Our Wacky World—6/7/2012

"Taking the Demon Test® may be the most important spiritual decision you make. This Test is the result of more than 30 years of research and thousands of hours in personal ministry with troubled souls. Through this vast experience we have been able to design this test so that we may quickly determine an individual's spiritual condition."

Demon Test

It seems as if everyone is dying this week. Now the "Trololo" guy has died. He was still kicking earlier this year. Meanwhile, FaceBook is zucking us up:

"I call this shift from the private to the public self 'digital narcissism.' Behind the communitarian veil of social media, we have fallen in love with ourselves. But this is a super sad love story. Because the more we self-broadcast, the emptier we become; and the emptier we become, the more we need to self-broadcast."

CNN

"The local Catholics spotted water dripping from a crucifix in Mumbai’s western suburbs. They eagerly lapped up the 'miracle water', thinking it had magical powers. Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association and Rationalist International, inspected the site and pinpointed the source of the water. A leaking toilet drain."

Secular News Daily

"The Catholic Church has released, for the first time in English, its rules for figuring out whether a claimed apparition of the Virgin Mary, or a message allegedly received from the Virgin Mary, is genuine or not."

Dispatches From The Culture Wars

Just another keynote address at a convention of skeptics and then...WTF??

How about a better spelling checker?

"A minute or so later, I had a 'wait… what?' moment, then flipped the card over and looked at it not peripherally to discover I had not been handed a business card, but a card with a naked photo of the two of them, with their information on how to contact them should I want to fuck."

Skepchick

"No writer who misspells 'vagina-desiccating' is safe in bringing up the notion of shame. Nor does his invention of this phrase show much familiarity with the vagina. I have never encountered a desiccated vagina in my life. Have you?"

Roger Ebert

"When Last activated the jammer, the ship went haywire. According to the electronic display on the ship's bridge, the Galatea was suddenly flying at Mach speeds over northern Europe and Ireland. Then alarms sounded. The ship's navigation backup – its gyrocompass – crashed, because it uses GPS to provide corrections. The radar did the same. Even the ship's satellite communications failed, because GPS points the antenna in the right direction. 'The crew were well trained and briefed, so they knew what was going on,' says Last. 'But, like us, they were surprised.'"

New Scientist

"This is starting to sound a lot like the Unification Church’s document called A Cloud of Witnesses, wherein they claim that the dead founders of all the world’s religions, along with nearly every great leader in history, met in the “spirit world” to declare that the Rev. Moon was the true savior of mankind. It’s one of the most insane things ever written, but this is just as crazy."

Dispatches From The Culture Wars

“When there is violence it’s going to be Jesse Jackson’s fault... It’s going to be Al Sharpton’s fault. It’s going to be Louis Farrakhan’s fault, and to a certain degree it’s going to be President Obama’s fault.”

CNN

"it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment by issuing specific commands to the industrial control hardware responsible for their spin rate. By doing so, both governments hoped to set back the Iranian research program—and the US hoped to keep Israel from launching a pre-emptive military attack."

Ars Technica

"Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. 'Things like that really, really, really annoy me,' fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful. 

"Last January, as he prepared to offer the class again, Kelly put the Internet on notice. He posted his syllabus and announced that his new, larger class was likely to create two separate hoaxes. He told members of the public to 'consider yourself warned--twice.' This time, the class decided not to create false Wikipedia entries. Instead, it used a slightly more insidious stratagem, creating or expanding Wikipedia articles on a strictly factual basis, and then using their own websites to stitch together these truthful claims into elaborate hoaxes."

The Atlantic

Don't bother, honey

"Karen Boyle, a microsurgeon who specializes in labiaplasty at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, has apparently seen an influx of patients suffering from troubling symptoms of a disorder -- a disorder! – that she says may be caused by their trendy skinny jeans. ...this disorder is called Meralgia Paresthetica, and while it doesn’t pose a significant health risk, it’s good to know the No. 1 culprit: Tight jeans. 'Skinny jeans can compress one of the nerves in the outer part of the thigh and cause symptoms of numbness, tingling and discomfort'"

HLN

"[Prince Charles] seems to think that the nation should be force-fed on alternative medicine today, while research into these treatments might be conducted some time in the future. I, on the other hand, have often pointed out that research has to come first; it should sort out the wheat from the chaff and, subsequently, we might consider integrating those treatments that demonstrably generate more good than harm. I therefore think that the FIH has become a lobby group for unproven and disproven treatments populated by sycophants."

No shit. (Science Based Medicine)

"The Pre-Symposium Event also includes a naturopath named Paul Sanders who is also a certified Classical Homeopath and completed his 'chelation board examinations' from the International College of Integrated Medicine in 1998. Horror of horros, [sic] I had no idea that such a thing existed as “chelation board examinations.” One might as well say that Sanders is board-certified in quackery, particularly if he uses chelation therapy for autism or heart disease. Oh, wait. He’s a naturopath and a homeopath; so I guess he’d be board-certified in quackery regardless of whether he uses chelation therapy in his practice."

