Adult Onset Atheist

Chantilly Lace

2012-02-15T14:58:00.001-07:00

I get those e-mails. I get many about interesting things from people who are bringing them to my attention, but I also get those emails. I also get way too many from list servers specializing on specific topics that I had a passing interest in once yet can’t really remember why. I also get LOLcats; lots of LOLcats for some reason.

Those e-mails are the ones presenting anecdotal evidence that either an extremely interventionist deity or a political conspiracy to undermine the USA exists. Judging by the impressive forwarding headers some of those e-mails have they have each circled the globe quite a few times. You know about those e-mails because you have gotten them also; probably lots of them like I have.

I usually delete them. Sometimes I check Snopes or something. It is amazing how long a discredited e-mail will continue to be forwarded in cyberspace. I am convinced that many people just forward the most amazing stories to as many people as they can in the hopes of finding out if they are real.

I got this one once about how “scientists” had proved that the earth really did stop rotating for several days as told in a minor old testament story. The story did not mention the terrible calamities that would occur if one were able to just instantaneously stop the earth’s rotation. For several days I imagined minor aspects of the devastation that would occur.

In the middle of a cup of coffee with good company I would burst out with something like: “And the tsunamis!!”.

I am still a little concerned with how difficult it was for my various companions to tell the difference between these outbursts and my normal conversation.

Sometimes I investigate those e-mails myself. This can be embarrassing.

I do like the awkward god story e-mails more that the conspiracy ones. Unfortunately, since this is an election year, the political conspiracy e-mails have become the norm. These are usually simply deleted.

Despite being expunged from my inbox the same lies keep popping up over-and-over like tap-rooted weeds. They also pop up on facebook pages and blogs.

The teabagger e-mail lie machine appears to work like this:

Truth is based on belief. If you want to believe something it can be true.
Things that support your belief should be sent to as many people as possible, and widely publicized.
People who think the information is wrong are probably lying because they believe something you don’t
If someone successfully proves that the lies you are spreading are wrong they are providing uninteresting information, which there is no need to share.

I just don’t care to even read much of the hyperbolic nonsense about how Obama is penning some new socialist executive order mandating gay marriage or forcing Christians into concentration camps. OK…maybe I do read some of them, if something really outrageous in it catches my eye

It depresses me, however, to read what was tagged onto bills like the 2012NDAA and realize some of the fascist hyperbole is a little too close to reality.

Some of those e-mails come festooned with pictures of of scantily clad young women. Pictures of scantily clad young women in my inbox have a tendency to catch my eye. This will be a real problem when they finally do mandate gay marriage.

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail with a photo of a woman in underwear contorted into some yoga pose I did not recognize. When I got around to reading the e-mail it stated first lady Obama spent $50,000.00 in a couple hours at a lingerie shop called Agent Provocateur. It went on to describe TFL’s shopping trip as some sort of babe-bonding outing with the Queen of Qatar; another not-unattractive middle-aged famous woman.

I spent a couple moments imagining TFL and QoQ modeling skimpy underthings for each other while making bawdry remarks and giggling.

The e-mail went into the level of detail usually only seen on outright lies or actual truth. Detail, however, makes it easy to fact-check a story so I decided to investigate this story.

First I found out that the shop in question exists. It even has a website with more yoga-esque posing young women; though no pictures of TFL or QoQ. They apparently specialize in bondage-themed lingerie (accounting for some of the yoga poses perhaps), and one article about the incident mentioned a handmade Calais lace corset that went for around a thousand dollars. Would anyone really need a different corset each day for two months?

Next I found a couple of articles describing the event in more detail. There appeared like there could have been a single originating source: the UK’s Telegraph. The Telegraph’s webpage for the story features a picture of a fully clothed Michelle Obama, and another picture of a mostly unclothed woman wearing dark sunglasses.

The QoQ and TFL apparently even closed off a whole city block so they could have privacy while shopping. Privacy maybe, but that is not very inconspicuous.

So, like the memorable photo of god’s goatse, this story initially appeared to be accurate.

On February 10th the Telegraph issued the following retraction:

Further to our article “First Lady’s luxury buys boost Agent Provocateur” (Jan 30), we would like to make clear that the “shopping spree” involving Her Highness Sheikha Moza and Michelle Obama that we referred to in fact never occurred, and that Her Highness has never been shopping with Mrs Obama, at Agent Provocateur or otherwise, and has never sought to have any part of New York closed off to enable her to shop undisturbed. We apologize for the distress and embarrassment this article caused.

So they just made this up. Total fabrication, and of course it made it onto e-mail.

It is interesting to note that, upon further digging, I came across an official white-house denial of the story. Upon issuing a categorical denial of the story (“100% incorrect”) the white-house spokesperson was asked to provide proof. What do you think the reporter wanted as proof to show that TFL did not buy her underwear from Agent Provocateur?

Shikshapatri

2012-02-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

One hundred and eighty-six years ago today, on February 11th 1826, Ghanshyam Pande wrote the 212 line Shikshapatri. the Bhagwan Swaminarayan, as Ghanshyam was called by his friends, turned out to actually be an incarnation of the Hindu god Narayana.

A large amount of the Shikshapatri concerns itself with sex; mostly about not having it.

They shall never touch nor speak with nor show their faces to any male who is not their nearest relative. – Shikshapatri verse 134

They shall take food once a day only, shall sleep on the floor and shall never knowingly look at any living beings in coitus. -- Shikshapatri verse 168

Narayana and Nara are twin male gods. The story goes like this: Nara-Narayana was -as the Supreme Being- talking up a bunch of folks outside their home when Shiva came in deressed up in his incarnation as Durvasa. Nobody notice him in his fancy flesh suit so he curses the whole lot. After some negotiation Shiva agrees to be satisfied with requiring Narayana being reincarnated in human form. He comes back as Swaminarayan, writes up the Shikshapatri, and a sect if born.

The twin likenesses of Nara-Narayana are often found in temples of the Swaminarayan faith. When Ghanshyam died on June 1st 1830 The sect was estimated at 1.8 million devotees in size. In 2002 the size of the sect was estimated at five million devotees; this despite numerous splits in the lines of accession.

No one shall ever here sermons or religious discourses or philosophical talks from a person whose words are likely to lead one astray from the path of devotion to Lord Krishna and/or from the path of one's own Dharma. – Shikshapatri verse 25

One proof of Ghanshyam’s divinity as an incarnation of Narayana is that he told Reginald Heber (Bishop of Calcutta) that he was divine. Reginald Heber is best known as a hymn-writer. One of his famous hymns is called: “The Son of God goes forth to war” and starts with the line : “The Son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain”.

They shall never keep close relation with a woman who has any kind of relation with a king. -- Shikshapatri verse 137

Poles Get the Boot

2012-02-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Seventy two years ago today, on February 10th 1940, 220,000 polish nationals from the Soviet occupied Kresy region were rounded up and sent to northern Russia. On April 13th another 320,000 would be sent to Kazakhstan. A third wave of 240,000 deportations occurred at the beginning of July, and a fourth large wave of 300,000 was conducted at the beginning of June 1941. Together with many mini deportation events the Soviets moved an estimated 1.7 million Poles; about a third of them were children. By the end of 1941 an estimated 760,000 of the deportees (about a third) were dead; most of the dead were children.

Half a world away, in Hollywood California, the long running ultra-violent kid’s show “Tom and Jerry” would debut on February 10th 1940. The first episode was called “Puss Gets the Boot”. The plot involved Jerry (the mouse) teasing Tom (The cat; real name Jasper) until he was forcibly removed from his home. Tom and Jerry ran for many years, and would eventually win the Academy Award for animated short film seven times.

On June 16th 1941 Nazi Germany would invade the Soviet Union through occupied Poland, and the deportations were put on hold. Under the Nazis things went from bad to worse for many Poles.

About 140,000 of the first wave of Polish deportees were classified as “Osadniks”. This was the name given to veterans of the 1920 Polish-Soviet war who were given parcels of land in the Kresy region. The battle of Warsaw (August 12-25 1920) was the deciding battle of the Polish Soviet war. The victory was due in large part to the fact that the codes used by Lenin’s forces had been cracked by Jan Kowalewski and a team of Methematicians from Lwow and Warsow universities. The crippling defeat of Bolshevik forces in 1920 coupled to the Soviet desire to annex the Kresy region transformed the “Osadniks” into enemies of the state.

38th Parallel

2012-02-09T00:03:00.000-07:00

Sixty-one years ago today, on February 9th 1951, elements of the 11th division of South Korea’s army began killing people in the Geochang County of South Gyeongsang Province. Over the next two days they would kill 719 purported communist sympathizers. 385 of the communist sympathizers were children.

The 11th division had just come off a two day rest. Two days earlier, on February 7th 1951, they had been massacring people in nearby Sancheong and Hamyang counties of the same South Gyeongsang Province. They only found 705 communist sympathizers on that day, 85% of them were described as either “women, children, or the elderly”.

The commanding general of the 11th division was Choe Deok-sin.

The year before, on June 25th 1950, Kim Il-sung’s North Korean army invaded South Korea starting the Korean war. Two days later, on June 27th 1950, President Syngman Rhee ordered the execution of Bodo League and South Korean Workers Party related people. Over the summer Rhee’s people would find and execute between 100,000 and 1,200,000, but nobody was keeping good count.

American officers photographed some of the mass executions, and reported them to General Macarthur. He replied that the executions were an internal South Korean matter.

British troops discovered one massacre in progress, and seized the site to prevent the massacre from continuing.

The South Koreans initially blamed the mass graves produced by the executions on the North Koreans. The truth was slow in percolating out. As late as 2008 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission discovered a mass grave filled with the bodies of children near Daejon; South Korea’s fifth-largest metropolis. The National Archives in Washington DC has recently released declassified photos taken by Americans at the Execution sites.

Syngman Rhee was South Korea’s first president. Rhee was a rabid Christian, having converted in 1899 while serving a lifetime prison term (obviously commuted) for sedition. In 1904 he traveled to the US where he studied, amongst other things, Christian theology. He returned to Korea in 1910 to become the chief secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association in Seoul. He escaped tensions with Japan in 1912 by emigrating to Hawaii where he began a Christian school for Korean immigrants. Rhee bounced around doing, amongst other things, Christian missionary work until the end of WWII, when he returned to Korea more permanently. With the help of the US he was installed as South Korea’s first president on July 24th 1948.

In 1986 general Choe-Deok sin defected to North Korea. There he served as a chief of the central committee of Chondogyo religious movement.

LittleFoot

2012-02-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

One hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, on the morning of February 8th 1855, the residents of South Devon England reported seeing cloven footprints in the fresh snow that had fallen the night before. These footprints were rapidly identified as having been left by Satan.

The news inspired many people to run out to see look for the cloven footprints in the snow. Apparently many people then saw them.

Though Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke had put their newly invented telegraph into commercial use along the nearby London-Blackwell railway over fifteen years earlier it had not reached the south Devon coast. Constrained by the speed of information the sightings were concentrated in a coastal meandering from Totnes to the coast, and then along it to the Exe estuary, then along the coast of that inlet to Exemouth; a total distance of about 40 miles. The next day residents of nearby Dorset county contributed to the collected sightings, and expand the track’s length to 100 miles. Soon residents of Lincolnshire clear on the central eastern coast of England contributed to the amassed data, and increased the length of the track by almost an order of magnitude.

Some sketches were made, but they are uniformly less impressive to me than something that was so immediately identifiable as Satan’s footprints should be.

Many reports of the footprints measured them at 1.5 to 2 inches wide, and eight inches apart. They apparently traveled in a straight line (except as obvious from the map of sightings did not) over houses , walls, and through drainpipes as small as four inches in diameter.

On March 5th 2009 new reports of Satan’s footprints in Devon have been reported. This time in north Devon.

Pantheon

2012-02-07T00:03:00.000-07:00

One hundred and fourteen years ago today, on February 7th 1898, Emil Zola was brought to trial on charges of criminal libel. He was convicted a couple of weeks later, and sentenced to a year in jail. Surprised by the sentence Zola escaped to England with little more than the clothes on his back.

Zola was a prolific author whose best known work at the time was a 20 novel set called the Rougon-Macquart series. Each of these novels presented elements of two families who would respond to the moral dilemmas of the industrial revolution in different ways. He referred to his work as an experiment in psychology; the Rougons were his control group while the Macquarts suffered the effects of experimentation with violence, alcohol, and prostitution.

On January 13th 1898 he would write a short essay which would overshadow all his previous work. The essay was published on the front page of the newspaper L’aurore. The letter was called J’accuse’ and detailed elements of a religiously-motivated conspiracy in the French military. It was because of this letter that Zola would stand trial.

The conspiracy ostensibly concerned an artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus who had been convicted in a secret court marshal of giving secrets to the enemy, and who was, on January 5th 1895, publically stripped of his rank and sent to Devil’s Island. Shortly after Alfred’s trip to Devil’s Island Information had surfaced proving Dreyfus’s innocence, and by the time of J’accuse’ years of statement and counterstatement had drawn a line between the church-influenced army and a more secular citizenry.

Dreyfus was Jewish. In 1895 he had already been the focus of anti-Semitic attacks by superior officers throughout his short career. As a cadet his war college examination grades were lowered by the anti-Semitic-motivated scoring by General Bonnefond who felt that “Jews were not desired” in command. When Bonnefond performed the same score adjustment for another Jewish cadet (Lieutenant Pickard) the two were able to amass enough evidence to lodge a formal complaint. The director of the school (General Lebelin de Dionne) acknowledged the injustice, but refused to reverse the damage. Because of this Alfred carried the troublemaker brand before his first command.

Perhaps because of his “Jewish Troublemaker” label Dreyfus was seen as a good target to pin the treasonous espionage on. Perhaps he appeared as too attractive a mark for the framing because the evidence concocted would turn out to be insufficient to convince most individuals unclouded by rabid anti-Semitism. When the construct failed the flying accusations spun off into increasingly threadbare and bizarre statements.

Unable to simply wash their hands of the affair the government collapsed. Dreyfus was offered a pardon in 1899, but retained his guilt.

Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902. Opinions and articles were immediately circulated suggesting that he had committed suicide in response to discovering some hinted-at evidence proving that Dreyfus was guilty all along. Decades later a roofer would, on his deathbed, confess to stopping up Zola’s chimney after accepting money for the assassination.

In 1906 Dreyfus would be completely and officially exonerated of his crimes.

In 1908 Zola’s remains were transported to the Pantheon in Paris. Alfred attended the re-internment ceremony. During it a military reporter named Louis Gregori pulled out a revolver and fired two shots at him at point blank range. Alfred survived with a wounded arm.“My object was to protest against the participation of the army in the glorification of Zola and the rehabilitation of Dreyfus. My blow was aimed less at Dreyfus than at Dreyfusism." -- Louis Gregori

In January of 2007 Jacques Chirac unveiled a plaque in the Pantheon which commemorated the anti-Holocaust activities of the many French citizens who together saved three-quarters of the French Jews from extermination during WWII. In a way that plaque serves as a milestone in the retreat from the anti-Semitic France that put Zola on trial.

“Sous la chape de haine et de nuit tombée sur la France dans les années d'occupation, des lumières, par milliers, refusèrent de s'éteindre. Nommés "Juste parmi les Nations" ou restés anonymes, des femmes et des hommes, de toutes origines et de toutes conditions, ont sauvé des juifs des persécutions antisémites et des camps d'extermination. Bravant les risques encourus, ils ont incarné l'honneur de la France, ses valeurs de justice, de tolérance et d'humanité.” – Plaque in the Panteon

Emo

2012-02-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

Six hundred and sixty five years ago today, on February 6th 1347, a little girl named Dorothea was born in the Prussian town of Montau. Her mother quickly taught her the secrets of her faith which included daily prostration and hours spent standing with her arms outstretched to form the shape of a crucifix with her body. She was also hung on the wall in the same pose using nails embedded in the wall to hold her arms up when the pain of holding them there became too much for the little girl. Treated this way Dorothea became a fertile ground for the love of jesus that would instill in her the ability to perform miracles; in 1976 she was canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic church.

In the mid 1300s it was a well advertised fact that little girls became sexually aware at the age of seven, and it was at this age that things really picked up for Dorothea. After an unfortunate “accident” that left her scalded by boiling water she finally met Jesus in person. While laid in a cradle with her burns swaddled to protect them the little girl was visited by a handsome well-dressed young man who happened to be jesus.

Dorothea was so struck by the handsome apparition that she systematically tried to recreate the events that brought jesus to her. She would pour boiling water on herself. She would dip her limbs in boiling oil. She would mortify her flesh with hot irons. She would burn herself with candles.

At 16 she was married to an accomplished swordsmith more than twice her age. She would bear him nine children; four would die in infancy. In addition to her physical torments Dorothea would constantly worry that her sanctity was compromised since she was not a virgin.

After the marriage two important things happened: First Dorothea carefully hid her self-inflicted injuries with modest clothing, and second she began having regular visions.

Dorothea experimented with many forms of castigation. She used log pillows, and would throw herself face-first at the ground. She would whip herself with fresh-cut switches till she bled, and she would irritate the slashes by wearing unwashed shirts made of knotted hair. When switches were not available she used leather strips, or rope, or chains, or …just about anything that could cause pain and raise a welt.

When the injuries scabbed she would pry off the scabs with twigs or bits of broken nutshell. She would rub the injuries with stinging nettles to make them swell and bleed fresh. She would soak the oozing cuts in salt water brine to prevent them from closing again.

Awkwardly timed visitations (when IS a good time for spectral visitations anyway?) coupled with prophetic visions can be hard on a new marriage. Dorothea was encouraged to go on multiple pilgrimages, but they did not slake her thirst for the divine. Gunter Grass examined the tribulations of Dorothea’s husband in his novel “The Flounder” (1977). In 1383 four more of her children died from the plague; in 1885 she went on a pilgrimage to Aachen. During the last pilgrimage (to Rome in 1389) of Dorthea’s unhappy marriage her husband, who stayed at home, died.

While married she made sure that the cuts did not extend beyond the collar or hem of her clothing. The injuries became so numerous that they bordered one another over every inch of her unexposed flech. Her breasts demanded special attention from her, and she enlarged the wounds she could reach until she had one continuous sore from the cuff of her sleeve to the center of her chest. Her body resembled “a plowed field”.

One time, while she was tryng to use the extent of her injuries to control her husband’s behavior, she punctured her feet repeatedly. Dorothea was hoping that her feet would fester so badly that she would be excused from dancing. Instead of avoiding the dancing she dressed in heavy stockings to cover the cuts. Her shoes filled with blood while dancing. Later she wore wooden clogs stuffed with marsh rushes to keep the wounds alive and purulent for as long as possible.

With her husband dead she was able to go off to Marienwerder (now called Kwidzyn) and, under the direction of deacon Johannes of Marienwerder, was able to abandon the semblances of sanity so she could get down to really pleasing her god. When Johannes got around to widely publishing the tomes he penned to support her bid for sainthood he had 342 sworn and notarized accounts of miracles and cures performed by Dorothea. He was also able to capture some of the exact wording Jesus used in revealing the holy word to Dorothea:

”Consider how I kept your wounds open; brimful of bitter pain whose scabs sometimes itched as though they were working alive with gnawing worms, at other times they delivered such sharp jabs as if they were shot cramfull by sharp arrows, sometimes they burned as if ignited by fire, at times they swelled until they broke open, at still other times they bled freshly and profusely with excruciating pain as if they were indeed fresh and new. During such times your eyes were filled with such bitterness that even when you were asleep they seemed filled with smoke and soot.” –Christ to Dorothea several weeks after the feast of St Agness 1392

In 1393 Dorothea walled herself into a cell attached to the Marienwerder cathedral. That winter was especially harsh. It probably reminded her of the times when, as a little girl, she would purposfully lie sopping wet on the cold ground till she was frozen to it.

13 months after her inturnment, on June 25th 1394, Dorothea died.

Prince of Tides

2012-02-05T00:03:00.000-07:00

Fifty eight years ago today, at 2am on February 5th 1958, a F-86 transonic sabrejet crashed off the coast of Georgia following a mid-air collision. The pilot ejected safely, and was recovered without incident. The plane went down near Tybee Island, which is near the mouth of the Savannah River downstream from the Savannah River nuclear power plant.

Two years earlier, in 1956, reactor C of the Savannah River plant would be the fourth reactor to go critical. The plant was originally designed to make material for nuclear bombs.

I can find no information as to whether any Savannah River nuclear material was on the Mark 15 nuclear device with serial number 47782. That 12 foot long hydrogen bomb was on the B-47 stratojet the ill-fated sabrejet had collided with.

The B-47 did not crash after the mid air collision. Col. Howard Richardson bravely fought the controls until he safely landed the Homestead-based bomber at Hunter AFB near Savannah. Richardson would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions. Unfortunately he dropped the bomb while saving his crew.

The model 1 Mark-15 nuclear device was called the “Zombie” device, and officially yielded 1.7(ish) megatons of explosive power. The later models (which the Tybee device most certainly was) yielded closer to four megatons. The Mark-15s all weighed about 7,600 pounds (3,450 kg), and were huge (they were almost a 3X12 foot cylinder). Putting one into any airplane, even the gigantic stratojet, seriously affected how the plane flew. The Tybee device was in the B-47 just to make the plane difficult to fly and give the crew experience flying with so much weight. After the collision the air force began using lead weighted dummies for flight-training purposes.

The Georgia coastline is muddy. If you drop an almost four-ton rock into the mud from way up in the air, while distracted by the likelihood of dying in a fiery crash, it can be hard to find. So far the Tybee device has avoided all efforts to find it.

Fahizah

2012-02-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

Thirty eight years ago today, at 9PM on February 4th 1974, the aptly named “Steven Weed” and his girlfriend Patty were hanging out in their Berkley apartment watching a television show called “The Magician”. Steve was seven years older than Patty. He wore big round glasses and a porn-star mustache. To their surprise three people they had never met before came to visit them at their flat.

One of the visitors was DD Defreeze. DD did not think his own name was cool enough so he preferred to be called Cinque Mtume as a reference to Joseph Cinque who led a slave rebellion on a ship named Amistad in 1839. DD wanted to start a “Black Revolution” in the US, and had gathered almost a dozen followers, but all his followers were white. DD was a desperate escaped convict and criminal mastermind. He had been convicted in 1972 (at the age of 29) of stealing 10$ from a prostitute, and simply walked away from a work gang on the 5th of March 1973.

DD’s friends were Willy Wolfe, and Nancy Ling Perry. Most casual observers would think that “DD Defreeze and Willy Wolfe” would be cool enough names. If anyone needed to change their name to be more like that of a fictional comic book character it would have been Nancy. Nancy was a sweet girl who had given up being a cheerleader, Sunday school teacher, and campaign worker for Barry Goldwater to pursue a future in topless entertainment and drug addiction. Perhaps one of the reasons they beat “Steve Weed” up so violently was that Nancy was jealous of his name?

The actual reason they had come was to meet Patty. She was thin, rich, and impressionable. They would kidnap her, keep her blindfolded for almost two months, and indoctrinate her into their philosophy. Eventually Patty would change her name to “Tania”.

DD called his group the Symbionese Liberation Army. He liked the term symbiosis and thought everybody should live together in peace, and he was willing to shoot a bunch of people in order to make that happen.

“We are of many colors, but yet of one mind, for we all in history’s time on this earth have become part of each other in suffering and in mind, and have agreed that the murder, oppression and exploitation of our children and people must end now, for we have all seen the murder, oppression and exploitation of our people for too long under the hand of the same enemy and class of people and under the same system.” — DD Defreeze from his Symbionese Liberation Army Declaration of Revolutionary War.

Eventually Nancy would take on the name “Fahizah”. DD and most of his followers would die on the 16th of May 1974 in a blaze of peace while firing over 9,000 rounds of assorted ammunition at LAPD officers.

Fahizah would die in the gun battle (mortally wounded in both the right lung and spine), but Tania would survive. Years later a character she was playing would be beaten to death by Sybil Sheppard in John Waters’s film “Serial Mom”.

Patty would find love and marry her bodyguard. He was Named Bernard Shaw. He was eight years older than Patty, and had a bushy porn-star mustache.

Famous Karla

2012-02-03T00:03:00.000-07:00

14 years ago today, at 6:45 PM on February 3rd 1998, thirty-eight-year-old Karla Faye Tucker would cement the fame she had long known was her destiny. Twenty-five minutes earlier George “dubbya” Bush had rejected Karla’s plea for a 30-day delay of her execution.

Karla, a pretty young prostitute from Houston Texas, had a smile made to photograph. She smiled for the cameras one last time, and said:

"I love all of you very much. I'm going to be face to face with Jesus now."

Dana Brown, her husband of three years, stood watching as she gasped twice, and silently became history. Tony Thornton, the husband of one of Karla’s victims observed that “Now Dana Brown gets to write his book”. Dana hung around after the execution for a bit to serve-up some sound-bites for the TV cameras. Dana cheerfully described his wife’s execution:

“Just Glowin’. The love of Jesus radiatin’ through her and around her.”

Karla and her lover Danny Garrett had killed two people with a pick-axe in June of 1983. They were quickly fingered, and in September of 1983 they were both indicted for first-degree murder. Within weeks Karla had picked up a bible from the prison ministry and converted to evangelical Christianity. She and Garret would be sentenced to die late in 1984, but Garrett beat the state to the punch by dying of liver disease in 1993. Two years after Garrett’s death Karla would pick up a husband from the prison ministry by marrying minister Dana Lane Brown.

Karla’s Christianity became the centerpiece for emotional appeals for clemency.

Terry Anne Meeuwsen, Miss America 1973, called for commuting of her sentence to life-in-prison. Meeuwsen had toured with The New Christy Minstrels till her miss America gig. The New Christy Minstrels had won a Grammy a few years before Meeuwsen won Miss Wisconsin for their debut album (Presenting the New Christy Minstrels) which included a cover of Woody Guthrie’s American-Socialist song: This Land Is Your Land. The year Danny Garrett died Meeuwsen became permanent co-host to the Christian Broadcasting Network’s (CBN) 700 Club.

The considerably less attractive Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson took up her cause also.

Sister Helen Prejean also met with Karla and spoke against her upcoming execution. Prejean was made famous when Sean Penn played a character amalgamated from two rapist murderers whom Sister Helen wrote about in her book: Dead Man Walking. At about the same time Sister Helen was meeting with Karla she was counseling Debbie Morris to write about her forgiving the abduction torture and multiple rapings at the hands of one of Sister Helen’s Walking Dead Men. Debbie wrote about her Christian forgiveness in her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking after several years professionally traveling from church-to-church testifying about her experiences. In the 1995 movie Susan Sarandon played Sister Helen, and Debbie Morris’s abduction and rape were never mentioned.

Linda Strom visited her. Linda Strom and her husband Dallas run an international network of prison ministries called discipleship unlimited. They started DU in Millwaukee Wisconsin the year after (1974) Meeuwsen was elected to the post of Miss America. They sing a lot in DU. She later (2000) published a book: Karla Faye Tucker Set Free: Life and Faith on Death Row. In 2003 Linda and Dallas moved to Texas; it was, apparently, a better place to grow their ministries.

The Christian publicity machine working for Karla pulled in whomever they could grasp. Beverly Lowry, fiction writer and associate professor at The university of Houston, interviewed Karla extensively. The result was her most famous book: Crossed Over. In it she relates the feelings surrounding the accidental death of her 18-year-old son Peter to the death-row Karla, and find emotional healing. The book was made into a movie with the same name where Diane Keaton plays Beverly Lowry, and Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Karla.

Good publicity requires good sex, or at least it is greatly facilitated by it. The Christian media stories of Karla feature bashful descriptions of her pre-conversion life. They half-heartedly refer to her prostitution. Many of them refer to Karla’s sexual -almost orgasmic- delight at hacking away at the blood-spurting bodies of her victims; she did hack them more than 20 times. One of my favorite Karla sex references mentions an orgy put on at the request of her sister Keri for her birthday shortly before the pickaxe murders.

Strangely, though her life was supposed to be a modern re-enactment of living in a drug-paved Sodom, the stories focus on those last few weeks before the axe murders.

Just after Karla gasped last her sister Keri yelled: “I Love You Karla”.

Yet somehow Karla managed to stay married to the same relatively-normal man, Stephen Griffith, for six years between her 17th birthday and her 23-years-of-age pickaxe murders. By my arithmetic that did not leave a whole bunch of time for a life of depravity.

“She always said that someday she would be famous” – Stephen Griffiths

And she became famous. Famous enough that many who would convert at her suggestion were gilded by simple association with her fame.

Ron Carlson, the brother of Karla’s female victim, was converted to Christianity by Karla. In 1999 Ron got his own movie The Power of Forgiveness, produced by Gateway Films and presented by Vision Video.

And her fame continues. As late as 2011 prison interviews with her and Dana Brown were re-packaged into a shiny-new DVD entitled: Forevermore: Karla Faye Tucker.

Serbian Bear Day

2012-02-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

Happy Groundhog day!

