High school baptism

I am sick unto death of public school employees proselytizing their students.

And I don't care what exactly you're proselytizing -- a political stance, a religious worldview, an opinion on gay rights or abortion or the legalization of marijuana.  Now, understand what I'm saying here; it is all right to discuss any of those things, as long as it makes sense in the context of the curriculum.

It is not all right to push one specific viewpoint on students.

Public school students are (1) young, and (2) a captive audience.  Furthermore, it is not a venue in which kids are generally taught to stand up to the adults and say, "I disagree with you, and here's why."  So at best the students who hold opposing viewpoints are generally going to be cowed into silence; at worst, they are held up to ridicule or punishment for going against both the authority figure and the majority.

Which is why what happened at a Georgia high school a couple of weeks ago is inexcusable.  Earlier in September Katie Beth Carter, a student at Heritage High School in Ringgold, Georgia, had been killed in an automobile accident.  The varsity football coach, E. K. Slaughter, decided to honor Katie's memory...

... by holding a ceremony and baptizing the entire football team.

Lest you think this was just a non-religious dunk in a water tank -- akin to the "Ice Bucket Challenge" that went around a couple of years ago to raise money for ALS research -- Slaughter's own words to the team should clarify:

Thanks for having the courage to take this step.  We talked the other day — for those who weren’t in our team meeting — I was just sharing with them, you don’t realize characteristics that certain people have until you don’t have them anymore.  And just reflecting over the last week with KB [Katie Beth] and just how loving she was and how servient [sic] she was… This is about you and this is about your relationship with Christ and nothing else, ‘K? It’s a big step for you.

And Katie's brother Jacob, a practicing minister, took the players one at a time and dunked them after saying, "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit..."

Baptism by Klavdiy Vasilievich Lebedev (ca. 1890) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some religious folks are lauding the coach for taking this step.  If you're one of them, then stop and ask yourself: would you be feeling the same way if the coach had used his position of authority to read to the kids from the Qu'ran or The God Delusion?  Or to lecture them about how important it was to stump for Hillary Clinton?  Or how they needed to write to their congresspersons in support of LGBT marriage rights?

If any of those made you cringe, then don't stand there and claim that you don't understand why proselytizing of any kind needs to be kept out of schools.

And it's not that I want school employees to encourage atheism.  That, too, is proselytizing.  What I'm saying is that none of it has any place in public schools.  There are plenty of venues where kids can be instructed in what to believe about religion, politics, and social issues.  Why are home and church not sufficient?  Why do we need to turn schools into indoctrination camps, and (inevitably) leave some kids feeling as if they're being excluded or demeaned because of their own beliefs?

Put simply: separation of church and state isn't there to protect nonbelievers; it's there to protect everyone.

Fortunately, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has gotten involved, and almost certainly there will be a lawsuit. "Losing a beloved recent graduate is a terrible tragedy and we understand the district community must cope and grieve together," said Liz Cavell, staff attorney for the FFRF.  "But this can and should be done in a way that does not give the clear impression that the school district endorses religion or a particular religion."

Which is it exactly.  Opponents have characterized the FFRF as promoting a secular viewpoint in schools, but that's inaccurate; it is opposed to promoting any viewpoint, secular or religious, to public school students.  Christians would rightly object to their children being told what they should believe, or that their own beliefs are wrong; adherents of other religions, and young people with no religious beliefs at all, should be accorded the same right.

In fact, isn't there something in the bible about "do unto others as you would have them do unto you?"  I seem to remember that part was pretty important.  Maybe Coach Slaughter and his supporters should re-read that part.

A tsunami of misinformation

One of the most frustrating things I encounter while doing research for Skeptophilia is sensationalized nonsense masquerading as fact -- especially when it is gussied up in such a way as to make it seem reasonable to the layperson.

This is the problem with the article "Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean (And It's Going To Get Worse)" that appeared over at Zero Hedge yesterday.  In it, we have a rehash of the Fukushima disaster of 2011, which generated a horrific tsunami and breached a nuclear power plant.  The combined effects of the earthquake and its aftermath cost almost 16,000 lives, and left 230,000 people homeless -- some of whom are still living in temporary housing.

Unfortunately, that's about where the Zero Hedge article stops being factual and starts relying on sensationalist exaggerations and outright fabrication.  Here's a brief list of the inaccurate claims that appear on the article:

• "[The Fukushima earthquake was] believed to be an aftershock of the 2010 earthquake in Chile."

