Moral sleight of hand

Magicians excel at misdirection and sleight of hand.  They can seemingly do the impossible, when in fact their shtick is simply a combination of manual dexterity and the ability to get you to look somewhere else besides the place where the actual trickery is happening.  No criticism intended; to be an excellent magician takes years of practice.  But the whole thing boils down to drawing your attention away from where you should be looking.

There are a lot of religious leaders who excel at the same thing.

We're seeing it in bucket loads at the moment, due to the Ashley Madison hack, wherein a site dedicated to finding married people partners to cheat with was broken into, and thousands of names and addresses made public.  The ones who hit the news were, of course, the public figures, but the hypocrisy factor made the religious ones stand out even more.  To no one's particular surprise, alleged pedophile and general lowlife Josh Duggar had an Ashley Madison account, and he and his family are now scrambling to do damage control despite his having a reputation by this point that is probably past salvaging.  

But no sidestepping was quite as comical as the dance done by British Islamist leader Hamza Tzortzis, whose name was also released in the leak.  Confronted by his having a paid subscription to the infidelity site despite his constantly preaching about the evils of sexual immorality, Tzortzis had what may be the weakest defense I've ever seen.

Tzortzis was lambasted by a follower on his Facebook page who wrote, "So Hamza, you are claiming that some guy knew all of your private information and wanted to screw with you so he created a fake account on Ashley Madison.  This guy then paid hundreds of dollars to maintain the account for 9 months.  This account was then used to make transactions at locations where you were also present at the time.  Then the ultimate plan was to hack the Ashley Madison database and release 40 million users so you could be exposed.  Am I getting this right?"

And Tzortzis replied, in toto, "You’re an idiot. Read the post before you write.  The amount was 15 pounds a month, not hundreds."

So okay, maybe not all of 'em are skilled at misdirection.

But not all of the sleight of hand has to do with infidelity.  Recently Mehmet Görmez, the head of the Diyanet (the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs), called on Islamic religious authorities throughout the Middle East to unite to fight ISIS.

Such a move, of course, would be deeply controversial in a region where sect loyalty and arguments about the interpretation of religious texts routinely lead to violence.  So in response to Görmez's statement, Bilal Yorulmaz, professor of religion at Marmara University, said that what the Islamic world really needs to be worried about is...

... the Jedi.

"Jediism … is spreading today in Christian societies," Yorulmaz said.  "Around 70,000 people in Australia and 390,000 people in England currently define themselves as Jedis."

He then went on to describe how Hollywood is the real problem, presumably because the movie industry so frequently blows up priceless archeological sites and beheads researchers who are trying to protect them.

Okay, I know confronting your personal failings isn't easy, and it must be even more devastating to own up to the evils committed in the name of your deeply-held ideology.  But setting up straw men as a way of deflecting blame only makes your own culpability in things that much clearer.

You have to wonder, however, how long people will go on defending a position that is, at its basis, indefensible.  Are they hoping that sooner or later, the short attention span of their followers will kick in, and all will be forgiven and/or forgotten?  Hell, it worked for Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard --  both of whom were caught in ongoing infidelity despite their continual harping on sexual purity.  Haggard, in fact, was not only caught cheating, but caught cheating with a male prostitute.  And both are now back to preaching the gospel to standing-room-only crowds, and making money hand over fist doing it.

Funny what time and pious misdirection can do.

I've always felt that honesty and integrity were about the most important character traits out there, so the whole thing is pretty repulsive.  To be able to stand up in front of a crowd and make utterances that are deliberately designed to steer people away from your own failings, indiscretions, and immorality is as dishonest as simply lying about it.

The sad thing is that for some reason, it works.  Just like with stage magic, people get fooled, again and again.  But far from entertaining, this sleight of hand just leaves me feeling a little sick.

A matter of truth

I'm willing to believe that I take stuff too seriously sometimes.  "Lighten up" is a comment I've heard since I was about six years old, as is "You're a bit tightly wound."

So let's just take it as a given that my annoyance at the latest Facebook spam fad might be an overreaction, okay?

Anyone who participates in social media has probably already figured out that I'm talking about the "What Does My Name Mean?" site.  I enter my name, and I'm told that "Gordon" comes from the Greek words "Gor" meaning "invincible" and "Don" meaning "god."

The problem is, every single one of them is wrong.  Made up, fabricated, untrue, and whatever words you can think of to that effect up to and including "liar, liar, pants on fire."  I know this because I'm a linguistics geek, remember?  Gordon is from Gaelic, not Greek, and it doesn't mean "invincible god," it means "hill dweller."

