Acid test

Apparently the most popular fad in alt-med nutrition these days is the so-called "alkaline diet."

The idea here is that lots of diseases -- cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's are the four most commonly mentioned -- are caused by your body having an "acid pH."  All you have to do, they say, is alter your diet to foods that result in "alkaline ash" (residues with a pH above 7) and you'll be healthy and happy and disease free.  (Here's one example.)

As is the case with most of these sorts of claims, it has a kernel of truth.  There are foods that result in alkaline ash; others that have acidic ash; and some that have neutral (pH = about 7) ash.  The easiest way to monitor this is to test your urine pH, as your kidneys regulate your blood pH by excreting or retaining hydrogen ions, which is what pH is measuring in any case.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Further, a lot of the alkaline ash foods -- fruits and nuts especially -- are certainly part of a healthy diet, and some of the acidic ash foods -- meat, poultry, fish, dairy, grains and alcohol -- are problematic if they make up too great a percentage of your diet.

But that's where the realistic bit ends, and the pseudoscience takes over.

The fact is, you can't change your body's pH, for the very good reason that it's one of the most tightly-regulated homeostatic factors in your body.  Your blood pH is always 7.4.  If it varies more than 0.1 pH points either direction, you are in a world of hurt.  Here's a quick summary of what happens if your blood becomes more acidic:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.3 -- blood acidosis; symptoms are shortness of breath, headache, confusion
pH = 7.2 -- dead

And the same for moving in the alkaline direction:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.5 -- blood alkalosis; symptoms are nausea, muscle spasms, twitching, numbness
pH = 7.6 -- dead

So the idea that by eliminating meat from your diet, you'll become more alkaline, and that's somehow healthy, is idiotic.  Each tissue in your body has a particular pH at which it functions best -- some are acidic (e.g. the stomach), some are alkaline (e.g. the blood and the small intestine), and (more importantly) changing that pH in any of them would be a seriously bad idea.

The bottom line is that if our pH yo-yoed around every time we ate a cheeseburger or an apple, we'd be dead.  End of story.

Now, it's true that your urine pH varies a lot; that's because your kidneys are regulating your blood pH by excreting whatever it takes to keep your blood in homeostasis.  So of course your urine pH changes.  It's compensating for what you eat and drink.  But there's nothing healthier about having alkaline urine.  All it means is that your kidneys are working, which is the same thing that having acidic urine means.

The funny thing is, the "alkaline diet" site I linked above gives a nod to that idea in the following paragraph:

Even very tiny alterations in the pH level of various organisms can cause major problems.  For example, due to environmental concerns, such as increasing CO2 deposition, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 and various life forms living in the ocean have greatly suffered.  The pH level is also crucial for growing plants, and therefore it greatly affects the mineral content of the foods we eat.  Minerals in the ocean, soil and human body are used as buffers to maintain optimal pH levels, so when acidity rises, minerals fall.

Right.  So that's why we have kidneys.  So that kind of shift in pH and other electrolytes doesn't kill us.

You'd think that a quick perusal of sites regarding actual research on the effects of diet (here's a good example) would immediately settle that point, but unfortunately the availability of correct information hasn't stopped the claims.  And worse, there are people now selling all sorts of supplements that are supposed to regulate our pH, and without which dire things are predicted to happen.

Me, I'm fond of the dietary advice "everything in moderation."  Listen to your body, make your decisions based on actual research, don't spend your money on useless supplements, and don't go crazy overboard on something like the amazing grapefruit-and-peanut-butter diet.  (I don't know if that actually exists, but given some of the bizarre diets out there, I'll bet it does.)

Best of all, learn a little bit of biology.  It's cool, it's interesting, and it'll keep you from getting suckered by alt-med nonsense.  And with that, I think I'm going to go have some bacon and eggs for breakfast, confident in the knowledge that my kidneys are up to the challenge.

