Mary's tears

A report is in from Fresno, California that there is a statue of the Virgin Mary in someone's house that is "weeping real tears."

The predictable result is that the devout are now flocking to the home of Maria Cardenas, and church officials are declaring that it's a miracle.  Devotees have spent hours kneeling and praying before the statue.  People are collecting the "tears" in vials, and claiming that they have magical powers of healing.  Cardenas states that the tears are "oily" and "smell like roses."

Such stories are not uncommon. There have been enough claims of this type that "Weeping Statues" has its own Wikipedia page.  Weeping statues, usually of Jesus or Mary, have been reported in hundreds of locations.  Sometimes these statues are weeping what appear to be tears.  Others weep scented oil, which is apparently what's happening in this case.  More rarely, the statues weep blood.

The problem is, of course, that when the church has allowed skeptics to investigate the phenomenon, all of them have turned out to be frauds.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of the easiest ways to fake a crying statue was explained, and later demonstrated, by Italian skeptic Luigi Garlaschelli.  If the statue is glazed hollow ceramic or plaster (which many of them are), all you have to do is to fill the internal cavity of the statue with water or oil, usually through a small hole drilled through the back of the head.  Then, you take a sharp knife and you nick the glaze at the corner of each eye.  The porous ceramic or plaster will absorb the liquid, which will then leak out at the only point it can -- the unglazed bit near the eyes.  When Garlaschelli demonstrated this, it created absolutely convincing tears.

What about the blood?  Well, in the cases where the statues have wept blood, most of them have been kept from the prying eyes of skeptics.  The church, however, is becoming a little more careful, ever since the case in 2008 in which a statue of Mary in Italy seemed to weep blood, and a bit of the blood was taken and DNA tested, and was found to match the blood of the church's custodian.  Public prosecutor Alessandro Mancini said the man was going to be tried for "high sacrilege" -- an interesting charge, and one which the custodian heatedly denies.  (I was unable to find out what the outcome of the trial was, if there was one.)

Besides the likelihood of fakery, there remains the simple question of why a deity (or saint) who is presumably capable of doing anything (s)he wants to do would choose this method to communicate with us.  It's the same objection I have to the people who claim that crop circles are Mother Earth attempting to talk to us; it's a mighty obscure communiqué.  Even if you buy that it's a message from heaven, what does the message mean?  If a statue of Mary cries, is she crying because we're sinful?  Because attendance at church is down?  Because we're destroying the environment?  (Pope Francis might actually subscribe to this view.)   Because the Saints didn't make it to the Superbowl this year?  Oh, for the days when god spoke to you, out loud, directly, and unequivocally, from a burning bush...

In any case, I'm skeptical, which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone.  I suppose as religious experiences go, it's pretty harmless, and if it makes you happy to believe that Mary's tears will bring you good luck, then that's okay with me.  If you go to Fresno, however, take a close look and see if there's a tiny hole drilled in the back of the statue's head -- which still seems to me to be the likeliest explanation.

Dragon slaying

If you needed further evidence that being in an administrative role does not necessarily mean you have any idea what you're talking about, witness the pronouncement by Head Teacher Graeme Whiting of Acorn School, a private school in Nailsworth, Gloucester, England, to wit:  children should not read fantasy literature because it will damage their "sensitive subconscious brains."  Instead of Tolkein, Lewis, L'Engle, Rowling, and McCaffrey, he said, students are better off reading classics such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, et al.

Here's his complete quote:

I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. 

Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world's 'must-haves', contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children... 

Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar, heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children! 

Children are innocent and pure at the same time, and don't need to be mistreated by cramming their imagination that lies deep within them, with inappropriate things.

Starting with the fact that this makes me want to shout "CITE YOUR SOURCES" in Mr. Whiting's face every other sentence, there are a few problems with this claim.

First, has he actually read any "classic literature?"

