Stop the Gellerization of America

Pamela Geller is this nice Muslin lady who runs an anti-Islam organization with its very own website and everything. She likes to warn us real Americans about the Mohammedans when they’re about to do something illegal, like whistle a call to prayer at a stoplight. There’s always some new and exciting way to be afraid of those Moslems.

With Thanksgiving coming, Geller has spent the past week or so wondering what the best way to connect her McCarthyite crusade to the holiday, like most of us have. And that’s how she discovered that your Thanksgiving turkey is really a Trojan Horse which has been brainwashed by the Prophet Mohammed. Check it:

Did you know that the turkey you’re going to enjoy on Thanksgiving Day this Thursday is probably halal? If it’s a Butterball turkey, then it certainly is — whether you like it or not.

Whether you like it or not, people! You cannot change your dead turkey’s religion just by wishing for a postmortem conversion really, really hard! That is unless you’re a Mormon, in which case you can have a weird pagan ceremony where you baptize your dead turkey along with a few Nazi war criminals for good measure. Anyway, this is a shock to Geller’s audience, who probably also believes in The Secret, Atlantis, energy independence, and extended warrantees too.

So why is Geller the only one very concerned about the Muslim turkeys? Sure, maybe it’s not the most important thing in the world. It’s probably only the fourth most important thing in the world. Geller laments how she seems to be the only one freaking out over this:

Where are the PETA clowns and the ridiculous celebs who pose naked on giant billboards for PETA and “animal rights”? They would rather see people die of cancer or AIDS than see animals used in drug testing, but torturous and painful Islamic slaughter is OK.

Yes, where is PETA? See, this is what separates a level-headed rational person like Pamela Geller from those ridiculous celebs and clowns, of which she certainly isn’t one at all, no, no sir. Why doesn’t PETA have an entire section of their website devoted to the cruelty of this halal slaughter practice including an article titled “The Cruelty Behind Muslim Ritual Slaughter” which anyone with two brain cells to rub against each other and a fraction of a second and Google could find? We may never know.

Chris Stedman Is Wrong On The Internet

EDIT: The Twitter back-and-forth between Stedman and myself isn’t showing up on this blog for some reason, and I’m too lazy to figure out why. So probably just read this at The BEAST where it miraculously showed up.

A billboard campaign rarely makes the news unless it’s either wildly provocative or sponsored by an atheist group. As far as billboards go, it’s all well and good to remind people of some dehumanizing catastrophe like a Celine Dione concert at the local casino; but if you suggest that Christianity’s a myth or that atheists exist, everyone will freak the fuck out.

And part of that everyone who freaks out at atheist billboards includes other atheists. Like Chris Stedman. Stedman calls himself a “Humanist chaplain.” [EDIT: Stedman responded in part on Twitter denying that he called himself that. I may have mistaken his defense of the position as a real job as self-defense] Don’t ask me what that means. Don’t ask Stedman either, because as far as I’ve been able to gather he hasn’t been able to elaborate on what that so-called “job” entails beyond simply being a decent person. It’s nice work if you can get it.

Anyway, Stedman’s been pretty upset with a billboard campaign by American Atheists. AA is admittedly on the more “in your face” end of the spectrum of atheist organizations, and for the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas they’re putting up these billboards:

Stedman doesn’t approve of the billboards even though, as a secular humanist, he would mostly agree with the underlying claim they make. Sure, he knows that Christianity’s based more on mythology than history, but Christians don’t. So they might be offended by American Atheists pointing that out. They need protection from those mean atheists and their differing opinions. But who will protect them? The “humanist chaplain,” that’s who.

So Stedman took to Twitter (where we admittedly follow him) to take American Atheists president and wearer of bewildered expressions in reaction to Bill O’Reilly’s idiocy Dave Silverman to task for undermining the secular cause by being too offensive. Silverman countered by citing increases in AA membership and media coverage. In a surreal move, Stedman then criticized Silverman for just focusing on the numbers. Because when you want to demonstrate a strategy’s effectiveness, you’re supposed to measure it with…Japanese calligraphy.

