The price of free speech

It's been kind of a grim week here at Skeptophilia.  The news over the last few days has been seriously depressing, what with the current political situation, the attack in Orlando (and the chest-thumping by ideologues that followed), and the ongoing turmoil in so many parts of the world.  And much as I'd like to return to my happy world of making fun of people who believe in Bigfoot, aliens, and telepathy, I'm afraid we have (at least) one more rather dismal topic to cover.

This one comes up because of Newt Gingrich, who (according to informed sources) is currently hoping to be chosen as Donald Trump's running mate.  And in what looks like a bid to align himself with Trump's "'Murica!  Fuck Yeah!" platform, Gingrich has proposed recreating the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

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

You probably know that the original such committee was founded back in the 1930s, first to keep track of (and stop) any infiltration into the United States by the Nazis, and later to do the same thing with the communists.  The committee did nab a couple of Soviet spies -- notably Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers -- but in the process blacklisted hundreds of people whose only crime was attending communist party meetings (or even being friends with someone who had).  Eventually, criticizing the government was all it took (as folk singer Pete Seeger found out).  Careers and reputations were ruined, and the gains in terms of national security were debatable at best.

Now, of course, the target is different; Gingrich wants to go after people with Islamist leanings.  "We originally created the House Un-American Activities Committee to go after Nazis," Gingrich said during an appearance on Fox and Friends this week.  "We passed several laws in 1938 and 1939 to go after Nazis and we made it illegal to help the Nazis.  We're going to presently have to go take the similar steps here... We're going to ultimately declare a war on Islamic supremacists and we're going to say, if you pledge allegiance to ISIS, you are a traitor and you have lost your citizenship.  We're going to take much tougher positions."

Which sounds like a credible position at first.  I certainly have no reason to defend people who have dedicated themselves to ISIS, or whose political and religious beliefs impel them to come over here and harm American citizens.

But the problem is, how do you find out who those people are before they act?  The FBI already monitors people who are suspected Islamists, not that such efforts are foolproof.  But Gingrich seems to be proposing further measures, taking legal action against people who have committed no crime, who have only subscribed to the wrong ideology.

Me, I find this troubling.  It's a slide toward imprisoning people for thought crimes, and one step away from abrogating the right to free speech.

And lest you think I'm overreacting, here; just two days ago, Donald Trump revoked The Washington Post's press credentials because he objected to perceived criticism by the media.  "Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign," he said in a statement, "we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post."

The Post's executive editor, Marty Baron, replied:

Donald Trump's decision to revoke The Washington Post's press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press.  When coverage doesn't correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along -- honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly.  We're proud of our coverage, and we're going to keep at it.

Which is it exactly.  If free speech means anything, it must involve allowing citizens to criticize the government.

So the whole thing is moving in a decidedly scary direction.  Look, it's not that I don't appreciate how hard it must be to craft policies that will protect American citizens, insofar as it is possible, from outside threats.  I can't imagine being tasked with monitoring anyone who is suspicious, and making the right call with respect to when to move in and make arrests -- especially given the backlash either way if you're wrong.

But I do know that restricting the right to free speech, muzzling the media, and harassing Americans for perceived "un-American activities," is not the way to go.  We tried it once before, and it didn't work out so well.  The price of free speech is risk -- but it's a cost that is well worth what you gain.

Complexity, uncertainty, and motives

Humans are complex beasts.

I know, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure that out.  (Fortunately for me, since I don't have one.)  But I was thinking about this today with regards to Omar Seddique Mateen, the perpetrator of Sunday's slaughter of 49 men and women in an Orlando nightclub.  Mateen himself was killed in the incident, leading to speculation about his motives for committing such a horrific act.

Immediately after he was identified, his obviously Middle Eastern name fueled talk that he was acting on anti-LGBT beliefs that came from Islam.  This idea was bolstered by the revelation that in a 911 call he made in which he pledged himself and his actions to ISIS.

Then his father came forward, and said that his son had committed the crime because he was "angered over seeing two men kissing."  So for a time, it seemed like the origin of his violent acts was clear enough.

