Prediction failure

I'm going to make a radical suggestion, here.

If you make a prediction, and what you are predicting fails to materialize, there is something fundamentally wrong with your model of how things work.

That's the way it goes in science, you know?  Scientists build theories -- models of how a system operates -- then use those theories to generate predictions.  If experimental data proves to be inconsistent with the theory's predictions, then it's time to revise the theory, or else trash it entirely.

It's a pretty elegant system, and not really that hard to understand.  So why is this so antithetical to the way a great many people think?  Because just recently, there are a group of people who have had their predictions fail, over and over, and all it seems to do is make them louder in defending it the next go-round.

Let's start with the whackjobs who thought that the military exercise Jade Helm 15 was a thinly-veiled cover for a end run by the federal government that would result in a takeover of Texas, the declaration of martial law, the widespread confiscation of guns, and the execution of citizens who objected.  The conspiracy wingnuts who believed this went so far as to hold rallies, demand public meetings in which explanations were demanded from military leaders, and send out armed monitors to keep track of what the troops were doing out there in the desert.

And then... and then... none of that stuff happened.  Jade Helm ended on September 14, Texas is still Texas, no martial law has been declared, Americans are as heavily armed as ever, and the government's stockpile of guillotines is still unused.  I wonder if we can get a refund on them?  I bet they kept the styrofoam packaging.

But are any of the militiamen types who were running about thumping their chests in June standing up, red-faced, and saying, "Wow, I guess we were wrong.  What goobers we are."?  Not that I've heard.

Then we have the ever-entertaining Glenn Beck, who has been claiming for years that the End Times are starting.  Every time something awful happens -- which, admittedly, is pretty much every day, global conditions being what they are -- Beck says, "This is it!  We're in for it now!"  And then... the world doesn't end.

Kind of anticlimactic, that.

About a month ago, Beck said the following on his weekly radio show:

What's coming is God saying, right now, to us, 'Please don't, please stand up, please!  Please stand up and choose me.  Please choose me.  If you don't, I can't protect you anymore.  Don't you see what is happening in the world?  Don't you see what's coming your way?  I want to protect you!  If you don't choose me, I can't!  We've made a deal: I'm your God, you're my people; if you reject me as your God and you pick other gods, I can't take you as my people any more.'

"This is not the run of the mill time anymore.  This is not 'it's coming' anymore.  This is it, gang.  This is it.  This is everything I've warned about, everything that I've worried about and I think it's going to happen so damn fast it'll take your breath away.  When it starts to go, you're just going to be 'what?'  Remember when I said at some point evil will just take off its mask and say, 'Raar'? It's going to happen.  Soon.

And what happened was more or less: nothing.  No calamities, no horrific events taking our breath away, and no evil going "Raar."  Just your ordinary stuff that has happened all along.  But does Beck say, "Hmmmm.... maybe I really don't have a direct pipeline to god?"

Of course not.  He just revises his prediction.  "Okay, maybe not soon soon," he basically said, on his show this week.  "But still soon.  You'll see."  Now he's saying the stuff he has been predicting was imminent for the past five years is all gonna happen in 2016.  "I'm terrible at timing," he said, as if that didn't somehow call into question his entire worldview.

Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecies to Baruch (Gustave Doré, 1866) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons

Then we had messianic rabbi Jonathan Cahn, who last year predicted that "the Shemitah" -- a cataclysmic event that will usher in the days of the messiah -- would occur on September 13, and would manifest as a massive stock market crash and resultant economic collapse.  But last Sunday came and went with no cataclysm, which was pointed out to Rabbi Cahn by Pat Robertson on The 700 Club.

Man, it's kind of sad when you're so loony that Pat Robertson calls you out.