Well, it might be true that someone believes that.  Presumably the writer of the article does.  But there aren't any geologists who do.  The earthquakes occurred a year apart and over 17,000 kilometers from each other.  There is no seismic process that could possibly connect the two.

If that weren’t bad enough:

• "Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean every day."

This isn't incorrect so much as it is misleading.  Note that nowhere in this statement (in fact, nowhere in the article) does it state how radioactive those 300 tons of water are -- i.e., how much radioactive cesium (the most common radioisotope in the leaked water) was present.  In fact, marine radiochemist Ken Buesseler has stated that ocean radiation levels near the disabled power plant are one thousandth of what they were immediately following the accident, and at any distance at all from the site the contamination is "barely discernible."

• "It should come as no surprise, then, that Fukushima has contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean in just five years."

Cf. my previous comments about quantities and measurability.

• "Not long after Fukushima, fish in Canada began bleeding from their gills, mouths, and eyeballs.  This “disease” has been ignored by the government and has decimated native fish populations, including the North Pacific herring."

This is referring to viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a deadly disease of fish that is caused by (note the name) a virus.  It has nothing to do with radiation or the Fukushima disaster, and was recorded in fish populations long before the earthquake.

Also, correlation does not imply causation.  Even if viral hemorrhagic septicemia had only been seen after debris from Fukushima washed ashore, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the contaminants in the debris had caused the disease.

• "Elsewhere in Western Canada, independent scientists have measured a 300% increase in the level of radiation."

300% of a minuscule amount is still a minuscule amount.

• "Further south in Oregon, USA, starfish began losing legs and then disintegrating entirely when Fukushima radiation arrived there in 2013.  Now, they are dying in record amounts, putting the entire oceanic ecosystem in that area at risk.

This is another viral disease called starfish wasting disease, and like the fish disease mentioned earlier, has bugger-all to do with Fukushima as there have been outbreaks of it since 1972.  However, there is some evidence that increasing water temperatures have made starfish more susceptible, so there's a connection to climate change, which is something we should be concerned about.

And no alarmist article would be complete without some scary pictures.  First, we have this one, from NOAA:

This has nothing to do with radiation leakage.  It's a map tracking wave heights of the tsunami as it crossed the Pacific, as you'd know if you had looked at the scale on the right hand side.

Then there's this one:

Which shows a bunch of dead starfish.  But as I established a couple of paragraphs ago, this has nothing to do with radiation poisoning.

And so on and so forth.  The alarmist foolishness in articles like this is dangerous from a couple of standpoints. First, it makes it sound like the scientists themselves are ignorant of what's going on, or (worse) are actively covering it up for their own malign purposes.  Second, it misrepresents what the science actually says.  Third, it distracts us from problems that actually are global catastrophes in the making by focusing our attention elsewhere.

At a less-than-careful reading, though, such an article sounds well researched and factually accurate.  It has links, sources cited, uses technical vocabulary.  It's only if you take the time to do some research yourself that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

So caveat lector.  As usual.  And to the people who keep forwarding this article around, I'm respectfully asking you to stop.  It's hard enough to get people to trust legitimate science these days; this kind of thing only makes it worse.

Cunning disguise

A couple of days ago, we had the conspiracy theory on the part of the pro-Trump side of things that moderator Lester Holt had thrown the debate in favor of Clinton because she was giving him threatening coded hand gestures.  So because the watchword around here is fairness, today we're going to look at another conspiracy theory, this one dreamed up by members of the pro-Clinton faction:

Donald Trump isn't really Donald Trump, he's Andy Kaufman in disguise.

Andy Kaufman, as most people my age know, was the disturbingly odd comedian who played the vaguely Eastern European Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi, and then went on to have a bizarre career doing standup comedy.  His comedy shtick frequently involved wrestling women, Elvis Presley impressions, and (occasionally, if the audience wasn't sufficiently appreciative) reading to them from The Great Gatsby until they gave up and left.

Kaufman's routines were so weird, and he was so secretive about his own personal life, that many people began to wonder if the line between his acting and his actual personality was becoming blurred -- that maybe it wasn't an act, that the man was mentally ill.  He did nothing whatsoever to discourage this perception, and in fact it was the subject of the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon (starring Jim Carrey as Kaufman).  But because of his penchant for dubiously tasteful pranks, when he died in 1984 at the age of 35 of a rare form of lung cancer, not a few of his fans wondered if he'd faked his own death -- and in fact, there are still people who believe that Kaufman is alive and in hiding under an assumed identity.