Which is not nearly as glamorous as "invincible god," but considerably more accurate, given that the Scottish side of my family were peasants.

And it's not just my name that is incorrect.  All of them are this way.  You keep being told that your name means "glorious prince" even if you enter your name as "Bullshit" or "Buttface" or "Fuckoff."

The whole thing is clickbait, an attempt (and apparently a successful one) to get millions of people to click on a link.

So what's the harm?  As a friend of mine said, "It's just a party game.  Ignore it."  Which I could, except for two things.

One is that such clickbait sites are sometimes linked to malware and viruses.  Some computer-savvy folks have determined that this one probably isn't, but a good many of them are, including the ubiquitous "99% of people can't come up with a man's name beginning with E.  Can you?" links.  At best, these sites are equipped to do data harvesting; at worst, you could come away with a computer virus.  So showing a little caution about what you click and share is a good idea.

The other thing, though, is more philosophical.  Dammit, truth matters.  We're encouraged all the time by this culture to fool ourselves, to (on the one hand) take personality tests that show that we're Special and Gifted and Misunderstood, and (on the other) that we've got personal and physical defects that can be remedied if you'll just buy this product that is On Sale For A Limited Time Only.  We're constantly bombarded by exaggerations, fibs, and outright lies, often motivated by someone's desire for your attention, loyalty, or money.

Or all three.

You should care if you're being lied to, even if it's about something insignificant.  Why is it fun to be told that your name means "Beautiful Queen" if it doesn't?

It's all too easy to get lulled into a place where comfort matters more than truth.  What else keeps the multi-million-dollar industry of astrologers and psychics in business?  The desire for warm and fuzzy messages from the Other Realms, in the face of the hard truth that such practices are pseudoscience and their practitioners charlatans, is what keeps their victims coming back for more.

So okay.  I know this one is apparently harmless.  I can accept that because I'm a linguist, and a little too tightly wound, the whole thing is grinding my gears way more than it reasonably should.

But it still seems to me that we need to put more value on the truth, even in small matters.  As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it: “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.  One word of truth outweighs the world.”

The voices of the dead

This week I ran into a couple of claims of a type I'd never heard of before -- and considering how long I've been in the game of analyzing the world of woo-woo, that came as kind of a surprise, especially when I found out that this sort of thing has apparently been going on for a while.

Turns out that there are people out there who say not only that they can contact the spirits of the dead,  but that they are acting as the ghost's locum.  In other words, they are guided by the not-quite-departed spirit to perform acts that the spirit itself would have done, if only it still had a body with which to do so.

Which becomes even more extraordinary when you find out that the ghosts are those of people like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Victor Hugo.

If you're thinking, "Wait... so that means...  No, they can't really be saying that" -- yes, that's exactly what they're saying.  These "mediums" write novels, create art, write music, and then claim that the works came from the minds of the Great Masters, who were just hanging around looking for someone through which to channel talents frustrated by the inconvenience of being dead.

First we have Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who in the 1970s catapulted to fame by going public with the story that she had written music -- or more accurately, written down music -- that had been dictated to her by Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some people have been impressed with her work to the extent that it was actually performed and recorded in a collection called A Musical Séance.  Pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was less effusive. "If the newfound compositions are genuine," he said, "they would best have been left on the shelf."

Brown died in 2001, still claiming that the pieces she wrote were actually compositions of long-dead composers.  She even described them; Debussy was a "hippie type" who "wore very bizarre clothes," Beethoven no longer had "that crabby look" because he'd regained his hearing, and Schubert tried to sing compositions to her but "he doesn't have a very good voice."

Skeptics, of course, point out that none of Brown's music goes much beyond the simpler and less technical compositions the composers created when they were alive, which is odd, especially since some of them had had hundreds of years to come up with new pieces.  But she's still considered by true believers to be one of the best pieces of spirit survival out there.

Then we've got Brazilian artist Valdelice Da Silva Dias Salum, who makes a similar claim, but about painting -- that when her hand holds the brush, she's being guided by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Monet, and Van Gogh.  She actually signs her paintings not with her own name, but with the name of the artist who (she says) was doing the actual work.

"I grew up poor and illiterate," Salum told Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, the reporter for NPR who wrote the story.  "I didn't even know who these painters were.  I had no artistic talent.  But the spirits selected me."