Let me give you an example.  My school is currently having a contest for both students and staff wherein if you read a hundred books in four years, you get your name painted on the library wall.  Of the hundred books, twenty of them have to be classics.  The result is that I am now in the middle of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.  Consider the following "inappropriate things" that I have so far discovered therein:

The characters are, one and all, horrible people.  Heathcliff, who I think we're supposed to relate to or at least empathize with, is a sadistic sociopath.  His thwarted lover Catherine is a whining, petulant, narcissistic shrew who goes on a hunger strike every time she doesn't get her way.  Edgar Linton (perhaps the most sympathetic character in the story, which isn't saying much) is a weak-willed milquetoast.  His sister Isabella appears to have no brains whatsoever.  Catherine's brother Hindley Earnshaw is a violent drunk, his son Hareton a swearing, sneering brat.  The servants are no better; Nelly Dean, the narrator through most of the book, meddles continuously with the result of making the already bad situation truly awful, and Joseph is a sullen religious nutter who speaks in a garbled patois that appears to be some bizarre hybrid between Yorkshire dialect and Esperanto.

"A romantic classic," the back cover says.  Really?  This romance for the ages starts with Heathcliff and Catherine falling madly in love with one another.  As a result, and because this makes total sense, Catherine decides to marry Edgar, then torments him for years as if this was his fault.  Heathcliff, however, evidently learns from Catherine's example that marrying someone you dislike out of spite is a great move.  Because he then follows suit, marries Edgar's sister Isabella, and on their honeymoon he is so angry at Isabella for not being Catherine that he hangs her dog.

Yes.  Her dog.  Heathcliff hangs her dog.

On their HONEYMOON.

Of course, being a romantic classic, one after the other of them come to bad ends.  So the entire story is 325 pages about really nasty people who are dying, just not nearly fast enough.

And Shakespeare?  What about the lovely, sensitive, and appropriate stories of King Lear and A Winter's Tale and (heaven forfend) Titus Andronicus?  The sex and violence is certainly not confined to the Bard of Avon, either.  Consider, for example, the Greek classics.  I actually really like Sophocles, and his plays are mostly about the cheering themes of incest, parricide, and damnation.

The second problem is not only does Mr. Whiting evidently not know the classics, he doesn't know much about fantasy literature, either.  So reading fantasy novels encourages "difficult behaviour" and results in "mental illness?"  I think you would have to go far to find a character that embodies loyalty more than Sam Gamgee, one that demonstrates the power of love in redemption more than Severus Snape, one that is a better role model for steadfastness and courage than Hazel from Watership Down, one that twists together yearning and loss and grief and beauty more heart-wrenchingly than Taran (from the sadly little-known five-volume Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander).  Those characters resonate precisely because they appeal to our higher selves, give us a sense that we can rise above our challenges and meet life head-on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now understand: I'm not saying that all fantasy literature is appropriate for all ages.  Game of Thrones, for example, is clearly targeted toward adults.  But to tar all fantasy literature with the same brush is idiotic.  And the claim that children are somehow damaged from reading A Wrinkle in Time is absurd.

However, despite my generally negative impression of Wuthering Heights, I think kids should read the classics, too.  I didn't read Shakespeare until I was a freshman in college, which I think is pitiful.  (And when I reluctantly started reading Othello in my freshman lit class, I was transfixed -- and couldn't believe what I'd been missing.)

Children (and adults) should read all kinds of books, from light entertainment to deep and thought-provoking literature that will still be with them years later.  The point is to enter a different world on the first page -- and to have your mind come out different when you reach the last one.

Good fantasy literature is transformative.  Far from "cramming [children's] imagination... with inappropriate things," the best of fantasy reaches levels that I can only describe as spiritual.  As C. S. Lewis put it, "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

News from the fringe

It's getting to the point that I'm not entirely sure whether the hyperreligious types here in the United States might be engaging in an elaborate act of self-parody.

I mean, is it just me, or have their claims been getting more and more ridiculous?  As I was casting about yesterday for a topic for today's post, I ran across not one, nor two, but three stories that made me say, "Okay, be honest.  You people aren't serious, right?"

