Wagering everything we've got

Prior to the 20th century, lung cancer and emphysema were rare diseases.  When someone contracted either of these diseases, doctors took notice, simply because they occurred so infrequently.  But with the turn of the 20th century came the rise of tobacco consumption, and the formation of the big tobacco companies -- R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, and Philip Morris -- who cashed in on the fad, and quickly rose to be formidable forces in the marketplace.

Doctors soon noticed the uptick in lung cancer rates, and it wasn't long before they figured out the strongest predictor of lung cancer occurrence.  Way back in 1939, Franz Hermann Müller of Cologne Hospital published a study of 86 lung cancer patients and a similar number of cancer-free controls, and found that the cancer sufferers were far more likely to have smoked than the cancer-free individuals did.

And of course, that information eventually found its way to the higher-ups in the tobacco industry.  As Robert Proctor points out in his paper "The History of the Discovery of the Cigarette-Lung Cancer Link: Evidentiary Traditions, Corporate Denial, Global Toll," it is clear from the documents that the people in charge of Big Tobacco knew about the connection -- but suppressed the evidence, or lied about it outright.  Proctor writes:

Tobacco industry insiders by the mid 1950s clearly knew their product was dangerous.  In December of 1953, when Hill and Knowlton were exploring how to respond to the uproar surrounding the publication of carcinogens in cigarette smoke, one tobacco company research director commented in a confidential interview: ‘Boy! Wouldn't it be wonderful if our company was first to produce a cancer-free cigarette.  What we could do to competition!’  Another remarked on how fortunate it was ‘for us’ (ie, for cigarette manufacturers) that smokers were engaging in ‘a habit they can't break’.  The mid-1950s cancer consensus was clearly (albeit privately) shared by the companies; and the reality of addiction was also starting to be conceded—at least in internal industry documents. 

UK cigarette makers also commented on the lung cancer consensus.  Three leading scientists from British American Tobacco (BAT) visited the USA in 1958, for example, and found that with only one exception all of those consulted—including dozens of experts inside and outside the industry—believed that a cancer connection had been proved.  Alan Rodgman at Reynolds  four years later confessed that while evidence in favour of the cancer link was ‘overwhelming’, the evidence against was ‘scant’.  Helmut Wakeham at Philip Morris about this same time drew up a list of dozens of carcinogens in cigarette smoke.  None of this was made public; indeed the tobacco industry throughout this time and for decades thereafter—until the end of the millennium—refused to admit any evidence of harms from smoking.

The result?  Proctor estimates that at current worldwide cancer rates, there is a death from lung cancer every twenty seconds.  90% or more of them would not have occurred had the individual not been a smoker.

1950s pro-smoking advertisement, meant to cast doubt on the link between lung disease and cigarettes [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Appalled?  Then consider, if you will, the parallels between this situation and the current campaign of disinformation and denial being waged by petroleum companies with regards to anthropogenic climate change.

According to an investigative report done by Inside Climate News, in 1978 Exxon launched its own carbon dioxide monitoring program, after reports that scientists were looking at a connection between carbon dioxide levels and global average temperature.  Between 1979 and 1983, Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio, Standard Oil of California, and Gulf Oil formed a task force to monitor and share climate research.

And what came out of this joint effort was, at first, an acknowledgement of the problem.  In 1980, Bruce S. Bailey of Texaco made what would be today a mind-boggling statement coming from a petroleum executive: that "an overall goal of the Task Force should be to help develop ground rules for energy release of fuels and the cleanup of fuels as they relate to CO2 creation."

But they very quickly realized two things; the problem was far bigger than they'd thought, and reducing carbon dioxide release was going to be very bad for business.  Soon, the delegates from the petroleum companies were singing a far different tune.  The CO2 and Climate Change Task Force was renamed the Climate and Energy Task Force, and by 1990 they had formed the Global Climate Coalition -- a lobbying group whose sole purpose was to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change, and to make certain that the United States government did nothing to curb fossil fuel use.