Which is strange enough.  But just last week Zach Schonfeld did a piece over at Newsweek that apparently there are people who take this idea one step further -- that not only did Andy Kaufman survive, but he survived as Donald Trump.

Andy Kaufman shortly before his death.  Yes, I know he looks absolutely nothing like Donald Trump.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Never mind that Trump himself is older than Kaufman; Trump was born in 1946, Kaufman in 1949.  So Trump was out there doing stuff while Kaufman was still alive and performing.  Easy, say the conspiracy theorists; either the real Trump died shortly before Kaufman's faked death, or... maybe... Kaufman killed him and took his place.

The sole evidence, if I can dignify it by that name, that is trotted out to support this nutty idea is that people point out the similarity between Trump's bombastic, blustering style and the persona of one of Kaufman's characters, lounge singer Tony Clifton, who would shout abuse at audience members in a New York-accented voice that Schonfeld says "resembled a coked-up Bugs Bunny's."  One of the proponents of this theory -- a science writer named Erik Vance -- says that the similarity is so striking they must be the same person.

"All you gotta do is watch one Tony Clifton video and you realize, this is Trump!" Vance told Schonfeld.  "He’s saying these audacious horrible things that he’s not serious about, but he doesn’t care!  It’s just one big joke for him.  And it’s brilliant.  You watch Donald Trump and you can’t help but think, ‘No one can think this stuff!’  I imagine Trump going home at night and putting on a beret and listening to Rachmaninoff and discussing postmodern theory."

I kept thinking that Vance would, somewhere in the story, say, "Ha ha!  Not really!  Of course I don't think Kaufman and Trump are the same person!  They don't even look alike!"  But Vance seems... really serious.  When he created a blog to give his theory more visibility, he was swamped with positive feedback, despite the fact that he said stuff like this:

I believe that Kaufman created his Donald Trump character sometime around 1972, as a precursor to his equally jarring Vegas lounge singer, Tony Clifton.  As the comedian gained fame and money, he worked doggedly to build a backstory for Trump, making him the son of a New York real estate agent, a graduate of the Wharton School, and giving him a stint in military school. 

As both Kaufman and his Trump character became more successful, the comedian had to increasingly rely on his brother Michael and collaborator Bob Zmuda to take turns playing Trump.  In 1983, exhausted and frustrated that he couldn’t dedicate more time to the Trump project, he made a decision.  He would fake his death, undergo reconstructive surgery, bleach his hair into an elaborate comb-over, and become Trump full time.

What this illustrates -- besides the fact that people believe some seriously wacky shit, a point that hardly needed emphasis, especially for regular readers of Skeptophilia -- is that engaging in nutty conspiracy theories is not confined to people of one political stripe.  It's easy to conclude that of course we are seeing everything clearly, it's the other side that subscribes to goofy notions about how the world works.  They believe in conspiracy theories; we are perceiving reality.

What's becoming apparent is that the lunatic fringe on both sides is prone to bizarre counterfactual thinking.  So once again, if behooves us to recall Kathryn Schulz's dictum of being able to look at our own beliefs and say, "I don't know, maybe I'm wrong."

Of course, the likely truth is that Hillary Clinton was not engaging in threatening nose-scratching to intimidate Lester Holt, Donald Trump is (for better or for worse) Donald Trump, and Andy Kaufman died at the young age of 35 way back in 1984.  I know that Ockham's Razor is just a rule of thumb, and sometimes the world does turn out to be weird and convoluted; but in this case, I strongly suspect that the simplest explanation is actually the truth -- regardless of what people on either side of the aisle would like to believe.

Possession profession

Looking for a job with excitement and travel opportunities?  Do I have news for you!

Of course, there are a couple of downsides.  These include (1) you most likely have to become a Catholic priest to be eligible, and (2) it requires you to commit yourself to fighting bad guys who almost certainly don't exist.

What I'm referring to is an urgent call that was issued last week by a spokesman for the Vatican regarding a drastic shortage of exorcists.  The announcement was made by Valter Cascioli, who is the "scientific consultant" for the Vatican-endorsed International Association of Exorcists, which in my mind is a little like being the "reality consultant" for Looney Tunes.  Cascioli, we find out, also teaches a course in exorcism at the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum in Rome.  This makes me wonder if there's a required lab class that goes along with the course.  Do you get graded on how thoroughly squelched the demon is after you exorcise it?  Do you get points off if your subject is eventually, as it were, repossessed?

