Some Shroud presentation notes

Earlier this week I had a pretty long post on The BEAST about a Shroud of Turin presentation I attended. Some of the details didn’t really fit with how I wanted to write the story, so I thought I’d add them here. This isn’t an admission of hiding facts which would have contradicted what I had to say about Russ Breault’s presentation. These are neutral omissions that just would have made the article too sprawling and rambling. Still they’re kind of interesting and I thought I should get them down somewhere and this is kind of the place for me for that sort of thing. So here we go:

The church this was held at had two flags on either side of its altar. One was a US flag and the other was a “Christian flag.” Now these are used by lots of Christian organizations, but they’re all pretty creepy. Here is is outside of the HQ of Focus on the Family:

And here it is at a Ku Klux Klan HQ:

There were ushers, but they didn’t… erm.. ush anyone. They just stood by the exits. One man was going to the bathroom towards the end of the event and an usher approached him and asked if he was leaving. I don’t know why, but it seemed ominous. Maybe that’s just my own paranoia though.

If Joe Nickell were there, he didn’t ask a question afterwards. I saw one person raising his hand after the Q&A ended, but I kind of doubt that was him since he’d have known to try to get his question out there quickly. Breault mentioned beforehand that his Q&A would have to be brief.

The pastor of the church’s name is Andrew Abraham. He shook my hand and told me God blessed me. He didn’t seem like an asshole.

Breault said that we were living in an age of skepticism. People seem to just lap that stuff up. I wish as many people showed up at skeptics’ conventions as they do to church on Sundays.

At one point Breault brought up a slide of the Pope holding that incense thing they use before Mass. Like a teacher in a classroom he said something like “And this represents… what?” and there was this really awkward pause because this is at a Protestant church and they wouldn’t be expected to know these things, apparently. A few people did and spoke up eventually.

One of Breault’s defenses against the Carbon-dating of the Shroud was that the scientists took a sample of it at a point where it had been handled. This is illustrated in the pic I have on The BEAST article where some Bishops are holding it. Breault used similar images to make this point. Then he made a few jokes about how scientists are stupid for choosing that sample. But during the Q&A it came to light that the scientists were following the Church’s protocol, since they owned the thing after all. Breault admitted this, therefore admitting that he was knowingly deceiving the audience by making it seem like this “error” – at least it was an error as he saw it – was the fault of the scientists and not the Church. I would speculate that the Church wanted to sample a part of the shroud which could be questionable so that they could always fall back on an excuse like the one Breault used to make it seem like it is at worst, still a mystery.

There were around 150 people there. Most of the pews were full. There were very few people under 40. I only saw one couple with children. I sat in the back corner in a ‘reserved’ section, but nobody seemed to care. They had water but nobody took any. It took place at 107 Smith Street in Tonawanda, NY, which is Immanuel Lutheran Church.

Breault was selling DVDs. He mentioned them once at the end, but didn’t cite them during the talk which would have been really annoying.

OK, that’s about it. Hopefully I’ll update this blog more often, but then again I always say that.

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]

Mississippi town bans fortune telling

The Meridian, MS town council has for for decades banned fortune telling, no doubt because it was such a popular place for fortune-telling types. But recently someone tried to open a business which would challenge that ban, and the town council decided to stick to their guns. The esteemed stateswoman Mary Perry explains the rationale for her decision:

“I read my Bible, too, and it talks about fortune telling and so forth,”

For those unfamiliar, the Bible is this religious text which is split into two sections. You’ve got the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is mostly about fortune telling and the New Testament covers And So Forth.

Perry continues with her brilliant legal analysis:

“Everyone has their own opinion and can do what they want but I try to follow what is legal and within my heart, and after praying about something. I kind of go with that”

There should be some kind of mechanism which automatically removes people from office when they vote against letting people do what they want and then explain their decision to not let people do what they want by saying that people can do what they want.

Maybe she meant that everyone can do what they want as long as what they want to do is run for office to overturn this weird prohibition. Probably more likely is the possibility that she’s just puking out word salad and has no idea what the actual sentences coming out of her mouth mean.

