Fracking, the EPA, and slanted journalism

Popular media make me crazy sometimes.

It's intensely frustrating to see science misrepresented by news outlets, and people unquestioningly accepting that misrepresentation as fact.  Some copy writer with who-knows-what background in actual science is given the task of summarizing scientific research, and then it's headlined with a catchy phrase that not only doesn't reflect the story accurately but simply reiterates whatever political slant that media corporation has.  Readers then take away from that inaccurate summary whatever they got from it -- sometimes only by reading the headline -- and interpret it via whatever biases they came equipped with.

Any wonder why the average American's knowledge of science is so skewed?

Take, for example, the recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency regarding hydrofracking and its effect on drinking water.  Here's a brief excerpt:

From our assessment, we conclude there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources. These mechanisms include water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of wastewater.

We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. This finding could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, but may also be due to other limiting factors. These factors include: insufficient pre- and post-fracturing data on the quality of drinking water resources; the paucity of long-term systematic studies; the presence of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between hydraulic fracturing activities and an impact; and the inaccessibility of some information on hydraulic fracturing activities and potential impacts.

So far, kind of an equivocal finding.  There has been some well contamination... but it doesn't seem to be very frequent... but it does sometimes happen... but there could be several reasons for that including "inaccessibility of information" -- i.e., the natural gas corporations not releasing said information when contamination happens, or maneuvering the people affected into silence via gag orders.

Understandable, of course, that the EPA wants to keep a low profile these days, considering the number of legislators who would like to see it defunded or dismantled completely.  So it's unsurprising that they're taking a "maybe so, maybe not" approach and trying to fly under the radar.

But that, of course, is not how the media spun the report.  The day the report was released, The Washington Times and The New York Post both had articles headlined, "EPA: Fracking Doesn't Harm Drinking Water."  The Times later amended their headline to read "EPA Finds Fracking Poses No Direct Threat to Drinking Water" after enough people wrote in to say, "Did you people even read the report?"  Which is marginally better but still not reflective of the waffling language in the report itself.  Even Newsweek went that way, with an article headlined, "Fracking Doesn't Pollute Drinking Water, EPA Says."

But lest you think that the conservative, pro-fracking media sources were the only ones who gave the report their own unique spin, the liberal, anti-fracking sources were just as quick to jump in and claim that the report proved that fracking was highly dangerous.  Common Dreams, an online progressive news source, ran it as "EPA Report Finds Fracking Water Pollution, Despite Oil and Gas Industry's Refusal to Provide Key Data."  Nation of Change had the story headlined with, "Long-Awaited EPA Study Says Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water," along with the following photograph:

So the conservative outlets told the conservative readers what they wanted to hear, and the liberal outlets told the liberal readers what they wanted to hear, and neither one reflected accurately what the original report said, which was virtually nothing of substance.

Add to that the fact that what little the EPA's report did say was immediately called into question, in one of those examples of weird synchronicity, by the resignation of Mark Nechodom, director of the California Department of Conservation, the day after the report was released -- over allegations that he had looked the other way while natural gas companies disposed of fracking wastewater by injecting it into central California agricultural and drinking water aquifers.

"Nechodom was named this week in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of Kern County farmers who allege that [California Governor Jerry] Brown, the oil and gas division and others conspired with oil companies to allow the illegal injections and to create a more lax regulatory environment for energy firms," an article in The Los Angeles Times said.  "Nechodom's resignation was unexpected, although he had increasingly been called upon by state officials to explain problems in the oil and gas division’s oversight of the oil industry and a parade of embarrassing blunders."

Not only that, a criticism levied against the EPA report itself appeared in EcoWatch, claiming that the writers of the report cherry-picked their data to ignore cases of contamination, including 313 documented cases of well contamination in a six-county region in Pennsylvania.  You have to wonder how much damage there'd have to be before the EPA did consider it "widespread."

So once again, we have government agencies waffling and misrepresenting the data, special interests and slanted media obscuring the real situation, and hardly anyone checking their sources, resulting in everyone pretty much thinking what they thought before.