Garcia-Navarro included in her story a drawing of a girl that Salum signed "Renoir."  To my admittedly untrained eye, it looks a bit like the attempts high school art students make to copy the style of the grand masters; there's nothing about it that has that luminous beauty that distinguishes a genuine Renoir.

But what do I know?  Apparently when Garcia-Navarro was researching for her story, she also found a writer named Divaldo Franco who is apparently producing new works by Victor Hugo, and another named Sandra Guedes Marques Carneiro, who has sold over 250,000 copies of romances she says are dictated to her from the spirit world by love-starved dead people.

No wonder they need to get their frustrations out.  When Rosemary Brown was on Johnny Carson, she apparently revealed that according to her sources, there was no sex in heaven, which is pretty damned disappointing.

Not that I'd probably be heading there even in the best-case scenario.

My general feeling about all of this is that as evidence for life after death goes, it's pretty thin.  Once again, we have the spirits of the dead communicating to the living things that don't really reveal to us much we didn't already know.  I find Rosemary Brown the most interesting of the lot -- I have to admit that some of her compositions aren't bad.  But there's nothing about them that jumps out at me and says, "Oh, this is definitely J. S. Bach at work."

The upshot is, as a writer, I'm going to continue to work on getting everything I can written while I'm alive.  It'd be nice if after I'm dead I could continue to dream up stories and upload them to the literal Cloud.  But I'm not counting on that opportunity.

So if you'd like to read something I've written (other than Skeptophilia, obviously), there's a selection at the right to choose from, and my next novel, Lock & Key, is scheduled to be on bookshelves in November.  Because once I've gone to my eternal reward (or just deserts, as the case may be), my general impression is that will be that.

Paranoia bombshell

The Question of the Day is:  At what point does a prominent figure go so completely off the rails that people stop believing him?  Or is there no lower threshold for credibility?

Interestingly enough, I'm not talking about Alex Jones, or even Rush Limbaugh, here.  Today's contribution to the Annals of What-the-Fuck comes from Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger," owner of Natural News.

Adams has made his name touting dubious nutrition tips and scaring the absolute shit out of people over the dangers of vaccines, but now has ventured into conspiracy paranoia of every type.  And yes, I know that some of the stuff on Natural News exists purely as clickbait, to push up the site's rankings in search engines, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that Adams himself thinks what he's saying is true.

Consider, for example, his take on the horrific explosions that happened last week in Tianjin, China.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Most people believe that the blasts were caused by poorly-stored volatile chemicals, an explanation that gains credence when you realize that Tianjin is a major industrial seaport, and Chinese safety standards are lax at best.  This is not to downplay the magnitude of the disaster; over a hundred people are known dead, and the chain reaction of explosions devastated a huge area in the city.  According to a BBC article on the explosions,

Before the explosions, several firefighters were already at the scene trying to control a blaze.  There have been suggestions that water sprayed on some of the chemicals could have led to the blasts.   Calcium carbide, known to be at the site, reacts with water to create the highly explosive acetylene. 

Chemical experts suggest an acetylene blast could then have detonated the other chemicals for a much larger blast. 

The China Earthquake Networks Centre said the initial explosion, in a city with a population of around 15 million, had a power equivalent to three tonnes of TNT detonating, while the second was the equivalent of 21 tonnes. 

The second was so big that satellites orbiting Earth picked it up as well.

But such measured, thoughtful reporting isn't good enough for people like Adams.

Nope.  He has to claim that the Tianjin explosions were carried out by American "space weapons," and that China and the United States are "already at war," because of China's devaluation of the yuan:

Chinese dissidents have told Natural News they have reason to believe the attack on Tianjin is a warning shot from the United States, which is terrified that China is on the verge of announcing its own gold-backed currency while declaring a fire sale on U.S. debt holdings. 

The actions would collapse the U.S. dollar and destroy the U.S. economy, sending the United States into economic freefall. The "Rod of God" weapon deployment by the U.S. Pentagon, we're told, was America's "shot across the bow" to send a powerful warning message to China while disguising the attack as a domestic chemical explosion.

What evidence does he have?  Apparently people saw helicopters in the air immediately before the blast occurred.  Also, the Chinese government is controlling the movement of tourists, requiring them to register their passport numbers and hotel accommodations with officials.  (Didn't they already?)

'nuff said.  The only possible explanation is that the United States is blowing up Chinese seaports using space weapons.  Because that's credible.