The harm in “traditional healing”

A few weeks ago when I wrote about a new age exposition here in Western New York, a few commenters on Facebook were whining about how I could dare to criticize the idiots who attended and the frauds who sold overpriced garbage to them. Here’s what one of them said:

Let whackos be wackos. Nothing wrong with them at all- they’re just wackos. Live and let live….. Whether the vendors are con-artists or not… Wackos need to buy their wacky stuff. It’s good for the economy.

Usually I just direct people who make this kind of argument to whatstheharm.net for lots of examples with what’s wrong with “wackos” selling quack “treatments” to the gullible. But since I don’t have a Facebook account, I’ll have to just write about a recent example in the news here.

Tanzania has outlawed witch doctors and traditional “healers” recently due to a mass killing of albinos for their body parts to use in magic potions. But that doesn’t mean their government will do anything about one of them selling the same crap to desperate sick people when the “miracle pastor” selling it happens to be making a lot of money off of it.

There is a line 16 miles long stretching to Rev Ambilikile “Babu” Mwasapile’s house in a remote area of Tanzania. They’re all waiting to pay the equivalent of 30 cents to get a mixture of water and herbs which, according to the BBC, is “safe to drink.” The problem is that it’s not really safe to buy. The people waiting in line for this have no real shelter besides their automobiles (if they happen to have driven there), and no access to clean water. So far 52 have died just waiting in line to buy this stuff.

Maybe some of them would have died of whatever they were trying to cure anyway. After all, they wouldn’t be going to such extreme measures if they didn’t have some serious medical ailment already.

Fortunately even the guy profiting off of all this insanity is calling for fewer customers, since it’ll probably turn out that he’s caused more suffering in his business venture than he’s alleviated. When this story came out, he was asking for no new arrivals until April 1. Also the tests to see if his concoction had any medical benefit were still ongoing. But even if it turns out it has some measurable positive effect, he should still be subject to the law for selling it without doing any real tests or seeking any approval for it at all.

ADE 651 update

A while back I wrote a list of the 5 worst quacks currently operating. One of them was Jim McCormick, the director of a company called ATSC which sold useless pieces of plastic to the military in Iraq and Afghanistan to use as bomb detectors. It’s kind of a stretch to call him a quack, I guess, because that term usually refers to woo dealing with medicine and not so much the war profiteering variety.

McCorcmick was arrested last January and questioned regarding his whole fraud thing. Then an unnamed was arrested for the same thing. And now a third unnamed man has been arrested. He was released on bail last week.

That’s your promised update. No lynching or anything like that, at least not yet.

Romanian fortune tellers are outraged

Queen Witch Bratara Buzea, mooch

The Romanian government has just passed a law which will require the fortune tellers in that country to pay a fine if their predictions don’t come true.

Naturally, the “witches” are outraged. From KOMO News:

“They can’t condemn witches, they should condemn the cards,” Queen Witch Bratara Buzea told The Associated Press by telephone.

And I guess when automobile manufacturers release cars with defective brakes, we should blame the plastic and steel instead of the company profiting off them. And when agribusinesses sell dangerous food, the FDA should go after the microbes and not the people responsible for the negligence. After all, we “can’t” condemn anyone responsible for their own fraud, right?

This is just a case of special pleading. Every single other manner of commerce is regulated within some bounds of reason in order to make sure people aren’t making a living out of scamming people out of money. It’s expected that when you run a business, you’re doing it in order to either sell products without lying about them or offer legitimate services which actually work.

But for some reason that kind of principle of honesty is not supposed to apply when it comes to religion and other forms of superstition. They get a total pass. The “witches” in question here were even outraged when, earlier this year, they were asked to *gasp* pay taxes! Oh, the humanity.

In fact, when that law was passed, they were so angry that they dumped a poisonous plant called mandrake into the Danube River. As far as I can tell, mandrake has no relation to the famous British Colonel who almost saved the world from nuclear war.

Political critic Stelian Tanase thinks this measure is a way for the government to distract attention from the way in which the international economic crisis is affecting Romania. But then again, he also thinks the “witches” should “put a spell on” the Romanian Prime Minister and President in order to punish them.

REPOST: Martian Jesus

A recently released picture of the Martian surface has ignited some controversy in the most widely circulated newspaper in the UK (“Has Jesus Christ Been Spotted On Mars?”). The question mark in the headline apparently means they’re not quite sure if there was an alteration of the Martian surface in order to make it sort of kind of look like Jesus:

Jesus had 3 visible boobs.