Be that as it may, Cascioli takes the whole thing pretty seriously.  "The lack of exorcists is a real emergency," he said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa.  "There is a pastoral emergency as a result of a significant increase in the number of diabolical possessions that exorcist priests are confronting.  The number of people who take part in occult and satanic practices, which lead to serious physical, psychological and spiritual damages, is constantly rising."

Saint Francis Borgia Performing an Exorcism by Francisco de Goya (1788) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Amongst the difficulties I see with the whole concept of possession is that you'd think an atheist like me would be a sitting duck with respect to demonic attack.  I mean, I don't do all of the Vatican-approved things to protect myself, e.g. wearing a crucifix, making the sign of the cross, praying, and sprinkling myself with holy water.  And yet, here I sit, neither turning my head a full 360 nor puking up pea soup all over my computer.  In fact, atheists never seem to be the victims of demonic possession -- it's always people who believed in the devil and all of his assorted pals in the first place.

I wonder why that is.

This doesn't seem to occur to Cascioli, however.  In fact, he says, "There is a broad spread of superstitious practices, and with that a growing number of requests for help from people who are directly or indirectly struck by evil.  It is dangerous to underestimate a phenomenon that is caused by the direct actions of the devil, but also by a decline in faith and values."

Note that Cascioli attributes the rise in the demand for exorcisms with the "spread of superstitious practices," which is true, but not for the reason he thinks.

In fact, Cascioli thinks that exorcist training programs need to be expanded dramatically.  "There doesn’t exist a training institution at university level," he says.  "We need an interdisciplinary approach in which science collaborates with religion, and psychiatrists work with demonologists and exorcists."

And of course, there's just one problem with that, which is that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that demons exist, so a scientist collaborating with a demonologist would be sort of akin to a scientist collaborating with a unicornologist.  Not much chance there of getting funding, much less making it past the peer review process.

Nevertheless, Cascioli is getting a lot of support from his fellow demon-eviction squad.  Father Vincent Lampert of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, who is called "America's top exorcist" and whose activities have been featured on the television show Paranormal Witness, concurs with Cascioli's call for more exorcists.  "We’re gaining all sorts of knowledge, but there’s still that emptiness within us that is being filled with addictive behavior such as drugs and pornography," Father Lampert said.  "The decline in faith goes hand in hand with the rise in evil."

Well, all I can say is that if pornography led to demonic possession, the vast majority of single males (and a good many of the married ones) would be possessed.  In fact, it's hard to imagine the demons keeping up with the demand.

In all seriousness, the whole thing strikes me as kind of dangerous.  Not the demons, but the exorcists themselves.  How many people who are mentally ill -- especially schizophrenics and people with panic and anxiety disorders -- have been frightened by the combination of their experiences and the superstitious nonsense being thrust upon them into undergoing an exorcism rather than seeking legitimate medical attention?  Despite Cascioli's confidence that he can tell the difference between a mental illness and demonic possession, I'm unconvinced.

Of course I would be, given that I don't think demons exist in the first place.  But still.  The idea that some poor tortured soul would seek out an exorcist rather than getting help from a doctor is appalling.

So there you have it.  Today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Myself, I can only hope that the shortage of exorcists isn't because the demons have been busier, but because belief in this dangerous superstition is on the decline.  The fact that there are still people like Cascioli and Lampert around is indicative of the fact that we're not fully in the 21st century yet -- but perhaps we're moving in the right direction.

Winner by a nose

A lot of Trump supporters are frustrated that Their Boy didn't do so well in the debate Monday night.  I mean, it would take a serious pro-Donaldite to feel like his performance was anything but a blustering, sometimes baffling word salad.  It's unsurprising considering his penchant for extemporizing -- a strategy that may play well when you're at a rally composed of your loyal followers, but doesn't exactly work on the national stage while being watched by (allegedly) more people than tuned in to the last Superbowl.

But the problem is, when someone you're counting on doesn't come through, you start casting around for an explanation.  Because obviously it couldn't be your candidate's fault, right?

Of course right.

So first, we had Donald himself blaming his poor showing on a faulty microphone.  How that could have an effect I don't know, given that we could hear him just fine.  Maybe he thought that the mic was magically turning his eloquent words into incoherent babbling like his comments on cybersecurity:

I have a son.  He's 10 years old.  He has computers.  He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable.  The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough.  And maybe it's hardly doable.  But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing.  But that's true throughout our whole governmental society.  We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.

Yeah!  Okay!  What?