“Humanist chaplain goes in, Humanist chaplain goes out, never a miscommunication.”

At this point my head was starting to ache and I felt like I had to intervene. So here’s how it went down:

<a href=”http://storify.com/BfloBEAST/beast-v-stedman-part-1″ target=”_blank”>View the story “BEAST v Stedman, part 1″ on Storify</a>]
The studies he’s citing are pretty interesting, but almost totally irrelevant. The experimenters would take people grouped by ideology and have them read fake news stories and respond to them. Some of the fake news stories confirmed their beliefs. Others contradicted them. And some of them would have a correction at the end, while others didn’t. What the study revealed was that people don’t usually change their false beliefs when they learn of new evidence which proves them wrong. Stedman seemed to think this proves that correcting misconceptions about atheists in a nice way works, while doing it in a more aggressive, American Atheists-style doesn’t. But there was no control in the studies he cited for tone. All it tested was whether or not people respond to any correction at all, and it looks like most of us don’t. So if he’s saying we should apply these findings to a strategy of explaining to people that atheists aren’t all evil people, then the new strategy would be no strategy at all. The whole idea of secular outreach, or even just education in general, is a futile endeavor if nobody will ever change their minds when corrected. But it doesn’t look like he was thinking of things in the same way:

<a href=”http://storify.com/BfloBEAST/beast-v-stedman-part-2″ target=”_blank”>View the story “BEAST v Stedman, part 2″ on Storify</a>]At this point I quoted from the abstract of a study he cited describing how the experiment was carried out, and pointed out that these studies weren’t about how people double down on their beliefs when they feel they’re under attack at all. He just made that up out of whole cloth. Here’s the relevant quote from the abstract:

We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

As you can see, there’s nothing in there about how corrections are made. That’s not what these people were studying at all. Stedman the chaplain is just doing another form of apologetics by pretending that empirical evidence supports what he’s already decided to believe for his own subjective reasons.

Later he claimed he was thinking of another study and couldn’t find it because he was busy. As of now I’m still waiting on that. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s right. Let’s hypothetically say that being aggressive in your outreach usually backfires and reinforces the same worldviews you’re trying to change. If that were true, you would expect an organization running billboards like this:

to fail pretty quickly. But that’s not what’s happening. The above billboard was made and paid for by one of the most popular creationist groups in the world, our old friends at Answers in Genesis.

And then there’s the assymetry to consider. It’s not like Stedman is objecting to a comparably ham-handed PR campaign like this one by some anonymous person on reddit:

The American Atheist billboards just present their general position on Christianity, i.e. that it’s a myth. It doesn’t say that myths are horrible things which will lead to you going on a senseless massacre. It should be no more offensive to theists than a Pepsi billboard would be to Atlanta. I pass by all kinds of advertising and marketing campaigns I don’t agree with every day, but I don’t go on a Quixotic Twitter crusade to stop them.

Another problem with urging people like Dave Silverman, PZ Myers, Greta Christina, and our other ‘angry atheist’ friends to be nicer in their approach is that people are pretty good at spotting phonies. If you think you’re being respectful on the outside, chances are the person you’re trying to reach will just see you rolling your eyes on the inside. Unless you’re trained as an actor or something like that, sugarcoating is always going to come across as disingenuous.

One last point: even if a nice accommodationist approach works for 70% of the population, there’s still a 30% potential audience for a more blunt approach. Why not let others try different approaches? Maybe it is less effective as a whole (and I’m not yet convinced of that), but do we really want to ignore everyone who doesn’t respond to the most popular tactic? It seems so short-sighted.

Sadly, our Twitter mini-battle ended pretty much where we started:

<a href=”http://storify.com/BfloBEAST/beast-v-stedman-part-3″ target=”_blank”>View the story “BEAST v. Stedman, part 3″ on Storify</a>]Not entirely opposed to multiple approaches…just partially. And that’s where the facepalming began.

39 Things Obama Could Do To Get My Vote

One year from today, Americans and Mormons alike will line up at the polls to cast their votes for who will be the next king of the playground. I didn’t vote for Obama last time because I am a racist who only votes for Arab-Americans like Ralph Nader (besides, to be totally honest, I prefer the Trial By Stone method of appointing political leaders as portrayed by the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal). And I don’t plan on voting for Obama again next year. But this could change.

