UPDATE: I'm deleting this post. Turns out, I (and millions of others, including the editorial staff of USA Today) were the victims of a hoax. Kim Davis did not receive a book deal -- for which I am, honestly, very grateful.
The origin of the story was The National Report, a satire site. To my credit, if the source had been The National Report, I would have realized it -- TNR is sort of a less clever version of The Onion, and I've seen their stuff before. But such is the way of things that bullshit stories sometimes gain unmerited credence by working their way up the media ladder, and this one duped the people at USA Today and other more reputable media outlets -- and thus, yours truly here at Skeptophilia.
All of which reinforces that we all need to check sources carefully. Thanks to the folks who let me know that I'd fallen prey to Poe's Law.
We'll be back to our regularly scheduled (and, with luck, more reliable) programming tomorrow.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Saturday, September 19, 2015
The cult of personality
The cult of personality is a dangerous thing. Whenever a person's brand becomes more important than what (s)he is claiming, there's the chance that herd mentality will take over -- and you'll follow the leader without question.
Dr. Oz. Oprah. "Food Babe." And, most spectacularly, Deepak Chopra, who regularly publishes something called -- and I am not making this up -- the "Chopra-centered Lifestyle Newsletter," which should win some kind of Narcissistic Title Award. Because I regularly check out the publications and claims of these people -- risking the loss of countless innocent brain cells -- I have more than once seen comments like, "We love you, Dr. Oz!" and "Go Food Babe Army!" appended to articles that would leave any sensible, scientifically-literate person doing repeated facepalms. I'm left with the unsettling impression that these people could claim that you can prevent cancer by eating red onions, and their audience would simply sit there nodding and smiling.
Oh, wait, Dr. Oz did claim exactly that. My bad.
But Chopra is in another league. This guy has made millions writing book after book of quasi-mystical, pseudoscientific bullshit, and he's as popular as ever. His followers have a devotion to him that borders on fanaticism. He still does the lecture circuit to sold-out auditoriums. And this despite the fact that what he says is so vague and fact-free that someone made a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator that produces convincing-sounding Chopra-isms on demand. (Here's the one I got: "The invisible is the womb of visible choices." I feel myself becoming wiser already.)
As an example of the bizarre, fact-free clickbait that Chopra dishes out, consider the recent article on his website called "What is Primordial Sound Meditation?" in which we find out that we each have a personal "mantra or sound" that if we chant it, will bring us "profound peace and expanded awareness."
How do we find out what our personal mantra is? Well, the implication is that such information isn't available to most of us unenlightened slobs, so we have to sign up for "Chopra's Primordial Sound Meditation Workshop" at the "Chopra Center." Once we do, they'll tell us what to chant.
Money first, enlightenment next, that's the motto over at the "Chopra Center."
And it's not just some random noise, they tell us:
And what will happen if you use your magic personal mantra? All sorts of good stuff:
But saying "you'd probably feel better if you did some meditation" is different than making bogus claims about universal vibrations at the moment of your birth creating a Special Sound Just For You, and then telling you that you can only find out what it is if you sign up for an expensive workshop. What Chopra et al. are doing is nothing more than a calculated, callous campaign of using people's ignorance about science, and anxiety over their health, to make money hand over fist.
And it works. Chopra, Oz, Food Babe, and the rest are as popular as ever, despite study after study debunking their wild claims. "Food Babe" was roundly ridiculed a few months ago for her claim that airlines were trying to kill us by pumping "impure air" into airplanes that "was not pure oxygen." Dr. Oz, especially, has come under significant fire, receiving a harsh rebuke last year from the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection for his support of sketchy diet recommendations. And earlier this year, a group of prominent doctors sent a scalding letter to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons demanding that Oz be fired from his faculty position there, citing "an egregious lack of integrity."
But none of that seems to make much of a dent in their popularity. They're still out there, still making ridiculous claims lo unto this very day, still bringing in money hand over fist.
Leading me to the troubling conclusion that however persuasive science is, it will never wield the power that the cult of personality does.
Dr. Oz. Oprah. "Food Babe." And, most spectacularly, Deepak Chopra, who regularly publishes something called -- and I am not making this up -- the "Chopra-centered Lifestyle Newsletter," which should win some kind of Narcissistic Title Award. Because I regularly check out the publications and claims of these people -- risking the loss of countless innocent brain cells -- I have more than once seen comments like, "We love you, Dr. Oz!" and "Go Food Babe Army!" appended to articles that would leave any sensible, scientifically-literate person doing repeated facepalms. I'm left with the unsettling impression that these people could claim that you can prevent cancer by eating red onions, and their audience would simply sit there nodding and smiling.
Oh, wait, Dr. Oz did claim exactly that. My bad.
