicians demonstrate that their IQs are lower than their shoe sizes, they should be shown the door.

Because I'm guessing that some of these people are too stupid to find the door unassisted.

I bring this up because of four -- count 'em, four -- examples of deeply ingrained stupidity in our elected officials just from the past three days.  WARNING: put a pillow on your desk, because I'm guessing there will be multiple headdesks to follow.

Let's start with Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who was asked at a press conference about the link between vaccines and autism.  He responded that he chose not to vaccinate his own children.  "We didn't immunize," he said.  "They're healthy."  Which is analogous to a guy saying, "Seatbelts are unnecessary.  I drive without a seatbelt, and I'm still alive."

Oh, and have I mentioned that Representative Loudermilk is on the House Subcommittee for Science and Technology?

Then we have Idaho Representative Vito Barbieri, who was in a hearing about a bill that involved the use of telemedicine -- using tiny remote devices to give doctors information, such as a little camera that could be swallowed in place of a standard colonoscopy.  Barbieri asked a doctor who was giving testimony in the hearing if the same technique could be used to give doctors information about the fetus during pregnancy.

"Can this same procedure then be done in a pregnancy?" Barbieri asked.  "Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor determine what the situation is?"

The doctor patiently explained that that wouldn't work, because a woman's reproductive system isn't connected to her digestive tract.

"Fascinating," Barbieri replied.  "That makes sense."

Is it just me that finds it appalling that we're allowing men who don't know that a woman's uterus isn't connected to her colon to make decisions regarding women's health?

Even worse is New York Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti, who wants a bill passed blocking the use of GMOs in vaccines.  Here's the language he wants passed:

PROHIBITION ON THE USE OF VACCINES CONTAINING GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS.
1. NO PERSON SHALL BE VACCINATED WITH A VACCINE THAT CONTAINS GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS.
2. “GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISM” SHALL MEAN: (A) AN ORGANISM THAT HAS BEEN ALTERED AT THE MOLECULAR OR CELLULAR LEVEL BY MEANS THAT ARE NOT POSSIBLE UNDER NATURAL CONDITIONS OR PROCESSES, INCLUDING RECOMBINANT DNA AND RNA TECHNIQUES, CELL FUSION, MICROENCAPSULATION, MACROENCAPSULATION, GENE DELETION AND DOUBLING, INTRODUCTION OF A FOREIGN GENE, AND A PROCESS THAT CHANGES THE POSITIONS OF GENES, OTHER THAN A MEANS CONSISTING EXCLUSIVELY OF BREEDING, CONJUGATION, FERMENTATION, HYBRIDIZATION, IN VITRO FERTILIZATION, OR TISSUE CULTURE; AND (B) AN ORGANISM MADE THROUGH SEXUAL OR ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION, OR BOTH, INVOLVING AN ORGANISM DESCRIBED IN PARAGRAPH (A) OF THIS SUBDIVISION, IF POSSESSING ANY OF THE ALTERED MOLECULAR OR CELLULAR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ORGANISM SO DESCRIBED.

There's just one tiny problem with all of this.  The processes he's describing are the ones used to inactivate the viruses and bacteria used in vaccines.  If the bill passed, it would require that vaccines contain unmodified pathogens -- i.e., the strains of the microorganisms that cause disease.

Can't you hear what the doctors would have to tell parents?  "Just to let you know, Mrs. Fernwinkle.  One of the side effects of this tetanus vaccine is that your son will get lockjaw and die, because I'm injecting him with the tetanus bacteria itself."

But no one is a better candidate for the "You Are Too Stupid To Govern" award than Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is the chair of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, and who this week brought a snowball into the Senate and threw it on the floor.  "In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, 'You know what this is?'  It's a snowball, from outside here.  So it's very, very cold out.  Very unseasonable."

Which makes me want to scream, "There is a difference between weather and climate, you illiterate moron!"  "It just snowed" is not an argument against climate change, just as "I have lots of money" is not an argument against world poverty.  And ironically, the same day as Inhofe did his idiotic demonstration, scientists at Berkeley National Laboratory in California announced that they had data directly correlating carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere with the trapping of thermal energy -- something that has been demonstrated many times in the lab, but never under ordinary conditions out in the environment.  The data -- which has been collected over a period of ten years from two widely-separated sites -- agrees exactly with climate-change models that nitwits like Inhofe think have been manufactured by evil scientists for their own personal gain.

So I really think we need to have an option for recall.  An "I'm sorry, we have to hold a revote, because we accidentally elected a blithering idiot to public office" clause.

