Jeff's Lunchbreak

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call today something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, today's called Fastnacht Day. Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of today, here's a recipe on my main site on how to make fastnachts. (I know it's a little late, since you should have made them either last night or early this morning, so that you could eat them throughout the day, but better late than never.)

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 28 | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)

I made a few changes last week that I'm just now documenting. First off, I did a slight bit of reorganization. I created a How To page, with directions for various projects. Some of these projects were previously listed on my Misc page, but I figured this new organization made a bit more sense. I added a link to the How To page to the main menu in the left hand column that appears on all of my pages, and removed the Mp3 entry from that menu, and moved it to the misc page. I figured there was so little content on the Mp3 page that it wasn't worth having its own entry in the main menu. In the new How To section, I created two new pages, Potato Salad Recipe and Wacky Cake Recipe.

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 21 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks to Pharyngula, Uncertain Principles, and Gene Expression over at Science Blogs for pointing this out.

Here's an interesting article in the Washington Post, written by some guy named Richard Cohen, who basically says that algebra is a worthless topic to most of the population, excluding the technical people who are going to need it for their careers. He argues that it shouldn't be a requirement for people to graduate from high school, which I think is just plain stupid.

He goes on to say, "If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please." My goodness. If your argument is that high school should only require students to learn the bare minimum needed to survive in later life, which seems to be his point of why students don't need algebra, how are English or history any more valuable? I know I'm biased by being an engineer, but I do try to keep my education well rounded. And I can honestly say that in my daily life, excluding my job, I use algebra far more than history, and way more than English. Hell, English is instinctual - we'd all learn it even without school. And history? I mean, when's the last time you had to know when King John signed the Magna Carta? As opposed to say, trying to balance your checkbook, or figuring out your car payment, or even just trying to make sure that the plumber isn't ripping you off when he charges you for his work?

Don't get me wrong, I think that our education should be well rounded. History and English are important, especially history in my opinion, so that people can put current events into their proper perspective, and learn from the past. But algebra is just as important. And it's not like it's asking a lot for people to learn algebra. It's basic, basic stuff. It's not like the requirement is for students to know calculus, or differential equations, or vectors, or imaginary numbers. Algebra is only one small step up from arithmetic. I use it everyday, and to compare it to English, algebra is as fundamental as being able to recognize nouns and verbs. If a high school diploma is supposed to have any merit for saying that a person has a fundamental skill set, and isn't just a piece of paper saying that a student showed up to class for 12 years, I don't think it's too much to ask students to understand algebra (and language, history & science, as well).

Here's one more statement he makes that bugs me, "Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note -- or reason even a little bit." This argument is so bad I almost don't know where to begin. First off, most people don't own the types of calculators that can do anything beyond simple arithmetic, and wouldn't know how to use an advanced calculator if they had one. The types of people that do own those calculators and know how to use them, or that own and know how to use the types of computer programs he's talking about, are usually technical people that have a good, fundamental knowledge of mathematics to begin with. They're not using them to replace that knowledge, only to save the tedium of doing hand calculations over and over. And the last part of that statement is just as off base. His argument against algebra was that students don't need it because most people don't use it in daily life. Well guess what, most people don't "write a column" on a regular basis, either, so does that mean English shouldn't be required? And I can do just fine finding thank-you notes without studying English. That's still no excuse for not having a well rounded education.

Anyway, this article gets me worked up because it's a mindset that seems to be so prevalent in much of our population. PZ at Pharyngula does a really good job of thoroughly attacking this particular article, and I'd recommend reading his post.

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 17 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

Note: This is a post of an essay that first appeared on my website November 7th, 2005. The original essay can be found here. This is the last entry of an ongoing effort to put all of my soapbox entries onto this blog, to give a space for user feedback.

7 November 2005

I spend enough time complaining on my soapbox, so I figured it was about time that I write something positive. I was originally just going to write about my new laptop, but figured I'd extend it to computers in general.

I was born in 1978. That puts me at the age where I got to witness personal computers becoming common place, initially being little more than souped up Ataris, blossoming into what we have today. My family's first computer was a Commodore 64. Originally, we used a T.V. set for the display, and it wasn't until we'd had it for several years that we finally got a dedicated monitor. I was pretty young when we had it. I remember being completely mystified by how it worked, but having fun playing games on it. We did have a few useful programs, like the word processor, Easy Script, which I hardly ever used, and the graphics program, Print Shop, which I used a bit, but for me that computer was mainly a game machine.

After several years, we finally bought our first IBM compatible computer. Now this was a fancy computer, a 286 with GeosWorks. It had a WYSIWYG word processor, a good drawing program, and a modem to let us get online on Prodigy. Yeah, I still played games on it, but this was a computer that I used for practical purposes, like writing my homework essays. I was still mystified by how it all worked, but I was learning.

After a few more years, we got another computer, this time a 386. I was getting older, so I did a lot more playing around with that one. I learned the ins and outs of DOS; I started using Bulletin Board Services (BBS's) and the Internet (with a text only browser for a while); I downloaded all types of programs to play around with music and graphics (both still pretty primitive compared to what you can do today); I even taught myself how to program in BASIC. And this was the first computer we had with good enough graphics capabilities that pictures on the computer actually looked real. By the time I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I had done a lot of playing around on that computer, and felt confident enough to build my own computer to take to college with me. I saved up a bunch of money from my job at KFC, and went out and bought the latest issue of Computer Shopper. That was back in the days when Computer Shopper was much bigger than most magazines - taller, wider, and about an inch thick - and just full of ads for computers and computer parts. I scoured through every page, looking for the best deals on everything. I ended up ordering parts from several different sources, and bought one of the new Pentium chips, and built the whole computer once all the parts got in. I guess I missed the real early days of building computers, when you actually had to do soldering and the like. By the time I built this computer, it was actually pretty easy. Tab A into Slot A type of stuff. The only thing that made it tedious was that you had to set jumpers on all of the devices to give them their IRQs and DMAs, plus go into the BIOS to configure it to handle your hard drive.

