The cult of ignorance -- and "do-it-yourself braces"

In his wonderful essay "The Cult of Ignorance," Isaac Asimov wrote something that still resonates, 36 years after it appeared in Newsweek: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

This tendency on the part of Americans to assume that democracy means that all ideas are equal, and everyone's utterances equally valid, often drives us to do ridiculous things.  We discount the conclusions of scientists, preferring instead the evidence-free declarations of politicians, actors, and athletes.  The criticism "they don't understand the common, working-class people" is frequently lobbed in the direction of the intelligent.   This sense that the well-educated are either impractical or else actively evil leads us to elect the unqualified because they "seem like regular folks," even though you'd think we'd all want our leaders to be selected from the best and smartest we have.  But somehow there's this sense that being smart, well-educated, and thoroughly trained gives the experts an ivory-tower insulation from the rest of us slobs, and probably leaves them immoral as well.

What it actually accomplishes, though, is to give your average guy the idea that he knows a great deal more than he really does.  Called the Dunning-Kruger effect, it makes the unskilled overestimate their knowledge and underestimate their ineptitude.  And just yesterday, I ran into a new phenomenon that illustrates that amazingly well: do-it-yourself orthodonture.

I'm not making this up.  Put off by the high costs of orthodontic treatment, the inconvenience of having braces (sometimes for years), and the mystery of how a few brackets and wires could straighten out crooked teeth, people have said, "Hey, I could do that."  Now that 3-D printing is easy and cheap, people print themselves out resin brackets, affix them to their teeth with glue, and start yanking.  Lured by testimony that such a course of treatment could reduce the costs to under $100 and shorten the duration of brace-wearing from three years to as little as sixteen weeks, the idea has been spreading like wildfire.

[image courtesy of photographer Jason Regan and the Wikimedia Commons]

But folks -- orthodontists have to go through extensive training for a reason.  It's not enough to peer in a friend's mouth and try to replicate the friend's orthodontic hardware on your own teeth.  One of the DIY-ers, a fellow named Amos Dudley, has posted pictures of his changed smile on the internet, an alteration that took only four months.  But orthodontist Stephen Belli says that looks can deceive:

I’d like to see an X-ray, because he’s probably caused some irreparable harm.  He moved these teeth in only 16 weeks.  You can cause a lot of problems with that.  If you move a tooth too fast, you can actually cause damage to the bone and gums.  And if you don’t put the tooth in the right position, you could throw off your bite.

And why did Dudley take on his own orthodontic work?  "Because," he said, "I wanted to stick it to the dental appliance industry."

A stance that apparently gave him the impression that he knew enough to start shoving around his own teeth.

I find this attitude impossible to understand.  I consider myself reasonably intelligent, but I know I'm not smart enough to be responsible for my own medical care.  Similarly, I know I don't have the training to understand the latest scientific findings in most fields, nor to come up with solutions to the nation's economic problems and foreign policy.  This is why we have experts.

Which is why it really pisses me off when someone comes up with the latest pseudo-clever meme about how to fix everything, such as this one:

When I first saw this one -- and it's been posted far and wide -- my first thought was, "Can't you do simple arithmetic?"  If you don't see what I mean, try this: let's raise the salaries of the soldiers and seniors to, say, $50,000 a year.  Accepting the numbers they've quoted here, this would require an extra $12,000 for each soldier and an extra $38,000 for each senior.  Multiply each of these by the number of active-duty soldiers (1,388,000) and seniors on Social Security (59,000,000) in the United States, respectively, to see how much money we'd need.

Then, using a similar calculation, figure out how much we'd save yearly by cutting the wages of retired presidents (of which there are currently four -- Carter, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr.  You can even be generous and throw in Obama if you like), the House and Senate members (535 of them), the Speaker of the House (1), and the Majority and Minority leaders of each branch of congress (4), down to $50,000 each.  See how much you save.

Falls a little short, doesn't it?

I mean, for cryin' in the sink, people.  If it was that easy, don't you think someone would have thought of this by now?