First, we had the Jehovah's Witnesses releasing a creepy cartoon aimed at children, trying to convince them that if they have friends with LGBT parents, it's their duty to make sure that the friends find out that their parents are sinners who are doomed to hell.

The cartoon features a little girl who comes to her mom, dismayed because she has a friend whose parents are lesbians.  The mom explains that this is problematic:

People have their own ideas about what is right and wrong – but what matters is how Jehovah feels.  He wants us to be happy and he knows how we can be happiest.  That’s why he invented marriage the way he did -- between one man and one woman. 

Jehovah created Adam and Eve, male and female. Then he said a man will stick to his wife… Jesus said the same thing. 

Jehovah’s standards haven’t changed.  It’s kind of like bringing something on a plane – what happens if someone tries to bring something on that isn’t allowed?

What a brilliant analogy!  Who you are attracted to is exactly like someone trying to bring a hand grenade onto an airplane.  Do go on, Creepy Cartoon Mom:

It’s the same with Jehovah! He wants us to be his friend, and live in paradise forever, but we have to follow his standards to get there.  To get there we have to leave some things behind – that means anything Jehovah doesn’t approve of...  People can change, that’s why we share his message.

Creepy Cartoon Girl then says she'll make sure to tell her friend's parents that Jehovah doesn't approve of their lifestyle, a development that Creepy Cartoon Mom pronounces "awesome."

Then we had a fundamentalist pastor in Tennessee who said that scientists are "abandoning Darwin" in favor of ghosts and UFOs, which (given that they live in the sky, sort of) are basically god.  As long as you squint your eyes and look at them really carefully.

In fact, Pastor Charles Lawson of the Temple Baptist Church of Knoxville has a great deal to say on the topic, following the general scheme of "if you're making up random shit, make up a lot of it":

Think about what I’m saying about aliens communicating with you. Aliens from above.  Something coming down from the skies and communicating with us here on this earth. A lot of scientists, a lot of them, and there’s really no way to know specifically because of political correctness and the pressure that’s put upon them.  A lot of scientists have abandoned Darwin, but because of fear of losing their jobs, fear of losing the ability to produce papers, uh, fear, peer pressure, they have to keep it in, and they don’t come out with it, but here and there some do.  They have abandoned Darwin.  They have abandoned evolution.

Yes, there's "no way to know specifically" because it's bullshit.  But that doesn't stop him for a moment:

Scientists have jettisoned Darwin and now they’re looking up, and past, and they’re getting into the spirit world, into the paranormal world.  And the two of them, they compliment each other, and they begin to get into something that their scientific books know nothing about...  You can get a Ph.D. from Harvard and not know one thing about a spirit.

And once again, there's a reason for that, but probably not the one Pastor Lawson is thinking of.

Finally, we have Mayor Tony Yarber of Jackson, Mississippi, who is recommending taking care of the abysmal conditions of roads in the city by... praying that the potholes will get filled.  Yarber tweeted:

Yes….I believe we can pray potholes away.  Moses prayed and a sea opened up. #iseeya #itrustHim #prayerworks

Some of the residents of Jackson were less than sanguine about the idea.  Glenn Garber responded:

Are you fucking kidding me?!  I have a better idea… Pay to have them filled!

Yarber responded, apparently in all seriousness:

We tried that.  So praying is the obvious alternative.

When days went by and lo, the potholes were not magically filled, one Jackson resident posted some doubts:

I thought he was going to pray for them to be fixed.  Did God deny his prayer?

Undaunted, Yarber responded:

Absolutely not.  I’m never denied.  Go to http://data.jacksonms.gov to see infrastructure plans.

Because evidently one of the mysterious ways in which god works is through filing road maintenance plans with the city council.  