Making the sky great again

It's been a while since we've heard from the contingent that believes the best way to dose a population with nasty chemicals is to put them into jet fuel, so that the residue coming from the engines would waft about and settle on our unsuspecting heads.  Which, and I must point out at this juncture that amongst other things I write murder mysteries, has always struck me as the worst way to deliver poisons I can think of.  Anyhow, it was with great anticipation that I checked out a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia in which a fellow named David Hodges takes Donald Trump to task for not clearing the skies of chemtrails.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Hodges starts out pretty positively:

Donald Trump has made good on a lot of promises.  He's stood up against the free trade agreements.  He's battling to secure our borders against the entry of unknown terrorists into our country.  He's battled the mainstream media with their incessant lies and propaganda.  He's all in all done a really good job.  He's also moving churches away from the 501(c) restrictions against political comment.  I love what he's done in many ways.

But then we hear that there's a big "if" in Hodges's mind:

But President Trump, sir, there is an issue that you're not dealing with, and it's an issue of paramount and critical and immediate importance: it's the issue of chemtrails.  I fully expected by now that the sky over America would be devoid of chemtrails.  You, sir, as the Commander in Chief, have the authority to make this happen.  Read the reports, President Trump.  Barium, chromium, magnesium, aluminum, causing early-onset dementia, Alzheimer's, causing autism in the young, lowering crop yields because it reduces sunlight by as much as 18 to 20 percent, messing with the weather patterns... I could go on, and on, and on.

As, in fact, he does:

This is a depopulation movement by the globalists.  Donald Trump has the ability to stop this, at least territorially.  And I cannot believe that he has not ordered the grounding of these transports that lay down these chemtrails.  This is a litmus test, sir, of your administration.  If you care about the American people as you claim, you cannot make this claim with 100% steadfast honesty unless you are willing to stop chemtrails and stop them now.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you the name of Hodges's YouTube channel:  It's called "The Common Sense Show."

I find it wryly amusing that here we have a Trump supporter who is ready to rescind his approval of the new president if he doesn't find a way to get rid of perfectly ordinary jet contrails.  Of course, this really shouldn't be surprising, as this sort of thing seems to be all too common in the folks who voted for Trump.  The whole administration has its support from people who evidently feel like if they click their heels together and wish hard enough, reality will suddenly conform to their wishes -- Jeff Sessions won't have lied under oath about his connection to the Russians, Betsy DeVos will be the best thing ever to reform public schools, Kellyanne Conway will suddenly become capable of telling the truth, and Trump himself will be a good family values Christian instead of a serial adulterer and probable sex offender whose most notable religious accomplishment is embodying all seven Deadly Sins in one individual.

So I thought the whole thing was pretty ridiculous until I started looking at the comments section, and yes, I know that no one should do that because it's simultaneously risking valuable brain cells and also whatever shreds of confidence remain that the human race is salvageable.  But I did it anyway, against my better judgment, and here's a sampling of what I found:

• Please stop overspraying us with chemicals like we are bugs!!!!
• It's one of my top concerns as well. Here in Central FL, they are greatly diminished since the inauguration, but not eliminated. Call in the Air National Guard.
• Here's my question.. Who is piloting these planes and what airports do they use? They are not passenger planes that are spraying. We must get to the bottom of this.
• Trump is in charge of the Navy and the Navy runs the Chemtrail program. When's he going to do what's right.
• It’s now apparent that the U.S. government has implemented Teller’s theory by spraying megatons of particulate heavy metals and chemicals like aluminum, titanium, barium, strontium and sulfur hexafluoride into the stratosphere.
• Trees and forests are DYING ALL OVER THE WORLD DUE TO CHEMTRAILS AND HAARP.
• I'm so sick of never seeing a sunrise or sunset. It's been literally a year since I remember seeing a clear sunset. They cover up all the stars, too.

No, you moron, those are called "clouds."

What has me worried is that someone will actually get President Trump alarmed about this, and he'll start trying to do something about it, which will mean he'll propose making some kind of damnfool changes to the rules surrounding airplanes, despite the fact that he clearly knows nothing about them.  Look what happened when he got wind of the whole vaccine/autism nonsense; he jumped right on the bandwagon and now is blathering on about creating a commission to make sure vaccines are safe (there's already such a commission, and in fact it's been around since 1987).  Worse still, in the last months he's met with noted anti-vaxxers Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and seems to be turning a deaf ear to the thousands of doctors and medical researchers who have written to him explaining that there is no connection between vaccines and autism.

For fuck's sake.