One hundred and seventy one years ago today, on February 2nd 1841, the first recorded Groundhog Day was celebrated in Berks County Pennsylvania. Forty six years later, on February 2nd 1887, the first celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania would be celebrated. The celebration in Punxsutawney would become the most famous celebration of this most auspicious holiday.

Hardcore practitioners erect special huts where they sit, drink, and speak only Pennsylvania Dutch (which is German with a bad accent). The highlight of the celebration is when a groundhog emerges from its hole. If the groundhog sees its shadow then there are to be six more weeks of winter.

Thirteen days later in Serbia (February 2nd on the Julian Calendar) there is a similar celebration called Sretenje or The Meeting of the Lord. The Serbians use a bear’s seeing its shadow to predict 40 more days of winter. Because bears are notoriously uncooperative the Serbian bear is often more notional than Punxsutawney groundhog, which has been named “Phil”.

Finally a flop

2012-02-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

Fifty four years ago today, on the 1st of February 1958, the United States finally had a successful launch of a earth-orbiting satellite. Explorer I followed the successful soviet launches of Sutnik1 and Sputnik 2. Unlike those two satellites Explorer I would continuously orbit the earth until March 19th 1970.

Almost half of the Explorer I satellite’s weight (13.79Kg) was mercury batteries, which gave out on May 23rd 1958. Until that time the satellite transmitted real scientific data. The Geiger counter alone was responsible for the discovery of the Van Allen Radiation Belt.

The satellite was long and thin, and was designed to rotate like a bullet around it’s long axis. Shortly after entering orbit the rotational axis began to precess. This left the satellite wildly flopping through its orbit. In the end Explorer I flopped around the earth over 58,000 times.

Een dubbeltje op zijn kant

2012-01-31T00:02:00.000-07:00

Forty nine years ago today, on the night of January 31st 1953, a tremendous windstorm synergistically worked with the high spring tide to create a storm surge that topped 4.55 meters above Normal Amsterdam Water Level in places. The surge topped and then overcame the sea defenses along much of the coastline of the Netherlands; 89 dykes failed. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level. The flooding inundated 1,365 km² of land, 30,000 animals drowned, 47,300 buildings were damaged, 70,000 people were evacuated, and 1,835 people died.

Not all of the low lying areas of the Netherlands were flooded. There were extremely low lying areas in North and South Holland that were protected by dykes along the river Hollandse Ijssel. Three million people lived in North and South Holland in 1953. By 5:30 am on the morning of February 1st the frantic efforts of volunteers along one section of the Dykes became a losing battle. A part called ‘the Groenendijk’ began crumbling, and soon developed a large gap; it was one of the few sections not reinforced with stone.

As seawater rushed through the widening gap towards the homes of three million people, the mayor of Nieuwerkerk hatched a plan to plug the hole with a large river ship. He commandeered a ship called “de Twee Gebroeders” (The Two Brothers), and commanded Captain Aire Evegroen to steam his ship into the widening gap. Strangely enough the plan worked, and is commemorated today by a statue entitled “Een dubbeltje op zijn kant” (“A dime on its side”).

73

2012-01-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

Thirty three years ago today, on 30 January 1979, after an exhibition in Tokyo, a Varig, cargo Boeing 707-323C registration PP-VLU en route from Tokyo – Narita to Rio de Janeiro-Galeão via Los Angeles went missing over the Pacific Ocean some 30 minutes (200 km ENE) from Tokyo. The wreck was never found.

Gilberto Araujo da Silva was captain of the 707.

153 paintings by Manabu Mabe were on board the 707. Manabu Mabe was a Japanese painter from Sao Paulo Brazil; he died eight days after his seventy third birthday in 1997. Manabu moved to Brazil when he was seven; his father was retreating from failed business ventures in Japan. By Manabu’s thirty fifth birthday his unique modern-Japanese-Brazilian style had been discovered by international art communities, and he was famous. The large Tokyo exhibit occurred when he was fifty four, and at the height of his talent and popularity.

Almost five-and-a-half years earlier, on 11 July 1973, Gilber was captaining another Boeing 707 which made an emergency landing in a 5km short of the runway of Orly airport outside Paris. A fire had started in the rear bathroom, and the cabin had filled with smoke. By the time Gilbert landed the plane 123 people on board were dead; most by smoke inhalation. Ten of the eleven people who survived were crewmembers.

Among the dead was Filinto Müller, age seventy three. Filinto was a well-known Nazi collaborator, and one of the architects of the vast repressive system of Estado Novo, who had risen through the political ranks of Brazil to become head of Brazil’s Senate. It is rumored that Filinto sometimes personally participated in torture sessions and summary executions against political opponents. In 1937 he visited Nazi Germany at the personal invitation of Heinrich Himmler.

Boom Goes the Dynamite

2012-01-29T00:03:00.000-07:00

Fourteen years ago today, at 7:33 AM on the morning of January 29th 1998, Robert D. “Sandy” Sanderson (a 35-year-old off-duty Birmingham Police officer) was helping the morning nurse open the New Woman, All Women Health Care Clinic when a bomb went off killing him and critically mutilating the 41-year-old Emily Lyons. The bomb consisted of a few sticks of dynamite with nails taped to them. The nails were added in the hopes that they would become red-hot projectiles that would rip to shreds any human tissue they collided with. Unfortunately for Sandy and Emily the design worked as planned.

Lisa Hermes, who was also arriving for work at the clinic, was a minute late for the blast. She arrived to find her co-workers lying in pools of blood and glass. Emily’s face and legs had been mangled by the blast; her belly was riddled with bits of nail. Emily would spend most of the next day in surgery in a valiant, and successful, attempt to save her life.

Sandy’s body was so severely mangled that it was obvious he was dead despite any autonomic twitching that may have been occurring. His home was across the street from the Women’s clinic where he moonlighted, and now lay dead. The explosion brought Sandy’s wife out of their apartment to see what was happening. Lisa, wanting to spare her the image of her dead husband’s mangled and twitching corpse yelled at her: “Don’t come across!”.

At least one person was running away from the carnage. A man running away from the scene was observed to pull a wig off his head, and stuff it into a blue bag. He then jumped into a grey 1989 Nisan pickup truck, and speed away. The observer even jotted down the license plate number on the truck. That man was later identified as Eric Robert Rudolf.

For the next several hours the surrounding area (including some dorms for University of Alabama at Birmingham) was evacuated. The fear was that there would be another bomb. No second bomb was found.

The fear of a second bomb was well founded. A little over a year earlier, at 9AM on January 16th 1997, another of Eric’s bombs went off near a Women’s clinic in Sandy Springs Georgia (an Atlanta suburb). Shortly after the first bomb a second bomb placed near where ambulance and fire-fighters might park went off; it injured six more people.

A few weeks after the Sandy Springs bomb, at 10PM on February 21st 1997, a bomb went off near a crowd of almost 150 people outside The Otherside Lounge off Piedmont Rd in Atlanta. The area around the club was cordoned off, and a second bomb was found and safely removed.

On the morning of February 24th 1997 the FBI received a handwritten letter from “The Army of God” which warned that there would be more bombings of women’s clinics and lesbian bars. The note also vowed to bring the violence to “supporters”.

“A Pro-Lifer who is not an active, although maybe troublesome, member of a Christian Faith Community has cut him or herself off from the Church, and therefore, from Christ.” – Army of God Manual

The existence of The Army of God had been known since 1982. Various members had kidnapped, blown up, and harassed abortion providers and those that they thought supported them. The AOG still exists, it has a website, it distributes an AOG manual, and it continues to bomb Women’s clinics. On January 1st 2012 a Women’s clinic in Florida was gutted by AOG members in a Molotov cocktail attack.

Rudolf was identified as a suspect in some of his bombings on Valentine’s day 1998; he would be identified as a suspect in more before 1998 drew to a close. He was put on the FBI’s most wanted list, and went into hiding. AOG members managed to keep him hidden till May 31st 2003.

While Eric was in hiding two country music songs were written about him, and thousands of “Run Rudolph Run” T-Shirts were printed. Many Christians openly described Eric as a Hero.

The people who helped “Rudolph Run” were seen as godly martyrs by their friends and family. No-one who harbored or assisted Eric has been convicted. In one famous incident Eric’s brother videotaped himself (on March 7th 1998) purposely cutting off his own arm with an electric saw. He sent the videotape to local news outlets saying the self mutilation would “send a message to the FBI and the media.”.

Eric avoided the death penalty, and now sits in prison penning long tirades against the evils of society, and the need to cure them for Jesus. Eric’s supporters publish his rants on the internet. Many of his tirades include misogynist attacks against women.

“The family’s greatest enemy in the West for the last hundred years has gone under the name, ‘feminism.’ Feminism slowly introduced the seeds of revolt within the family and turned hearth and home into a battle field.” – Eric Robert Rudolf

There is a great amount of parallelism between Eric’s violent ramblings and the “Protect the Family” verbiage of social conservatives.

Eric became a rabid Christian when his mother moved the family (with teenage Eric) to the Church of Israel compound in 1984; a little over a decade before Eric began bombing. Eric self-identifies as a Roman Catholic, but the Church of Israel is an offshoot of the Temple Lot fringe of the Later-Day-Saints (Mormon) church. The “Temple Lot” referenced in the name is the spot in Independence Missouri that Joseph Smith dedicated to building the first LDS temple (and laid a cornerstone in 1831), and where all Mormons will gather at the last of the latter days. The Temple Lot group owns the exact 2.5 acres of real-estate which is the future temple’s lot.

Big Snow

2012-01-28T00:04:00.000-07:00

One hundred and twenty five years ago today, on January 28th 1887, the largest snowflake ever was seen in Ft Keough, Montana. The snowflake measured 15 inches (38 cm) by 8 inches (20cm).

The second biggest snowflake was seen eighty-four years later in Bratsk, Siberia sometime in the winter of 1971, and measured 12 inches (30 cm) by eight inches (20 cm).

Hot Snow

2012-01-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

Sixty one years ago today, at 3:30 am PST on January 27th 1951, at 7,000 feet over Railroad Valley, members of a special weapons crew began inserting a nuclear capsule into the open nosecone of a MKV nuclear device. At 5:44:30 am PST Able shot took place 1,060 feet over Frenchman’s flats dry lakebed in the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Two days earlier the Las Vegas Review–Journal had run a banner headline whose huge two–inch letters declared, “VEGAS A–BOMB POPS!”.

Almost five years earlier, on July 1st 1946, the Able device was detonated 520 feet over the Bikini Atoll; its target was the red and white painted battleship “Nevada”. The Able device was a 23 kiloton fission device, and it failed to sink the Nevada. Due to a faulty tailfin the bomb missed its intended aimpoint by 710 yards.

Seconds after the Able shot Ronald Gardner, circulation manager for the Las Vegas Review–Journal, was wakened from a deep sleep. For an instant the barely-breaking dawn sky was a bright as mid-day. Windows were broken a hundred miles away.

The Las Vegas Review–Journal ran a banner headline whose huge two–inch letters declared, “VEGAS ‘ATOM-IZED’”.

The Able shot was only the tenth nuclear detonation ever. At 1 kiloton it was small compared with most of the others. An experienced observer remarked that it provided a “lesser show”.

B-29’s tasked with monitoring the after-blast effects flew through Able shot’s cloud; they could hear the plane sandblasted with ejecta from the dry lakebed as they did. Visually the Able shot cloud appeared to rise as high as 35,000 feet and then break apart. Other B29’s tracked it more precisely; it passed over the Sangre-de-Cristo mountains south of Denver CO at 7pm MST. At 9 am EST on the 29th of January 1951 the cloud passed over the southern New England coast, and was estimated to be 300 miles wide. It started to snow.

Before the crippling blow of digital photography thousands of rolls of film were processed in the Eastman-Kodak plant in Rochester New York. They constantly measure background radiation, as it can expose film. On the 29th of January 1951 the snow that fell on Rochester New York was significantly radioactive.

The Able shot was the first of hundreds of nuclear tests conducted at the NTS.

Say I did not

2012-01-26T00:04:00.000-07:00

Fourteen years ago today, on January 26th 1998, President Bill Clinton, with his wife Hillary standing beside him, told the world this:

"I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false."

Cigars enjoyed a surge of popularity.

Since that time the phrase “Blue Dress” has taken on new meaning. Locations on the white-house tours have garnered extra attention including:

Various locations in the Oval Office,
The private study of the oval office,
and the hallway by the private study next to the Oval Office.

Scotland

2012-01-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

Uganda celebrates the anniversary of two military coup-d’états separated by a span of exactly fifteen years today. The first coup, led by Idi Amin on January 25th 1971, deposed President Apolo Milton Obote. The second, on January 25th 1986, deposed Tito Lutwa Okello who had deposed the same Apolo Milton Obote barely six months earlier.

Obote, who had created the office of an executive president, was "dictatorial and barbaric”. The corruption he fostered led to widespread shortages and deprivation. When he was finally deposed in a relatively bloodless Coup by Idi Amin there was nationwide celebration.

Obote had been deposed while out of the country. There is some small evidence that other nations supported this efficient transition. Amin told Uganda and the world he was just a “caretaker” and that elections would take place as soon as possible.

Then, a week later, Amin changed his mind, and installed himself as president. Then things got bad.

Idi Amin attempted to solidify the Coup by exterminating “Obote supporters”. This started with high ranking officials, and descended into genocidal purging of Obote’s Lango tribe. The purging was extended to include the Acholi people who speak a mutually intelligible Luo language. Army barraks were stormed and Luo speaking soldiers were killed. In 1972 a failed invasion by exiles loyal to Obote failed, and kicked Amin’s brutality into a higher gear. By early 1972 over 15,000 Acholi and Lango soldiers and civilians had disappeared, and Amin was just getting started.

As the number of bodies grew so did the length of Amin’s official title. It eventually grew to:

"His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular".

He also officially claimed to be the uncrowned King of Scotland. Amnesty International claims 500,000 people lost their lives to Amin’s barbaric reign.

Amin was popular outside of Uganda. Some dignitaries thought his wild tittles were the sign of mental simplicity, and discounted his barbarism. Pakistani and Libyan leaders saw his rule as a potential toehold in central Africa, and supplied him with military hardware.

Buoyed by thousands of foreign troops armed with tanks and jets Amin invaded neighboring Tanzania in 1979. Amin’s troops were trained for brutalizing a population, not fighting a war, so when the Libyans on the front line were outflanked the Tanzanians marched right into Kampala. Amin fled to exile in Libya. Tito Lutwa Okello and his fellow exiled Ugandans took up the reins of government when the Tanzanians left. Unfortunately the people put in charge of setting up the election they called for rigged it so Obote won. So began Obote’s second term as president.

Obote’s second term was even more brutal than the first. The party he had “defeated” (the National Resistance Movement) in the rigged elections sought recompense and responded to their harsh treatment by forming the National Resistance Army (NRA). Obote attempted to cut off support for the NRA by moving three-quarters of a million people into concentration camps. Decisions on who to put in the camps or promote in the Ugandan army began to be decided on tribal affiliation. Tito Lutwa Okello’s group found themselves on the wrong side of the racial divide, so they staged another coup, not five years after ousting Amin, and ousted Obote for a second time.

By now civilization in Uganda had almost been completely dismantled. The army could barely fight, and the NRA quickly took over.

The chaos that was Uganda would continue to destabilize the region; sometimes spilling over into neighboring nations.

In 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Front would launch the invasion of Rwanda from Uganda which would eventually seed the Rwandan genocide.

London Mills

2012-01-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

Forty three years ago today, on January 24th 1969, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) shut down following student riots. LSE consistently ranks as a top 20 school in one thing or another most years. Four Fabians (Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw) came up with the idea to start LSE at a breakfast party at Borough Farm, near Milford, Surrey, on 4 August 1894.

LSE students wanted to highlight their belief that it was their democratic right to influence the appointment of Dr. Adams (in 1967), who had served in Rhodesia. They “occupied some buildings”. The schools administrators decided there were some buildings they would prefer to not have occupied, and so put up some metal grating to dissuade the students from entering those buildings. The students thought that the grating disrupted their freedom of expression, and so they removed them, with sledgehammers. This angered the administrators who had a couple dozen students arrested. This in-turn angered the students who staged a sit-in in front of the police station, in the middle of the road. Since everything was pretty much at a standstill the administrators shut down the campus.

In 1969 USA campuses were being disrupted by anti-Vietnam war protests. Protests conducted by the very people who risked being drafted to fight in that war. These English protests by contrast were sparked by a dislike of African involvement by a Director who had already been in his position for over a year. Nobody was shot, no teargas was lobed, no-one was hospitalized due to brutal police beatings, but it was rather inconvenient.

In 2009 John Ata Mills was elected President of Ghana; one of the most stable and peaceful African countries.

In 1969 John Ata Mills was a student at LSE.

Moscow Too

2012-01-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

Seventy five years ago today, on January 23rd 1937, seventeen Bolsheviks went on trial in Moscow for belonging to the “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite-centre”, whose purpose was apparently overthrowing the Soviet Government. This was the second of the three “Moscow trials” that bookmarked Stalin’s Great Purge.

The first two “Moscow Trials” ended with high ranking Bolsheviks publicly confessing to crimes such as conspiring with the Nazis; some defendants begged for death sentences.

Investigations into the particulars of the crimes the defendants were confessing to yielded confusing information. One conspirator (Georgy Pyatakov) supposedly flew to Oslo to personally receive terrorist instructions from Trotsky on a commercial flight that did not exist. Another conspirator (Ivan Smirnov) was a key operative in the assassination of Sergei Kirov that took place while he was imprisoned by the very Soviets who accepted his confession; he had, in fact, been imprisoned for over a year at the time of Kirov’s assassination.

Despite the problems with reality the trials proved convincing to influential people. The US Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies, witnessed the first two trials and judged them fair:

“In view of the character of the accused, their long terms of service, their recognized distinction in their profession, their long-continued loyalty to the Communist cause, it is scarcely credible that their brother officers…should have acquiesced in their execution, unless they were convinced that these men had been guilty of some offense.* It is generally accepted by members of the Diplomatic Corps that the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty.”

British MP D. N. Pritt observed:

“We can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct and the prosecution fairly conducted”.

The sentences handed down during the second trial were more lenient than those handed down during the first. All sixteen defendants of the first trial were sentenced to death and executed. Only thirteen of the seventeen defendants of the second were sentenced to death; the others were sentenced to labor camps. The reason for the leniency was, in part, that confessions at the second trial named names used in the third. The defendants who went to labor camps died shortly after arriving at the camps. Documents released after the fall of the USSR confirm that they were executed by undercover Soviet agents sent to the camps to kill them.

The spectacularly confessing defendants in the trials had been tortured for months. Nikita Khrushchev said of the trials:

“They were only so stigmatized and often, no longer able to bear barbaric tortures, they charged themselves (at the order of the investigative judges – falsifiers) with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes”

Some of the defendants, notably first trial defendant Grigory Zinoviev, were apparently given assurances that their lives would be spared and their families left undisturbed. Zinoviev was executed within days of sentencing. His family was then rounded up and executed.

For each defendant in the “Moscow Trials” tens of thousands of unnamed individuals were also executed. Since the fall of the USSR mass gravesites have been uncovered yielding almost a quarter million corpses.

Incense, Wine and Candles

2012-01-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

One hundred and thirty five years ago today, on January 22nd 1877, the authorities finally had enough of Arthur Tooth, and put him in prison. Arthur, a priest of the Church of England, had been burning incense and candles in his church. This was illegal as a result of the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 which read in part (section 8):

That in such church any alteration in or addition to the fabric, ornaments, or furniture thereof has been made without lawful authority, or that any decoration forbidden by law has been introduced into such church; or,
That the incumbent has within the preceding twelve months used or permitted to be used in such church or burial ground any unlawful ornament of the minister of the church, or neglected to use any prescribed ornmament or vesture; or,
That the incumbent has within the preceding twelve months failed to observe, or cause to be observed, the directions contained in the Book of Common Prayer relating to the performance, in such church or burial ground, of the services, rites and ceremonies ordered by the said book, or has made or has permitted to be made any unlawful addition to, alteration of, omission from such services, rites and ceremonies.

Arthur was just the first priest imprisoned for ritualism. Sidney Faithorn Green, T. Pelham Dale, Richard William Enraght, and James Bell Cox were all imprisoned for varying stints after Arthur was released. Sidney was imprisoned for twenty months; he must have burned a boatload of incense!

The Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 was repealed on 1 March 1965 through the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measures of 1963 (No. 1)

Miss Sam

2012-01-21T00:01:00.000-07:00

Fifty two years ago today, on January 21st 1960, A test of the mercury Launch Escape System (LES) took a little Rhesus monkey named Miss SAM 11.7 miles out to sea from the Virginia barrier island she was launched from. The LES is a rocket put on the tip of a bigger rocket; both the US Mercury and Apollo rockets were equipped with them. The LES fires and carries the capsule up and away from the main rocket. The LES, being mounted on top of the capsule, shoots its fiery exhaust gasses down onto the capsule. This must be a very scary ride indeed.

SAM was an acronym for the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

The test rocket Miss SAM rode in, the Little Joe 1B, consisted of just the LES and a capsule. The fact that the LES was able to carry Miss SAM to an apogee of 9.3 miles indicates how powerful the little LES rocket was.

If Miss SAM could have processed the information she would have been almost as scared by the safety record of the US monkeys in space program as that wild January ride. The US had been flinging monkeys into space for a dozen years. The first monkey, a Rhesus named Albert, suffocated during a V2 trip on June 11th 1948. Albert II died on impact, Albert III died in an explosion, and Albert IV died on impact, Albert V died when his parachute malfunctioned, Albert VI died as a result of heat stress while waiting in the capsule for the recovery team to find him. Changing the name did not help as Gordo was then killed due to a mechanical failure. The first monkeys to travel to space and survive were Able (a rhesus like Miss SAM) and Miss Baker (a squirrel monkey). Able died four days after his flight after being over-anesthetized for a surgery to remove one of his flight electrodes that had become infected.

The safety record was getting better. Miss Baker lived to 27 years of age (November 29th 1984). She was buried on the grounds of the United States Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The year before Miss SAM’s flight the rhesus named SAM was launched to a 53 mile apogee, and survived. Miss SAM would also survive.

Lonely Lenin

2012-01-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

Fifty four years ago today, on January 20th 1958, Sir Vivian Fuchs arrived at the south pole after having left Shackleton base on the 24th of November 1957. Fuchs was leading the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition which would be the first land crossing of the Antarctic. When he got there Sir Edmund Hillary had already been waiting for 17 days. Hillary’s team’s tractor train had left from Scott base, and had set up supply drops for the final leg of Fuchs’s team’s trans-Antarctic expedition.

When Hillary arrived he found a group of 20 Americans led by Rear Admiral George Dufek. In 1956 Dufek with Captain Cordiner, Captain Hawks, and the pilot Lieutenant Commander Shinn became the first Americans to set foot on the south pole after flying there on a R4D (C-47) Skytrain. After wandering around in the snow for a few pictures they attempted to fly back to McMurdo Station, but the plane’s skis were stuck fast. They fired off 11 JATO bottles at once to break the plane free.

In October of 1956 work on the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station had begun. Hundreds of tons of materials were airdropped onto the South Pole. The base was finished in March of 1957. Eighteen Americans overwintered there that first year. Temperatures reached -74 F. The station has been inhabited ever since; though rebuilt and expanded several times.

Not to be outdone the Soviets established a base at the South Pole of Inaccessibility (SPI) in 1958. The SPI is the location on the continent farthest inland from any point. The Soviets put up a building and topped it with a gold bust of Lenin. The base was abandoned because it was too far away from anything to be practical.

On the 19th of January 2007 (or the 20th depending on how you interpret the international dateline at the south pole) team N2i (Rory Sweet, Rupert Longsdon, Henry Cookson and Paul Landry) arrived at the abandoned SPI station after traveling the 1032 miles it took to get there on foot and kite-ski. The Soviet SPI station was covered in snow; only Lenin’s bust remained visible. They flew out on a Russian-piloted DC-3.

Hillary flew from the South Pole to McMurdo station shortly after Fuchs arrived. Just before Fuchs completed the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition on March 2nd Hillary was flown out to him so they could gloriously enter Scott Base together.

Silver Boom

2012-01-19T00:02:00.000-07:00

Ninety five years ago today, just after 6pm on January 19th 1917, a small fire broke out in the melt-pot room of a Silvertown (an industrialized district in the London Borough of Newham) mill that had been built 24 years earlier for the production of Caustic Soda.

The Silvertown plant had actually stopped making Caustic soda about five years before the fire. As demand for Caustic Soda had waned the demand for munitions had waxed, so the plant was repurposed to make TNT. By January 1917 the plant was producing TNT for Brittan’s effort in World War I at full bore. This amounted to about 9 tons of TNT per day. On the 19th the plant had a little over five-days of production waiting in railroad cars to be shipped out.

Due to the time of day few people were at work. Unfortunately, due to the urban location of the plant, when the 6:52 explosion took out many nearby buildings (like the fire station) it resulted in 73 deaths. Molten metal from the railway cars that had contained much of the TNT rained down on many flammable surfaces. One chunk hit a tank holding 200,000 cubic meters of natural gas which exploded in a spectacular fireball. The explosions at Silvertown were reportedly seen as far as 100 miles away.

The year before, on April 2nd 1916, 200 tons of TNT vaporized a plant in Uplees (near Faversham). 105 people were killed. What fragments they could find of them were buried in a mass grave in the Faversham cemetery.

The vacuum process used at the Silvertown plant was invented by Brunner Mond chief chemist F. A. Freeth who described it as:

“Manifestly very dangerous.”

It was early in WWI when Freeth, who had been fighting in the trenches in France for six weeks, received an urgent plea to return to England. It had been discovered that the Germans had scaled-up a process for making explosives from air and coal. The TNT process that the allies used would soon lag behind this new German process enough to give Germany an overwhelming advantage on the battlefield. The allies wanted to cut their TNT with inorganic nitrates (which was almost as explosive as pure TNT) to avoid losing the war. Freeth was the best chemical engineer to scale the process up with an eye towards product rather than safety.

It took Freeth three days to effectively solve the scale-up problem.

Establishing the process required political as well as engineering skills. Glitches and hiccups in converting soda-ash factories to the nitrate-cutting process caused long down-times early-on. In the middle of one of the stoppages a gaggle of French generals announced they were going to tour the factories whose process was to stave-off their imminent defeat. Freeth devised a complicated shell-game to prove to the French generals that the process was working.

Freeth unpacked as much product as he had on hand, and charged the factory with it. He placed a lookout on a bridge the generals would traverse on the way to the plant, and when the lookout signaled their approach Freeth turned the factory’s machines on. For the next 10 minutes, under the gaze of the French generals, he “produced” the nitrate-cut TNT. Minutes after they walked out the door the machines, having run dry of material to work, stopped.

"At the end of every month we used to write to Silvertown to say that their plant would go up sooner or later, and we were told that it was worth the risk to get the TNT." -- Francis Arthur Freeth

The year after the Silvertown explosion, on 1 July 1918, eight tons of TNT took out a substantial part of the National Shell Filling Factory in Chilwell. Of the 137 people killed in Chilwell only 32 could be positively identified. The rest were buried in a mass grave in the Attenborough churchyard.

Mano-a-Mano

2012-01-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

Four hundred and twenty-one years ago today, on January 18th 1591, King Somdet Phra Naresuan Maharat of Ayutthaya defeated Crown-Prince Minchit Sra of Burma in a one-on-one elephant battle. Legend has it that Naresuan narrowly avoided death at the hands of his childhood rival before fatally slashing Minchit.

Naresuan’s hat bearing the mark of Minchit’s near fatal strike is still on display as a national treasure of Thailand. The anniversary of the battle is celebrated as Royal Thai Armed Forces Day.

Raoul

2012-01-17T00:01:00.001-07:00

Sixty seven years ago today, on January 17th 1945, Raoul Wallenberg was detained by Soviet soldiers as they took control of Budapest. Raul was never heard from again.

In June of 1944 Raoul had been recruited by the U.S. War Refugee Board to travel to Hungary, and establish a covert operation within the Swedish embassy for the protection of Hungarian Jews. At the time of his arival in Budapest on July 9th 1944 he had absolutely no experience in diplomacy or clandestine operations. Raoul was assigned as First Secretary in the Swedish legation to Budapest from August 10th 1944 (four days after his 32nd birthday) until his detention by the soviets a little less than six months later.

During that time Raoul is credited with saving well over 10,000 people.

Raoul and fellow Swedish diplomat Per Anger devised the creation of official looking “protective passports” (Schutz-Pass). Although not legal the Swedes worked to have the bearers of these documents treated as Swedish citizens. Raoul did all he could to distribute the Schultz-Pass as quickly as he could get them printed. On one occasion he intercepted a train headed for Auschwitz. His driver recounted what happened:

“.. he climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men deliberately aimed over his head, as not one shot hit him, which would have been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colours. I don’t remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it”

The Schultz-Pass program quickly became more than Raoul and Per could run by themselves. At the height of the effort over 350 people were diligently working on the program; including diplomats from countries other than Sweden. Raoul rented 32 buildings in Budapest and declared them extraterritorial, and therefore protected by diplomatic immunity. He put up oversized Swedish flags on them, and posted signs on their doors like: The Swedish Library” and “The Swedish Research Institute”. The buildings were said to house over 10,000 people before the war ended.