Is it just me, or is god relying more on bureaucracy now than he did back in the good old create-loaves-and-fishes days?  When the multitudes came to Jesus to be fed, he didn't say, "And I hath filed a requisition with the Greater Judea Food Distribution Network, and thy loaves and fishes will be delivered three weeks from next Thursday, as hath been prophesied in the scriptures."

The Miracles of Christ (Aert van den Bossche, ca. 1500) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyhow.  I'd like to think that these people aren't serious, but I'm very much afraid that they are.  Worse still, there is a good percentage of folks in the United States who read this kind of thing and say, "Hallelujah!" instead of doing what I did, which is guffawing.  I live in hope, however, that the more outrageous the claims from the fringe get, the more people will stop and say, "Okay, wait a moment.  That can't be true."

Or maybe not.  After all, this is the country where a majority of the citizens say that climate change is a "myth" while simultaneously believing that people do bad stuff because a woman created from a rib was given an apple by a talking snake.

It's all in the wrist

As the science has become more sophisticated, the creationists have had to resort to their own sort of sophistication to fight it.  Witness (if you don't mind doing repeated headdesks) Answers in Genesis's recent "paper," "On the Origin of Human Mitochondrial DNA Differences, New Generation Time Data Both Suggest a Unified Young-Earth Creation Model and Challenge the Evolutionary Out-of-Africa Model."  (If you would understandably prefer not to risk valuable brain cells, and also give AIG further hits on their hit tracker, the gist is that if you pick and choose, you can use mtDNA data to show that some human haplogroups can be traced back to a common ancestor about 6,000 years ago.  Therefore Adam and Eve, apparently.  How they explain the fact that you can use the precisely same method to show that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor between 6 and 7 million years ago, I have no idea.)

Likewise, as the evolutionists have become better at using media to give access to their information, the creationists have done the same.  So it's not surprising that the young-earth crowd has taken to splashy publicity blitzes to spread their message, like Ray "Mr. Banana" Comfort's dubious strategy of giving out his new book Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before America Will Have an Atheist President along with Subway gift cards at Reason Rally 2016, costing him $25,000.

Myself, I have no problem with this.  Can you imagine what will happen when Comfort and his crew hand out his book and the gift cards at an event where 99% of the attendees are secular rationalists?  My guess is that they'll accept, chuck the book, and go get a nice foot-long sub with the works at Ray's expense.

Equally sketchy is an order by an evangelical group for over a hundred thousand silicone wristbands that say "DEBUNK EVOLUTION" in large unfriendly letters.  The owner of Rapid Wristbands, Fiyyaz Pirani, couldn't refuse; for one thing, it was a hefty order and represented a lot of money to his company.  For another, he didn't want to do the same thing that the Christian cake bakers did, which is to refuse to serve someone on ideological grounds.

So what did he do?

He accepted the order, and when the fundamentalist ministry who ordered the wristbands paid up, he donated the whole shebang (an amount of over $4,000) to the National Center for Science Education.

"I’m thrilled to donate to a cause I really believe in," Pirani said.  "NCSE has labored for years to keep creationism out of the public schools, and I’m pleased that my company’s donation will help it continue its valuable work."

So I only have one thing to say to the ministry that ordered the wristbands:

As marketing strategy backfires go, this ranks right up there with Mitsubishi's decision to name their car model the "Pajero," neglecting the fact that "Pajero" means "wanker" in Spanish.

As far as NCSE goes, they (of course) happily accepted the donation, and were far more mature than I would have been had I been their spokesperson.  Explaining, probably, why I will never be their spokesperson.  "We admire RapidWristband.com’s way of responding to unwelcome orders," said Ann Reid, NCSE’s executive director.  "It’s more ethical than refusing to fulfill them—and more constructive."

Not to mention about a thousand times more hilarious.

So that's our news for today from the folks who (in Sam Harris's trenchant words) believe that the Earth was created a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.  Myself, I love it when things work out this way.  Poetic justice is always a better option than getting combative.  Not only is it more effective, it stings a hell of a lot worse.

Cat-and-mouse game

What is it with people and cartoons?