And, of course, doing nothing about the actual problem.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.  Because what we need is responsible media, giving accurate and comprehensive reporting on issues like this -- not more shallow and skewed blurbs that do nothing but muddy the water (as it were).  And we need readers who are willing to follow the first rule of critical thinking -- check your sources.

And we also need government agencies that are willing to bite the bullet and tell people the truth, come-what-may.

And because none of that is likely, what I need is a couple of ibuprofen and another cup of coffee, because all of this depressing stuff has given me a headache.

Speculation, conjecture, and the Sealand skull

One of my attitudes that I've found is remarkably uncommon in other humans is that I don't have the need to have an opinion about everything.

When I don't have enough evidence, one way or the other, I simply don't know -- and that's that.  I find that this response especially annoys teenagers.  When one of my students asks me something like, "Is there life after death?" and I respond, "There's no definitive evidence, so I don't know," I frequently find that they come back with, "Yes, but what do you think?"  When I tell them that if I have nothing to go on, I don't think anything, I often find that they snort in my general direction and walk away.

It's not only a little mysterious that people feel obliged to form strong opinions about things for which they have no data whatsoever, it's mighty puzzling how they come to those opinions in the first place.  In the case of life after death, I suspect that a lot of it is wishful thinking.  The concept of simply being gone is, I have to admit, pretty disturbing, but I've found that the universe seems to be under no particular obligation to present me with reality that I happen to like.  So I'm sticking with "I don't know."  I'll find out sooner or later either way, and until then, I'm content in my state of ignorance.

So when a kid in my Critical Thinking class found a site about the "Sealand skull," and asked me what I thought about it, I had a similar reaction.  The Sealand skull was allegedly discovered by some workers repairing sewer pipes in a house in 2007, in the town of Olstykke on the Danish island of Sealand.  So without further ado, here is the skull in question:

So you can see why the question of "do you believe this?" would come up.  According to the story, the skull was taken to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and radiocarbon dated to between 1280 and 1200 B.C.E.  The skull is supposed to be larger than a typical human skull, and with the outsized eyes, people said that it must be the skull of an alien.

And that's the sum total of what we have to go on.  A photograph.  No hard evidence at all, since none of the sources mention where the skull currently is, who the scientists are who carbon-dated it, or anything else.  There's a brief mention of some group of oddballs called "The Order of the Light of Pegasus" who had a house in Olstykke and were reputed to be "the guardians of objects... believed to be mysterious," but searches for anything related to said Order all bring you back to websites having to do with the Sealand skull.

The whole thing has the hallmarks of a hoax, but do I know it is?  Nope.  To prove that it's a hoax -- or to prove anything else about it -- you'd need to have access to the skull itself.  It certainly seems to be an Extraordinary Claim, the sort of claim apropos of which Carl Sagan said you needed Extraordinary Evidence.  But we not only don't have extraordinary evidence, we don't even have your regular, garden-variety evidence.  We have no evidence at all.  At the moment all we have is an unsubstantiated story -- i.e., a tall tale.

This, of course, hasn't stopped people from spinning out all sorts of speculation about it, because nothing improves a zero-evidence claim like having zero-evidence conjectures derived from it.  So naturally, someone decided to do a facial reconstruction from the Sealand skull photograph, and came up with this:

So apparently, the original owner of the Sealand skull was Gollum.  Which is, honestly, rather surprising.  Didn't Gollum get fried in the lava pit in Mount Doom in the end, along with His Precious?  Because if so, it's hard to explain how his skull could have ended up in a house foundation in Denmark.

Be that as it may, however my intuition is that the Sealand skull is a fake, I know better than to rely on my gut for any kind of reliable approximation of what's real or not.  So I don't really have any conclusion about this, other than to say that if it is real, it'd be a pretty earthshattering discovery, bringing up the inevitable question of why the scientists who studied it weren't trampling each other to death to be the first people to write a paper on it.