So I'm perhaps to be pardoned for having very little confidence that Donald Trump will take the scientific stance on "chemtrails," namely, that they're water vapor.  Of course, I have to admit that it might be entertaining to see what he'd propose doing about them.  Maybe build a wall around every airport.  Or, in an analogous move to all of his other appointments to key government posts, just hire someone who knows absolutely nothing about airplane engines to Make Jets Great Again and call it done.

A glitch in the matrix

No matter what your views, on politics or other things, I think there's something we can all agree on:

The last few months have been pretty weird.

First, there was the Brexit vote, followed by the revelation afterwards that over a million people apparently voted to leave the EU because they thought "remain" would win, and after the votes were tallied said that they wished they'd voted the other way.  One person actually said, "I feel genuinely robbed of my vote," as if some supernatural power was controlling his hand when he voted.

Then, we had damn near every political poll predicting a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton, and election night resulted in an unequivocal win in the Electoral College for Donald Trump, something that left people on both sides of the aisle feeling more than a little stunned.

Then we had the Superbowl.  The Patriots were widely favored to win without any difficulty.  Sports writer Paul Kasabian, of Bleacher Report, wrote that the likeliest scenario was that the "Patriots jump out to an early lead and go to running back LeGarrette Blount consistently in the second half of the game to control the time of possession and keep Atlanta's high-powered offense off the field. It's certainly possible that will lead to success, as the Falcons finished 29th this year in run defense DVOA...  The Falcons' defense has improved over the last couple of months, but it's hard to see them slowing down the versatile Pats too much."

And of course, that's not what happened.  The Falcons hit an early and completely unexpected lead, only to have the Patriots stage one of the most stunning comebacks in football history to win 34-28.

Then there was the Oscars, with the bizarre and now-notorious flub wherein Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner of Best Film, causing a surge of horrified people onto the stage -- and the producer of La La Land, Jordan Horowitz, was the one to make the correction.

"I'm sorry, there's a mistake," Horowitz said, to gasps from the audience.  "Moonlight, you guys won best picture.  This is not a joke."

And that's not even considering the number of times that I and others have looked at what is happening in the U.S. government -- hell, in the whole world -- and said, "I keep thinking things can't get any weirder, and then it happens."

So apparently all of this loony stuff has left people searching for an explanation.  And they've found one.

There are now people who are using this as evidence that we're living inside a computer simulation gone haywire.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote:

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix.  There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win?  How would they react?”  “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!”  And then it happened.  We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

Apparently this isn't just the idle speculation of a handful of woo-woos.  Clara Moskowitz, senior editor of space and physics at Scientific American, wrote about this very idea a year ago.  "A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors," Moskowitz wrote.  "They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds.  So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds."

But now, Gopnik says, the controllers of the simulation have either lost their grip, or else they're just fucking around with us.  And we shouldn't comfort ourselves with thinking that it's going to be over any time soon:

Until recently, our simulation, the Matrix within which we were unknowingly imprisoned, seemed in reasonably sound hands.  Terrible things did happen as the cold-blooded, unemotional machines that ran it experimented with the effects of traumatic events—wars, plagues, “Gilligan’s Island”—on hyper-emotionalized programs such as us.  And yet the basic logic of the enfolding program seemed sound.  Things pinned down did not suddenly drift toward the ceiling; cats did not go to Westminster; Donald Trump did not get elected President; the movie that won Best Picture was the movie that won Best Picture.  Now everything has gone haywire, and anything can happen. 

Whether we are at the mercy of an omniscient adolescent prankster or suddenly the subjects of a more harrowing experiment than any we have been subject to before (is our alien overlords’ funding threatened, thus forcing them to “show results” to the grant-giving institution that doubtless oversees all the simulations?), we can now expect nothing remotely normal to take place for a long time to come.  They’re fiddling with our knobs, and nobody knows the end.

I'm not sure how to think about this.  I've always been a hard-headed materialist; what you see in front of you is real, of course it's real; the Ockham's Razorish least-ad-hoc-assumptions model is that what you're experiencing is, at its essence, the real external universe.  But I've run into people who were idealists -- who believed that what we observe isn't real, that it's a construct of our minds, and that our sensory experience is the only reality.  (I actually knew one guy who was a solipsist -- he believed, apparently seriously, that his perceptions were the only reality, and the rest of us were figments of his imagination who ceased to exist when he wasn't directly observing us.  We used to piss him off by sneaking up behind him and whispering, "We're still heeeere.")