Anyway, when it was all said and done, I had a pretty good computer. It wasn't quite top of the line - after all, I was limited to a high schooler's budget, and you could have easily dropped $5000 or more trying to get the best of the best, but when I compared it to other computers that I saw being advertised, it was a good deal. I'd saved myself quite a bit of money, and gotten the exact parts I wanted, by building the computer myself. I remember thinking at the time, and telling it to anyone who'd discuss this type of thing, that I'd never buy a computer already put together. If you just spent a little bit of time looking for the best prices and building it, you could get a far better computer for the money by building it yourself. Well, it didn't take long for that to be overturned. I think it was only a couple of years later when my dad was looking to buy a new computer, and he bought one already put together. He'd done a little looking, too, and by then, it wasn't worth it to try and build a computer yourself, when it was so cheap to get one already put together.

I didn't buy a new computer for a long time after that. I had my computer, and I just kept upgrading it. Eventually, by the time I quit using it, I think the only original parts were the case and the sound card. Everything else, motherboard and disk drives included, had been replaced. One of my good friends bought himself a laptop during that time. I remember hearing how much he paid for his laptop, seeing how limited it was and how much my computer could do, and thinking that I'd never buy a laptop for myself. You could just get so much more for the money with a desktop.

Well, fast forward a few years to the present. About a year ago, my wife and I bought a laptop computer. My computer was getting so old (and Frankenstein-ish from all the mods I'd done to it - I'd even taken a saw to it to cut the case to make certain parts fit better), that it was getting impractical to upgrade it anymore. My wife had a relatively new computer that I'd just upgraded with a bit more RAM, so I figured that maybe now would be the time to try out a laptop, as a kind of secondary computer. And boy do I love it. It's become the primary computer, and the desktop is now the secondary computer, serving mainly for backing up files, or getting onto the Internet from time to time.

My new computer's almost a year old now, and I'm still digging it. It's a Sony Vaio laptop. It wasn't top of the line, but it does everything I'd want it to do except burn DVDs (I bought a DVD burner for our old desktop to do that). The fact that I've got a Sony camera, so the memory stick works in both, is a big plus.

Now that I've owned a laptop, I don't know if I'll ever buy a desktop again. I really like the portability of a laptop, and to me it's worth the decreased performance and/or increased price. I don't do a whole lot of travelling, but when I do, it's invaluable to have our computer there to download pictures from our digital camera so that the memory card doesn't get full. Not just that, but it's great to have it as a kind of digital photo album to show people pictures. And with how many hotels have internet connections now (and now that I've got my new cell phone that works as a high speed modem), it's nice to be able to access the internet from anywhere, even driving down the highway. And aside from travelling, it's nice to be able to take the computer to any room of the house - especially sitting it on your lap in the family room to browse the internet while you're watching T.V., and then to take it into bed to keep on reading something from in there. I even used it when I was redoing our kitchen, taking it in there with me to access the blue prints I'd made. Anyway, I'm not trying to turn this into a commercial, but I really was surprised at how useful it was to have a portable computer, even with as little travelling as I do, and how much the portabilityoffset the reduced performance.

And to tell the truth, the reduced performance on a laptop isn't nearly as big of an issue as it was when my friend bought his laptop back when we were in college. Back then, it was a huge difference between using his computer and using my computer. Now, any application that I can run on our desktop, I can run just as well on our laptop. And not just that, but it seems less important now to have the latest technologies. Back on my old computer, I was always upgrading my computer every year or so so that it would run the newest programs well. Now, about all I upgrade is RAM and the hard drive - everything else is already so overpowered for the applications I do, that I wouldn't notice a difference by upgrading. I mean, how powerful of a processor do you need to browse the internet, or type on a word processor? I know that computers will continue to get more powerful, and people will keep on figuring out cool new applications, but it seems to me that computers now can do so much now (dvds, video editing, wireless internet), that I don't feel a big need to have to have the latest technologies. I think the frenetic pace of upgrading/replacing that characterized the computer industry before is going to slow down here in the near future. Sure, gamers will always want the latest and greatest, as will techno geeks, and from time to time there will be some new developments that will make you want to upgrade, but pretty soon, I think that for the average user, computers will become like other appliances, that only get bought rarely. Now wait for 15 years from now, when I come back and read this on a holographic display projected onto my retina from a cell phone computer, and I won't be able to believe how naive I was.

To get back to desktops, though, they've come a long way as well. We still buy desktops for the computers where I work. In this case, it does make sense, since most of us don't really do any travelling that we'd need a laptop for, and we really do use most of the computer power for our engineering applications. I'm basically the IT department here at work, so I've taken these computers apart quite a few times. And boy, is everything set up better than it used to be. I remember when I built that computer back at the end of high school. It was easy enough, but like I said above, the jumpers were tedious. Not just that, but anytime I wanted to upgrade a hard drive or disk drive, I actually had to take out the motherboard to get to the screws that were holding the drive in. Taking out the motherboard meant taking out all of the cards attached to it, because they were screwed into the case. It was a pain in the neck. Now these new cases on the computers here at work either have hinges, or sliding parts, or any other ingenious solution, so that you can get to and change just about any part in 5 minutes or less. I mean, even just the cases now are nicer. And there aren't any more jumpers to set on anything (well, you could with the hard drive, but most new computers seem to be using cable select). Everything's plug and play. And the new BIOS's auto detect the hard drives, so there's nothing to set up there, either. It's just so much easier to work on computers now.