 John McCain (right), shortly before his banishment

Since I know the President reads all of our posts and commits them to memory like most other people on Earth, I will now inform him of 39 things he can do over the course of the next year in the interests of both earning my vote and of general awesomeness.

1. Start wearing a cape.
2. Grow an Afro.
3. Make The Avengers real.
4. Replace hands with hand-shaped chainsaws.
5. Sign an executive order mandating that one night a week, Bill O’Reilly’s TV show must only air footage of O’Reilly trying to fit his fist in his mouth.
6. Stop the war on drugs.
7. Follow @BfloBEAST on Twitter.
8. And then re-tweet ALL the things!
9. Start every sentence with “In accordance with The Prophecy…”
10. Angrily refuse to answer any questions about The Prophecy.
11. Tell my boss to fuck off during the State of the Union address, at the end in between the now obligatory reassuring lies “The state of our union is strong” and “Thank you, and may God continue to bless America.”
12. Wipe all the snow off my car right before I get out of work all winter.
13. New appointment: Attorney General Glenn Greenwald.
14. Go BASE-jumping in secret just to try to piss in Nancy Grace’s mouth.
15. Dress up as a pirate on a random Tuesday and when people ask about it, act like you don’t know what they’re talking about.
16. Cut the military budget in half.
17. Split the money saved from #16 between NASA and the NSF.
18. Answer the next “Why” question at a press conference with “Because FUCK YOU, that’s why.”
19. Order the National Guard to follow Nickelback on tour, just to freak them out. Both of them.
20. Murder Andrew Breitbart with a predator drone.
21. Then outlaw drone assassination of US citizens.
22. Stop doing that sideways pointing thing he does.
23. Punch Jay Leno in his stupid prick face.
24. Get the birther thing started again by pushing for an amendment to the Constitution which nullifies the requirement that the President must be a natural-born citizen. It’s an idiotic rule anyway, and the conspiracy nuts are too much fun.
25. Strap a camera to your head and livestream everything you do for a day.
26. Sexually harass Herman Cain using a stick of pepperoni and at least 3 types of cheese.
27. Order Mike Tyson to train his pigeons to pick the pockets of hedge fund managers on Wall Street.
28. Release the invisibility cloaks along with all other technology the government received from the aliens and has since been hiding away in a vault to the public.
29. Make the Pentagon invisible.
30. Presidents can too make things invisible. It’s in the CONSTITUTION.
31. Change the National Anthem to either What Is Hip? or any song from the Black Dynamite soundtrack.
32. Find my car keys.
33. Abolish the death penalty for all crimes except for driving 5 or more miles per hour under the speed limit in the passing lane.
34. Sell Idaho to the Canadians.
35. Forget that, trade it for Vancouver.
36. Sell Arizona to the Mexicans.
37. Challenge Rick Perry to a duel. At dawn. At “Niggerhead.” Call him ‘yellow’ when he declines.
38. Stop pestering us about your boyfriend Jesus.
39. Use the find/replace function on your speeches to change “Republicans” to “jive turkeys.”

The Rum Diary

It seems like we’ve been mourning Hunter Thompson for the past seven years now. We’ve had the obituary, the response to others’ shitty obituaries, the oral history, the documentaries. Some people got to see his ashes shot from a custom-made Gonzo cannon. We’ve even had weird conspiracy theories about him being murdered floated out on the internet by people who apparently have trouble understanding why someone like Thompson would blow his brains out when he’s in a wheelchair and just starting George W Bush’s second term as President. And now we’ve got the long-awaited movie adaptation of The Rum Diary.

The Rum Diary is pretty good for a superhero origins movie. The superhero later became known as Raoul Duke and Hunter Thompson, but back then he was Paul Kemp.