As a communication between members of the GCC, recently made public by the Inside Climate News report, put it: "Unless 'climate change' becomes a non-issue, meaning that the Kyoto proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts."

As far as the scientists employed by the oil companies, they certainly knew what was going on.  One, Raymond Campion of Exxon, wrote to colleague J. T. Burgess in 1979 that "warming of the atmosphere... may be noticeable in the next twenty years," and that natural oscillations in weather patterns would "worsen the effect."  They even requested input from the scientists; in 1980 John A. Laurmann of Stanford University was asked to address the members of the GCC, and told them that "the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is projected to double by 2038, [and] would likely lead to a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures with major economic consequences...  [M]odels show a 5 degrees Celsius rise by 2067, which would result in globally catastrophic effects."

Their response?  To make sure that the information never gained traction beyond the scientists themselves.  Henry Shaw, a scientist at Exxon, said that such information shouldn't become common knowledge because it "may alarm the public unjustifiably."

The result was that until the mid-1990s, most people in the United States had never heard of climate change.  It got out eventually, of course -- but rather than making the fossil fuel industry retreat in disarray, they stepped up their campaign of denial in the media, and made sure that the advisory posts on the subject of energy production and the environment were occupied by pro-industry individuals.  For example, after George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, he appointed Philip A. Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, as chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality.

Does the phrase "fox in charge of the henhouse" come to mind?  Especially given that when Cooney resigned in 2005 -- after allegedly doctoring reports to cast doubt on scientific consensus on global climate change -- he went to work for ExxonMobil?

And this is the group of people who are still, ten years later, driving climate policy in the United States.  They are still spending millions of dollars in a disinformation campaign, still funding candidates for public office who are unwilling to take away the petroleum industry's carte blanche, and still doing whatever they can to convince us that the last ten years of record-breaking temperatures and insane weather have nothing to do with anthropogenic carbon dioxide.  Jack Gerard, the current president of the American Petroleum Institute, has said that any federal mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is "destructive government interference."

But eventually the "la-la-la-la-la, not listening" stance of our government toward climate scientists will be revealed as what it is -- catastrophic mismanagement by the individuals who were elected to safeguard the citizenry of the United States.  Eventually the climate itself will cast a harsh light on the past forty years of evidence suppression and outright falsehoods.  And if this year is any indication, "eventually" might be coming awfully quickly.

Because this time, we're not talking about people getting cancer because they were misled by unscrupulous tobacco companies who cared more about the profit motive than they did about either public health or the truth.  This time, the stakes are higher.

This time, we are in a game with people who have a proven record of lies, evasions, and half-truths -- and what is being gambled on is the long-term habitability of the Earth.

Parsing political correctness

Haters of political correctness have a new target, and that is the Concerned Students of USD, who are demanding that the powers-that-be at the University of San Diego remove a statue of Father Junípero Serra from campus.  Serra was an 18th century Franciscan monk who founded the first nine Catholic missions in California, in locations from San Diego to San Francisco.  Serra's detractors -- and there are many -- have identified him with the policies of colonialism, conversion, subjugation of Natives, and eradication of pre-existing cultures in favor of Spanish Catholicism.

There are a lot of people speaking up against the move, however.  Nathan Rubbelke, writer for the conservative-leaning online journal The College Fix, was clearly in favor of keeping Serra's statue where it is.  "With his settlement, he converted, baptized and educated thousands of Indians," Rubbelke writes.  [I]n a secular sense, one might see Serra’s mission as colonialism, but that a religious perspective offers a different view."

He goes on to quote USD historian Michael Gonzales, who said that it was unfair to hold Serra responsible for the destruction of the California Native society, because the majority of the deaths were caused by disease.  "While scholars can criticize Serra and the Franciscans for lacking medical training," Gonzales said, "they cannot be held accountable for failing to understand the spread of diseases and microbes."

As you might expect, the truth is more complex than that.