And the Internet. Can you even remember what it was like to have a stand alone computer? Or a computer with just a dial up modem? There's just so much information out there, available at your fingertips. And it's great to be able to talk to my parents using a video conference, so that they can see their grand daughter. The Internet's become such a big part of how I use my computer that now when my Internet connection goes down, it feels like my whole computer's broken.

Anyway, that's enough gushing about computers. It's hard to believe how much computers today are capable of doing, especially considering how fast it's come about. I'm sure my prediction about the pace of technology change slowing down will prove to be dead wrong. Just look at what's happening with cell phones. It's probably been about 20 years since our family bought that Commodore 64. It'll be interesting to see what computers are like in another 20 years.

Further Reading

• Spoof of Old Time BBS on Engadget

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 14 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it's finally come to this. I'm selling my RX-7. It was the first nice car I bought after I graduated from college, and it's a damn nice sports car, but it's time to get rid of it. My wife and I had been discussing selling it for a while - a two-seat sports car doesn't lend itself well to a family life, and I hadn't really been driving it all that much. And then, while it was parked on the side of the road in front of our house, another car came by and side-swiped it. I could get it fixed up, but if I'm just going to sell it, anyway, why go through all that hassle? So, I've put an ad in the paper that'll start running tomorrow, with a reference to a page on this site with more information on the car. I think it's a fair asking price no matter what, but if somebody buys it who's going to do a lot of the repairs on their own, it could end up being a really good deal for them. Or, even though I hate to think about it, for that price, somebody could part the car out and make a reasonable profit. Anyway, if you're reading this and live anywhere near Wichita Falls, TX, and have any interest in owning a good sports car, take a look at that page.

Update 11 Feb 06: Wow, that didn't take long. Somebody bought my car already - last night, the very same day that the ad first ran in the paper.

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 9 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

This is an excerpt from another entry on this blog. The original entry was so long that I wasn't sure people would read the whole thing, so I've decided to pull out the best parts into their own entries.

My wife and I recently went on a medical mission trip to Guatemala. Since it was a mission trip, pretty much everybody that went was a pretty devout Christian. And it seemed like a big part of the reason that many of these people went was to do God's work to help these people. So obviously, religion can inspire people to do good things. I think I had the most liberal interpretation of the Bible of anybody there (see my Bible Interpretation Essay), and that most of those people accepted the Bible as a divinely inspired book. Like I said, this is a topic I've been thinking a lot about, recently, so seeing all of these people going to Guatemala to help so many strangers made me think that maybe I'd been thinking too harshly about religious fundamentalism, if it creates good things like this. But then, towards the end of the trip, we learned about all the mudslides Hurricane Stan had caused in that country, and about a bad earthquake that had just hit Pakistan (and don't forget that Hurricane Katrina had just caused all of that devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast), and it got the people to discussing those natural disasters. And what seemed to be the consensus was that the Bible talks about the end of the world coming, and these were just signs. And that really bothered me. It's a type of complacency - natural disasters happen, it's God's will so there's nothing we can do about it. What about global warming? We're screwing up the planet right now, and hurricane seasons are just going to get worse. Maybe this was just an anomolous year (random variability is going to make some years have more hurricanes than others), or maybe it was a symptom of global warming. Why not try to figure out the real reason - maybe we'll be able to change something to prevent this from happening in the future, or maybe we'll be able to predict these things better so that we'll be able to get people out of harm's way. But to just pass it off as God's will really irritates me.

So, after that conversation, it got my head back out of the clouds. Religion can inspire people to do good things, but I think that fundamentalism, or extremism in any sense, is bad. Let me repeat that, so that you don't skim through and miss it - the religious fundamentalism in our country right now is bad. You may say that you believe in Christ, but your actions are harmful. In the past, fundamentalism has lead to the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, all of the fighting in Ireland, and countless other evils. The bad things that have been done in the name of religious fundamentalism (not religion in general, but fundamentalism) more than outweight the good things that have come out of it. So, be religious, but don't abandon sense and reason.

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 6 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is an excerpt from another entry on this blog. The original entry was so long that I wasn't sure people would read the whole thing, so I've decided to pull out the best parts into their own entries.

Yet again, watching T.V. with my wife, we saw a show on the National Geographic Channel, Is It Real? (which is turning out to be one of my favorite shows, by the way). This particular episode dealt with exorcisms. Actually, at the time of writing this, if you go to National Geographic's Video Archive, and do a search on "exorcism," you can find a short clip from the episode. And really, I don't know exactly how many people are buying into this, but from the video clips you could see on the show, there were some pretty big crowds at the services of one particular exorcist, Bob Larson.

While I was watching this man perform his exorcisms, I was struck by one thing, before they ever even introduced the skeptics (so I don't think I was being biased by their views), and that was how much the whole thing looked like stage hypnosis. There was the preacher, up at the front of a big crowd, with his "patient" there with him, and he kept talking to "the demons" possessing these people. I mean, the susceptibility of the human mind to the power of suggestion is a lot greater than most of us would like to believe. And it's not necessarily stupid people (Nobel laureate Richard Feynman discusses being hypnotized by a stage magician in one of his books), it's just that certain people have a disposition towards being hypnotized. So, I told my wife that's what was going on, and lo and behold, a few minutes later when National Geographic showed the experts, that's exactly what they thought was going on.