We've had people claiming that the Cat in the Hat is a coded symbol for the takeover of the world by the Illuminati.  A Saudi imam issued a fatwa against Mickey Mouse because "the mouse is one of Satan's soldiers."  The Vatican looked gave a serious look into whether or not the Simpsons are Catholic.  A French academic published a paper making the claim that The Smurfs is communist propaganda.  There was an outcry by the seal-the-borders cadre here in the United States when it was revealed that Dora the Explorer might be an illegal immigrant.

And because all of that wasn't ridiculous enough, Salah Abdel Sadek, head of Egypt's State Information Service, has made the claim that violent extremism in the Middle East is due to...

... Tom & Jerry.

Yes, Tom & Jerry, the iconic cat-and-mouse duo whose goofy hijinks have delighted Saturday morning cartoon watchers for decades.  But their shenanigans may not be so innocent, Sadek claims:

[Tom & Jerry] portrays the violence in a funny manner and sends the message that, yes, I can hit him … and I can blow him up with explosives.  It becomes set in [the viewer’s] mind that this is natural...   The cartoon conveys negative habits like smoking and drinking alcohol, teaches children that stealing is normal, distorts the concept of justice, and helps children invent sinister plans using sharp instruments such as chainsaws.

Okay, can we just get one thing straight right from the outset?

Cartoon characters are not real.  Because of this, I do not expect the world to be like an episode of Scooby Doo.  Although I have to admit that it would be easier in a lot of ways if it did.  Then all we'd have to do is to pull the masks off of the Koch brothers, and it'd turn out that they were actually the carnival owners, and they'd have gotten away with taking over the government if it hadn't been for You Crazy Kids and Your Flea-Bitten Mutt.

Also, most children are perfectly capable of telling cartoons from real life.  I grew up watching Looney Tunes, and I never once thought it'd be a clever idea to drop an actual anvil on anyone.  I was aware right from the outset that if you shoot a gun in someone's face, it doesn't simply blow their nose around to the other side of their head.  I knew that I couldn't paint a picture of a tunnel onto a wall, and then run down it like it was real.

Further, I understood that if you step off a cliff, you will fall right away, not wait until you notice that you're in mid-air.

In other words, I got that there's a difference between cartoons and real life, a distinction that seems to have escaped Salah Abdel Sadek.

Of course, there's another reason that he's making the claim.  Blaming the problems in the Middle East on a pair of (Western) cartoon characters makes it easy to ignore the more troubling reality -- that extremism isn't going to be as easy to fix as telling your children to turn off the television.  In order to do anything substantive about extremism, you have to acknowledge the role of poverty, sectarianism, and the preaching of religious intolerance, all three of which the Egyptian government is reluctant to address.  That would require doing something difficult, such as addressing wealth inequity, legislating equal treatment under the law for all races and religions, and squelching the Muslim clerics who shriek about jihad against those who are "insulting Islam" by virtue of holding other beliefs.

Easier to blame a fictional cat and mouse, isn't it?

So there you have it.  All this time and money and effort, and to end the violence all we had to do was cut subscriptions to The Cartoon Network.  It'd be nice, wouldn't it?  Just shutting something off makes it go away.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way.  I know.  I've been trying that with Ann Coulter for years, to no avail.

The politics of rage

So Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president.

I got in an argument with a couple of friends last year when Trump first began to ramp up his campaign.  "Never going to happen," I was told.  Trump will fizzle out.  People will realize what a clown he is, and he'll go down in flames.  Or, maybe, Trump isn't really serious, he's playing a great big practical joke on America and at some point will shout "Ha ha, fooled ya!" and drop out.

My response then was that I wished I could believe that.  Trump, I said, has been serious from the beginning.  He's a power-hungry megalomaniac who looks at the presidency as another thing his money and influence can buy, another notch on his gun, another trophy on his wall.  Once he sets his sights on something, he doesn't give up until either he's attained it or been denied.  No way will he concede or (worse) drop out.