Respectful Insolence

The truth and everything but the truth

It is often the case that "New Age" aficionados tend to drift from one thing to another, blithely ignoring the obvious disparity amongst then, now, and next. "Aliens", astral projection, refractive mineral specimens, necromancy, Chinese interior decoration, multiple mutually-exclusive systems of divination, bits and pieces of major and minor world religions, their own fevered imaginings and addictive fantasies of the End O' The World—in short, an admixture of unrelated and often incompatible beliefs, "lifestyles" and what passes with impunity as the truth, with the resultant collage, when viewed from a nominal distance, a shade of pseudo-color that can only be referred to as "brown".

In a mind-space where anything can BE at any given instant, practitioners of this wildly malleable yet mediocre art are often able to mix and blend within each other with remarkable ease. All the contradictions and pesky details are easily passed over; the lack of simple, basic clarity a given.

Fortunately for these highly mockable people there is the Internet, an unathoratative place where their disparate thoughts can coalesce into a false vacuum (Hawking radiation does not occur here; there is too much anti-gravity). Yesterday, I trained a long-jaundiced eye upon one of their hives of dissonance:

My Telekinesis

The sound you "hear" is that of unbridled ass, a form of noise that even the cleverest exponents of chaos theory have been unable to grapple. The shear variety of stuff at this crap-in boggles even the stoutest mind. Clicking a few links at random wanders you through a highly divergent, self-involved universe occasionally punctuated by threats of eternal damnation by passing followers of the cult of The Dead Man On A Stick™, who by definition know better than everyone else.

Others have remarked on this phenomenon. I quote from an article [dead link] by Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"The central, unexpressed tenet of the Butterfly Theory is that the truth is ever-elusive. Like a butterfly, it flits from place to place, alighting perhaps for a moment here but then skittering over to there, never setting anywhere. It exists but can never be caught; it is glimpsed but never known. It is not even necessary that it have any content, that there be any there there. Its function is simply to beckon, like the maguffin in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. What makes the beckoning irresistible to multitudes follows from a second tenet of the theory, that the truth, whatever it may or may not be in substance, utterly charms. It is particolored and it shimmers; it is lovely to behold and even lovelier to imagine beholding. 

"So sublime is the charm of this sort of truth that each glimpse of it rewards and emboldens the beholder as powerfully as might actual possession of another, more robust sort of truth by a more skeptical sort of seeker. Those who succumb to this charm do so not merely willingly but eagerly."

The link to the article quoted above is dead. PM me for a copy.

As "Bob" once said:

"The SubGenius wants no part of the "New Age," it is already here and it obviously sucks."—SubGenius® Pamphlet #1

Or kill me.

Our Wacky World—5/26/2012

Note: ScienceBlogs have been overhauled with WordPress and some old articles are now gone. Sorry for the dead links in past posts but it's beyond my control. Also, most of the pictures in this installment don't link to anything. Sorry.

It's been one year since the Harold Camping letdown. Where are his followers now?

'Another engineer I came to know had spent most of his retirement savings, well over a half-million dollars, taking out full-page newspaper ads and buying an RV that he had custom-painted with doomsday warnings. Even when I pressed, he wasn’t willing to admit any doubts about whether October 21 would really, finally, be it. “How can you say that when you see that all this beautiful information is in the Bible?” he asked me, his voice rising. “How can everything we’ve learned be a lie?”'

Religion Dispatches

"Some church members, who declined to give their names, defended their pastor... Another church member, who declined to give his name..."

CNN

Here's the damn video. Meanwhile...

"Orly Taitz has released her first campaign ad, which is four minutes long and apparently narrated by that chain-smoking woman you might expect to run into at a VFW hall."

Crazier than Pam Geller? You tell me.

The commander of Fort Bliss is an uninformed, uniformed dickhead:

"I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act. Soldiers who commit suicide leave their families, their buddies and their units to literally clean up their mess. There is nothing noble about suicide." 

"I am personally fed up with Soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us."

That's what I call supporting the troops. (CNN)

Moving along to our next dickhead...

"Rush Limbaugh was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians yesterday, but the whole affair seemed strangely cloaked in secrecy. The AM talker was ushered into an invite-only ceremony that took place behind closed doors inside the State Capitol's House chambers, "which were locked and guarded by armed members of the Missouri Highway Patrol while the ceremony took place," according to the Kansas City Star.  Democratic lawmakers were banned from the induction."

Media Matters

Guess what happened next?

"Crumbliss said the special security camera is serving a dual purpose. He said the House has been considering installing cameras in the chamber so that it can have live broadcasts of its session. The camera pointed at the Limbaugh statue outside the chamber can serve as a pilot project to test the resolution and quality of its picture, he said."

