Category Archives: Skepticism

Want smart independent kids? Stay away from Texas

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This is truly frightening. This is a direct quote from the official platform of the Texas Republican Party:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Yes, the Texas Republicans are officially opposed to teaching kids how to think critically. They want their children to blindly believe whatever they are told.

This is a blatant ploy to gain votes from the strongly religious, of which Texas has a great many. If from the time a student was born, he has people telling him that the Earth is 6,000 years old and humans and dinosaurs were around at the same time, we definitely don’t want his teachers to start “challenging the student’s fixed beliefs” by introducing stuff that contradicts that, like geology or paleontology or pretty much any other branch of science. If mommy and daddy tell you that evolution isn’t true and God did it all, well we wouldn’t want to “undermine parental authority” and have Junior go and start thinkin’ about it, now would we?

The fact that this is the Texan governing party’s official position and they want to make this law makes me weep for the children of Texas.

One reason I could never live in Texas. Well, this and the scorpions.

Planet-watching

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“I swear, this is the weirdest planet I’ve ever watched,” said Yargo as he rolled his chair back, shaking his head.

“Which planet is that?” asked Gren indifferently. The planet Gren was watching was in the early stages of a major war, and she didn’t want Yargo’s problems to distract her from watching it unfold.

“They call it ‘Earth’. Population about 7 billion, one moon, five or six big land masses plus a big chunk of ice at the bottom. You know the one – in the system with nine planets but they just decided they only have eight?”

“Oh, them,” said Gren. “Where that idiot Drood crash-landed a bunch of years ago?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. We got him and his kid out just before the humans found them. His kid was playing with some rocks when we got there and we just left them standing. Do you believe it? The rocks are still there and those nuts are still talking about it. They call it ‘Stonehenge’. Anyway, that’s not the weird part.”

Gren realized that Yargo wasn’t going to let it go until he told her about it, so she turned her monitor off and sat back. She closed her middle eye, as she always did when she was bored. “So what’s the weird part?”

Yargo sighed. “Their scientists have made so much progress over the past couple of their centuries. They’ve travelled to their moon, sent probes to the next planet out, and can send messages between any two points on the planet within seconds. Their doctors can take pieces out of one person and put them into another person and have both people survive. They’re slowly but surely starting to solve problems like hunger and disease, and they’re realizing that they’re slowly killing their planet with heat and are starting to do something about it, though they’ve got a ways to go on that one. They’re even taking some baby steps into the world of quantum physics.”

“Sounds like they’re making fairly standard progress. Cold fusion will likely be their next big discovery, right? So what’s weird about it?” asked Gren.

“They still have all the old superstitions that far more primitive societies have. Supernatural beings, healing people with magic, people who claim to see the future, all that kind of thing.”

“So? Lots of planets have different cultures that are at different levels of development.”

“But that’s the thing” said Yargo. “This is all within the same culture, the same country, often the same town. You could easily have a nuclear physicist living right next door to someone who makes a living convincing people that they have some kind of energy field flowing through their body and he can manipulate it and cure diseases. It’s the juxtaposition that’s the weird part.”

Oh, here he goes, thought Gren to herself. He’s using the big words. Means he’s getting all worked up. “But once their scientists figure out that there is no such energy field, all of that will go away. Happens all the time on planets all over the galaxy.”

“No!” exclaimed Yargo, clearly agitated now. “They have explained it! They know there’s no such energy field, but millions keep believing it anyway. They’ve done study after study and there’s zero evidence that this stuff works, but it’s still a huge industry. You wanna know the funny part?”

Not really, thought Gren, but she knew he was going to tell her anyway.

“There are people who believe that you can mix stuff in water and then keep adding water so many times that by the time you’ve finished mixing it, there’s none of the original stuff left. They believe that the water remembers the properties of the stuff and so it can be used as a medicine. The less of the original stuff in the water, the more effective it is.” Yargo laughed.

Gren got up and walked over to the foam machine. She poured herself a tall glass, her third of the morning. She looked at Yargo to see if he wanted one as well, but he was staring at his monitor again. She quietly made her way back to her station, hoping he’d just continue watching and stop his little rant, though she had to admit that this water memory thing was pretty funny. They’d heard some doozies over their years of planet-watching, but that was one of the more original ones. But she’d had enough of Yargo’s weird little planet. She wanted nothing more than to just watch the war while she enjoyed her foam. She flipped the switch and saw the screen come back on, then closed her middle eye again as Yargo continued.

“Early in most of these civilizations we watch, they can’t explain all kinds of natural phenomena, like lightning or tornados, or health-related things like diseases or even death. They have no idea what causes any of them, so they make up imaginary spirits and things like that.” Yargo waved his arms in the air, conducting an invisible orchestra. “Eventually they figure out what’s really causing these things and the superstitious thoughts are no longer necessary, so they get abandoned. Eventually, they look back and laugh at what their ancestors used to believe.”

“But these humans, I don’t get them. Their scientists explain things to the point where the magic isn’t necessary anymore, but people continue to believe it anyway. I think many of them understand that their beliefs and their science are disparate, but they manage to keep things separate in their minds anyway. But those people aren’t the problem. There are many who actively try to dissuade people from believing the scientists.”

That got Gren’s attention. She opened all three eyes and spun around. “What? Why? What’s the point of that?”

“Well, as I said some make their living selling this stuff. If you’re selling magic bracelets or ineffective “remedies” or energy field manipulation or whatever and scientists say it doesn’t work, you want people to believe you and not them otherwise you’re out of business, aren’t you?”

“So they’re all crooks?”

“Well, no. There are lots who honestly believe it really works, likely because the human brain is really weird. You can give people something that has no medicinal ingredients at all but if you tell them it does and they believe it strongly enough, it can actually have a real, measurable effect.”

Gren was really starting to find these humans interesting. Her war completely forgotten, she asked “Sorry, what? You can give them fake medicine and it works?”

“Yup.”

“So what the hell’s the point of having doctors?”

“Well, it doesn’t actually cure things, it’s more for temporary relief of symptoms. It doesn’t always work that well, and it works differently for different people, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. It’s weird.”