Never have I been so sorry to be right.

My fear all along has been that Trump would be able to go the distance because he is tapping in on something deeply interwoven into the psyche of America -- the idea that we are threatened, that anyone different from us is dangerous, that if we're poor all it means is that we are (in Ronald Wright's trenchant words) "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."  And, furthermore, that there's a simple solution to all of it.  Build a wall.  Deport all Muslims.  Cut taxes.  Get Obama out of the White House.  Nuke ISIS.  Stop trading with China.  Keep jobs on US soil.

So Trump has appealed to a group of people who share a dangerous combination of traits: a lack of understanding of the complexity of the world, and a deep-seated, visceral anger that the face of the United States is changing.

The result is that we have a nominee who has not only said, but been applauded for saying, the following:

• I'm the worst thing that ever happened to ISIS.
• Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.
• No more 'Merry Christmas' at Starbucks.  No more.  Maybe we should boycott Starbucks.
• [About Carly Fiorina]  Look at that face.  Would anyone vote for that?  Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?  (When called on it, he said, "I think she's got a beautiful face.  And I think she's a beautiful woman."  And he still surged in the polls.)
• I think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.
• [About GOP debate commentator Megyn Kelly]  You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes.  Blood coming out of her… wherever.
• [About John McCain]  He’s not a war hero.  He’s a war hero because he was captured.  I like people who weren’t captured.
• NBC News just called it ‘The Great Freeze’ — coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?
• [About same-sex marriage]  It’s like in golf. A lot of people — I don’t want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive.  It’s weird.  You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore.  And, I hate it.  I am a traditionalist.  I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.
• I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.
• You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.
• We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people who really understand what’s happening and maybe, in some ways, closing that Internet up in some ways.

Each time, people like me have had a thought of, "Okay, that's it.  That's got to wake people up, get them to see who they're supporting for what he actually is -- a narcissistic, arrogant blowhard whose ideal of government is closer to a fascist dictatorship than it is to a democracy."  Instead, each time he's seen a spike in the polls, and comments like "He speaks his mind" and "He's saying what people are thinking."

I'm going to propose something radical -- that our president should be appealing to our highest ideals, not making utterances that sound like things my uncle said after his fourth can of Bud Lite.  (S)he should have a far better understanding of world policy than your average person does.  (S)he should help us to see reality, not reinforce the ugliest and most divisive of our preconceived notions.

But that hasn't happened here.  I keep being told by my optimistic friends that Trump may have won the nomination, but there's no way he can win the presidency.  That a match-up with either Clinton or Sanders, whichever wins the Democratic nomination, will result in a for-sure Democratic win.

I wish I believed that.  We've been hearing the same thing over and over during the last year, from Republicans and Democrats alike -- that the Trump candidacy was doomed.  Each time, the prognosticators have been blown back with surprise when he's surmounted challenge after challenge, seen nothing but growth in his support.

And now, a substantial fraction of Americans on both sides of the political aisle are looking at the election and thinking, "How in the hell did we get here?"  And lest you think that I'm exaggerating about the panic Trump is inducing in both parties, witness the op-ed piece written by David Ross Meyers, conservative writer and former staffer for George W. Bush, published yesterday over at Fox News Online.  In his scathing take-down of Trump's candidacy, he writes:

To begin with, Mr. Trump has autocratic tendencies, and openly admires tyrants such as Vladimir Putin.  In fact, his narcissism and cult of personality leadership style seem better suited to countries like North Korea and Uzbekistan than America.  Trump has repeatedly attacked core conservative principles such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and American leadership on the world stage.  He has incited the use of violence against his detractors, called on America to commit war crimes, and suggested the possibility of civil unrest if he is denied the GOP nomination. 

Mr. Trump proclaims that he’s going to make America great again, but can’t provide any realistic plans for doing so; instead, he frequently resorts to scapegoating outsiders, foreigners, and minorities.  The few policies that Trump has articulated would make America less safe, trample upon our most fundamental rights, and appeal to the basest instincts of the American people.