Which may seem a long way from do-it-yourself braces, but it's all the same thing, really; the attitude that a completely untrained individual is just as good as an expert at solving complex problems.  The cult of ignorance is still thriving here in the United States.  But despite our desire to think that everyone's ideas are on equal footing, ignorance will never be as good as knowledge.

Misplaced nostalgia

I've never really understood people who pine for "the good old days."  I'm not saying that the time we live in is perfect, mind you; but I find that real nostalgia requires a very selective memory.

This comes up because of Donald Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again."  Someone finally thought to ask him when he thought America was great the last time -- in an interview in the New York Times, Trump was asked what era he'd like to return us to.  His answer is as myopic as it is enlightening:

I'd say that the first time would be the time of military and industrial expansion at the start of the 20th century.  If you look back, it really was, there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship...  And the late '40s and '50s, it was a time when we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.

It's no real wonder that Trump looks back with fondness at the first part of the 20th century.  It was the era of the Robber Barons -- people like John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew W. Mellon, James Buchanan Duke, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who became rich on the backs of the working poor.  The actions of the Robber Barons represent the beginning of corporate control over the government.  It was an era of unbridled free enterprise, which sounds good until you see the outcome -- a veritable plutocracy that continues up to this day.

Poor children working in a glass factory at midnight (1920s) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Similar things could be said about the post-World War II United States, a time in which we became a nuclear power, had our fingers in the governments of other countries (either by their invitation or not), and were setting ourselves up for the debacles in Southeast Asia and the Middle East of which we are still dealing with the consequences.  It was the last time the white patriarchy would go unchallenged, and was immediately followed by the civil unrest of the 1960s, in which so many institutions, social mores, and political edifices would be shaken to their roots.

So of course those are where Trump would like to return us -- to a time when there was unprecedented opportunity, as long as you were a rich, white, well-connected man.  If you were female, if you were a minority, if you were from the lower classes, well, pretty much sucks to be you.

I'm too young to remember the 50s, but I certainly remember the 60s and 70s well enough.  I grew up during the decades when we as a society were still struggling with throwing off enculturated rules of a social structure that prior to that time had been accepted without question.  When I was in high school, in the mid-70s, minorities were beginning to see more acknowledgement of their fundamental human rights -- but the powers-that-be were so terrified of the outcome that on Prom Night, they decided to crown a black Prom King and Queen and a white Prom King and Queen, because what if they had only one vote, and there was (gasp of horror!) a black King and a white Queen?  Can't have that.  There were several classmates of mine who were LGBT, but 100% of them were still in the closet -- some until years after graduation.

Boys couldn't have long hair, or they'd be brought into the principal's office and have it cut off.  Girls were tracked into home ec, boys into shop.  One female friend told me, years after, that she was told not to take physics by her counselor, because "why would a girl need physics?"  Fortunately for her, she basically told him "the hell you say," and took it anyway.

So the "good old days" turn out to have been good only for the select few.  To claim otherwise requires ignoring not only our own history, but the day-to-day reality of the vast majority of American citizens.  But it's not surprising that Trump turns a blind eye to the inequities of the 20th century; he, and people like him, are the ones who profited from them.

Despite the problems we face, I'll stay right here in the 21st century.  I'll take the growing pains and risks and uncertainties of 2016 over the unquestioned white male privilege of the Gilded Age and the post-World War II eras.  I have no particular desire to don the rose-colored glasses that would be necessary to look back in sentimental nostalgia at a period when things were not nearly as good for everyone as people like Trump like to claim.

Lying for Jesus

Keep 'em scared.  Convince people that their way of life, their very existence, is threatened.  Tell them that if they don't fight back, the Bad Guys will win, will erase every trace of their culture and belief systems from the country.

After all, fearful people do two things that are very useful.  They double down on their beliefs -- and they are easy for the unscrupulous to manipulate.