But the father added a comment that made a lot of us frown in puzzlement: he said that his son's actions "had nothing to do with religion."  Really?  If so, why would he be angry over two guys kissing?  It's not like rational secularism would give you the impetus to be so furious over gay guys showing affection that you'd shoot up a nightclub.

Shortly after that, Mateen's ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, came forward and said that Mateen had been physically and verbally abusive to her.  In her statement, Mateen comes across as not just angry, but mentally unstable.  "He was two totally different people," Yusufiy said.  "He would turn and abuse me, out of nowhere, when I was sleeping...  He was not a stable person.  He beat me.  He would come home and start beating me because the laundry wasn't finished, or something like that."  As far as his religious ideology, she said he was religious, but had never expressed sympathy with ISIS, terrorist organizations, or extremists.  "He wasn't very devout," Yusufiy said.  "He liked working out at the gym more."

Then things got even murkier when it was revealed that Mateen himself was a "regular" at Pulse himself, and "used gay dating apps."  This put yet another spin on things -- that Mateen was gay and leading a double life, pretending to be straight to keep the peace with his conservative father.  The image developed of Mateen as a tortured young man, steeped in self-loathing, who used the attack as a way of atoning for his own "sinfulness" through jihad against homosexuals.

Here's the problem, though.  It's always a losing proposition trying to parse the thoughts and motives of someone who died without leaving any hard evidence about what he was thinking at the time.  And even if he had -- left a note, called a friend, whatever -- there's still the problem that we'd only have his own words from which to draw a conclusion.

It's frustrating to say, "We don't know, and almost certainly will never know."  After a tragedy, we want to know the reason, to understand how such appalling things could happen.  Somehow, if we could just pin the cause on one thing -- Islam, availability of guns, mental instability, his anguish over being a closeted gay man, growing up in a narrow, judgmental household -- we could attain closure.

But in this case, it doesn't seem to be possible.  His motives could be any or all of the above, or something else we haven't even considered.  People seldom do anything based on one straightforward, clear reason, much as it'd make life simpler if that were so.  At this point, it's probably pointless to engage in further speculation; we need to be putting our thoughts and efforts into helping the survivors and the families of the victims, and -- most importantly -- taking steps to build a society in which such horrific acts never happen again.

Ghoul agenda

Once again, the United States has been hit by a mass murder.  Fifty confirmed dead, more than that injured.  My heart is torn in half thinking about over a hundred people who had only intended to spend a fun night dancing, drinking, and socializing, and found themselves the targets of a terrorist.

But you know what galls me more?  Before the bodies cooled, before family and friends had been notified, before all of the victims had even been identified, there was an explosion of rhetoric designed for one purpose and one purpose only; to use the tragedy to score political points.  These ghouls couldn't even wait a few days before twisting the deaths of fifty people to serve their own ideologies.

Let's start with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who shortly after the massacre tweeted a verse from the bible -- Galatians 6:7.  "Do not be deceived.  God cannot be mocked.  A man reaps what he sows."  Patrick was immediately excoriated for his callous response, and as a result deleted the tweet, following it up with a statement about how "stunned and saddened" he is over the event.  Some have generously speculated that Patrick's post had nothing to do with the Orlando killings -- he does post bible verses on a daily basis -- but given his anti-LGBT vitriol in the past, I'm to be forgiven for being somewhat doubtful of that.

Others were less equivocal about it.  Firebrand evangelical preacher Steven Anderson stated that he was happy the massacre occurred, because after all, the victims were "just disgusting homosexuals at a gay bar."  Anderson went on to point fingers at others he said were going to use the tragedy to gain political ground, in a statement that should be an odds-on contender for the 2016 gold medal in Unintentional Irony:

But the bad news is that this is now gonna be used, I’m sure, to push for gun control, where, you know, law-abiding normal Americans are not gonna be allowed to have guns for self-defense.  And then I’m sure it’s also gonna be used to push an agenda against so-called “hate speech.”  So Bible-believing Christian preachers who preach what the Bible actually says about homosexuality — that it’s vile, that it’s disgusting, that they’re reprobates — you know, we’re gonna be blamed.  Like, “It’s all extremism! It’s not just the Muslims, it’s the Christians!”