What's next?  Claiming that there's a ground war being fought entirely between groups of crisis actors?  After all, why wage an actual war when you can just trick all the sheeple with footage of fake battles and false flags?

Okay, maybe Adams really is pulling our legs, here.  Maybe he's entirely in it for the ad revenue, and is making shit up, Weekly World News-style, just to keep us coming back.  But if you read what he writes, he sounds as if he's entirely serious.

Which brings up the troubling question of how many of his readers believe all of this stuff.  Are there really that many folks out there who think that everything in the mainstream news is false?  Because the way Natural News links get passed around on social media can't just be explained by the "Hey, you'll never guess what Mike Adams is claiming today!" phenomenon.

I dunno.  I find the whole thing troubling.  Not that it's impossible that Adams himself is paranoid; paranoia is, unfortunately, an all too real manifestation of some psychiatric disorders.  But the fact that enough readers exist to keep Natural News in business scares the hell out of me.

Because if that many people actually believe that the United States is blowing up Chinese cities with ray guns from space, I'm ready to concede defeat on the skepticism and move on to writing fiction full time.  After all, if it works for Mike Adams, it can work for me.

We're in for a spell of weather...

Why is it that some people will believe anyone's pronouncements on anything, as long as said person is not a scientist?

I and others have ranted repeatedly about a large slice the public's dismissal of climate science and evolutionary biology.  And the anti-science stance of each of those, I know, comes from a different source; the petroleum lobby's power over the political system in the first place, and religion in the second.  But this general distrust of anything scientific runs deeper than that, touching on topics where there is no obvious motive for disbelief, where people for some reason will accept folksy tale-telling over evidence-based, data-driven research.

And that makes no sense to me at all.

As an example of this, let's consider The Old Farmer's Almanac, which just came out with its predictions for the winter last week.  And based on their methodology, which as far as I can tell involves voodoo and rain dances, we're going to have a wicked snowy winter.

"The snowiest periods in the Pacific Northwest will be in mid-December, early to mid-January and mid- to late February," the Almanac says, which at least has a better chance of being correct than their predicting a blizzard in, say, July.

But the fact is, no scientist takes what the Almanac has to say seriously, because their weather forecasting isn't science. According to an article in Consumer Reports, the Almanac bases its predictions on "a secret mathematical formula using the position of the planets, tidal action of the moon and sunspots" that is kept in a black tin box in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Because that's gonna be reliable.

And how accurate is it, anyway?  Skeptical blogger Steven Novella found one place where someone actually tested the Almanac's predictions, and guess what happened?

In the October 1981 issue of Weatherwise, pages 212-215, John E. Walsh and David Allen performed a check on the accuracy of 60 monthly forecasts of temperature and precipitation from The Old Farmer’s Almanac at 32 stations in the U.S.  They found that 50.7 percent of the monthly temperature forecasts and 51.9 percent of the precipitation forecasts verified with the correct sign.  These may be compared with the 50 percent success rate expected by chance.

This is my "shocked face."

But what pissed me off the most about this year's predictions was an article from KOMO News Online called, "Who to Believe?  Snowy Farmer's Almanac?  Or NOAA's Warm El-Niñoey Blob?" written by, of all people, a trained meteorologist who therefore should know better.  And while author Seth Sistek concludes that we should probably trust NOAA, which has forecasted a warmer-than-average winter for the northern United States because of a blob of anomalously warm seawater parked off the Pacific Coast of North America, even the fact that he asks the question gives unwarranted legitimacy to what honestly is a bunch of hocus-pocus.

[image courtesy of NOAA]

"[I]n the battle between Blob and book," Sistek writes, "I'd have to lean toward the Blob in agreeing with the supercomputers that it'll be a warmer winter."

Which, as endorsements go, is not exactly knocking my socks off.  What's next?  Asking the astrologers to draw up zodiac charts to predict solar flares?

Okay, I'm coming off as pretty harsh toward The Old Farmer's Almanac, I realize.  But the problem is, there's already a tendency in this country for people to buy pseudoscience over science, to distrust researchers, to look at scientists as ivory-tower nerds who are disconnected with practical reality.  We definitely don't need anything to push us further in that direction, even if it is "all in fun." To quote Novella again:

I hear many people quoting one almanac or the other about what kind of winter we are in for. They don’t seem to realize that the almanacs are using 200 year old pseudoscientific methods that have never been validated.  Despite the coy marketing of these predictions, many people take them as legitimate... 

It seems that the public did not want the scientific information – they wanted the predictions made by mysterious methods.  I can understand, for marketing reasons, why future editors of the almanac would not consider dropping the predictions.  But here is a recommendation – why not get rid of the two century old dubious methods and replace them with the climate forecasts made by the National Weather Service?

Because, apparently, folksy prognostications still carry more weight than actual science with a large sector of the American public.

Look, I know that meteorology as a science still has a long way to go.  Weather and climate are vastly complex systems, extremely sensitive to initial conditions, and long-range forecasting is still fraught with inaccuracies.  Even the most highly-trained meteorologists, using the latest computer models and our best understanding of how the science works, still get it wrong sometimes.

But damn it all, it's still better than magic formulas in black tin boxes in Dublin, New Hampshire.

A ban on questioning

When I was sixteen years old, I signed up for a class called Modern American Literature.  I wasn't much of a reader -- English and History tended to be my worst subjects by a large margin -- but the class seemed better at least than slogs like Shakespeare and Nineteenth Century Poetry.

The teacher was a young woman named Ms. Beverly Authement, and her enthusiasm was infectious even for a mediocre student like myself.  So when it came time for us to choose books to read, I went through the list with at least a slightly better than average attitude.

The problem is, I hadn't heard of almost any of the books on the list, and wasn't sufficiently motivated to ask for suggestions, so I picked one more or less at random.  My choice was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

And my mind hasn't been the same since.

The story is the tale of a 17th century Peruvian priest, Brother Juniper, who is trying to make sense of the deaths of six villagers in a bridge collapse.  Why would God do such a thing?  What linked the six?  There had to be a reason, after all, that he selected these six to die, and no others.  So Brother Juniper delves into their histories, finds out what circumstances led to their being on the bridge the moment it broke apart and plunged them to their deaths.

And in the end, he concludes that either there is no reason for such things, or the reason is so subtle that it is beyond the human mind to discern it.  And in the devastating last pages, Brother Juniper is found guilty of the heretical action of doubting the divine will by the Inquisition and is burned at the stake, along with all of his writings.

Heavy stuff, and not something that you'd usually think of as a page-turner for a sixteen-year-old male.  But I couldn't put it down.  And the questions it opened in my mind took me to a new place in my understanding of the world -- which is what all good books should do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is why the actions of some parents and the response of the administration in Tallahassee, Florida are so completely wrongheaded.

A summer reading list for Lincoln High School included Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a novel told from the point of view of an autistic fifteen-year-old.  It has been lauded as a masterpiece, and in fact was recently turned into a Broadway play.  But the book contains swearing, and represents some adults as struggling with the truth of religion.

So a cadre of parents approached the principal asking that it be removed from the list, and the principal capitulated.

The parents are saying this isn't about censorship.  "I am not interested in having books banned,” said Sue Gee, who spearheaded the effort.  “But to have that language and to take the name of Christ in vain — I don’t go for that. A s a Christian, and as a female, I was offended.  Kids don’t have to be reading that type of thing and that’s why I was asking for an alternative assignment.  I know it’s not realistic to pretend bad words don’t exist, but it is my responsibility as a parent to make sure that my daughter knows what is right or wrong."

She's "not interested in having books banned?"  Then what does she call "removing a book from a reading list because of ideological objections?"

And you know, Ms. Gee, if reading one book that asks some deep questions is enough to shake your daughter's faith, then there wasn't much there to begin with.  It's something that has struck me more than once; the tendency of the religious to represent their god as all-powerful and all-knowing and invincible, but simultaneously to feel like the whole edifice is so vulnerable and weak that it will crumble if a few people ask questions or have different viewpoints.

So what should a parent do if a child brings home a book that brings up some troubling points, or uses inappropriate language?  Discuss it with her.

After she reads it.

Because we're not talking about assigning Portnoy's Complaint to third graders, here.  These are young adults who soon will be off in college or at jobs, and will have to face a great deal more questioning of their own motives, beliefs, and attitudes than could ever come up in a single novel.  Keeping kids in some kind of protected, isolated hothouse out of fear is only going to have the effect of making it an even ruder shock when they run into the real world -- which will happen sooner or later no matter what.

Teenagers should be reading things that make them ask questions, that challenge their assumptions, that leave them changed by the last page.  If these things aren't happening, then reading turns into one of two things -- an echo chamber for what they already believed, or a set of literary drills with no purpose other than to force them to keep their eyes moving across the page.  As I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "It is perfectly acceptable for you to leave this class in June with your beliefs unchanged.  It is not acceptable for you to leave with your beliefs unquestioned."