Although I'm a bit skeptical, I tend to be very trusting of people. So I saw this man doing his exorcisms, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he believed in what he was doing just as much as the people being exorcised. I told my wife that, but she doesn't have quite as high of a regard of human nature. Her response was, "I bet he's selling something and making a lot of money off of this." And just a few minutes later, they show how he sells books and videos at his services.

I wish I could find a transcript of this episode, or maybe catch it on T.V. again to get this certain quote. One woman said that she'd been excorcised by Larson many times, I think in the double digits. That right there should be a signal that these people aren't doing what they say they're doing. I guess you can come up with lots of rationalizations for this (more than one evil spirit, getting re-possessed), but I'd seriously question the validity of an exorcist who needs repeat business. And this helps bring up the point of what is wrong with people buying into this - they're not getting the real help that they need.

These people have problems. They wouldn't be seeking out help if they didn't. And obviously, many of these people believe that the exorcists are really doing some good for them. I had a brief discussion on this topic with an acquaintance of mine, who said that maybe the psychological effects of believing that you've been helped really do help. Well, that may be true to some extent, but I think the case of the woman going back to the exorcist multiple times shows the problems with that. She's not getting the help that she needs. People may argue that psychologists don't cure you in one visit, either, or that some psychologists are too quick to give out drugs, but at least they're trying to find and treat the actual problem, not just hypnotizing you and shouting "Devil be gone."

Well, I'd like to rant on this a little bit more, but without having a transcript of the episode, or writing this while the episode is still fresh in my memory, I just can't remember enough to bring up any good points, so I'll just move on to discussing alternative medicine in general.

Americans seem to be embracing alternative medicine these days, and I really just don't understand it. A few years ago, I was with a group of acquaintances, and one other man who knew them that I had just met that night and never saw again. But I still remember one statement this man said. We were out having dinner, and the topic came up of what we all did, and what our wives did. He told how his wife was into homeopathy, and the statement that really sticks out in my mind, "Western medicine can't explain it, so they just dismiss it." And that seems to be a common mantra among people that are into this sort of thing. Now, medicine is just like any other science, there are unknowns. But, just like any other science, it's based on experiment and evidence. Doctors perform studies on large groups of individuals, and study the results of those studies, and from that determine what treatments work and what treatments don't. And you know what, sometimes the doctors don't understand why exactly a certain treatment performs the way it does, but if they find a signficant statistical correlation from their study, they'll dig into it further. They don't just dismiss things things that they can't explain. You'll find examples of this all the time, such as a recent article on news@nature.com, explaining how a certain drug originally intended to combat Lou Gehrig's disease also caused a loss of appetite. The doctors couldn't explain it at first, but after some studying found that it had to do with growth of new cells in the hypothalamus. And they still don't understand exactly what's going on, but they can see that something's happening.

I think that a lot of homeopathic remedies work to some degree not because there's anything beneficial about the remedy itself, but because of the placebo effect (more info at Wikipedia). Basically, if you believe something will work, no matter how ineffectual it actually is, you will at least perceive less of the symptoms, and might actually get somewhat better. Not too long ago, I went on a cruise with my family. The first night out, the seas were a little rough and lots of people were getting seasick. The crew had two remedies to sell- dramamine tablets, or metal bracelets. The crew seemed to be recommending the bracelets quite a bit, and I saw quite a few people buying them. I heard one customer ask if they really worked. I really wanted to tell him that it would work just as much as he wanted to believe that it did, but I bit my lip.

There may be some home remedies or alternative medicines that do legitimately work, not just the placebo effect, but actually having a measureable impact. After all, modern medicine has gotten several of its treatments from traditional remedies. For an example, look at how we've gotten aspirin from the traditional remedy of using willow bark (More Info). The difference is, though, that modern medicine approaches the problems more scientifically. Not just to try and figure out what works and how it works, like I've already discussed, but also what side effects there might be from the treatment, or how a certain new drug might interact with other drugs. Sure, a home remedy might alleviate a certain symptom, but if you later found out that it was a carcinogen, or that it had bad side effects when mixed with the cough syrup that you take, you might have been better off to never use that home remedy, and that's one of the important safeguards that comes with the way modern medicine works.

So really, the biggest problem that I see for alternative medicines, is, like I had discussed for exorcism, that people who need help aren't getting the treatments that they really need. Not just that, but because these remedies aren't studied as extensively as conventional medicine, there could be bad side effects that people don't realize.

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 6 | Permalink | Comments (40) | TrackBacks (0)

This is an excerpt from another entry on this blog. The original entry was so long that I wasn't sure people would read the whole thing, so I've decided to pull out the best parts into their own entries.

I was watching TV one night with my wife, and I can't remember what channel or show it was that we were watching, but at the time, some book called Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau was the second best selling book in America, followed behind Harry Potter. Since I first saw that, while channel surfing I've seen Kevin Trudeau numerous times either being interviewed legitimately about his book, or more often on an infomercial in a staged interview trying to sell his book. Apparently, he's doing rather well. when I first checked the New York Times Best-Seller Lists this past August, the book was at the number one spot for hardcover advice. When I checked again at the end of October, 2005, the book was still at that spot. And really, it just amazes me how he can do so well.