Kemp was Thompson before Thompson was Thompson – more of a late ’50s greaser who rode around with the Hell’s Angels than the eccentric character we all came to know and love in later years. But there are several moments in the film where you get the impression that you’re watching the beginning of certain aspects of his persona. His love of driving fast in sports cars with beautiful women, his love of psychedelic drugs, his hatred of Richard Nixon – all these things are inserted into the script in order to foreshadow the future of Thompson’s career. Even some lines are lifted directly from his later works for the more obsessive fans in the audience who might be looking for a little more than a literal translation of the novel itself.

Because – and I say this as one of those obsessive fans in the audience – the plot of The Rum Diary isn’t that great. I don’t even remember how it ended, exactly, though I’m pretty sure it was different from the film. What I do remember are the little anecdotes and the overall ambiance. The look and feel of Puerto Rico just before the Paleface, Inc. came in with their pin-striped suits and took over the place, that was really the strong point of Thompson’s writing at this stage.

And that definitely carried over into the translation to celluloid. Some of the characters are simplified to fit a Hunter Thompson model some of us might be more used to. The newspaper’s staff photographer Bob Sala is made into more of an Oscar Acosta / Dr. Gonzo / Ralph Steadman constant companion character than he was, and Moberg (more on him later) is more of an outcast in the film, while he was more or less part of a trio in the book.

Since this is set back about half a century ago, one of the predominant themes of corruption and crime within journalism seems quaint in the modern world. A PR guy played by the Two-Face / Thank You For Smoking guy asks Kemp to plant what amounts to miniature subliminal ads for his development projects within his stories. And although he agrees to it Kemp seems troubled by how he’s being used in the situation. So back then that would’ve been the standard reaction to an offer to be paid to unethically haul water in what amounts to a tiny newsletter for a guy who wants to build a hotel; today you get hacks like Judith Miller enthusiastically volunteering to make a case for war in Iraq in the pages of the New York Times. It’s sad how things change sometimes.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but the parts I remembered and the imagery it conjured in my mind looked pretty much exactly as I imagined. The one exception was how Moberg looked. But going back to the book it dawned on me that they had portrayed him pretty accurately and that I had read it wrong. In the movie Moberg looks like an actual transient bum who sleeps in the streets. Reading the book gave me the impression he was just the scruffiest of a scruffy bunch – the drunk who all the other drunks point to, saying, “At least I’m not like him.” But that was because I assumed Thompson was using  an unreliable narrator device in describing Moberg.

But I think a moderate version of Moberg could even be justified by a literal reading of the text. The newspaper’s editor Lotterman yelled at him a lot, but you get the feeling Lotterman was a uptight guy from the beginning. Besides, in the book it was Moberg who was originally with Chenault, not Sanderson. They had a small place on the beach way out in the sticks where he would hunt for chicken. All these factors put together led me to believe Moberg was a little more together than he appears in the film. But then you’ve got Thompson’s [Kemp's] original description of him, which pretty much overrides my own nerding out over this:

Moberg had been in San Juan only a few months, but Lotterman seemed to loathe him with a passion that it would take most men years to cultivate. Moberg was a degenerate. He was small, with thin blond hair and a face that was pale and flabby. I have never seen a man so bent on self-destruction — not only self, but destruction of everything he could get his hands on. He was lewd and corrupt in every way. He hated the taste of rum, yet he would finish a bottle in ten minutes, then vomit and fall down. He ate nothing but sweet rolls and spaghetti, which he would heave the moment he got drunk. He spent all his money on whores and when that got dull he would take on an occasional queer, just for the strangeness of it. He would do anything for money, and this was the man we had on the police beat. Often he disappeared for days at a time. Then someone would have to track him down through the dirtiest bars in La Perla, a slum so foul that on maps of San Juan it appears as a blank space. La Perla was Moberg’s headquarters; he felt at home there, he said, and in the rest of the city — except for a few horrible bars — he was a lost soul.

It goes on for a few more paragraphs, but you get the idea.

Anyway, enough about Moberg. He’s a minor character. What you should take away from this is if you’re thinking about seeing The Rum Diary, don’t expect a literal translation. That’s a pretty unreasonable expectation for any movie based on a book and especially so here, where the filmmakers are trying to make this more of a final goodbye to one of the 20th century’s great journalists than a simple story about a crappy newspaper in late ’50s Puerto Rico.