Junípero Serra [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

First of all, it must be pointed out that the University of San Diego is a private Roman Catholic university.  Of course the people in charge there support Serra, who just this year was elevated to sainthood by Pope Francis.  They are starting out from the standpoint that however many Natives ended up dying (for various reasons), Serra was saving their immortal souls by establishing Catholicism in the region, so on balance, he was doing god's work.  It's unsurprising that they want to celebrate the person who was one of the founders of the faith in California.

And as far as the Concerned Students of USD, didn't you notice that you were attending a Catholic school?

That said, Serra's treatment of the Natives wasn't as beneficent as Rubbelke and Gonzales would like us to believe.  A Frenchman, Jean de la Pérouse, was a visitor to the Spanish missions of the 18th century, and was appalled at the way the Natives were being treated:

Corporal punishment is inflicted on the Indians of both sexes who neglect the exercises of piety, and many sins, which are left in Europe to the divine justice, are here punished by iron and stocks.  And lastly, to complete the similtude between this and other religious communities, it must be observed, that the moment an Indian is baptised, the effect is the same as if he had pronounced a vow for life.  If he escape, to reside with his relations in the independent villages, he is summoned three times to return, and if he refuse, the missionaries apply to the governor, who sends soldiers to seize him in the midst of his family, and conduct him to the mission, where he is condemned to receive a certain number of lashes with the whip.

Individuals who escaped more than once were brought back and whipped to death.

Robert Archibald, director of the Western Heritage Center of Billings, Montana, wrote the following as the conclusion of a paper about Serra and the missions in the Journal of San Diego History:

The missions were not agents of intentional enslavement, but rather rapid and therefore violent social and cultural change.  The results were people wrenched from home, tradition and family, subjugated to an alien culture and contradictory values.  Predictably these people did not submit to such treatment voluntarily and force became a necessary concomitant.  The result in many cases was slavery in fact although not in intent.  The principle emerges that decent people whose motives as judged by their own standards are excellent, have frequently violated other people who live by different standards.

Whether you're Catholic or not, it remains to be seen whether anyone should celebrate an individual who was, at least in part, responsible for such atrocities.

There's a difference between political correctness and cultural sensitivity.  A recent article in The Atlantic, "The Coddling of the American Mind," highlights this.  The authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, explore how in recent years the expectation that controversial issues be treated even-handedly and with sensitivity has morphed, in many colleges, into a demand that no potentially offensive topics be broached at all:

For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works...  The current movement is largely about emotional well-being...  [I]t presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.  The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.  And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.

So the same criticism that was levied earlier against the Concerned Students of USD can be aimed at what the article calls the "trigger warning movement" -- if all you want is to remain comfortable and to have your current beliefs and ideals left unchallenged, why are you in college?  Colleges should be about pushing against your boundaries.  Not to give offense deliberately, mind you; but to encourage you to question your own stance, and to understand more deeply that not everyone sees the world the way you do.  As I tell my Critical Thinking students every year, "You might well leave this class with your beliefs unchanged.  You will not leave with your beliefs unexamined."

The problem is that now any demand for reconsideration of our attitudes toward historical figures is thrown together with what Lukianoff and Haidt call "vindictive protectiveness" -- the implication that any discomfort college students experience is crossing the line into what amounts to the deliberate provocation of PTSD.

The problem is, conflating the two is simply incorrect.  You cannot equate the mindset of hypersensitive college students who expect to glide through life without ever being offended with the expectation that institutions of higher learning adopt a clear-eyed view of history, and a little bit of cultural sensitivity.  Asking an African American student to read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is hardly the same thing as having a bronze statue on campus of a sadistic bigot who thought he was doing god's will by torturing Natives who didn't want to adopt his beliefs.  Dismissing them both as ill-founded "political correctness" is drawing an oversimplified false analogy.

In other words, wrong.

A reason to keep going

This week we are seeing the final installment of the wonderful Washington Post weekly column "What Was Fake On the Internet This Week?"  It's not that the writer, Caitlin Dewey, has run out of material, that a wave of logic and skepticism has swept across the interwebz, rendering her job pointless.