On February 6, 1957, the Soviets released a document dated July 17, 1947, which stated:

”I report that the prisoner Wallenberg who is well-known to you, died suddenly in his cell this night, probably as a result of a heart attack or heart failure.”

Today Budapest is counted as having the largest Jewish population per capita of any European city. .

18 to 21

2012-01-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

Ninety three years ago today, on January 16th 1919, Nebraska ratified the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Though ten more of the forty eight states would ratify the amendment Nebraska was the last state needed to make the amendment law. Only two states rejected the amendment: Connecticut and Rhode Island.

At midnight almost a year later (January 17th 1920) the Volstead act (National Prohibition Act) went into effect, and prohibition was the law of the land. The Volstead act detailed the particulars for enforcement and interpretation of the 18th amendment. The Volstead act would eventually allow up to 200 gallons of wine to be made in a home each year for personal consumption (that is about 1,000 bottles), and establish a medical prescription mechanism for distributing whiskey.

Fifty-nine minutes after the Volstead went into effect six armed men hijacked two freight-trains loaded with “medical whiskey”.

Just fourteen years later the entire eighteenth amendment would be repealed by ratification of the twenty-first amendment. Only one state, South Carolina, rejected the twenty first amendment. Utah was the last state whose ratification was needed to make the twenty first amendment law. Utah ratified the twenty first amendment on December 5th 1933. Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, both Dakotas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia have never ratified the twenty first amendment.

Sticky-Sweet

2012-01-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

Ninety-three years ago today, on January 15th 1919, it was a surprisingly warm day (40F) in Boston Massachusetts. People near Kearney Square reported hearing a sound not unlike a machine gun. What they heard was the sound of rivets popping out of the seams of a 50 foot tall tank of molasses located at 529 Commercial Street. The tank contained over 8.5 million liters of molasses.

There is a common idiom in the northeast: “As slow as molasses in January”. On that warm January day the wave of molasses is calculated to have traveled at 35MPH. It destroyed architectural supports and moved buildings off their foundations.

People who were not crushed by the impact were suffocated by the sticky fluid. Survivors spoke of passing out because they were unable to breath. Twenty-one people died and over fifty were injured.

On warm days the neighborhood supposedly still sweetly smells of molasses.

Be

2012-01-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

Forty-five years ago today, on January 14th 1967, as many as thirty thousand people joined together in San Francisco’s Golden-Gate Park to ”Be”. Timothy Leary, in his first public appearance in San Francisco, told the crowd to "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Augustus Owsley Stanley III cooked up a batch of “White Lightning” LSD which was freely distributed.

Some say the “Summer of Love” started that winter afternoon, and lasted three years.

The organizer, Michael Bowen, had been enthralled by the city of San Francisco since during childhood trips when he vacationed there from LA with his mother’s lover Bugsy Siegel. Bowen and Siegel also traveled several times to Siegel’s Las Vegas Flamingo hotel. Perhaps Bowen’s choice of San Francisco over Las Vegas is one of the reasons why love is often treated differently in those two locations today.

Nika!

2012-01-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

One thousand four hundred and eighty years ago today, on January 13th 532, Emperor Justinian I went to the Hippodrome in Constantinople (now Istanbul) for an exciting day of chariot races. This would prove such an exciting day of racing that the riots that followed it would claim as many as thirty thousand lives, and leave much of Constantinople in rubble.

There were two big “teams” competing; the “Blue” team and the “Green” team. Justinian was a “Blue” team supporter.

By the end of race 22 for the day the normally passionately divided fans had stopped yelling “Win Blue” or “Win Green”, and had started shouting one word: “NIKA” (victory).

Nika stems from the same root as Nike the name the Greeks gave to their goddess of victory (Roman Victoria). She was often portrayed as a divine charioteer in Greek art.

They Hippodrome race fans also decided it would be nice to crown a new Emperor and so began burning looting, killing, and generally acting badly.

The riots took most of a week, and Justinian held up in his palace and made plans to flee. This gave his wife, Empress Theodora, the opportunity to utter two of the great lines recorded by history:

On her husband’s desire to flee for his life:

“Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss.”

On her own risk of untimely death should she stay:

“Royalty is a fine burial shroud.”

Justinian hatched a plan. He ordered a eunuch to deliver, and distribute, a bag of gold and a message to the “Blue” team captains. The message pointed out that he was a “Blue” supporter, and the man they would crown emperor was a green supporter. The "Blue" supporters laid down their arms, and went home. The disserted “Green” supporters were no match for the emperor’s guards who slaughtered them with impunity.

I suspect that the “Greens” did not do as well at the next chariot races.

“Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as a whirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe unto us! for we are ruined.” – Jeremiah 4:13

Happy Bedford Day

2012-01-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Happy “Bedford Day”. Forty five years ago today, at 1:15 pm on January 12th 1967, seventy three-year-old James Hiram Bedford died of Kidney cancer that had metastasized to his lungs. The modern concept of hospice care would not be truly introduced into the US by Cicely Saunders for another two years. James was being cared for by a Seventh Day Adventist couple in a “Nursing Home” they operated out of a space Bedford rented to them.

After James was pronounced dead by his physician, Dr. B. Renault Able, they (Able and the Seventh Day Adventist caregiver Mr Raymond Vest) poured crushed ice over him and began CPR. They performed CPR on his corpse for over an hour until Robert F. Nelson (a.k.a. Robert Buccelli) arrived and began injecting pure DMSO into Mr. Bedford’s carotid arteries. CPR continued for another hour until the injections were complete. James was then wrapped in his ice soaked bed sheet, transferred to a large foam box, and covered in one-inch-thick slabs of dry ice.

By 5 O’clock James had become the first cryopreserved human being. Within six days he would be transferred to Phoenix Arizona where he would be immersed in liquid nitrogen. The next six folks Bob Nelson would “preserve” were not transferred to liquid nitrogen before their dry ice evaporated and they experienced significant decomposition.

James Bedford was a doctor of psychology at the University of California Berkley where he published on the subject of occupational counseling. He had answered a 1965 announcement that read:

“the Life Extension Society now has primitive facilities for emergency short term freezing and storing our friend the large homeotherm (man). LES offers to freeze free of charge the first person desirous and in need of cryogenic suspension”

The Life Extension Society was the brainchild of Evan Cooper, who left cryogenic research entirely three years after James became the first cryogenically preserved man. His wife Mildred explained that:

"He turned away from cryonics because of overload, burn-out, and a general sense that it was not going to be a viable option in his lifetime."

Cooper was lost at sea while sailing sometime in 1983. Bedford’s corpse remains frozen in Dewar of liquid nitrogen somewhere in Scottsdale Arizona.

Algerian Superbowl

2012-01-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Fourteen years ago today, on January 11th 1998, the Green Bay Packers defeated the San Francisco 49’rs 23-10 to win the NFC championship. Half a world away, in the Algerian town of Sidi-Hamed, about fifty gunmen killed as many as 400 people and kidnapped thirty young girls.

It was the holy month of Ramadan.

Sources differ on which fundamentalist Islamic group bombed the packed mosque and shot those who fled the burning structure. Some said it was the AIS (Islamic Salvation Army). Most thought it was the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). Apparently the message that needed to be sent was important enough to slaughter hundreds of people, but not important enough to actually write down and send to a newspaper.

The December 30th 1997-January 29th 1998 Ramadan was especially bloody. When the Muslims gathered to break their fast on the first night of Ramadan, 6:15 pm on December 30th 1997, a coordinated attack occurred in the small northern Algerian province of Relizane. Fundamentalists armed with knives and axes stormed several farming villages. Everything that moved was killed. When the number of potential victims dwindled the corpses were mutilated. The attackers left at Dawn. Probably to fast before that evenings Iftar.

There was another large massacre on the night of January 4th 1998, and another large one following the Sidi-Hamed massacre on March 26th in Oued Bouaicha. There were over 25 large massacres conducted by Algerian radical Islamics in 1997 and 1998, and no good count of the smaller ones.

Two weeks after the Sidi-Hamed massacre, on January 25th 1998, Jewel would sing the national anthem to start the San Diego hosted Superbowl which would see the 11 point favorite Green Bay Packers loose to the Denver Broncos 24-31

Several days after Superbowl XXXII Cardinal Francis Arinze delivered to the entire Islamic world the official Vatican message in which he said:

“There are numerous Signs Of Hope: the growing solidarity among people in our time, especially with the poor and destitute, the desire for justice and peace, voluntary service, the return of religion, an awareness of human dignity and of the rights which flow from it, attention to the environment, etc.”.

The Nashville Beep

2012-01-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Sixty Six Year ago today, at 11:58 am on January 10th 1946, John DeWitt launched the US space program from Fort Monmouth New Jersey. Just before noon John finally heard the quarter-second pulses he had been trying to bounce off the moon with his jury-rigged world-war-two-surplus 3,000 watt bedspring dipole array transmitter. The 111.5 megahertz signal took 2.5 seconds to go to the moon, bounce off it, and travel back to the receiving antennae. The endeavor was called “Project Diana” after the Roman goddess of wild things and the moon.

The bouncing things off a distant object approach had philosophical similarities to the first big program John facilitated. About 22 years earlier, on March 18th 1924, John broadcast a message from the First Baptist Church of Nashville asking for anyone who heard it to write in. John had just successfully directed the design and installation of the station in a small room in the northwest corner of the First Baptist Church’s Sunday school annex. W.A. Marks (a member of First Baptist Church of Nashville) had been trying to get local Ward-Belmont College to allow his church to broadcast their outreach ministry message on their much smaller transmitter with no success. When the path to go it alone was completed station WCBQ (“We Can’t Be Quiet”) became the first licensed radio station in Nashville, and the second official church broadcasting station in the entire south.

Today there are MANY religious broadcasting stations in the USA, and the message has changed little from 1924.

The simple beeping sound bouncing off the moon, however, was an important milestone in the progress of human culture.

Texas Jonesing

2012-01-09T00:17:00.000-07:00

One Hundred and Fifty Four years ago today, on January 9th 1854, Anson Jones went up to his room at the Capitol Hotel in Houston after dinner and shot himself. Jones had been the last president of the Republic of Texas. About twelve years earlier, on February 19th 1846, Jones lowered the Republic of Texas flag in Austin, declared "The final act in this great drama is now performed. The Republic of Texas is no more.", and gave the flag to a teary-eyed Sam Houston.

Anson was not a native Texan; he was a New Englander. He was born in Massachusetts and licensed as a medical doctor in Oneida New York.

The dissolution of the Republic of Texas came as a result of tremendous support from the people of Texas who had repeatedly burned Jones in effigy for not proceeding with annexation fast enough. It should have come as no surprise to Jones that his repeated applications to become a Texas senator were rebuffed. Jones was convinced that his last bid in 1857 would finally send him to Washington, but it received zero votes from the Texas legislature.

Less than four years before his death, in 1854, most of the branches of the free-love Oneida cult in his hometown of Oneida had shuttered their doors.

Perhaps it was the combination of his rejection by Texas and the lack of free love in his hometown that proved too much for the 59-year-old Jones.

The Divine Mona Lisa

2012-01-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

Forty nine years ago today, on January 8th 1963, visitors to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC stared in amazement at the original Mona Lisa. Close inspection of the original work of art (on loan for the first time to the USA) revealed that she lacked any facial hair. Not only did she not have the mom-stache popular with some electrolysis-avoiding dark-haired Europeans; she lacked eyebrows and eyelashes. They were told that genteel women in the 16th century plucked them out because they were unsightly. In 2007 Pascal Cotte discovered through the use of ultra-high-resolution scans of the painting that Leonardo had painted Mona with eyelashes and eyebrows, but centuries of age and cleaning had removed them.

Some people believe that the Mona Lisa is a self portrait of Leanardo da Vinci in drag.

Cotte’s discovery may have come too late for a Harris Milstead. The famous painting went on display mere weeks before young Harris graduated from Towson High School. It is an easy drive from THS to the National Gallery of Art. Harris would first become famous in 1964 as the killer of his friend Sally before the serial killer who actually killed her was caught.

While the memory of his short-lived stint as prime suspect in a murder still fresh on everyone’s lips Harris plucked his facial hair, proclaimed his bisexuality, and began his long career as a drag queen. Harris would take the stage name of “Divine” from his friend and director John Waters. In the 1974 film “Female Trouble” Divine played both Dawn Davenport and Earl Peterson who, in a possible nod to Divine’s bisexuality, act out a sex scene with each other.

113 of Piet's Questions

2012-01-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

Piet from Rotterdam sent me a link to a quiver of questions he wrote for the Christian believer. They are good questions, and therefore make a good addition to the “How can you believe in Christianity?” literature. It has been pointed out to me many times that my voice is too quiet on this topic; some have suggested that anti-religiousness is the hallmark of a true atheist, and therefore my writing is not truly atheistic. Piet provides an easy way to protect myself from the atheist thought police who would prosecute me for all-too-simply not believing in god(s).

Writing the reasons for not believing is an important –almost necessary- exercise for any Adult Onset Atheist. Once an awkward theistic god is abandoned one’s thoughts turn to amazing and fulfilling ideals. The body follows, and one’s life becomes transformed into a gritty purpose-driven sting of incredibly unlikely phenomena. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that one left religiosity in the dust because it couldn’t keep up with the pace of maturity.

When we begin to remember childhood with the blinding shine of a fondness only decades can buff out of an otherwise difficult time the religion of our childhood basks in some of that shine. Perhaps we remember family members who cut us off because of our de-conversion, and long for their more interested position in our lives once more. Perhaps the ritual and church friends begin to feel like other childhood friends and games. Somehow living as an atheist makes childhood religion look better simply because we are better.

That’s where writing like Piet’s questions come in handy. It is too easy to be an atheist simply by not abandoning theistic delusions. It may even be the best way to be an atheist, but the world, and for type 2 atheists our lives, is full of theistic content. Some anti-theistic content appears necessary from time-to-time.

-AOA

Piet from Rotterdam's 113 questions (he has more at the original site here):

This is an English translation of part of the questions. The original version can be viewed here. Suggestions for improvement or bashing in general please send to Piet

1. Where does your god come from?

2. What is your god made of?

3. What gender is your god? The Bible speaks of a male.

4. Why did your god need to make the earth?

5. What is the purpose of millions of galaxies?

6. Why didn't this omnipotent god create the universe in a single stroke with a clear vision in mind?

7. How can an all-knowing god be disappointed in his creation?

8. Why does your god need people to spread his word, why does he not do this himself?

9. How can a loving god allow that there is a hell for those who do not believe in him?

10. If a person is fully capable of saving another but doesn’t do so, we disapprove of it. We call such a person wicked and unethical, and this person can even be punishable in some cases. Why don’t we condemn a god who, according to many believers, is able to save people out of misery every single day but doesn’t do so?

11. What evil did plants and animals do that died in the Great Flood? Why is there no separation between primary and secondary suffering?

12. Why is your god mercilessly indifferent as to how nature works? It’s eat or be eaten.

13. What happened to those people who weren’t familiar with the Bible before it was written?

14. With 10% to 20% of women having miscarriages, is your god the greatest abortionist?

15. Leprosy was not an unknown condition in the time of the Bible. There were even rituals performed by priests to cure the disease. In Leviticus 13-14 it is clearly proscribed what the priests need to do. The ritual requires two clean birds of which one is to be killed, and the other dipped in its blood together with some cedar wood, scarlet and hyssop. The living bird is then set free and the sick person sprinkled with the bloody mixture once daily for seven days. After a further seven days of isolation, washing and bathing, and shaving and cutting hair, the patient must take a lamb to the priest who will slaughter it for a trespass offering. The priest will daub some of the blood on the patient’s right earlobe, right thumb and right big toe.

“And the priest shall dip his right finger in the oil that is in his left hand, and shall sprinkle of the oil with his finger seven times before the LORD: And of the rest of the oil that is in his hand shall the priest put upon the tip of the right ear of him that is to be cleansed, and upon the thumb of his right hand, and upon the great toe of his right foot, upon the blood of the trespass offering: And the remnant of the oil that is in the priest's hand he shall pour upon the head of him that is to be cleansed: and the priest shall make an atonement for him before the LORD.”

What does Yahweh achieve with bird blood and blood on right thumbs and toes? Wouldn’t it have been easier to give a description of an effective cure instead of these primitive voodoo rituals?

16. Why does your god let Lot and his daughters live so that they can commit incest later? And what father would give his daughters to a sex-mad mob?

17. Why was Jesus not recognised by the Jews as their promised Messiah?

18. In 2 Kings 2:23-24, forty two children are dismembered by two she-bears because they mocked Elisha for being bald. Were they some kind of super bears?

19. Why did your god interfere many times in human affairs in the Bible but did nothing during the Holocaust?

20. When you speak of an all-good god, how does this square with the god in Isaiah 45:7 who says that he creates evil?

21. The Bible is often pointed to as a source of morality. Why are war and slavery not forbidden?

22. Can the bloodthirsty and vengeful god of the Old Testament be reconciled with the loving god that is preached about? A god who lets the children of wicked people be exterminated. Or who commits genocide (Midianites).

Child sacrifices were in fact quite popular. Isaac, the only son of Abraham had to be offered. What trauma does a child suffer? And many know the upsetting story of Jephthah. He promised Yahweh that he would offer the first person he met if the battle ended in his favour. The first one he met after the war was his only child, his young daughter. More child sacrifices can be found in Genesis 42:37; Joshua 6:26; 1 Kings 16:34; 2 Chronicles 17:31, 28:3, 23:10 and 20; Jeremiah 8:30-31; Psalms 106:37-38; Ezekiel 16:20-21; Leviticus 20:2.

23. If the Bible is the word of god, why does it contain so many internal contradictions?

24. If there are so many religions the followers of which are completely convinced of their accuracy, how do you know so surely that your religion is the true one?

25. If Adam and Eve only had three sons, where do we come from?

26. Is a religion that says faith is more important than using one’s reasoning abilities reliable?

27. Why is the number of atheists in prisons proportionally much smaller than you would expect based on demographics?

28. When you ask an atheist if he will provide proof against the existence of the Bible’s god, will you then provide proof against Zeus, Odin, Ra, etc.?

29. Do we have to turn away from our families to be good Christians (Luke 14:26)? Isn’t this a recurring theme in many sects?

30. There are countless myths about people born of a virgin who do special things. Why is the myth about Jesus true but the rest not?

31. Is Christian belief founded on fear?

32. How reliable are the four gospels?

33. How is it possible to be happy in a heaven while your non-believing friends and family members must suffer forever in hell?

34. Why doesn’t everyone have the same opportunity to receive the gospels? Millions of people are born in places where one seldom or never hears of Jesus? And what happened with people who died before Jesus came?

35. How can a benevolent god punish people just because they don’t believe in him?

36. Why did Jesus curse a fig tree for bearing fruit outside the harvesting season?

37. Why did Jesus behave violently at one occasion? Why didn’t he turn the other cheek? Does this agree with his earlier declarations?

38. Why does your god use deceitful spirits and live among them (1 Chronicles 22:19; 2 Chronicles 18:21; 2 Thessalonians 2:11)?

39. Why do venomous fangs, sharp claws, viruses, toxoplasma and all parasites and pathogenic bacteria exist?

40. Why does Jesus announce to the spectators (Matthew 16:28) that many of them will see him return? Why does he not keep his promise?

41. Why doesn’t the god of the Old Testament just create a new earth?

42. Who were the mythical giants of Genesis 6 who were also known as Nephilim? What became of them?

43. How loving is a god who commands the impaling of children and the raping of captured women?

44. Aren't a talking donkey, a flying axe and a motionless sun examples that should convince us of the Bible’s truth?

45. Matthew 4:8 “Again, the devil taketh him [Jesus] up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;” As most people know, the world is round. To be able to see the kingdoms in, for example, South America, something more than a high mountain is needed. Must we give the lord a bad mark for geography?

46. Where did all the water for the Great Flood come from? And how did Noah assemble all those millions of animals? How did Noah get all their food together and how did he prevent them eating each other until they got back on land?

47. When there are 1,500 creation myths, why should the story of one nomadic tribe from the Middle East be true?

48. Is there proof available that a god exists outside the ideas and conceptions people have in their heads?

49. Why is there nothing about Herod's infanticide to be found in history books?

50. There were dozens of scribes in Jesus’ lifetime in the area he inhabited. Why did no one write anything down?

51. Jesus could read and write but an autobiography is lacking. Did he not have the time for this?

52. Where was Jesus between the ages of 18 and 30?

53. In which year was Jesus born? There are disparate versions that indicate a difference of more than ten years.

54. What is the use of letting billions of people suffer who are all forced to participate in a game of good and evil?

55. Why do Christians not kill any women in accordance with Deuteronomy 22:21 when they enter marriage as anything but virgins, but they oppose homosexual marriage?

More passages from which the believer has strayed: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22)

Sex during menstruation: “And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people.” (Leviticus 20:18)

56. Why are there two creation stories in Genesis that are contradictory?

57. Why would an infinite, almighty, etc. god demand worship from a being he himself created? This being, angel or human, is infinitely insignificant compared to god himself. Would any person wish to be worshipped by a bacterium? Would any person be offended if a bacterium doesn’t believe in him/her? And the difference between a person and a bacterium is indeed huge, but finite. The difference between god and a person is infinite.

58. How can one conduct a census under the reign of Quirinius when there is no citizenship? What is the use of returning to the place your ancestors came from, in a land that is permanently in a state of war? Is this Christmas story indeed credible?

59. In Matthew it is written that Jesus did not come to bring peace but a sword; in Luke it says that all those who reach for the sword will die by it. Where do these conflicting statements by Jesus come from?

60. Were the writers of the gospels creationists or evolutionists?

61. Why isn’t it a problem for some Christians to label accounts that don’t please them, for example Jonah in the whale, as metaphors? And on what basis does one draw the distinction?

62. How is it possible that a god who sees all asks Adam where he is (Genesis 3:9)? Also in this text: “And the LORD said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know” (Genesis 18:20-21) indicates that the biblical god Yahweh needs first take a look to see what is going on.

63. And how unlikely is it that in one city, 50 righteous infants or children cannot be found who couldn’t be condemned for sodomy?

64. A god that created billions of galaxies approaches Sarah to eat a pancake. Is this realistic or plain superstition?

65. The Gilgamesh epic is the oldest source describing a Great Flood. Why are the Hebrews not being accused of plagiary?

66. Why are many Christians unaware of the influences of Celtic and Germanic rituals and customs on their faith? The feasts and festivals are Celtic, and sainthood Germanic.

67. The Old Testament describes countless despicable things that the Jews did. Why are these laws no longer upheld as Jesus made it clear that he doesn’t repeal them but respects them (Matthew 5:17-19 and Luke 16:19)?

68. Tens of millions of people have fallen victim to other persons/groups who used texts from the Bible for this purpose. Is Christianity a peaceful movement?

69. Archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct biblical stories. After thorough investigation, it appears that many incidents never occurred, for example the exodus. Does this alter Christianity’s starting point?

70. The witnesses who described Jesus many decades later lived in a cultural climate where superstition featured prominently. Could this have influenced how they interpreted the traditions?

71. “God created man in his image and likeness.” Our bodies show countless non-functional vestiges that are characteristic of an animal background. Piloerectile muscles (arrectores pilorum), vomeronasal organ, apocrine glands, appendix, etc. From these it has become clear that it is a widely-branching pedigree consisting of countless hominid forms. Was the resemblance ape-like?

72. What is the meaning of a blessing given to a marriage when the divorce rate among Christians is higher than among atheists? (Source: VS)

73. What is the use of “Thou shalt not kill” if Christians depart en masse for war zones?

74. In many communities “Keep the Sabbath” is proclaimed every Sunday. Isn’t it a bit presumptuous not to say a word to indicate the intended audience?

75. Why can you get good results with a faith healer when suffering from asthma, eczema and MS (where psychological influences can affect the condition) but is it pointless to go there with an amputated limb?

76. It becomes ever more clear that religious feelings have a physiological basis and that it is easy to arouse “supernatural experiences”. Why search outside people’s heads when these phenomena can be explained this way?

77. Why does religion claim a moral high ground? This while faith has thwarted people and restricted their freedoms for centuries. Ever since the Enlightenment the position for many groups has improved significantly.

78. What would be the problem if one were to change NDEs (near-death experiences) to just-still-living experiences? And if all arguments that point to a natural cause of these occurrences become preferred?

79. How was Moses able to describe his own death?

80. At several locations during archaeological excavations, inscriptions have been found that link Yahweh with a female counterpart Asherah. Why is this not seriously looked into, and the story remains limited to one-sided monotheism?

81. In biology you see social structures built around a basic ethic of fairness. In several cases, you even find assisting of the weaker and sacrifice. Do the roots of our human morality not lie here?

82. Religious movements are always at the forefront concerning matters of life and death (immortality) even as there is no concrete proof of the latter. Can they then be considered reliable discussion partners?

83. In Psalm 82:1, “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.” Who were these gods and what was their role during the meeting?

84. Why did your god put people on earth and send wicked angels there too? He surely knew that this would be a mistake and that people would be influenced by Satan. You simply don’t put children into a pit of snakes.

85. Equality principles, for example between men and women, are put under pressure by various religions. Are religious scriptures not a source of discrimination? When a woman bears a child and it is a boy, she is unclean for seven days. If the child is a girl, the mother is unclean for fourteen days (Leviticus 12:2-5). The value of a man and a woman translated into money (silver shekels) is different. For example, between the 20th and 60th year, the ratio was 50 to 30 (Leviticus 27:3-4). Making a vow to Yahweh: If a woman is married then it is the husband’s prerogative to divorce her (Numbers 30:9-13). The link provides further examples.

86. He tells his followers that his work on earth is done and he is ascending to heaven. When he said it, he was lifted up before their eyes and taken in by a cloud so that they no longer saw him. Is heaven above us or did Jesus leave in a UFO?

87. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term describing the uneasy tension that arises when absorbing facts or concepts that are at odds with one’s own beliefs or opinions, or at behaviour that is contrary to one’s convictions. This feeling of discomfort leads one to reconsider one or more opinions or attitudes unconsciously to bring them more in line with each other, to make them compatible. Usually, others notice such a change in opinion or attitude sooner than the person himself does. Does this apply to the steadfastness of a religious belief? Even when there are sufficient arguments to prove the opposite?

88. In several passages, Jesus says people must give away their property and live in poverty. Why don’t Christians do so? Does religion then become a question of suffering deprivations, and is this asking too much?

89. Is it desirable to raise children religiously? And to do so seven days a week for many years? What is the difference from the indoctrination the communists considered for bending people to the ideas of the Party?

90. Does it benefit society when children are pressed into all kinds of separate schools? Each denomination can establish its own schools where children are isolated and only hear what their particular church considers to be important.

91. Where in the Bible is hell mentioned? In Judaism the “Gehinnom” (Hebrew: גהנום, Greek: Gehenna, γέεννα) is recognised. The name is derived from the Valley of Hinnom, which together with another valley surrounds the Old City of Jerusalem. It is a precursor to Olam Ha-Ba (the world to come, cf. heaven) where one stays only temporarily (a maximum of 12 months) and where one’s soul is cleansed of sin. This involves a spiritual purification: The devil and physical pain and suffering also don’t occur in Judaism (Wikipedia). Evangelicals also speak only of Gehenna and thus refer only to the Jewish concept, not hell.

92. Why is there so much reverence for church forefathers when they were anti-Semitic (Luther) or callous murderers (Calvin)? You regularly hear that they were filled with the “Holy Spirit”. Did the “Holy Spirit” break free of god?

93. In Matthew 27:51-53, the corpses of saints rose from their graves. These living zombies were seen by many. Decades later, not a single eyewitness took the trouble to give this due consideration. Where did the zombies go? Did they die a second time?

94. Lazarus was raised from the dead after a few days, an extraordinary event to which only one writer (John) gives any attention. Was this a conscious choice of the remaining writers or did they know nothing about it?

95. Is attempting to reconcile the trinity with the Bible into a dogma a futile excercise? Where are the relevant passages saying that there are three in one, a father, a son and a holy ghost (for Catholics, are there more still)? Can one still rightly speak of monotheism?

For the marathon runners, here are a few more. Originally, 95 questions/propositions were put forward to correspond with the 95 propositions against evolution or to correspond with those of Luther. The number has symbolic relevance and facilitates searching. It represents a starting point for the target audience.

96. Wandering a little through the bible shows it to consist of traditions handed down from the Bronze Age. In proportion to the earth’s entire history, it’s a mere lick of paint at the top of the Eiffel Tower. An atheist looks at the whole picture from a distance and assesses the questions easily with certainty: For him/her it’s no more than gross superstition. These answers smoothly point towards mythology. Why are believers so hotly intent to beat matters straight with a crooked stick?