Some possible explanations:

1. After his resurrection, Jesus flew around the solar system to preach at organisms on other worlds. He couldn’t find any, so he decided to make a self-portrait on the surface of the planet to which humans would probably first travel. It was too much work, and Jesus gave up after a few years.
2. Jesus was really a giant Martian buried underground, and when he punched his way out of his burial-place (like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill 2), he left behind an outline of a vaguely human-ish figure on the Martian surface.
3. Intelligent life on Mars which has since gone extinct heard about Jesus on Earth by being very quiet and listening in on the Middle East region 2000 years ago and then just decided to alter the surface of their planet to make it look kind of like a human, just for the fuck of it.
4. Mars is a big planet on which erosion happens. There are no oceans on the surface, so that leaves a lot of possibilities for geological features which might kind of sort of look like a human. Since we’ve evolved in a way to recognize faces, it is not surprising that we would sometimes mistakenly perceive a face. There’s even a name for this phenomenon.

I wonder which is the most likely.

If it really were a face, then it should look that way from all angles. For example, here is a rotated picture of a human face which is still easy to identify as a human face:

Even though this is not how we normally see other humans, it is still easily recognizable as a face. And here’s a rotated shot of the same photo of the Martian surface:

Unless you’re already looking for Jesus here, you won’t see it. You have to want to see it. That should have given pause to whichever Daily Telegraph editor OK’d this story. On the other hand, ad revenue ad revenue ad revenue ad revenue ad revenue ad revenue…

We get spam

WordPress does a pretty good job of filtering out spam comments. We get lots of them at the BEAST, many of which are pretty funny because they’re awkwardly worded (“I very much enjoy this content, please continue,” etc.). But this one I took note of was weird in both its approach and the actual product/service it was trying to sell.

I don’t want to link to it because that would kind of defeat the purpose of having a spam filter in the first place, but here’s a screen shot of where you end up when you follow their link:

Do you see what they did there? They took that ever-popular “For Idiots” tagline used for that series of introductory books to every subject imaginable and avoided copyright infringement by substituting “For” with “4.” But unlike the books, calling their perspective customers idiots isn’t an appeal to self-depreciating humor; it’s just accurate. This product truly is for idiots – I’m sorry, “4″ idiots.

5 Effects that cause people to believe in nonsense

Originally posted at the BEAST

All of us humans are the result of an unconscious biological process called evolution. Based on the conditions at the time, lots of different pressures selected for certain traits. And after those conditions changed – for example most of us don’t need to prioritize escaping from predators on the savannah anymore – all of the selected-for traits remained. We can’t just say, “Hey! Now that we have houses and locked doors and stuff, I don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night whenever there’s a loud noise because chances are very good that it isn’t a fucking tiger here to eat me and dismember my children!”

Nowadays, lots of these psychological traits have become a target for charlatans and frauds out to scheme you out of your time and money. Here are a few of them to bear in mind the next time one of them approaches you.

The Forer Effect

Carnies like this one depend on at least 60 suckers born per
hour in order to raise a family of four.

***
What it is:

Also known as the Barnum effect, the Forer effect describes our tendency to think that descriptions of a large group are directed at ourselves personally. Bertram Forer performed an experiment on his students where he gave a personality type description to his students, leading them to believe that each were custom designed for each individual when in fact they were all reading the same description. Here’s a snippet:

While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.

People love flattery, and when it’s restrained within some bounds of reason they’ll just eat it right up. This is why you never see astrology newspaper columns which describe what a colossal douchebag Pisces can be, even though we know that there are people of that “sign” who fit that description perfectly.

What it can lead to:

Astrology, Tarot, and most personality tests.

Worst case scenario:

A friendly stranger on the street approaches you and offers you tickets for a “free movie.” Afterwards, she asks you some innocuous-sounding questions while you hold on to a metal bar attached to something which looks like a lie detector, but isn’t. You go on what you believe to be another “date” at her office, where a man in a sailor suit does a high-pressure sales pitch for some excessively overpriced literature. Before you know it, you’re paying a cultish authoritarian institution for the privilege relaying all of your most deviant sexual fantasies to an official record which is then stored away for blackmail purposes in the event that you try to escape. Yes, you have just joined the Church of Scientology.