That's a lesson that evangelical preacher Jim Bakker and his pal Rick Wiles, host of the ultra-Christian radio show TruNews, have learned all too well.  Despite the fact that 83% of the citizens of the United States self-identify as Christian, Bakker and Wiles have taken it on as their mission to convince that overwhelming majority that they are a desperately embattled minority who faces persecution and eventual extinction if they don't, for god's sake, do something.

Lying For Jesus, is how I see it.

Jim Bakker [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In an interview last week on TruNews, Bakker and Wiles make it abundantly clear how this extermination plan is going to go.  Bakker said:

Be ready.  Be ready.  Are you ready to serve God if they're gonna cut your head off?  Years ago, God spoke to me, and I was supposed to start preaching it, but nobody would accept it.  How are you gonna tell people that the church needs to be ready to have their heads cut off, to say, "I'm willing to die for the gospel of Jesus Christ?"  There is such fear in the church... I mean, fear.  Not just fear of ISIS, not just fear of one thing, but fear of not being politically correct.  I tell you, you will be murdered if you preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Wiles, of course, agreed, instead of doing what I would have done, which is to point out that not only has no one been murdered in the United States for preaching the bible, but church attendance seems to be as strong as ever, and just last week the Religious Right successfully sledgehammered their views into law in North Carolina, making it legal for Christians to discriminate against LGBT individuals in the name of "religious freedom."

But people like Bakker and Wiles never let a little thing like reality interfere with their message.  Bakker goes on:

It's over, people!  The gospel is over in the United States of America!  We have turned our back on the Bible.  We can't preach the Bible anymore.  I could tell you stories that would curl your hair... If I told you what I have been through and what I go through and what I am facing, because of what we would call the old-fashioned gospel, which is simply the Bible.  Anyone who wants to stand on the absolute word of God -- you don't have much...  Everyone's talking about Donald Trump.  Who would have thought that we would have a man running for president who needed to say, "Next Christmas, we're going to say 'Merry Christmas' again?"

Well, that got lots of applause from the studio audience, given how evidently in their pretend world the 17% of us who aren't Christian are winning a war on the 83% of the United States who are.  The only possible response, of course, is to fight tooth and nail to maintain the hegemony they have had for over two hundred years, and which is showing no sign of going away any time soon.

And speaking of lying, Wiles then suggests that whenever you go to a store and have to give your name to be called for an order, you should say your name is "Merry Christmas" so the clerk has to say it over the microphone.  Because, apparently, lying outright to a clerk is exactly what Jesus wants you to do.

This idea also got lots of applause.

Seeing the support he got from that point, Bakker decided to pursue it:

How can this be a point on which to run for president?  How can it be?  How can it be almost illegal to say "Merry Christmas?"

"Almost illegal?"  Sort of like "almost pregnant?"

Rick Wiles then asks a question:

Going back to the spiritual uprising; who is telling us that we can't say "Merry Christmas?"

Exactly, Rick.  Good question.

But Bakker, of course, has a response:

[If you prayed or said "Merry Christmas" in public] they would threaten to arrest you.  They would threaten to mow you down with a machine gun. 

Even Wiles seems to realize that they're on shaky ground at that point.  He asks:

They're gonna come in with guns, into a high school graduation, and shoot you for saying the Lord's Prayer? 

But Bakker hasn't gotten where he is by backing down:

Not right now, but they will.  They will if we don't stop them. 

Ah, yes.  "They."  By whom he means, apparently, atheists like me.  Who, by the way, could not care less how much time Bakker, Wiles, or anyone else spends in church, how many times they thump the bible, or what they preach on the street corner.  We honestly don't give a rat's ass if they stand on their roofs in July, stark naked, shrieking "Merry Christmas!" at passersby all day long.  All we want is for Bakker and his ilk to keep their beliefs out of our schools, laws, and public buildings.  Beyond that, they can believe any damn fool thing they want to.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that Lying For Jesus works.  If you tell people often enough that they're embattled and besieged, they'll believe it.  Even if the messenger is a guy who resigned from his first ministerial post because of a sex scandal (in which he offered to pay $279,000 to the victim to keep silent), and in a separate incident was imprisoned for five years on fraud and conspiracy charges.