Actually, it's the opposite.  After doing the column for a year and a half, Dewey is feeling defeated.

I understand her despondency, and I won't say I don't feel something of the same myself at times.  Dewey not only feels up against a rising tide of credulous idiocy, but also the inevitable money motive of the clickbait sites -- Now8News, The World News Daily Report, Before It's News, Above Top Secret, Infowars.  These all straddle the line between honest attempts to peddle a viewpoint, however crazy, and a completely pragmatic desire to devise headlines that get people to click the links and activate the advertising revenue it brings.

Dewey writes:

Frankly, this column wasn’t designed to address the current environment.  This format doesn’t make sense.  I’ve spoken to several researchers and academics about this lately, because it’s started to feel a little pointless.  Walter Quattrociocchi, the head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca in Italy, has spent several years studying how conspiracy theories and misinformation spread online, and he confirmed some of my fears: Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.

Pretty hard to argue that point.

I was talking to my son about the problem yesterday evening, and his initial response was to agree with Dewey.  What she -- and I -- are attempting to do largely amounts to what my dad used to call pissing in a rainstorm.  (Had a way with words, my dad.)  But on reconsideration, Nathan said, "Well, think of it this way.  Let's say that of the people who read your blog, 90% are already rationalists and skeptics, and are only reading it for the amusement value, or to validate their own opinions.  That's still 10% for whom the issues are still in play.  How many hits do you get a day?"

"About a thousand, give or take," I said.

"So, that's a hundred people you're reaching every day who still might be convinced.  It's like the swing states in an election.  They may be few in number, but they're the ones whose votes count the most."

Smart kid.  And as he put it, "Having a hundred swing voters a day read your posts isn't too damn bad, when you think about it."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Couple that with an email I got yesterday from a loyal reader, who had the following to say:

Merry Christmas to you and yours, Gordon.  I want to take this opportunity to tell you how much I appreciate the time you put into being a voice of reason in the whirlwind of craziness.  I can't imagine how you keep plugging away at this, but dammit, someone needs to be saying these things.  Kudos to you, and I hope Skeptophilia is around for many more years.

It's not only the personal validation of Fighting The Good Fight that keeps me going; it's knowing that there are people who are still reading, thinking, and talking, and who might in some small way be inspired to keep it up by reading what I write.  Yes, the internet is full of sensationalist trash and clickbait sites; it's an awfully good conduit for bullshit.  But it also links minds from across the world, and I can't help but feel optimistic about that.  As ZestFinance CEO Douglas Merrill put it, "All of us is smarter than any of us."

So if you're reading this, thank you, whether you've come here because you're undecided, come to have your opinions validated, or come to scoff at someone you disagree with.  If you're still reading and thinking, you're doing what you need to do.  Even if there will always be people in the world who renounce logic and reason, there is nothing to be gained by the logical and reasonable amongst us staying silent.

Idiocy one-upmanship

A loyal Skeptophilia reader and frequent commenter sent me a reply to yesterday's post, about the office of Education Committee chair being filled by a creationist chemtrail-believer who thinks that the nation's problems would be solved if church attendance was mandatory.  The message said, in toto, "I see your Sylvia Allen, and raise you a Michele Fiore," followed by a link.

The link was to a story from ThinkProgress called "Nevada Lawmaker Says Cancer is a Fungus, Recommends Simply Washing it Out."  In it, we read about Michele Fiore, who has a weekly radio show, wherein we hear the following:

If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing, let’s say, salt water, sodium cardonate [sic], through that line, and flushing out the fungus…  These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.

Inexpensive and cost-effective, sure.  But they aren't FDA-approved for a reason, to wit, injecting salt water and sodium carbonate into a cancer patient's pic line would have the unfortunate side effect of death.  Sodium carbonate, also known as washing soda, is a strong base, and is often used in soap manufacture, taxidermy, and as a silver polish.  You wouldn't want to drink the stuff, much less have it injected directly into your bloodstream.