***

The Placebo Effect

“By harnessing my body’s ‘natural energy field,’ this worthless bracelet can help me–ow, my back!”

***

What it is:

We usually think of the Placebo Effect as when we feel better after seeing a doctor, solely from their “bedside manner,” or when subjective and/or psychosomatic symptoms are relieved by something the patient believes is effective medicine, but actually is just a sugar pill. That’s definitely a part of it, but the Placebo Effect also plays a part in the perception of the medical practitioner, not just the patient.

So not only can the Placebo Effect cause patients / customers to be deceived into thinking that an ineffective treatment works, it can do the same to the people who are trying to use science to solve that same problem. So the people doing the studies on, say, homeopathy, can also be Placebo’d by perceiving an improvement in a condition when there isn’t one. This goes a long way towards explaining why certain implausible methods occasionally get written up in respected, peer reviewed publications with vaguely promising results.

What it can lead to:

“Alternative medicine” like homeopathy, acupuncture, most chiropractic, naturopathy, Reiki, psychic surgery, and whatever other form of bogus “treatment” the quack industry invents.

Worst case scenario:

Your dog is scratched by a rabid raccoon, so you head off to your local alt-med store for some homeopathic rabies cure for dogs (hey, homeopathy cured that cold you had for 11 days, so this will work too, right?). After administering it a few times, your pet’s condition seems to be improving…until it bites off your hands. It dies the next day. Also: You can no longer masturbate.

***

The Ideomotor Effect

So there’s this guy.

***

What it is:

It’s very difficult to keep completely still. We’re pretty much always making these involuntary movements. And when you hold, say, a pen, it’s going to move a little even if you were to try very hard to keep it motionless. It’s so subtle that some don’t even believe that they themselves are causing the movements in the object in question.

So if someone can convince themselves that a stick will twitch when they’re standing near a bomb, and if they can then convince a Middle Eastern government to buy $85 million worth of these magical sticks, then the lives of everyone using one of these fake bomb detectors is put at risk.

What it can lead to:

Dowsing, facilitated communication, automatic writing.

Worst case scenario:

Your kids are having trouble saying goodbye to Grandma, so you pick them up a Ouija board. The next night, they “receive” a message from Grandma telling them to take your car to the cemetery. They’re arrested for driving underage. You’re charged with negligence. Your wife leaves you and takes the children. And your house. You end up dying cold and alone.

***

The Clever Hans Effect

Wilbur’s tragic mental illness was exploited to create a classic ’60s sitcom

***

What it is:

Clever Hans was a horse in Germany who lived about 100 years ago. His owner, a guy named Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that Hans was able to do simple math by stamping his foot, which would be a pretty amazing breakthrough in the cognitive abilities of non-human animals if it were true. However, as a study by psychologist Oskar Pfungs demonstrated, what was actually happening was that the crowd watching would unconsciously cue the horse as to when to stop stomping his foot. So instead of adding, say, 7 and 9, the horse would stop stomping his foot after 16 times which is when the crowd’s demeanor would change. The audience was what poker players would call an easy mark.

This kind of observer bias also carries over into psychological studies where surveys are used. People and horses alike are eager to give those performing a study what they believe they want to see instead of a real, honest reaction.

What it can lead to:

Believing that animals are communicating with you.

Worst case scenario:

David Berkowitz and his neighbor’s demon-possessed dog.

***

The Availability Heuristic (Availability Bias)

***

“As the ethnic and religious majority, we are under constant threat of oppression.”

***

What it is:

In general, people don’t deal very well with statistics. Especially when those statistics show that an overhyped phenomenon is much less common than we’d believe solely from news media coverage. We tend to conjure up examples of things which come easily to mind and think about them as if they were common occurrences even when they’re not.

So for example, we here in the US spend a huge amount of money doing something which our political leaders call “fighting terrorism,” while those same political leaders simultaneously tell us that we cannot have a single-payer health care system like the rest of the industrialized world because it is “too expensive.” Someone unfamiliar with any of the statistics of harm caused by terrorism and by a lack of health care coverage might be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that terrorism kills more Americans than not having health insurance. But that’s clearly not the case. It’s just that we prioritize “fighting terrorism” to such an insanely out of proportion degree because it’s easier for us to be rattled emotionally by dramatic, violent events like 9/11. We just aren’t wired to be so moved by more mundane causes of death, even when they’re much more common.