97. Research has shown that prayer has no effect at all on patients. It may even have a negative effect as a by-product. Would it not therefore be wise to abandon prayer?

98. Hebrews 6:4-6 states: “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance;” Why do believers make such an effort to convince ex-believers when this passage makes it clear that it is pointless?

99. He was the channel between heaven and earth, between god and man. Descended from heaven, at his birth shepherds revered him and brought him fruit and firstlings of their herds. Later he ascended to heaven and the sun god set him upon a throne, his omnipotence having become divided. It was believed that someday he would return to raise the dead and to lead the world. This person was already known in Egypt three centuries BCE. This culture later spread rapidly to parts of Africa and Western Europe. We have this to thank for Christmas and Sundays. The cult also branched off into the Roman Empire, and was familiar with seven sacraments, including baptism, confirmation and communion. On Sunday the priest spoke holy words about bread and water. They believed in the soul’s immortality and the resurrection of flesh. Eventually this movement was prohibited by the Catholic emperors. There are notable parallels also with Asclepius, Heracles and Dionysus, and the aforesaid is the story of Mithras, not Jesus. Christians often insist on the independence of their stories, but where does this tale come from and why would an existing cult take over elements from an emerging religion, one that was even persecuted in its early stages? Is it not more likely that Christians simply borrowed stories that they knew already, including those where they only needed to change a name?

100. The greatest sinner or criminal can plead for mercy and forgiveness at the last moment and make it into heaven, for example the murderer on the cross. Thus Adolf Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot could get inside with the right timing. Yet the atheist who works hard his whole life for the benefit of others has no chance. Is your god a bit hypocritical and more absorbed in himself than with altruistic charity that doesn’t rest on faith?

101. The claim that Genesis must be seen as a metaphor still sounds far-fetched. Many Christians agree that evolution cannot be denied. Even the Catholic Church has confirmed it. This natural process where common descent plays a key role has meanwhile been proven. Even if the weight of evidence doesn’t convince some, there still remains an insurmountable problem. If the story of Adam and Eve is only symbolic, what then is left of Original Sin?

102. In Q. 37 an example of Jesus showing contradictory ideas concerning violence is given. Here follow three more examples whose reliability you should rate on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is unreliable and 10 is very reliable. Intermediate ratings can of course also be assigned.

Example 1: Jesus calls for swords when the time has come for his arrest, and at the moment he meets his captors he is suddenly fundamentally opposed to violence. A confrontation occurs and Peter hacks off Malchus’ ear, which Jesus heals before being taken captive. Peter runs after the abductors and soon begins a leisurely discussion about the capture. Imagine that you shoot a firearm during the arrest of a friend. How likely is it that as an assailant you’ll just be let off by pleading with the arresting officers? It is also strange that those who resisted Jesus’ arrest went free.

Example 2: Jesus makes a whip of rope and storms the temple courtyard. The guards do nothing. He beats all the merchants on the run and doesn’t allow anyone to escape the courtyard. The next day, Jesus still wanders casually around there. A comparison can be made with a similar one-man action done at Amsterdam’s Albert Cuyp market. How far will you get with a whip, probably against city police, guards and hundreds of merchants? And would you succeed in keeping it occupied until the next day? This doesn’t just concern the ideological question of a centuries-old tradition where it was necessary for people to come from far to obtain offerings.

Example 3: According to the gospels, Jesus was well known in Jerusalem, daily preaching there in public. Suddenly he is so unfamiliar that it is necessary for Judas to identify him (with a kiss) from among his followers. It would be the same as if Pim Fortuin puts up a poster in Rotterdam to ensure that an innocent person is arrested.

103. We must look at Paul’s Christological view, specifically why, as a genuine reformer, Jesus didn’t tackle any concrete practicalities. He didn’t repeat any pronouncements that Buddha had made so often to the point of monotony, and thus we have only a single declaration of “Stop the slavery.” There is nothing about women being equal to men with a few female disciples as living examples. Suppose the described person had said, “The people must choose their own leaders who must serve the people,” thereby presenting the basis of democracy. No nonsensical assertions about you having to give everything to the poor, which is impractical and just creates more poverty. Or just a little business sense such as each year you give 5% of your belongings to people who are less fortunate.

104. Do you find the above picture pleasing?

105. This question comes from a Jehovah’s Witnesses booklet in which it is proposed that the wise men who came from the east were astrologers (Matthew 2:1-2). This practice is forcefully condemned in the Bible (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Their question is (without answer): “Would God have led people who practise things He condemns to the newborn Jesus?”

106. Is eternal damnation not fairly callous with regard to humans who spend just a short while here on earth, and whose lives consist mostly of avoiding all the pitfalls that would undermine their faith?

107. Here are a few YEC questions (Young Earth Creationists, variously Great Flood supporters).

A. Fossils are usually found in well-sorted geological strata with more primitive sorts found lower down, and thus not as jumbled-up hotchpotch. How do creationists explain this?

B. How do you explain salt deposits between different layers?

C. As an aside, what was actually found recently as a result of research at the Black Sea?

D. Much is frequently said about a great flood(Great Flood Theory). Growth rings of some trees go back as far as 10,000 years but show no evidence of such a flood. Why not?

E. Deposition layers of snowfall (varves) go back some 50,000 years but here too you do not encounter this catastrophe. Why not?

F. In ancient cultures (e.g. Egypt) there is no trace of a deluge. The pyramids have never been submerged. Why is evidence lacking here?

G. Why do some varieties of whale have a pelvis and vestiges of hind legs? Young ones are born covered in hair and sometimes you see whiskers.

H. What is the purpose of piloerectile muscles (arrectores pilorum), vomeronasal organs and the apocrine glands around the anus?

I. Why don’t we see any isotopes occurring naturally on earth with a half-life below 16 million years?
Isotope | Half-life | Found naturally on earth
Vanadium-50 | 6,000,000,000,000,000 years | Yes
Neodymium-144 | 2,400,000,000,000,000 years | Yes
Hafnium-174 | 2,000,000,000,000,000 years | Yes
Platinum-192 | 1,000,000,000,000,000 years | Yes
Indium-115 | 600,000,000,000,000 years | Yes
Gadolinium-152 | 110,000,000,000,000 years | Yes
Tellurium-123 | 12,000,000,000,000 years | Yes
Platinum-190 | 690,000,000,000 years | Yes
Lanthanum-138 | 112,000,000,000 years | Yes
Samarium-147 | 106,000,000,000 years | Yes
Rubidium-87 | 48,800,000,000 years | Yes
Rhenium-187 | 43,000,000,000 years | Yes
Lutetium-176 | 35,000,000,000 years | Yes
Thorium-232 | 14,000,000,000 years | Yes
Uranium-238 | 4,470,000,000 years | Yes
Potassium-40 | 1,250,000,000 years | Yes
Uranium-235 | 704,000,000 years | Yes
Samarium-146 | 103,000,000 years | Yes
Curium-247 | 16,000,000 years | No
Lead-205 | 15,000,000 years | No
Hafnium-182 | 9,000,000 years | No
Palladium-107 | 7,000,000 years | No
Caesium-135 | 3,000,000 years | No
Technetium-97 | 3,000,000 years | No
Gadolinium-150 | 2,000,000 years | No
Zirconium-93 | 2,000,000 years | No
Technetium-98 | 2,000,000 years | No
Dysprosium-154 | 1,000,000 years | No

108. Why do creationists remain so contrary? At Talk.Origins, the replies to the 95 propositions against evolution were readily available. They can be read here. Is it a case of unbounded naïveté or foolishness?

109. Satan is often portrayed in Christian circles as a sly fox. Meanwhile, he has got enough time to read Revelation and sees billions of people entering his hell, the majority of the world’s population. What permits this crafty guy to capture such enormous numbers before the final battle? After some hard training, it would be child’s play to eliminate all those softies from heaven for good. Thus, is the outcome already determined?

110. There are many cranks here who believe in heaven and hell. From this belief they set upon their opponents with arguments that are supposed to convince these critics that they would be better off becoming believers. But let’s look more closely at just one aspect of those imaginary places, namely the temperature: Which one is hotter?

111. Joshua 23:1-14: After exterminating many races, a joyful report was received, forbidding mixed relations with the survivors. One’s own people always first. Such nationalism was in its full glory under Joshua’s leadership. What do you think of those politics? Do they agree with the apartheid regime as shown in South Africa?

112. Why do creationists try so hard to disprove evolution when the creationist theory cannot be explained scientifically on any of its points? Doesn’t this fall under the category of measuring with two different yardsticks, which is therefore intellectually dishonest?

113. Forty years to cross a piece of desert? The overland distance between Cairo and Jerusalem is 424 kilometres. In a car this takes five hours, an hour in a plane, and as a hiker doing an average distance of eight kilometres a day, it would take 53 days. It took the Israelites 40 years, i.e. over 14,600 days to walk that stretch, and thus the distance they covered each day was a few tens of metres. Did they walk in circles?

Invisible Idiot

2012-01-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

Fifty-eight years ago today, on January 7th 1954, IBM engineers at Georgetown university turned on the Georgetown-IBM experimental translator. Sixty-some-odd Russian phrases were translated into English to the delight of on looking government observers and journalists.

Since 1956 there has been a story, retold countless times, that someone began feeding data to the machine translator after everyone had left the room.

First they fed the idiom:

“Out of sight, out of mind”

into the machine, and asked it to produce a Russian translation. The resulting Russian translation was then fed into the machine for an English translation. The resulting English phrase was:

“Invisible Idiot”

The same treatment was then given to the phrase:

"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

The resulting phrase from its recursive translation was:

“The liquor is OK, but the meat is rotten!"

Off the Rails

2012-01-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

One hundred and fifty nine years ago today, on January 6th 1853, a passenger car broke loose from a train that had left Andover Massachusetts en route to Concord New Hampshire just minutes before. The car rolled down an embankment, and when it came to a stop there was one fatality. Benjamin “Bennie” Pierce (age 11) died as his parents (who had been traveling to attend a funeral of a family friend) watched. Two months later his father would be inaugurated to be the 14th president of the United States of America.

Bennie’s mother Jane would never recover from the tragic death of her third and only surviving child. For years she hid away in an upstairs room of the white house writing maudlin letters to Bennie. She would not appear in public at all until new-years-day 1855. Jane was rarely seen after that, and became known as “the shadow of the white house”. In 1856 she is credited with starting the happy tradition of having a white-house Christmas tree.

Christmas trees should be taken down by January 6th

Pierce is known as one of the least effective presidents of the United States. Of the 44 presidents Pierce has been ranked by some as 39th in effectiveness. The same group ranked his predecessor (Millard Fillmore) as 38th, and his successor (James Buchanan) as 40th.

Pierce was a languid anti-abolitionist and repeatedly admonished northern abolitionists to stop “encouraging ugly feelings”. Harriet Beecher Stowe referred to him as "the archtraitor.”.

Baptism Lessons

2012-01-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

Five hundred and eighty-five years ago today, at 3 in the afternoon on January 5th 1527, a 29-year-old Felix Manz was baptized to death, and not by accident. His last words were apparently "Into thy hands, O God, I commend my spirit."; which history would suggest was a popular last phrase for dying Protestants, especially Anabaptists, of which Felix was a founding member.

"Into thy hands, O God, I commend my spirit."

On march 7th of the previous year Zurich Protestants made adult baptism punishable by drowning. History suggests that they were purposefully ironic in their choice of punishment.

The Swiss executioners could, conceivably, have thrown Felix from a bridge. Zurich’s “vegetable bridge” had spanned the Limmat since the first century, but they chose to use a boat instead.

The crowd yelled encouragement to Felix as they rowed him out into the icy river:

“Stand firm and suffer for Jesus' sake”.

Felix was accompanied in the boat by a clergyman who attempted to elicit a purportedly life-saving confession from him. Felix would have none of it, and continued to “preach” to the crowd assembled on the shore.

In the crowd were his mother and brother. Felix’s mother had intimate knowledge of the workings of Zurich’s churches as a canon in one of Zurich’s three main Protestant churches had impregnated her with the bastard child who grew to become the doomed man in the boat. The very church where her impregnator worshiped, and potential site of her impregnation, overlooked the river her son was soon to drown in.

The Grossmünster or "great minster" is the heir to a commission for a church issued by Charlemagne himself, and a statue of the emperor with sword in hand adorns the church’s southern tower. The Grossmünster, however, was not opened for 400 years after the emperor died so the link is a tiny bit more fragile than the statue commemorating it.

Both Felix’s mother and brother also shouted encouragement at him while he was taken out into the river to die. What does a mother shout at her doomed son in the hopes of convincing him to die for the sake of baptizing adults?

“Go son, Show them how it’s done!!”

Felix’s hands were bound and pulled behind his knees and a pole was placed between them.

Coney Island Baby

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

One hundred and nine years ago today, on January 4 1903, an elephant named “Topsy” was purposefully electrocuted on New York’s Coney Island. Topsy had been sentenced to death for wildly killing three men in as many years. At least one of the men Topsy killed was an abusive trainer who fed the elephant lit cigarettes for laughs. The sentence was initially to be carried out by hanging, but more rational heads prevailed.

Thomas Edison, who lost a bid to electrify New York City with his direct current electricity (DC) had been flamboyantly demonstrating the dangers of alternating current electricity (AC) ever since. Edison had been puttering about killing stray dogs, cats, cattle, and horses for his demonstration purposes, and he jumped at the chance to take on something larger. Edison referred to his process of AC electrocution as being “Westinghoused” (after the main proponent of AC).

In 1890 Edison’s technician Harold Brown (Edison himself was an outspoken critic of capital punishment) made the first electric chair. When the state of New York first used the chair on August 9th 1890 for the execution of William Kemmler they had set the current at 100 volts. This had been sufficient to kill a horse the day before so there was general confidence in the arrangement. After 17 seconds the current was turned off and Dr. Edward Charles Spitzka pronounced Kemmler dead. A couple of minutes later some of the spectators noticed that Kemmler was still breathing; though painfully. The apparatus was quickly reset to deliver 2,000 volts. During the second try Kemmler caught fire and filled the room with such sickening fumes that several spectators vomited upon themselves.

Westinghouse commented that: “They would have done better using an axe.” This may have been a slightly ironic reference to Kemmler as he had been convicted of killing his common law wife Tillie Ziegler with a hatchet (on March 29th 1889).

In order to prevent the Kemmler problems with Topsy Edison had the 28-year-old elephant fed carrots laced with 490 grams of potassium cyanide before the electrocution. It only took a few seconds at 6,600 volts to dispatch Topsy. 1,500 people witnessed the spectacle, and many thousands more have seen the film Edison made of it.

It is interesting to note that Edison’s nemesis George Westinghouse had actually procured the rights to the offending AC technology from Nicolai Tesla. Tesla had worked in Edison’s lab. Edison is famously quoted as dismissing his technician’s ideas: “[Tesla's] ideas are splendid, but they are utterly impractical.”

Hot Love

2012-01-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

Fifty one years ago today, just before 9pm on January 3rd 1961, 27-year old John A. Byrnes began lifting a control rod out of the SL-1 reactor located about 60 miles west of Idaho Falls, Idaho. The procedure Byrnes was supposedly attempting was a re-connection of the control rod to an automated servo mechanism. This would require that Byrnes pull the 88-pound rod four inches out of the reactor core. Instead Byrnes pulled the rod twenty six inches out of the core.

The SL-1 reactor had been renamed the Argonne Low Power Reactor (ALPR) the first of many designed to provide electrical power for remote posts. Pulling the control rod more than 20 inches out of the core was the central operation in a unpublished scuttle procedure for the ALPR-type reactors. One operator explained it: “If we were at a radar station and the Russians came. We’d yank it out.”

Once the central control rod was removed the reactor went “prompt critical” causing much of the coolant water to explosively vaporize. The twenty-six-thousand-pound reactor vessel jumped over nine feet in the air. Parts shot off the vessel as the steam sought escape; one part impaled one of three men (26-year-old Richard C. Legg) in the containment chamber. Steam shot out scalding the remaining men. 22-year-old Richard Leroy McKinley would survive until 11pm.

Investigation into Byrnes’s motivation suggests a possible suicide-murder involving an affair with one of the other operators and perhaps his wife with one of the other operators.

The bodies of the men were measured at 500 R/hr. They were buried in Arlington National Cemetery using special lead-lined coffins, sealed in concrete, placed in metal vaults, and given another concrete cover for extra safety.

Vulcan

2012-01-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

One hundred and fifty two years ago today, on January 2nd 1860, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier announced to a meeting of the Académie des Sciences in Paris his discovery of the planet Vulcan. Vulcan orbited the sun at a distance of 21 million kilometers (inside the orbit of Mercury which is around 58 million kilometers). The period of revolution was 19 days and 17 hours, and the orbit was inclined to the ecliptic by 12 degrees and 10 minutes. Urbain was already famous for discovering Neptune in 1846; Vulcan was his second planet.

Urbain had predicted the presence of Vulcan due to anomalies in the perihelion precession of Mercury. Classical mechanics fails to account for 43 arcseconds per century of the precession. Urbain had carefully accounted for discrepancies in Uranus’s orbit to discover Neptune; he was convinced the same thing was happening with the larger discrepancies in Mercury’s orbit.

For years documented sightings of Vulcan passing over the disk of the sun confirmed its existence. After Urbain died in 1877 the number of sightings decreased.

In 1915, 38 years after Urbain's death, Albert Einstein used his theory of relativity to more accurately predict the perihelion precession of Mercury.

Oregon Eugenics

2012-01-01T00:31:00.000-07:00

Seventy Eight years ago today, on January 1st 1934, the German law entitled “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring” went into effect. Under it the Germans sterilized some 400,000 retarded, blind, deaf, and mentally diseased individuals. Most were sterilized by the time World War II really got up to full speed. When they ran out of clinically identifiable genetically diseased individuals the Nazis began sterilizing Afro-Germans.

During the Nuremberg trials there was a move to prosecute Nazis who took part in the sterilizations. The Nazis were able to successfully defend their actions by referring to virtually identical laws in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and (the country they suggested provided them with the inspiration) the United States of America.

The US forced sterilization eugenics campaigns may have begun in 1897, but they did not really take off until 1927 when they were legitimized by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell. The Supreme Court never ruled that compulsory sterilization was in-and-of-itself unconstitutional. In 1942, with Skinner v. Oklahoma, it ruled that compulsory sterilization of criminals was unconstitutional only if white collar criminals were excluded from the sterilization program.

After the Nuremberg trials connected the US sterilization laws to some of the same Nazis who helped run the death camps, support for compulsory sterilization in the US declined. The last compulsory sterilization in the US (under the eugenics laws) took place in Oregon in 1981. The Oregon Board of Eugenics, later renamed the Board of Social Protection, existed until 1983.

Lost Day in Paradise

2011-12-31T00:22:00.000-07:00

Seventeen years ago today, on December 31st 1994, almost 9,000 residents of the nation of Kiribati found themselves in January 1st 1995. For those people the date of December 31st 1994 would never exist.

This was not a natural phenomenon.

The nation of Kirabati consists of some 726 square kilometers of land spread out over 33 million square kilometers of ocean. Half the nation (including the uninhabited Starbuck Island) was on one half of the international data line, and the other half, including the capitol were west of the line. This was somewhat inconvenient, so the line was moved over from the 180th meridian to just east of the 150th meridian.

To put this into perspective New York City is just east of the 75th meridian, and Los Angeles is just east of the 120th meridian. The date-line was moved two thirds of the distance from LA to NYC, or roughly the distance from LA to Chicago.

Kirabati is one of the least developed nations in the world. Their easternmost island, formerly Caroline Island, became the first location to see the sun on January 1st 2000, and so was the first location headed into the new millennium. Caroline Island was re-named Millennium Island. Caroline Island is home to a large population of potentially endangered Coconut Crabs, and no people.

The residents of Kirabati face the consequences of another potentially important unnatural phenomenon. Since most of the islands are at sea level any significant rise in sea level would make them disappear entirely.

Happy Holodomor

2011-12-28T00:25:00.000-07:00

Seventy-nine years ago today, on December 28th 1932, Pavel Petrovich Postyshev called for the installation of New Year trees (Yolka; literally “spruce”) in schools, children's homes, Young Pioneer Palaces, children's clubs, children's theaters and cinemas. The New Year Tree should not be confused with the Christmas tree left up till New Years (or if an artificial tree till Midsummer’s Eve); though they are both similarly decorated. The Yolka had been banned since 1916; first by the Ukrainian Synod because it was seen as German (the enemy in WWI), then by the Russian SFSR because it was “bourgeois and religious”. Resurrecting the tradition invigorated a resurgence of New Years Day celebrations across the USSR. It was party time, and people thought this was a “good thing”.

Pavel was not your typical early 20th century Martha Stewart. Five years before his Yolka letter Pavel had been secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) in Moscow where he was in charge of propaganda. I think he kept a little of the propaganda flair when he moved to the Ukraine (he would eventually head the Kyiv Oblast) because in 1932 fancy new media items began popping up there.

The first were a series of Agitprop films which depicted peasants as counterrevolutionaries hiding grain and potatoes at the time when workers, who were constructing the “bright future” of socialism, were starving. At the same time (late 1932) Pavel had State police and party brigades scouring the Ukrainian countryside collecting up anything that looked like food. The name Agitprop came from “Department for Agitation and Propaganda”, which was part of the Central and regional committees of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The department was later renamed Ideological Department. People in the Ukraine began to go hungry. In January 1933 Ukraine's borders were sealed in order to prevent Ukrainian peasant from fleeing to other republics. 190,000 people were forcibly stopped at the border.

The depictions of Ukrainian peasants as counterrevolutionaries was not just the product of good character development as Stalin was convinced that the Ukraine was a hotbed of "nationalist deviation". Stalin wanted Pavel to clean this out. Pavel started out strong by ousting 100,000 people from the Ukrainian communist party in his first year there(he would oust another 168,000 by 1938). In order to weaken any popular support for this huge number of defrocked communists Pavel hatched a plan to thin out the Ukrainian population. Eventually the implementation of that plan would be called the Holodomor.

In 1933 the soviets began putting up catchy propaganda posters which read “To eat your own children is a barbarian act”. Over 2,500 people would be convicted of cannibalism during the Holodomor.

From 1937 on a marvelous New Year Tree was erected at the Moscow Palace of Unions. An invitation to the Yolka at the Palace of Unions became a great honor for Soviet children.

Techno Hippies

2011-12-27T22:59:00.000-07:00

Nine years ago today, on December 27thy 2002, the lovely Brigitte Boisselier (a Raëlian bishop and CEO of Clonaid) called a press conference in Hollywood Florida. She had died her usually platinum blond hair a light red for the press. The purpose of the conference was to announce that Clonaid had just successfully cloned the first human baby. The baby had been named Eve.

In March of 2001 Clonaid had announced that a woman would become pregnant with a cloned fetus in April, then the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations raided Clonaid's lab in Nitro, West Virginia. Shortly after the Announcement of the birth in December Korean prosecutors raided the offices of BioFusion Tech; Clonaid's Korean branch. Legislators began climbing overtop one another to outdo the severity of the other’s anti-cloning laws. Some began calling for Eve to be removed from her mother and placed with special guardians. Compliance agencies made it clear that they would be exploring the information Clonaid released for any illegality that might exist. It should have come as no surprise that Clonaid released no additional information; even refusing to identify the mother.

The Raëlian’s that Brigitte was a bishop of are often described as a UFO cult. They were interested in cloning because they saw it as a first step in human immortality. This idea is not inconsistent with their view that extraterrestrials called the Elohim created life on earth as a scientific experiment. From time to time the Elohim have returned to earth to guide the experiment. Most people know these extraterrestrial guiders by names like “Jesus” or “Buddha”.

The Raëlians are officially active on social issues. They support the use of GMO foods, as well as topless rights for women, and they are strongly anti-war.

If the cloning ever hits full output we might be overrun with lovely GMO-corn fed topless techno-hippies. Too bad the world is going to end so soon.

Christmas Leftovers

2011-12-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

One hundred and sixty five years ago today, on December 26th 1846, a pioneer named Patrick Dolan stripped off his clothes and danced around naked in some fresh Sierra Nevada snow. After running through the woods for an undocumented length of time he returned to his friends’ party and died. His friends were hungry so they ate him. In this way the most famous story of Christmas leftovers in the American Westbecame legend.

Prelude to Civil War

2011-12-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

One hundred and eighty-five years ago today, sometime after 10 pm on the Christmas Eve 1826, a group of nine cadets began drinking whiskey-laced eggnog in room 28 of the West Point United States Military Academy’s North Barracks. Before long the party expanded to room 5, and the two gallons of whiskey smuggled into the Academy were gone. Some of the cadets immediately left to procure more whiskey; a trip which would prove successful.

Dozens of drunken cadets on a campus where possession of alcohol could lead to expulsion eventually drew attention; even on Christmas Eve. At around 3am Christmas morning the superintendent of the North Barracks interrupted at least eight cadets in room 5 loudly singing, and very drunk. One of them was named Jefferson Davis.

Attempts to silence the Christmas party eventually sparked a small riot, which was fueled by the timely arrival of the third gallon of whiskey. Twenty people would be court-marshaled, but Jefferson Davis was not amongst them.

Thirty four years and a few months after the eggnog riots Davis would come to the forefront of another uprising against the US. On February 1st 1861 Jefferson Davis would be named president of the then month-old Confederate States of America.

Neo Feudalism

2011-11-01T01:00:00.000-06:00

So…This blog has been up for about two years. I have subjected you to a couple hundred posts; some way too long for a blog. In that time I’ve also gotten a couple hundred comments; though almost half were from one delusional Serbian. My tracking scripts show that the blog has garnered around 25,000 hits. Some people have spent hours reading over the content I’ve written up.

Mostly this blog has been evidence that I’ve got something to say, and I can say it. I cannot emphasize enough how the idea of an audience has shaped my message of love and humanity that I type into a void of electrons. Sure I’ve gotten a lot of personal flac and support from those who know how to contact me directly, but those are from people who have every invitation to exploit their treasured position in my life. Most of you have read this in spite of who you might be to me, and I should take the time to let you know that you are precious to me also.

Why this outpouring of gratitude? It does not mean that I’ve discovered where you live and have been stalking you. I will not show up at your work with a mangy puppy and a look of threadbare delirium pleading to borrow your used socks. A cup of coffee would be nice, but only for your company. I digress.

I have been struck by changes in the US political and economic system. It was not the OWS movement that initiated my concern, but it got me to thinking about doing something about it.

I’m thinking about lending my squeaky little voice to the idea of re-instituting progressive taxation and instituting universal healthcare in the US. This blog would suffer.

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." -- Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2 William Shakespeare

I do so like writing love notes to the wind; knowing there is no invisible deity to intercept them, and prevent them for getting to you.

Whoever you are.

Flat Earth Darwinist

2011-10-30T01:44:00.000-06:00

I am a lucky enough person to be able to run during my brief lunchtime at work. I enjoy more than simply the luck that comes from realizing the grace of a tolerant work environment. When I run I escape into a wilderness where the curvature of the earth can be seen over dry land. Buildings, and for that matter anything manmade, refuse to contaminate the horizon. I can see forever, and then the world simply ends. If I were inclined to be a flatlander the scenery through which I run could be used as stark proof for my beliefs.

I am not inclined to believe the earth is flat. It is true that before I escaped puberty the first grainy images of the earth from space were popularly displayed. It is true that many hundreds of years before I was born the idea of a flat earth had already been largely discredited. Maps and globes that proudly displayed a spherical (or pretty darn close to spherical) earth were the standard means of representing our planet for a very long time before I ever saw one. Yet, if we go back in time far enough, we will find people who honestly believe that the earth is flat. How can this be?

When I look out to the edge of the earth I know there is something beyond it. When I look out to the edge of the earth I also realize that it is just not all that far away. When I put the farthest thing I can see in reference with something, like a mountain or a big rock, I realize that the earth disappears at a distance I could walk to in a day. It would be a really long walk, but the distance is easily grasped. When I try to think of the distance between earth and Alpha Centauri I become dizzy from the use of unimaginable orders of magnitude. When I try to think of the horizon I am ticked with the idea that a good marathon runner could span that distance in a few hours, and that even I could run it in just a couple hours longer than that.

The Marathon derives its name from a historic battle fought in the summer of 490 BCE. Around that time there were supposedly large numbers of people who thought that the earth was flat. Not only did Pheidippides run farther than the edge of the world, but the battle of Marathon itself was against an enemy who had traveled in ships from a distance many times greater than the distance to the edge of the world. If the ancient folks really believed that the earth was flat then the whole “falling off the edge of the world” element was probably not so important. There must have been some set of explanations for why the horizon existed which were sufficiently untestable that they filled the need for explanation. The edge of the visible world could be explained away as an annoying phenomenon; deal with it and move on.

