Cloaking device activated

New from the "Don't We Have Worse Things To Worry About?' department, we have two astronomers from Columbia University proposing that we use a laser-based device to cloak our planet from being spotted by hostile aliens.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, David Kipping and Alex Teachey suggest that it might be time to consider shielding our planet from unfriendly eyes.

"About ten years ago, it was proposed that aliens might choose to signal their presence to us not through radio waves, but by building megastructures, which would transit their star and create very weird and artificial-looking transits," Kipping said, bringing to mind the odd luminance drops discovered last year in "Tabby's Star," an anomaly that has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

Scientific luminaries as prominent as Stephen Hawking have suggested that however exciting the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would be, it might not be so great if the aliens came for a visit.  "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans," Hawking said.  "If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.  A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Put even more succinctly by none other than Dave Barry, "It's all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with aliens, but I bet he'd change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door.  I bet he'd be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us."

Kipping says that the idea of cloaking the Earth is feasible, and wouldn't be very expensive, costing around the same in energy as seventy typical homes.  "We realized that because lasers are narrow directed beams, it was quite feasible to produce artificial transits," Kipping said.  "We then took this a step further and had the idea that one could use such a laser system to completely cloak the Earth's transit."

So that sounds okay.  But this does bring up two troubling points.

The first is that if there are intelligent life forms out there looking in our direction, they already know we're here.  Starting in the 1950s, we've been beaming radio waves into space carrying our television shows, an idea that has spawned movies as different as Starman and Galaxy Quest.  Any aliens intercepting our transmissions started with such feats of brilliance as Gilligan's Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and (heaven help us all) Lost in Space, which means they have probably already decided that Earth's inhabitants are a bunch of complete morons.  It wouldn't surprise me to find out that we've already been the subject of a documentary on another planet entitled The Derpuloids of Dumbass-3.

So there's the problem of too little, too late.  But the more serious issue is that maybe instead of worrying about the arrival of hostile aliens, we should attend to more pressing problems.  To wit: climate change (and the fact that our leaders are largely sitting around with their fingers in their ears saying, "la-la-la-la-la, not listening" whenever a climate scientist brings up the topic).  Environmental devastation on a mammoth scale.  The increase in earthquakes directly caused by hydrofracking.  The fact that the American presidential election is increasingly looking like it will boil down to, "Which disease would you like?  Leprosy or syphilis?"

I know that installing a Romulan Cloaking Device on the Earth doesn't preclude our attending to some of these other issues, but I do worry about our attention being trained on the wrong things.  If you consider overall risk, I think that the collapse of the ice shelves, and the flooding of every coastal city on Earth -- now considered virtually inevitable -- is a little more critical than taking measures to keep away the Cardassians.

So anyway.  I'm all for SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).  I would love nothing better than to have concrete proof that we're not alone in the universe.  But considering the vast distances we're talking about -- keep in mind that light from the nearest star takes a little over four years to get here -- I'm thinking we're safe.  Even if the aliens watched episodes of Green Acres, decided that humanity didn't deserve to live, and took off in their spaceship with planet-destroying missiles, I think we won't have anything to fret about for a long time yet.

Psychic health care fundraiser

I swear, sometimes humans are so weird that it leaves me not knowing what to think.

Take, for example, the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre, in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada.  Like any good hospital, Red Deer is committed to excellence in patient care.  It's also like other hospitals in that there's never enough money to achieve everything they want to achieve, so they rely on volunteers, donations, and groups like the Friends of the Red Deer Regional Hospital to meet their goals.  The FRDRH says on their homepage that their vision is to "improve care and comfort to all patients and residents through selfless efforts of staff and volunteers," and their mission to "facilitate innovative fundraising programs for services and equipment to benefit patients and residents in our facilities."

Which all sounds fantastic.  So the FRDRH decided to hold a fundraiser to support their efforts, and as part of this fundraiser, hired...

... a psychic.

For a hundred dollars a pop, you can have a chat with medium Colette Baron-Reid, who bills herself as follows:

Colette Baron-Reid is an internationally acclaimed intuition expert and host of the TV show Messages From Spirit.  She’s also a bestselling inspirational author published in 27 languages, keynote speaker, recording artist, and entrepreneur. 

Vote into the Watkins List as one of the Top 100 Most Spiritually Influential People in 2013, her reputation as a noted contemporary thought leader was firmly established.  In person or on paper, Colette delivers her message of perspective and hope with her trademarked compassionate candor peppered with a pinch of infectious personality.