Based on other places she's dispensed such wisdom, apparently she didn't mean sodium carbonate, but sodium bicarbonate.  In other words, baking soda.  Which likewise is perfectly fine for making biscuits, but is not meant to be put in a cancer patient's pic line.

If you're doing repeated facepalms over this, I haven't told you the most appalling part: Fiore served as Majority Leader of the Nevada State Assembly, and would still be in the position if not for her removal a few weeks ago (not for catastrophic stupidity, which at least would have been heartening, but for financial improprieties).  Worse still, up until last month, she was the CEO...

... of a health care company.

Her company, "Always There 4 You," says on its "About" page:

Always There 4 You is a locally-owned and operated business.  It has been serving the community for over 10 years. Your health and safety are secure with us.  If you don't want to worry your family members or trouble them with your daily care.  If you live by yourself and are either elderly or disabled, live a simpler life by getting aid from the kind and friendly staff of Always There 4 You.  We are trained to help you in all sorts of areas, With our in-home healthcare, you can get help with washing, bathing, preparing meals, dressing, taking medication, and doing light housework.  You'll also make great friends and companions!  Make life easier on yourself by getting help from Always There 4 You.

You'll also, apparently, get "sodium cardonate" in your pic line if you get cancer.

Encouragingly, the powers-that-be seem to be on to her, because in November Fiore lost her license to provide health care, and "Always There 4 You" closed.  Fiore was unrepentant, and blames the closure on harassment.  "The never-ending barrage of government red tape and regulations has made being in business not worth being in business," Fiore said, showing once again her knack for articulate exposition.

Oh, but you'll never guess what else!  She's also in favor of murdering refugees, not only here on American soil, but anywhere in the world!  She'll do it herself, in fact:

What, are you kidding me? I'm about to fly to Paris and shoot ‘em in the head myself!  I am not OK with Syrian refugees.  I’m not OK with terrorists.  I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out, just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life.  I’m good with that.

So, think about it.  You've lost your health care license, you were removed as Assembly Majority Leader because of a million dollars in unpaid tax liens, you advocate shooting innocent people in the head, and you give health advice to desperately ill people even though you apparently don't know the difference between sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate.  What do you do?

You run for Congress, of course.

This is, I kid you not, a photograph from Michele Fiore's promotional 2016 calendar.

I would like to say, "Ha ha, I'm just kidding."  I would like even more to say, "Oh, but don't worry, there's no way she'll get elected."  But it's becoming increasingly apparent that you can be completely immoral, and also stupid to the point where it's a wonder you can walk without dragging your knuckles on the ground, and still win the majority of the votes.

So next November, keep your eye on Nevada.  We might just have someone in Congress who will make Louie Gohmert look like a Rhodes Scholar by comparison.

Moronocracy

Here in the United States, we have a fine old tradition of electing people to public office who are entirely unqualified to fulfill their duties.

Several of those have been frequent fliers here at Skeptophilia.  We have Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, despite being a rabid climate change denier who gets off by finding new and creative ways to cut the budget for NASA.  We have James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe, who somehow ended up in charge of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, even though he calls anthropogenic climate change a "conspiracy" and has vowed to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency.  We have individuals like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert, and Rick Brattin, each of whom alone would be sufficient evidence that having an IQ lower than your shoe size is not necessarily an impediment to winning a majority of the votes in an election.

In fact, I'm beginning to think that there's some kind of mathematical rule of politics in which (vote count) x (IQ) = a constant.

So I suppose it should come as no great surprise that this week, Sylvia Allen was appointed to be the chair of the Arizona State Senate Committee on Education.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Allen's been here before, too.  Regular readers might recall her statement from March of this year, in which she interrupted a hearing on concealed-carry laws to offer the following puzzling insight:

I believe what's happening to our country is that there's a moral erosion of the soul of America.  It's the soul that is corrupt.  How we get back to a moral rebirth I don't know.  Since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have.  Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.