Gren laughed. “I imagine all of these energy field people would be out of work if human doctors knew about this.”

“They do know! They call it the ‘placebo effect’. They’ve been studying it for two hundred years. Many of them even know that this is what allows all of these so-called ‘alternative medicines’ to appear to work. But the people who believe in these supposed ‘therapies’ think the scientists and the medical community are in some kind of conspiracy to keep people sick.”

“What? Why?” said Gren again.

“They say it’s because the doctors make more money from the medicines they have than they would make from the cures they’re covering up.”

“That’s hilarious.”

“I know, right? So millions of scientists and doctors and nurses all over the planet are supposed to be involved in this huge co-ordinated cover-up to keep people sick. And they’re manipulating the results of every study done everywhere so that it looks like these alternative therapies don’t work and their expensive medicines and treatments do. And over the last hundred years, not one person has had a change of heart and stepped forward to expose the conspiracy.”

“Well, of course not,” agreed Gren, putting her foam glass down to avoid spilling it as she shook with laughter, “the doctors would have to kill them to keep them quiet, wouldn’t they? Probably arrange to have them overdose on that memory water! Or would that be ‘underdose’?”

Gren and Yargo continued to laugh until their boss stuck his head in the doorway. “Everything OK in here?” he asked, unsmiling.

“It’s all good, boss”, said Yargo as he rolled his chair back to his station.

Gren went back to her screen, watching the war continue, wondering whether the people on Yargo’s planet made any more sense than the ones killing each other on hers.

Decoded: Brad Meltzer’s Decoded

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Recently we happened upon a TV show called Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, which was about Fort Knox and what may or may not be inside it. The idea of the show was to take a critical look at Fort Knox, visit it, and talk to people involved to see if they could figure out what’s inside. They investigated rumours that all the gold that was originally in the vault is now gone, but they maintain the security to make people think it’s still filled with gold because otherwise chaos would erupt. The show was certainly entertaining, and we all enjoyed it.

It turns out that this is a series which just began its second season. Each week they investigate something different, and we’ve watched three or four of them now. As a skeptic, I was excited by this. Perhaps this would be TV’s first show to investigate these kinds of rumours and urban legends from a truly skeptical point of view – a TV version of the Skeptoid podcast. There have been other shows that claimed to investigate these types of things, but they generally sensationalized what they were investigating and ignored the scientific method. I’ve seen a number of shows that start by assuming rumours to be true and then decide that because they failed to disprove them, they must be true. That’s not how it works. A prime example is a show called Ancient Aliens, which Ryan and I watched a few weeks ago. I will have to get to that one in another article, which means I’ll have to watch the show again. It may be difficult to write through the fits of laughter I will undoubtedly have at what they called “evidence”.

Brad Meltzer is an author who writes political thrillers as well as comic books. I had never heard of him until this show – or didn’t think I had. A couple of weeks after we first watched the show, my son was looking over our “bookshelf of books we hope to read someday if we ever find some free time” and found a book of his called The Tenth Justice. I don’t even know where it came from. Anyway, Meltzer only appears in the show in front of a green screen showing weird symbols (including the phrase “U83R L33T H4X3RS”) and on the phone. He has a team of three investigators (a lawyer, a historian, and an engineer) who do the real work, travelling around the country (and across the globe – they were in Germany in one episode) visiting places, doing research, and interviewing people.

They do manage to find people who were really involved in the things they’re investigating. When talking about Edgar Allen Poe’s connection to the Declaration of Independence, they talked to a distant relative of Poe’s. They talked to General George Patton’s granddaughter as well as descendants of both Billy the Kid and the man who killed him, Pat Garrett. They talked to the national head of the KKK (and you could see the discomfort on their faces as they interviewed him). They talked to someone who’s actually been inside the vault at Fort Knox, or at least claimed to have been. They talked to the last living person who helped carve Mount Rushmore. But sometimes their interview choices are less useful, like the head of some fringe conspiracy theory group. One time they interviewed the bartender at a bar near Fort Knox, and another patron happened to overhear and offered up his own theories.

In one or two episodes, I found that Meltzer seemed to be sensationalizing a bit – he’d say something like “We’ve learned that x happened” when we’d learned nothing of the sort. We’d heard someone say that X happened, or we’ve perhaps surmised it, but he seemed to jump to “learned” a little too quickly for my liking. But most of the time, they do a pretty good job of ignoring the rumours and meaningless “evidence” and taking the anecdotal evidence with the appropriate grain of salt. I was impressed that after investigating the death of General George Patton (there have been theories that he was murdered ever since he died in a car accident in 1945), one of the crew basically stated the null hypothesis – that unless we have compelling evidence proving otherwise, we must assume that the accident that killed Patton was just an accident.

Unfortunately, they don’t always find what they set out to find. This is not a failing of the show; sometimes the required information is just not available. We still don’t know what’s inside Fort Knox. We still don’t know where the original Declaration of Independence is. We still don’t know whether Billy the Kid was actually killed by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner. But some things do seem to have been dug up. For example, General George Patton died in a car accident, but the soldier who was at fault in the accident was never charged and there was no autopsy. This led conspiracy theorists to suspect that he was murdered, and some nutcases extremists even suspected it was done at the command of Dwight Eisenhower. But after the investigation, it was discovered that Patton himself ordered that the man at fault not be court martialled, and that his wife requested that there be no autopsy. The cynic in me wonders if these things were truly “discovered” by Meltzer’s team and weren’t previously known, or if they just set up the episode to make it look like they’d discovered it.

My kids and I are enjoying Decoded, so we’ve set up the PVR to record new episodes. The boys also like to listen to Skeptoid, which I encourage. I’m happy to play my part in raising the next generation of critical thinkers. Unfortunately, the History channel won’t let us watch episodes from season 1 online, though it does give a helpful link so that I can buy them from iTunes. It’d be nice if History would get with the times and let us watch past episodes online like many other channels and networks do. Hey Brad Meltzer – decode that.

Legalized magic

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There is a piece of legislation in Ontario whose mere existence has me baffled. Essentially, it allows people who perform acts of magic to give themselves a title and makes it illegal to give yourself that particular title without being licensed to do so. This is like my having the ability to call myself a frobshmirtzer because I can talk to invisible aliens from the planet Frob, but if you try to call yourself a frobshmirtzer, you will get fined. I don’t have to prove or even demonstrate that I can talk to such aliens, or even that they exist. I can just say that modern science doesn’t have the right tools to be able to detect these aliens but trust me, I can. The government has decided that someone calling themself a frobshmirtzer without having this ability is somehow against the public good, so they have outlawed it. Only in this case, the word isn’t frobshmirtzer, it’s “acupuncturist”.

I did a fair bit of research for this article. I look around for studies that examined the effectiveness of acupuncture, and found many that showed that it was completely ineffective, or at least no more effective than placebo. There are special tools that can be used to simulate the needles without actually inserting them into the skin (amusingly called “sham acupuncture”), and there are studies that show that sham acupuncture is just as effective as “real” acupuncture. There are studies that show that inserting the needles into random places on the body, rather than the magic acupuncture points, is also just as effective. I did find a number of studies that showed it to be very effective in certain cases, but those studies were either done by or funded by agencies that were associated with holistic medicine and therefore had a vested interest in positive results. I’m afraid that a study showing how effective acupuncture is does not carry much weight with me if it was done by the Department of Holistic Wellness at a Chinese university.

But I have to be honest here. I also found a few studies that showed it to be effective without any obvious bias in the study or flaws in how it was done. Now, I’m not a trained scientist, so I can’t always look at a study and see what was done wrong; it’s possible that these studies had biases (obvious, unintentional, or well-hidden) in them or other problems that discount or completely invalidate the results. I don’t know for sure, so I have to take them at face value. But whenever I hear about such a study on one of the several skeptical podcasts I listen to, the podcasters (who are trained scientists) point out the flaws in the study. Long story short: if there have been peer-reviewed clinical trials showing the effectiveness of acupuncture whose results have been analyzed and repeated by other researchers (none of whom have any conflicts of interest), mainstream science hasn’t seen them.

Can I say with absolute certainty that acupuncture never works better than placebo? No, of course not. What I can say with absolute certainty is that nobody has ever given a scientifically plausible explanation of how it works that is consistent with what we know about the human body and doesn’t resort to special pleadings about undetectable energy fields. At best it is an unproven and controversial practice. To me, it is appalling that there is an Ontario law that gives it credence and treats it like a perfectly valid and accepted form of medical treatment.

The legislation in question is called the Traditional Chinese Medicine Act, 2006. It’s a fairly short act that essentially does the following:

  • defines “traditional Chinese medicine” as “the assessment of body system disorders through traditional Chinese medicine techniques and treatment using traditional Chinese medicine therapies to promote, maintain or restore health.”
  • establishes a body called the “College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario”
  • authorizes members of the College to perform acupuncture and to give “a traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis identifying a body system disorder as the cause of a person’s symptoms using traditional Chinese medicine techniques”
  • states that only members of the College can call themselves “acupuncturist” or “traditional Chinese medicine practitioner” and lists the penalties

This act seems to be a work in progress – five years later, the College has not yet been created. The government has created The Transitional Council of the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario, whose goal is to “develop regulations and establish the College“. One thing I found amusing on their web site was that one of the standards they plan to create is to define “what are considered acts of professional misconduct“. How do you define professional misconduct in an industry that is entirely based on fallacy?

I do not believe that all acupuncturists are charlatans, liars or cheats. I’m sure many of them, likely even the majority, honestly believe that what they are doing is effective. The placebo effect is very powerful, and confirmation bias is very difficult to see through. You likely know people, or perhaps you’re one yourself, who have gone to a psychic and come away saying “wow, she really nailed it!” Then they can tell you ten facts the psychic said about that person that were exactly right. Did they mention, or do they even remember, the other thirty facts that she got wrong? “I’m hearing a name, a woman’s name. Marcie? Marge? Margaret? Mary?”  “Yes, I have an Aunt Mary who died two years ago! Wow, it’s amazing how she knew that!” She only got 25% of her guesses right and you think she did a great job. That’s confirmation bias. It’s highly possible that an acupuncturist will unintentionally take credit for those patients who seem to be positively affected by acupuncture, and dismiss those for whom acupuncture does not work as the anomalies, saying “well, it doesn’t work for everyone”.

I am angered by the fact that our government has wasted time and money discussing the “issue” of non-registered acupuncturists and coming up with a plan to register them. Acupuncturists make their living inserting needles into people’s bodies and telling them it will heal them, when everything we know about medicine tells us that it can’t work, and countless studies show that it doesn’t. This practice, according to the Ontario government, is OK. But calling yourself an acupuncturist when you’re not licenced to do so is illegal and you will be subject to a fine of up to $25,000 for a first offense. This is so ass-backwards that it makes my head spin.

9/11 was an outside job

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I watched a YouTube video recently called Loose Change. This is one of the most popular 9/11 conspiracy videos out there. The description of the video on the YouTube page is as follows:

For anyone who still has doubts about 911, weigh out the facts and the overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the reality that the events of 911 were one big set-up.

This exposes the lies, disproving every aspect of the bogus 911 commission report put forth by the corrupt government.

Judge for yourselves, but investigate the facts and evidence before jumping to a conclsuion [sic].

The video is about an hour and twenty minutes long. The film is professionally shot and edited, and there are a number of computer animations which are also professionally done – what I mean by that is that it looks good. This is not something done in the basement with a hand-held video camera by some conspiracy theory nut. The film states and attempts to prove that all of the terrible events of September 11, 2001 – the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the airliner crashes at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania – were designed, orchestrated, and then covered up by the American government. It contains descriptions of physical evidence, scientific discussions, and interviews with witnesses, firefighters, airline industry spokespeople, and scientists.

It is also complete and utter horseshit.

There are numerous web sites out there (here, here, here, here, here) that address the claims made in the film in great detail, some of them point-by-point, so I’m not going to do it here. Suffice it to say that the makers of this film get many facts wrong, misinterpret facts and evidence (whether accidentally or intentionally), and use many of the standard logical fallacies including straw men, observational selection, appeals to ignorance, and red herrings.

For me, the most damning evidence that this whole conspiracy theory is wrong is the lack of whistleblowers.  If this were a government plot, the number of people that would have to have been complicit is immense. The people that flew the airliners (who must have been OK with a suicide mission). Pilots that fired the missiles at the Pentagon. Demolitions experts that planned and planted the explosives. Air traffic controllers and other staff at the airport in Cleveland (where United flight 93 landed in this scenario). Communications experts who faked all of the cell phone calls from flight 93. There must have been some firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other first responders that were in on it, so they could hide or destroy evidence of the explosives if any was found in the rubble. Many experts in many different fields to come up with ways that this could all happen but still look like a terrorist plot. The President of the country. Numerous senior members of the armed forces, CIA, and FBI. Who knows how many other members of the Executive Branch as well as advisors and assistants. There would have to be people whose job it is forever to ensure that any evidence found in the future is covered up, and witnesses and others involved in the conspiracy paid off or killed. We’re talking about hundreds of people here.

If this was a government plot, the majority of the people I listed above must have known about the plan, or at least part of it, beforehand and agreed with it. None of them had any trouble planting bombs in the iconic twin towers in downtown Manhattan that have hundreds of thousands of people going through them every day. None of them had a problem with firing a missile into the Pentagon. Even if they didn’t know about the attacks or agree with them beforehand, they’ve had plenty of time since then to realize what they were a part of and reflect on their role in this event. But in the ten years since the attacks, not one person has had a change of heart and come forward. Perhaps the American government has had each and every one of them murdered in such a way that their friends and families didn’t suspect murder. If that’s the case, why hasn’t the government just killed the makers of this film for revealing the truth?

The funny part is that the conspiracy theorists describe the most complicated conspiracy ever conceived, which was apparently pulled off to perfection, and at the same time point to many mistakes that the conspirators made and clues that they left behind. So they’re saying that the most evil government conspiracy ever was pulled off by a bunch of incompetent boobs.

There was no government conspiracy to kill American citizens on September 11. The attacks were pulled off by a bunch of Islamic extremists who hijacked four airliners. That, my friends, is the 9/11 truth.

Tara the Medium

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I was perusing a skeptoid.com article recently (see also my review of the Skeptoid podcast), and Google’s ad selection algorithm decided that since the article was about the paranormal, I would probably like to see ads for paranormal services. Logical to some extent, since the Google algorithm couldn’t easily detect that the article was debunking the particular paranormal event it was discussing. Anyway, one of the ads was for Tara the Medium, which, as it turns out, was not a Queen of England who was not particularly tall or short. Tara is a psychic (at www dot tara dash medium dot com1) and offered a free psychic reading, and I’m not one to turn down something valuable that I can get for free.

1 – I’m listing the URL but intentionally not including a link to the site so she gains no pagerank from this article.

Tara is apparently a “special case, even in the occult field”. She is a “pure psychic”, unlike other types of hybrid psychics I suppose. Her bio page says that she was born on August 8, though no year is given. She also talked about another event, her first “vision”, which happened on February 27, but again no year. How does knowing these dates with no years give me any information at all, other than the ability to send her a birthday card? She was trained by an unnamed “Western Spirit Master”, and is now so powerful that she can do reading of people she’s never met or even seen, as long as she knows their date and time of birth and their email address. I was not aware that my email address was somehow connected to me spiritually, but who am I to argue with the spirits? (Yes, I know the email address is only necessary so she can contact me. But that’s not as funny.)

Despite this being a free reading, there are some terms and conditions. Here are some of the more interesting ones. Note that “The Company” refers to “the company selling the offers found on the website www. tara-medium. com.

  • “The Company offers no commitment regarding the actual unfolding of the events mentioned on the website or affiliated emails.”
  • “The texts provided by the www. tara-medium. com website and affiliated contents cannot be regarded as advice provided by recognized regulated professions like legal, medical or psychological advice.”
  • “If the User is suffering from a specific illness or problem (legal or juridical), he or she should consult a professional suited to that problem as soon as possible.”
  • “The Company may not be held liable for any breach of contract in case of force majeure, including but not limited to: war, catastrophe, fire hazard, strikes, power failure or breakdown, and more generally any event that would not allow for the proper processing of the orders.” – Why not? Surely a pure psychic like Tara can see these things coming.

“The Company” is called Astroway, based in Hong Kong. I did a search on them and found a complaint on complaintsboard.com. (This by itself means nothing – regardless of how great your company is, someone is going to complain.) This guy had dumped in more than £750 (over $1100 Cdn as of mid-July 2011) before deciding that Tara wasn’t giving him anything except “a load of false predictions and plausible stories”. There was a comment on the posting from someone saying that Tara was running a psychic scam (note that “psychic scam” is redundant). The commenter gave some suggestions on who to complain to, although “the appropriate bodies in you [sic] relevant country” is not very helpful. But his credibility went right out the window when he tried to be more helpful by saying “I found a really good psychic at [some other site]”.

I sent in my request for a free reading on Friday evening, June 24th 2011. I received my reading (via an email link to a web page) two days later on June 26th. (I received another email the next day saying that she was surprised that I hadn’t looked at it yet, which was strange since I had.) The reading was far longer than I expected, and rather than include the entire thing in this article, I’ve copied it here and added some comments. As I said the reading is quite long so you may not want to read the whole thing but just skim it for my comments, which are easy to find in blue boxes throughout. Same goes for the subsequent emails she sent me later – more details on those below.

Here are the main points of my reading:

  • She spent 13 hours on my reading
  • There will be a decisive turning point in my life on July 25, 2011 (give or take a couple of days). This is one month from when I received the reading.
  • The three months after this date will be the most important of my life, followed by three more very good months.
  • She detects in me “unbounded magnetic power, along with extraordinary strength and exuberance”.  
  • She says “You radiate your amazing magnetism with so much force that people perceive it even long after you’ve left”. [I’m sure that those of you who know me personally are nodding right now.]
  • I have “often violent and destructive anger”. [Again, those of you who know me personally are nodding. But don’t let me catch you nodding, or I’ll kick your ass.]
  • I have remarkable “energy, vitality, endurance, and resistance”.
  • I am “too egocentric to be able to love someone absolutely”.
  • I should “learn to take things easier and not be too aggressive” or it will spark my violent anger.
  • My lucky numbers are 1, 9, and 10.
  • I have a huge potential for luck and unexpected money, and yet bad luck is unjustly affecting me.
  • The sun is my dominant planet (despite it not being a planet at all). It has provided me with numerous lucky occasions but I couldn’t take advantage of them because no one was there to help me. [Thankfully, now I have Tara!]
  • I have Unlimited Inner Power [note proper capitalization] that I “totally ignore and make no use of at all”.
  • A person who is envious of me may try to direct harmful unlucky vibrations at me. [This person is obviously unaware of my “violent and destructive anger”.]
  • I will be getting enough money over the three month period starting July 25 that I will never need to worry about money ever again.
  • She can tell me all the decisions I will have to make and what to do, which games to play to maximize my winnings, and what “interesting encounters” I will have, with whom and where, and if they will be favourable or if I should avoid them.
  • She has helped many famous people to be more successful, but she’s not naming names (for their privacy, you know).
  • She’s willing to give me “the most complete, detailed and precise astral reading of [my] entire life”.
  • If I’m not completely satisfied, I can send her an email and she’ll refund my money, no questions asked.
  • As a free gift, I’ll receive a “magic wish-fulfilling pentacle”, which “seems to be impregnated with a mysterious secret that contains  powerful astral forces” and “is reputed to trigger the rapid  realization of your secret wishes”.

To get my complete astral reading, all I have to do is fill out a questionnaire. Oh, and send some money to cover her costs. The questionnaire contains 14 yes/no questions such as “Do you tend to regret your past?”, “Are you sometimes afraid of your future?”, and “Do you sometimes doubt your abilities?” These are utterly useless questions since anyone who doesn’t answer “yes” is a liar. She asks for “a small contribution of only $CAD99.00 (instead of the usual $CAD178)” though she gives no reason for the discount. I would love to continue down this road and see how accurate my personal DATED ASTRAL READING OF LUCK AND MONEY is, but sorry dear reader, I’m not paying $99 for it. If anyone would like to send me $99 via Paypal, I will use it to pay for my reading, but otherwise I’m afraid my professional relationship with Tara the Medium is at an end. But if you’re thinking of sending me the $99, please, read on first.

Now, someone who believes in psychics is likely to look at their reading and focus on things that are correct, ignoring statements that are wrong, and then manage to convince themselves that the psychic who got two right guesses out of twenty “nailed it”, at which point I would point out the error of their ways. As a skeptic, it’s likely that I’m doing exactly the opposite: focussing on things that she got wrong and dismissing what she got right as coincidence. Perhaps the truth, as it so often is, is somewhere in the middle. But Tara did say that she “can see the future of someone accurately, 97% of the time”, so I would have expected a lot more hits and very few misses. As it happens, there was a bunch of stuff that’s true about me but it was all vague enough that it could be said about anyone.

There wasn’t one single thing in my reading that made me think “wow, how did she know that?”, and certainly nothing compelling enough to warrant spending $99 for another reading.

Tara Follows Up

On July 2nd, six days after receiving the reading, I received another email with a link to a different page, which I have copied here, again with comments. On July 6, another one, copied here. There aren’t that many comments in the third one, because it doesn’t contain any information that wasn’t in the second one, and the second didn’t contain much that wasn’t in the first. On July 12th, I got yet another email (which she resent again on the 14th), in which she offers me my DATED ASTRAL READING OF LUCK AND MONEY for only $CAD79.00 instead of $99, though again she doesn’t state why she’s giving me this discount. To those of you who were considering giving me the $99 via paypal, great news! I just saved you $20! You’re welcome.

But wait, there’s more! On July 18th (shortly after I was considering posting this article), I got another email. Not only did this one reduce the price again to $69 (another $10 in your pocket, dear reader!) but there was no mention of the July 25th date. This time, she knows the exact amount of money I’m going to win ($9600), and the date is now August 24th. And the cheque will come in a yellow envelope. I’m no psychic, but I could have predicted that as we approached July 25th and I still hadn’t paid anything, the date would change.

I’m assuming that she’ll give up on me at some point because it will eventually become obvious that I’m not going to partake. Watch my twitter feed and facebook page on July 25th and August 24th to see what kinds of wonderful things happen to me. But if nothing spectacular happens on those days, you gotta know that it’s entirely my own fault, for not having given Tara the opportunity to help me. I will also update this article periodically if I continue to get more emails from Tara.

Let’s get serious

I’ve had a good laugh with this whole thing but just underneath the surface, I’m quite angry. I keep referring to Tara as a she, but I doubt anyone named Tara is actually involved here. It’s probably a whole staff of writers who have experience with human psychology and how to manipulate people. The thing that makes me angry is how much work went into my “reading” and the subsequent emails. Granted, they are very likely form pages with “insert name here” and “choose random planet” and stuff like that. But nobody is going to put all of that together to make a few hundred bucks off a handful of gullible people, which tells me that they are likely making tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. All they have to do is provide people with meaningless drivel about the astral plane and positive energy and negative vibrations and all of that bullshit, and they will find people who believe it and are willing to part with their money just so they can be told exactly what they want to hear. “You’ve had bad luck and problems with money (or you wouldn’t be on this web site), but it’s not your fault – someone else is to blame and if you give me some money, I can prevent them from getting in the way of your rightful happiness.” Some people will pay the money, receive the fake readings, and be quite happy. Others will realize that they’re being scammed, but by the time they realize that she is not telling them anything actually meaningful, she already has their money.

Dear Tara: You can shove your DATED ASTRAL READING OF LUCK AND MONEY right up your astral plane.

Update – July 25: Got another email from Tara, and the price was reduced again to $59.

Update – August 3: Got two more. One on my birthday and another on August 1. The price is now $49.

Update – August 5: Another one – this time with a 3-day deadline. Down to $29. The price is low enough now that I’m actually considering paying it just to see what happens next, but I know better.

Update – August 11: Another one, this time with an offer for a “Great Magical Intervention” for only $39.

Update – September 2: Another offer from Tara, this time she’s promising $100,000 or more, if I pay $29.95 for a Active Magic Thought ritual. This will likely be the last offer from Tara, since I have finally clicked on the “if you don’t want to receive further offers, click here” link.

Skeptoid

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I recently discovered my new favourite podcast – Skeptoid. From the web site: “Skeptoid is a weekly science podcast dedicated to furthering knowledge by blasting away the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture, and replacing them with way cooler reality.” Host Brian Dunning created this podcast back in 2006 and has done over 250 episodes. Each is 8-12 minutes long and covers a single topic such as an unexplained phenomenon (like spontaneous human combustion), outrageous claims (“ionized bracelets” will cure all your ills), urban legends (plastic water bottles leech poison into the water), conspiracy theories (doctors and researchers cover up cures for diseases because it’s in their best interest to keep people sick), and pseudoscientific alternative medicines (diluting a tiny drop of toxin billions of times until there’s none of the toxin left in the solution will cure all your ills). Dunning investigates each topic, its history, the claims made by its supporters, and most importantly, its scientific plausibility.

Note that the idea of this show is critical thinking, meaning thinking for yourself, using proper scientific procedures to investigate and evaluate these claims, not attempting to prove or disprove a preconceived notion. The idea is not “anything mystical or supernatural is bullshit”, and he does not begin a podcast on such a topic by assuming that it’s bullshit. It may appear that way though, because pretty much all of the mystical or supernatural claims he’s investigated have been bullshit shown to be either wrong or untestable.

Something that should seem obvious but wasn’t at first is the first question he asks about any phenomenon. When talking about some unexplained phenomenon, the first question is not “how does it work” or “how do we explain it”, as I would have expected. The first question is “does it actually happen?” There’s no point in trying to come up with a scientific explanation for something if there’s no evidence that it’s ever happened. How is it possible for a human body to suddenly burst into flame? Well, who cares how if it’s never happened? You also need to watch out for implicit assumptions – trying to answer the question “is there a curse on King Tut’s tomb?” assumes the existence of curses. But “have an inordinate number of people involved with the opening of King Tut’s tomb died under mysterious circumstances?” is a valid question which can be investigated.

Things I’ve learned from skeptoid thus far:

  • Homeopathy is hogwash (I already knew that)
  • Astrology is hogwash (that too)
  • Most “near death experiences” can be explained by a lack of oxygen to the brain. People who experience oxygen deprivation but are in no danger of dying report extraordinarily similar symptoms.
  • No documented cases of spontaneous human combustion that cannot be explained by a normal fire followed by slow burning have ever occurred
  • Nostradamus was a noted plague doctor who made lots of predictions that were no more reliable than anyone else’s at the time. There has never been a case of a specific incident predicted by Nostradamus that later came true.
  • The people who were involved with the opening of King Tut’s tomb didn’t die of unusual circumstances with any higher frequency than any other group of people
  • Your hair cannot turn white because of stress or something frightening
  • Reading in the dark will not hurt your eyes
  • You do not need to drink eight glasses of water a day
  • Subliminal advertising does not work. The famous experiment where ads were displayed during movies for a fraction of a second and a huge increase in concession purchases was seen never happened.
  • Nothing toxic leeches from plastic water bottles
  • You can’t die from “skin suffocation” by painting your entire body. Even if you paint it gold.
  • Claiming that a health product is effective because it’s “all natural” is meaningless. Cyanide, salmonella, and E. coli are all natural; Tylenol is not.
  • Chiropractic was invented over 100 years ago by a man who had never been to medical school. It was based on “innate intelligence”, a spiritual essence that flows through the body and can be affected by magnets and spinal manipulation. Many chiropractors no longer believe this, but they are essentially unlicensed physical therapists. Chiropractors are not medical doctors and cannot write prescriptions.
  • In a crisis, a rush of adrenaline can give you more strength than you would usually have, but it cannot give you “super-human” strength, eg. enough to lift a car.
  • Aspartame is not a government mind-control drug, nor does it cause multiple sclerosis or any other disease

A couple of the episodes I especially liked were the ones on logical fallacies – describing the straw man argument, appeal to authority, ad hominem attacks, slippery slopes, and the excluded middle. I have to admit that I’ve used some of those same types of arguments myself from time to time, so it was good to get a description of what they are, how to recognize them, and why they are not useful. In fact, they’re worse than “not useful”, they’re actively counterproductive. If you resort to one of these logical fallacies in your arguments, it’s likely that you don’t have a strong position to begin with, making your argument look even less compelling.

When you do a podcast with over 100,000 listeners talking about how a particular alternative medicinal practice cannot possibly have the effect that it’s claimed to, someone will inevitably send you an email telling you how that particular practice saved him or someone he knows from certain death, and it’s too bad you’re so closed-minded. Dunning gets lots of these, and every now and again he reads and responds to them in a show. His responses are generally funny, but can be snarky and disrespectful, and sometimes downright mean and insulting. You can hardly blame him though, considering the insults he receives. He even did an episode on who’s more closed-minded – the skeptic or the true believer? The answer: both. And neither.

I haven’t even mentioned the biggest debate of all – creationism vs. evolution. I’ve written on this topic in the past, though not in a few years. In general, Dunning’s biggest problem with creationism is the faulty arguments many creationists use against evolution: “It’s just a theory”, “it can’t explain the eyeball”, “life has never spontaneously been created inside a jar of peanut butter“, etc. Some arguments against evolution are laughingly silly: “Evolution is wrong because atheists believe it, and we know that Hitler was an atheist” (which he wasn’t). “Evolution is wrong because it doesn’t explain how galaxies and stars formed.” Even the unbelievable “evolution is wrong because some evolutionary scientists are overweight“. And of course, there’s the “excluded middle” argument – either evolution or creationism is “right” and the other is “wrong”. These are not the only two options – perhaps God created the initial building blocks of life and let them evolve. Not to mention that evolution is a fact. We know it happens. It has been observed in laboratories. The claim that there is debate among scientists is false – there is no debate.

OK, I was wrong. The faulty arguments against evolution are not Dunning’s biggest problem with creationists. His biggest problem with creationists are the so-called “young earth” creationists, who believe that the Bible is literally true and scientifically accurate. The earth was created in six 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. Humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Carbon dating (and geology in general) is wrong. Take any piece of actual science that contradicts this and throw it out and say “God did it all”. When a scientist shows you scientific proof that you’re wrong, just tell them that “God did it in such a way that all your tests are invalid.” And who’s closed-minded?

So what?

You may say “What’s the harm? So some people believe that an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell in the 1940’s. Even if they’re wrong, so what?” and in that particular instance, and many others, you would be right. But one of Dunning’s biggest pet peeves is alternative medicine. If you pay big bucks for some “detoxification” pills that have no actual medicinal value, you’re getting ripped off by a scam artist. Even worse, if you believe that every illness you have is caused by undetectable misalignments in your spine preventing some undetectable mystical field from flowing freely through your body, you may decide that seeing a chiropractor is of more value to you than seeing an actual doctor. If I had used alternative medicine instead of going to the hospital when I had my pancreatitis attack in 2010, I would be dead. My mother, mother-in-law, and sister are all cancer survivors, and I assure you that they are survivors thanks to modern medicine. No amount of spinal manipulation, copper bracelets, wheatgrass juice, crystals, homeopathy, or all-natural herbal remedies derived from ancient Chinese wisdom would have helped them without real doctors practicing real medicine. This is one of the biggest dangers of pseudoscience.

All 250+ Skeptoid episodes can be downloaded or the transcripts read from skeptoid.com, or you can subscribe through iTunes. Watch out though – there are a number of ironic ads on the site for psychics and various alternative medicines because of Google’s logic in deciding what ads to place there. I have an upcoming article on one of those.

The Grand Delusion?

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While looking over the videos for my previous posting on atheism, I saw another video that appeals to “college-educated, intelligent Christians” to use their education and intelligence to scientifically analyze their faith. There are a number of questions asked (your standard “If God loves us all, why do bad things happen to good people?” and “Why are there so many starving children in the world?” as well as a clever one I hadn’t thought of before, but I’ll get back to that one later), and Christians are asked to answer the questions while thinking logically and scientifically. Most of the time, there is no good answer other than your standard “God works in mysterious ways” or “God must have a reason for all the suffering”. However, when you make the initial assumption that God is imaginary and then go through the questions again, suddenly there are answers that make sense. Bad things happen to good people by chance. Children are starving in Africa because they live in a place where it is difficult to grow food and the people and countries are too poor to be able to import enough for everyone — essentially, there is suffering and starvation because not enough is being done to prevent it. The “inescapable” conclusion is that God is imaginary. However, the video isn’t done there. It keeps going and in my opinion, goes too far.

This video attempts to demonstrate by use of logic that God does not exist. (Of course, they have done no such thing here, they’ve just shown that if you assume that God doesn’t exist, all of these particular questions have a logical answer. This isn’t proof of anything.) But the video goes one step further and asks why it is important to do this. They say that it’s important because there are millions (if not billions) of people around the world who believe in God, talk to God, and ask questions of God. If God is imaginary then these people, the vast majority of the world, are all delusional. According to some stats I’ve heard, something like 95% of the world’s population believes in God in one form or another. It’s one thing to say that you believe something different from 95% of the world, but quite another to say that anyone who doesn’t believe what you believe is delusional.

Secondly, by specifically targeting Christians with a college education, the video’s producers imply that anyone without a college degree is too stupid to understand what the video is saying. This is untrue and just a touch insulting.

Finally, the fatal flaw in this video is that it ironically uses exactly the same faulty logic that many creationists do. There are things that happen in the universe that don’t make sense given our current level of scientific knowledge. Creationists frequently point at these questions, saying that because we can’t answer these questions, the underlying scientific assumptions we’ve made must be false, and so God must have done it all. These questions are unanswered simply because we don’t know enough about the universe to answer them all. It’s even possible that human intelligence is simply not capable of understanding some of the intricacies of the universe. This doesn’t mean that what we’ve learned already is untrue. This video says exactly the same thing, but in reverse — here are some questions that we don’t know the answer to, and because the answers we currently have make no sense, the underlying premise behind them must be false. The logic is just as faulty here.

The clever and interesting question I mentioned above was “Why won’t God heal amputees?” You hear about so-called faith healers, who heal the sick with just a touch. But every now and again, you hear about someone whose cancerous tumour mysteriously disappeared, or a blind person who can suddenly see, or some other “miraculous” case of a sick person being healed through prayer. In some of these cases, the medical community is completely baffled, and so many claim this as proof of God’s existence. But there has never once been a case of an amputee miraculously regrowing limbs. Why not? We’ve already got the question of why God would heal some sick people and not others, but now it’s more specific — why will God heal cancer patients and blind people and ignore amputees? Of course, the fact that we don’t know the answer to this question means precisely nothing, but it’s an interesting question nonetheless.

The simple truth is that it is not possible to prove that God does not exist. There’s always the possibility that He’s out there somewhere, fudging test results to keep Himself hidden. Why would He do this? I dunno, but that doesn’t mean He doesn’t have a good reason. It is, and will always be, a matter of faith. I have written on numerous occasions before that I am an atheist. But I don’t think that people who are not atheists are all delusional or stupid, we simply believe different things. I’m a Jays fan, but I don’t think that Yankees fans are stupid, we just believe different things — neither one of us is wrong. Well, I guess either God exists or He doesn’t, so either atheists or theists are wrong, but since we don’t (and probably can’t) know which group is wrong, it doesn’t really matter.

The atheist’s nightmare is yummy

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I’ve read two interesting and somewhat related posts in the last couple of days, one on Boing Boing and the other on Slashdot. The first was about how scientists have now actually witnessed evolution in a lab. Scientists have been watching some E. coli bacteria in a lab for twenty years, through over 44,000 generations. They have noticed that around the 31,500th generation, some of the bacteria suddenly gained an ability that E. coli generally doesn’t have (something about metabolising citrate — I won’t even pretend that I understand the details). They managed to “replay” the evolution using saved samples of the bacteria, and found that something happened about 10,000 generations earlier that allowed this mutation to take place. The quote at the end: “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.“

The other is a old video of some nutbag explaining to former actor and current evangelist Kirk Cameron why the banana is “the atheist’s nightmare” because “it is so perfectly suited to the human hand” and therefore must have been designed by God. This is just too funny. Here is another funny video saying that peanut butter proves that evolution is false, because:

  1. scientists say that life can sometimes be created by matter and energy,
  2. peanut butter is matter,
  3. peanut butter is exposed to energy such as light and heat, but
  4. we never find life spontaneously being created inside a jar of peanut butter.

Wow, got me convinced. If that ain’t scientific proof, I don’t know what is. Oh wait, a couple of quick questions — has anyone ever examined every jar of peanut butter ever created for any microscopic form of life that was spontaneously created? Because we know that if evolution is true, then the form of life that might be spontaneously created from matter and energy would be a single cell. Evolution does not say that you might open a jar of peanut butter to find a chihuahua or a platypus inside. Also, peanut butter has been around for about a hundred years, while the universe is billions of years old. Have we waited long enough to say that it’s definitely not going to happen? Not to mention the obvious point that even if evolution is true, the possibility of this happening inside a jar of peanut butter is so low that the fact that you haven’t seen it happen is not proof that it can’t.

Speaking as an atheist, I can honestly say I have never had a nightmare involving either bananas or peanut butter. I ate a banana just the other day and quite enjoyed it. Cut one up, pour a little milk on it and sprinkle a touch of sugar, quite a nice little snack. I had an English muffin with peanut butter tonight when I got home from baseball. And ironically combining both nightmares, I used to love peanut butter and banana sandwiches when I was a kid.

Conservapedia — Wikipedia for the hard of thinking

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Well, folks, here it is — the encyclopedia you’ve been waiting for if you’re afraid of the truth and want to live in your own little everything-is-wonderful world. It’s called Conservapedia.com, “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia”. I don’t even know where to start with this one. It’s wikipedia except they abandoned the Neutral Point of View concept, and decide to write everything from a conservative Christian point of view (which is fine), but then treat that point of view as fact (which is not). Its criticisms of Wikipedia are funny — a Wikipedia article can present all kinds of facts about something like homosexuality, but because it doesn’t explicitly say “Homosexuality is immoral” or “wrong” or “an abomination”, they view this as an endorsement and therefore Wikipedia has a liberal bias. Because you are allowed to describe years and time periods using BCE/CE in place of BC/AD, Wikipedia has an anti-religious bias. Because you are allowed to use British English rather than American English on pages about British topics, Wikipedia has an anti-American bias.

The articles use all kinds of faulty logic — how can evolution be true if smart people like Archimedes, Aristotle, and Isaac Newton didn’t propose such a theory? Plus, Hitler believed in evolution. A quote even hints that Hitler’s evolutionary beliefs caused him to believe that Germans were superior to other races, and that Jews were to be segregated. Ergo, if you believe in evolution, you are evil. Also, atheism is obviously evil because Stalin, Lenin, and Karl Marx were atheists. And of course, the old standby, “If science cannot currently conclusively prove something, it must be false” (eg. evolution, the Big Bang, a genetic basis for homosexuality). Yup, definitely trustworthy.

Here are some “trustworthy” “facts” that I learned from Conservapedia:

  • The opening paragraph of the article on homosexuality says “homosexuality has a variety of negative effects on individuals and society at large“
  • homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to be engage in promiscuity, violent behaviour towards their partners, homicide, pedophilia, cigarette smoking, and illegal drugs
  • most hate crimes against gay people are not actually hate crimes, and hate crimes committed by gay people against heterosexuals are vastly underreported
  • abortions cause breast cancer
  • the theory of evolution is evil — “a vast majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the evolutionary position since World War II have been atheists“
  • “a virgin is a person of either sex who has not married“

Obviously there are going to be articles that have incorrect facts on them; I’m sure you could go through Wikipedia and find plenty of incorrect information. However, the article on homosexuality has thirty-five sections, 290 references, and at least two thousand edits. It’s not like someone added some incorrect or misleading information — many people have. The virginity page doesn’t even mention sex, but to give an accurate description of what virginity is would require actually discussing sex, and we can’t have that, now can we? In order to “protect” people from a description of sex (and come on people, this can be done without an explicit description of how it is performed), they choose to publish something that is patently untrue. And I’m supposed to take this site seriously?

The Conservapedia article on Wikipedia is also particularly “trustworthy”. The following quotes all take place within the opening two paragraphs of the article:

  • “Despite its official “neutrality policy”, Wikipedia has a strong liberal bias“
  • “It has millions of entries on topics ranging from an explanation for “duh” to singles by obscure rock bands to arcane British royalty.“
  • “Initially, Wikipedia was hosted on servers operated by Bomis, Inc., a company that also sold pornographic pictures.“

There’s even a page on how Conservapedia differs from Wikipedia. One of the 16 listed reasons is: “We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts. Wikipedia editors who are far more liberal than the American public frequently censor factual information. Conservapedia does not censor any facts that comport with the basic rules.” This is laughable, since Conservapedia not only allows but encourages conservative censorship of liberal facts, though I suppose they are up-front about it. Also, they treat the Bible and biblical scholars as a source of “facts” and conveniently ignore scientists whose findings don’t agree with their agenda.

Do I want my kids perusing Wikipedia? To be honest, no. There are indeed explicit and disturbing pictures on some pages, as well as explicit descriptions of things that an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old really do not need to have described to them. However, Conservapedia, while family-friendly, presents opinions as facts, and tries to spin homophobia, general intolerance, and anything that disagrees with their beliefs (however misguided) as “faith”. Faith has as much to do with hating gay people as Islam has to do with murdering Americans. A few extremist crackpots ruin it for the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims, and similarly, the people who created this site are simply Christian extremists teaching hate and masquerading it as faith. I won’t let my kids anywhere near this site until they are old enough to be able to distinguish facts from bullshit presented as facts.