But that, too, hardly constitutes proof of anything.  At the moment, the best we can say is that there's no evidence one way or the other for a claim made by an unknown individual about an alleged scientific study by unnamed scientists about a skull that may or may not exist.

So that's that.  Back to speculating about whether or not there's an afterlife, because even that has more going for it, as scientific support goes.

Message for you, sir!

It's an occupational hazard as a blogger that occasionally you get hate mail.

I was thinking about this because I got not one but two emails yesterday informing me that I'm going to hell.  I suppose that's natural enough, too, given my criticisms of religion, but two in one day did seem a bit much.  The first one was succinct enough -- it was in response to a post from earlier this year, in which I described a guy's claims that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster et al. were signs of the End Times, as hath been prophesied by the scriptures.  Here's what I was told, regarding that post:

Scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, "Where is the promise of His coming?"  For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. (2 Peter 3: 3-4)

To be fair, the person who made the comment is the guy who is made the original claim about El Chupacabra being mentioned in the Book of Revelation, so it's understandable that he'd more or less tell me to fuck off.  But it is the first time in my life that anyone has accused me of walking lustfully.

The second was more detailed, if only marginally more coherent, and was in response to a post I did two years ago about the "Quwave Defender," a device that costs hundreds of dollars and is supposed to protect you from "psychotronic manipulation" by the government.  I know from experience that the conspiracy theorists tend to be even touchier than the religious folks, so when you combine the two you get a mixture that makes nitroglycerin look like KoolAid.  Here's what the commenter told me about my opinions apropos of the Quwave Defender:

If someone such as Mr. Skepticism comes "just happens" to come across a site like Quwave and doesn't bother to research Targeted Individual harassment, etc., obviously the writer is guilty of the crime and spreading disinformation.  Entering the phrase, "targeted individuals in the usa" returns 54 million !!! results.  The overwhelming amount of information that is out there on this atrocity is incomprehensible in light of the fact the Mr. Skepticism and his partners in crime continue to get away with their sinister motives.  Don't worry, Mr. Skepticism, your crime ring will reign free....for a while.  Eventually it will fall like a house of cards, you can count on it. Then you will be homeless, hungy [sic], jobless, friendless, and dying...like all your victims.  Then you get to go to hell and be tortured far more terrifying and obscene than what all of you did to innocent victims in your lifetime.

So she sure told me.  It does cross my mind, however, that saying you get "54 million results" from a Google search is no indicator of whether what you're searching for makes sense.  Just for fun, I did a Google search for "magic alien weasel," and got 618,000 hits, which is considerably smaller than 54 million, but still pretty impressive for something that doesn't, technically, exist.  It also netted the following photograph:

So I was curious, in that game of free-association way that internet searches frequently exhibit, to find out where the photo came from.  Turns out it's from a movie I'd never heard of called The Man from Planet X, a 60s-era B-grade science fiction flick which sounds pretty amazing.  But better yet, the search turned up the photo because it had been used in a blog called A Writer's Universe, which at a glance looks absolutely wonderful -- a blend of science and fiction and musings about the universe, and you should all definitely check it out.

So a piece of hate mail threatening me with hellfire led me to a cool blog that I certainly will be coming back to.  One of those weird silver-lining things.

One of the funny things about blogging, and hate mail, is that I never know which posts are going to generate the most vitriolic responses.  Sometimes I'll post something pretty brutal, and when I hit "Publish" I think, "Man, I'm going to get blasted to smithereens over this one."  And... nothing.  Then I'll post something that seems so gentle and conciliatory that I won't give it a second thought, and...

BAM.

This happened just this week with my piece called "Bias Testing," in which I tried to strike a cautionary note and suggest that we all (myself included) need to keep our biases in mind when we react to a news story.  The news story I used as an illustration had to do with a Muslim woman, Tahera Ahmad, who was allegedly denied an unopened can of soda on an airplane, ostensibly because she was wearing a headscarf.  I even said explicitly that we only had Ahmad's side of the story, and that the airline was investigating the incident, but I was still lambasted repeatedly for being (1) a bleeding-heart left-winger who fell for Ahmad's obviously bogus story only because I suffer from white liberal guilt, and (2) a bigoted America-first racist because I mentioned that I didn't like Islam as an ideology, and therefore am complicit in the humiliation Ahmad experienced.