Because saying that homosexuals deserve to be gunned down because of their sexual orientation is, apparently, "not hate speech."

But Anderson's statement brings us to the whole conflict over gun ownership.  Because it wasn't even an hour after the murders hit the news that I saw this:

And this:

And this:

Then, there's this post implying that it's Obama's policies that are at fault here:

Because obviously, there can't be any reason for those statistics other than, you know, Obama.

Not to be outdone, Donald Trump commented on the killings, but as befits a sociopathic narcissist, made it all about him.  "Appreciate the congrats for being right about radical Islamic terrorism," he tweeted.  "I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance.  We must be smart!"

How about some mention of the victims, here?  No, of course not.  That would distract from his incessant focus on himself.  And because that wasn't enough, he followed it up by a sly implication that Obama was not only complicit, but in agreement with the shooter.  He "gets [the motives of the killer] better than anyone understands," Trump said in an interview yesterday.

Then the conspiracy theorists got involved.  The Pulse massacre was a "false flag."  The shooting victims weren't really shot, they were "crisis actors."  And combining all of the above, for a trifecta of heartless lunacy, we have none other than the inimitable Alex Jones, saying that the shootings and the recent killing of singer Christina Grimmie were false flags engineered by Obama to outlaw guns.

I just have one question, here.  What happened to the tradition of a moment of silence when tragedy occurs?  What happened to showing some respect for the people who have died, and those whose lives have been changed irrevocably?  What about compassion?

And most of all, what about forgetting about yourself and your narrow little worldview for a while, and putting yourself in the shoes of people who are suffering?

Yes, there have been tremendous outpourings of sympathy.  There have been donations of time, money, and blood for the victims.  Such times bring out the best in us, pull us together, tap into unknown wellsprings of love and caring.

But for some, it only tightens them down on fears, anger, and hatred.  And for those people, I have only one thing to say: shut the fuck up.

Meme wars

It's time we all make a commitment to the truth.

I am sick unto death of people trying to score political points by spreading around falsehoods on the internet.  With the access to technology most of us have, it usually takes less than five minutes to check on the veracity of what you're about to post before you post it.  Instead, people seem content to spread around bullshit that conforms to their preconceived notions, whether or not it's true.

This is inexcusable.  And it needs to stop.

And yes, it's both sides of the political aisle that are guilty of this.  Let's start with this one, that was making the rounds a few months ago:

Ted Cruz never said that.  Snopes has a link to a transcript of the entire speech he made at Liberty University on the 23rd of March, 2015.  That line appears nowhere.

The worst part?  When I told the person who posted this that it was fake, his response was, "Yes, but I'm sure he believes it.  He could have said it."

You know what?  I don't give a flying fuck what Ted Cruz, or anyone else, could have said.  The fact, is, he didn't say it.  Claiming that he did is a lie.  Don't try to tell me that the truth doesn't matter.

Next up, Elizabeth Warren:

That's another big nope.  Snopes says it's "unproven," but adds, "We were unable to locate any interviews, footage, clips, tweets, or other instances in which Elizabeth Warren said anything remotely resembling the phrase quoted above."

I.e., she didn't say it.  Moving on.

There's this one, attributed to Mitt Romney:

Not only did Romney not say that, Laura Ingraham didn't air a show on that date, and Romney was not her guest at any time in early 2014.

The false attributions don't stop at political figures:

This one started making the rounds right after Prince died, so he conveniently couldn't say "I never said that."  Fortunately, Snopes did.

How about this one, trying to discredit Donald Trump:

The people at FactCheck.org researched this one exhaustively.  Trump never said any such thing, not in 1998 or any other year.

Most appallingly, there's this one:

No, sorry for those of you who'd like to believe this; Hillary Clinton is not an "advocate for rapists."  In 1975 she was a defense attorney.  Do you know what a defense attorney's job is?  Go ahead, I'll wait while you look it up.