But Trump wasn't the only one to claim that there was fishy stuff going on.  There's a conspiracy theory making the rounds that the moderator, Lester Holt, was deliberately throwing the debate for Hillary Clinton.  And not only that; Clinton herself was signaling him by giving him threatening coded hand gestures by scratching her nose.

I'm not making this up.  According to the video, Clinton scratched her nose six times.  She apparently did this to let Holt know if he was asking questions to Trump that were too easy or ones to her that were too hard, to coerce him into sidestepping awkward topics, and allowing Clinton to (and I quote) "interrupt and score with a zinger."

Never mind that according to a PBS staff writer, Trump interrupted Clinton 51 times in two hours.  Never mind that Trump himself was sniffing constantly during the entire debate, and no one's claiming that he was secretly signaling someone, possibly his coke dealer.

I mean, seriously, folks.  If you don't like Hillary Clinton's politics, that's absolutely fine by me.  But the idea that she was communicating with Holt in code so he could skew the debate in her favor is...

... kind of stupid.

For one thing, Lester Holt is a registered Republican.  Why on earth a registered Republican (who has been a respected figure in journalism since the early 1980s) would throw a debate in favor of a  Democrat is beyond me.  I have a feeling it's beyond the people making the claim, too.  After all, these sorts of things aren't about rationalism and logic, they're about the world conforming to their own personal view of things.

Damn the evidence, full speed ahead.

But even so, I've seen this claim surface on social media more than once in the past couple of days, and mostly the comments have been on the order of "I knew it would be rigged" and a knowing nod.  And this strikes me as a dangerous trend.  It's the approach of the toddler, you know?  If you don't get your way, if your every wish isn't immediately met, it's the whole world's fault.  It couldn't be that you're interpreting things wrong, or (heaven forfend) you might not understand what's going on.

Nope.  Can't be that.  Has to be a conspiracy.

All the more reason for me to stay right the hell out of politics.  I'm always reminded of the quote by Dave Barry: "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that person is crazy."

The problem is, in order to get elected, the crazy person also has to have followers.  And they're often even crazier.

I smell a rat

I think I've made my position on GMOs plain enough, but let me just be up front about it right out of the starting gate.

There is nothing intrinsically dangerous about genetic modification.  Since each GMO involves messing with a different genetic substructure, the results will be different each time -- and therefore will require separate testing for safety.  The vast majority of GMOs have been extensively tested for deleterious human health effects, and almost all of those have proven safe (the ones that weren't never reached market).

So GMOs are, overall, as safe as any other agricultural practice -- i.e. not 100% foolproof, but with appropriate study, not something that deserves the automatic stigma the term has accrued.

There are a great many people who don't see it that way.  One of the most vocal is Gilles-Éric Séralini, who made headlines back in 2007 with a study that alleged that rats fed genetically modified corn showed blood and liver abnormalities.  When the study was published and other scientists attempted to replicate it (and failed), the results of Séralini's study were attributed to "normal biological variation (for the species in question)."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Undeterred, Séralini went on in 2012 to publish a paper in Food and Chemical Toxicology about long-term toxicity of glyphosate (RoundUp) that is still the go-to research for the anti-Monsanto crowd.  He claimed that rats dosed with glyphosate developed large tumors and other abnormalities.  But that study, too, failed in attempts to replicate it, and it was withdrawn from FCT, with the editor-in-chief stating that the results were "inconclusive."

So if you smell a rat with respect to Séralini and his alleged studies, you're not alone.

But there's no damage to your reputation that can't be made worse, and Séralini took that dubious path last week -- with a "study" that claims that a homeopathic remedy can protect you from the negative effects of RoundUp.

So, to put it bluntly: a sugar pill can help you fight off the health problems caused by something that probably doesn't cause health problems, at least in the dosages that most of us would ordinarily be exposed to.

Being that such research -- if I can dignify it by that name -- would never pass peer review, Séralini went right to a pay-to-play open-source alt-med journal called BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  Steven Savage, a plant pathologist, had the following to say about the study:

The dose is absurd.  They gave the animals the equivalent of what could be in the spray tank including the surfactants and the a.i. (active ingredients).  If glyphosate or its AMPA metabolite ever end up in a food it is at extremely low concentrations and never with the surfactant.  Unless you were a farmer or gardener who routinely drinks from the spray tank over eight days, this study is meaningless.

Furthermore, Andrew Porterfield, who wrote the scathing critique of Séralini I linked above, pointed out an additional problem:

Scientists have been sharply critical of the study’s methodology and conclusions... the paper has no discussion on the natural variability in locomotion or physiological parameters, making it impossible to tell if anything was truly wrong with any of the animals.