But don't let that dissuade you from believing everything he says.  Especially if what he says is "be afraid."

There's a part of this fear, though, that is very real.  And that is the fear of rational people that the rest of the citizenry is going to make decisions based in irrational fears like the ones Bakker and Wiles are peddling.  We've got an election coming up, and more than one of the candidates is capitalizing on that sense of being constantly at risk.  So ask yourself: do you want the voice of reason to be swamped by people who are accepting the fact-free scare-talk of a huckster who somehow, bafflingly, still gets people to listen to him?

Because if that comes to pass, maybe there's a reason to be afraid, after all.

The bunny trail

Tomorrow is Easter, the most important celebration of the Christian calendar, a time when believers are reminded about such things as eternal life and redemption and salvation.  Also, therefore, time for the wacko fringe element to remind everybody that they better not get their kids chocolate bunnies, because this will cause children to hippety-hop right to hell.

[image courtesy of photographer Josef Türk Jun and the Wikimedia Commons]

At least, this is the claim of "Shirlee" of the site Real Bible Stories, in her post "Easter Bunny Brings Satan's Communion."  And I'd like to be able to tell you that this is a parody site, but "Shirlee" appears to be entirely sincere.  Here's what she has to say:

Easter. For many, it conjures images of a basket-toting rabbit bearing chocolate bunnies. The White House hosts an Easter Egg hunt, as do many churches.  What’s wrong with that?  It’s a celebration of spring, and fertility, and...  Yes, fertility. I’ll bet you didn’t know Jesus was a fertility god, did you? 

What’s that you say? He’s not? 

Then why are you worshiping rabbits — an unclean animal, consumption of which is abomination to God — and hunting for colored eggs on the celebration of His Resurrection?

Yes, well, in Leviticus 11:6 the bible also says that rabbits "chew the cud," which they don't.  But don't let that stop you from taking the whole thing as the literal truth.

And wait until you hear who is responsible for this perversion... you'll never guess.

It's... the Catholics:

Yes, Catholics. The inheritors of the Babylonian religion, who have perverted every aspect of Christianity with the ways of Nimrod and Semiramis (Ishtar)! 

Satan has found a very clever way of perverting Christianity...  He used the Catholic cult to inject his own rituals — those directed at any number of false gods, and even a false Savior — into Christian worship!  Think about it...  Whenever you idolize the Easter bunny, or trade eggs, or even fast at Lent, you are worshipping Satan!

Huh.  I was raised Catholic, and even back then, I was always in it for the chocolate.  But I suppose that's only to be expected from a former cult member who made it worse by giving up religion entirely.

"Shirlee" then goes into a long diatribe on the origins of Easter and how the "Catholic cult" (her words) has twisted the whole thing into a fast-track into hell.  She also more than once uses the phrase "Bunnies of Satan," which I think would be a great name for an all-girl metal band.

She ends with a scary question:

Will your kids be chomping on chocolate eggs and rabbits tomorrow, taking the Devil’s Communion?

In all seriousness, I find it hard to imagine living my life in such perpetual fear.  The idea that there's this evil guy who is constantly trying to find ways to grab you, and that even something like a Russell Stover Chocolate Bunny Rabbit could provide him ingress, is so horrid that if I believed it, I wouldn't want to leave my house.  Ever.

It does make you wonder what's appealing about this world view.  Once you've bought in, though, it's clear why people stay.  If you have let yourself become convinced that everything is a threat, and the only way to avoid burning in agony forever is to follow the bible word-for-word, it's unsurprising that it's difficult to cut free.