What this has to do with concealed-carry laws, I have no idea.  Probably Senator Allen doesn't, either.  After all, this is the same woman who posted on Facebook that she believes in chemtrails and weather manipulation:

Ok, I do not want to get into a debate about weather.  However, I know what I see weekly up here on the flat where I live outside of Snowflake.  The planes usely [sic], three or four, fly a grid across the sky and leave long white trails streaming behind them. I have watched the chem-trails move out until the entire sky is covered with flimsy, thin cloud cover.  It is not the regular exhaust coming from the plane it is something they are spraying.  It is there in plain sight.  What is it they are leaving behind that covers the sky? 

Things are happening all around us that we see everyday and just don't get what it is.  I think we throw the "conspiracy theory" at people when we don't understand or have the information they have so we try and explain it that way.  Plus we just don't want to believe that our government would do anything terrible to us.  Well, just a few examples, the IRS attack on the Tea Party, Benghazi, wire taping [sic], Fast and Furious just to name a few and we think that they would not manipulate our weather?

It almost goes without saying that she's also a creationist:

The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with...  We need to get the uranium here in Arizona, so this state can get the money from it.

And this, dear readers, is the person the Arizona Senate chose to lead the oversight of education in the state.

I keep thinking we're getting to a point where we're wising up, that we're figuring out that when we elect idiots, they (surprise!) do idiotic things.  But I guess we're not done yet.  Sylvia Allen, a woman who not only knows nothing whatsoever about science but is apparently functionally illiterate, is now in charge of such issues as school funding, curriculum oversight, and assessment reform for an entire state.

I'd like to end on a positive note, but I don't see one here.  All I can say in conclusion is that some days, it's hard to remain an optimist.  Lately, I'm more sliding over to the "we deserve everything we get" camp.

Murky waters

Yesterday I ran into the latest completely bogus suggestion from the alternative medicine nuts:

"Hydrogen-rich structured water."

Plain old water, apparently, isn't good enough, we need special water, water that is different by virtue of having lots of properties that make complete sense as long as you failed high school chemistry.

They start off with a bang:

You have probably heard that the human body is two-thirds water. It may surprise you to know that over 99 percent of the molecules in your body are water molecules. So how is it possible that 99 percent of the molecules don’t do anything?  That question inspired leading scientists to put water under a microscope.  What researchers discovered was a fourth phase of water known as structured water.  Meaning, the molecules are structured or ordered for cells to absorb them.

There are only a few problems with this paragraph, to wit:

• Two-thirds does not equal 99%.
• The water molecules in your body actually do lots of things, which is why if I took all of the water out of your body, you would die.
• You can't see water molecules under a microscope.
• There are actually eleven known phases of water, each of which exists at various ranges of temperature and pressure, as shown on the diagram below:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So already we're off to a great start, with one of the highest bullshit-to-text ratios I've ever seen.

Then we're told that not only is this product "structured," it's "hydrogen-enriched," so that it is "Powered to flush toxins and waste...  Activated to replicate and convert energy...  Energized for lasting alertness... [and] Optimized for better hydration."

Now, there are two ways they could add hydrogen to water; as hydrogen gas (gases are soluble in water; witness seltzer), or as hydrogen ions.

Neither would be a good idea.

If you add hydrogen gas to water, presumably under pressure (the way they make soda), then when you open the bottle, it'll fizz out, just as the carbon dioxide does when you pop the cap off a beer, which you'll probably need to do to recover from the stress of reading all of this.  The problem is, forcing hydrogen gas into water under pressure and then giving it to an unsuspecting person is problematic, from the standpoint of the fact that hydrogen gas is explosive.

Remember the Hindenburg?

Yeah, that.

Adding the hydrogen in ionic form isn't any better.  When you add hydrogen ions to water, you've created what chemists call an "acid."  The more you add, the more acidic it becomes, and the more the pH of the solution drops.  Plain old lemonade has a pH of about 5 or so, depending on how strong you make it; this corresponds to a hundred-times higher concentration of hydrogen ions than plain water (pH of 7).  Commercial vinegar has a pH of about 3, meaning it has a hundred times higher concentration still (recall that pH is a logarithmic scale; each pH point corresponds to a tenfold change in the hydrogen ion concentration).