And if that weren't bad enough, Séralini proposes to counteract these most-likely-nonexistent health effects with pills that have been diluted past Avogadro's Limit -- i.e., the point where there is even a single molecule of the original substance left.  There have been dozens of controlled studies of the efficacy of homeopathy, and none of them -- not one -- have shown that it has any effect at all except as a placebo.

So we have doubtful health problems in animals that were not evaluated beforehand for health problems being treated by worthless "remedies" that have been shown to have zero effect in controlled studies.

Of course, considering how powerful confirmation bias is, I'm not expecting this to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  I will say, however, that we'd be in a lot better shape as a species if we relied more on reason, logic, and evidence -- and less on our preconceived notions of how we'd like the world to be.

Algae aura

Can I just say that I am sick unto death of people misrepresenting science?

Some scientist somewhere makes a discovery, and it seems to take only milliseconds before every woo-woo with a favorite loony idea about how the world works is using it to support their claims.  These people have taken confirmation bias and raised it to an art form.

I saw a particularly good (or bad, as the case may be) example of this yesterday in an article by Michael Forrester called "People Can Draw Energy From Other People The Same Way Plants Do," that is getting passed all over social media.  So let me illustrate my point by telling you what some of Forrester's conclusions from this scientific research are, and afterwards I'll tell you about the actual research itself.

See if you can connect the two.

Forrester says that we absorb "energies" from our surroundings.  He never defines what he means by "energy," but I'm pretty sure it's not the standard physics definition, because he includes stuff about being around "negative people."  He cites "psychologist and energy healer" Olivia Bader-Lee, who says:

This is exactly why there are certain people who feel uncomfortable in specific group settings where there is a mix of energy and emotions...  The human organism is very much like a plant, it draws needed energy to feed emotional states and this can essentially energize cells or cause increases in cortisol and catabolize cells depending on the emotional trigger...  Humans can absorb and heal through other humans, animals, and any part of nature.  That's why being around nature is often uplifting and energizing for so many people.

We're then given specific recommendations for how to "absorb and heal" efficiently.  These include:

• Stay centered and grounded
• Be in a state of non-resistance
• Own your personal aura space
• Give yourself an energy cleanse
• Call back your energy

I was especially interested in the "energy cleanse" thing, and fortunately, Forrester tells us exactly how to accomplish this:

The color gold has a high vibration which is useful for clearing away foreign energy.  Imagine a gold shower nozzle at the top of your aura (a few feet above your head) and turn it on, allowing clear gold energy to flow through your aura and body space and release down your grounding.  You will immediately feel cleansed and refreshed.

So all I have to do is imagine it, eh?  Given that I work with teenagers, I wish the "owning your personal aura space" was something that would happen if I imagined it.  Teaching a room full of tenth graders is like trying to herd puppies.  Since yelling "BACK OFF" is seldom effective, it'd be nice if all I had to do was to picture my "aura space" (gold-colored, of course) and the teenagers would be repelled backwards in a comical fashion, sort of like Yoda did to Count Dooku at the end of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay.  So you're probably wondering what scientific research led Forrester and Bader-Lee to come to this conclusion.

Ready?

The discovery by a team of scientists in the Biotechnology Department of Bielefeld University (Germany) that a species of algae can digest cellulose.

If you're going, "Um, but wait... but... how... what?" you should realize that I had exactly the same response.  I spent several minutes thinking that I had clicked on the wrong link.  But no.  In fact, Forrester even mentions the gist of the research himself:

Members of Professor Dr. Olaf Kruse’s biological research team have confirmed for the first time that a plant, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, not only engages in photosynthesis, but also has an alternative source of energy: it can draw it from other plants.

And from this he deduces that all you have to do to be happy is to picture yourself underneath a gold shower nozzle.

I've seen some misrepresentations and far-fetched deductions before, but this one has to take the prize.

I get that people are always casting about looking for support for their favorite theories.  So as wacky as Forrester's pronouncements are, at least I see why he made them.  But what baffles me is how other people can look at what he wrote, and say, "Yes!  That makes complete sense!  Algae that can digest cellulose!  Therefore aura spaces and energetic vibrations of happiness!

Okay, I admit that I can be a hardass rationalist at times.  But seriously, what are these people thinking?

Not much, is my guess.

So anyhow, watch out for those negative energies.  Those can be a bummer.  But if you're feeling like your vibrations are low, don't despair.  I hear that getting into psychic communication with algae can help.