Before I even get into looking at the claims that this man made, let's take a look at his reputation, first. Here's a very good page on the Federal Trade Commission website. He was banned from doing any more infomercials because of the number of lies he told. Here's a quote from the FTC page:

In nationally-televised infomercials, Trudeau advertised that Coral Calcium Supreme, a dietary supplement purportedly made from Japanese marine coral, provided the same amount of bioavailable calcium as two gallons of milk, could be absorbed into the body faster than ordinary calcium, and could cure cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, lupus, and other illnesses. In a separate infomercial, Trudeau claimed that Biotape, an adhesive strip, provided permanent relief from severe pain, including debilitating back pain, and pain from arthritis, sciatica, and migraines. In June 2003, the FTC filed a complaint in the Northern District of Illinois against Trudeau and some of his companies, alleging that these disease claims for Coral Calcium Supreme were false and unsubstantiated. The Commission also alleged in a separate action that Trudeau violated a 1998 FTC order by making the Coral Calcium Supreme claims and the pain-relief claims for Biotape.

This man is, almost literally, a snake oil salesman. With the type of repuation that this person has, how can people continue to buy his book? I guess the answer is that most people who see a book in the bookstore won't go and research the author before buying the book, and if they see it on the Home Shopping Network they won't do a lot of research, either. But really, after watching the infomercial and the types of claims he's making, you'd think people would do some checking into it. Part of the problem also lies with retailers. I know we need to have freedom of expression, but what about responsibility for what you're selling? Wal-Mart is well known for its refusal to sell certain controversial items, like music albums with explicit lyrics. How can they in good conscience sell a book like this one? Well, I guess businesses stay in business by selling what people want to buy, and apparently that means this book. Plus, allowing dishonest people to publish there books in the interest of free expression is better than censorship. So really, most of the blame does come down to the people being gullible/ignorant enough to believe this man's claims and to buy his book.

So let's take a look at some of those claims. Here's a transcript of one of his infomercials (along with the webmaster's commentary) on InfomercialWatch.org.

In the interest of keeping this essay from becoming too long (both for the reader's sake, and so that I can actually complete it to post it on my website), I'm only going to look in detail at one of his claims. Here's one of the exchanges that took place in that interview, regarding multiple sclerosis. I included the first few lines so you can see the exchange leading up to his claims about MS.

TRUDEAU: There are. There are all-natural cures. You'll never hear about them because the manufacturers can't tell you what they are. Diabetes, migraines, cancer, heart disease, acid reflux, Attention Deficit Disorder, depression, stress, phobias, fibromyalgia, pain of all sorts, arthritis, the list goes on. Lupus, multiple sclerosis; there are cures for multiple sclerosis. There are cures for muscular dystrophy that are all natural and people are not being allowed...

MATTHEWS: Now muscular dystrophy, for example ...

TRUDEAU: -[to tell the truth].

MATTHEWS: How long would ... well, I mean, I guess it depends on the case. But on the average, what kind of program of homeopathic medicines would someone have to get on and ... ?

TRUDEAU: There is ... in the book I tell you, in most cases, MS symptoms are caused by something you're eating. It's a food additive. And when you stop eating it within ... in some cases, days, the symptoms of MS go away. Now isn't that shocking?

MATTHEWS: Well, it is shocking.

TRUDEAU: It's caused by a food additive in many cases. In many cases, MS is being diagnosed when a person doesn't have anything. It's a food additive that's causing the problem.

Well, to start off with, this is a bit misleading. You can see in the first statement by Truedeau that he's claiming a cure for MS. But then in the rest of the discussion, he talks about treating symptoms of MS, not the disease itself. Notice the slight shift in his claim there. He goes on to say that the symptoms are caused by food additives, and that doctors are misdiagnosing the disease. If I were a doctor, I'd be highly offended, that somebody would make such a serious accusation, that I'm not just misdiagnosing a case here and there in the less severe cases, but most cases of MS. I don't think doctors are that inept. My wife's a nurse, and through her I've met several medical doctors. And they are very intelligent people. They have to be to get through all of the schooling it takes to be a doctor. I don't think it would be very easy for food companies to add an additive to their foods, and to trick all of the doctors into thinking that the symptoms were actually caused by MS. Not just that, but I think enough research has been done that people have a pretty good idea of what the causes of MS actually are. To read some real information about the disease, visit the National MS Society.

I hope that specific claim helps to show how ludicrous his claims are, but let's discuss the claims in general. Read that transcript I mentioned above if you've never had the displeasure of watching this man's infomercials. Most of his claims, which should be evident enough from the title of the book, are very conspiratorial. He's saying that all of these natural cures are out there, but there are all these cover-ups to keep them from being known, so that drug companies can continue to make money. While I'm not willing to dismiss the power of greed in driving people to certain actions, you really have to consider how many people would have to affected by such a conspiracy, and you really have to have a low opinion of people on top of that. I mean, consider just how many people work for drug companies doing research. It's a huge industry. Not one of those people has a high enough moral standard to speak out for the greater good of the world? And what about other research institutions, like universities? Are all of those professors, not to mention their grad and undergrad students that are doing large parts of their research, also a part of the conspiracy? It just seems ludicrous. They're human beings, with the same compassion for humanity as everybody has. They'd jump at the chance to find a cure to save all of those people. Even at a selfish level, don't you think somebody would want the fame of being the one to uncover a conspiracy and give the world the cure for cancer? or any of the other maladies Trudeau is claiming are being covered up?

And just to wrap up the discussion on this book, here's a link to the book on Amazon.com. At the time I posted this, there were 1734 reviews of the book, so go ahead and read some of them for yourself. Apparently, the book doesn't even have all of the content that Trudeau claimed it would in those infomercial interviews.