The truth is that Clinton was appointed to defend the accused rapist, Tom Taylor, and according to the chief prosecutor, Mahlon Gibson, "Hillary told me she didn’t want to take that case, she made that very clear."  Snopes goes on to say:

As for the claim that Hillary Clinton "knew the defendant was guilty," she couldn't possibly have known that unless she were present when the incident in question occurred.  Even if she surmised that the defendant was likely guilty based upon the evidence and/or his statements, she was obliged to operate under the rules of the U.S. legal system, which assume the accused to be innocent until proved guilty.

And so on and so forth.

You know what?  I don't honestly care what political party you belong to, whether you're liberal or conservative or something else entirely.  I don't care who you're planning to vote for next November, or if you're sick of the whole shebang and decide to stay home.

But I do care about the truth.  So for all of you people with the fast-forward-finger out there; take five damn minutes and check to see if what you're posting is true before you post it.  If posting stupid stuff politicians do and say gets you off, then there's certainly enough to choose from without spreading around outright falsehoods.   You are helping nothing, and proving nothing, by circulating bullshit because it lines up with what you'd like to be true.

What you're doing is making yourself complicit in a lie.

Brexit conspiracies

Even people over here across the Atlantic have been watching the whole Brexit controversy closely, and wondering whether the powers-that-be in Great Britain will elect to remain part of the European Union, or leave it and steer their own course.  I'm not nearly well-informed enough in global politics and economics to comment either way, but of course I did have to take a look at an article over at Politics that said that there have been conspiracy theories popping up all over the place that have to do with the issue.

Now, I may not be very savvy politically, but I do know my conspiracy theories.  (What that says about  my priorities I would prefer not to consider.)  So naturally I had to check out the article.  The author, Adam Bienkov, says that there are five conspiracy theories that have arisen regarding the Brexit controversy, to wit:

1. The "Remainers" have planted sleeper agents in the "Leave" campaign.
2. The online voter registration site crashed hours before the deadline to register, and the crash was staged by the government to prevent people from registering.
3. The news media is biased toward the "Remain" campaign.
4. The government has been sneakily registering non-British EU citizens who are living in the UK to vote.
5. There is a cadre of academics and experts who are working together to defeat the "Remain" campaign.

So I read all of this, and I'm thinking, "That's it?  That's the best you can do?  Sleeper agents, website crashes, and biased academics and news broadcasters?"

What, no chemtrails?  No government-run execution camps with guillotines for dissenters?  No HAARP-style weather modification stations to unleash chaos?  No claims that every damn thing that happens is a "false flag?"  No shape-shifting Reptilian alien overlords from another planet?  (Not even Nigel Farage?  I'd think that'd be a gimme.  The first time I saw him, he immediately struck me as looking like someone whose facial muscles were being operated remotely by a species that had only recently learned the rule "When expressing interest, raise the eyebrows and open the eyes wide.")

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And not even a single claim that whatever side of the issue you're arguing against is being controlled by an evil cadre of Jews?

C'mon, British people.  You can do better than this.  I'm not normally someone who waves the Stars & Stripes and runs around shrieking "'Murica!  Fuck yeah!", but in this case, I'd say we're kicking your asses.  Okay, you got us with regards to beer quality, humor level in comedy shows, cleanliness of public transport, attractive accent quotient, and overall level of civilization, but when it comes to conspiracy theories, you don't even have a shot at a bronze medal.

I know it's probably galling to have to look to your American cousins for inspiration, but admit it; we got this down cold.  When it comes to dreaming up cockamamie explanations for perfectly ordinary events, the Yanks are the tops.  (Although I must say that the Russians are contenders.  Just in the last couple of years, we've had Russians claiming that a funny-looking rock was a spaceship, that Vladimir Putin attacked the Crimea to get control of a Jurassic-age super-powerful alien pyramid, and that every historical account that occurred before the early Middle Ages is a fabrication by an evil consortium of historians.  Not to mention various reports of Bigfoot, a topic they seem to take awfully seriously.)

So I'm not suggesting that we Americans get complacent, mind you.  It's times like this that I'm glad we have people like Alex Jones and Jeff Rense on our side.  But the recent British attempt to break into the world of batshit lunacy was really kind of embarrassing, and I would encourage any British readers of Skeptophilia to pay close attention to how we do things over here, and follow our model.