One last thing. As well as they capture the image and tone of Thompson’s book, I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as the Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas movie. Then again, this one didn’t have an obsessive maniac in the director’s chair, and we all know Johnny Depp’s not nearly as age-appropriate for a 20something Hunter than he was 14 years ago as a 30something one. Still, it’s better than Where The Buffalo Roam, but not quite good enough to not wait for it to come out on DVD.

__________________________________

4 Ways the Alt-Med Industry is Fucking With Animals

Animal testing is a tough subject. For the most part I’m for it, although there are probably a lot of unnecessary ways it goes down which should probably be stopped. But when it comes to developing new drugs to treat diseases, there’s a certain amount of acceptable harm to non-human animals which in my opinion can be justified in the interests of a greater good to humanity.

Probably some BEAST readers disagree with me there, and we can have a discussion about the moral ambiguities and grey areas, and maybe learning more about it might cause some of us to change our minds. But when you get into how animals are used in the alternative medicine industry, all these potential nuances are wiped away since by definition alternative medicine doesn’t even work. If any of the practices I’m about to get into had shown efficacy through real scientific evidence, then they wouldn’t be alternative medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. So what we’re talking about here isn’t about whether we should sacrifice X number of Y species to save Z number of humans; it’s just about how much we should let the quack industry harm animals for the sole purpose of profit.

Killing Tigers For Boner Pills

This one will grow up so that he may give us hope for a solution to our erectile dysfunction.

Hey guys! Having trouble getting your dick up without fantasizing about presumably wild tiger-sex? Does the idea of poaching endangered species to grind up into vitalism-inspired magic dust give you a boner? If so then alternative medicine has just the thing for you.

Vitalism is this quasi-religious way of looking at the world which emphasizes some kind of vital essence of things. We might be made of mere atoms, but there’s also some kind of mysterious living force or “spark” of life within us which always manages to escapes detection by empirical means.

In some versions of this belief, the vital essence idea doesn’t apply only to life and living organisms themselves, but also to each part of the body. So for example, my feet aren’t just organs made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements as encoded by my DNA and controlled by electrical signals connecting them to my brain. For some reason that’s not quite cool enough to interest people who get into vitalism. For them, my feet also have to have a “keeping Josh standing” essence to them. Presumably if you cut them off, they’d still ‘want’ to help me walk just because that’s what they really like doing, apparently.

So how does this apply to killing tigers for boner pills? You need to start with the assumption that tigers have AWESOME sex lives. I don’t know why exactly people would assume that, but if they do, the secret to their unparalleled ability to just bone for hours on end (at least according to vitalism) is literally in their junk. Chop it up, smash it into powder, pour the powder into those little empty pill capsules you can buy at the health store, and you’ve got an aphrodisiac. Or at least a product you can sell as one, thanks to the FDA’s lax regulations.

Homeopathy For Cows

Louise and Melvin, seen here  drinking their €2 million barrel of water.

We’ve dealt with how absurd homeopathy is a few times before, so I’ll spare you the details on that this time around. It’s a similar way of thinking to what leads people to crush up tiger junk for boner pills, but adds another layer of quackery by insisting that the supposedly active ingredient be diluted. Like, diluted a lot. This makes the remedy more powerful. Seriously, that’s what homeopathy proponents say they believe.

Using homeopathy on cows isn’t so much evil as it is stupid and wasteful. But that’s not stopping the European Agriculture Committee from allocating millions of taxpayer Euros on it during one of the worst recessions in decades. You know, just to be really extra sure it doesn’t work. Again.

This time the quacks are saying homeopathy will cure mastitis, a bacterial breast infection, in cows. The nauseating Dana Ullman tried to portray a recent study as supporting his brand of bullshit, but as Le Canard Noir points out on Quakometer, Ullman badly misrepresented the actual text of the study. A group of cows being treated for mastitis using homeopathy showed statistically significant results, but — and this is the part Ullman leaves out — there was only one observation showing the homeopath group of cows having a significant difference compared to a placebo-controlled group. Also there was only one trial, so the chances of a false positive increases.