It just boggles my mind that so many people are buying into what this huckster is claiming. I mean, it's not just his claims that get me worked up - anybody can be an idiot on their own time - it's that he's got one of the best selling books in America based on those claims.

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 6 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This is an excerpt from another entry on this blog. The original entry was so long that I wasn't sure people would read the whole thing, so I've decided to pull out the best parts into their own entries.

The other day, I received a religious e-mail that was pretty disturbing. Basically, it links separation of church and state with the September 11th terrorist attacks, then goes on to say that the world's going to Hell in handbasket because of our Godless ways. I think it's scary the type of mindset it takes to write that type of e-mail, believe it, or forward it on to people.

Below is a copy of an e-mail that I got the other day. I've reduced the font size from the original formatting in the e-mail I got, and I made it all left-justified, instead of centered, but other than that, I tried to keep the formatting (mistakes and all) pretty much the same.

Granted, this is just one e-mail, but I got it from two different people, indicating that a lot of people are buying into it and forwarding it on to people that they know (okay, the one guy that sent it to me did so just to get a rise out of me, but the e-mail still got to him, so it's still making it's rounds).

Subject: FW: Please Read This ,It Got me to Thinking--Hope You Do Too !

In light of the many perversions and jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke, it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her "How could God let something like this happen?" (regarding the attacks on Sept. 11).

Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, "I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.

And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?"

In light of recent events...terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.

Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school . the Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said OK.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world's going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.

Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.

Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing?

Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they WILL think of you for sending it. Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit. If not then just discard it... no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don't sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in!!

We Plan GOD Laughs

If you dont agree send it to the author,

(intentionally left out)@aol

This e-mail scares me. Basically, it links separation of church and state with the September 11th terrorist attacks, then goes on to say that the world's going to Hell in handbasket because of our Godless ways. I think it's scary the type of mindset it takes to write that type of e-mail, believe it, or forward it on to people.

Now, I don't doubt that there are certain problems on the rise in this country, but I don't think it's any worse than problems that have appeared in civilization in the past - we just need to understand their causes and correct them. Correlating the problems to removal of school prayer just doesn't seem like the answer to me - it's like saying global warming and other increases in natural disasters are a result of the reduction of pirates since the 1800's (See the Flying Spaghetti Monster site) (Actually, out of all the problems that are on the rise in our country today, one of them that scares me the most is the abandoning of science for increased religious fundamentalism.)

You know who in history had it good? Rich Romans. You know, the pagans who would practice homosexuality, had slaves, and massacred Christians in the Colosseum for entertainment, just to name a few of their vices. Their standard of living was very good, even by today's standards. They had running water, central heating, flushing toilets, and a lot of other things that weren't commonplace in Europe again until the last couple of centuries. They had feasts where there was so much food, that it was accepted practice to excuse yourself to vomit between courses, just to make more room in your stomach (hey, gluttony, there's another sin). You know who in history had it bad? Poor peasants in Medieval Europe. You know, the devout Christians who went to church every Sunday, had complete faith, and wore hair shirts and flailed themselves as pennance for their sins. They were little more than slaves to their lords, and had a horrendous standard of life. I know lots of people like to point out that the Roman Empire did eventually fall, and they like to blame it on their decadent ways, but the empire still lasted for several centuries, not to mention the republic before that, which is quite a long time for a nation to last. If the empire fell because of their sins, it sure took a long time for it to happen, letting people enjoy that decadent lifestyle the whole time.

That line in the e-mail about Dr. Spock's son committing suicide isn't even true (See Snopes). Besides, what's so bad about not beating your kids, anyway, and disciplining them in other ways?

And what's the purpose of that parenthetical comment about someone speaking out against school prayer getting murdered - that whenever someone gets murdered God was mad at them?

To me, this e-mail reeks of propaganda. The writer has an agenda - getting Christianity into schools and government - and he/she's preying on people's religious beliefs to try and make them feel guilty enough into going along.

Actually, since I've been writing this, a new study by Gregory S. Paul, titled "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" was published in the Journal of Religion and Society. It shows the correlation between the number of people in a nation that believe in and worship a creator, versus different problems that that nation faces. To quote the study, "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies... The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a 'shining city on the hill' to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health." I know statistics can be taken many different ways, correlation is not causation, and I'm sure there are many factors contributing to problems in the U.S. But this does demonstrate that the more "Godless" nations are actually doing better than the U.S. in terms of "societal health," and that becoming less religious as a nation does not necessarily lead to the collapse of society. It's just absurd to blame the problems in the U.S. on abandoning school prayer and other such things. (To read more about this study, take a look at the article in The Times or this blog entry on Thoughts from Kansas, or just go and read the study, itself.)

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 6 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

Note: This is a post of an essay that first appeared on my website November 2nd, 2005. The original essay can be found here. This is part of an ongoing effort to put all of my soapbox entries onto this blog, to give a space for user feedback. A "new" retroactive post will be made every Monday.

To start off, let me say that when this soap box entry was written, it wasn't completely up to date with current events. I began writing this in August, before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. But, like it says on my homepage, my website's just a hobby, so with my focus being on other things, it's taken me a little while to write this entry. I've even put this essay aside to complete two other pages on this site that were more important to get done quickly (Guatemala 2005 Photos and Homosexual Marriage Soapbox Entry). So, there are many things I've seen since I started writing this essay that would go right along with the topic, especially remarks I've seen related to Hurricane Katrina. However, in the interest of actually completing this essay and getting it posted on my website, I'm not going to write about them. In fact, I'm even going to drop one of the original topics I was going to discuss, Justice Sunday II, just because it's taking me so long to write this.