I'm confident that you can rise to the occasion.  Any country that produced both Monty Python and Eddie Izzard is definitely not lacking in the quality control department.  So I'm counting on you.  I'll be watching the news over the next few weeks, waiting for words like "Illuminati" and "truther" and "Nibiru" and "police state" to show up in British media sources.  Let's see what you got.

Dog days

My wife and I share our living space with two canine companions.

First, we have Grendel, a (very) mixed breed, who looks like the result of blenderizing DNA from a pug, a German shepherd, a pit bull, a husky, and a fireplug.  He's cute, in a melancholy, "what are you so sad about, boy?" kind of way, and uses his wide range of pathetic expressions to get attention and food scraps.

Then we have Lena, whose ancestry includes redbone, blue-tick coonhound, and beagle.  She's eternally cheerful, has a tail that never stops wagging, lives for chasing squirrels, and has the intelligence of a loaf of bread.

They get along pretty well, although I kind of get the impression they don't really understand each other.  Grendel sometimes tries to play with Lena, in his ponderous sort of way, but it never lasts very long.  Lena usually ends up capering around, trying to fit all of the toys in her mouth at the same time, and Grendel gives up, sighs heavily, and plods over to us hoping we'll give him a dog cookie for at least giving it a shot.

I've always had dogs.  There's something about having a dog in my house that just seems necessary.  It always comes along with bushels of pet hair, muddy pawprints, and a variety of carpet stains, but I can't imagine that part of my life being missing.

I bring all of this up because I've always wondered about how dogs were domesticated.  Some people think they started out as utilitarian hunting animals, and after selection for responsiveness to human interaction, gradually morphed into what we have today.  Others think that the companionship aspect was there from the beginning, perhaps from as long ago as our cave-dwelling days.

The question, of course, will probably never have much going for it other than speculation, given that we don't have much in the way of evidence on which to base an answer.  However, a study by Laurent Frantz of Oxford University et al., published this week in Science, has at least given us a little more information about when and where this pivotal event took place.

According to Frantz's team, a study of DNA from the remains of 59 ancient dogs, including one from the late Neolithic Period (this particular mutt lived in Newgrange, Ireland about 4,800 years ago), dogs were domesticated at least twice -- once in Western Europe, and once in East Asia.  The East Asian dogs came with their human friends during migrations, and interbred with preexisting European Paleolithic dogs to produce most of the breeds familiar in Europe and America.  Says Tina Hesman Saey, who wrote about the study in Science News:

Using the Newgrange dog as a calibrator and the modern dogs to determine how much dogs have changed genetically in the past 4,800 years, Frantz and colleagues determined that dogs’ mutation rate is slower than researchers have previously calculated.  Then, using the slower mutation rate to calculate when dogs became distinct from wolves, the researchers found that separate branches of the canine family tree formed between 20,000 and 60,000 years ago.  Many previous calculations put the split between about 13,000 and about 30,000 years ago, but the new dates are consistent with figures from a study of an ancient wolf’s DNA.

Which is a long time ago, considering that most of the distinct modern dog breeds trace back to a common ancestor only a few centuries ago.  (Exceptions include some of the old Chinese breeds, such as the Pekingese, Shih-Tzu and Sharpei, which seem to be a good bit older than that.)  But despite the recent diversification of shapes, sizes, colors, and behaviors, what seems pretty certain is that dogs in some form have been our friends for a long, long time.

Compare this to cats.  A recent study done in Japan found that cats recognize their own names and their owners' voices, but apparently evolved not to give a damn.  Their ears turn and whiskers twitch when their owners speak, but it doesn't make a lot of difference to their behavior otherwise.  I find this result unsurprising.  I can say from personal experience that my 18-year-old cat Geronimo considers me to be warm-blooded furniture, and his expression usually says, "I am only refraining from clawing your eyes out because you feed me expensive canned food every day."  Contrast this to Lena, whose body language communicates "I LOVE YOU SOOOO MUCH" if I give her a muddy stick to chew on.

Not that I'm biased, or anything.  I'm sure that a lot of this is my projecting my own emotions, thoughts, and feelings onto my pets, but when Grendel looks up at me with those big sad eyes, it's hard not to sense a bond.  Maybe we've evolved into the relationship, too, because there's something primal and comforting about having a dog around.