Well, make up your mind.  You can see as how I can't be both at the same time.  But that'll teach me to try to steer a middle course between two extreme (and, allow me to add, biased) views; you end up hitting the rocks no matter what.

So that's today's visit to the mailbox.  I've grown a thick enough skin after five years of blogging that most of the time, these missives don't cause me any more than a momentary bother, but it's still interesting to see what prompts people to respond.  And at least they're delivered via email.  Because even if it wasn't a Mortal Wound, I'd rather not follow in Fair Concord's footsteps and catch an arrow to the chest.

Stopping the strangler

What do you know about diphtheria?

If you're like most of us, you probably know it's one of those bad childhood diseases pretty much no one gets any more, and that it is the "D" in the DPT shot.  That's about it.

So let me tell you more about diphtheria.  You'll see why in a minute.

According to the Mayo Clinic, diphtheria is a "serious bacterial infection of the mucous membranes of the nose and throat."  The most definitive symptom is a "layer of thick grayish material" across the back of the throat -- in fact, the name of the disease comes from the Greek word διφθέρα, meaning "leather" -- which can completely block the airway and cause the victim to suffocate.

That's not all, however.  The disease can affect the skin, causing deep, painful, silver-dollar-sized ulcers.  Patients run a high fever, with all of the accompanying misery.  The toxin produced by the bacteria can damage the heart, liver, and kidneys, so even with treatment, some sufferers are left with permanent debility.  Prior to vaccination, the epidemics it caused were devastating; repeated outbreaks in the United States in the 1920s caused an average of 14,000 deaths per year, mostly among children under the age of ten.  An epidemic in 1613 in Spain was so dreadful that it was called "El Año de los Garrotillos" -- "the year of strangulations."

Have I made the picture vivid enough?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The reason I bring this up is that a six-year-old child from the city of Olot in Catalonia, Spain is currently in the intensive care unit in a hospital in Barcelona because he contracted diphtheria.  It's the country's first case since 1986, which is why doctors have had to initiate a worldwide search for sufficient quantities of the antitoxin to treat the boy's symptoms.  It wasn't on hand in any hospital in Spain, because no one gets the disease there any more.

Because of the vaccine, remember?

But the child's parents are anti-vaxxers.  They elected not to have their son vaccinated against this completely preventable disease, despite (1) the vaccine's demonstrated effectiveness, safety, and nearly 100% freedom from side effects, (2) the known deadliness of the disease, and (3) Spain's policy of offering free vaccination to anyone.  They preferred to put their child at risk for illness, and potential long-term debility or death, because of their belief in fear mongering and conspiracy theories and discredited studies linking vaccines to autism and autoimmune disease.

I'm a pretty tolerant guy, most of the time.  But I think these parents should be prosecuted for child endangerment.  They are no more responsible parents than the people who watched their 17-year-old son die in agony from appendicitis because they believed in the power of faith healers, and the people who let their sixteen-month-old son die from bacterial meningitis because their religion forbade them to seek conventional medical treatment.

All of these stem from a trust in non-scientific foolishness strong enough to put a child's life in danger.  I fail to see how they differ.

The fact that enough parents have been swayed by the fear talk is why California recently passed a bill to end personal opt-out provisions for vaccinations.  Supporters, such as Senator Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) -- who was a pediatrician before he went into politics -- put it succinctly: "Vaccines are necessary to protect us.  That protection has been eroding.  The science is clear: Vaccines are safe and efficacious."

If you needed further illustration of that, consider the outbreak of measles -- another dangerous, and entirely preventable, disease -- last year that sickened 169 people in eight states between December 2014 and March 2015, and which was traced back to unvaccinated children who had visited Disneyland.