The reason we can be so easily convinced that someone like Pheidippides thought he was running on a flat earth is that we can easily see how a flat earth theory works. When we build, conceive of distances, or do most any mundane manipulation of geospacial coordinates we can treat the earth as flat with impunity. Most of our lives can be productively spent treating the worlds topography as an “I don’t care”. Though modern civilization has created many thousands of activities that require the realization of a spherical earth most people would be unaffected if they were forced to believe that the earth was flat. How could you force them to believe such nonsense? How about threatening them with something nasty…like eternal damnation? Just get someone to write a book, or pretend to discover some hidden plates which have the flat earth gospels on them.

You may think I am being mean spirited in suggestion of even imagining pulling off such a whimsical intellectual falsehood. What good would it do? Hmmm…let me think about that one.

Isolating a large group of productive individuals on the basis of self-limited understanding of the universe might produce a useful well-defined cadre of like minded individuals. Here you would have a cluster created by mutually supported gullibility. What else would they believe? What lengths would they be willing to go to in order to protect the underpinnings of their mutually held delusions? The flat earth gospel would be an effective screen for ideas that might disrupt the cluster. Belief that the earth was round would be a good indicator of the potential presence of other contaminating ideas. Converts? Converts are great! If you can really be convinced that the earth is flat you should be able to be convinced of anything!

I think that the potential use of flat earth ideology is too damaged by centuries of contaminating thought to be of much use. It would be better to find a gentler, softer, less invasive concept to use as a ideological filter. Racism and nationalism have been used to great effect, but by design they are limited in their scope. A scientific concept would be best. One that has only been around for a few hundred years at most would be ideal. The concept should have little impact on most of the population if it is abandoned, but should be sufficiently well known that people can actively discredit it.

I know just the one:

The theory of Natural Selection (i.e. Evolution)

Placebo Effect

2011-10-28T01:24:00.000-06:00

The use of placebos in the clinical treatment of disease conditions would appear to be a no-brainer. Since the pioneering work of Henry Knowles Beecher, and his defining paper of 1955, the placebo has been a concept of great note. The placebo (Latin: "I shall please") effect is the production of a measurable response to a medical intervention which has no physically therapeutic elements. The placebo effect has been observed with drugs (sugar pills), surgeries (sham interventions), and psychotherapy (lies). The unifying feature of placebos is the misinformation given to the patient; they are told they are receiving competent medical intervention when they are not.

The idea of lying to patients in order to improve the prognosis of their treatment raises all sorts of moral questions. There is a lot of literature discussing these moral dilemmas; this entry is not part of that discourse. I try to avoid writing about morality except in cases where I want to. However, one can imagine how a potentially powerful positive effector that just happens to be a great excuse to lie gathers more support than a simple treatment that does not encourage untruth. Some of that collection of untruth concerns claims of the effectiveness of placebo treatments.

The idea of a strong placebo effect has survived for decades with only sporadic targeted examination. Placebos are typically used as negative controls in medical tests; there are rarely placebo negative controls. The placebo effect is usually examined relative to a generalized out-of-test population. Over the past decade the placebo effect has been more carefully examined. The results are interesting.

1) Placebos do not cure cancer or set broken legs.
2) They are generally ineffective in situations where a clear binary (either cured or not cured) outcome is clearly defined.
3) They are good pain relievers, causing an almost 7% decrease in perceived pain.
4) They only work against pain in 35%-40% of most populations.
5) They are wildly effective in some people.
6) They are effective anti-depressants.
7) They are much better than no treatment for many psychological illnesses.

These data suggest that claims of disappearing kidney stones and vanishing brain tumors are no more common after lying to a patient than giving them the straight dope. On the other hand the severity of the pain caused by passing the kidney stone can be reduced with lies.

The conditions most demonstratively affected by placebo use are those with a neurologic component. That the brain can change itself is a repeating motif of this blog.

The questions of how the benefits of a placebo effect can be more robustly applied to susceptible conditions is worthy of more intense examination.

Big Rod's Taco Time

2011-10-26T01:00:00.000-06:00

I was recently part of a conversation where someone was choosing a name for a yet-to-be-born baby. They were sure (without any evidence) that the future baby would be a boy. Certain attributes of the pregnancy were interpreted as clues to the baby’s gender. Apparently some relatives were interpreting the same clues as indicating that the baby would be a girl. I mistakenly thought that the disagreement over the gender of the child (due just as winter imagines itself in 2011) was good natured fun. Gender assignment is apparently serious business for some folks. I should issue a general warning to be careful in all matters concerning the gender of a yet-to-be-born fetus.

I should also state that the statement: “Why don’t you name him Richard because everyone will be calling him Dick” may not be well received.

This sensitive minefield of interpretation lies in the frequently irritating landscape of cultural sensitivity. The misinterpreted borders of this undiscoverable country lie where languages assign different meaning to similar phonemes. In Norway the term “Sakte Fart” refers to slowing down, and has nothing to do with inhaling flatulence.

Names often create the most difficulty. I knew a young lady who spelled her first name “Bich”. She insisted that it be pronounced “Bick”, and we often complied with her wishes. I found a coffee mug imported from China with the slogan “Shut up Bich” printed on it. I think the coffee mug’s slogan was misspellt.

A former acquaintance had a roommate named “Yu Suc” who pronounced his full name as: “You Suck”.

These, of course, are simply disconnects of sound and meaning. These are examples of actual cultural difference. These can easily be humorous should attitude rise to the occasion. The most sensitive areas of culture do not hide behind veils of noise.

Cultures are made of people, and many people will defend their inclination to ignorance with great force.

Near my house is a fast-food restaurant called “Big Rod’s Taco Time”. Here is a snapshot of its street sign:

Once, while driving by this establishment in a vanpool peopled with three Mormon bishops (one former) I asked: "So if you saw a film called 'Big Rod's Taco Time' what do you think it would be rated?"

The question -which I thought was a clever joke- was met with blank stares. Should I try and explain or should I just let it go? Which would be more amusing?

"Do you think such a movie would be shown as a double feature with the lion king?" I asked.

"Sure" one of the bishops replied "Why not?"

This was not getting anywhere "OK if one of the lion king characters were to have the nickname 'Big Rod' would it be the warthog or the meercat?"

"That doesn't make sense" replied the one bishop whose attention I still barely had "None of them were named Rodney, and Rod is a nickname for Rodney"

"Did any of you go to the stake party at the farm?" the last bishop whose attention was now lost to me asked the others "That piglet put down a real steamer. I thought someone was going to step in it. I watched for 15 minutes, and people came close, but nobody stepped in it"

"Yeah, I think I saw that doodie" replied another bishop "It looked like it was a person's"

"My Brittany [which is breed of dog] made a pile out front of the church last week" The former bishop looked up from his iPhone and chimed in "I'm was sure from the smell that someone tracked it in."

They went on till the van-ride was over about poop smells, people stepping in poop, what poop looked like, and more things "poopy" than I was prepared to imagine. I was stunned. Here I had shyly tread out a phallic innuendo joke and found myself drowning in scatology.

The squeals of laughter and wild eyed enjoyment of the bishops made me nervous. I could not keep up with the rapid-fire use of anything but the word s**t to describe poop. I was a pre-teen once so I've got an extensive scatological vocabulary, but I found myself confused in the presence of these practiced masters. When one of them responded to a loving description of a pizza-generated-canine 'number two' only to be asked if they had ever seen a pizza 'number three' I was lost. What is a 'number three' anyway. I was afraid to ask. What if there were fractional equivalents and a scratch-and-sniff training set to tech the intricate spectrum of deification to children? I did not want multimedia poop props pulled out in an enclosed van.

It just goes to show that it is dangerous stepping into the minefield of human communication. You never know what you will step in.

Blue Jello

2011-10-24T01:09:00.000-06:00

So, I get hit with the anger issue again. This time I was talking with someone who assumed I was a Mormon. This assumption stems from the fact that I don’t drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and religiously avoid the ingestion of any psychoactive materials. There are people (who might be called pissants) who point out that caffeine is a powerful psychoactive chemical, and I ingest lots of coffee and the like. There is usually not coffee at events where I might be confused as a Mormon so that lack of purity was not immediately obvious.

There is a type of conversation where two Mormons will test each other’s status by listing their vices. When I am being honest in such a conversation it can appear like I am touting the robustness of my mormoness. Usually the conversation segues into a listing of church duties and it becomes obvious that I am not LDS.

When I make statements like: “I don’t do anything for the church, in fact I don’t even attend, because I am not LDS, and I have no intention of ever becoming LDS” the statements are carefully dissected by the LDS listener who sometimes gleans a hint at the possibility that I am not Mormon.

If they get the hint they usually ask: “So you are NOT LDS?”.

“No” I say “I am not LDS”.

Then, and they always do this, they say: “That’s OK”.

I often find myself wanting to retort with: “I think so too”, and sometimes I do.

Occasionally the Mormon conversant is less than pure in his (invariably a white male) mormonhood. When they admit to “tasting a few beers on the weekends” the conversation shifts from further delving into our mutual purity reports into other matters. Often the matters are political. I once got a detailed description of the nuts-n-bolts of the Lewinsky-Clinton affair; I should have resisted my urge to ask if he had bought his wife a blue dress. On the occasion that precipitated this blog entry the conversation shifted to atheists; I successfully resisted the urge to proclaim that I was an “Adult Onset Atheist”.

“What about that Richard Dawkins fellow, he is so mean and angry” said the pasty middle-aged man who thought I was a mormon.

“Dick?” I replied.

“HaHa good one, yeah these atheists just hate everything good in the world” he chuckled back.

“I hate it when that happens…” I said “But I always pictured Dawkins as a soft spoken English person with an agreeable somewhat pithy disposition. I don’t think I would like to have him on my dissertation committee, but can’t really say why without giving the idea more attention than it deserves. Why do you think him so angry and mean?”

“I know he appears nice and well mannered” he replied.

I found myself thinking “He seems some way, but you have inside information to the contrary?" You, who have been talking to me one-on-one for ten minutes and still think I am a tithing member of the LDS church? OK, bring it on.

“He is just hiding his extreme anger, sometimes it even comes out in what he says” He continued.

“What did he say that you found particularly angry or mean?” I asked; thinking at the same time that it would not be very hard to tease angry mean and lowbrow comments from me out of this blog.

“I can’t think of any” he said “but he is always saying such mean things”

It was time to end the conversation about unidentified ephemeral somethings that conclusively proved poorly-defined evilness in somebody I’ve never met.

“Have you seen the deserts?” I asked “I hope they have some Blue Jello; It is my favorite!”

“Blue Jello?” he replied “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Blue Jello. Are you sure they make Blue Jello?”

“Yes, Its my favorite. I’ll have to go pop into the kitchen and check” I replied while edging away “The Blue Jello…is…y’know….Blue”

Herding Cats

2011-10-22T01:04:00.002-06:00

Herding cats is difficult on a good day. Problems arise due to the disconnect between a person’s desire to communicate and have their needs understood, and the cat’s utter ambivalence to the very existence of the human. Because of the complexity of the human emotional mix it is often easier to experience emotional validation from a pet cat than to get it to travel as a member of a pack towards a waiting cat trailer.

Perhaps it is the loneliness of the open prairie or the confined cat-smell of the great feline holding pens of the Midwest, but men’s minds wander while out herding cats. The concepts of personal validation get mixed with more tangible expressions of understanding. Did kitty refuse the tinned catfood because she dislikes tuna-seafood offal surprise, or is my sofa throw too frayed? Cat herders begin to imagine feeling and reason behind the spindle-shaped cat pupil. Die-hard cat herders blur the line between manipulating the behavior of cats and their own moral condition.

“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly committed themselves to herding cats. Those who do not are people who cannot or will not completely focus themselves on the task of cat herding, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing the deep understanding of cats which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them can herd cats if they have the capacity to be honest.” – Manual of Cat Herding 1st edition

The inability of most cats to follow direction is immediately obvious to those who work amongst them. Over 10,000 people go to the emergency room every year due to cat-related injuries; most of these are caused by tripping over the cat. Do cats trip humans on purpose? Some believe so, but how can one tell?

There are two cats that live in my house. By repeating my mistake of regularly feeding them I prevent them from running away. That is where the control ends. Every morning I shuffle out to the kitchen in the pre-dawn dark; every few months the household is awoken by a terrifying squeal. If the cats are attempting to channel my activity they are doing using what appears to be an unacceptably dangerous method. I think it more likely that the cats are acting out independent of the possibility that they might be irreparably stepped upon.

It is easy to convince oneself that there is comprehension in the activities of many things in our lives. The best measure we have for how comprehension works is our own mind. This leads to false conclusions.

On October 22nd 1901 Annie Edson Taylor put her cat in a barrel, and threw it over Niagara Falls. It took a while to retrieve the barrel, but the cat was generally unharmed. Annie decided it would be safe to go over Niagara Falls herself; in the same barrel. Unfortunately for Annie the sounds of impending death coupled with the erratic movement of the plummeting barrel took hold of her sanity. In short it scared the bezeebus out of her.

“If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat... I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Fall.” -- Annie Taylor, shortly after being removed from her barrel

Annie, despite making a living as a clairvoyant in her later years, was unable to see terror in her cat’s eyes. She made the mistake of thinking that her trip would prove as inconsequential as her cat’s.

Friday's Underwear

2011-10-19T13:48:00.000-06:00

I’ve been told that there is going to be a rapture again this Friday. The information I’ve gotten is mixed on whether one will be raptured with clothing on:

Or if one’s clothing will be “left behind”. Whatever your heavenly wardrobe might be it is never a bad time to do a load of laundry, and remember to wear clean underwear on Friday.

Might Be Awesome

2011-10-18T19:56:00.000-06:00

The last time someone said “if things had been different they would not have been the same” to me it was about a sports event. It was said with a look of serious contemplation about the latest University of Utah vs. BYU football game. The game is called the “holy war” because BYU is owned and operated by the Mormon Church and the University of Utah represents the rest of secular America to the largely Mormon residents of Utah. Utah beat BYU 54-10, and this was cause for some serious consideration. Somehow spectator sports justify the most blatantly foolish statements.

I have, in all seriousness, made the statement: “if things had been different they would not have been the same”, and it was not about a sporting event. I made the statement in reference to one of the seminal events in the formation of science as a philosophical discipline. To clarify I need to backtrack a tad; back to some unspecific year around 1590.

"Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science" -- Stephen Hawking,

Galileo Galilei had just gotten an appointment to chair of Mathematics in Pisa, and was performing his experiments on acceleration due to gravity by dropping baseballs off the leaning tower of Pisa. He dropped the balls from each floor, and then plotted the velocity. This is what he saw:

Galileo did this with bowling balls, and golf balls, and they all had exactly the same curve. This proved that Aristotle was wrong. Aristotle was (perhaps incorrectly) quoted as saying that objects accelerated to a constant velocity that was proportional to their weight. They did this because they wanted to be closer to objects of their same type, and apparently there was a limit to the effective acceleration of their desire.

We are accustomed to the notion that years add knowledge to the collective social “knowing”. Just think of the idea of zero. For thousands of years mankind could count, but apparently did not know what zero was.

There must have been word problems on ancient arithmetic tests like this:

Ezekiel has seven scrolls in his basket. He gives five scrolls to Mathew, and two scrolls to John. How many Scrolls does Ezekiel have left? Well I don’t know either; it’s magic!

Perhaps Ezekiel’s apparently empty basket was full of the desire for more scrolls. Perhaps it was the same palpable desire that Aristotle knew held him to the earth. The ancient world must have been a much more passionate place for its great thinkers to see desire in all things.

Many of you know that the story of Galileo dropping assorted sports balls off the leaning tower of Pisa is apocryphal. Not only were the sports I suggested he pilfered equipment from not invented till many years later, but he had no reliable mechanism for measuring the large velocities generated by free-fall. Instead he used some “spheres” and inclined planes.

Worse yet is the fact that if he had been able to conduct the Pisa experiments as described he would have gotten very different results. A baseball dropped from a height at sea-level air density reaches a terminal velocity of 80.4 ft/sec at about 100 feet of fall. The terminal velocity is where the friction of the air equals the acceleration due to gravity, and the falling baseball just can’t go any faster. Instead of the previous graph Galileo would have seen this:

What is worse is that the denser bowling ball would have a greater terminal velocity. Galileo would have proven experimentally that Aristotle was correct. Instead of forces and vectors science would be speaking the language of desire and love.

More specifically I should have said:

“If things were more amazing then they might be awesome”

Sounds much more reasonable.

What's this NOMA for anyway?

2011-10-14T01:00:00.000-06:00

There is nothing that can be obtained through deity worship which cannot be accumulated faster and more efficiently without it.

One of the major problems with the practice of deity worship is that it halts, or at least seriously impededs, many types of forward progress. Technological progress has been, at least for the last couple of centuries, one of the least impeded; progress in the disciplines often lumped together as “the Humanities” are the most. With recent trends in anti-intellectual, and especially anti-science, rhetoric in the USA it might appear that I’ve gotten it backwards. Let me take a couple of minutes from you to explain.

Many of the attacks on science are attacks on “basic science”. Although all technological progress can be attributed to basic science we are still making significant technological advances based on very old basic science. In order for basic science to become a rate-limiting step in technological advancement it would be necessary to first establish a several-millennium Nuevo-dark age. Applied scientists and engineers are the true drivers of technological progress. Applied science is far enough removed from the philosophical musings of basic science to protect it from most attacks. Attacks on engineers and applied scientists are usually personal, or based on the basic science they support.

The fact that we are still making major technological advances using the basic science of Isaac Newton (1643-1727) is strong testament to the fact that the basic science we already know still has a lot of useful advancement left in it.

It may appear that some embattled basic science is needed to form a comprehensive picture without which applied science is incoherent and impotent. The concepts collectively known as evolution (1865) immediately come to mind. There are two reasons, besides the fact that I can accurately describe myself as an evolutionary biologist, that evolution so quickly comes to mind. The fist is that the attacks on evolution have generated a false controversy surrounding it. Since it is so often being spoken of it is on the tip of the pointy mind of mine that it comes to. The other is that modern medicine operates using well-worn comparative understandings of structure and function; the relationship of the structures is organized through our understanding of their development through the evolution of species. Modern Medicine is a major grouping of positive technological advancements.

How would we maintain our comprehensive picture of life that facilitates modern medicine without the basic science of evolution? We would use magic of course! Things just are the way they are as the result of the unknowable and apparently capricious motivations of a creator. Similarities are just part of the divine mystery.

It is interesting to note that “Intelligent Design (ID)” creationists have recently created a dogma-approved subclassification of evolution called “Micro-Evolution”. Micro-Evolution (MiE) describes the adaptation of strains of fast reproducing organisms, like bacteria, to selective pressures. Since the adaptation of bacterial strains (like enterococci) to selective pressures (like antibiotics) result in many thousands of deaths worldwide it is significantly disadvantageous to force ignorance of the phenomenon. When the applied technological importance of even the most embattled of basic sciences becomes undeniable the useful bits can be extracted for assimilated.

I’ve often thought that a well-educated ID’er could devise an effective alternative hypothesis to MiE. Mixing uncomfortable definitions of bacterial species with elements of synergy and horizontal gene transfer one could develop a Gaia-like localized response hypothesis. If talk of evolution becomes illegal I will author such a hypothesis using a rude-sounding pseudonym.

Technology can progress with torturously mutilated basic science, but the humanities cannot.

I have been quoted (even in this very blog) as admiring the artistic and moral accomplishments of religious society. Even basic science has experienced tremendous advances within rigorously religious structure. Isaac Newton, for instance, was a fringe-idealed religious nutter, yet he created concepts in mathematics and physics of unparalleled importance. These great accomplishments are independent of religiosity.

For centuries accomplishments by the non-religious were severely restricted as non-religiosity was illegal. If something was to be accomplished it would be by a religious person; if it was to be a highly regarded accomplishment it would most likely have to come from a highly religious person. Only after the rise of secular movements did the religiosity of the accomplisher have any possible affect on the genesis of the accomplishment.

Science appears to many to involve only non-religious things:

"A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

- Albert Einstein

"Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but both look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect."

- Freeman Dyson

"Science makes major contributions to minor needs. Religion, however small its successes, is at least at work on the things that matter most."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

The humanities, however, have long been the undisputed domain of religion. But what progress has been made in creating a more humane society except where religious views have been re-forged, or at least tempered, by secularism? It is a compelling observation that: as religions abandon religiosity they accomplish more of that which they supposedly do best.

I might strongly disagree with the assertion that compulsion by a powerful deity is an effective tool for achieving social morality, but even if it is effective; is it the only tool? If we appreciate the sentiment in the biblical commandment 8 (“thou Shall Not Steal” Ex 20:2-17, Deu 5:6-21) haven’t we accomplished most of what we have accomplished for personal property rights by devising ways of protecting them, and prosecuting civil laws curtailing theft?

The essence of religion has been compared to poetry and art:

“Religion is poetry plus, not science minus." -- Krister Stendahl

"Religion is the art of the poetic. Science is the art of the provable. Politics is the art of the possible." -- Paul H. Carr

Compare the languid verses of the twelfth century with Ginsberg or Corso. Compare the cartoonish medieval iconography with even such mundane works as the mass-pulp Japanese mangas. You will not see an essence in the earlier works that services any purpose greater than being a seed that the later works developed from.

Great works may be possible based simply on creative answers to the question: “What does the deity think about this?”. A still greater body of work is possible from answers to the question “what does the human mind think of this?”. The human mind is shaped by the inputs it perceives, and especially those inputs in which it perceives artistic design. By making art for people we change them, and change the type of art that has the most impact on them. Culture can therefore “progress” faster.

Even if we have not exhaustively realized the potential of religiously-motivated humanities we have certainly demonstrated that it will take increasingly unacceptable amounts of time to get the last good bits out.

Sunscreen and Love

2011-10-12T05:15:00.000-06:00

Since yesterday was “National Coming out day” I think today should be “National closet organizer day”. Everyone in the US can ceremoniously tidy up their closets. We can pull out our warm jackets from storage, and question once again if we will ever really wear those shoes. You know the shoes I’m talking about. Perhaps we can donate them to a good charity. Then we can imagine someone unknowingly “walking a mile in them”. It is advisable to have a notebook handy while cleaning out one’s closet in order to jot down any stray metaphors one can identify out of the clutter.

In Salt Lake City yesterday a few hundred folks dressed in pink shirts and gathered together for a group hug. I learned about the gathering late last night (early this morning?) via a large picture on the Salt Lake Tribune’s website. The idea was to form a human pink dot to show support for LGBT folks who are considering coming out of the closet. I would have loved to have been in that crowd. I even have a pink T-shirt I obtained as the result of an unfortunate laundry incident.

The kids were in school, and I never get invited to these types of things by myself. As a pasty middle-aged man I am the image of the type of person who locks people into closets –both literal and metaphorical- and keeps them there for his pleasure. I would think the celebration of coming out of a closet would be severely dulled if coming out simply meant changing closets.

Pink Dot

Sometimes it is difficult for people to “come out” about what they feel about themselves. A young (25 year-old) woman in Hildale Utah “came out” of her polygamist relationship with Warren Jeffs yesterday. She ran away to a neighbor’s house (the neighbor just happened to be the self-proclaimed leader of a rival polygamist sect) with little more than the clothes on her back. The FLDS men surrounded the house, and the resulting standoff went on for some time. Eventually the Sheriff and deputies showed up and transported the young woman to safety. She should be welcomed out of her closet too.

I think “National Coming Out Day” should be extended to embrace almost anyone leaving a metaphorical closet. I can imagine a world where the act of declaring one’s sexual preference is less controversial than declaring ones political party, and not because of an extreme inflammation of the already too violent partisan rhetoric. I can imagine a time when the question of what type of person someone might be interested in is less important than the question of whether they are interested in me; for me that time is now.

“Come out into the sun, we’ve got sunscreen and love”

Unfortunately one of the things we remember on “National Coming Out Day” (October 11th) is the last day 21-year-old Matthew Sheppard lived. He died on October 12th 1998 after a week-long battle to survive injuries he incurred while being tortured on October 6th. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson convinced Matthew that they were gay so he would accept their “ride home”. When they were done torturing Mathew they tied his body to a fence to serve as crow-food. When they found him 18 hours later (a passing cyclist thought he was an interesting scarecrow until he looked closer) his face was covered in blood except for two thin tracks where his tears had washed his face clean. Matthew never recovered from his coma.

It is somewhat insensitive of me to dilute the denunciation of such horrific acts with a vapid call for some sort of general peace, love, and understanding. This is probably one of the reasons why I don’t get invited to these things.

The other is my general lack of interest in some particulars. As a scientist I’m asked questions about the validity of evidence to support a biological basis for homosexuality.

“Why does it matter?” I ask: “If it is a choice or not? Shouldn’t people be able to make these sorts of choices without being harassed?”

I don’t like looking at people's adult choices as a congenital defect. I don’t think we need to expend resources researching LGBT as if it is a disease that may someday be cured.

I know there are people hamstrung by questions about morality. Even if I take off my shoes and socks I will run out of digits counting just the churches I can think of that define homosexuality as a sin-thing. How can anyone come out knowing that god thinks their lifestyle is an abomination? Well…I’ve got an idea…Try Atheism.

“Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are”

That’s right! You too can live a moral adult lifestyle of your choosing. Learn to cast off religious guilt by casting off religion. No need to talk to your invisible friends in the dark. We are waiting in the sunshine with sunscreen and love!

And if you still have those voices you might want to see someone about them.

It probably snowed in 1492

2011-10-08T01:24:00.001-06:00

I “knew” it would snow. I may have been a bit fuzzy on the prospect of the first snow occurring the first weekend in October, but I “knew” it would snow eventually. I couple this to the fantastic belief that the very solid surface I'm standing on is actually a rather insignificant speck of matter flying unaided through a vacuum-like void called “space”. This planet wobbles as it spins around a continually ongoing nuclear explosion, and that wobble causes seasons. All these increasingly astronomical explanations couple to provide a belief system that my belief in allows me to “know” that it will snow. Some people call that belief of mine “faith”.

One very common definition of faith that I'm given is: “Faith is belief in something without evidence”

This is often extended by degrees to: “Faith is belief in something without enough evidence”, or: “Faith is belief in something without direct evidence”, or even further to: “Faith is belief that the evidence is true”

My operational definition of faith is: “Faith is belief in something despite evidence to the contrary”.

I sometimes extend my definition (especially for my deist friends) to: “Faith is the knowledge that something exists when all the evidence cannot refute it's non existence”. I like to meditate on the double negative in the extended version; it is not a good definition to use late at night or in trivial conversations.

I have been abused by belief in things whose evidence was faulty; mostly faulty evidence purposefully provided by other people. I don't think my disillusionment in these cases was a crisis of faith; it was a crisis of trust. Sometimes I have had faith in trust. Sometimes I have hung onto the notion of trust long after the “evidence to the contrary” has almost buried me.

This early snow will not bury me. Though it has caught every leaf on every plant by surprise. The Ginkos had not even turned yellow, and now they are white. I “know” this early snow will melt before the leaves turn, but the leaves will turn and fall, and new deeper snows will fall and cover them.

I would like to have a way to tell what is going on in another person's mind; preferably a way that did not involve a power drill. Instead I have a faith like something that will not scrape off my shoe. I have a faith that leaves a scent once everything is gone. Simple words will send me. When the words are gone the memory of them will send me still.

The snow is mostly gone now. It fell while melting, and attained at least two inches of stable depth before it stopped falling, and the melting became dominant. Now there is rain, and the snow is vanishing even faster. It will snow again. It will probably snow again before November.

It is the wobble of the earth which does it. This wobble takes a year, which is much too slow for my 30 minute attention span, and so I have no direct evidence for it. I live close to the great Bonneville salt flats so I have seen the curvature of the earth over dry land. There are few places on earth to do that. I can say that I know the earth is not flat without the use of scare quotes.

A couple hundred years BC a man called Eratosthenes of Cyrene proved that the earth was spherical, and even calculated the circumference of the planet. He observed the sun's reflections at the bottom of wells in the cities of Aswan (which sits on the tropic of cancer) and Alexandria (which is quite a bit north of Aswan). On the summer solstice the sun's reflection was in the center of the Aswan well, and not in the center of the Alexandrian well. Measuring the amount of off- centeredness of the summer solstice sun in the Alexandrian well he calculated that the sun was 1/50th of a circle off of being directly overhead. He then hired someone to pace off the distance between Aswan and Alexandria, which turned out to be about 800 kilometers (about 500 miles). Multiplying 800 by 50 gives 40,000 for the circumference of the earth. The current value (measured using all sorts of fancy high-tech gadgets) for the circumference of the earth is 40,075.16 kilometers. Eratosthenes was off by 75.16 kilometers (almost 47 miles).

On Monday the USA celebrates Columbus day. I learned in primary school that he proved the earth was round. He did it in 1492.

Nuthins gonna change

2011-10-04T16:13:00.000-06:00

This is the third of what looks to be a three part series on atheism in recovery. The other two parts can be found here, and here

The biggest problem with methods of recovery from addiction is that they are too often unsuccessful.