I mean, seriously: do we want these people in charge of making decisions about our future?

Now, I have to go.  I've got an ice pack and some aspirin waiting for me.  My forehead hurts.

Civil disobedience as a moral imperative

Let me just say at the outset that I'm a law-abiding sort.  With the exception of getting pulled over twice for driving too fast, I've never had a single unpleasant run-in with the cops.  And both times I got caught speeding, I was able to argue my way out of a ticket.

While I'd like to think that my history of clean living is because I have a respect for authority and the rule of law, some of it is due to the simple fact that I hate complications and conflict.  If I come up to a stop sign in broad daylight, and it's clear that no oncoming car on either side is within a quarter-mile of the intersection, I'd rather stop, look both ways, and then go rather than run the stop sign and risk having a third opportunity to explain my actions to a cop.

But my question of the day is: are there times when deliberately, knowingly breaking the law is the right thing to do?

I'm talking, of course, about civil disobedience.  And in my opinion, sometimes putting your own legal record, safety, or (perhaps) life at risk to make a higher point is not only the right thing, it comes close to a moral imperative.

A 2010 sit-in in Budapest protesting forced evictions of the poor [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole idea of breaking the law to bring attention to a greater wrong has been much on my mind lately, for two entirely different causes, both of which will be immediately evident to regular readers of this blog.  The first one is the "opt-out" possibility for standardized testing, which is coming to a head in a lot of states, most recently New Mexico -- where state education officials are using combative language to make the point that exempting students from standardized tests is illegal, and districts that do not compel all children to sit for mandated exams risk losing their funding.  A number of districts are rebelling, some even providing pre-printed forms to parents to sign that exempt their children from the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) exams.

And none did it with such panache as the Las Cruces School District, where the forms were printed with the statements, "Federal and state laws require all students to participate in state accountability assessments," and "These laws do not offer an exemption or right of refusal to test."  One has to wonder how close they were to adding, "But this form allows parents to exempt their kids anyway," and "You can kiss the Las Cruces School District's rosy-red ass, policy wonks."

The other area in my life in which civil disobedience is making some demands is in our area's attempts to block the storage of LPG (liquified petroleum gas) in unstable salt caverns beneath Seneca Lake.  Over 200 people, including my wife, have been arrested and charged with trespassing for blockading the gates of the facility, and I'm likely to be in the next round.  (Apparently they're not marching the protesters off in handcuffs, which I find kind of disappointing.  Such a missed opportunity for a photo-op.  But if someone can get a photograph of me being arrested, when it happens, I'll certainly find a way to post it here.)

Of course, what I'm talking about here is mild compared to the penalties you can incur in other countries.  Protesting against repressive governments in other countries can get you jailed and/or tortured, being that that's what repressive governments do.  Deliberately breaking the law to make a point reaches its pinnacle of risk in places like Saudi Arabia, where last week a young man was sentenced to death by public beheading for tearing up a qu'ran, hitting it with a shoe, and uttering curses against the prophet Muhammad.  Apparently the man is an atheist -- or, as they call them in that part of the world, an "apostate" -- and he was demonstrating his contempt for religion in general, and Islam in particular, by his actions.

And Saudi law being what it is, in a few weeks he'll almost certainly find himself kneeling in the city square of his home town of Hafr al-Batin, and his head will be severed with a sword.

Which brings up the question of when a cause is important enough to risk your own life.  Or, to put it another way, when is something legal, and at the same time so ethically wrong, that putting yourself in harm's way is the right thing to do?

Not easy questions to answer.  Human morality being the shaky thing it sometimes is, it's easy to conceive of someone breaking the law for his/her own selfish ends, and then justifying it by calling it civil disobedience.  It's also true that one person's civil disobedience is another person's immorality -- as in the parents who are putting other children at risk of disease by their insistence on their right not to vaccinate their own kids.

These are difficult things to sort out.  The best choice is to do a lot of soul-searching before you embark on such a course of action, not only to be certain you understand the risk, but to make sure that you're not engaging in equivocation to rationalize away something that you really shouldn't have done in the first place.  As we discuss at length in my Critical Thinking classes, morality is a deeply personal thing, and unfortunately the words "moral," "ethical," and "legal" don't always line up the way we might hope.  I'll end with a quote from that exemplar of the willingness to put one's life at risk for a higher cause, Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, in Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.  I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.  You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws.  This is certainly a legitimate concern.  Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws.  One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?"  The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."