But Chopra is in another league. This guy has made millions writing book after book of quasi-mystical, pseudoscientific bullshit, and he's as popular as ever. His followers have a devotion to him that borders on fanaticism. He still does the lecture circuit to sold-out auditoriums. And this despite the fact that what he says is so vague and fact-free that someone made a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator that produces convincing-sounding Chopra-isms on demand. (Here's the one I got: "The invisible is the womb of visible choices." I feel myself becoming wiser already.)
[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]
How do we find out what our personal mantra is? Well, the implication is that such information isn't available to most of us unenlightened slobs, so we have to sign up for "Chopra's Primordial Sound Meditation Workshop" at the "Chopra Center." Once we do, they'll tell us what to chant.
Money first, enlightenment next, that's the motto over at the "Chopra Center."
And it's not just some random noise, they tell us:
A mantra is a specific sound or vibration—which when repeated silently—helps you to enter deeper levels of awareness... The mantra you will receive is the vibration the universe was creating at the time and place of your birth, and it is calculated following Vedic mathematic formulas.So what he's done is taken three pieces of mystical nonsense -- astrology, numerology, and New Age woo -- and combined them to make an all-new Bullshit Mélange. We also have one of our favorite words, "vibration," which of course makes it even more scientific. All we need is "quantum" and "frequency" and we'd be all set. (They didn't show up in the article, but I'd be willing to bet you my next month's salary that they're used in the workshop.)
And what will happen if you use your magic personal mantra? All sorts of good stuff:
When you silently repeat your mantra in meditation, it creates a vibration that helps you slip into the space between your thoughts, into the complete silence that is sometimes referred to as "the gap." Your mind is no longer caught up in its noisy internal chatter and is instead exposed to its own deepest nature: pure awareness.Now, don't get me wrong; I'm completely in favor of meditation. It is great for relaxation and reducing stress. And there's no doubt any more that stress is contributory to poor health, so anything you can do in the way of decreasing it is probably going to do you nothing but good.
But saying "you'd probably feel better if you did some meditation" is different than making bogus claims about universal vibrations at the moment of your birth creating a Special Sound Just For You, and then telling you that you can only find out what it is if you sign up for an expensive workshop. What Chopra et al. are doing is nothing more than a calculated, callous campaign of using people's ignorance about science, and anxiety over their health, to make money hand over fist.
And it works. Chopra, Oz, Food Babe, and the rest are as popular as ever, despite study after study debunking their wild claims. "Food Babe" was roundly ridiculed a few months ago for her claim that airlines were trying to kill us by pumping "impure air" into airplanes that "was not pure oxygen." Dr. Oz, especially, has come under significant fire, receiving a harsh rebuke last year from the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection for his support of sketchy diet recommendations. And earlier this year, a group of prominent doctors sent a scalding letter to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons demanding that Oz be fired from his faculty position there, citing "an egregious lack of integrity."
But none of that seems to make much of a dent in their popularity. They're still out there, still making ridiculous claims lo unto this very day, still bringing in money hand over fist.
Leading me to the troubling conclusion that however persuasive science is, it will never wield the power that the cult of personality does.
Friday, September 18, 2015
No science, no vote.
As a nation, we need to stand up and say that we are sick of political candidates who espouse ignorant, anti-science views.
No, let me amend that; we don't need to say it. We need to shout it.
The topic comes up because of the Republican primary debate night before last. All eyes, of course, were on Donald Trump; with the lead he's got, he's going to be hard to beat for the nomination unless he makes a serious misstep.
He made one two nights ago. But the bizarre thing is that damn near no one is talking about it.
I mean, he made a good many other cringe-worthy statements, all delivered with his badda-bing-badda-boom style that for some reason seems to excite people. Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of all was the exchange with Carly Fiorina over his questioning how anyone "could vote for that face," which ended with a verbal right hook from Fiorina and a babbling you're-beautiful-who-loves-ya-baby backpedal response from Trump. But despite his gaffes and handwaving and mugging for the camera, and his zero details, we'll-just-fix-it platform, he pretty much stuck with his political script throughout the whole debate.
Until the topic of vaccines came up, and Trump said he thought that vaccination causes autism.
"People that work for me, just the other day," Trump said, "two years old, two and a half years old, their child, their beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very very sick, now is autistic."
No, I didn't think so.
Then Rand Paul -- did I mention, he's also a doctor? -- was asked to weigh in:
Okay, I know I'm not very political. I'm up-front about that, and have mentioned it more than once in this blog. I have neither the knowledge nor the experience to make statements on most political topics with anything close to authority.
But dammit, we can not continue to have leaders who ignore science. And it doesn't matter why they're doing it -- political expediency, pandering to their voter base, or outright foolishness. There are too many problems we are facing as a nation and a world that can only be approached from a scientific knowledge base to elect someone who is willfully ignorant (or as my dad used to call it, "stupid") regarding such issues as vaccination, climate, and the environment.