The simple explanation for how Trump has gotten this far is that political commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have for decades encouraged the politics of rage, fanned the fires of divisiveness and anger.  We should not be surprised that the result is a candidate who has ridden to the nomination on the heat of those flames.

But like many simple answers, it's probably not entirely correct.  The divisiveness and anger were already there -- else the hateful commentary from Limbaugh, Coulter, et al. would never have resonated as it did.  And in a lot of ways, people are right to be angry; years of skewed governmental policies have favored corporate profit over the needs and struggles of ordinary citizens, have fostered job loss and outsourcing and the defunding of public education and environmental degradation, irrespective of the cost to the citizenry.

So I do get where this sentiment, at least in part, comes from.  But what I know is that Trump is not the answer.  I mostly stay out of politics, so for someone like me to feel this strongly about a political race is unusual.  We can't let Trump win.  A man like him in an ordinary job is at worst a boor, a lout, a loudmouth, a grandstanding demagogue.

Running a country, he could be a Mussolini, a Hitler, a Kim Jong-Un, an Idi Amin.  Impossible?  No way would he wield that kind of power, even if he won?

This man has beaten all of the odds, confounded every single naysayer from the beginning.  Don't tell me what he can and can't do.

Focus on making sure he's defeated.

Killing the cat

If there is one feature that is nearly universal to humans, it's curiosity.

I suffer from this myself.  When there's something I don't know -- even if it doesn't concern me -- I become kind of obsessed with finding it out.  It's not because I'm a gossip; in fact, I'm completely trustworthy with secrets (should you ever be tempted to tell me some salacious detail about yourself).  So even though I have no intention of ever doing anything with the knowledge, I still want to know.

Turns out, I'm not alone.  A study published last week in Psychological Science by Bowen Ruan and Christopher Hsee at the University of Chicago has shown that people are driven to find out things -- even when they know ahead of time that what they're trying to find out might well be unpleasant.

[image courtesy of photographer Julián Cantarelli and the Wikimedia Commons]

Ruan and Tsee set up a series of tests in which the outcome might be known to be pleasant (or at least neutral), known to be unpleasant, or could be either.  In one, they had a set of gag "electric pens" that deliver a painful shock when you press the button.  Test subjects were given either red pens (you know you'll get a shock from those), green pens (you know you won't be shocked), or yellow pens (you could either get a shock or not).  They then counted the number of times participants pressed the button.

Yellow pens got clicked twice as often.  (Oddly, the green pens got clicked the least.  I guess that a painful, but interesting, outcome is still preferable to a boring one.)

They repeated the procedure, this time using digital recordings -- one of a pleasant sound (running water), another of an unpleasant one (nails on a chalkboard).  Once again, the people who didn't know which they were going to hear clicked the "play" button the most often.

And yet again -- this time with pleasant natural imagery (a butterfly) and an unpleasant one (a cockroach).  Same results.

Study author Ruan said, "Just as curiosity drove Pandora to open the box despite being warned of its pernicious contents, curiosity can lure humans–like you and me–to seek information with predictably ominous consequences... Curious people do not always perform consequentialist cost-benefit analyses and may be tempted to seek the missing information even when the outcome is expectedly harmful."

What is the most interesting about this study is that Ruan and Hsee asked the participants to rank whether they felt better, worse, or the same after the tests than before.  Across the board, the participants who were presented with uncertainty -- most of whom decided to test that uncertainty even at their own risk -- felt worse afterwards.

This is pretty curious.  We're driven to do things that could be dangerous (or at least unpleasant), and feel worse afterwards, and yet... we still do them.  It seems as if our "let's find out" attitude, so lauded in science as the wellspring of our drive to understand, might have a darker side.

So we might all be Pandora, doing what we do just to see what happens, and only regretting our decisions after the fact.  Curiosity doesn't necessarily kill the cat, at least not every time -- more often, it keeps us curious felines coming back for more.