It’s only been very recently in human history that we’ve been able to compile statistics on a large scale. For most of our time here, what comes easiest to mind was really all we had to go on. But that’s not necessarily the most accurate portrayal of reality.

What it can lead to:

Pretty much anything that can be summarized in a cheap, stupid soundbite or a random anecdote.

Worst case scenario:

You hear about The Secret from Oprah, and then waste your money on the book. You learn that you can have whatever you want just by visualizing it. You are arrested, for stealing other people’s property, and raped in prison.

Maridjan vs. the Volcano

For some reason I’m only finding out about this now. PBS had an updated segment on it last night.

There’s this tradition in Indonesia among the Javanese people of Indonesia where a “spiritual guardian” will “talk” to the “spirit” of a volcano in order to find out how the volcano is doing, its music preferences, what kind of celebrities it follows, whether or not it’s going to erupt and kill off a large chunk of the surrounding human population, that sort of thing. It’s a lot like volcanology except that it’s a ridiculous superstition which does not work.

The volcano’s very own Anne Sullivan in this case was a guy named Maridjan (who became so famous that he endorsed an energy drink, for whatever that’s worth), and his deaf and blind volcanic Helen Keller is Mount Merapi. Volcanologists were warning the local government to evacuate the local area because it looked like there was going to be a major eruption. But Maridjan felt differently because the volcano told him so itself.

In the modern news media narrative, this would be the two sides of the story where the reporter should teach the controversy in order to avoid accusations of bias. On the one side you have relevant experts using seismic data, measurements of gas emissions, temperature changes, and stratigraphic analyses – and on the other you have some guy claiming that he’s talking to the volcano. That’s the fair and balanced way of framing the issue.

As you may have guessed from the use of past tense earlier, this whole ‘talking to a volcano about its feelings’ thing didn’t work out too well for our man Maridjan. From NPR:

KUHN: Yes. Well, volcanologists actually predicted this eruption before it happened. So they managed to evacuate large numbers of people. I also went to a stadium yesterday where the refugees are living. But, you know, not all the residents heeded the warnings.

And one reason for this is they have this so-called spiritual guardian of the mountain who didn’t think the eruption was going to happen. And a lot of people listened to him. So, you know, as we were going out to the volcano today, we passed farmers cultivating their rice paddies, just about oblivious to this huge volcanic activity going on right to the north of them.

INSKEEP: What happened to that spiritual leader, Anthony?

KUHN: He, himself, became a burned offering to the mountain, you could say. He was found in his home, burned to death in a prayer position. The appointment of the next guardian is up to the local sultan. There’s a selection process in progress right now.

Yes, Maridjan, the poor mountaineer who could barely keep his family fed, was one day shooting at some food, and up from the ground came some bumbling molten rock from the Earth’s crust which then burned him and his most devout followers alive.

KukuBima gives you the energy you need to run for your life from a natural disaster after being duped by a superstitious con man.

So now the Javanese people are in the market for a new spiritual guardian of the volcano since that seems to be such an important and worthwhile position. But on the positive side, they want Indonesia’s chief volcanologist, a man named Surono who initially warned of the imminent Merapi eruption, to be the new spiritual guardian.

Surono doesn’t share his would-be predecessors’ beliefs, but maybe it’d be for the best if he accepted that title. Of course the best possible outcome would be for people to stop believing that we can communicate with volcanoes, but short of that it’d be much better for the Javanese to accept true things even if it’s for bad reasons. It’d be not too different from the way the government removed thimerosol from the MMR vaccine in order to appease antivaxers into getting their children vaccinated even though thimerosol hasn’t shown signs of being dangerous at such low levels. I guess that’s progress. Kind of.

The Simpsons decide not to set off nukes inside the US

So now we can add the writers for the Simpsons to the seemingly endless list of people the 9/11 troofers believe were involved in the implausibly large conspiracy. The NY Observer is reporting on some blog post by a conspiracy theorist who believes that the sort of recent episode about Springfield adopting Big Brother-y surveillance policies hinted at a “false flag” nuclear attack which was supposed to take place last weekend.