All righty, then.

So we have a fundraiser for promoting cutting-edge, evidence-based health care that involves paying lots of money to have a woman tell you she can get in touch with your dead relatives, and that Aunt Bertha is just having a jolly old time in heaven.

Which brings up a question I've always had.  When the mediums do their shtick, why do they never find that your dead relatives are in hell?  I know that given some of the people in my family, it seems pretty likely.  We always get told that Grandpa Albert is happy and wishes all of us people down here on Earth the best, but we never get messages like, "Grandpa Albert says to tell you, "DEAR GOD GET ME OUT OF HERE SATAN JUST SENT A CRAZED WEASEL TO CHEW OFF MY FEET."

Which, now that I think about it, could be kind of entertaining.  Maybe I should start my own business as a medium, specializing on getting in touch with people who are in hell.  It'd be fun to tell people, "Uncle Steve says the Lake of Eternal Fire is kind of toasty this time of year.  He also said to tell you, 'Satan said to say "see you next Thursday."'  Do you know what all that's about?"

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I can't argue with a charity event that raises money for a needy hospital, but for cryin' in the sink, why couldn't they have found a better way to do it?  Hire a magician.  At least with a magician, no one's pretending that what they do is real.

Anyhow, if you're in Red Deer, Alberta on April 9, and have $100 to throw away, you might want to consider attending.  I'm always curious about how these hucksters ply their trade, and would love to hear a report.  And at least you'll have the comfort of knowing that your money is going to a good cause, and not to the medium's downpayment on her next crystal ball.

The Soldiers of Christ Bill

In a time when partisan rhetoric, hate-mongering, misogyny, and xenophobia are the Flavors of the Month, the Mississippi House of Representatives just passed a bill that is horrifying even by comparison to what's come before.

House Bill 786, the "Mississippi Church Protection Act," makes it legal to kill someone if you do it while you're acting as a participant in a church service or as a place of worship's "security team."

Here's the relevant section of the bill:

The governing body of any church or place of worship may establish a security program by which designated members are authorized to carry firearms for the protection of the congregation of such church or place of worship, including resisting any unlawful attempt to kill a member(s) or attendee(s) of such church or place of worship, or to commit any felony upon any such member or attendee in the church or place of worship or in the immediate premises thereof.  Any church or place of worship that establishes a security program that meets the requirements of subsection (2) of this section and any participant of such security program shall be immune from civil liability for any action taken by a member of such security program, if such action occurs during the course and scope of the member's performance of their official duties as a member of the security program for the church or place of worship.

Does anyone else see the problem with this?  It's saying that an unregulated and untrained individual, simply by being a member of a church's "security team," is being given carte blanche to kill a person, based on their judgment regarding whether the person was committing a felony.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If that doesn't freak you out sufficiently, maybe the fact that both the bill's supporters and detractors are calling it the "Soldiers of Christ Bill" will do the trick.

Matt Agorist, over at the Free Thought Project, stated it clearly:

By passing this bill, the state of Mississippi effectively recognizes churches as their own sovereign entities — mini-states that are tax-free and immune from their acts of violence carried out in their official duties.

Larry T. Decker, Executive Director of the Secular Coalition for America, concurs:

The "Mississippi Church of Protection Act" is well deserving of the title for "Worst State Bill."  This legislation would put "soldiers of God" above the law, allowing them to act as judge, jury, and executioner.  Religious institutions are already exempt from taxation, financial transparency, and many civil rights laws.  The Mississippi Church Protection Act would constitute an unprecedented and dangerous next step.  Belonging to a church should not afford anyone the same rights and protections as law enforcement.  This legislation emboldens extremists by creating a legal means for radical preachers to enlist their congregants into "God’s army."

Sean Tindell, one of the 85 Representatives who voted for the bill (33 voted against), disagreed.  He said, "The self-defense of these churches is a God-given right...  this legislation will protect the church body."

He did not comment on why churches should receive special protection via this act, and why the same claims couldn't be made for business, schools, and so on.

Interestingly, the Mississippi Police Chiefs' Association is strongly against the bill.  The MPCA's Executive Director, Ken Winter, said in an interview:

By effectively dismantling Mississippi's licensing system, this bill would block law enforcement who stop an armed suspect from confirming that he isn't a violent criminal, severely mentally ill or otherwise dangerous.  We just don't believe that it's a good idea for people to be carrying concealed weapons and not have participated in any training.