But apparently there are some honest-to-goodness scientific types who are seriously considering the idea that we might be part of a big computer simulation being run by an amazingly advanced race.  And I don't know about you, but this creeps me out.  I had a hard enough time, in the days when I was still attempting to be a practicing Catholic, thinking about a god who was watching me all the time.  Every moment of the day.  While I was showering, while I was taking a piss, and... other times.  You get the picture.  I often wondered how people could possibly find this thought comforting; for me, it was like presupposing that the entire universe was being run by a demented stalker.

So now we're back in the same predicament, but here the Perverted Master Stalker is some superpowerful alien race who not only created me as part of their simulation for some unknown reason, but is watching me to see what I'll do, and probably wondering why their creation picks his nose and plays air guitar when Tommy Shaw's "Girls With Guns" pops up on his iPod.  (Not simultaneously.)

On the other hand, if the being running the simulation really is some kind of Loki-like trickster who is just messing around with us, I suppose it serves him right that some of his creations behave in bizarre ways.

Turnabout's fair play, and all of that sort of stuff.

I guess the upshot is that we should all prepare ourselves for further weirdness.  I'm not sure whether to be apprehensive, or just to leap into the chaos with both feet.  Either way, my reaction probably isn't going to make much difference; however the simulation is being run, I highly doubt that the Alien Master Race is gearing their universe to conform to my desires.  So bring it on.  If the world is going to be crazy, may as well enjoy it.

The witches vs. Donald Trump

As an example of the general principle that there is nothing that is so weird that someone can't respond to it in such a way as to make it far weirder, we have: witches attempting to cast a spell on Donald Trump.

Many of us are looking for ways to resist President Trump's rather pernicious agenda, so I suppose it's not to be wondered at that the Wiccans want to give it a try, too.  They did so five days ago with hexes designed to "bind Donald J Trump, so that his malignant works may fail utterly" so that he "shall not break our polity, usurp our liberty, or fill our minds with hate, confusion, fear, or despair."  They used various props such as orange candles, magic wands, and Tarot cards to support the cosmic vibrations they were attempting to harness, and instead of ending with the traditional closing words of Wiccan spells -- "So mote it be" -- they ended with "You're fired!"

For the good of the order, I'm not making this up.

Michael Hughes, one of the witches involved, explained that they weren't trying to harm President Trump.  "This is not the equivalent of magically punching a Nazi," Hughes said.  "Rather, it is ripping the bullhorn from his hands, smashing his phone so he can't tweet, tying him up, and throwing him in a dark basement where he can't hurt anyone."

Which, honestly, doesn't seem to be any less violent than magically punching a Nazi.

Be that as it may, the whole thing turned out to be pretty popular, given that a Facebook page devoted to the ritual garnered 10,500 likes, and for a while the hashtag #magicresistance was trending on Twitter.

As far as results, though, not so much.  After the Cosmic Convergence of Anti-Trump Spells, there has been no discernible decrease in the president's tweets, lying, or divisive bullshit.  So you'd think that'd make the Wiccans go, "Huh.  I guess it doesn't work, then.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  And that'd be that.

But as I said, there's no bizarre claim that can't be countered so as to make it even more bizarre.  Despite the utter lack of effectiveness of the curses, the whole episode had the pro-Trump cadre completely up in arms.  For example, Alex Jones, who really needs to stop doing sit-ups under parked cars, claimed that the witches were attacking Trump "because he's good."  "Every evil force out there hates Trump," Jones said.  "He has mega-level charisma."

But there's no one who can contribute to a surreal situation quite like Pat Robertson.  He was outraged when he heard about what the witches were doing, and said that concerned folks need to "send those curses back where they came from."

"I read that a bunch of witches have gotten together to put a curse on Trump," Robertson told his audience on The 700 Club a couple of days ago, "and I think the Christians need to be praying for him to defend him...  all you have to say is the five words, 'I bind you, Satan, and the forces of evil, in Jesus's name.'"

Which is way more than five words.  But given the grade-A-lunacy of the rest of the claim, I'm not going to quibble over simple arithmetic.