Unsurprising, too, that people like this get their knickers in a twist over anything that's different.  Which is why an elementary school in Kennesaw, Georgia has cancelled a yoga program designed for  alleviating student stress because parents thought it was "sorcery."  Kids and staff are now forbidden from saying "namasté" to each other.  One parent wrote:

Now we can’t pray in our schools or practice Christianity but they are allowing this Far East mystical religion with crystals and chants to be practiced under the guise of stress release meditation.  This is very scary.

Yes indeedy.  We don't want students de-stressed.  We want them scared.  We want them to be aware, 24/7, that anything they do, any tiny misstep, could potentially lead to their spending eternity in hellfire.

The administrators, of course, caved; no way could they push back against the people who raised the stink, because then you'd have Fox News blathering on for weeks about the War on Christianity even though Christians make up 55% of the population of Kennesaw.

So anyway.  Me, I'm just looking forward to next week, when all of the remaining Bunnies of Satan are gonna be on sale.  It may be the Devil's Communion, but it sure as hell is tasty.

Rising tide

At what point does choosing to ignore the facts cross the line into being morally responsible for what happens?

Because I think we've reached that point with respect to climate change.

Folks, we've been warning people about this since the early 1980s.  James Burke's seminal documentary After the Warming first aired in 1989, and predicted not only the dire consequences of anthropogenic climate change, but the resistance of the powers-that-be to doing anything to halt it.  (If you watch it now, many of its predictions sound like history -- his timeline for what was going to happen from 1990 to the present came so eerily true that it almost makes me want to believe in precognition.)  However much Al Gore is derided for his politics, his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth has also proved to be prescient.

Scientific paper after scientific paper -- peer-reviewed, based in hard data -- has demonstrated incontrovertibly that our world is warming.  There is no controversy amongst the climate scientists any more.  And still we shrug our shoulders at politicians who brand climate change as "liberal claptrap" (Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California), or those who say that if it's real at all, it will be "beneficial to society" (Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma).  Scientists who research climate have faced gag rules, funding cuts, and harassment from the likes of Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, who somehow, bafflingly, has ended up chairing the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

This all comes up (again) because of a study by Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen et al., who last week released a paper in the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that is rightly scaring the absolute shit out of anyone capable of reading a scientific paper (thus disqualifying Rohrabacher, Inhofe, and Smith).  The title of the paper is unequivocal: "Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence From Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that2◦C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous."  (Note: the link is to a draft released last year; the paper itself appeared after extensive peer review, and with only minor modifications, in JACP last Tuesday.)

[image courtesy of photographer Angskar Walk and the Wikimedia Commons]

If the title by itself doesn't spook you enough, take a look at this excerpt from the abstract:

There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 ◦C warmer than today.  Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings...  We argue that ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration in response to ocean warming, and we posit that ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters.  Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years... Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms...  Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2 ◦C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous.  Earth’s energy imbalance, which must be eliminated to stabilize climate, provides a crucial metric.

Co-author Eric Rignot put it more bluntly in an interview with Slate:

Ice sheet loss is non linear by nature.  You push the ice sheet one way, they do not react; you push them more, they start reacting; you keep pushing and they fall apart...  If we get there, we won't be able to fix it.

Among the scarier predictions of the Hansen et al. paper is a sea level rise of five to nine meters.  Do you recognize what this means?  The states of Florida, Delaware, and most of southern Louisiana would be underwater.  As would the nations of Bangladesh and the Netherlands.  All of the world's coastal cities would be inundated, with the exception of a few that have higher ground, like Seattle and San Francisco -- which would then become a string of islands.  This isn't talking about frost-free winters and warmer summers, and having to run your air conditioner more; this is talking about turning a significant proportion of humanity into eco-refugees.

Climate scientist Anna Liljedahl, of the University of Alaska, has said that the trends she's seeing are evidence of runaway warming.  The situation in the Arctic is dire.  The permafrost is experiencing widespread melting, with a resultant additional contribution of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere:

The scientific community has had the assumption that this cold permafrost would be protected from climate warming, but we’re showing here that the top of the permafrost, even if it’s very cold, is very sensitive to these warming event...  At the places where we have sufficient amounts of data we are seeing this process happen in less than a decade and even after one warm summer.