The most common interaction people have with drug addicts is when the addict has done something to turn them into victims. Whether this is because the addict has actually perpetrated a crime to obtain money for drugs, or more commonly simply because the cumulative psychological effect of the drugs has rendered them emotionally numb in a world full of feeling humans, the addiction is often an excuse rather than a focus for treatment. Often the victims will not even know addiction is a driver in their victimization unless the individual has been caught outright or if the victimizing behavior is the result of a relapse. Usually when one knows that they are the victim of a relapsing addict's behavior it is not the first relapse the addict has had.

A reduction in the magnitude of addicts' impact on society is a poor indicator of a particular treatment approach's success rate. Certainly it is the most important measure as far as a faceless culture’s attention is concerned. If addicts quit behaving so inconveniently then –as far as society was concerned- they would cease to have a problem. This is a criminality approach to viewing drug addiction; it does not address the numbers of people who suffer from in the downward spiral of drug dependency.

Treatment effectiveness can be measured using metrics like one-year and five-year outcomes post treatment. Most treatment options involve a traceable client-patient relationship involving beds and money. Data has been generated from several treatment options. The data varies enough to support the fully salaried efforts of numerous experts, but much of it falls into the 50% effectiveness range. This means that 50% of the individuals completing a treatment remain drug-free (although many data sets focus only on particular chemicals) for a year or five.

The problem with these data is that the selections of their sample sets are highly discriminatory. It is likely that people who would be likely relapsers would not make it into a program, or would not graduate. How much of the data is actually stating that “people who are identified as unlikely relapsers have only a 50% likelihood of relapsing”.

It is interesting to note that two of the major drug-addiction-focused 12-step groups (AA and NA) conduct semi regular “membership surveys”. These suggest that it is a little more than twice as likely to have a person respond that they are in their first year of recovery than that they have been drug-free for one, two, three, four, or five years. This suggests that the success rates are similar for 12-step and medical treatment options. However, there is much overlap in the sample sets; most patients from medical treatment facilities attend a 12-step group after graduation, and many 12-step group members went through a medical treatment facility.

Since addiction is a treatable disease there should also be a background remission rate. Some place this level at 5%. So 5% of people recover from active addiction without identifying a particular treatment. Many of these untreated and cured folks report the ability to use social quantities of drugs like alcohol after their spontaneous cure.

Those addicts whose disease prevent them from ever rigorously seeking help are poorly captured by any data set. Some data has suggested that certain groups (like cocaine-addicted prostitutes in Los Angeles) may on average seek help over a dozen times a year with very low-rates of success (<5% per attempt). Attempts to statistically capture these populations have resulted in hyperbolic assumptions that adjust overall success rates down to levels similar to published spontaneous cure rates. In other words vigorous hand waving while appealing to the degradation of an emotionally-vulnerable community allows all treatment options to be rendered statistically worthless.

To some this appears like an exploitable week point common to available treatment options. Disingenuous comparison between a concrete treatment option and the hand-waving adjusted general data should show that any specific treatment option is ten times as effective as all of the options in the general pool. Since addiction treatment is profitable these comparisons do not go unchampioned.

Since most options in the adjusted general pool take advantage of 12-step programs the 5% impotency statistic has been cited as the effectiveness rate of 12-step programs. Though capitalistic competition is seen in this use of the 5%-12-step statistic, the most common use I’ve seen of this is by religious groups attempting to secure converts.

The “god” of the 12-steps is too secular. Several 12-step groups have splintered from AA in order to establish more rigorously religious groups. It is worth noting that attempts are being made to establish non-religious recovery groups that translate the 12-steps into more rational principles of recovery. I should really write more about them than I do. However, the classic theistic approach to psychological issues is quite different than that practiced in any 12-step group.

In a 12-step group one does not find people chanting or “laying-on” of hands. There is little fasting or burning incense. Some meetings have candles, but none have Ouija boards. In short the amazing magic is missing. There are however, damaged minds willing to accept fantastical explanations for mundane occurrences. And that is prime convert material for most theistic religions.

Recently there was a very minor protest at a major meeting of a 12-step organization. Several young men in bright yellow shirts denouncing AA handed out fliers, and engaged anyone who would listen. They were pushing the 5%-12-step statistic as proof that only their divine solution would cure addiction. These guys even went so far as to pronounce that since the succsess rate of 12-step groups was equal to the spontaneous cure rate that everyone in 12-step groups would burn in a lake of molten sulfur. I hate it when that happens!

12-step groups have been around long enough to be a stable and recognizable pool of potential converts. Usually the fishing for converts is not attempted via the dissolve the 12-step group for god dynamite fishing technique the guys in yellow shirts would like to attempt. Instead the convert is wooed from within the 12-step group. It is not unheard of to have organized cadres of missionaries attempting to surreptitiously harvest converts, but most attempts are made by the divinely inspired individual.

You can imagine the damaging effects an internal holly war could have on any organization, In order to minimize certain things that could harm 12-step groups they have each also adopted principles of group conduct they call the “12 traditions”. Number 6 reads:

“6. An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.”

It is widely understood that any specific religion is an “outside enterprise”. To the devout individual their actions may not be connected to a specific religion, and are therefore exempt.

While the yellow-shirted protestors randomly wandered around outside the main meeting of the conference was going on inside. 20,000 former-addicts gathered to hear the motivational words of two carefully-chosen individuals. Here is a carefully-chosen sample of what they heard:

You want a laugh? I'm watchin' TV last night; the PBS special. Now they must think I'm stupid, or you're stupid, but I'm gonna share it: It was the discovery of -humans- of mankind. They had a little Lucy thing y'know. This little skull. This, this monkey they found then all of a sudden we all tied to it. I'm just bein' sarcastic. And they're sayin that's us; right? They've got a new one, a baby one, called Salam. I'm getting somewhere, trust me. This is a new one. So I'm listening to them. They say that NOW from Lucy to Salam that the monkey came out the tree. Jumped out of the tree. Learned how to stand upright. They also went on to say that the arms of the Salam and the Lucy were monkey's so they could swing in the trees to stay away from predators. If the predators is on the ground why the hell would I want to learn how to walk? THAT DON'T MAKE NO SENSE! Y'know I was sittin' up there like: Are you for real? Y'know like who you tellin' this to? Are you kidding me? The whole thing about [a specific 12-step group] is that what we tell you is what it is in the book! Nothing is gonna change. Lucy ain’t gonna manifest from swingin' no tree!

Apparently either the big stage proves too strong a temptation for some undereducated proselytizers seeking to make a big haul of converts, or the 12-step fellowship’s vetting process for main speakers is beginning to select for a strongly theistic message.

I’m not sure this is a trend more than it is evidence of what has been a long-standing threat. There are no secular institutions that are not potentially under attack from those who would crush them into more theistic dust. Those institutions that are seen as consisting of the most intellectually week are probably the most attractive targets.

Just look at what’s happened to the GOP!

Belladonna Bill

2011-09-28T18:36:00.000-06:00

This is the second of a hopefully three-part analysis of atheism in recovery.

The linkages between human hallucinogenic experience and belief in a theistic god have roots that extend deeper than recorded history. The interaction is twisted and complex. At times (like with the Salem witch trials) hallucinogenic material conjures visions of evil. In the 70s it was popular to interpret sections of revelations as promoting the consumption of blotter acid. In November of 1934 Bill Wilson took massive doses of a strongly hallucinogenic drug mixture, saw what he thought was a manifestation of god, and then laid the foundation of what would become Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

In the 77 years since Bill’s big trip AA has helped millions of alcoholics and –despite their insistence on focusing only on alcohol- drug addicts recover from their active addictions. The twelve steps that Bill Wilson was instrumental in developing for AA have been adopted by numerous other self-help organizations. Collectively those groups are called “12-step groups” and cater to problems with everything from gambling addiction to a problematic propensity towards loving other humans. The 12 steps of AA contain two references to “God as we understood him” (Steps 3 and 11), two references to “God” (Steps 5 and 6), one reference to “him” (Step 7), and one reference to a “Power greater than ourselves” (Step 2); half of the steps mention god. Bill Wilson began AA by understanding god through a hot flash and a strong feeling of ecstasy mixed with serenity.

The Towns-Lambert cure for alcoholism that worked so well for Bill Wilson involved the administration of a mixture of two herbs: deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna) and black henbane (Hyoscyamus niger). The alkaloids in both these plants are severe digestive irritants in addition to being potent hallucinogens. The Towns-Lambert cure also contained large amounts of prickly ash bark (Zanthoxylum americanum) which was used at the time to counter the purgative effects of cholera. Dosage of the mixture was determined by administering it to the patient until their eyes dilated and they became visibly flushed. The cure required that the mixture be administered every hour –day and night- for 50 hours. The cure was considered complete when the patient’s bowels cut loose, at which time they were given large amounts of castor oil to help them “purge and puke”.

"All at once I found myself crying out, "If there is a God, let Him show himself! I am ready to do anything, anything! Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in my mind's eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay there on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness... and I thought to myself, "So this is the God of the preachers!" A great peace stole over me." – Bill Wilson

Most people would quickly connect the huge doses of hallucinogenic drugs with the onset of a hallucinogenic experience. Bill would not try and recapture his chemically-induced spirituality for another 15 years. In 1950 he engaged in “clinically controlled” LSD experiments. He apparently liked them so much he talked many people into joining him for experiments, and may have continued them into the 1960s. The LSD may have influenced some of his later writings (through a supernatural bond with a 15th century monk named after Saint Boniface who was martyred bringing Christianity to the Frisians), but it had no effect on the initial incorporation of god into AA. By the time Bill started dropping acid regularly many other 12 step groups had begun the process of splitting off from AA. The god they would take with them was the nightshade god not the acid dream.

Perhaps even before Bill Wilson stopped attending AA meetings, and certainly before he died in January of 1971, the god of AA began undergoing a subtle change. The god became more secularized, and less definitively theistic. Today it is just as likely that an AA god will be defined as “Good Orderly Direction” or “Group Of Drunks” as “Christ who died for our sins”. AA has always been secular, but early on that operationally meant that they would even allow Catholics into their initially all-Protestant organization.

Some of the splinter groups formed from AA members adopted the 12 steps in an entirely religious setting. Any secularization was unacceptable. Though each of these numerous “Faith-based” 12-step groups probably has an interesting history they are of little and less importance in this essay.

On its official website AA advertises that: “A.A. is not a religious organization; it is not allied with any religious organization, and requires no religious belief as a condition of membership. Members include Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists.” Which suggests that all beliefs are equivalent to no belief in the practice of AA’s principles.

However, in the chapter titled “We Agnostics” in the central literature for AA (The “Big Book”) we get a different story. Here the unabashedly theistic AA god is described as: “an All Powerful, Guiding, Creative Intelligence” underlying everything. The chapter continues to describe an atheist's conversion to a theistic belief, and underscores how this allowed the former agnostic to find fulfilling recovery. How can an atheist not feel like a second-class member after reading this material?

Perhaps even more damning is where –later in the “Big Book”- the alcoholic is given advice on how to treat atheists: “If the man be agnostic or atheist, make it emphatic that he does not have to agree with your conception of God. He can choose any conception he likes, provided it makes sense to him. The main thing is that he be willing to believe in a Power greater than himself and that he live by spiritual principles.”. Is this advice to lie to atheists in hopes of converting them later?

Most people who attend AA meetings are struck by the religiosity of the Lord’s Prayer which is used to end most AA meetings. To the controversy surrounding the Lord’s Prayer Bill Wilson replied: “It is also true that most AA’s believe in some kind of god and that communication and strength is obtainable through his grace. Since this is the general consensus, it seems only right that at least the Serenity Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer be used in connection with our meetings. It does not seem necessary to defer to the feelings of our agnostic and atheist newcomers to the extent of completely hiding ‘our light under a bushel.”.

Thousands of atheist alcoholics have stayed sober for longer than Bill Wilson ever did. This calls into question the dogmatic requirement for a theistic conversion in order to reap the benefits Bill Wilson describes in his writings (he wrote most of the “Big Book”). Because so many atheist alcoholics entered AA because they were (even if disingenuously) offered full membership, and then stayed sober, it would appear as if the collective understanding of AA would cause it to become increasingly secular. Unfortunately AA is fused to the theistic articulations of Bill Wilson, and can only undergo a secular transformation at its edges.

Some splinter groups have been able to continue the obviously-needed secularization of the AA doctrine. Some groups even go so far as to categorically define themselves as “Not Religious” at the start of their meetings. However these splinter groups are still 12-step groups which mention god in half their steps.

There was a move in some Toronto-based AA groups to secularize the 12 steps. When the region found out what they were doing they removed mention of the meetings from their meeting lists. Once off a meeting list a meeting becomes a private group with no area support for attracting new members; in essence it is no longer an AA meeting.

What can an atheist honestly gain from any group that insists on upholding a concept of god in its central premises? Is it possible to have a concept of god that does not contain a god in it?

The god of the 12-steps is the non-existent hallucinatory god of Bill Wilson. However, this tool is credited by many as being the essential element that helped them in recovery from their active addiction. Is there anything in Bill Wilson’s god concept worth salvaging?

Addiction is a condition characterized by the obsessive use of drugs (and I mean mind-altering drugs when I say drugs in this essay). Drugs –by definition- affect the ability to reason. This places the addict in a situation where their personal reason is incapable of responsibly assisting them. The subtle workings of a disease-embolden system of self-deception actually allows the warped reason of the addict to destructively work against their own self-interest.

Few would take the screaming delusion of Bill Wilson’s 1934 encounter with god as proof of any god’s existence. Most would not have to closely examine a slobbering Bill Wilson with toxic levels of hallucinogenic plant alkaloids in his blood to realize that there might be a drug problem at work. What might be obvious from the observer’s perspective is clouded by drug-fuelled delusion in the mind of the addict.

Where can an addict get the observer’s perspective that they need? It is almost everywhere that isn’t in their mind, but who will they listen to? From the social amalgam of the addict's environment the information will come as bits and pieces from a collective set of intelligences whose parts are distinguished only by the seemingly random choice of which will be heard. This differs from a theistic god only in that it is a convenient construct designed to describe something that cannot be operationally defined, but need not -in the conventional sense- actually be real. In this case it is confusion that makes sense of the god concept rather than any god making sense out of confusion.

As the clouding dissipates (due in large part to drugs physically leaving the body) the addict can begin to focus on their personal self-deception in a more organized way. In steps 4,5, 6, and 7 the addict lists and then examines what goes on in their head. Hopefully the well-practiced mechanisms of self-deception become apparent here. By step 7 the 12-stepper has dealt with five of the six mentions of god in the 12 steps. God becomes increasingly less theistic as the addict develops a reasonable sense of self. In steps 8 and 9 the focus shifts to how the addict deals with other actual people.

11 is the last step that specifies a theistic-sounding god, but in this step the god is rather deistic in ability. The 12-stepper is instructed to pray: “only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out”. For many the spiritual awakening described in step 12 was the understanding that there actually is no real god.

Drug addicts have thrown themselves off buildings because they thought they could fly. Some have drowned believing that they could breathe water. The magnitude of a delusion is no impediment to its use by a drug addict in the manipulation of their perception. As the addiction progresses it becomes harder for the drug addict to constructively tell the difference between delusion and reality. The forces that must work together for an addict to realize recovery of are indistinguishable from an interventionist god to that addict.

Mike's Equinox

2011-09-23T00:00:00.000-06:00

The following is a story related to me by a good friend who I will call Mike for no particular reason. He has looked it over and agreed that it is an accurate rendition of his story; except for the parts that aren’t. There are many atheists who have drug problems, but due to intense pressure by Christian groups they are often unable to be openly honest about their problem. Since self-deception is such an important aspect of drug addiction any impediments to honesty are particularly damaging to recovery. Mike has been clean for many years, and it was a rare treat to have him relate his conversion to atheism. This is not simply because of the enviable importance he places on my impact in his conversion. I happen to relate strongly to Mike, and I hope you find something in this severe abridgement of his story. I think you’ll see why I held out till today to publish it.

Because of flak I will receive I should point out that the VAST majority of Christians are not directly responsible for the pressure I mentioned above. This is a story about the impact of the pressure not a story about those that apply it.

This is also the first of a hopefully three-part analysis of atheism in recovery.

Mike’s Story:

It was a couple weeks shy of 27 years ago that a friend [let’s call him Chris] came up to me and asked how long it had been since I had gotten high. I had been hanging out in the back of meetings of some 12-step groups for over a month. I was attempting a knowing inclined slouch in a folding chair near the door. I had effectively repelled almost everyone with my non-confrontational disposition , but Chris had known me from Jr High School so the pathetic failure of my attempt to look cool was familiar to him.

It seemed like everyone in the room that night had some effusive boast about the “tools” they had gotten at a detox, or a sober living house, or some other credible establishment. I knew that I would be called out for not having gotten the right “tools”; perhaps that was Chris's purpose in confronting me. I wasn't surprised that my lack of fitting in would become unacceptable eventually. I had somehow hoped that it would have take longer for them to notice. I found Chris’s question especially disturbing because I had no idea when I’d last gotten high. No “tools”; no idea when I’d last gotten high…Chris was going to politely ask me to leave, and probably also ask me to pay for all the coffee I had drunk.

I spent a good portion of each meeting wondering where I would be sleeping that night; eventually I knew I would run out of couches. The people in the circle were dressed in freshly-laundered clothes, and looked like they owned their own couches; couches I was sure that I would never be welcome on. I shoved my hands as deep into my pockets as they would go. I had a student ID in one of them. No keys. No money. No wallet.

“I don’t know” I told Chris “I didn’t go through anyplace so I didn’t get an official date.”

Chris twitched an eyebrow slightly. “Did you use today?”

“No”

He smiled slightly. “Did you use yesterday?”

“No” I replied

Chris smiled a little more broadly, turned, and walked away. I began slinking out the door. If Chris did not officially give me the polite “don’t come back” talking-to I could pretend I never knew what was coming. And besides ... I didn’t have any cash for the coffee.

Chris caught me just outside. He was clutching a calendar. “We need to figure out your clean date. When did you last get drunk?”

“I was at a Labor day party at the University….” I trailed off in mid sentence. Most of what I remembered about the party was what people had told me, and that it was outdoors. My eyes glazed with a toxic mixture of bewilderment and embarrassment. I had dropped the second half of the sentence, it broke into a million sharp fragments, and glistening shards of it were sent skittering across the floor.

Chris eventually realized I was done. He flipped the calendar to September, and put his finger on Labor Day (September 3rd). “Okay…did you use after then”

“A couple of days later I had a couple of bong hits.”

He moved his finger over to the 5th. “Is this when you used last?” he asked.

“I don’t know” I replied.

I noticed that the calendar had various astronomical events printed on its squares. Monday the 10th of September was a full moon.

“How about I choose that day” I said; pointing at the 23rd of September. Its square was marked “Autumnal Equinox”.

When Chris left I had a date: the autumnal equinox. Some years it is on the 22nd of September, and some years it is on the 23rd.

I somehow felt like I now had an official endorsement to sit in the circle. I abandoned my back of the room seat (I later learned that those seats near the door were called “death row”). I listened and heard people talking about sponsors and steps.

Apparently I needed to get a sponsor. I asked this old dude to be my sponsor. He said that our backgrounds were too dissimilar for him to be my sponsor, but that I “Could call him my sponsor till I found a better one”. I never spoke with him again.

I asked another old dude to be my sponsor. When he found out I already had one he told me I should just stick with one sponsor. I was apparently set for both clean date and sponsor.

The steps were another thing entirely. The steps mention a “higher power”, and to be even more specific call it (him) god a couple of times. Chris explained that I could have a free ride on the god concept; I could choose whatever I wanted. I could even choose a doorknob if that worked. I knew he was lying, but if I did not question him on it too deeply I could slip by without anyone questioning it. If anyone asked I could say that: “I was trying out doorknobs”.

Things were going better for me. I was back in school. My mom was letting me crash at her house most nights. I did some odd jobs which earned me enough money to ride the bus wherever I wanted AND take up chain-smoking.

I remained confused on the god issue. Somehow I knew the next step to accepting a particular god was a trip up north to a dirt-farm in New Hampshire where I would spend my days digging roots while dressed only in soiled orange bed sheets. At times I thought this would be a good idea.

Several times I heard the refrain “I’ve heard some people choosing doorknobs for their Higher Power. This makes no sense, and will not work. You need to find a loving god. I know my higher power –whom I choose to call Jesus Christ- loves me.”

What’s this thing with doorknobs? Why doorknobs? I told Chris I thought an ashtray would work better for me. Since I had taken up chain-smoking I caught myself searching for ashtrays all the time. He tried to explain the “concept” of higher power that I was maybe not getting. I told him that ashtrays would make for a better metaphor; for me at least.

“OK” he said tentatively.

By this time I had moved into a group house and actually had a successful semester at school.

I understood that the idea of a separate frame of reference was needed to handle the self-deception that was such a destructive force in my life. I understood that it was important to create that frame independent of flesh-and-blood people because each person came packaged with their own set of problems. I knew that the limitations of any particular inanimate object rendered it insufficient as a foundation for any robust frame of reference. However, the ashtrays would work for a while. I could use the time to search out some true godhead. I had begun to decide that I would prefer not to end up in New Hampshire marveling at grotesquely shaped potatoes. I devised a plan.

I obtained several religious texts:

A King James Bible (They give these things away)
The Bhagavad-Gita (Free from the Hare Krishnas who also gave away free lunch at school)
The Book of The Law (A book by Aleister Crowley I had lying around)
Naked Lunch (I still cannot explain this one)
Beelzebub’s tales to his grandson (which I had lying around)
A translation of the Dhammapada
A translation of the Sefir Yetzirah

I remember there being nine books, but I can’t remember the other two titles.

Each evening I would lay the books out in my room, strip naked, and read random passages from each. In retrospect I think the nakedness had more to do with my poor laundry skills than any mystical ritualism, but it felt ritualistic so I kept it up. I also enrolled in a Hebrew class at the University. I wore clothes to the class.

As I read more and more of these texts I became less tolerant of the folks telling me to choose Jesus over doorknobs. First of all they did not realize I had already traded my doorknobs for ashtrays. They also did not realize how hard I was trying to figure this whole everything-god-higher-power out.

Now that I was bathing more regularly some people asked me to go to church with them. When I refused I imagined them giving me reproachful looks.

I lashed out at times. For a few weeks I would counter the “my higher power who I choose to call Jesus Christ ...” with a “MY higher power who I choose to call the prince of darkness ...”. I was individually lectured for having disruptive ideas, but eventually the excitement I got from that special attention wore off.

I came to understand that the frame of reference I needed to combat my self-deception existed everywhere that I wasn’t. When I let go of the petty fury over inappropriate religious intervention I realized that this inappropriately named god thing was just one of the "tools" I needed. I now had tools, and I effusively boasted about them at meetings.

Clarity and truth became actions that I could practice at.

For a long while I clung to what I’ve come to refer to as a deistic god. I argued that there was some force that permeated everything for some unknown purpose. Its unknowability became an asset when I was called upon to defend my higher power against the legions of Jesus. The ephemeral force stood up so much better than the ashtray-god; especially after I gave up smoking.

Then, a few years ago, I met AOA. Talking to him I began to realize that the deistic god was more of a crutch used to get people off my back. If I actually believed in this deistic creation it was a form of self-deception. If some self-deception worked then why couldn’t more intricate lies?

Chris -who was (and probably still is) a practicing Christian- gave me one rule about choosing a 12 step god; that it couldn't be me. Despite how much I tried I could not find an imaginary friend who was not simply a part of me who I lied about being something else. It was the perspective that I needed; not the fantasy. I've found that god works best for me when it is not god at all.

Relieving myself of this burdensome construct has been strangely liberating.

There are so many things I can do with an enhanced clarity now that I’ve gone full atheist. I can love. I can trust. I can be more Mike than I would have thought existed.

Prayer for Agnostics

2011-09-17T23:15:00.000-06:00

When I wrote the blog entry “Prayer for Atheists” I did not even think about whether its contents would cause doubt to be cast on the strength of my atheist convictions, but it has; three times at least. I must admit that the core of my atheism rests upon very little. To be transparently honest I do most of my not believing in any god by simply not believing, and this is an activity of very little substance.

As far as the “Prayer for Atheists" post was concerned I was outed for not presenting evidence that prayer does not work. There have been multiple studies done on Prayer. Francis Galton conducted some of the first published studies on prayer in 1872; he found it had no effect. In the almost one hundred and forty years afterward prayer continues to show no effect in controlled studies. Why did I not present this information? Shouldn't I take the time to point out the false promises of a central religious ritual in an entry named for it?

The main reason I did not effectively champion the anti-prayer studies was that I did not really think about doing it. I was too busy not thinking about magic sky-buddies to get around to pointing out how silly it is to try and talk to any of them. However, there is another reason to not champion the prayer efficacy studies. That reason is that they are all fatally flawed.

I have not worked at NIH for fast approaching two decades. One of the exciting new features on the Bethesda campus when I last did was the mysterious National Institute of Alternative Medicine. Quacks or not the NIAM folks were much more interesting with their incense and rattles than the other researchers whose centrifuges and scintillation counters seemed to continually leak.

The research of the NIAM appeared to involve more emotion than reason, and the researchers were more often heard singing, laughing, or yelling than their more stoic counterparts in real medicine. Those of us who would venture across campus drive from the National Library of Medicine to see some magic tree or bush-planting ceremony would swap stories of strange NIAM antics. One story of two intercessory prayer researchers has stuck with me.

They were arguing about mechanism. Was it some theist central power or some diffuse star-wars-like “force”? The discussion heated to an argument that filled the multistory glass-window-walled foyer with echos and recriminations. As the one researcher stormed off the other issued this fateful threat:

“I WILL PRAY FOR YOUR CONTROL GROUP!”

I realized that this self-centered fool would not have been the first person to pray for that group. At sometime someone would have prayed that all good things would happen to everyone for all time. Why would that prayer be any less important than any prayers following it?

This gets to the heart of the studying prayer problem. Since it is supposed to act by mechanisms that cannot be measured -or even observed- it is impossible to know what is going on in an experiment. It is so untestable that it is unknowable.

In order to test prayer one would have to design a system of prayer efficacy. Some prayers would have to be more effective than others. Perhaps it is the language the prayer is spoken in? Perhaps there is a inverse square law that relates the distance of a prayer to the amount of effect one might have on a prayeee? We can create intricate possible theories of the transmission and reception of prayer magic, but since we make them up they have no intrinsic validity. What does it tell us about anything if we can disprove a notion we know was woven from fantasy and imagination?

A rational mind would look at this quandary and state that if anything is this unknowable then there is nothing to really know about it. Even people who pray cannot ever know if their prayers work any action ever. Even if prayer did perform magical actions their frequency, direction, and magnitude would be indistinguishable from random events. In other words even thinking about the magic of prayer is a waste of time.

There are schools of theology that maintain that prayer has a special effect on a supernatural realm that is unencumbered by reality. I do not blame those people for not reading my blog. I'm sure they have better things to do, and I hope they do those things away from sharp objects or busy roads.

Those who read my blog are more critical. If you think that prayer does amazing intercessory magic I can provide no argument that would be more effective than just asking you to examine the details of what you think prayer does. Ask yourself: “Self: How can I know this?”, and the foundations of belief will start to erode.

If you are able to open yourself up to the idea that prayer doesn’t do anything real you are a prayer agnostic. Realize that even asking the question: “does it do anything magical” is in itself the product of flawed reasoning. If you then ask yourself “it must have some use even though it is not magical” then you have become a prayer atheist.

Not Alone

2011-09-12T00:01:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was September 11th; a day that will be known as nine-eleven for the foreseeable future. Ten years ago religious fanatics flew planes into buildings in New York and Washington DC. One hundred and fifty-four years ago a bunch of religious fanatics attacked a few hundred pioneers on a sagebrush studded mountain meadow in what would become the state of Utah. 9-11 is an important day for religious fanatics, but this year it fell on a Sunday so many possible memorials (at least in Utah) were cut short.

Only one person was ever convicted of the slaughter that occurred on nine-eleven 1857. The tight-knit authoritarian Mormon community whose residents slaughtered the non-Mormon pioneers were able to pull off a conspiracy of silence protecting all but one of those nineteenth-century terrorists. To this day residents of the towns near mountain meadows insist on the innocence of just about everyone who could have been involved.

The 2001 nine-eleven events have spawned hundreds of conspiracy theories. On most days I find them amusing, but the tone of their insistence on the anniversary reached a sickening pitch. It was like eating too much of a rich sweet desert; it is hard to think of them without burping up a bit of their now unfortunate flavor. Good people died and we mark the suffering of their families by the cacophonous wailing of internet sleuths who “discovered” this or that hidden in TV footage?

It is at these times, when I am over-imbibed with truther quacking, that I am tempted to say: “I am only interested in your conspiracies because they sound so amusingly stupid”. This would unfortunately get me labeled a “hater” or a “non”, and I would be deprived of my more direct source of sweets when the flow of stupidity ran thin. However, the synergy of teabaggers and the current election cycle is probably not going to stopper that flow anytime soon.

To avoid the onset of some intellectual diabetic condition in these coming times of plenty I have begun reaching out to other atheists in Utah. They do exist, and they are interesting!

Recently they put up a billboard advertising their existence. Here is a picture of it:

I'm in this picture. Can you spot me?