His co-host, Wendy Griffith, agreed.  "That thing with the witches was supposed to happen Friday night at midnight, and I know all the believers were there on Facebook, you know, cancelling out those curses by the witches, and pleading with the blood of Jesus.  You know, there were probably millions of Christians praying for him."

"Yes," Robertson said.  "Send it back where it came from.  Send the curse back."

So let's see, here.  We have some witches sending useless magic spells out against Trump, because he's so good and charming and charismatic, and Pat Robertson is mobilizing Christians on Facebook to utter their own magic spells (prayers, to be accurate, although in this particular case I'm not seeing much of a difference) to make the witches' spells bounce back, presumably resulting in their being "thrown in a dark basement where they can't hurt anyone."

It's enough to make me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

Look, I know that magical thinking is hard to eradicate, but is it too much to ask people to apply a little bit of rationality to these situations?  Okay, yeah, it probably is beyond Alex Jones and Pat Robertson, but fer cryin' in the sink, why don't their listeners stop and say, "All right, that was ridiculous"?

Or better yet, stop listening?

Anyhow, that's today's news from the Forlorn Hope Department.  Me, I'm not expecting this to be over any time soon.  I'm sure the witches have some more potent spells in their arsenal, and once they realize that (1) the first salvo accomplished fuck-all, and (2) the ultra-religious are mobilizing their forces to work up some kick-ass counter-spells, they'll really want to step up the campaign.  Maybe they'll even move from orange candles to black ones.

That's when shit's gonna get real.  Or surreal.  Whatever.

The end of the experiment

Have you heard about House Bill 610?

Introduced by Representative Steve King (R-IA), H.R. 610 is called the "Choices in Education Act of 2017."  Here's the short description:

The bill establishes an education voucher program, through which each state shall distribute block grant funds among local educational agencies (LEAs) based on the number of eligible children within each LEA's geographical area. From these amounts, each LEA shall: (1) distribute a portion of funds to parents who elect to enroll their child in a private school or to home-school their child, and (2) do so in a manner that ensures that such payments will be used for appropriate educational expenses. 

To be eligible to receive a block grant, a state must: (1) comply with education voucher program requirements, and (2) make it lawful for parents of an eligible child to elect to enroll their child in any public or private elementary or secondary school in the state or to home-school their child.

Already there should be some alarm bells ringing, and I haven't gotten to the really bad part yet.  This voucher system allows tax money to be funneled to private institutions (including religious schools), and yet establishes no standards that those institutions need to meet in order to receive these "block grants."  So that's right: your tax dollars might go to support a school where children are taught in science class that the Earth is 6,000 years old and dinosaurs went for a ride on Noah's Ark.  In North Carolina, a voucher program even funds schools that have explicit conditions for religious adherence for a student to be considered for admission.

Further, the bill sets no guidelines for money being provided for homeschooling.  Note that I am not against homeschooling per se: I know several homeschooling families who have made that choice for excellent reasons, and whose children turned out well educated (better educated, in fact, than the average public school student).  However, I've also known families in which kids were kept home out of suspicion or paranoia, and in one case resulted in an eleventh grader finally re-entering public school -- with a fourth-grade reading level.  So simply giving money to homeschoolers for "appropriate educational expenses" without specifying what is meant by "appropriate" is seriously thin ice.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Not only that, the idea of replacing current public school programs with a voucher system has a proven track record of abject failure.  A study in 2016 of voucher-funded private schools in the Milwaukee area found that 41% of those schools failed.  "I do not mean failed as in they did not deliver academically, I mean failed as in they no longer exist," said Michael Ford of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who was lead author of the study. "These 102 schools either closed after having their voucher revenue cut off by the Department of Public Instruction, or simply shut their doors.  The failure rate for entrepreneurial start-up schools is even worse: 67.8 percent."

These results are mirrored in other states -- Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have all seen significant problems with voucher programs, including loss of funding to public schools and dubious results in terms of student success, retention, and college acceptance after graduation.

But as I said, I haven't even told you about the worst part yet.  The Choices in Education Act of 2017 explicitly repeals two bills -- the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the No Hungry Kids Act of 2013.