Despite the hair, muddy pawprints, and carpet stains.

Go to the source

One of the many things I harp on with my students is "check your sources."

And "check your sources" doesn't mean the same thing as "cite your sources."  A bullshit citation written up in perfect MLA format, every comma, parenthesis, and colon in place, is still a bullshit citation.  There is no substitute for doing the legwork of making certain that the information you're using comes from a reputable source.

Which brings us, predictably enough, to Natural News.

Natural News has hidden for years under the façade of being a healthy-lifestyle site.  The 10% of their articles that are about better diet and regular exercise as a way of increasing vitality and longevity, however, are drowned beneath piles of nonsense of the worst sort, including anti-vaxx rhetoric, homeopathy, "toxin cleanses," and conspiracy theories about how the scientific world is an evil empire bent on ruining human health permanently.  Here's a sampler of their most-viewed articles as of today:

• 10 shocking reasons why Zika virus fear is another fraudulent medical hoax and vaccine industry funding scam
• How antidepressants ruin your natural serotonin so you can never be happy again ... without your pills
• Why double-blind drug trials are a science FRAUD: The more toxic the side effects, the more patients believe the drugs are 'working'
• Mother beats cancer with JUICING after told she only had two weeks to live

So it's not surprising that you won't find anything from Natural News in a peer-reviewed science journal, and it's not because there's a big conspiracy to keep their discoveries from becoming known.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But if there's one thing that Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and his cadre of loons over at Natural News excel at, it's marketing.  They know how to push their ideas into social media, giving it all a nice glossy veneer of respectability, duping the desperate, gullible, and scientifically illiterate into buying what they're selling.  However, they haven't been able to make any inroads into the world of actual scientific research, which is why...

... they are starting their own science journal.

Called the Natural Science Journal, the idea is to make an end run around all of the legitimate checks-and-balances that keep outright bullshit from making its way into print.  Here's a bit from their press release:

In a world where nearly all so-called "science" is actually little more than corporate fraud and government malfeasance, nearly all mainstream science journals have been taken over by pharmaceutical and biotech interests.  As a result, they destroy and suppress human knowledge rather than expanding it. 

All the big science journals -- Nature, The British Medical Journal, The Lancet and so on -- function almost entirely as science prostitutes for corporate interests, spewing out a vomitous cascade of fraudulent, industry ghostwritten "doctored" studies that the industry pretends represent real science.  This sad, filthy corruption of science harms the reputation of science itself and detracts from the valuable expansion of knowledge that can be achieved when science is practiced in the interests of humanity rather than corporate profits.

Which is mighty convenient, given that most of what peer-reviewed science has shown directly contradicts everything that Mike Adams and his crew believe.

And I feel obliged to mention that he really needs to lay off the "bold" typeface.

Adams is adamant that he is fostering actual research:

Please note that this journal is a hard sciences journal, meaning we seek scientific papers based on hard analytics in chemistry, physics, botany and so on. This is not a journal for philosophy or thought experiments that cannot be proven through hard experimental data.

So he's asking for submissions about the following topics:

• Geoengineering and weather modification
• Climate change / carbon dioxide
• Vaccine composition, toxicity and adverse events
• Genetically modified organisms
• Agrochemicals (pesticides / herbicides)
• Epigenetics and chemically-induced genetic expression
• Biosludge and biosolids
• Botany, permaculture and chemical-free agriculture

But don't worry, they're not biased at all.

Look, I know science isn't perfect.  Scientists (like all of us) have their biases, peer review sometimes misses mistakes (and occasionally outright fraud), the money motive drives research to an unfortunate degree, and so on.  But it is still by far the best tool we have for understanding the universe, including ourselves and how our own bodies work.  The idea that Adams has created his own "journal" simply because he doesn't like the fact that scientific research doesn't support what he believes isn't an indication of a failure of science.

It simply means that Adams is wrong.

My fear, though, is that given Natural Science Journal's neutral-sounding name, and its cursory nod in the direction of peer review, it will be taken seriously.  And then it'll be even harder to deal with the unscientific hogwash Adams and his ilk put out.