The billboard is on 2100. Just the other side of the impressive heap of spent ore from the Bingham canyon copper mine is a still-standing billboard advertising the end of the world on May 21st 2011.

On September 10th I had the marvelous opportunity to see Victor Stenger talk at the University of Utah. The event was organized by SHIFT; a student group of secular humanists. Though his talk was intelligent to the point where I felt measurably smarter after it my attention was captivated by the audience.

The look of informed question in a person's eye is an extremely attractive feature. I could have spent hours just listening to the questions, and staring in awe. I guess I'm just kinda creepy that way.

We are not alone!

GOP Antivax

2011-09-09T13:30:00.000-06:00

I avoided the GOP debates because I thought they might cause violent headaches. Unfortunately I did not dodge the headache bullet as well as I dodged the debates. However, I'm surprised it took so long for someone to enlighten me on the antivax stand of some of the candidates.

HPV vaccine is an effective preventive measure for some very common types of cervical cancer.

HPV-associated cervical cancer rates by race and ethnicity, United States, 1998–2003

In 2007 (the most recent year numbers are available)—

12,280 women in the United States were diagnosed with cervical cancer.
4,021 women in the United States died from cervical cancer.

Without widespread use of the HPV vaccine tens of thousands of women will die.

"It is wrong for government, whether it’s state or federal government, to impose on parents what they must do to inoculate their children." -- Michele Bachmann 2011 GOP presidential debates

Soggy Brain

2011-09-08T21:13:00.001-06:00

I do not have a hard and fast rule against working on the computer when I have a headache. I use little pearls of wisdom to gently guide my activities:

Do not move too quickly or you will feel like throwing up

Stay away from the powerdrill

Same goes for the benchvise

People may need to be yelled at, but don't

STOP YELLING … ow...where is that f**king powerdrill

Yes, everyone on the internet forum is stupid, but not as stupid as you are right now.

Sometimes I open up things things that I've associated with feelings other than this raw-sewage brain feeling that's left this itch of bile at the back of my throat.

Today I re-read something sad that usually brings up a tear when I know I'm alone. Salty bile is only slightly more tasty.

Today I opened a special story someone special sent (yes...that's five 's'-words in a row, and saying it fast feels icky) me just about a year ago. Reading it has conjured smiles out of my face when my mood was as black and hard as obsidian frozen beyond memory of its birth fire. Instead of wanting to whisper sweet secrets into the ears of the protagonists, or tell them of the joys beyond the troubles they would fall into, I am stuck wanting to get them out of my head where their rotting bath-towels are short-circuiting already sparking neurons.

I'm left with little to do.

Perhaps I should watch an old movie so I can ignore the dialog until it doesn't make sense?

Maybe I can take a bath so I can weld wet onto my whole-body feverish sensation? Then I can jealously curse the sodden towel as it lies comfortably wadded on the floor.

I remember one boat-trip from Catalina Island to Long Beach CA where the waves picked up en-route. The boat's deck was crowded with well-fed college-students. One-by-one they took their place at the rail till their stomachs were empty and they stained to puke up any viscous dregs of bile they could muster. The dry-heaved bile formed bubbles on their lips. The brisk sea breeze caught the bubbles and they drifted over the boat darting through the complex navigation equipment studding the cockpit. They would then delectably pop in the hair of the students leaning over the leeward railing.

At least writing on the computer is safer than using a sharpened pencil.

Golden Shower of Pits

2011-09-07T17:58:00.000-06:00

When I see large numbers of people at events I often-times wonder about the internal control-elements of the crowd. This July I took myself and a friend to see Interpol at DC’s 9:30 club for my birthday. The audience was strangely lit by the glow from a thousand smart phones. Every screen I was able to make out was tuned into the internet-based social network called facebook. Perhaps one could write a facebook app to synchronize the interaction of people in crowds?

Humans are often called “social” animals, but they are not eusocial (“true social”) animals. Two species of eusocial mammals have been identified: Fukomys damarensis and Heterocephalus glaber. These rodents live in large colonies that resemble a pit full of rats. Within these colonies the division of effort is accompanied by a diversity of physiological forms reminiscent of hive insects. Lording over the colony is a queen that can be more than twice the size of her non-fertile offspring. The queen induces the physiological polymorphism by peeing hormone –laden urine on her children, and then aggressively threatening them.

There are reports of humans using chemical signals to create socially synchronized structures. The McClintock effect involves the synchronization of menstrual-cycles around that of a dominant menstrual pacesetter. Researchers swabbed the armpits of pacesetter women and then rubbed those swabs on the upper lip under the nose of the test subjects. The periodicity of the test subjects' menstrual cycles became like that of the menstrual pacesetter.

H. glaber is the cooler of the two eusocial mammals. The common name for H. glaber is “Naked Mole rat” or “Saber-toothed sausage”.

One invasive way to synchronize a crowd would be to implant glowing electrode-tentacled robotic squids into the brains of those to be synchronized.

Music has a calmative effect on most mammals. Rumor has it that H. glaber is most responsive to techno and Jimi Hendrix.

A very non-invasive way to induce group synchronization would be to mechanize the function that was to be synchronized, and thereby bypass the fickle control-processes of the human brain. One Japanese-English artist called Sputniko designed a robotic menstrual cycle stimulator. It induces cramping via an electric current and then sends a dribble of blood down the inside of the thigh. The possible genesis of a cyber-McClintock effect was probably not the singularity that Vernor Vinge envisioned.

Males may also be able to affect the menstrual synchronicity of women’s menstrual cycling. In mice males can adjust the menstruation periods of nearby female mice by peeing on them. This is called the Whitten effect. It seems like –when it comes to sex and society- rodents pee on each other an awful lot. There are humans who pee on each other, and for many of them this also has something to do with sex.

I can’t help but imagine the intricate machinations of biochemical signal and countersignal confused into the madness of crowds. Each beating heart pounds out a message of throbbing humanity that builds into the day’s gamelan of culture. I can’t help but see some crowds and know that something is going to happen; something interesting that draws me in.

Prayer for Atheists

2011-09-06T00:01:00.000-06:00

“I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my younger and more vulnerable years I could measure the value of life in amounts of hoardable material. Living could be tallied and assessed. Then at some point I noticed that love had coated the machinery of reason with an insistence of intangibles. The arbitrary basis for value eroded the illusion of precise transitions from one level of measure to another.

Events fought each other for importance across the swaying span of my attention. Some events dislodged by more powerful images would scream as they plummeted into the yawning abyss beneath that span. Sometimes an event that had barely edged out onto the span before being flung over would bounce against the stony walls that anchor the span; in the sound of the impacts (and often a muffled splash) would be a name that I had forgotten. I've always been very poor at remembering names.

How can I look into someones eyes long enough for minutes to turn awkward and back again yet not remember the color of those eyes? How can I remember the warmth of a quickening pulse, yet not remember the temperature of the room, or the color of the room, or even if there was a room at all?

Some of the more powerful events that cross the span of my attention are armored in irritation and insult. This armor acts like the magic plus-ten possession of some upper-level Dungeons-and Dragons hero who slashes across the span knocking level one players to their death; he gains levels and power at the expense of the more delicate events.

I would like that span to be wider, and more solid. There are so many events that I would have coaxed across that span that I would be better served with a golden-gate Brooklyn bridge of an attention instead of the rope-and-plank footbridge with which I make due. It would also be nice if it could better accommodate two-way traffic.

This past long weekend I spent many hours talking to people who called themselves Christians. I was reminded repeatedly of why I do this blog. I do not want to attack Christians; I want to tease out from Christianity those human qualities better served through reason. One of the things I would love to steal from Christians is prayer.

Talk to a Christian about an emotional subject for a few minutes and they will bring up praying. One might get the impression that every good Christian must pray a dozen or more hours a day. Some give to prayer a magical power to effect reality, but even those who equivocate on the idea of breaking the law of gravity with a few hail-Marys are convinced of the usefulness of prayer. The atheist will usually ask (and reasonably so): “How useful can something be if it does not do anything”.

The most common use of prayer is as an expression of powerless interest. The statement that “I will pray that [something good] will happen to [someone]” expresses interest in some positive future without commitment to the activities required to realize that future. I say things like this all the time. I would like many things to occur in the future which I am unable (and often simply unwilling) to substantively help realize. Such statements are a nice part of a conversation, and they sound more genuine when the word “pray” is used instead of something flaccid like “hope”. I would love to have a cool word like “pray” to use in conversations.

However, prayer is more than a knockoff phrase. It is a practice. Using it in reference to special events helps to secure their passage across the span of attention. Resolving the details of an event in order to pray for its resolution helps speeds it's passage. Making time to re-examine a day's events may widen the span a tad, and increase the safety of an event's passage.

There are so many people who touched me this weekend. I would like to write about every one of them in detail, but I cannot. There too many folks who I would love to write about touching me in detail this weekend, but I missed them.

One man told me of a story involving motorcycles and kids. It was a bikers-for-Jesus gang that brought nurturing and attention into the lives of marginalized kids. On-and-on he went about the differences they were trying to make. When he mentioned Jesus and I mentioned being an atheist the conversation did not skip a beat. He spoke of praying for these kids, and of how he remembered their names. I would tell you his name, but I've forgotten it.

One older woman told me of her second diagnosis of breast cancer. It had been a decade since her first. I may remember her name, but the particulars of her children and grandchildren and loved ones who would be affected were lost behind the film of air that held back her watery eyes as she described her tentative fear. She spoke of praying for strength, and the ability to “make it through”. When I touched her hand and said “you've made it here, and from here you will go places that will be better because you are there” she found a misplaced smile. When she mentioned Jesus and I mentioned being an atheist the conversation did not skip a beat.

Because we have evolved to know each other there are bonds between people.

Some people have suggested that the span of attention can be propped up with moderation in emotion. That if we rigidly sandwich our attention between abortive sorrow and short-winded elation it would serve us better. In some ways it may be poor logistics management to allow a crushingly diverse press of bodies to try and cross my span of attention. I do not know how many more dreams lie broken at the bottom of that abyss because of my aversion to closing my eyes, but it is no small quantity.

Not everything from this weekend has made it across my attention span. I would like to have brought more across. Perhaps I should more closely examine one psychological tool that might help facilitate that.

Mongolian Bar-B-Que

2011-09-03T01:14:00.011-06:00

Seventy years ago today, on September 3rd 1941, six hundred soviet POW’s (many of whom were selected on the basis of their “Mongolian” characteristics) and 250 sick polish prisoners were put in an airtight room where pellets of the insecticide Zyklon B were then added. This followed a successful, but far less disciplined experiment, on a few hundred Roma children from Brno conducted in early 1940.

The experiment took 20 hours even though it was estimated that the subjects expired within 20 minutes. Johann Kremer (an SS doctor) dispassionately described following the progress of the experiments: "Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives.". These original experiments may have become protracted through an unsophisticated means of airing the chamber out. The commercial Zyklon B had an odorant added to it (Methyl-2-bromoacetate which smells like bad eggs or flatulence) which may have lingered longer than the active hydrogen cyanide component.

The chamber clean-up crews reported that: “the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.”

Later batches of Zyklon B were made for the gas chambers specifically by omitting the odorant.

Zyklon B was so much more effective on humans than lice that, by tracking bills of sale, it can be noted that only 5% of the insecticide delivered to Auschwitz was made for use in its gas chambers.

Zyklon B was not the only gas used by the Nazis in their gas chambers. Carbon monoxide from directed engine exhaust might arguably have been more efficient. Zyklon B remains the iconic source of gas and it’s generic cousin, hydrogen cyanide gas, is still used in single-person gas chambers today.

In a little under four years the Nazis would use Zyklon B, and its competitors, to exterminate a variety of people. Though the Nazis apparently preferred to exterminate Jewish folk they continued to select Mongolian soviets, like those in that fateful first group, whenever the opportunity arose.

In recent years holocaust deniers have pointed to the lack of Prussian blue residue on gas chambers as proof that the all the Zyklon B stories are just made up. Prussian blue is a dye that forms when prussic acid (another name for hydrogen cyanide) reacts with some materials. I would think that this would be a perfect sort of experiment for some re-creationist engineers –like Myth-Busters. That is it would be perfect for them if not for the fact that even suggesting it might acknowledge some hint of validation for holocaust denier hate-speech.

I am amazed at how neo-Nazi groups have sprung up around the world. With them the rate of holocaust denier literature publishing has also risen. When the truth behind holocaust itself is denied the details easily become lost.

One geographic hot-bed of recent neo-Nazi activity (with a major upsurge in 2008) is in Mongolia. The Mongolian neo-Nazis are apparently quite violent.

Walkin' on the Golden Shore

2011-09-01T01:05:00.004-06:00

Well, soon I’m off to CA again (actually I should be almost there by now...ROAD TRIP!). What wonders will the golden state regurgitate up on me for this trip.

The sea throws up wonders on its shore. California collects these things like a memory of some past high tide.

Some of my fondest memories from CA are of low tide. In sheltered back-bays the sea reveals for only those few hours treasures that it nurtures there. Mud-flats gurgle with life. Exposure to air mates the ooze with the vital scent of decay. One bright morning while I was fighting Sol’s intrusion for a few extra minutes sleep my partner rubbed cod liver oil on her teeth and breathed sultry breaths into my nostrils; it was low tide all over the world.

“But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand -- miles of them -- leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, -- north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent- minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries -- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” -- Herman Melville from Moby Dick chapter 1

There is a rhythm to tides which resonates with the beating of my heart. The tide comes in to leave its traces high on the beach, and then slides away to reveal tide-pools and the tender surfaces of mudflats. When I watch the sea I am drawn to its edge. I follow it out, and then retreat from it as it comes in. It is a slow motion version of a child dancing away from waves breaking on a pebble beach. One could smile and dance with the sea through many layers of its rhythm.

What changes in my life lead me towards, and then away from, the California shore? Is there some great tidal flux in my mental state that lets me oscillate to the rhythm of obfuscated motivations?

Boston Common

2011-08-23T19:01:00.000-06:00

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." --Friedrich Nietzsche

Many of the corporeal folks who’s opinions I admire are childless. This is partially (though it might be a large part) because I think not having kids is an admirable default position. There are at least three reasons why I should feel different. One was, to my great delight, brought into focus during a pleasantly drenching Boston summer rain.

The first reason is my own kids. This is the most obvious and least compelling reason. Anyone who digs through old blog posts here will stumble across multiple references to AOD and AYD. Read of the magic fairy sprinkles of vitality and pure love these beings dust so many of my motivations with and why not believe that all people should tirelessly pump out more of these treasures? If it were possible I might suggest such an approach, but AOD and AYD are super-beings; most people just pump out kids. The existence of AOD and AYD is actually another stanza of the reasoning why choosing not to have children is a great idea.

Putty in my hand

The second potential reason is to be found in the biology that unites people as a species. This reasoning is that the propagation of a social species should help to preserve the genetics of the species. There is undeniable truth in this reasoning…at least till one starts to run the numbers. The World Bank estimated the earth’s human population at over 6.775 billion in 2009. Though there might be more than enough in resources on the planet for double this number the doubling rate is such that resource depletion will become a major concern soon. The earth’s human population was 3.324 billion in 1965. That’s a doubling time of 44 years. The biology reason also decays into fertile ground for the childless stand.

There is a bumper crop of births swelling the bellies of women all over the town I live in. This is Utah so the demographic statistics suggest that there is a constant bumper crop of fetuses developing, and that I just don’t usually notice them. In my defense the crop is usually restricted to haggard looking people trudging weak-kneed through Wal-Mart; this autumn there are several women who I know swelling towards childbirth. Several of the pregnant women I know are also close enough to being teenagers that their pregnancies scream for some sort of ultra-pathetic attention.

Teenage pregnancies are also not uncommon in Utah, but since I avoid the company of teenagers they are invisible to me. Their spawn fills some bottomless “at risk” demographic which will help to enliven the future’s statistical description of social decay. Many of the children from these pregnancies will not be the product of choosing to have children; they will be the product of not choosing to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

Despite attempts to stunt them the children become real people. The less mature parents (and the unprepared grandparents) are shaped by the burden. They talk exclusively of time to themselves, budgets, and sleep. The people are shaped by the elements of their upbringing; every once in a great while one of them is beautiful to know. Each childless adult simply enhances society’s ability to shoulder some of its un-aborted burden.

Perhaps we should offer a tax credit of $100.00 for every year after age 18 that an adult remains childless. Giving a twenty-eight-year-old woman a $1,000.00 tax credit might stimulate the economy more than giving her younger sister with six kids $6,000.00. But I digress. It is so easy to slip into the negatives associated with people having children.

It was raining after I saw my friend perform for Blue Man group in Boston. For some minutes I was amazed at little things: Boston is a lovely city; in The Common electric lights make the lake look black. East coast summer rain is pleasant; the feinting cold a welcome respite from triple-digit daytime temperatures. Conversations with someone whose own decades have collected enormous talent and experience is intoxicating. I began to visualize unimagined connection between terrifically cool things. I like to immerse myself in such things. I would wallow often if given a chance, but the opportunities are rare.

We had probably been talking about kids for a while when I noted the topic. I began thinking about the thinking about the topic. This was a conversation concerning the development of other loving humans with the kind of interest driving it that might be reserved for developing some futuristic world filled with advanced civilizations populated by compassionate super beings.

We spoke of developmental stages, and the breakthroughs that defined them. We spoke of the development of super-abilities: the ability to see, to know, to reason, to communicate, to feel, and to care.

Then a beautiful woman met us in the park and began speaking of the development of her children in a similar voice. There were two of them! Is the earth ready for this cresting wave of super beings? Will we be driving flying cars and talking with our minds before we are reduced to digging fibrous roots with the sharpened detritus of our species’ former glory?

This is not a reason to have kids though. It is a reason to help the people we have develop or heal. It is thinking of the children we have as elements of our future society.

When I finally returned to Utah I realized how full-to-bursting I was with new ideas. How can I translate them though? I could more easily capture water with a butterfly net.

Both AYD and AOD received a large hug. On each of their foreheads I planted a kiss. I stepped back and imagined them as the large brightly-colored glowing brains I once saw on a star-trek episode. I smiled.

The Mummy's Curse

2011-08-18T14:15:00.000-06:00

Give most human teenagers a choice of either taking a class in Mormon scripture from some pasty white guy or taking a class in space-alien philosophy from strangely-dressed people who mummify humans and pets in their garage, and which do you think they will choose? Mark twain called The Book of Mormon “Chloroform in print”. Alien mummification, however, is the stuff that adolescent dreams are made of; well…this and some other stuff. Sure LDS seminaries sometimes cater to the “other stuff” of teenage dreams, but they don’t get caught at it any more often than core curriculum teachers, and I’m sure the Summum church's teachers would be no less likely to provide “special instruction” to a few students.

History was poised on the brink of allowing a select few high school students in Draper Utah to make the Mummy-Mormon choice. Unfortunately it appears as if the Canyon School District has thrown cold water on these dreams for the time being.

The Canyon School District is the district that contains Alta High school. I wrote about Alta High School’s exciting school spirit a few months ago.

The mummifiers are none other than members of the now famous Summum church. The Summum church became famous last year when the US supreme court ruled that their free-speech rights were not being violated by Duchene county (UT) when that county refused to put a monument to the Summum church’s seven principles next to the existing public monument to the Ten Commandments.

The choice was to come in the form of a seminary building. Canyon School District is building a new high school in Draper, and had set aside land for a seminary. The Summum church officially petitioned to have a Summum seminary next to the new high school, but so did the LDS church. The Canyon School District decided that there would be no seminary on the land it had purchased and labeled “seminary” on preliminary drawings.

I do not know of any public high schools in the state of Utah that do not have an LDS seminary adjacent to them. There may be one or two, but I would be surprised if it was more than that. According to the Salt Lake tribune: “83,634 of Utah’s 150,572 high school students were enrolled in seminary classes”. It takes an awfully large number of seminary structures to accommodate that many students.

I have a feeling that the LDS church will find a way to get some land adjacent to the new high school in Draper; they will simply get their adjacent land from someone other than the Canyon School District.

The coolest thing about mummies might indeed be the fact that the brains of the mummified person are removed from their skull using a hook, but mummies would be so very cool even without this manipulation. Mummies are so cool that for many years they were thought to posses magical powers. Mummia was a preparation made from ground mummies, and was thought to have medicinal properties. As late as 1908 E. Merk offered mummia powder in its catalogue. However, the best source of mummia was from “fresh” Egyptian mummies crushed to order. I have not been able to find any particular mention of which parts of the mummified corpse were more tasty or more effective.

If I were the Summum seminary teacher I would make sure that the seminary had several mummies. The Summum compound in Salt Lake features the mummified remains of the church’s founder “Corky” on public display in a squat copper-colored pyramid. The church mummifies pets for a small donation. I’m sure they could mummify a few things for their seminary. Even mummified road-kill would be more interesting than Mormon scripture.

Since they are apparently not going to get their seminary space Summum’s next move might be to compete with the school lunch program.

The LDS church has special reason to be afraid of the draw Egyptian mummies have. Joseph Smith (founder of the Mormon church) himself bought four Egyptian mummies from a traveling mumia peddler in 1835. They were the last four of a set of 11 mummies one Michael Chandler had been trying to hock for two years. Chandler sold Smith the four mummies along with five papyrii which served to prove they were real Egyptian mummies. Smith forked over $2,400 dollars for the lot; what a steal.

The papyri were needed to prove the Egyptian mummies were real because many mumia peddlers were trafficking in counterfeit mumia. In the cases of the powdered material the mumia could be cut with any number of things; that was one reason why whole (or identifiable parts) were preferred. In the case of whole mummies more contemporary substitutes were often passed off as the real thing. This mumia falsa was a common blight on the trade in more genuine snake oil.

Imagine the delight experienced by the followers of Joseph Smith when he explained that their donations to his church had not only purchased some dried corpses from across the sea, but that they had also purchased magical scriptural documents. It appears as if the papyri that Smith bought were actually written by Abraham. That’s right…father of the abrahamic religions! How auspicious!

Abraham had a lot to say on the papyri. He spoke of Kolob, of pre-mortal existence, gave specifics about the stuff the universe was created from, but my favorite is the consistent use of the polytheistic notation of “Gods”. If Abraham was a polytheist it would explain why he was so quick to accept god’s being of two minds on the subject of his son. But I digress.

Translating papyri is somewhat different than translating ephemeral golden plates. The papyri were not magiced away after the translation. This left the possibility that someone else would come along and use a technology that yielded more accurate translations than the seer stones Joseph smith used.

Sure enough, in 1966, the papyri were re-discovered. The translation of the papyri proved to be almost as awkward as the soon-to-be-discovered Salamander Letter would be.

Prep School

2011-08-16T10:22:00.007-06:00

In 1998 a mid-sized (300+ student) private school called Alta academy closed its doors. Several months ago I wrote about racist activities at suburban Alta high school in the Salt Lake valley. Alta Academy was just a short drive from Alta High; drive a bit further and you would begin climbing the grade towards the ski resort that shared the name “Alta” with both the public high school and the private academy.

For twenty-two years of its near 30 year existence the Alta Academy had one principal. That principal was recently sentenced to serve a bazillion years in some Texas prison.

1988 Alta Academy Yearbook Photo

A couple months ago I wrote about FLDS (Fundamentalist Later-Day Saints church) members breaking into a publicly-held building where they stole a few metric tons of books. They burned some of the books, and then “donated" the rest to a LDS-run charity several hundred miles away. How many laws were broken? What purpose would such an action serve save to demonstrate the control one group had over a community. This book-burning was a true fascist-terrorist-conspiracy.

Conspiracies were apparently part of the standard curriculum at Alta Academy. Warren Jeffs maintained that the Federal Government was orchestrating numerous conspiracies. The spectrum of conspiracies Jeffs taught ranged from mind-control to faked moon landings.

“At Alta Academy, Warren told us that men have never been on the moon. He told us that the Lord would never allow man on the moon. He said that the Lord allowed them to land on a little no name planet in space but he would never allow them to land on the moon.” – former Alta Academy student

Thousands of people drive by the former site of Alta Academy every day on their way to Alta and Snowbird ski resorts. Utah created a license-plate with the tagline “Greatest Snow on Earth” in part because of the great skiing at these resorts. In the summer thousands of cyclists puff their way up the conveniently-located-yet-awesome incline. The mouth of little cottonwood canyon is some particularly choice real-estate. Selling it no-doubt helped finance the huge Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas.

Running the Academy helped to develop the twisted psycho-sexual control fantasies that are the hallmark of the over 10,000 strong FLDS faith. Control was imposed over dress, speech, and facial expressions.

“I enjoyed my time at Alta Academy, but I didn’t have anything much to compare it to” -- Former Alta Academy student

Jeffs was seen holding a five year old boy up by his ankle and “shaking the evil out of him”. Jeffs would demonstrate “proper submission” for wives by pulling one of his wives by her hair into the front of a classroom full of boys and yanking her to her knees. When he was done she thanked him.

He also allegedly repeatedly sodomized five and six-year-old boys in the bathrooms of Alta Academy.

These activities and more were reported to Utah authorities who could not successfully investigate or prosecute him. Jeffs did not completely move to the backwater of Colorado City until 2002. Most of these activities were done in an upscale suburban neighborhood of the modern metropolis that is the Salt Lake Valley.

Jeffs taught purity, goodness, and sweetness to thousands of folks. He led people in multi-hour-long prayer sessions. In order for Jeffs to be guilty a jury would have to conclude that these foundations of their own faith were not absolute protection against sin and evil. In order for these accusations to be true a jury would have to discount the very words that their faith called the definition of truth. In order to wade through the piety of Jeffs and arrive at the physical truth of the situation a jury would have to conclude that there was an accurate method for determining reality that was independent of their faith; a method that could be applied to matters of faith. It is not hard to craft a jury in Utah that could simply not go there.

Jeffs attempted to exploit this weakness in Texas. He provided hours of theological information to the jury. Despite being repeatedly admonished by the judge for presenting irrelevant material he manipulated the context of his presentations to continue his teachings. For one dodge he put a devout FLDS member on the stand so he could ask him long scriptural questions. Eventually he was shut down. The jury was not swayed by his fundamentalist-Mormon religious appeal. This was Texas after all; not Utah.

There have been some attempts to prosecute Jeffs in Utah, but they have failed or been overturned on appeal.

Some people would have you believe that Jeffs began his raping and psychological abuse only after he moved to the YFZ compound in Texas. I have even been told that he created the YFZ ranch because he could not conduct the same perverted activities in Utah without getting caught. The book-burners of Colorado City know this is not true. There is in fact every reason to believe that the rapes continue as the FLDS wage civil-war trying to replace Jeffs as their prophet from god.

Some of the rapes could be prevented if the Utah authorities put people in jail for their part in book-burning conspiracies.

So He Loaded up the Truck and Moved

2011-08-11T22:00:00.000-06:00

I saw the look of fear in his eyes after I raised the question:

“This place is great! Why doesn’t everyone live here?”

He stumbled slightly for words:

“I…uh…well….not as great as it seems…well”

I was standing under a squatting shade tree in the fading post-drizzle evening grey. Mosquitoes buzzed angrily at my lathering of citronella repellant. Over its protective odor I could still smell the faintly ripe scent of estuary coming from all directions. If I began walking I would find myself at a shoreline in under an hour; regardless of the direction I chose. But I would not walk. I would stay under the dripping tree and talk to this sputtering man about California till it got fully dark.

I had never really visited Rhode Island before. Looking at the path interstate 95 takes through the state I realize that I must have driven through it before, but 95 through Rhode Island is built on a little strip of land transplanted from Elizabeth New Jersey. If I had any notions of what the rest of Rhode Island was like I imagined the hulking rust towers of Gary Indiana dissolving into a stagnant oil-slicked pool. Strange wild-haired people lived in poorly preserved vintage cars; the hoods were open to reveal that the engines had all long ago been removed.

The previous day I spent a few minutes looking at the Capital building for Rhode Island. I noticed that most of the windows had air conditioning units in them. Was this some ruse planed to turn away potential immigrants: “No central air here, and our other capital is a trailer”?

I had not brought up California to the sputtering man. Someone else had realized the two of us would be attending the same function in San Diego in a few weeks. I began wistfully recalling a fire on a Coronado beach where fighter jets with wheels extended for landing would occasionally scream over our heads with a jet–fueled intensity. I wondered about how much of a tangent this newly-met person would endure, but it was the suggestion that I move everyone I knew into his smallest state of the union that started him sputtering.

Earlier in the afternoon I met a woman with Bo-Derek braids who talked at length about her Mercedes. It or one just like it had come from California, and the story of its trip was her story. She fogged at the memory of those people who had ridden with her in her German car, and tenderly missed them.

These were not the people I wanted to see in Rhode Island, but if I had known they were there I would have.

Beige Man Group

2011-08-10T16:30:00.001-06:00

When I was young political decisions were described as happening half in the public arena, and half in smoke filled rooms. Cynics would say that all decisions happened in the rooms filled with smoke. The smoke in the rooms of power was from cigars puffed upon by fat white men in suits. It appeared as if this was a natural order of things; it contrasted sharply with the images of powdered wigs and robes that percolated up from the power-rooms of history (and England).