Let's start with the first one.  The ESEA is a wide-reaching piece of legislation that focuses on equal access to education regardless of disability or socioeconomic status, and mandates school accountability, professional development, and support of educational programs.  Provisions include providing financial support to schools serving students from low-income families, assisting schools with the purchase of textbooks and library materials, funding bilingual education and English as a Second Language curricula, and creating or maintaining enrichment programs such as classes for gifted and talented students, Advanced Placement programs, and education in the arts and music.

The No Hungry Kids Act should be self-explanatory, but let me use the description from the bill designed to repeal it:  The NHKA establishes "certain nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs. (In general, the rule requires schools to increase the availability of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat or fat free milk in school meals; reduce the levels of sodium, saturated fat, and trans fat in school meals; and meet children's nutritional needs within their caloric requirements.)"

Yes, you understand all this correctly: the Choices in Education Act of 2017, if passed (and it seems to have widespread support), will trash both of these laws entirely.

One of my education professors in my long-ago teacher training program at the University of Washington called the last 120 years of American public schools "an experiment to test the radical hypothesis that all children can, and deserve to, be given equal access to education."  Through much of our history, this hasn't been the case.  If you were wealthy, your kids got to go to school; if you were not, they didn't.  The result was that poverty was effectively hereditary, and so was all that goes with it; poor access to health care, shortened life span, exploitation in the form of child labor, low-paying jobs with awful working conditions waiting for kids when they become adults because they've been trained for no better.  This bill, should it become law, will tear down an edifice that (while certainly far from ideal) has come closer than humanity ever has to giving all children, regardless of gender, origin, race, religion, or socioeconomic status, a chance to break the fetters of institutionalized class stratification.

This bill is still in the early stages, and it's not too late to fight it.  Call your representatives.  Let them know that should the Choices in Education Act of 2017 become law, it will result in irrevocable damage to our education system.  Tell them that the proposed changes aren't supported by the empirical data, and will accomplish little but program cuts in already-cash-strapped public schools, and further weakening of the wall between church and state through diverting public tax money to religious institutions.

Let them know that the public school system could use reform, but destroying it entirely will have repercussions that will take generations to undo.  Our educational system isn't perfect, but it's an experiment in social equity that can't be allowed to fail.

Ignoring the experts

The new book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, by Thomas Nichols, could not have been published at a better time.

We have an administration that is relentlessly committed to creating their own set of "alternative facts" and labeling as fake news anything that contradicts the narrative.  Criticism is met with reprisal, honest journalism with shunning, facts and evidence with accusations of bias.  The message is "don't listen to anyone but us."

Nichols's contention is that we got here by a steady progress over the last few decades toward mistrusting experts.  Why should we rely on the pointy-headed scientists, who are not only out of touch with "real people" but probably are doing their research for some kind of evil purpose?  You know those scientists -- always unleashing plagues and creating superweapons, all the while rubbing their hands together in a maniacal fashion.

I have to mention, however, that this was something that always puzzled me about 1950s horror films.  Those scientists who were part of an evil plot to destroy the Earth -- what the hell was their motivation?  Don't they live here too?

Be that as it may, Nichols makes a trenchant point; our lazy, me-centered, fundamentally distrustful culture has created an atmosphere where anyone who knows more than we do is automatically viewed with suspicion.  We use WebMD to diagnose ourselves, and argue with the doctor when (s)he disagrees.  We rate our folksy "look at the weather we're having, climate change can't be real" anecdotes as somehow having more weight than the hard data of actual trained climate scientists.  We accept easy solutions to complicated problems ("Build a wall") instead of putting in the hard work of understanding the complexity of the real situation.

What does she know, anyhow?  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Nichols was interviewed a couple of days ago in the Providence Journal, and shared some pretty disturbing observations about the predicament our culture is in.  "The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance," Nichols said.  "Worse, many citizens today are proud of not knowing things.  Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue."

Of course, Nichols is not the first person to comment upon this.  Isaac Asimov, in his 1980 essay "The Cult of Ignorance," wrote something that has become rightly famous: "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, Nichols says, is not only pernicious, it's demonstrably false.  "People can accept the idea that they are not seven feet tall and can't play basketball.  [But] They hate the idea that anybody is smarter than they are and should be better compensated than they are.  This is a radical egalitarianism that is completely nuts."