Science is a process. It is a way of sifting out fact from fiction, good ideas from bad ones, solid theory from folly and superstition. It is time for voters to treat a baseline knowledge of science, and a respect for scientific research, as a sine qua non for electability.
In which case Trump, Carson, and Paul just catapulted themselves right out of the running.
No, let me amend that; we don't need to say it. We need to shout it.
The topic comes up because of the Republican primary debate night before last. All eyes, of course, were on Donald Trump; with the lead he's got, he's going to be hard to beat for the nomination unless he makes a serious misstep.
He made one two nights ago. But the bizarre thing is that damn near no one is talking about it.
I mean, he made a good many other cringe-worthy statements, all delivered with his badda-bing-badda-boom style that for some reason seems to excite people. Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of all was the exchange with Carly Fiorina over his questioning how anyone "could vote for that face," which ended with a verbal right hook from Fiorina and a babbling you're-beautiful-who-loves-ya-baby backpedal response from Trump. But despite his gaffes and handwaving and mugging for the camera, and his zero details, we'll-just-fix-it platform, he pretty much stuck with his political script throughout the whole debate.
Until the topic of vaccines came up, and Trump said he thought that vaccination causes autism.
"People that work for me, just the other day," Trump said, "two years old, two and a half years old, their child, their beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very very sick, now is autistic."
[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]
The moderator asked Ben Carson and Rand Paul to respond to that. Why did he pick those two, out of the ten other people in the debate?
Because they're doctors, that's why. They should know the truth, and be unafraid to say it.
And both of them bobbled the question.
At a moment when the appropriate response would have been, "You, Mr. Trump, are dead wrong, and are apparently incapable of reading peer-reviewed science," both of them gave milquetoast rebuttals that sidestepped the main point -- that what Trump had just said was dangerously incorrect.
There have been numerous studies, and they have not shown any correlation between vaccination and autism. This was something that was spread widely fifteen or twenty years ago, and has not been adequately, you know, revealed to the public what's actually going on. Vaccines are very important. Certain ones; the ones that would prevent death or crippling. There are others, a multitude of vaccines, that probably don't fit in that category, and there should be some discretion in those cases. You know, a lot of this is pushed by big government. And that's one of the things that people so vehemently want to get rid of, big government.Trump, whose motto is Death Before Backing Down, responded:
Autism has become an epidemic. Twenty-five years ago, thirty-five years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close. It has gotten totally out of control. I am totally in favor of vaccines, but I want smaller doses over a longer period of time. Because you take a baby in, and I've seen it, I've seen it, with my children, you give them over a long period of time the same amount. You take this beautiful little baby, and you pump... I mean, it looks like it's meant for a horse, not for a child... Give the same amount, little doses over a long period of time, you'll see a big impact on autism.And Carson said in response to that:
The fact of the matter is, we have extremely well-documented proof that there is no autism associated with vaccinations. But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time.So Dr. Carson, can you show me your peer-reviewed research that shows a connection between administering vaccines over a short period of time... and anything?
No, I didn't think so.
Then Rand Paul -- did I mention, he's also a doctor? -- was asked to weigh in:
One of the greatest discoveries of all times was vaccines, particularly for smallpox... I'm all for vaccines, but I'm also for freedom. I'm a little concerned about how they're bunched up. My kids had all of their vaccines, and even if the science says that bunching up is not a problem, I ought to have the right to spread my vaccines out at the very least.Did you catch that? Freedom to do what you want. Even if the science says you're wrong, and that you are putting your own children, and other people's lives, at risk.
Okay, I know I'm not very political. I'm up-front about that, and have mentioned it more than once in this blog. I have neither the knowledge nor the experience to make statements on most political topics with anything close to authority.
But dammit, we can not continue to have leaders who ignore science. And it doesn't matter why they're doing it -- political expediency, pandering to their voter base, or outright foolishness. There are too many problems we are facing as a nation and a world that can only be approached from a scientific knowledge base to elect someone who is willfully ignorant (or as my dad used to call it, "stupid") regarding such issues as vaccination, climate, and the environment.
Science is a process. It is a way of sifting out fact from fiction, good ideas from bad ones, solid theory from folly and superstition. It is time for voters to treat a baseline knowledge of science, and a respect for scientific research, as a sine qua non for electability.
In which case Trump, Carson, and Paul just catapulted themselves right out of the running.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
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:
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.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
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."
"Could you imagine the outcry from liberal activists if the students had been forced to write 'Jesus is Lord'?" Starnes went on to say.
Locke then followed Starnes into the Unintentional Irony Zone with the following statement:
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.
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."
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...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?"
- 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
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.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
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."
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."
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]
"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."
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.
Monday, September 14, 2015
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:
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.
*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.
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.
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