Cahn immediately went into backpedal mode:

Nothing has to happen.  You can't put god in a box or he'll get out of it.  The stock market wasn't open on Sunday, so you can't have a crash.  But what's happening with the Shemitah is, there are several templates in the book about how the different ones have come in the past forty or fifty years.  This one has... two of them have had a crash on Elul 29 [the Jewish calendar date that corresponded to September 13], but this one has a different pattern, and that's what this has done.  This is called the pattern of this [sic].  When the Shemitah has happened in the last cycles, what has happened is that in the days before the last day, the stock market, which has been ascending, the Shemitah changes that direction, and it starts to descend.  That has happened in this one as well.  It started in the summer...  It has followed the major pattern.  And this time is called the Shemitah's wake, and sometimes you have the worst crashes occur then, so we'll see what happens.  

Bad things will happen!  Maybe on the date I said, but if not then, they'll happen either before or after that!  Like the stock market going up and then going down!  Because that never happens unless it's ordained by god!

People complain when the weather forecasters get it wrong occasionally.  These bozos, on the other hand, can have a zero batting average, and they continue to get television interviews and have weekly radio shows.

I don't get it.  I mean, I know that the folks who made the predictions themselves are interested in face-saving -- but why don't their followers go, "Whoa.  These people are crazy."?  Instead, every time some new apocalyptic nutjob pops up, spouting prognostications of doom, there are large groups who simply follow along, baaing softly, seeming not to notice that such forecasts have been wrong every single time.

It may be the only undertaking in which a zero success rate doesn't have any effect whatsoever.

Okay, maybe I'm being overly optimistic to expect that people would apply the principles of scientific theories to beliefs that are fundamentally unscientific.  But you'd think that human nature -- which, as far as I've observed, carries with it a dislike for being duped -- would kick in at some point, and the conspiracy theories and apocalyptic prophecies would not gain traction any more.

Never seems to happen, though.  

But it'll happen in 2016!  On February 10!  You'll see!  The whole human race will abandon superstition, and the days of goofy counterfactual beliefs will be over!  Thus sayeth the prophecies!

Cross my heart and hope to die.

The perils of indoctrination

Can I clarify something here?

Learning about something is not the same as learning to believe in it.

As an example, in an introductory political science class, I would undoubtedly study communism.  I might even read Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.  This does not mean that I now have no choice but to become a raving communist, ready to leave behind capitalism and go to North Korea to join in the worship of Dear Leader.  In fact, it could well have the opposite effect; my reading of those books might leave me thinking, "This is all bullshit."

Or I might decide that it sounds right.  It could go either way.  The point is, having been exposed to the communist school of thought means I have the choice of making up my own mind -- provided I have been given enough tools of rational evaluation to decide what makes the best sense.

This is a point that has evidently escaped Fox News commentator Todd Starnes and evangelical pastor Greg Locke, both of whom have gone public in the last couple of days with statements that any inclusion of material about Islam in public school curricula amounts to "indoctrination."  Locke went even further, saying that Christian parents need to see to it that their children completely refuse to participate.

"You need to tell your kids, ‘Take an F for the class,’ Locke said.  "Because I’d rather fail in man’s class and get an A+ in God’s class.  And we need to have some kids that have some character, that stand up.  Because we do not serve the god of the nation is Islam [sic].  We do not serve Allah."

Starnes said parents are up in arms, too. 

"'I am not pleased that my 12-year-old was taught the Islamic conversion prayer,' parent Brandee Porterfield told me," Starnes wrote in an op-ed piece.  "Joy Ellis was a bit fired up, too.  She discovered the Islamic lessons after examining her daughter’s class work.  'I was very angry that my child, my Christian child, was made to profess that Allah was the only God,' she told me."

"Could you imagine the outcry from liberal activists if the students had been forced to write 'Jesus is Lord'?" Starnes went on to say.

Starnes gives the impression that the state standards include Islam only, and ignore Christianity completely, a claim that is outright false -- the curriculum guidelines in Tennessee (the state in question) list nearly equal numbers of concepts from Christianity and Islam, and in fact, the sixth grade standards include zero references to Islam, but the following about Christianity:

[Students will be able to ] describe the origins and central features of Christianity... 