We have reached the point where ignoring the facts and ignoring or ridiculing the predictions of the people who are trained to understand the Earth's systems is a profoundly immoral stance.  There's a principle from Roman law that applies here: "Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit."  "Those who remain silent, when they should have spoken up, may be considered to have agreed."  If you support politicians who are complicit in hoodwinking the American citizenry with regards to the magnitude of this problem, you participate in that immorality and bear some of the responsibility for the outcome.

Which in this case, is increasingly looking like it will be horrific on a scale we have never seen before.

The Texas flood fossils

I get really fed up with the media.

I make a significant point in my Critical Thinking classes that there is no such thing as unbiased media -- that even the decision of what qualifies as news introduces a bias into reporting.  Add to that the slant that every news source has, and it underscores how important it is to take what you see, read, and hear with a big ol' pinch of salt.

But still.  There are times that poor reporting just pisses me off.  Take, for example, the story that appeared on KCEN-TV, out of Temple, Bell County, Texas last week, wherein we find out that a man in Tyler, Texas has found some fossils in his back yard that were deposited during the biblical Great Flood.

Tyler resident Wayne Propst was poking around in his aunt's front yard when he found some fossilized shells.  He cleaned them up with a toothbrush, then called a "fossil expert" named Joe Taylor who confirmed that they were from the time of Noah.

Propst was thrilled.  "From Noah’s flood to my front yard, how much better can it get?...  Now all I got to do is go in front of my aunt's house and pick up something from back when it all began.  I don't even have to search anymore.  What's really interesting to me is we're talking about the largest catastrophe known to man, the flood that engulfed the entire world."

Yes, and we're also talking about an event that left behind no geological evidence whatsoever, and therefore almost certainly never happened.  But don't let that stop you.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Propst's aunt, Sharon Givan, who owns the property where the fossils were found, was equally excited.  "To think that like he says that we have something in our yard that dated back to when God destroyed the earth.  I mean, how much better could anything be," Givan said.

Which brings up what is, to me, the most troubling thing about the whole Noah's Ark story.  This is supposed to be an edifying tale, right?  About a guy who listened to god and he and his family got saved from destruction?  But what the religious seldom focus on is that according to the bible, everything else on Earth died.  Animals, plants, infants, children, people from other cultures who had no part in what was happening.  It is, honestly, one of the most unpleasant stories in the entire bible (and there's a lot of competition in that regard).

I got in a discussion with a biblical-literalist Christian about this one time.  How, I asked, can you justify the death of little babies because god decided that everyone but Noah's family was too wicked to live?  How can babies be "wicked?"

And she said -- no lie -- "God knew that the babies would grow up to be evil just like their parents, so he killed them to wipe out the evil in the land, root and branch."

Which is one of the most flat-out amoral statements I've ever heard.  Genocide?  Including women, children, and infants?  No problem, as long as god says they deserved it.  My general impression is that a god who operates on that kind of basis would hardly be worthy of worship.

But I digress.

The contents of this story should not really surprise anyone who lives in the United States.  There is still a strong thread of fundamentalism here, especially in the southern states, and young-earth creationism is alive and well (and the fight against teaching it as science in public schools is ongoing).  But why in the hell is it considered news that a guy believes in Noah's Ark?  We don't have news stories with titles like, "Hoboken Woman Still Getting Messages From Magic Unicorn."  (Although I have to admit, I'd read that article.)

The worst part is the last line in the article, which says, and I quote: "For the record, we have not independently verified if the rocks are in fact historic."  Meaning what?  You're gonna send a reporter down to look at the fossils and say, "Okay, they look like they're from the Great Flood to me?"  You haven't radioisotope dated them yourself?  You are unaware that fossils are, in fact, old?

Or that you're considering, heaven forfend, asking an actual fucking paleontologist to weigh in on this?