But such an attitude is intensely frightening to people like Gee, who apparently consider any exposure their children have to different worldviews a threat.  Worse still is the fact that the principal, Allen Burch, caved in and removed the book from the list rather than fighting the demagogues who made the demands.

And in the end -- as usual -- the students lose.  Because these sorts of acts are completely antithetical to education, a word whose etymology is from the Latin verb educare, meaning "to draw out of."  We often forget that, don't we?  Education isn't about stuffing facts into children's brains; it's about drawing out of them what they're capable of becoming.

Or as Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka put it, "Education should be a grenade we detonate beneath stagnant ways of thinking."

Overshooting towards catastrophe

Last Thursday we hit a milestone and I didn't even realize it at the time.

It's called Earth Overshoot Day, and it's nothing to celebrate.  It's the point in the year that the human population of the Earth's use of resources outstrips the total resource production for that year.  In other words, it's the point at which we go into deficit spending.

According to environmental scientists, this date has been creeping upwards ever since it was first estimated, back in the 1970s.  This year it was the earliest ever -- August 13.  Even more troubling is when you consider individual countries' overshoot points, and find out that the United States' rate of use passed its capacity for production over a month ago, on July 14.

What bothers me most about this -- besides the obvious fact that such behavior can't continue forever -- is how oblivious to it most people are.  We go on using resources as if they were infinite, wasting vast amounts of materials and energy because of careless practice or outright laziness, and still have an entitled sense that we should be able to keep doing this as long as we want, that throwing the world away after one bite is some kind of god-given right.

A lot of this here in the United States comes, I think, from living in a country that is resource-rich and still has a lot of open space.  For most of our history, we did have a vast amount of material wealth, far more (it seemed) than we could ever spend.  This attitude engendered a wildly reckless attitude that is exemplified by our treatment of the Passenger Pigeon, a bird that used to be the single most common bird species in North America -- yes, more common than starlings, robins, or crows are today.  19th century accounts describe the skies as being darkened for hours as immense flocks of a million or more birds flew over.  Yet within less than fifty years of those awe-inspiring sightings, the Passenger Pigeon was extinct.  The last member of the species, a female nicknamed Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

How could this happen?  Simple: overhunting and habitat loss.  Millions of birds could be trapped from one flock in a single day using a device called a tunnel net.  Professional hunters shot pigeons in quantities that boggle the mind; records show that at one nesting site in Petoskey, Michigan, fifty thousand birds were killed each day for over five months.  Yet it wasn't until the species had dropped below the sinister threshold called the "minimum viable population" that anyone said, "Wait a minute.  This can't continue."

Even considering this, only one of many examples of over-exploitation that resulted in a disaster, we still have the attitude that the Earth has an infinite capacity to support our every whim.  Americans get an average of 41 pounds of junk mail per person per year, 44% of which goes to landfills unopened, at a cost of millions of trees.  Simultaneously, most of us shrug off efforts to promote recycling.  Planned phase-out of incandescent light bulbs -- a device that wastes 95% of the electricity passing through it as heat -- are met with outcries against an "interference with the free market."

We have the right to use everything up, dammit.  Don't get in the way of our conspicuous consumption.  Somehow, the Earth will manage to keep up.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

After all, we can't be expected to change our habits, right?

Of course right.

This attitude of entitlement runs deep in our cultural consciousness.  It's right there in the first chapter of Genesis, isn't it?

God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."  Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.

A pity we don't pay less attention to this mandate, and more to ones like "Love your neighbor as yourself."

At some point, however, this attitude is going to change, or circumstances will change it for us.  As our government has proven over and over, you can't engage in deficit spending without there being a bill to pay at some point.  We can either take the overshoot phenomenon seriously, now -- or we will face some seriously unpleasant consequences eventually.

But for a lot of people, "eventually" isn't sufficient motivation.  It's not enough that simple economic logic dictates that such behavior can't continue; the fact that we're not now in a worldwide disaster makes it easy to ignore the inevitable one that will follow if we don't change our ways.  All too easy to keep going with our comfortable, shop-till-you-drop lifestyle, and figure that when the time comes to pay up, we'll manage somehow.

Which explains not only our own behavior, but our continual election of leaders whose attitude is "Environmental problems?  What environmental problems?"  Which honestly could be better summed up as, "Wow, nasty leak!  I'm sure glad it's not at our end of the boat!"