• monotheism 

• the belief in Jesus as the Messiah and God’s Son 

• the concept of resurrection 

• the concept of salvation 

• belief in the Old and New Testaments 

• the lives, teachings and contributions of Jesus and Paul 

• the relationship of early Christians to officials of the Roman Empire 

I wonder what credence these people would give to an Islamic family who complained about the sixth-grade curriculum and claimed it was "Christian indoctrination?"

Locke then followed Starnes into the Unintentional Irony Zone with the following statement:

[Teaching about Islam] is nothing more than absolute brainwashing of religion.  And so, I’m telling our folks, don’t take the test.  Keep your kids home from school...  [T]hey have to learn about Islam and Mohammed and how it all came about and about the Holy Koran and the Five Pillars of Islam and how they pray and when they pray and where they pray and why they pray and about pilgrimages and all of this!  That’s a bunch of bunk, we do not serve the same God.

So not only are Starnes and Locke lying about the facts, what they're saying is untrue on a deeper level.  Learning what the Islamic conversion prayer says is not the same as declaring that it represents the truth.  In a good social studies curriculum, children are taught about a great many political, social, and religious systems, and they grow to see how those institutions have shaped human history.  The point isn't conversion, the point is broadening of the mind.

And really, how likely is it that one unit of a forty minute social studies class in elementary school is going to profoundly alter a child's religious beliefs?  Consider how many students have been exposed to Greek mythology -- Zeus, Hera, Athena, and the rest of the lot -- during their school careers.

How many of these students then went on to spend the rest of their lives sacrificing goats to Apollo in their back yards?

Once again, you have to wonder what they're so afraid of.  Are their children so weak in their beliefs that even learning about Islam is sufficient to make the whole house of cards come crashing down in ruin?  Or do they fear that Islam is, at its heart, more attractive than Christianity?  Or that any opening of the mind provides a gap through which Satan might leap?

Whichever it is, their demands that schoolchildren not be exposed to other cultures and other belief systems comes at a cost.  Deprived of any knowledge of beliefs outside of their own will result in another generation of narrow-minded, paranoid bigots, living in a little circle of their own fearful certainty, not even wanting to admit that any ideas different from their own might be worth knowing.

And that, honestly, might be what Starnes and Locke are really trying to accomplish.

Yes, we have no bananas

Yesterday a student asked me, "Is it true that you can die from eating too many bananas?"

I responded, "You can die from eating too much of anything.  How many bananas are we talking about, here?"

She said, "Seven, is what I've heard."

That sounded pretty unlikely to me, and I said so.  "What about eating seven bananas could be dangerous?"

"You'd die because so much potassium would be toxic," she said. "My brother told me he heard that from a friend."

Sketchier and sketchier.  One of the functions of your kidneys is to keep the levels of sodium and potassium in your blood within an acceptable range, and I couldn't imagine that a few too many pieces of fruit was all it took to overwhelm the system.  So I said I still thought it seemed implausible, but told her I'd look into it.

And lo, it turns out that this claim is making its way around.  In fact, BBC News Online ran a story just a few days ago entitled, "Can Eating More Than Six Bananas at Once Kill You?"  And this once again illustrates the truth of Betteridge's Law, which says that "Any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered by the word no."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The most bizarre part about all of this is that it was stated, right there in the article, that the origin of the urban legend (if I can dignify it even with that name) was British actor and comedian Karl Pilkington, who made the statement in a conversation with fellow comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

"Before when you were talking about bananas," Pilkington said, "I had that fact, about if you eat more than six, it can kill you.  It is a fact.  Potassium levels are dangerously high if you have six bananas...  I saw a bowl of bananas.  There's six bananas there.  You know why there's only six?  Seven would be dangerous."

And for some reason, enough people didn't know he was joking that the whole thing has now gone viral.

Can I remind you once again that Pilkington is a comedian?  I.e. a person who makes a living exaggerating the truth, or simply making shit up, to be funny?

And the BBC News Online is not helping.  Although later in the article they do quote Catherine Collins, a dietician at St. George's Hospital in London, who confirmed that seven bananas isn't going to kill you, there is an unfortunate tendency of people to read only the headline and the first couple of paragraphs of an article and decide that's all they need to know.  And by the fourth paragraph, you're still left thinking that your life is in danger from Toxic Death Bananas.

"It would be impossible to overdose on bananas," Collins said, way down near the end of the article.  "You would probably need around 400 bananas a day to build up the kind of potassium levels that would cause your heart to stop beating."

Well, I'm no dietician, but my general impression if that you eat 400 bananas in a single day, you're going to have way more problems to worry about than potassium toxicity.  And given that she phrased it this way, I'd be willing to bet that even amongst the readers who got this far in the article, there were still some who read Collins's statement and focused only on the words "EAT BANANAS POTASSIUM HEART STOP BEATING" and missed entirely the words "impossible to overdose."

So thanks to an offhand comment from a comedian, we now have another loopy idea to add to the list, joining ones like Daddy Long-Legs Are Deadly Poisonous But Have Weak Fangs, and Don't Throw Rice At Weddings Because Birds Will Eat It And Then Explode.

In short: there is no reason for bananaphobia.  Seven seems excessive, honestly, but if you'd like to pig out and eat the whole bunch, have at it.  And the other takeaway is: don't learn your science from comedians.  They lie sometimes.

Pennsylvania werewolves

Recently, we've looked at such topics as the ascribing of tragic accidents to god's will, the role of social media in spreading misinformation, and the ongoing controversy over Kim Davis's refusal to follow federal law in Rowan County, Kentucky.  But all of this has made it even more imperative that I take a moment to address a much more serious question that I'm sure is at the forefront of everybody's mind:

What's going on with werewolf sightings in Pennsylvania?

The word "werewolf" brings up different associations for different people, and those mental images are usually dependent on their age.  For people in my generation, the usual thought is of the guy in the camp-horror movie An American Werewolf in London:

The creepy realism of this movie -- all in the days before CGI, allow me to add -- made it one of the most memorable scary films of the 1980s.

Younger people, of course, are more likely to think of a different depiction of a werewolf, exemplified by Taylor Lautner in Twilight.  Lautner's acting shows amazing emotional range, running the gamut from "brooding" all the way to "sullen."  He occasionally even manages "morose."  He also bears mention as the only actor in history who is better at finding bogus reasons for taking his shirt off than William Shatner.

Anyhow, you can see that there is a huge variety of mental images that the word "werewolf" evokes.  So let's compare that to some recent sightings of "bipedal wolves" coming from Clearfield and Cambria Counties, in central Pennsylvania, shall we?

According to a report in Phantoms and Monsters, there have been three encounters in the past month with creatures that fall somewhere between American Werewolf and Twilight, placing them squarely in the range of what most of us would consider a werewolf.  The most recent was the most detailed, a report from a 42-year-old woman "of sober mind" who is "not prone to embellishing."  She was out walking her dogs a couple of weeks ago, she says, when the following happened:

I walked the dogs through the park and then decided I wanted to go around the block on the back side of the park.  There is a main road that runs along side of the front of the park and a dirt road that runs along the back side of the park.  The roads meet at a streetlight. I was on the main road and got within about 25 yards of the streetlight and there was a huge figure, about 7 feet tall I estimate.  It was standing just back from the light and I could see just the legs.  They were hair covered and bent backwards like a dog. I could not make out a face or other details as it was standing back...  The first thought I had was "oh shit, that is a big damn dog" and then it dawned on me what I was seeing.  My next thought was "it is a freaking werewolf"!!!  It was rocking side to side like it was waiting for us to get closer.

Her dogs, interestingly, didn't seem to notice the thing, but she yanked on their leashes and hauled ass back home.

Which turns out to be the last sensible thing she did.  Because the next night, she thought the best possible course of action would be to walk her dogs again...

... on the same path.

I got to within 150 feet of where I saw this thing and my chihuahua started growling and all of his hair was standing up.  He started barking and going in circles looking for what ever it was that he sensed. No reaction at all from the pit.  She is feisty and not afraid to fight intruders so that really surprised me.  About the same time the little dog was freaking out there was a HUGE crash in the woods next to us, maybe 10 yards away of so.  This area is very swampy and there are quite a few large bushes and trees.  This crash sounded like a tree falling, but like it fell instantly.  It was lound [sic], fast and instant.  I ran out of there so damn fast.  I did not see anything this time other than my dog freaking out and the large crash.

She then goes on to describe how when she let her dogs out the next morning, they both ran up to a particular spot on the back yard fence, and were acting "very agitated and almost scared," and were "growling, with their hair standing up."  The werewolf, she surmises, followed her home, and is now lurking out there somewhere near her house.

*cue scary music*

All of which brings to mind the fact that I would be a great person to have on your side if there was a real werewolf in the area.  At the first sign of snarling and howling, I'd piss my pants and then have a stroke, giving the werewolf someone to attack who was already incapacitated, and allowing you to escape.

Because I may be a skeptic, but I'm also a great big wuss.

In any case, that's it, evidence-wise, for the Pennsylvania werewolf.  No hair, no tracks, not even a photograph, only a trio of anecdotes.  So as spooky as they admittedly are, I'm not ready to label this one a verified sighting.

On the other hand, if you live in rural central Pennsylvania, you might want to exercise some caution when you're out walking at night.  Safety is the priority, and we don't want anyone getting mauled to death, which seems to be the usual approach werewolves have toward defenseless humans.  Unless it's Taylor Lautner, who would only stare glumly in your general direction, and then take his shirt off.

Which is preferable, but not by much.

Acts of god

On Friday, September 11, an enormous crane collapsed in the Grand Mosque in the city of Mecca, killing 107 people and injuring 87.

The Grand Mosque of Mecca [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The more prosaic amongst us attribute the collapse to the wind from a violent thunderstorm.  Others, however, have called this an "Act of God" in retribution for the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001.

A writer who goes by the handle Dom the Conservative, and bills herself as "a Christian conservative, mother, and wife" whose purpose for writing "is to inform, anger, and unite 'We the People'" had the following to say:

(A) devastating attack of a seemingly supernatural kind has taken place in the Grand Mosque of Mecca, the largest mosque in the world and the same location to which Muslims make their hajj pilgrimage each year...  Whether you believe in God, Allah, or any supernatural force, the symbolism is eerily sinister, especially on the day that true Islam, the Islam of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad, reared its ugly head in West.

The people commenting on her post were not nearly so circumspect.  Unsurprisingly, "God works in mysterious ways" was said more than once.  When a commenter suggested that the victims were innocent people, he was immediately mauled by a string of vitriolic comments like "What do you think the people killed in the WTC were guilty of, asshole?" and "No Muslim is innocent.  They all want to kill us" and "If they hadn't been in their mosque worshiping Satan, they wouldn't have died."

None of which is very surprising, honestly.  The attacks of 9/11 are still raw for most Americans.  I know more than one friend who took a few days' vacation from social media so they wouldn't have to be bombarded by reminders of the horrific events of that day and the days following.

But still.  It appalls me that there are people who honestly think that a divine being would work that way.  Do people really believe that the deity that at other times they call "all-loving" and "the prince of peace" would look down at a group of people, none of whom had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, and say, "Ha!  If I smash a bunch of them, that will teach the rest of 'em a lesson!"

Apparently, the answer is "yes."  But you have to wonder why anyone would think that such a god would be deserving of worship.  If there is justice in the world, it does not come in the form of killing random people to avenge the unjust deaths of a bunch of other random people.

But then I realized; that is exactly how the god of the bible operates.  I recall being vaguely unsettled by this even in my churchgoing days, and actively avoided reading the parts of the bible like the following:

• God killing 14,700 people in a plague, because there was too much complaining about how many people god had killed (Numbers 16:41-49)
• God killing 50,070 people for peeking into the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 6:19)
• God sending two bears to maul 42 children to death for teasing the prophet Elisha about his bald head (2 Kings 2:23-24)
• God sending divine fire to kill 51 men for no particularly obvious reason (2 Kings 1:9-10)
• God killing a man and his wife for not donating enough money to the church (Acts 5:1-11)

And so forth and so on.  And that's not even counting the most famous instances -- the slaughter of the firstborn children in Exodus, and the horrific drowning of nearly every living thing on Earth in Genesis.

To me, a god like this doesn't sound like anything I'd be even slightly inclined to worship, even if I believed he existed, which I don't.  I'm more inclined to agree with Richard Dawkins:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

So it's not to be wondered at that people who take the bible seriously think that the collapse of the crane in Mecca, and resulting deaths of 107 innocent people, is the hand of god at work.  That's precisely how the god of the bible does work.

Funny, isn't it, how many of these same people question atheists' basis for morality, when their own moral code is based on the behavior of a deity who evidently considers such an action just?  But that, of course, is far from the only morally questionable stance you find in this belief system:

I'm not trying to be offensive, here, it just really strikes me as baffling.  I'll leave you with another quote, this one from the Greek philosopher Epicurus: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?  Then he is not omnipotent.  Is he able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? Then why does evil exist?  Is he neither able nor willing?  Then why call him God?"

Quantum frequency box

The latest in a long line of pseudoscience-based diagnostic and treatment devices is making the rounds, which is only notable because of how widely it's being circulated amongst the woo-woo alt-med crowd.  Called "Physiospect," this gadget claims to do just about everything but toast your bread for you.

The sales pitch starts with a bang:

The Physiospect is an NLS biofeedback system, connected to a computer it can diagnose and treat almost every known pathological condition, disease and illnesses, even before there are any physical symptoms.  The Physiospect machine will determine the stress level of all organs and systems, it can select the most appropriate allopathic and/or homeopathic remedies, as well as suitable foods, herbal and nutritional remedies, and can identify emotional and physiological issues.

Which is vaguely amusing in a number of ways, not least because at the bottom of the webpage is the following bolded message:

Physiospect does not provide specific medical advice, and is not engaged in providing medical and professional services.

Now, I may be missing something here, but "determining the stress level of all organs" and selecting remedies for what ails you (even homeopathic ones, so presumably you can figure out which pills with no active ingredients whatsoever would be the most helpful) definitely sounds like "providing specific medical advice."

How does it work, you may  be asking?  Well, they tell you all about it:

It works by sending an infra-red triggering signal of extremely low intensity to the Bio-field around the brain via specially designed headphones.  The principle is based on the fact the every cell tissue and organ has its own unique frequency pattern that varies as it experiences a load or stress.  The healthier the area being investigated the more stable its frequency pattern is.  We can direct the Physiospect to investigate the unique frequency of say the tissue of the right lung, given that the Bio-fields of both brain and lung tissue, (as with all parts of the body) are in constant communication with each other.

Right!  Okay!  What?

One thing I noticed right away was those wonderful words "field" and "frequency," which have rigorously-definied, specific meanings in physics, but seem to be popular with woo-woos who evidently think that you can take scientific vocabulary, define it any damn way you please, and still make sense.

But let's see... there's another word that always seems to appear in these sorts of claims... where is it?... it's got to be here somewhere...

The principles of the Theory of quantum entropy logic give justification to claim that a biological organ with pathology have an unstable (meta stable) state and Physiospect functions according to the principle of amplification of the initiating signal with the disintegration of meta stable systems involved.

Ah, yes.  There it is.  "Quantum."  Nothing in woo-woo alt-med works unless it's "quantum."

This is then followed by what may be the single most incomprehensible bunch of pseudoscientific technobabble I've ever seen:

The Physiospect is a system of electronic oscillators resonating at the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, whose energy is equivalent to the energy breaking down the dominant bonds that maintain the structural organization of the organism under investigation.  The magnetic field of the molecular currents, affected by external fields, lose their initial orientation, which causes misalignment of the spin structures of de localized electrons of admixture center of cortex neurons; that, in turn, gives rise to their unstable meta stable state whose disintegration acts as an amplifier of the signal. Physiospect produce a preset bio electrical activity of brain neurons.  With this it becomes possible to selectively amplify signals hardly detectable in the back ground noise and to isolate and decode the information they contain.

Worse still, we find out that the way the machine fashions a remedy for you is that you place a "carrier" like some water or sugar pills into the "resonance cup" after the machine scans you for problems.  The correct "resonant frequencies" are then downloaded into the "carrier," and you swallow it to fix what ails you.

Oh, and if you don't put any "carrier" into the "resonance cup," no worries!  The machine downloads the treatment directly into your body.

Well, all I can say is, I'm perfectly happy with my quantum meta-stable neurons oscillating at their original delocalized spin orientation, but thanks anyhow.  Especially when you find out that the system costs €11,500 (with an optional upgrade to the "Physiospect 23" for another €2,500).

You might be asking yourself, "What kind of moron would fall for such an obviously bogus spiel?"  I know that's what I asked.  But apparently, these things are showing up all over the place, purchased both by individuals and by practitioners of alternative medicine for use on their clients.  So as mind-boggling as it is, Physiospect is making money hand-over-fist selling these contraptions.

Look, I believe in caveat emptor and "a fool and his money are soon parted," and one of the recurring themes in this blog is that if you staunchly refuse to learn any actual science, you deserve everything you get.  But really.  This is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Rooking poor gullible people of €11,500 --  which, for my fellow Americans, is just shy of $13,000 -- and then sending them a souped-up laser pointer attached to a box with an assemblage of apparently random electronic equipment is just mean.

The whole thing makes me pine for the days when con artists tried to rip you off by claiming to be exiled Nigerian princes.

Moral assault

There is a speech by a public figure that I wonder if you've heard.

I won't present it here in full; but I will give a link to the complete text later, for those of you interested in reading the entire thing.  But here is a bit of it:

There is an effort today to disturb the established order.  Wait a minute.  Listen, I am talking straight to you....  Let me repeat, the Bible says as clearly as language can put it...   

Individually, Christian people... through the years have been able to work together and to understand each other.  But now a world of outside agitation has been started, and people are coming in the name of piety, but it is a false piety, and are endeavoring to disturb God’s established order; and we are having turmoil all over America.  This disturbing movement is not of God.  It is not in line with the Bible.  It is Satanic.  Now, listen and understand this.  Do not let people lead you astray.

These religious liberals are the worst infidels in many ways in the country; and some of them are filling pulpits...  They do not believe the Bible any longer; so it does not do any good to quote it to them.  They have gone over to modernism, and they are leading... people astray at the same time... But every good, substantial, Bible-believing, intelligent, orthodox Christian can read the Word of God and know that what is happening now is not of God...

Whenever you get a situation that rubs out the line that God has drawn... whenever that happens, you are going to have trouble.  That is what is happening today in this country.  All this agitation is... to overthrow the established order of God in this world...  Certain people are disturbing this situation.  They talk about the fact that we are going to have one world.  We will never really have one world until this world heads up in God.  We are not going to have one world by man’s rubbing out the line that God has established.  He is marking the lines, and you cannot rub them out and get away with it.

The established order cannot be overthrown without having trouble.  That is what wrecked Paradise.  God set up the order of Paradise.  He told Adam and Eve how to live and what food to eat and what not to eat.  He drew the lines around that Garden; and when Adam and Eve crossed over the lines of God, thorns grew on roses.  The first baby that was born was a murderer and killed his own brother.  So it has gone down through the ages.  It is man’s rebellion (due to the fall) against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world.

Sound like familiar rhetoric?  Contains a few more words, but basically the same sentiment as Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis's statement on being released from jail the day before yesterday: "I just want to give God the glory.  We serve a living God who knows exactly where each and everyone stands.  Keep pressing, don’t let down because he is here.  He is worthy."

And no one was more voluble about the jailing of Davis being an assault on the established order of god in the world than Mike Huckabee.  In an op-ed piece he wrote for Fox News, Huckabee said:

When I warned that the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage would lead to the criminalization of Christianity in America I was dismissed by many as an alarmist and my comments were mocked by the chattering class.  Now, just two months after the court's lawless ruling, an elected county clerk has been put in jail by an unelected judge for refusing to issue a “marriage" license to a same-sex couple, removing all doubts about criminalization of Christianity in this country. 

Kim's stand for religious liberty is a pivotal moment in our nation's history.  Will we continue to pretend as though the Supreme Court is the "Supreme Branch" with the authority and ability to make laws?  It most certainly is not.  The Supreme Court is one of three co-equal branches of government under our Constitution.  It is no more the "Supreme Branch" than it is the "Supreme Being" with the authority to redefine the laws of nature or of nature's God!

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the parallels between Huckabee's words and the opinions voiced in the speech from which I quoted in the beginning of this post.  God has delineated proper guidelines for behavior; the courts are attempting to force the abandonment of those guidelines; and right-thinking Christian folk are commanded to stand up against the tyranny of a judicial system determined to erase the divine order in the United States of America.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The only problem is, the first speech is one given by evangelical preacher Bob Jones in 1960 after the Supreme Court forced the segregation of public schools in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.  He argued that the separation of races was a moral imperative, straight from the mouth of god via the bible.  The Supreme Court of the day was nicknamed "the nine dictators" and public employees were encouraged to flout the ruling -- resulting in the "Massive Resistance" movement that shut down schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia for nearly two years rather than see them integrated.

See the problem here?  When someone claims to know what god wants, almost always (what a coincidence!) god's will agrees perfectly with the person's own biases and beliefs.  Cherry-picking scripture to back up those biases and beliefs is easy enough; as we've seen over and over, you can find support for damn near anything you want in the bible if you pick and choose, up to and including stoning disobedient children to death.

And each time some bigoted cultural practice is presented as divine utterance, dire predictions are made of what will happen to our society if it's legislated into well-deserved oblivion.  Just yesterday, Glenn Beck said that the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage was going to lead to our abandonment by god:

This is it.  I'm telling you this is the last call.  Within a year, America will be so divided that we literally will not even be able to understand one another.  I am telling you, please, Dear God, listen to me, please.  Please!  We are here.  This is the moment that historians will look back and say, 'They would have survived, but they chose death instead.'  He can no longer be our God.  He has to withdraw...  We're going to feel the full ramifications of what it feels like to choose death.

How is this any different from Bob Jones's claiming that ending segregation was "rebellion... against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world?"  Both are motivated by the narrow-minded, self-righteous bigotry of men and women who believe that the law of god demands the denial of basic human rights -- and both are justified using scripture and the language of hellfire and damnation.

And both, fortunately, are destined to the scrap-heap of history, along with countless other evils that have been put into the mouth of god by pious hypocrites -- slavery, the subjugation of women, anti-semitism, the torture of heretics, the burning of witches.

The target changes each time.

The basic inhumanity of moral assault, however, always remains the same, regardless of how it's justified.