It's a shame when the government has to step in to protect children from their parents' ignorance and superstitiousness, but that's what's needed here.  If you want to put your own life at risk -- fine.  If you'd rather let yourself die of a treatable or preventable disease because you think it's against god's will to go to the hospital, or because you're so fearful of conventional medical treatment that you'd rather the alternative, that's your choice.  I might think you're being ridiculous, but there's no reason to prevent you from making that choice for yourself.

But when you start making dangerous and irresponsible choices for your children, that crosses the line into child endangerment.  At that point, there should be a legal way to step in and stop you from putting the life of an innocent young person at risk.

Swing votes, squirt guns, and prayer

Most of you probably know that the United States Supreme Court is likely to announce a decision on the federal legalization of same-sex marriage some time this month, and that the decision is likely to come down to how one man votes -- Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is in the uncomfortable position of being the "swing voter."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The more liberal-leaning justices -- Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan -- seem likely to vote in favor.  The remaining four more conservative members are likely to vote against.  That means that Kennedy will almost certainly be the one who casts the deciding vote.

And this is why he is currently the target of prayer rallies.

The effort is being organized by "Coach" Dave Daubenmire, who came into the public eye after an ACLU suit to stop him from forcing the players on his high school football team to pray.  Daubenmire and the school district he worked for settled out of court (the school district lost $18,000 in the process), but Daubenmire now spends a lot of time on the lecture circuit telling everyone how he beat the ACLU because of god's power and the power of prayer.

And now Daubenmire, who in his post-coaching days runs a ministry called "Pass the Salt" (further increasing the WTF factor in the whole thing), is organizing a nationwide series of prayer rallies that have as their goal persuading god to persuade Anthony Kennedy to vote no:

We're going to have a solemn assembly of prayer and repentance, asking God, please God, help us rescue marriage.  And we're going to totally focus on Justice Kennedy, we believe he is the swing vote, and we're just going to ask the Lord to forgive us of our sins and turn the heart of Justice Kennedy that he might see the error of his ways and protect marriage. The neat part about it... is that we're asking people from all across America.  Clear out there in California, you can't come to Washington D. C., but could you organize a prayer vigil at the same time we're doing it, noon to three o'clock Eastern Time on June 14?  Could you get the people in your church to come to a prayer rally?  It's not where we're asking the politicians to do something, it's not where we're marching and carrying signs and rebelling, it's where we're saying "Lord, forgive us, how did we ever get in this mess, please, Lord, forgive us."  

Can I paint a picture here, real quickly?  I like to use the illustration of Super Soakers, the little squirt guns that look like big cannons that kids like to play with.  That's they way I see prayer.  Everybody has a Super Soaker.  There a lot of people who are praying, and they're squirting their guns, they're doing all they can, but there's a difference between putting a lot of people out in a field and telling them to shoot away, and bringing them into your living room and putting a dot on the ceiling and saying, "Hey, everybody, point your Super Soaker at the dot on the ceiling."  The end result of that, if we got a hundred people to point their squirt guns at the dot on the ceiling, eventually there'd be a hole in the ceiling.  Concentrated, focused prayer.  That's why we think the Salt and Light Brigade is so important.  They don't have to come, we'd love for people to come, but we realize they can't.  But what if they all gathered in their local churches, or with their prayer groups, or with their families, and we told them who to pray for... We're going to focus all of our power in the same direction rather than just sporadically squirting our guns up in the air.  We're going to focus our guns on the same target, and punch a hole in the heavenlies. 

So far, this all Super Soakers For Jesus business seems to fall into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department, but I do have to wonder how this could possibly work even if you accept Daubenmire's premise that there is a god who somehow likes to micromanage affairs here on Earth.  Daubenmire and his ilk always go on and on about how god knows everything and is all-good and all-powerful and will ultimately make everything work out; so it seems a little odd that anyone who believes that would think that prayer would accomplish anything.  Either your opinion is in line with what god already intended to do (in which case god was going to do it anyway, and your prayers are unnecessary) or it isn't (in which case god has no intent of doing what you say, so your prayers are futile).  Either way, it doesn't accomplish much.

Even C. S. Lewis, whose writing is usually pretty clear-headed and rational -- not that I agree with most of his conclusions -- seemed troubled by all this.  In his essay "Does Prayer Work?", he is up front that you can't change god's mind, but he thinks that petitionary prayer still somehow makes sense:

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men?  For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.  But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries.  Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will.

Which, frankly, strikes me as a little petty.  It's like a parent saying to his child, "I know you're hungry, but I'm not giving you food unless you ask, and you have to ask in exactly the right way."

And it also brings up the problematic situation for Daubenmire if Kennedy votes "yes."  Was god not listening?  Did the devil persuade Kennedy to vote in a more infernal way?  Did the prayers not work for some other reason?  Did they not have enough people praying?  ("You know, if there'd been 1,284,733 people praying, I'd'a had a chat with Justice Kennedy.  But 1,284,732 people just didn't quite do it for me.")

Because if god is so dead-set against same-sex marriage, you'd think he'd find a way to make sure it didn't happen regardless, right?

So the whole thing seems to turn on a philosophical point that doesn't, honestly, make a lot of sense.  It's far from the only thing in this worldview that I can't make sense of, of course.

As I said before, however, there's no real harm in it.  If they want to spend their time trying to change a presumably all-knowing deity's mind, they can knock themselves out.  At least that's less time they'll have to try to convince politicians, who not only can be swayed, but who actually exist.

Bias testing

We're all biased.  It's inevitable.  Even the most clear-headed and rational of us has opinions, judgments, political leanings.  We can't help but jump to conclusions with little evidence, now and again.  I distinctly recall one student who signed up for my intro-to-neuroscience class a while back, whose appearance made me think "Trouble" -- multiple piercings, longish hair, t-shirts for bands whose names alone were barely school-appropriate -- and who turned out to be one of my best, most interested, most intellectually passionate students that year.  (To my credit, I figured out my mistake after one class session with him.)

So we can't escape bias, but the key is to keep the light shining on them.  And I'm going to propose a test that can be applied in just about any situation to determine whether you are coming to a logical, evidence-based conclusion, or whether you're falling for your own unconsidered predilections.

Take, for example, the story that hit the news a couple of days ago about the young Muslim woman who had an unpleasant experience aboard a United Airlines flight.  Tahera Ahmad, director of Interfaith Engagement for Northwestern University, was being served by the flight attendant, and asked for an unopened can of diet soda, and was refused.  She didn't want an opened can, citing reasons of hygiene, but the flight attendant allegedly said, "Sorry, I just can't give you an unopened can, so no Diet Coke for you."

When the man sitting next to her was brought an unopened can of beer later in the flight, Ahmad questioned the flight attendant again regarding why she wasn't allowed to have one.  The flight attendant said, "We are unauthorized to give unopened cans to people because they may use it as a weapon on the plane."

When Ahmad understandably objected to this rather peculiar policy, not to mention its unequal application, a nearby passenger shouted at her, "You Muslim, you need to shut the fuck up -- you know you would use it as a weapon, so shut the fuck up!"

And no one stood up for her.

The experience left Ahmad in tears from humiliation, as most of us would be in her situation.

Tahera Ahmad [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, I don't mean to go into the details of what happened; according to United Airlines, they are now "investigating the situation."  And honestly, at the moment, we have only Ahmad's account of the incident.  But what interests me more is the reaction of people who have written about Ahmad's experience -- because a great many of them have questioned its veracity.

"I find it hard to believe," one woman wrote, "that someone could be treated this way in full view and hearing of dozens of passengers and the flight crew, and no one put a stop to it.  This doesn't have the ring of truth.  It seems more like something she'd make up, one of those invented stories of discrimination that allow her to get undeserved sympathy.  I bet when the airlines investigates, they'll find that none of this happened."

As far as the woman's claim that it's unimaginable that someone wouldn't have intervened on Ahmad's behalf, I hardly need to point out that there have been many documented cases of actual physical violence -- assault or rape -- that have occurred in full view of passersby, none of whom chose to get involved.  But if you read the commenter's objections, and thought, "Yeah, she has a point...", I want you to do a little thought experiment for me.

What if we changed things around?  What if, instead of a young Muslim woman in a headscarf being taunted and humiliated by people who are more than likely white American Christians, it had been a young white American Christian woman on Saudia Airlines, who had asked some innocent question and had been ridiculed and jeered at by a bunch of Muslim men?  Would you have questioned her story then?  Is your outrage the same?

Because if not, you are biased.

We know nothing about Tahera Ahmad except for her gender, occupation, and religion.  The leap to the conclusion that she might have made the whole thing up in a ploy for appearing oppressed was made on the basis of nothing but the above, because we have no other evidence to go on.  And I would argue that it's likely that the sole reason for skepticism was her religion.  (For another vitriolic attack on Ahmad based explicitly on her religion, check out this post at The Conservative Treehouse.)  If you questioned Ahmad's story, and would not have questioned the story of our hypothetical young Christian woman, you are making the judgment that a Muslim is more likely to lie than a Christian -- in effect, making a pronouncement about the ethics of 1.57 billion people, or 23% of the world's population.

Now, I'm not saying that I like Islam as an ideology.  I'm no apologist for religion in general, as regular readers of this blog know all too well.  I don't need to point out that there have been horrific things done by Muslims, in the name of Islam.  What I am saying is that to make an assumption that all billion-and-a-half Muslims in the world are equally kind, ethical, and compassionate, or equally dangerous, violent, and threatening, is patently ridiculous -- and worse, it's lazy thinking.

The same standard applies in politics.  Consider the response by Fox News regarding allegations that former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert had sexual contact with a male student while he was a high school teacher.  Knowing nothing more than what's been released about the case, Fox has already cast Hastert as the victim.

Commentator Brit Hume said on Sunday, "There’s, evidently, a blackmailer, extortionist… and all indications seem to be no charges will be brought against the person who was blackmailing the former speaker."  And if that wasn't enough, Geraldo Rivera spoke up with a similar view, when he tweeted, "Sex misconduct from yrs ago was gross but Speaker Hastert is now a victim who should be given pass in exchange for testimony vs blackmailer."

That's it?  Sex with a minor is "gross, but?"

But let's do the little flip-around again.  Suppose that the allegations of homosexual contact with a minor had been levied against a prominent liberal Democrat.  What do you think Fox News's response would have been?

Makes it clearer, doesn't it?

As I said in the beginning, it's not like we all don't jump to unwarranted conclusions sometimes.  But our willingness to stay there, not to consider the reason for our leap, is troubling.  The world is not a simple place, and people seldom do things for one single, unambiguous reason.  Deciding that a woman claiming discriminatory treatment is lying solely because she's a Muslim, and that Dennis Hastert is an innocent victim of blackmail solely because he's a prominent Republican, is not only biased, it's simplistic foolishness.

And to accept those conclusions without examining them is the epitome of intellectual and ethical laziness.

Royal baloney

Sometimes I wish that if people want to espouse crazy worldviews, they'd jump right in and do it, and not claim that there's a logical argument and evidence that supports it.

I mean, just go for it, okay?  No half-assed looniness, here.  If you believe that the universe was created by a Giant Glow-In-The-Dark Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, then believe it.  Don't try and convince us by claiming that the DNA fingerprint of rabbits matches the spectral lines of the stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.  Because then you've crossed the line from Interesting Woo-Woo to making yourself look ridiculous.

Which is something that someone should explain to Eric Dubay, a blogger whose "About Me" states that he is a 32-year-old American who lives in Thailand, teaches yoga and wing chun part time, and is a full-time exposer of the New World Order.  Because Dubay, who predictably enough thinks that the United States is being run by a cadre of Illuminati, has put together an argument for his views using genealogy.

Dubay says that every American president has royal blood.  34 descend from Charlemagne, and 19 from King Edward III of England.  This can't be a coincidence:

If America declared its Independence from the European monarchies in 1776, how is it possible that every single president has descended from European monarchs?  If presidents are democratically elected as we are told, what are the odds that we would always choose members of British and French royal bloodlines to lead us?

The whole thing is one big conspiracy to keep the aristocracy in power, Dubay says:

Researchers like David Icke, Michael Tsarion, and Fritz Springmeier, along with foundations like the New England Historical Genealogy Society, Burkes [sic] Peerage, the Roman Piso Homepage, and other reliable genealogical sources have documented these royal presidential bloodlines.  Actually, by branching out far enough on the presidential family tree, the dedicated researcher will find that all 44 presidents share kinship, belonging to the same general ancestry, often called the 13th Illuminati bloodline, the Merovingian line, and/or the Windsor-Bush bloodline.

The fact that he goes to David Icke as a source should put you on notice right there.  And he goes on to say that not only have the elected presidents all been cousins, so are the people they ran against.  So we'd have elected members of The Family even had the other candidate won.  As an example, he says that George W. Bush and his opponent, John Kerry, are...

*cue ominous music*

16th cousins.

That was the point where I started laughing.  Because if you're not conversant with all the once-removed lingo of the genealogists, "16th cousins" means that Bush and Kerry share one set of great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.  At an average generation time of 28 years, this means that this set of great-etc. grandparents lived almost 500 years ago.

Let's throw in a few other inconvenient facts.  If all two presidents share is descent from Charlemagne, that pushes back their common ancestry to about 1,200 years ago.  Meaning that Charlemagne and whichever of his various wives and mistresses were involved were the pair's mutual 40-times-great grandparents.

Besides just being ridiculous, which is problematic enough, there's another major flaw in Dubay's argument -- and that is that just about everyone with ancestry in Western Europe is likely to be descended from Charlemagne.  Charlemagne, when he wasn't ruling the Holy Roman Empire, seems to have spent a lot of his time doing one other thing, if you get my drift.  So if you're of western European descent, congratulations -- you have royal blood.

The difficulty is that you're also descended from most of the rest of Europe at the time, including the peasants.  The total population of Europe in the 8th century was about 30 million, give or take; but consider that from a purely mathematical standpoint, if you trace your family tree back that far, doubling at each generation, you would have 2 raised to the 40th power ancestors -- or about 1.1 trillion people.

This means that at that point, you (1) are descended from lots of people multiple times, (2) are probably descended from every single individual who left descendants, and (3) are related to every single person currently alive who has European ancestry.

Including Charlemagne.

Let me put this in a personal way.  I'm a descendant of Charlemagne at least twice, through my descent on my dad's side from the Lyell family (landed Scottish gentry, although they certainly didn't have much money to speak of by the time they got to the United States) and on my mom's side from the de la Tour family (petty French nobility, whose scion kind of blew his reputation by going to Nova Scotia and marrying a Native American).  So is my wife, who not only descends from Charlemagne, but from the aforementioned King Edward III of England (through her descent from the Hylton family, including the "Mad Baron Hylton," about whom I should tell you some time).

So yes... my wife and I are distant cousins.  Maybe one of us should run for president.

I see a resemblance, don't you?  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So sorry, Mr. Dubay, but there's no conspiracy going on here, unless you count the fact that every president thus far has had at least some western European ancestry.  Until we elect a president who is of 100% Chinese descent, we're pretty much stuck with Charlemagne's progeny.

And of course, it still doesn't matter, because anyone of Chinese descent almost certainly has Genghis Khan as an ancestor, because old Genghis proved pretty conclusively that you can make love and war more or less simultaneously.

So that's that.  And now I'm going to go get some breakfast, and figure out how many people my wife would have to bump off in the line of succession before she could become Queen of England.  I wouldn't mind spending the rest of my life as Prince Consort.  Seems like a good gig.