These kinds of things are really popular with conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, but it’s not always clear what the connections between world politics and pop media actually are supposed to be. This one seems to think that the Simpsons writers are using this foreshadowing as a warning. Because if there’s one group of people you’d expect to know about the imminent nuclear attack the US government was planning to use against itself in order to justify enacting martial law, it’s the writers of The Simpsons.

The other way conspiracy theorists make connections between the TV they watch and their fantasy world they imagine is by claiming clips like this one from 1997 are actually a way the conspirators have of bragging about their future plans. It’s apparently not enough that the conspirators always seem to get away with their evil deeds with nobody but a few of the most unhinged noticing, they have to go one step further by forcing sitcom writers to inject little clues into their jokes just to fuck with the unthinking “sheeple.”

That or, you know, coincidences happen and crazy people latch on to them in order to justify their warped worldview. One or the other, I guess.

Anyway, as you may have noticed, there was no nuclear attack last weekend. Hooray! But now conspiracy theorists need to find some way to reconcile their predictions with the fact that they failed to materialize. One way to do this would be to admit that maybe their predictions were incorrect. Or they could go with the self-aggrandizement route, by claiming that their own rantings exposed the secret plan, which would then need to be called off. And thanks to the vigilance of the “Infowars” crowd, we’ve been spared from martial law another day. AGAIN.

Please buy our useless junk so you can find nothing

Last year around this time of year I made fun of a Sun article which was essentially an advertisement for a theme park which was allegedly “haunted” by the “spirit world.” Since I am apparently very un-creative, I am going to do pretty much the same thing again this year.

But there’s a twist! This year’s Advertisement For Ghost-Related Business Disguised As A News Article (AFGRBDAANA) is from what’s supposed to be a more reputable newspaper, the Boston Globe.  The first problem here is with the headline:

So the obvious question here is this: Why do these gadgets only seem to work for those who already believe in wandering spirits? If they really did reveal evidence of ghosts, then they should help both believers and skeptics alike to find them. The fact that the headline needed to be qualified to apply only to believers implies that these gadgets only provide rationalizations for what the ghost hunters already decided to believe instead of real evidence which would then inform a belief one way or the other.

In the evolution-creationism “debate,” no scientist offers evidence for evolution on the condition that the audience already believe in evolution. The same is true for any other similar controversy. The evidence is supposed to be the basis for belief, not something you search for only after founding an opinion based on emotional whims.

Amateur ghost hunters hope these gadgets, which typically cost less than $100 each, will help them spot ghosts in haunted houses.

Gosh, they’re “typically” less than $100? What a bargain!

That quote above is factually accurate. People who call themselves amateur ghost hunters (as opposed to the really seriously professional ones) really do hope that the equipment will help them spot ghosts. But it’s still another example of a journalist not investigating far enough for fear of appearing “biased.” The job of an actual reporter assigned to a story like this should be to actually find out whether or not the products do as they claim. When Mark Baard puts that question aside, as he does in this article, he steps outside of journalism and into the field of advertising.

“I don’t believe that they detect ghosts, per se,”’ said Belanger… “But they might detect something that’s happened before, during or after a paranormal event.”

Really? How do you distinguish between the two, Mr. Salesman? Baard fails to follow up on this distinction. He just uncritically accepts it at face value. But seriously, why hold back here? Is he seriously trying to inject nuances into his ghost hunting business? I mean, come one, let’s not be ridiculous and claim that we’re detecting ghosts here. That would be nuts! But yeah, sure, events leave paranormal evidence behind which my products can detect. Everyone knows that, right?

Astrology-based politics

The 2010 mid-term elections has been a massive coming-out party for all kinds of crackpots. HIV deniers, creationists, anti-condom activists, and every other brand of conspiracy theorist have been nominated by their party to run for alarmingly high public offices. Journalists usually try to use reasonable methods to understand this unreasonable trend. At the very least, they try to make it sound like that’s what they’re doing.

But the innovative folks at AOLNews are taking a different path in their political reporting today. A guy who works there (I’m deliberately not calling him a reporter) talked to an astrologer named Shelley Ackerman about the elections and called it an article. Here’s how it begins:

Some swear by astrology. Others scoff at it.

That’s the beginning and end of Barry Weintraub’s investigation into the validity of astrology. It’s not like it’s his job to find out whether or not astrology actually works. That would be biased.