The whole thing reinforces the fact that there is a significant proportion of Americans who still think that churches should be above the law -- or, at least, not subject to the same laws the rest of us are.

It's high time we take a good hard look at the nationwide policy of treating churches as if they are nations-within-a-nation -- subject to their own rules, exempt from taxation, and largely protected by their own leaders from prosecution when laws are broken.  It's long overdue for "it's my religion" to stop being some kind of universal Get Out Of Jail Free card.  But unfortunately, with the passage of House Bill 786, we've taken a large step backwards into a time more like the Middle Ages -- when the religious authority and the secular authority were considered coequal.

And if you don't see where that can lead, you haven't studied enough history.

A win for anti-woo

I so often write about topics that make me (and at least some of my readers) want to do repeated headdesks that it's nice to have an opportunity to write about something where the good guys came out ahead.

I'm referring to the decision by Robert DeNiro, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, to pull anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield's film Vaxxed from being shown at the festival.  DeNiro said:

My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family.  But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for. 

The Festival doesn’t seek to avoid or shy away from controversy.  However, we have concerns with certain things in this film that we feel prevent us from presenting it in the Festival program.  We have decided to remove it from our schedule.

Given that the premise of the film is antiscientific horseshit, I and other folks who value evidence and logic over hysteria and misinformation applaud his decision.  Said David Gorski, over at Respectful Insolence:

Freedom of speech means that Andrew Wakefield and anyone he’s conned “persuaded” into believing his pseudoscience can make whatever sort of propaganda film they want, provided they can find the resources to do so.  It also means that the Tribeca Film Festival can screen that same pseudoscientific antivaccine (but I repeat myself) propaganda film if its organizers so desire.  However, it also means that journalists and, yes, bloggers can criticize Tribeca for its decision, refute Andrew Wakefield’s long history of promoting antivaccine misinformation about the MMR, and pre-emptively demolish the conspiracy theory at the heart of Vaxxed.  That’s not “censorship.”  It’s just more speech.

Which is it exactly.  But given that it's conspiracy theories that started the anti-vaxxer movement in the first place, it's not to be wondered at that DeNiro's decision immediately unleashed a screeching horde of anti-vaxxers who claim that Big Pharma had threatened DeNiro into pulling the film.  Even less surprising is that the charge was led by none other than Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, of Natural News:

To try to strong-arm De Niro into pulling the film, intense shaming pressure was brought to bear against Robert De Niro by the vaccine totalitarians, who told De Niro this documentary was so dangerous that no one should ever be allowed to see it.  Vaccine safety, they insist, can’t even be allowed to be DEBATED, they insist!  Only one side of the debate may be seen by the public, and that one side must be the 100% pro-vaccine side which ridiculously claims that “the science is settled” even when no one is allowed to see the science they don’t want you to see.

"The science they don't want you to see."  Better known as "discredited studies that have been replicated over and over with no results."

Of course, Adams defines "science" as "whatever agrees with my preconceived notions," so this is a distinction I wouldn't expect him to make.

But he's not done with his ranting yet:

De Niro discovered that even declaring yourself to be pro-vaccine isn’t enough to appease the vaccine totalitarians.  The mere granting of any public platform to this explosive document is very nearly a crime in the eyes of the corrupt, fraudulent vaccine industry and all its arrogant zealots. 

As more pressure was brought against De Niro for defending the free speech of what might be one of the single most important documentaries of our modern age, he caved.  He pulled the film from Tribeca, participating in the censorship that was demanded by the vaccine totalitarians.  The film’s page on Tribeca was also memory holed — it used to be found at this link — and De Niro felt compelled to issue a follow-up statement today that appeases the demands of the vaccine fundamentalists.

"Vaccine fundamentalists."  Or, as the rest of the world calls them, "medical researchers."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It would take a stronger man than I am not to indulge in a little bit of schadenfreude over Adams's apoplectic rage.  Too often the decision goes the other way -- indulging the anti-science types because they tend to shriek the loudest.  The fact that DeNiro has swayed in the other direction should be heartening.  DeNiro has an autistic son himself, and has gone on record as indulging in some sympathy toward the anti-vaxx movement -- showing that dealing with difficult situations can lead people in either direction, toward considering evidence-based solutions or gravitating to irrational ideas out of desperation.  Not being in his shoes, I can't imagine what it's like, but it's a positive sign that he's taken a step toward rationality.

Of course, Adams isn't gonna see it that way.  To him, it's just one more Big Pharma conspiracy.  To which I say: give it a rest, dude.  The good guys won this time.

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.