What is weirdest about this is that we unhesitatingly accept the expertise of some people, and unhesitatingly reject the expertise of others.  "You put your life in the hands of an expert community all day long," Nichols says.  "Every time you take an aspirin or an over-the-counter medication, every time you talk to your pharmacist, every time your kids go to school, every time you obey the traffic directions of a police officer or go through a traffic light.  When you get on an airplane, you assume that everybody involved in flying that airplane from the flight attendant to the pilot and the ground crew and the people in the control tower knows what they are doing."

And yet when we are told that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists accept anthropogenic climate change, a substantial percentage of us go, "Meh, what do they know?"

The difficulty is that once you have fallen into the trap of distrusting expertise, it's hard to see how you could free yourself from it.  As the adage goes, you can't logic your way out of a position that you didn't logic your way into.  Add into the mix not only the rampant anti-intellectualism characteristic of our current society, but the fundamental distrust of all media that is being inculcated into our minds by the rhetoric from the Trump administration, and you've created a hermetically sealed wall that no facts, no evidence, no argument can breach.

So Nichols's conclusions are interesting, enlightening, and deeply troubling.  His arguments are aimed toward the very people who will be the most resistant to accepting them.

And with our current leadership deepening divisions, distrust, and suspicion of experts, it's hard to see how any of this will change any time soon.

Worldwide lunacy

I experience a peculiar twist on schadenfreude when I find out that other countries have politicians who are as apparently insane as the ones we have to deal with here in the United States.  It may not be nice of me, and I certainly wouldn't wish our current situation on anyone, but I have to admit that there is something ineffably reassuring about knowing that we don't have the market cornered on pernicious looniness.

This comes up because of an article I was sent a few days ago by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a political candidate in Australia who thinks that the current worldwide trend toward LGBT rights and marriage equality is due to...

... gay Nazi mind control.

I kid you not.  Michelle Meyers, of the right wing One Nation party, went on a bizarre screed on Facebook a week ago, which included the following:

It’s a carefully contrived but disingenuous mind control program, melded together by two Norwegian homosexuals who graduated from Harvard…  Utilising many of the strategies developed by the Soviets and then the Nazis, they have gone on to apply and perfect these principles so as to make them universal in their application—but with devastating results considering the counterproductive nature of such “unions.”

"Counterproductive?"  In what sense?  Can you please describe to me the "devastating results" of giving official approval to the expression of love between consenting adults?

Of course, that's not all Meyers has to say.  People like her never just leave it at one or two loony statements.  She posted a photo on her website of herself next to a cushion with stripes of different colors, and wrote that the rainbow has become an emblem of a "sexually corrupt and morally bankrupt society...  The rainbow has been raped and sullied. its colors have been purloined and paraded as a trophy of the culture war being waged worldwide.  But its fruits are bitter, it’s [sic] victory hollow and its legacy toxic."

Michelle Meyers of One Nation

Lest you think that Meyers and One Nation are just a group of fringe wackos, Western Australia Premier Colin Barnett just brokered an agreement with One Nation, with Barnett's Liberal Party allowing One Nation to direct their preferences to the party in regional and local elections in exchange for their support for Barnett being re-elected as Premier.  The implications of this deal with the devil were not lost on the director for One Nation in Western Australia, Colin Tincknell, who said, "It’s great, it a great deal for One Nation.  It looks like it will get us some seats in the upper house in Western Australia."

As far as whether the voting public will go for it, the elections are on March 11, so we'll see what happens.

Lately I've felt like I'm watching the world spiral out of control -- things were far from perfect, but at least seemed pretty stable, through much of my adult life.  Now, just in the last year, we have Brexit, Trump's victory and the resulting chaotic shitstorm in Washington, far right candidate Marine Le Pen standing a good chance of a victory in the 2017 French presidential election (something that has business leaders seriously spooked -- Eric Adler, CEO of PGIM Real Estate, said that a Le Pen win could "blow up the EU"), aggression by the Russians, missile launches by North Korea... I am seriously concerned that we might be seeing the first signs of a slide into another catastrophic world war.

So my schadenfreude over Australia's nutcake politicians is tempered by a very real fear that this is just another symptom of the ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism that seems to be sweeping the globe lately.  It's all very well to roll our eyes at people like Meyers -- but when people of that stripe get voted into office, as they were in November here in the United States, the laughter begins to ring pretty hollow.