But here’s what’s not biased, for some reason: Pretending that an astrologer’s opinion of US politics is newsworthy.

Traditionally astrologers look to the lunation just before we go to the polls on Nov. 2 (in this case, the Oct. 22 full moon) to determine which party will fare better. And it’s no surprise that the elevation of Jupiter in the chart cast for Washington at 9:37 p.m. favors gains for the GOP, but how many?

Who among us didn’t know that the elevation of Jupiter means a Republican-controlled House? If you raised your hand just now, stop reading this now – for you are ignorant in the ways of astrology. It’s like the first rule: Most gas giants are very conservative. Those of us who were following this last election cycle may recall Saturn’s 2008 racist gaffe on CNN with Wolf Blitzer which many expert astrologers say cost John McCain the presidential election.

Ackerman later turns her focus to the Connecticut Senate race:

I’m having second thoughts about this one. Blumenthal (b. Feb. 13, 1946) was practically a shoo-in before he fibbed about serving in Vietnam. Bad move.

But why didn’t the stars tell her that this was going to happen? I thought this was the whole point of having professional astrologers in the first place. I am shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU that this astrologer only discovered this by reading it in the news instead of reading it from Neptune’s magical aura.

Will Neptune give Blumenthal the same magical aura that it provided for Palin in 2008, or will Saturn in Libra deliver the victory that McMahon has earned (and/or paid for)? It’s Blumenthal’s to lose: One false move and he will.

Come on, Ackerman! Don’t keep us in suspense! I really want to know about that magical aura’s political leanings. Maybe the entry on Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will provide better information:

Astrologically aligned with the United States’ Aquarian moon, and buoyed by Neptune’s transit in Aquarius since 1998, will their popularity wane when Neptune enters Pisces for the first time (since 1860) in April 2011, or will their influence hold through the presidential election of 2012?

That’s where that entry ends. And then she goes on to another issue. She wouldn’t risk all of her well-deserved credibility on the election. But what else can you expect from a Libra?

REPOST: Epistemology

Orac at Respectful Insolence had a great post a month or so ago which really nailed some basic problems with accepting pseudoscience. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

Of course, even within New Age, skepticism seems to be without a basis. After all, if you accept astrology and fairies, really, on what possible basis can you reject channeling the dead?… Unfortunately, this is a completely predictable result. When one leaves science, rationality, and reason behind, there is no reliable way to differentiate one woo from another, one pseudoscience from another, one faith-based belief from another. When anything goes, nothing goes, and nothing can be included or excluded based on evidence. Everything is fair game.

This is something that inevitably comes up pretty much every time I try to talk to one of these believer people. It just seems obvious to them that their own beliefs – say, that homeopathy works – are somehow beyond testing and experimentation, or that there’s a massive conspiracy to cover up all the successful tests, or some other lame excuse. But when others use the exact same arguments to support beliefs which are even crazier – like that reptilian aliens have infiltrated human society up to the highest levels of government - somehow to them it is just as obvious that they are suddenly the crazy ones. But that’s hypocritical since they’ve already abandoned the idea of ruling out beliefs altogether in order to support their own.

It reminds me a lot of how some fundamentalist Christians will say that it’s crazy for Muslims to believe that Mohammed flew up into the sky on a horse, but it’s perfectly reasonable for them to assume that Jesus rose from the dead, hung out for 40 days, and then flew up into the sky without a horse. Or you can reverse that if you like, it’s all the same absurd double standard.

And whenever I talk to these people, I always think that if I can only show them how they can rule out pseudoscientific ideas which are just a little bit too crazy for them, they will have some “A-ha!” moment and realize how skeptics come to reject their ideas and the attempted justifications. And that they in fact use the pretty much the same methodology we are using when they dismiss ideas that seem too crazy, even to them. But that rarely happens.

People who are into woo generally just don’t like the idea of having some kind of epistemological foundation for belief, and they like even less that it is science that has proven to get us closer to the truth than any other proposed foundation so far. It would be pretty amazing if we as a civilization had reduced disease, extended life expectancy and increased quality of life by proposing that ideas be tested on the basis of whoever simply says “That’s what I believe,” but strangely enough that didn’t happen. And it probably won’t work in the future, either.