I know that a lot of media has devolved into clickbait and/or pandering to the whims of whoever wails the loudest, but is it too much to ask that we expect that news sources at least attempt to present real news stories in as unbiased a manner as they can manage?  The media gets away with this bullshit because we as consumers tolerate it.

It's time to demand more from our newspapers, radio and television news, and online media.  When you see or hear a story like "Tyler Man Says He Found Fossils From Noah's Flood," write or call in to let them know that it's unacceptable.  There always will be trash news sources -- I doubt The Daily Mail is going anywhere soon -- but the only way things will change is if we start letting the powers-that-be know that we expect more.

I'm so blue

In today's contribution from the "There's Always A Stupider Claim" department, we have one-upped yesterday's post about tachyon-infused jewelry with a site that tells you how to make "Blue Solar Water."

According to the site with the euphonious name "Ho'oponopono," making "Blue Solar Water" is simple.  Here's how a "Blue Solar Water" enthusiast, Mabel Katz, explains it:

1. Get a blue glass bottle. Any color blue, from light blue to dark blue will work.
2. Fill with tap water and cover with a non-metallic lid -- cork, plastic, even cloth wrapped with a rubber band will work because the purpose of the lid is just to keep the dirt and bugs (that Love Blue Solar Water) out.
3. Place in the Sun for an hour or more.  Mabel comments that when left longer, it is sweeter.
4. When done, your Blue Solar Water can be stored in the refrigerator in any container -- glass, plastic, etc.
5. ENJOY!  How Much Blue Solar Water to drink?  Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len once shared that, for the sole purpose of CLEANING memories, he drinks a gallon and a half of Blue Solar Water a day!

So, yeah.  "Cleaning memories."   Katz tells us that it's useful for erasing your memory, which I find a troubling idea.  I already have to re-enter a room three times to remember why I went there.  I'm not sure I need anything that's going to make me forget more than I already do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that's not its only use.  Check it out:

- Add some to your Coffee, Tea, Cocoa, Juice, etc.
- Add Blue Solar Water to everything you cook -- Pasta, Soup, Oatmeal, scrambled eggs, etc.  Remember, just a drop of Blue Solar Water will solarize all of it.
- Add some Blue Solar Water to your washing machine when washing clothes.
- Spray some in your dryer.
- Add it to your radiator to make your car hummmm.
- Add it to your bath water.
- Spray yourself with Blue Solar water after showering.
- Spray rooms with Blue Solar Water.
- Gargle with it.
- Wash Floors with it.
- Wash your car with Blue Solar Water.

These are just a few of the ways that we have used Blue Solar Water.  Have FUN with it and be Creative in finding new ways to CLEAN with Blue Solar Water.

I have to admit, that none of these are a problem, if it floats your boat (and I'm sure that "Blue Solar Water" will make your boat not only float, but "hummmmm.")  After all, it's just water.  Like, plain old water.  So if you get a happy feeling by spraying water all over your house, then don't let me stand in your way.

There's a problem, however.  I live in upstate New York, where the sun only comes out when it thinks no one is looking.  How can I "solarize" my water when the sun isn't shining?  Well, fortunately, Mabel Katz is way ahead of me:

[A] very small amount of Blue Solar water, even one drop, added to regular water will solarize it.  You can also solarize it under an incandescent clear light (blue bottle) for an hour, or an incandescent blue light (clear bottle) for an hour.

So that's convenient.  She even has an answer for what to do when you run out, or don't have time to "solarize" any more water:

You can also use it mentally. Mentally repeat "Solar Water"  This will work when you REALLY cannot prepare it or have access to it.  God will do it for you ONLY when you cannot do it physically.

Which raises magical thinking to a whole new level.  "Here's how to make the magic water... but really, all you have to do is think about magic water and the magic will happen!"

So anyhow, many thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link.  It's a little troubling that every time I think I have plumbed the depths of human gullibility, I find that there are many more circles of hell still below me.  Maybe I need to gargle with some "Blue Solar Water" and erase the memory, because if I do any more headdesks, I'm gonna end up with a concussion.