So if the hydrogen-enriched water people are right, we should all be drinking vinegar.  Or, better yet, the sulfuric acid from your car battery, which at a pH of about 1 has a million times more hydrogen ions than pure water does.

Healthful stuff, battery acid.  Really "hydrogen-enriched."  It'd certainly flush out the toxins, rather in the way that Drano cleans out the pipes in your kitchen.  I doubt you'd feel all that "activated and optimized" afterwards, however.

Once again, we have a product that is so much snake oil -- water with some minerals added, that is then marketed as the next big thing in health.  The only benefit from this stuff is to the bank accounts of the people who are peddling it.

So there you are.  How to make water even, um, waterier.  Or something.  And how we should all give up on regular old water.

Myself, I'm thinking of switching to scotch.

The right to blaspheme

There is a fundamental difference between criticizing an idea and criticizing a person.

Ideas stand or fall based upon their consonance with the known evidence.  If I believe that aliens have abducted my dogs and replaced them with synthetic life-forms so they can spy on me, that statement is either true or false, and presumably should be resolvable by applying a little science and logic.

Okay, that's a facile example, and I recognize that; but honestly, any statement someone makes can be treated that way.  If you are making a claim about the way the world works, that claim is testable.  More importantly, testing the claim requires that we criticize it, push and prod at it and see where its weaknesses (if any) lie.  If certain realms are made off-limits to criticism, the result is that their truth value can't be analyzed.  They have to be accepted on faith alone -- i.e., without question, whether or not the evidence you have agrees or disagrees.

Which is why British MP Keith Vaz's declaration of support for anti-blasphemy laws is so wildly wrong-headed.

In a discussion over anti-Muslim statements on media, Miqdaad Versi, Assistant Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, said, "Muslim communities need to be able to respond to accusations [against] Muslims, or against the Prophet, in a more effective way... Whether there should be legislation is something that really is a more complicated question."

Vaz, in response to Versi's comments, went further.  "I have no problem with the re-introduction of anti-blasphemy laws in the UK," Vaz said. "Religions are very special to people.  And therefore I have no objection to [a blasphemy law] … but it must apply equally to everybody.  If there were to be new blasphemy laws, it should apply to all religions.  If we have laws, they should apply to everybody...  If somebody brings it forward in parliament I'll vote for it… Obviously it depends what's in the bill. But I have no objection to it being brought before parliament and having a debate about it."

Which is a dangerous step toward the type of repression of free speech you see in so many places in the world -- the end result of which is a dictatorship like Saudi Arabia, where you can be sentenced to death by beheading for "offending the prophet."  Or, in the case of poet Ashraf Fayadh, simply for bringing to light the government's determination to keep a stranglehold on all forms of free speech.

Don't get me wrong.  Ridiculing people's dearly-held beliefs isn't nice.  But once you start legislating which ideas are off-limits for ridicule, where do you stop?  Is all satire forbidden?  Do all religions fall equally under the hands-off policy?  (That seems to be what Vaz intends, but if you look around the world, it seldom works out that way in practice.)  What about other dearly-held beliefs?  What if someone is a passionate believer in astrology?  Or spirit survival?

Do we really want to try to figure out which ideas merit protection from criticism, and which do not?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Religious claims are, at their basis, no different than any other claim.  By suggesting that we set them aside from criticism, we are making an imaginary distinction, and then trying to legislate behavior regarding which side of the distinction some statement falls.

Note, however, that I'm not talking about true hate speech, in which people or groups are threatened or insulted.  Here, we're talking about ideas.  And in the realm of ideas, free speech has to trump "niceness."  While I might not like it if someone ridicules my atheism (for example), making such speech illegal is the first step down a very troubling path.

I'll end with a quote by one of my favorite writers -- someone more people in our modern, offense-phobic society should read: