Intellectual Coccooning Reaches Ridiculous Levels

You get out of your mind only the products of what you put into it. That's why, even if you don't believe everything you read, what you read still has something of an influence on how you think. If you're like me, then that leads you to the conclusion that there's no monopoly on truth, so therefore it's important to sample a diversity of different points of view and to periodically investigate factual claims offered to substantiate a variety of opinions. If you read only liberal stuff, eventually you'll become liberal.  If you read only conservative stuff, eventually you'll become conservative.

We're also all susceptible to confirmation bias -- whether consciously or not, we self-select facts and information that confirms our initial opinions.  So keeping a broad sample on the reading menu is the best way I can think of to come as close as possible to making up your own mind about things rather than be an intellectual sheep.

But, if you are a deeply socially conservative evangelical Christian, a rather significant industry has been created around you, with you as its market, which will provide you with all the necessities and luxuries of life, only "from a Christian perspective."  This way, you can magnify your pro-Christian confirmation bias to the maximum extent possible.  You can insulate your delicate Christian mind from anything that isn't Jesus-approved by:

• Reading the news from a Christian perspective
• Making sure you have a Christian roommate
• Playing a clone of "Guitar Hero" that features only Christian rock music
• Listening to popular music that has been rewritten so that every song has Christian content
• Using a web browser that automatically rewrites web pages to filter out content thought to be not Christian-friendly

And soon, you won't even have to poison your delicate mind with the pernicious liberal influences of ... wait for it...

The Bible.

Yes!  Coming soon, from the people who think Wikipedia is too liberal, is the "Conservative Bible Project."  It's the King James Bible, only with all the references to social justice, common sharing of goods and wealth among Christians, and even  removed!  The Conservative Bible Project promises to take words out of even the mouth of Jesus as he's being crucified to redeem the sins of mankind for all time:

Liberal Falsehood:
The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:
Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

After all, why should "real" Christians read about, you know, Christ forgiving people for their sins?  What does that have to do with real Christianity?  Tell you what, I'm glad I'm no longer a believer and no longer a member of any identifiable political bloc. Adhering to a party line would be so much work with nonsense like this floating around.  I simply lack the mental energy to sustain cognitive dissonance to such a degree.

You know, on the other hand, this might be a colossal hoax.  A joke.  It has to be.  It certainly is registering on my B.S. meter.  Poe's Law is in full play here; it is difficult to figure these things out sometimes.

Glenn Beck Spews A Densely-Packed Set Of Hysterical Lies

Why has America fallen into such desperate and horrible straits?  Oh, yeah, that's right, it's the atheists' fault.  Or, as Doug Mataconis puts it, "Yea, it has nothing to do with all those religious people who’ve, you know, actually been in charge of the country all these years." But a snappy response is not enough. Beck deserves a thorough takedown for this:

And I'm the guy who's going to give it to him. Glenn Beck, you are a lying, hysterical, fearmongering, pandering liar.  Who lies in order to gain ratings and who lies in order to whip people into a needless and destructive political frenzy and who just plain lies.

1.  "In God We Trust" appears on all the money, you lying sack of shit.  I defy you -- I challenge you to swear to forfeit on that immortal soul that you believe in -- to produce a single piece of U.S. tender in circulation that does not contain, somewhere on it, the phrase "In God We Trust."

2.  The Decalogue is allowed in courthouses.  Sometimes -- when it's part of an artistic display about the law and history.  We are, on our public buildings, allowed to acknowledge the role of the Ten Commandments as part of our cultural and legal history.  When the Decalogue is offered for religious indoctrination, however, that violates something inherently American, specifically, the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.  You should read it sometime.

3. You can pray in school.  You just can't force someone else to pray in school along with you.  Big difference.  You also can't pray in a manner that disrupts normal class activity.  But yes, you can pray in school.

4.  "Can't sing Christmas carols"?  Huh?  What court, what political institution, what police officer, what legislation, what rule, what anything stops you from singing a Christmas Carol where and when you want to?  You're just a crazed, frothing LIAR, Glenn Beck.

5.  Religious "nones" on the rise, meaning more Americans are not identifying with any particular religion -- even becoming outright atheists?  (Note that responding "none" to a demographic survey about religion does not mean one is identifying as an atheist.)  Aren't these Americans who have the Constitutional* right to be atheists if they want?  Why, then, do you object to Americans using their freedom, Glenn Beck?  What is it about liberty that offends you so very much?

6.  To suggest that atheists have a "void" in their lives is condescending in the extreme.  Glenn Beck, it's damn good odds that you do not worship Quezacoatl.  With what do you fill the void left by the absence of worship of the winged moon serpent? You don't feel a void in your life caused by your rejection of the divinity of Osiris.  You and I are exactly alike in that respect -- my list of mythological deities who I do not worship just has one additional name on it than yours.  Trust me, there's no void.  The real question is, with what does Glenn Beck fill the gigantic, gaping void in his ass?  The answer is, "his head, and it's high time he pulled it out."

7. To further suggest that atheists fill the "void" in their lives with "power, career, money, celebrities, politics, government" is even more ridiculous.   I'll grant you that I'm an atheist who is interested in politics -- but most atheists I know aren't.  Almost no atheist I've ever met is is in the least bit concerned about celebrity gossip, by the way -- everyone I've ever met who is deeply interested in celebrity gossip has also been, or at least claimed to be, religious.  "Put your faith in government, not God" is a message no atheist is preaching.  Why?  Atheists who are also politically liberal tend to support the current Administration -- because they are liberal, not because they are atheists.  Atheists who are politically conservative (or, much more likely these days since conservatism has become so identified with religiosity, libertarian) tend to oppose the current Administration -- because they are not liberal, again not because of their religion.  Almost like religious belief and politics have no logical link to one another.  Hmm, makes you think, doesn't it?

8.  "Why do you think we are as powerful as we are, or as we have been?"  Several answers here, Glenn, which need to be examined together.  Exhibit A:  Geography.  It's very difficult to invade the United States because to do so, you'd have to either have a military foothold in Canada or Mexico, or do an amphibious landing on one of two heavily-urbanized coasts.  Exhibit B:  Natural resources.  Our borders contain fertile farmlands, ample mineral resources, petroleum, and at one time, vast stretches of timber.  (If you want to give Jehovah credit for that, fine, but you should also note that He also gave those blessings to places like sub-Saharan Africa, China and Russia which do not enjoy the same levels of power or prosperity we do.)  Exhibit C:  A government founded on Enlightenment principles of republican democracy and individual rights, coupled with a strong political commitment to those ideals throughout our history, creating a sociological environment in which individual prosperity flourishes and collective prosperity flourishes as a result.  Exhibit D:  We won both world wars of the twentieth century -- in part because we weren't invaded through a combination of smart diplomacy, a strong Navy, and the benefits of our geographic isolation from belligerent nations -- and therefore unlike every other nation in the world, did not have our industrial plant and basic infrastructure wiped out by enemy action.  Jehovah, even if He exists, has little to do with any of this -- the ebb and flow of history and the accidents of geography do.

9.  When he asks, "What did we do different than other countries?" Beck cannot be seriously suggesting that other nations throughout history have been irreligious.  European nations fought 150 years of war with one another over religion.  He can't seriously be suggesting that places like Iran are irreligious.  (Oh, right, they're worshiping the wrong God.  Er, that is, they're worshiping the same God but they call Him "Allah" instead of "Jehovah" so that's where they went wrong; they ought to use English because if it was good enough for Jesus, English is good enough for them Iranians too.) 

10.  And that reference to the "Creator" in the Declaration of Independence -- who, exactly would that be?  It's not like Jefferson didn't know about the Christian diety when he wrote it.  T.J. could just as easily have written "All men are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights" but he used the phrase "their Creator" instead.  But even if we were to concede the non-obvious contention that Jefferson was referring to Jehovah, this clause still falls far short of Beck's characterization that it "recognizes the authority of God."  At best, it recognizes that a "Creator" of some sort exists.

11.  Nor does the failure of other countries to adopt some version of this language mean that they necessarily believe that human rights are dispensed by the government.  But they -- like the United States -- recognize that human rights have to be handled and adjudicated by the government, by the courts.  Human rights do not exist in an anarchy.

12.  "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is, and always was, a song explicitly intended to meld elements of military glory and religious imagery.  Which you can enjoy if you want.  I'll concede that the melody and the meter are well-crafted.  But it's not the national anthem and I'd resist efforts to make it the national anthem.  Question: since the song refers explicitly to Christ and a variety of other New Testament images (like Lilies of the Valley and the millennial apocalypse) does that mean that Jewish people can't enjoy it, too? Perhaps just as important -- do you think atheists were the ones who corrupted this song in this manner? What proof do you have to back that up? Because my money is going to be on the side of the betting table that says the teachers and school officials responsible for that creepy musical interlude were Christians.

Now, the kids singing and chanting about Obama is really creepy, and whoever chose to pirate the sycophantic Obama-worship on traditional American songs thus compounded upon the inherent creepiness of children singing songs to praise to political leaders.  Nor will I defend it or the equally delusional school officials who thought it was a good idea to instruct schoolchildren to do this.  But what that has to do with why atheists are evil, though, I haven't a clue.

If I were in Congress, would I try to take "In God We Trust" off the money?  Yep.  If I were on the Supreme Court, would I vote against public displays of the Decalogue in almost all cases.  Probably (I can't be certain unless I had been briefed on a case).  I say that because a governmental display of religious iconography is inherently the government promoting religion in favor of non-religion, and from my perspective that violates the Establishment Clause.  But to get my way, I'd have to convince other people that I'm right about those ideas -- through the legal or political processes.  That is the nature of the system.  That system of laws is the distilled essence of America.  And it didn't come from God -- it came from a collection of lawyers, steeped in the radical philosophy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who rendered very good service indeed to their new nation when they implementing it.

You have a Constitutional* right to vomit all of this nonsense, Glenn Beck.  And I have the Constitutional right to call it what it is: five solid minutes of hateful, fearmongering, bigoted lies.


* Some would even say "God-given" although I say God has nothing to do with the Constitution -- and I have the text of the Constitution itself to support me in that contention.

When The Russian Media Says You're Being Sensationalistic

Dateline: Moscow, Russia. Armed robber subdued by pretty young hair stylist, who proceeds to subdue him, handcuff him to the radiator, and use him as her sex slave for two days. Who could ask for anything more?

Memo To Wingnuts: You're Not Helping

A political movement, with populist roots, that expresses dismay and resentment towards high taxes, high levels of deficit spending, accumulating national debt, and grasping increases of Federal power over the economy is a good thing. It can provide fuel and foundation for significant, principled, and effective political action. And it can be a force for the creation of good policy and making America a better place.

The "tea party" movement is not that movement. Glenn Beck's teary-eyed rants are not that call to action.

It could have been, which is more the pity. But with stuff like this going on at the "tea party" movements, it's going to be very difficult for the movement to regain whatever credibility it started out with. The linked video begins with the scheduled speaker and group leader announcing that 1) Barack Obama's presidency represents the culmination and last step in a fifty-year long effort by the international communist conspiracy to take over the United States, 2) he urges all of the "tea party" attendees to not send their children to college, and 3) he holds himself out as an example of a principled Amercan by not paying any taxes at all. And then at just shy of five minutes into the video, there is this colloquy:

Off-Camera Woman: [Shouts] Burn the books!
[Scattered applause, possibly not for her]
Off-Camera Man: I don’t think you were serious about that, were you?
Woman: I am too.
Man: "Burn the books?"
Woman: The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books.
Man: [laughs nervously] "Brainwashing books?"
Woman: Yes!
Man: Which ones are those?
Woman: Like, the evolution crap, and... [pause] Yeah!

Now, the voices are off camera, and the quality of those voices is noticeably better than the quality of the audio pickup for the speaker leading the discussion. What's more, characterizing conservatives as book-burners plays very closely into left-wing stereotypes about what conservatives really are, and that is for the most part a maliciously untrue characterization.

So my B.S. meter is getting some medium-range readings here, because it's plausible in my mind that the voice-overs are actually dubs put in to subvert the message that the "tea party" organizer is trying to spread. Or that she was there and actually said these things, but was fulfilling the role of agent provocateur.

But on the other hand, sadly, I must admit that there are some genuinely crazy types out there. And this "tea party" thing is accreting Kool-Aid drinkers at an alarming rate. Honorary movement leder Glenn Beck is drawing what appear to be non-sarcastic concerns about his mental health based on his on-camera conduct like pretending to set someone on fire in the studio to make a point. And there are some people out there who think that censorship (although they often call it something else) has a place in our society, people who tend to do things like try to get Harry Potter books pulled out of public libraries because they are offended by the notion of witchcraft.

For those who oppose the social, foreign-policy, and/or economic goals of the President, not controlling this sort of thing is going to prove very, very counterproductive.

Follow Up On Swoopo: Potlach

In a previous post, I referenced a particular auction on questionably-legal but unquestionably-clever auction site Swoopo.com. The particular auction was for $1,000 cash. Well, it's still running. Here's what the auction looks like now:This is absolutely astonishing to me. The bidders are now actually paying for the right to pay more money than they are going to get back if they win. At this point, if you win the auction, you will have to pay nearly $1,200 in order to get $1,000 back.

I've got to call bullshit at this point. This doesn't even make sense.

I remember that I read once in a book that an anthropologist described a Caribbean society which used tobacco leaves as money. Periodically, one or another household would throw a party and gather as many tobacco leaves as they could spare in a big pile and, at the climax of the feast, light it on fire. The ritual was called "potlach" or something like that, and the point was to show your neighbors how wealthy you were by demonstrating how much money you could destroy simply for the sake of destroying it. The character in the book wanted to demonstrate to someone else in the book that "conspicuous consumption" was not a phenomenon limited to Western European societies. But this sort of thing is the only way I can understand the behavior of people who continue to bid on this auction -- one that they cannot possibly benefit from winning and which they must pay in order to win.

Another theory would be that these people are suffering from an extreme form of the Gambler's Fallacy -- they put in bids earlier in the auction and now feel like they need to win in order to recoup some of their losses.

Still another theory, and one that I am warming to more and more as I consider this, is that the bidders do not understand what they are doing. They must think they are bidding $.75 in order to win $1,000. That's a sort-of reasonable, or at least justifiable, kind of gamble -- provided you ignore that by winning, you are promising to pay the purchase price, an exchange of seventy-five cents for a chance at a thousand dollars makes a kind of sense.

So what seems like the most probable explanation for the bidders' behavior is that they simply do not understand what they are doing. Why else would you pay money for the right to pay more money -- and nothing more?

UPDATE: The auction finally ended, at a total bid price of $1,846.05. The "winner" placed a total of 667 bids, paying $500.25 to win. Now, I think I understand what was going on and my judgment is a little less harsh -- Swoopo apparently did not charge him the $1,846.05, which is apparently what the "100% off" means. So the only thing the winner paid was $500.25 and he reaps a net profit of $499.75. In a gambler's assessment, that's a good return on investment. It also explains why people would bid to pay more than the value of the prize -- they aren't really going to pay that money; the only cost to them is the cost to bid. In terms of Swoopo's involvement, though, this was still a hugely profitable activity -- they took in a total of $9,320.25, and had to give away $1,000, producing a net profit margin of 823%.

Cure Allergies With A Laser -- Or Not

As many of you either recall from reading these pages, or from knowing me, I suffer from allergies. I medicate using OTC drugs and I've sought treatment on multiple occasions. Most recently, I was disappointed at the small amount of coverage my medical insurer gave for allergy treatments, which indicates that it places a low priority on them -- and with the minimal treatment the allergist reccomended; he didn't want to put me on a routine of allergy-cure shots and advised me to take some drugs when the symptoms got bad. Oh, really, doc? Gee, I couldn't have figured that out on my own, thanks!

Allergies can be serious stuff; anaphylaxis can kill. I had one of those episodes where I feel like my windpipe is contracting on me last night right when I came home (where I've been having bad reactions over the past few days, and I don't know why) last night, which went away after a little bit of wheezing. So this morning I thought to read about what else I might do other than keep on popping Claritin every morning -- which is about the only advice I got from the allergist last time, and for that I didn't need to see anyone.

Allergies are in the news again, too. The Obama family is looking to take in a dog to be their pet, which is good, because every First Family needs a dog. This is serious business George W. Bush has a black Irish Setters named Miss Beazley and Barney; his dad, George H.W. Bush the Older and Wiser, famously had a Springer Spaniel named Millie. Bill Clinton had Buddy, a chocolate Labrador Retriever. Ronald Reagan had Rex, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and Lucky, a Sheepdog. And the list goes on; the last President to not have a dog was Carter (Amy Carter was given a dog named Grits by her teacher, but the Carters gave Grits back, opting instead to only have a cat). But Malia Obama, age ten, is apparently allergic to dogs, so they need to find one that she won't be reactive to. And Barack promised his girls that they could take a puppy to the White House with them.

So how fortuitous that I come across this dandy little article. Now, I too can spend oodles of money, and join with these non-doctors, in trying to bilk my insurance company, so that they can shoot lasers along my acupuncture meridians to treat allergy symptoms! And they're coming to Southern California soon, and maybe they can come to the rescue of Malia Obama, too!

"Shoots lasers at acupuncture meridians." Hmm. Let's think about that. First of all, what is a laser? Ultimately, it's a tightly-focused beam of light of a given frequency created through a handful of physical processes. It's light, the same stuff that your flourescent bulbs produce. Since you can control the frequency of the light, you can control its color, and since it's tightly-focused so the beams move in only one direction, you can control where it goes. For most people, lasers are useful for the fact that they are absolutely straight -- they are the best levelling and straight-edge tools available. But on certain media that react to electromagnetic radiation within the visible light spectrum, like compact discs, the laser can be used to produce all sorts of interesting results.

Allergies are, at their root, hyper-sensitive reactions of the immune system to particular kinds of stimuli. They occur in mucous membranes (in the form of expulsion of lymph and snot, producing sneezing and coughing), in the blood (in the form of escalated hemoglobin and immunoglobin production), and on the skin (typically in the form of a rash or hives). It's difficult to imagine light doing anything to any of this.

See, a laser must be 1) possessed of sufficient energy to react to the medium, and 2) must be used on a medium that is reactive in some way to visible light. So, a police officer can use a sensor equipped with a laser to determine how fast your car is moving -- because the surface of your car reflects (that is, reacts) to the laser. But it's not going to cut your car open like an electromagnetic buzzsaw. It takes a Class IV laser, one operating with several orders of magnitude more power than the handheld laser pointers I use to play with my cats, can actually carry enough energy to cut metal (like in an industrial welding situation) or human issue (as with a surgical tool). Class III and lower lasers lack sufficient power to do much of anything other than to illuminate (although your retina is quite sensitive and you shouldn't look directly into a powerful laser of any class).

The laser used in this treatment is cleared by the FDA as a "neurological relaxation device." This device is either strong enough to pierce human tissue, or it is not. I do not imagine that having your skin pierced by a laser gun would be particularly relaxing. So it's safe to assume that we're looking at a laser that will only put a bright dot of light in a particular place on the body.

Now, there is a disclaimer for the service:

The treatments we perform are not medical treatments. It has been developed from an entirely different field of therapeutics using the principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the study of human physiology and an in-depth knowledge of allergens.

Let's repeat. "The treatments we perform are not medical treatments." That ought to be a clue, right there, that this is something suspicious. Also, the misuse of capitals when describing traditional Chinese medicine indicates either a lack of education or an attempt to purchase credibility. The rest of their website is pretty slick (here -- audio starts immediately upon load), so I'm betting on the latter.

Shining lights on the body is simply not going to do much of anything. What possible physiological effect could this have? Maybe you'll get a tan, but it isn't going to do anything about your allergies. If these people want to get themselves a ton of publicity, they ought to shine their lights on Malia Obama and see if she gets cured of her dog allergy. Then maybe I'll set aside my skepticism. Or, maybe, they might not want to take a chance of putting the new President's young daughter in a state of analphylactic shock. That might be a more prudent course of action -- but a revealing one, too.

Debunked By An Eleven-Year Old

Learning this gives me hope for the future of skepticism in our society. While there are plenty of wooly-headed fuzzy thinkers out there who believe in crap like Therapeutic Touch, an eleven-year-old girl was able to construct and execute a double-blind test that proved it was nothing but bullshit. (A phrase that enjoys academic validity.)

Hat tip to the incredibly funny but sadly slowly-updated Crap-Based Medicine. And kudos to the little girl who stood up to some adults with a lot of money to lose and exposed them for the frauds they are.

Smart Presidents

A friend is taking a class in psychology through the local college. It seems that while discussing the subject of IQ tests, the professor told her class (which included my friend) that Bill Clinton had an IQ of 187 and George W. Bush has an IQ of 95.

My bullshit detector immediately began to register a signal. Leave aside the obvious political bias inherent in such a statement. (Would a Republican repeat such a statement, even if it were true?) If a politician had an IQ of 95, which is by definition lower than average what possible reason could he have to release that information to the public? And if another politician had an IQ of 187, that would make him by definition one of the smartest men in all of America, if not the world. Maybe there are 187 IQ people out there, and yes, Bill Clinton is a pretty smart guy. But he didn't strike me as being that smart.

Fortunately, this was hardly the first time this particular concept had been articulated and like most urban myths, it has been reduced to a chain e-mail and from there analyzed by the good folks at snopes.com. They confirm that it is indeed a hoax. The e-mail from which the professor may well have taken her rumor is even more politically slanted than the false statement she told her class.

I'm not an egalitarian about such matters; I do think that there is such a thing as intelligence and that some people have more of it than others. now, I'm going to assume, for purposes of this post, that IQ is really the same thing as intelligence and that the IQ test more or less accurately measures this quality of a person. I am not sure that ultimately I agree with that assumption, but I'll dispense with that issue for now.

The e-mail, rumor, and meme embodied in this statement fits in to a political myth -- a concept I've been mulling about in my mind for a few days -- in this case the myth of "Smart Democrat, Dumb Republican." More on that subject in a few days, as I develop my thoughts further. For now, it suffices to note that this is far from the first time that the completely unfounded idea that whatever Democrat is competing with whatever Republican for the White House is smarter than the GOP's choice -- implying, in turn, that Democrats are smarter than Republicans. This flatters Democrats and insults Republicans, but its coincidence with the truth will probably happen no more often than chance would have it be so.

You're seeing it play out now in the 2008 election -- Barack Obama is smarter than John McCain, and therefore you should vote for Obama. Well, I think they're both pretty intelligent guys. Obama's educational credentials are extremely impressive. Editor of Harvard Law Review is not something you get from affirmative action; it is not something you get for being merely above average. But McCain got into and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, which I for one find an impressive credential. If young John McCain had been actually dumb, or even of only average intelligence, I rather doubt that Annapolis would have taken him no matter who his dad was. No one cakewalks through Annapolis (or West Point); there are no "social promotions" and Senators' sons and Admirals' sons have washed out of Annapolis.

Now, no matter how good it is, Annapolis isn't Harvard Law School and Obama's grades seem to have been better than McCain's, and McCain does not hold a graduate degree the way Obama does. So maybe Barack Obama is smarter than John McCain -- but that shouldn't be the question. The question should be "Is the candidate smart enough to competently discharge the office of President?" For both McCain and Obama, the answer is pretty clearly "yes."

And if smarts were all that it took to be a good President, then shouldn't we have seen four years of bright economic growth, adroit foreign policy, and a cultural Renaissance under nuclear physicist (and Annapolis grad) Jimmy Carter? Indeed, if Carter was so smart, how come he got thrown out of office by alleged dunderhead Ronald Reagan?

The "dumb Republican" myth seems to permit that from time to time, a Republican can be smart. Usually this refers to the blindingly obvious intelligence of Richard Nixon -- the subtext being that the only way for a Republican to be smart is to be an Evil Genius. Maybe Nixon was evil, maybe he was a genius. I think he was neither. Misguided, I'd agree with. Consumed by his own ego, I'd get on board that train. I might even be talked into calling him a sociopath. But "evil?" No -- evil requires a conscious intent to harm, it requires malice. Nixon in all likelihood thought that most of what he did, he did in an effort to advance the moral good, and as for the other stuff, well, that just wasn't something that had any real moral gravity one way or another because it's no more immoral to eat pancakes than waffles for breakfast, right? That could be how he saw decisions like what to do about Vietnam, whether or not to get his guys to play dirty tricks with elections, and how he saw formulating electoral strategies that involved appealing to the racism of southern whites. Like I say, if you said, "Nixon was a sociopath," I might agree with that. Or not; I think he saw his diplomatic efforts to China as morally good; I think he imposed wage and price controls because he thought it was the right thing to do for poor people. I don't think he was corrupt in the sense that he took overt bribes; Pat would have had a fur coat instead of a cloth one if he did.

And as for being a genius, well, maybe; he was clearly a really smart guy. But "genius" should indicate someone of exceptional and highly unusual intelligence. Was Nixon smarter than Humphrey? Was he smarter than Kennedy? Who's to say, really?

We haven't a clue what the IQ of any Presidents are, nor should we particularly care beyond the point that the person in question demonstrates intellectual capability sufficient to understand and evaluate public policies. I would venture to guess that the threshold for that is something on the order of "above average," but less than "significantly above average." There is no indication that any President in living memory has lacked that ability. Perhaps that's because in order to get to be President, you have to climb to the top of the very competitive profession of politics, which means you have to be pretty smart in the first place. Dumb politicians lack the ability to do the things necessary to reach high office.

Speculation About Equilibrium

I got this "open letter" in my e-mail today, from United Airlines. It would seem that the airlines are calling for regulation of the oil market in an effort to reduce the skyrocketing cost of their fuel. If I've uploaded the picture right, you should be able to click on it and read the whole thing. Of course, you may have got an e-mail very similar to mine. Particularly because I don't think the letter is aimed at a narrow target of a select group of people, I think this letter can stand up to a bit of bullshit detection.

Now, I hadn't ever really considered "oil speculators" as being particularly evil or doing anything particularly harmful to the economy. And no one ever complained about them before. What, exactly, is "oil speculation" and why is it so bad? Why do the airlines want us to think that this practice is responsible for increased fuel costs which lead to rising airfares, less airline service, and repeated calls for government bailouts of these businesses?

"Speculation" is, in essence, buying something now in the hopes that it will increase in value later. You buy something -- a widget, a plot of land -- for $100 today, and hope that in the future, someone else will buy it for $110. Or, more realistically, for $100 plus the transaction costs of buying and selling it, adjusted for inflation at the time you sell it.

It can happen with anything for which there is a market -- oil is of interest today but other kinds of things have been the subject of speculation in the past. Notably, land speculation was responsible for a lot of economic activity, some of which was tumultuous and some of which was quite beneficial, in our nation's history.

Adding to this are things called "futures markets" in which you buy today the right to receive a product tomorrow, which makes speculating in a commodity very easy. You can buy one ton of pork bellies for $1,335.60 at today's commodities market closing prices. That means the market price for pork bellies is $.6678 per pound. You can also buy a future in pork bellies at the same price today -- meaning that you can buy a farmer's promise to give you 2,000 pounds of bacon in one month for $1,335.60 today. In one month, if the price of pork bellies has risen to $.70 per pound, you can sell those pork bellies and make a profit of $64.40. That would be a profit margin of 4.82%, before transaction costs like commissions.

Clearly, speculators are hoping to make more profit than 5% on their transactions. And like anything else in the market, there is a level of art to it, a level of science to it, and a level of luck to it. Some speculators hit it big when they bought oil futures for $60 a barrel and now it's selling for more than $100 a barrel.

What I don't understand is why this is a bad thing. Yes, traders are in business to make a profit. But commodities future speculation typically stabilizes market prices by buying and selling at points when enough profit has been earned that the speculator wants to lock in the money, and by cutting their losses when the price falls too far below the purchase price -- dampening the effects of market fluxuations. The speculator who initially buys a future guarantees that the commodity will continue to be produced, because that money goes to the producer who is looking to reduce his risk, too.

The advocates of oil market regulation will tell you that speculators bid up the price of oil, adding nothing but financial transaction costs, and would have you believe that because they do this, they have inflated the price of oil and are therefore at least partially to blame for the pain you feel at the pump these days -- and the increasing price of air travel, which is what these particular advocates are concerned with. But here's the part of that story they don't want you to remember -- a futures trader cannot successfully sell a commodities future for more than the real market price. The reason for that is that no one will buy what she is selling. "Speculators," then do nothing more than bid up the producer's lower sale price of a commodity to the true market price. Oil is as competitive a market as pork bellies, and you don't hear anyone complaining about the price of bacon being jacked up by a bunch of commodities traders. The reason is not that pork belly futures are less economically sensitive than oil futures. The reason is that the commodities traders in the pork belly market, like the commodities traders in the oil market, must work within the boundaries imposed by market conditions.

So a call for "regulation" of the oil market is not intended to take money out of the pockets of commodities traders, but rather to depress the price of oil below what the market would reach by its own equilibrium. An unregulated market reaches the equilibrium price for the commodity -- the point at which the price curve meets the quantity curve along the supply-demand axis. Regulation can take only one of four forms: artificially restricting supply, artificially restricting demand, artificially increasing price, or artificially depressing the price. (No amount of government regulation will increase supply or inflate demand.) Regulation of oil to make it cheaper for the airlines (and other consumers) therefore means doing something to keep the price low. This can mean restricting demand or supply through rationing. I don't think that's what anyone has in mind.

So by process of elimination, we're talking about price caps. Why does that leave a sour taste in my mouth? Why shouldn't I want something that will make oil cheaper?

The reason is because price caps don't work and are not sustainable in the long run. The market demands value in exchange for value; that is the definition of equilibrium. When a product is sold at an under-equilibrium price, even if that price is still very profitable for the producer, demand pressure is increased for that commodity in the short run, and supply pressure is decreased in the long run.

In the short run, people will find ways to cheat to buy the below-market price oil. Then, soon enough, there will be no more below-market oil to be bought because people will have bought it all and the gas stations will be dry. The extra cost could take many forms -- increased "user fees" for airplane transportation, for instance, or bribes to the gas station attendant to cut in line, or "gas club membership dues," or things like that. But there will be indirect costs that consumers pay that will sneak in to the market in order to buy petroleum products if the market is regulated in the manner considered.

If price caps are sustained for a long period of time, someone in the oil production infrastructure will not be paid what they know perfectly well they could be for their product or their labor. So they will quit working because it's better to not work at all than to work and not get paid. Oil supply will decrease. Demand will not, however, which will further distance the market price of oil from its equilibrium price. Eventually, producers of oil -- the people who pump it out of the ground and the people who refine it into gasoline and other usable products, will find the regulated price to be so distant from what they know they could get that they will also withdraw from the market. This will continue until supply reaches a low enough point that the government relents and raises the artificially capped price to more closely approximate the price that the real demand and real supply curves would indicate.

So what will happen is that the true price of oil will not decrease -- part of the price will become hidden, and the real price will not go down, but in the long run, supply will decrease and there will simply be less oil to be had at any price.

Now, that's not to say that a little regulation will go that far. The scenario I describe is only if there is a fairly aggressively regulated market. But I go as far as I do because I think people are reacting viscerally and not rationally to the rapidly-changing market conditions, and will call for stern levels of regulation. Now, maybe you think that overall, the market needs regulation despite everything I've said. And I'll allow that it's possible for light regulation, theoretically, to have a beneficial effect in keeping the quality or quantity of a product within levels that are beneficial to society at a whole. But I am very skeptical of direct price regulation which is what we're talking about here. I do not see in the CEOs' open letter a call for moderate, careful, and restrained levels of price regulation that closely tracks prevailing global market forces. And that is why we should be very cautious about what the CEOs have suggested to American voters.

Vomiting For Jesus

This funny and scarcely-believable passage is an excerpt from a book written by an atheist journalist who went undercover through the "Christian Boot Camp" at Ted Hagee's church in Texas. It's funny for several reasons, in part because of the outrageousness of things the guy claims to have done and seen, and scarcely-believable for the same reason.

Some things in the passage I can readily believe. The group catharsis exercises, for instance, seem eminently credible. So too with the frequent casual invocations of God in utterly prosaic activities. The author getting through those sorts of situations in the way he did, though, I have a much harder time buying in to.

You may remember the Legend of Davey Hogan scene from the wonderful movie Stand By Me. Allegedly, something roughly akin to this happened at Hagee's boot camp for new Christians. I have to wonder -- why didn't anybody comment on the fact that all the paper bags were dry? This question won't make sense until you RTFA.

I know much better than to think that the bulk of Christians I know go through experiences like these or would put even the tiniest bit of credulity in what is described. In reading the passage, I have difficulty imagining anyone actually buying in to what's going on -- although I think there probably is something to his invocation of the circus scene from The Kreutzer Sonata.

The whole thing is very well-written and alternatively quite funny and quite creepy. On the whole, I have reservations about buying into it. Some of it seems too ready-made to fit into my own prejudicial fantasies about evangelical Christianity. I would rather get a better understanding of what such people are really like than be entertained by caricatures, especially ones that do not seem like they could be real. Some of it seems so beyond the scale of anything within the orbit of credible human interaction that I can't imagine anyone, of any level of faith or any level of intelligence, believing or doing what is described.

So my bullshit meter is out for this one. Yes, it is funny, but I'm thinking maybe that's because it's intended to be comedy rather than reportage, and I recommend it for that reason. Besides, you will learn about the tragedy of alcoholic clown abuse and get a brief lesson in how to speak in tongues.

Here's A Way To Locate A Valuable Tool

After all, it's important to have an open mind. It's important to be willing to evaluate new ideas on their face and not discard them out of hand. Skepticism doesn't mean that you close your mind to different ideas. So.

There's a new form of non-invasive medical treatment out there, called Colorpuncture. Here's how it works:

Scientists are now discovering that light is actually the medium by which cells communicate and it is at the very basis of many body functions. In a Colorpuncture treatment, frequencies of colored light are focused on the skin using a hand-held acu-light tool ... with specially designed, hand-made interchangeable glass rods which emit different colors of light through a focused tip. Each color consists of different wavelength frequencies of light and therefore communicates different energetic information. Treatments include a specific set of points in a sequence using a prescribed pattern of colors. As the light is absorbed by the skin and transmitted along energetic pathways or meridians deep into the body, it stimulates intra-cellular communication which supports healing.

Are you willing to give it a try? After all, the people who wrote the testimonials on the site swear that it helped them! There's even been scientific papers on file with the National Institute of Health suggesting that the technique is useful and helpful to certain kinds of patients! Well, perhaps you don't fit the profile of people who can benefit from this form of therapy, so let's see who are good candidates to beneefit from it:

If you are ill and suspect that your bodily symptoms may be related to old traumas or unresolved emotional issues, or to your confusion or lack of direction in life, Colorpuncture can help you access and heal the roots of your problems. Healthy people, who want to help prevent illness by clearing energetic blockages before they impact the body, as well as those who want access to soul information needed to move more easily on their life paths will find Colorpuncture treatments given by a trained Colorpuncture therapist to be an invaluable assistance.

So, if you're ill, or if you're healthy, or if you've had traumas in the past, or if you have unresolved emotional issues, Colorpuncture can help you. Well, that seems to include people like me. I'm healthy. In fact, pretty much everyone falls into either the category of "ill" or the category of "healthy." There isn't really a very broad third choice between the two; one is the opposite of the other, and it's a binary system -- if you're not ill, you're healthy, and vice versa.

Here's what I might propose, if I were irresponsible. I'd propose getting a sample of maybe 100 people who have been diagnosed with, oh, I don't know, melanoma. Something right there on the skin that Colorpuncture can easily treat. Melanoma's most overt symptom is a mole-like growth, which can be of many colors, that is a form of a malignant tumor on the skin. A therapist trained in the use of the Colorpuncture acu-light tool should be able to easily identify and focus the tool on the subject. One-half of the subjects of the test will be given Colorpuncture treatment with the frequency prescribed by the Colorpuncture therapist, and the other half will be given surgery to remove the melanomas and some of the tissue surrounding them. Then, we compare the mortality rates of the patients.

If Colorpuncture therapy is a valid form of therapy, we should see similar mortality rates in the Colorpuncture patients as we do in the surgical patients. The first question to you, Reader, is -- does Colorpuncture stand even a remote chance of reaching that result? The answer ought to be patently obvious. Now, here's the real question -- why is such a proposal obviously irresponsible? How can you know, without actually doing this experiment, what the result is going to be? Why is it that you are very confident, without having actually performed this experiment, in that prediction -- indeed, if you're like me, you're confident to the point of calling it a certainty, so where does that confidence come from?

Congratulations. Now that you've identified the source of your certainty, you have located your bullshit detector. This is a valuable tool to help you make your way through life. Don't lose this tool. Use it often.

Hat tip to Eric Berlin for the link to "Colorpuncture." Who thinks up crap like this? And more importantly, do people really spend good money on it?

Abortion As Art

My bullshit meter is reading pretty high on this one. But here's the story; it's all over the Internets and has caused the Yale Daily News website to go down from the traffic spike:

An art student at Yale claims that she did the following. First, she obtained sperm samples from various donors. Then, she used them to inseminate herself, becoming pregnant. Then she took a variety of "legal, herbal" products that functioned as abortifacents, and thus induced miscarriages. She videotaped the miscarriages and kept samples of the blood. She repeated this several times, without consulting a doctor or having concern for her own health. Finally, she built a large cube covered in plastic sheeting, in which the videos and the blood samples will be displayed while the cube is suspended from the ceiling of the on-campus art gallery.

Both anti-abortion and pro-abortion activists have been very quick to condemn this "art project." The anti-abortion types, obviously, think that the repeated abortions make the art student a "serial murderer" and suggest that she has a "mental problem." The pro-abortion types believe, rightly, that the project trivializes the experiences of abortion and miscarriage. Women who want to be pregnant are heartbroken when they miscarry. Even women who do not want to be pregnant are usually pretty upset at being in a circumstance which causes them to terminate their pregnancies.

I'm highly suspicious of the authenticity of this story. It's contrived, it's so deliberately provocative, it's the sort of thing that obviously will spread like wildfire across the net. If I'd sat down to write the "feverish right-wing outrage of the week," this would have been pretty close to what I'd have come up with. I'd have made it Wellesley instead of Yale. So stay tuned, and stay skeptical.

UPDATE: (from the comments) Looks like the B.S. meter is working fine. But a lot of "big bloggers" seemed to have fallen for it.