Let’s say you have the world’s worst basketball player. Someone who only makes, say, 1 in 20 shots. You give him a basketball and tell him to take 3 shots. He makes one of them. The basketball equivalent of Dana Ullman would say that this player makes 1 in every 3 shots. A more scientific person interested in knowing just how bad this hypothetical basketball player is would tell him to shoot the ball as many times as possible, and then take a percentage. And if this basketball player is analogous to homeopathy, what that person would find is that the only times he manages to sink a ball are basically flukes.

The Europeans are being swindled by cranks and frauds to support magical thinking. If they want to spend more money on how they treat cows, that’s great. But at least spend it testing some treatment which is plausible. We don’t need to waste time and money on showing there’s no tooth fairy, and we don’t need any more studies on whether or not water has memory. It’s ridiculous.

Torturing Bears For Their Bile

Let’s say you’re a black bear, in southern China, born and raised. In the forest is where you spent most of your days. Chillin’ out, relaxin, maxin, all cool and all, eating some fruit, honey, and small birds outside of the nearest village.

A black bear, seen here roaming the forest like a boss.

When a couple of dudes who were up to no good started making trouble in your neighborhood. You get in one little fight and the poachers got scared. They said, “We’re going to lock you up in a cage for the rest of your life so we can extract bile from your gall bladder to sell as traditional Chinese medicine.”

PWNED!1

Yeah, so that’s an image of a black bear in captivity. What they do is puncture a hole through its abdomen into its liver. They keep this wound from closing up, creating a brand new orifice which the quacks then use to extract bile. Imagine being kept in a cage only slightly bigger than you so someone can stab you in the guts without you tearing both of their arms off. Then whenever the hole in your belly starts to heal, they tear it back open again. It sounds like something out of an Eli Roth torture porn flick where medical staff are kept around to keep the victim from dying prematurely, thereby prolonging its suffering for as long as possible. But this is alternative medicine, so you know they do all of this with love and in harmony with nature and stuff. Or something.

Smoking Vulture Brains to See the Future

For some reason, some people in South Africa got the following idea into their heads: That you can see the future — especially lottery numbers and the results of sporting events — by getting yourself a vulture, killing it, crushing its skull, extracting its sweet juicy brains, rolling it up into a giant spliff, and smoking it.

You would probably think this is the kind of superstition with a short shelf life, since it’s so easily testable. Actually, maybe “easily” isn’t exactly the right word. But if you find it easy to kill a bird and smoke its brains or you know someone who does, and if that really does allow you to perceive future events, this should be one way to win the lottery or a long-shot sports bets by being like this kid:

But no. As far as I know, there’s no huge surge in South African millionaires. All that’s happening is that the vultures in that part of the world on the verge of going extinct because people can be greedy and stupid. Or maybe it’s just that they secretly like the taste of vulture brain smoke but rightfully feel embarrassed about it so they make up this lie about seeing the future to cover for their weird and cruel habit. Some vulture brain junkie is probably explaining to his wife right now that they’re going to win the lottery any day now if only he could just have a few more vulture brains.

Fetal Ghost Busters

Haunted Abortion Cemetery? The BEAST Investigates

There are lots of stories of haunted places here in Western New York. Surprisingly, most of them are places with prices of admission: haunted theaters, haunted hotels, haunted gift shops, haunted pet stores, haunted haunted houses, haunted toll booths, and that sort of thing.

Being the poverty-stricken proletariat that we are, we decided to investigate a supposedly haunted place which is open to the public. So we went to Goodleberg Cemetery in Wales, NY, to investigate the local legend of fetal ghosts terrifying the populace by leaving tiny handprints on the windows of cars.

Here are the results of our investigation. Enjoy and Happy Halloween.

[bunting]

Oops

I kinda forgot about this blog until some obsessed fan reminded me of it. So if one of the tens of people who read this regularly still haven’t given up on it, please do keep it in your subscriptions or whatever. I’m going to try to keep it updated with BEAST stuff and more, but no promises. A few things from the past month or two to follow…