2 November 2005

Okay, I don't want to beat a dead horse. I know I've gone over the subject of evolution several times. So, I'm going to try to stear clear of that in this essay. (Maybe I'll start a new section on my site, Evolution Rants, so I can just write away about it to my heart's content, and not have it interfere with the rest of this site.) Anyway, I've been doing a lot of reading over the past couple months on evolution, creationism, science, religion, etc., probably devoting more time to it than I should. And so it's making me notice these things more in daily life. And now I think that the whole evolution vs. creationism debate is just the symptom of a larger problem in this country. I'll just throw out a few examples here in the opening paragraph, and then discuss them later on. First, just the other day, I got an e-mail, the same one from two different people (though one guy sent it to me just to get a rise out of me, but it still shows that it's making the rounds), that correllated the September 11th terrorist attacks with taking prayer out of school and the moral decline of our country. Second, and I don't remember exactly where I saw this, but at the time, some book called Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau was the second best selling book in America, followed behind Harry Potter. Actually, as I began writing this in August 2005, and again when I checked in October 2005, it's at the number one spot for Hardcover Advice on the New York Times bestseller list. And finally, I was watching the National Geographic Channel the other night, and on their new series, Is It True (which is a very good series, by the way), they did a special on excorcisms, and showed all the people that are buying into it.

All of these examples, as well as my previous rants on evolution, show a society that's increasingly abandoning science and embracing the mystical. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a Christian myself (though my views would probably get me branded as a heretic in most circles), so I believe that there's more to the universe than just what science can tell us. And some home medical remedies do work. But I think that for the most part, scientists, doctors, and other technical people know what they're doing and what they're talking about, supernatural explanations are usually the wrong explanations, given the choice between homeopathy and modern medicine - I'd take modern medicine any day, and that some of the religious views in this country right now, to put it frankly, just plain scare me.

Scary Religious E-mail

Okay, this topic is really what got me worked up the most to start writing this essay. Below is a copy of an e-mail that I got the other day. I've reduced the font size from the original formatting in the e-mail I got, and I made it all left-justified, instead of centered, but other than that, I tried to keep the formatting (mistakes and all) pretty much the same.

Granted, this is just one e-mail, but I got it from two different people, indicating that a lot of people are buying into it and forwarding it on to people that they know (okay, the one guy that sent it to me did so just to get a rise out of me, but the e-mail still got to him, so it's still making it's rounds).

Subject: FW: Please Read This ,It Got me to Thinking--Hope You Do Too !

In light of the many perversions and jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke, it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her "How could God let something like this happen?" (regarding the attacks on Sept. 11).

Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, "I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.

And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?"

In light of recent events...terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.

Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school . the Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said OK.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world's going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.

Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.

Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing?

Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they WILL think of you for sending it. Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit. If not then just discard it... no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don't sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in!!

We Plan GOD Laughs

If you dont agree send it to the author,

(intentionally left out)@aol

This e-mail scares me. Basically, it links separation of church and state with the September 11th terrorist attacks, then goes on to say that the world's going to Hell in handbasket because of our Godless ways. I think it's scary the type of mindset it takes to write that type of e-mail, believe it, or forward it on to people.

Now, I don't doubt that there are certain problems on the rise in this country, but I don't think it's any worse than problems that have appeared in civilization in the past - we just need to understand their causes and correct them. Correlating the problems to removal of school prayer just doesn't seem like the answer to me - it's like saying global warming and other increases in natural disasters are a result of the reduction of pirates since the 1800's (See the Flying Spaghetti Monster site) (Actually, out of all the problems that are on the rise in our country today, one of them that scares me the most is the abandoning of science for increased religious fundamentalism.)

You know who in history had it good? Rich Romans. You know, the pagans who would practice homosexuality, had slaves, and massacred Christians in the Colosseum for entertainment, just to name a few of their vices. Their standard of living was very good, even by today's standards. They had running water, central heating, flushing toilets, and a lot of other things that weren't commonplace in Europe again until the last couple of centuries. They had feasts where there was so much food, that it was accepted practice to excuse yourself to vomit between courses, just to make more room in your stomach (hey, gluttony, there's another sin). You know who in history had it bad? Poor peasants in Medieval Europe. You know, the devout Christians who went to church every Sunday, had complete faith, and wore hair shirts and flailed themselves as pennance for their sins. They were little more than slaves to their lords, and had a horrendous standard of life. I know lots of people like to point out that the Roman Empire did eventually fall, and they like to blame it on their decadent ways, but the empire still lasted for several centuries, not to mention the republic before that, which is quite a long time for a nation to last. If the empire fell because of their sins, it sure took a long time for it to happen, letting people enjoy that decadent lifestyle the whole time.

That line in the e-mail about Dr. Spock's son committing suicide isn't even true (See Snopes). Besides, what's so bad about not beating your kids, anyway, and disciplining them in other ways?

And what's the purpose of that parenthetical comment about someone speaking out against school prayer getting murdered - that whenever someone gets murdered God was mad at them?

To me, this e-mail reeks of propaganda. The writer has an agenda - getting Christianity into schools and government - and he/she's preying on people's religious beliefs to try and make them feel guilty enough into going along.