Monica Lewinsky connected politics to cigars in a more intimate way. The smoke was inhaled. The term “Trading in hog bellies” became more useful as a euphemism. Only the white men and suits remained.

Then came president Obama, and the “Beige Man Group” was re-cast. Only the suits remained.

Sometimes the suits are optional, and if we are to judge from the popular photos of half-naked congressmen the white men of power are not all fat anymore.

Does this mean that the rooms are empty? How different is American politics simply because it looks different?

The initial primary funding season has come to a close. Some candidates, like John Huntsman, have begun to fade simply as a result of their inability to raise enough cash. It is almost possible to accurately pick who the 2012 Republican nominee will be based on the amount of money raised at this point in their campaign. Rick Perry has avoided inspection by “not running” until this funding window has closed so his chances are difficult to assess. Of those Opensecrets.org are tracking Mitt Romney has raised around five times what the next highest earning Republican candidate has raised.

Campaign contributions are seen as free speech, and expensive free speech at that, by the Supreme Court. Romney’s over 18 million dollars (as of 30 June 2011) came mostly from large donors. This means that there are a small number of people who have a lot to say, and want Mitt Romney to say it for them. In fact 94% of Mitt’s money came from large donors. Barak Obama who will probably be the Democratic nominee has raised over twice what Mitt has raised, but only 23% of it has come from large donors. Lots of people want the president’s ear.

However, the reporting leaves out some important information. Much of this election’s campaigns will be financed by political action committees, or PACs. The money from the PACs are not specifically reported as being attached to any one candidate. Romney’s PAC (“Restore Our Future PAC”) received a $1 million dollar donation from W Spann LLC in April, but his campaign only identified a little under 90 thousand dollars as being PAC money before 30 June 2011. Three months later W Spann LLC dissolved; apparently their sole business was donating to Mitt Romney’s campaign. It appears like W Spann was just another name for one Edward Conard whohas been a major source of financial support for all of Mitt’s campaigns. Both he and his wife have each donated to Mitt’s campaigns at every chance they have had. But that was not enough free speech for them.

By the 30 June reporting deadline the Romney “Restore Our Future PAC” had raised over 12 million dollars. That is a number comparable to (60% of) the amount of money that the Romney campaign reported, and much more than any of the other Republican nominee candidates reported. Almost 1 dollar in ten in that PAC came from one man. There are over 300 million people in the USA. That’s an awful big slice of the free speech pie for one man.

You know…I would like a little free speech, but it’s so darned expensive these days.

Talkin' Posteriori

2011-08-03T13:14:00.004-06:00

“a posteriori definition” sounds like it would be best developed through the use of tight jeans and many hours in the gym. It is in fact a pedestrian way of describing the act of defining something after you know something about it. Fortunately one can mix a little a priori prejudice into the crafting of a posteriori definitions to make a complete ass out of oneself.

I was recently skimming over some blogs I frequent when Self-Taught Atheist served up a video of Bill O’Reilly trashing liberal media’s coverage of the recent tragedy in Norway. For those of you who don’t know an unbalanced anti-Muslim extremist recently killed a whole bunch of non-Muslim kids at a liberal-run summer camp in Norway to bring attention to the fact that everyone should be more concerned about Muslims in Norway. Don’t worry too much if that last sentence did not make sense; in fact if it made sense to you there may be more cause for worry. If you want to know more about the motivations behind the massacre the killer wrote a long manifesto outlining his motivations. It goes on about how we need more Christianity in Europe, and even provides some hints as to how Christianity can be reformed to make it better (He suggests re-uniting the Protestant and Catholic churches in what would be a re-reformation). The only saving grace in all this is that we now have a picture of a strapping Aryan mass-murderer frothing about something other than Jews. Evil done for new reasons is not a sign of progress however.

Here is the video of Bill O’Reilly:

What struck me was that Billy says that Mr. Norway killer (MNK) was not a Christian because no Christian would do something like that. One might have casually defined MNK as a Christian due both to his rantings and his baptism, but now that he has produced some significant evil he is not a Christian. Perhaps he is no longer a Christian now that he has crafted this evil, but was one up until he killed the first kid? Perhaps he stopped being a Christian when he decided to kill the first kid? Perhaps he stopped being Christian when he thought about killing people for the first time?

The question that haunts me is “What is he now that he is not a Christian”? He is obviously not a Muslim. I would venture to say that he is not a Jew, or a Buddhist, or a Jayne, or a Hindu, or just about anything. What do you call someone that is not defined into any faith: AN ATHEIST!

Somehow the notion being lumped into the same “other “bin that accumulates producers of evil is unsavory to me. The more defining monikers like “Secular Humanist” begin to sound attractive.

Of course it would simply be best if Billy would get his a priori out of his a posteriori; though I think it may be stuck.

Psychotropic Jesus

2011-08-01T00:40:00.001-06:00

I have often been told that I am angry because I am an atheist. When I am told this when I am not angry I find the statements amusing. When I am angry I find listening to the statements discomforting. I have accepted the idea that I will continue to have emotional responses to my world. Although fine tuning may be possible my emotions are generally pulled from a mixed bag. I would not, however, trade the love that transmogrifies lust into desire for a guaranteed respite from a few fleeting moments of anger.

I have been told that by “accepting Jesus Christ as my Personal Savior” I will not have to experience any anger ever. Most Christians I know do not prescribe to this most powerful psychotropic Jesus. The ones that do are often crazy like bat droppings, so I am not sure if the statements concerning the effectiveness of psychotropic Jesus are lies or delusional ramblings. If these statements were limited to the phlegm-speckled tirades of street preachers I might not even notice them.

There is something enticing about the upturned scrub-blushed face of enforced innocence. The eyes look with the hint of a fear that what they see might invalidate some promise of redemption. There is misdirection in the placement of outward facing protections against disillusionment. The promises of purification are for delivery after death; they rely on no real proof, and no amount of reality can insist on addressing the stuff they are made of. The only unstoppable threat comes from within the skull the eyes look from. It is in that flask that the unstable chemistries occasioned by the mixing of such volatile ingredients as opportunity and desire are explored.

What event could cause someone, like a pretty young mother of two I recently met, to become enraptured with the idea of purification after death? Some hurt too terrible to relate? Some injury carved in tender skin uncomplicated by the scars of experience? Some unmentionable wrong she committed which continually floats to the top of her conscious; buoyed on a tide of guilt? Complete purity always hints at a dark evil hiding just behind the apparent transparency of purpose. What weight could be fused to such an agreeable countenance like a surgically implanted prosthetic hump?

It is often something lacking rather than something lurking which causes this type of imbalance. That lacking ingredient is usually a grounded perspective. The influenced of a skewed horizon is suggested by the reliance on a fix occurring after death for a problem that that affects one’s life. There are problems that cannot be fixed during life, but those are different situations.

Perspective may be an essential lacking ingredient, but supplying that ingredient might not be the most effective fix. Perspective, in and of itself, is not very compelling. Better to redirect the psychoactive intensity towards engaging pursuits, like scrapbooking, or imagining why so many more stars are reflected in a lover’s eyes than the billions present in the night’s sky. Better still, one can develop varied emotional attachments and create a world filled with a cacophony of secret languages.

There, in a world full to bursting, a horizon can be used. There, hand in hand with an understanding confidant, you can look out at that horizon, and watch the sun rise.

There is no reason to be all messed up on Psychotropic Jesus. Love is just waiting to well up inside your every thought. Give up on god and find true love by just being human again.

Persecution Salve

2011-07-22T19:26:00.000-06:00

One of the most interesting aspects of 21st-century religiosity in the US is the intense persecution it feels. This persecution is often administered by the “intellectual elite”. Since most of the readers of this blog would be grouped into that category I thought it would be nice to point out that there are people who think you are being naughty, and they want it to stop; now!

Thought you are being naughty by simply thinking your elitist thoughts there are some of you who take your naughtiness one step further, and formulate opinions. Some of you even go so far as to share your opinions. Some of you even write them down.

You create confrontation between facts, figures, philosophy, art, and truth. You are a little intimidating to even those who agree with you, but have not done their homework. I personally (sometimes) spell check my blog entries to suck up to your favor, and I don’t just do this because you are so good looking.

The standard American focus of perceived persecution is Christianity. This is probably due in part to the fact that so many Christians use torture iconography as a mainstay of their fashionable jewelry. I recently saw someone with a chic little gold cross inlaid with diamonds hung around their neck on a gold chain. If the core magic of your faith requires the torture and death of your god then images of persecution should never be far from your mind. Some Christians, who may simply feel that they are not persecuted enough in their daily lives, go so far as to whip themselves bloody.

Practitioners of alternative medicine are also the subject of elitist persecution. I have heard the derisive statement: “there is no such thing as alternative medicine; if it worked it would just be called ‘medicine’” thrown around like a well loved stuffed toy. Persecution is not victimless. People’s livelihoods are at stake when alternative medicine is attacked.

Practitioners of alternative medicines must hide behind disclaimers to prevent being bullied by that lapdog of elitist science: the FDA. While researching hexagonal water I often ran into disclaimers similar to these:

The statements contained on these pages have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Many of the methods and products in this page are NOT considered scientific by the FDA, nor are they even recognized.

The information contained here is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Suggestions and ideas presented in this document are for information only and should not be interpreted as medical advice, meant for diagnosing illness, or for prescriptive purposes.

The FDA has even begun publishing lists of what it calls “fake cancer cures that should be avoided”. The list I found had 187 items on it. “187” is gang-slang for premeditated murder (this is a reference to California Penal Code section 187, subdivision (a) that defines murder as the "unlawful killing of a human being, or fetus, with malice aforethought"). What significance should we derive from this connection between this FDA alternative medicine hit list, and the hidden meaning behind the number of items on it?

Some of the items on the list are directly associated with proven cancer-causing benefits. Dong Ling Cao (aka Rabdosia or Isodon Rubescens) has sourced two extracts that have killed cancer cells in preliminary tests. Shouldn’t teas made from the whole plant kill cancer better than some extract? Perhaps one would get even more benefit by eating the dirt the plant grew in also? What if they smoked it?

One whole subgroup present several times on the FDA’s 187 list is the potion generically called “Black Salve”. Black Salves have been clinically proven to cure certain types of skin cancer. Sure they are non-metastasized skin cancers that have a 100% cure rate after modern out-patient surgery, but the Black Salve’s cure them. This is why they are called an alternative to modern medicine.

The Black Salves cannot cure all the cancers that modern medicine can. There are a couple of side effects. Sometimes they are manufactured without active ingredients. Sometimes they contain random nastiness.

On the upside, they have been used for hundreds of years. Their use, like bleeding with leaches, predates modern medicine.

The black salves work by burning the skin off the area they are applied to. Because of this they are sometimes called corrosive salves. Sometimes they are named after their ingredients with names like “bloodroot black salve” or simply “bloodroot salve”.

Sometimes they do burn off a little more than the applied area, but this is easily blamed on the sensitivity of the patient instead of the effectiveness of the product. There is also the pesky problem of infection when one chemically burns open a necrotic sore while simultaneously smearing the wound with a concoction loaded with bacteria of questionable origin.

I’ve seen the photos people whose noses have melted off after the application of these alternative medicine products. I firmly deny the charge that I personally showed them to anyone and then told them not to pick their nose. The publication of those pictures is simply scare tactics by elitist doctors and lawyers.

And..y’know… they are a little scary.

Black and White

2011-07-15T02:52:00.000-06:00

When I was quite young I found discussions of magic thrilling. There were two types of magic in the world: Black (evil) magic and white (good) magic. One had to be careful to not invoke black magic by accident; both involved strange incantations and special effects.

Today I will be talking about the white beads harvested from the magic blender, and blackbody radiation. I may even talk a little about underwear.

After extensive searching I believe that the white beads are supposed to be a source of “far infrared energy” for the water. I looked at pictures of several PI-Mag-type devices, and saw white beads in some of them designated as far-infrared sources. A description of the magic blender gleaned from some Nikken-related site states:

“Contains pi-ceramics to help normalise pH and introduce far-infrared energy”

The far-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is usually defined as that with wavelengths between 15microns and 1 millimeter. This puts the far-infrared spectrum right up against the low part of the microwave spectrum. The far infrared spectrum is from about three hundred to almost twenty thousand gigahertz when expressed as frequency. However, some confusion exists in the FIR therapeutics community, and I have seen the spectrum for FIR given as 8-14 microns (which is mid-IR).

A quick search of health benefits from far-infrared energy yields an amazing amount of material. It may be that certain treatments using far-infrared radiation specifically generated from IR-LEDs could be of some use, but that has little to do with the little white beads in the magic blender. The white beads are ceramic beads designed to reflect FIR radiation back at the water. Here is an explanatory quote:

“Far Infrared Radiation(FIR) is only produced by properly activated ceramic materials radiating in selected spectra in the far infrared band.”

What this means is that the material is supposed to cause a spectral shift in the radiation it receives. The material absorbs several wavelengths of radiation, and then emits FIR. This is not a far-fetched concept. There are many compounds that have a defined absorption and emission spectrum.

Fluorescent compounds adsorb energy in the form of light (often UV), and then emit light of a much longer wavelength. Some fluorescent compounds are inorganic. Some naturally occurring rocks are strongly fluorescent. Why couldn’t there be a ceramic material that absorbed in the low-to-mid IR, and emitted in the FIR?

This is the basis of the claims made by an entire industry of FIR therapeutics. The lion’s share of FIR therapeutic devices are in the form of clothing. Yes, much of that clothing is underwear; one has to get the magic close to the skin.

My searches have not discovered any materials that absorb in the mid-IR wavelengths and fluoresce in the FIR wavelengths. Fluorescence is a very specific chemical property. The range of wavelengths that excite or are emitted by a fluorescent compound is very narrow. It is more likely that the absorption-emission coupling that the FIR hucksters are describing is the result of a much more general physical property called black-body radiation.

Black-body radiation could account for a shift of the reflected radiation to a longer wavelength. According to Wien's displacement law the wavelength maximum for a black body radiator is inversely proportional to the temperature of the black body. Since the underwear should be somewhat cooler than the body on which it is stretched it should emit at a slightly longer wavelength.

For the beads in the water unit to work this way the water would have to be at a higher temperature than the beads. I’m not sure how this would occur in the DPA.

A search of patents describing FIR brings up US patent 4,886,972 “FAR INFRARED EMITTING BODY OF A CORE MATERIAL COATED WITH AN ULTRAFINE POWDER”. This describes treating material (which could be fabric) with ceramic material to improve its ability to reflect FIR. This patent describes the ceramic material as having properties that are optimal because they are “very close to black body”.

The closeness to black body is the definition of the property called “emissivity”. The closer the emissivity of a material is to 1.0 the closer that material is to acting like a black-body radiator. Emissivity of some metals (like aluminum foil) can be as low as 0.05. Many ceramics have emissivities in the 0.95 range. The emissivity of human skin and cloth is also very close to 1.0.

One could greatly increase the emissivity of aluminum foil by coating it with ceramic, but not boxers (or briefs). This is of course assuming one’s boxers are not made of the same material as their hat.

There is also a question of magnitude of the effect. A quick calculation using Wien’s displacement law (and a standard value for the Wien’s displacement constant of 2,897,768.5 nm*K) shows that in order to shift the maximum emission wavelength by just over three microns one would have to soak one’s shorts in liquid nitrogen.

Still, despite these obstacles, the use of FIR energy clothing has shown tremendous benefits:

FIR therapeutic products are supposed to:

• relieve arthritis pain, such as rheumatoid arthritis, knee pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, and all kinds of chronic pains.
• aid the process of weight loss, wrinkle reduction and tissue regeneration.
• energize the body
• Increases metabolism
• Increases blood flow
• Reduces hypertension (high blood pressure)
• Reduces the chances of blood clots
• Improves the elasticity of arterial walls
• Flushes toxins from the lymph areas
• Reduces the acidity in our bodies (a more alkaline body is healthier)
• Improves the immune system
• Reduces pain associated with all types of Arthritis
• Increases the extensibility of collagen (fibrous protein constituent of bone, cartilage, tendon, and other connective tissue)
• Relieves muscle spasms
• Reduces joint stiffness
• Reduces edema (an accumulation of an excessive amount of watery fluid in cells, tissues, or serous cavities)
• Reduces exudates (substances oozing from the skin)
• Successfully used to aid weight control
• Reduces sinus congestions
• Reduces migraine pressures
• Relieved headache tension and pain
• Helps to heal skin burns & reduces scaring
• Reduces inflammatory skin conditions, like psoriasis
• Reduces Cellulite dimpling

The following is a disclaimer I ran across for some magic boxers:

All products helps in preventing, controlling and relieving various ailments. Results may vary from individual to individual depending on their age, body constituency and severity of ailment/s and toxin level in the body. No medicinal system gives guarantee on health products. Company recommends to use the products 3 to 6 months for cure. Curing time varies from person to person. But from our experience, 90 -93 % is the success rate and of course this is a miracle.

Which does sound miraculous…since they do say so themselves.

Tropical Shire

2011-07-12T06:17:00.000-06:00

It is unfortunate that so much talk of evolution by atheists appears to revolve around the question of just how much veracity evolution has. This detracts from the fact that the history of evolution tells a multitude of stories; the most recent stanzas of which are written in flesh and blood. There is a complex verse that sings the tune of the hominids to which we all sing harmony.

I’ve casually asked questions about the basic theory of evolution. I was first insulted by the false assertions of the Creation Research Society, and more recently by IDiocity. Is there a question to be asked? Is there a story to be told? Even the most detailed modern creation myths contain fewer extensible details than a Dr. Seuss book, and they lack the catchy rhymes. These myth tat strong questions exist about the basic theory of evolution tries to shout down productive and interesting discussions about the details of how evolution actually occurred. I find this state of affairs irritating.

Recently, while trying to watch a visually captivating film clip in the enterence to the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, a young man pushed past me, exclaimed that some "THEY" was ignoring god's truth, and stormed out. I almost followed him to get details about his "THEY", but there are fewer hours in the day than there are self-righteous fools.Instead I ventured further into the Hall of Human Origins.

The evolution of man is an unfolding narrative. Details help us understand who we are, and the details are wonderful. There are questions to be asked, and enticing mysteries. I was introduced to one of these mysteries recently.

People who are forced to defend the veracity of hominid evolution rarely talk about the enigma of the Australian aboriginal peoples. This is because the stories of the culture and descent of these peoples are hidden behind seemingly intractable enigmas. There is no clear line of evidence that does not stumble over some important detail. I think this makes their stories all the more amazing.

The IDiots avoid talking about the aboriginal peoples of Australia because what is known of their stories makes hash out of all creationist arguments.

The aboriginal peoples of Australia are the surviving members of the oldest continuous civilization on the planet. Their civilization is often estimated to be over 65,000 years old. This number is huge. Homo sapiens is believed to have descended around 250,000 years ago. The Australian aboriginal peoples have been a coherent culture for a length of time on the same magnitude of scale as Homo sapiens has been a coherent species.

Much of this time the aboriginal peoples have been isolated. They are thought to be descendants of people who migrated down the chain of islands that is now Indonesia to New Guinea. Once in New Guinea they crossed to the tip of Australia, and stayed.

Here is a picture of a likely migration path for the aboriginal peoples of Australia:

Possible Migration Path

Some of the multiple water crossings shown in the map might have been dry land during the migration. It is believed that ocean levels were low enough to dry out some, but not all, of the water crossings. Migrating people would have needed some way to cross over water in mass in order to migrate to Australia. The modern aboriginal people of Australia have no water-crossing technology; there is also no hint of such technology as far back as their history is documented. As far as modern aboriginal peoples of Australia are concerned they were never able to cross water en-mass.

If they had made even very primitive boats for the migration the technological advancement would have put them light-years ahead of any other people on the planet. Instead of that technology shaping human destiny they apparently forgot how to do it.

The widely accepted story is that the loss of seafaring ability was the cultural equivalent of blind cave fish losing their eyesight. Like caves Australia and the Indonesian islands have a unique variety of flora and fauna.

Australia is home to the kangaroo, the duck-billed platypus, the Koala, and way too many other specially adapted animals for me to comprehensively list here.

In the map I have colored the Indonesian island of Flores green. It is also home to a multitude of specially-adapted creatures including the spectacular Komodo Dragon. The fossil record of Flores speaks of a long history of unique animal forms. There was a dwarf elephant-like animal, and giant rats (there is still at least one species of giant rat living on the island). The fossil record of Flores has also yielded up many dwarf human remains.

Homo floresiensis (aka Hobbit-man) is the name given to the diminutive human remains uncovered on Flores. On average H. floresiensis was only about a meter tall. Dating the various remains suggests that H. floresiensis may have existed as a coherent population from around 100,000 years ago to perhaps as recently as 10,000 years ago. This means that H. floresiensis existed when the Australian aboriginal peoples migrated to Australia, or they were an offshoot of that migration event and developed their diminutive size due to isolation on Flores Island.

When species are isolated they often quickly (many generations fast) develop unique traits. Deviant size appears as a common early-acquired trait. Gigantism or dwarfism are often signature features of this so-called “island effect”. It is commonly held that the small size of H. floresiensis was due to a hominid island effect.

Why would H. floresiensis be isolated? Surrounding islands are close enough to see. Flores itself is so small as to exert some kind of migration pressure on its inhabitants. Local migrations of people occurred within the span of H. floresiensis existence. At some point H. floresiensis migrated, at some point they witnessed migration, the island was not nearly as difficult to migrate from as Australia, and there would have been regular reasons to at least partially migrate. How could island effect so effectively mold H. floresiensis?

As far as I know they have not uncovered any seafaring apparatus (like a boat) from the H. floresiensis finds. Did they also come by boat, and then forget what a boat was?

Was the isolation caused by cultural traits? Was there a belief system that caused these peoples to lose their tremendously advanced capabilities? Because these are relatively recent hominids the path of their development speaks more directly to specific features of our own abilities to create societies than most other narratives of natural selection, and how cool is that?

Stone-Age-Lizard-Ninjas

2011-07-11T21:17:00.002-06:00

In the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History there is a hall generously sprinkled with replicas of skeleton fragments from human ancestors. Most of the fragments are skulls. The skull replicas suggest the calcium-rich armor that protected that organ most closely associated with actually being human.

The resolution with which the fossil record currently describes the evolution of the human species is far greater than I realized. New named hominids have popped up since I last really looked at the hominid fossils. The narrative of human evolution is developing character and plot.

One area that the Smithsonian described as a subplot was a bit out-of step with the central narrative. That area is now called Asia. Someplaces in Asia there are Homo erectus fossilizing themselves over a million years ago. Somplaces in asia the delicate craniums of modern looking Homo sapiens have been dated at an astonishing 68,000 years of age.

There is one place in Asia where a strange divergent race of morphologically striking homonids emerged. That place is the island of Flores in Indonesia.

The Smithsonian display suggested that Homo floresiensis existed from 95,000 to 17,000 years ago. It further suggests that homonids existed on the island of Flores for 800,000 years.

If Homo floresiensis is evolved from hominids that migrated to Flores 800,000 years ago then they represent a divergence from Homo erectus. If Homo floresiensis emerged 95,000 years ago they represent a divergence from Homo sapiens.

Homo floresiensis had a much smaller brain cavity than Homo sapiens. One part, however, is similar in development. That is the areas that are used for recognition and cognition. Homo floresiensis would probably have been capable of culture. If the capability for culture was conserved during the tremendous selective pressure that shaped Homo floresiensis it must have had a selective advantage. Culture must have played a part in the divergence of Homo floresiensis from whatever its source stock was. If the source of Homo floresiensis was us (Homo sapiens) then the divergence of Homo floresiensis may speak to possibilities in evolution that can effect our world.

Flores is the source of some important culture. I played my way to a recent world record on an Angklung named after the island of Flores.

One of the more persuasive explanations for the divergence of Homo floresiensis is that island isolation drove the divergence. Culture can easily multiply the effects of natural isolation. The divergence of Homo floresiensis due to cultural isolation could be a compelling potential addition to the narrative of our ancestry.

I picture Homo floresiensis as a strange warlike human. In my mind they tip spears with tropical poisons, and ride komodo dragons into battle with trespassing Homo sapiens. The authoritative forces of their rigid tribal structure select for smaller and smaller brains. They become the perfect warriors. Stone-age-lizard-ninjas.

Somewhere in Indonesia a small band of Homo floresiensis which avoided the extinction of the rest of their species may still crouch in the dark jungles of Flores. They listen intently to the sounds of their modern cousins creating a world of amazing expression. They hear music for the first time while furtively glancing into the world of Homo sapiens. It is likely that they hear Homo sapiens playing the popular locally-made percussion instrument called the angklung.

The angklung is specially made to lure stalking intelligences out of the wild. It produces a lovely intoxicating sound.

I picture Homo floresiensis listening intently to a angklung ensemble playing “We are the World” because that is the song I played to secure the world angklung ensemble record on July 9th 2011.

Sweatin' to the Oldies

2011-07-10T21:06:00.000-06:00

Being very hard of hearing, and functionally tone deaf, has up till now limited my career as a musician. Despite these significant impediments I can today honestly describe myself as a world-renowned pioneering and award-winning musician.

My nascent career as an groundbreaking world musician began thousands of miles away from anywhere I have ever been. I picture the bamboo that would be crafted into the very angklung that would make me famous growing in black forest soil on a mostly wild Indonesian island. My angklung produces a single note, and is named after a single Indonesian island. The note was B-sharp, and the island was Flores.

The award I refer to is the world record for the largest angklung ensemble. The event I attended was the first ever attempt to set the record, and since there was no existing record to break we were a shoe-in for the record books. Someone suggested that this made the record less substantial; I prefer to think of it as pioneering new benchmarks for the progress of human culture as expressed in music. By one count there were 5,189 people involved in the effort.

The event took place on the expanse of poorly watered lawn that are the Washington Monument grounds. This is a great place for an event.

The record “attempt” was a key draw for the 2011 Indonesian cultural festival. One of the other big key events was a concert by “Air Supply”. I would miss the concert.

I was drawn to the Indonesian festival not by a desire to kick-start my musical career, but by a desire to get some lunch. I got some lunch that was quite good. It consisted of barbecued chicken on a stick coated in peanut sauce. The wait to get it was by any measure way too long, but it was made surreal by Washington DC July heat. I was so soaked in sweat that when I tried to put on sunscreen it foamed up like dishsoap.

There was a large professional stage where extremely perky announcers would gush over the accomplishments of each performer in an endless stream of dance troops and karaoke singers. Several of the karaoke singers were delicately attractive girls dressed in multilayered evening gowns. The gowns had long sleeves and neck-obscuring tall collars. The base layer looked like a quilted brocade. The top layer was a semi-transparent nylon shell with sequined patterns.

Twin jumbo trons captured the karaoke singers' exotic gyrations in practiced zoom and pan. The rock beat could have been produced by a three-piece band, but the organizers had opted for tape-deck instead. The singers attempted to marry traditional chant-like melodies to the electronic beat. In the thin heat that pretended to be breathable air the effect conjured images of small furry animals caught in a merciless geared industrial mechanism. They were whining in a terminus of pain. Whenever I glanced at the projected squealing pretty overdressed girls I would sweat a little extra.

There were dancing troupes in amazing oven-like costumes, and more perky banter. Then suddenly the stage was empty.

I still had a few minutes to wait for my food. One of the preparers was cutting bananas that she would coat in batter and deep fry. She did it with glacially slow precision. It was hypnotic. One cut, peal back a little more peal, place the knife against the banana, push it slowly through, peal some more.

I heard a strange trilling sound coming from some far-off place. It was beautiful. Someplace in it I could make out a song. It trailed off, and then started up again. The preparer must have been taking five minutes per banana; it was not food, it was art. I began to recognize the song. It was Bohemian Rhapsody.

I took my chicken on a stick (finally) across the festival grounds towards the National Klansman and noticed a second smaller stage On it was a group of people playing a bamboo percussion instruments hanging from black steel frames. A black-clad conductor wildly gesticulated in front of them while the performers would grab bits of their instrument and shake it vigorously. The band was rounded out with a small drum set and a bassist. The sound was exotic and danceable.

I could not completely make out the next song, but I knew it would be at home on a CD with some title like “greatest hits of the 80s”.

I was hooked.

Up on the main stage the perky announcers bantered about an “angklung world record”, and before I could figure out what this meant “Batala” -the amazing Brazilian drumming troupe- marched out. Always a treat their appearance was somewhat surprising at a festival named for a country roughly half way around the globe from the country that spawned their musical style. I discovered that despite the heat I had enough energy to bounce on the balls of my feet. I'm sure there was a breeze.

It was at this moment; soaked with sweat, driven by the primal beat of a few dozen drums, baked by a taunting sun, that I remembered a small (literally) bit of human ancestry from Indonesia that formed part of an interesting narrative.

Luckily I was just down the street from a place where I could get a little (literally) background information on it.

Interpol - Slow Hands by scootaway