Bullshit. (Atlanta Journal)

'Listen to his laugh.  It resembles the flat “Ha! Ha! Ha!” that appears in comic-strip dialogue balloons. But worse – far worse – it is mirthless. Mr. Romney expects us to be amused, although he himself is not amused. Freeze the frame, cover the bottom of his face with your hand, and study his eyes. There’s no pleasure there, no amusement. Genuine laughter is triggered only by, and is completely dependent on, shared perception. That’s why we say we “get” a joke. 

'But Mr. Romney is too busy working to share anything – like the vaudevillian tapping so desperately that he’s covered with what performers call “flop sweat.” In rehearsal, I once heard a director say to an overeager actor, “Relax, you’ve got the job.” Now that Mr. Romney seems to have wrapped up the nomination, that counsel may apply here.'

NYmag

"Her distraught parents even called her GP more than 50 times about their daughter's ailing condition over a four-and-a-half month period before her death on January 6 last year. An inquest heard that her GP, Dr Sharad Shripadrao Pandit, accused her parents of "mollycoddling" her. Shockingly, he even claimed her symptoms were brought on because she was 'lovesick'."

Telegraph

"Six roasted fetuses covered with gold for black magic rituals were found in a Bangkok hotel room"

CNN

"We've never really understood the point of preparing to live through the Apocalypse. Isn't the whole point of being a believer during the Rapture is you'll get sucked up to Heaven while the heathens are left behind? Why would you want to stick around surviving anyway? Nonethless [sic], if you're of the inclincation [sic] to expect the world to end in the foreseeable future, we urge you to shop for your survivalist gear anywhere else but [pastor Jim] Bakker's site. Consider the following some tips to surviving the end of the world on a budget."

The Atlantic


There's a movement afoot in the US to make everyone nine months older:

"Clever lawyers might argue, if a person is charged with drinking, or for driving a car while a year under the legal age for such, that the defendant is actually nine months older than their stated age as mandated by the new amendment to their state’s constitution... How many lecherous dirty old men can escape justice by arguing in court that the girl was actually not seventeen but eighteen, after the days of gestation that preceded her live birth are added to her pre-constitutional amendment birth date to produce her true age?"

Blasphemous Blogging


Get ready for "no-kill" farming:

'“We are what we eat” rings even truer now that Chinese researchers discovered that molecules of rice survive the digestion process, enter the blood stream of animals and regulate the expression of mammalian genes. Violence against plants backfires, as it leads to violence against humans and against the environment as a whole, for instance when plants are genetically modified and made resistant to insects, pests or diseases. 

'Positively understood, the project of plant liberation would allow plants to be what they are and to realize their potentialities, often in the context of cross-kingdoms co-evolution. Inasmuch as humans and animals share the vegetal soul with plants, the potentialities of the latter are also ours, though often it is virtually impossible to recognize them as such.'

Dispatches From The Culture Wars


It sounds like there's a reason the cops said they only take cash:

'It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family's money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. "The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money," Williams says. "Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money."'

Huffington Post

'According to a 2010 piece in Fast Company, the trade journal of the breathless bullshit industry, the people behind TED are “creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.” Well! That’s certainly saying… something. (What it’s mostly saying is “This is a Fast Company story about some overhyped Internet thing.”) 

'To even attend a TED conference requires not just a donation of between $7,500 and $125,000, but also a complicated admissions process in which the TED people determine whether you’re TED material; so, as Maura Johnston says, maybe it’s got more in common with Harvard than is initially apparent.

'Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.'

Salon

You know, I've been wondering about TED. They've had some good talks—even Randi has turned up, doing his usual spiel—but I doubt we're going to see Henry Rollins. Or did he already do one? Damned if I know.

"He discovered my post, and things looked like a mildly interesting flame war was going to roast for a while. But then Yomin bizarrely leveled up, and began slinking around the web, making edits to my Wikipedia entry as well as posting on such venues as the RD.net’s old forum, saying things about me that crossed the line from the usual flaming and trolling into actual, legal defamation. I think the child molestation accusation was where I decided enough was enough, and I actually had my attorney file a libel and defamation suit. I later withdrew it on his advice once it was clear just how beyond the pale a personality Yomin was."

The Atheist Experience


Everyone's favorite ex-military chaplin on the gays:

“It is entirely possible — we know from the Bible, for example, when Jesus cast the devil out of Legion, he went into a herd of pigs,” Klingenschmitt said. “So, it is possible for demons or the devil to inhabit or invade animals just the same way they invade humans, and that causes the sin of lust.” 

“So, what you’re saying is, in humans it’s marketing that makes people gay; in animals, it’s the souls of gay humans who have invaded the animals,” Pacman [sic] replied. “That makes them gay?”

Raw Story

"Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing."

CNN

Somewhere, a bantha is weeping