Actually, since I've been writing this, a new study by Gregory S. Paul, titled "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" was published in the Journal of Religion and Society. It shows the correlation between the number of people in a nation that believe in and worship a creator, versus different problems that that nation faces. To quote the study, "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies... The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a 'shining city on the hill' to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health." I know statistics can be taken many different ways, correlation is not causation, and I'm sure there are many factors contributing to problems in the U.S. But this does demonstrate that the more "Godless" nations are actually doing better than the U.S. in terms of "societal health," and that becoming less religious as a nation does not necessarily lead to the collapse of society. It's just absurd to blame the problems in the U.S. on abandoning school prayer and other such things. (To read more about this study, take a look at the article in The Times or this blog entry on Thoughts from Kansas, or just go and read the study, itself.)

Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About

Like I said in the introduction to this essay, I was watching TV one night with my wife, and I can't remember what channel or show it was that we were watching, but at the time, some book called Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau was the second best selling book in America, followed behind Harry Potter. Since I first saw that, while channel surfing I've seen Kevin Trudeau numerous times either being interviewed legitimately about his book, or more often on an infomercial in a staged interview trying to sell his book. Apparently, he's doing rather well. when I first checked the New York Times Best-Seller Lists this past August, the book was at the number one spot for hardcover advice. When I checked again at the end of October, 2005, the book was still at that spot. And really, it just amazes me how he can do so well.

Before I even get into looking at the claims that this man made, let's take a look at his reputation, first. Here's a very good page on the Federal Trade Commission website. He was banned from doing any more infomercials because of the number of lies he told. Here's a quote from the FTC page:

In nationally-televised infomercials, Trudeau advertised that Coral Calcium Supreme, a dietary supplement purportedly made from Japanese marine coral, provided the same amount of bioavailable calcium as two gallons of milk, could be absorbed into the body faster than ordinary calcium, and could cure cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, lupus, and other illnesses. In a separate infomercial, Trudeau claimed that Biotape, an adhesive strip, provided permanent relief from severe pain, including debilitating back pain, and pain from arthritis, sciatica, and migraines. In June 2003, the FTC filed a complaint in the Northern District of Illinois against Trudeau and some of his companies, alleging that these disease claims for Coral Calcium Supreme were false and unsubstantiated. The Commission also alleged in a separate action that Trudeau violated a 1998 FTC order by making the Coral Calcium Supreme claims and the pain-relief claims for Biotape.

This man is, almost literally, a snake oil salesman. With the type of repuation that this person has, how can people continue to buy his book? I guess the answer is that most people who see a book in the bookstore won't go and research the author before buying the book, and if they see it on the Home Shopping Network they won't do a lot of research, either. But really, after watching the infomercial and the types of claims he's making, you'd think people would do some checking into it. Part of the problem also lies with retailers. I know we need to have freedom of expression, but what about responsibility for what you're selling? Wal-Mart is well known for its refusal to sell certain controversial items, like music albums with explicit lyrics. How can they in good conscience sell a book like this one? Well, I guess businesses stay in business by selling what people want to buy, and apparently that means this book. Plus, allowing dishonest people to publish there books in the interest of free expression is better than censorship. So really, most of the blame does come down to the people being gullible/ignorant enough to believe this man's claims and to buy his book.

So let's take a look at some of those claims. Here's a transcript of one of his infomercials (along with the webmaster's commentary) on InfomercialWatch.org.

In the interest of keeping this essay from becoming too long (both for the reader's sake, and so that I can actually complete it to post it on my website), I'm only going to look in detail at one of his claims. Here's one of the exchanges that took place in that interview, regarding multiple sclerosis. I included the first few lines so you can see the exchange leading up to his claims about MS.

TRUDEAU: There are. There are all-natural cures. You'll never hear about them because the manufacturers can't tell you what they are. Diabetes, migraines, cancer, heart disease, acid reflux, Attention Deficit Disorder, depression, stress, phobias, fibromyalgia, pain of all sorts, arthritis, the list goes on. Lupus, multiple sclerosis; there are cures for multiple sclerosis. There are cures for muscular dystrophy that are all natural and people are not being allowed...

MATTHEWS: Now muscular dystrophy, for example ...

TRUDEAU: -[to tell the truth].

MATTHEWS: How long would ... well, I mean, I guess it depends on the case. But on the average, what kind of program of homeopathic medicines would someone have to get on and ... ?

TRUDEAU: There is ... in the book I tell you, in most cases, MS symptoms are caused by something you're eating. It's a food additive. And when you stop eating it within ... in some cases, days, the symptoms of MS go away. Now isn't that shocking?

MATTHEWS: Well, it is shocking.

TRUDEAU: It's caused by a food additive in many cases. In many cases, MS is being diagnosed when a person doesn't have anything. It's a food additive that's causing the problem.

Well, to start off with, this is a bit misleading. You can see in the first statement by Truedeau that he's claiming a cure for MS. But then in the rest of the discussion, he talks about treating symptoms of MS, not the disease itself. Notice the slight shift in his claim there. He goes on to say that the symptoms are caused by food additives, and that doctors are misdiagnosing the disease. If I were a doctor, I'd be highly offended, that somebody would make such a serious accusation, that I'm not just misdiagnosing a case here and there in the less severe cases, but most cases of MS. I don't think doctors are that inept. My wife's a nurse, and through her I've met several medical doctors. And they are very intelligent people. They have to be to get through all of the schooling it takes to be a doctor. I don't think it would be very easy for food companies to add an additive to their foods, and to trick all of the doctors into thinking that the symptoms were actually caused by MS. Not just that, but I think enough research has been done that people have a pretty good idea of what the causes of MS actually are. To read some real information about the disease, visit the National MS Society.

I hope that specific claim helps to show how ludicrous his claims are, but let's discuss the claims in general. Read that transcript I mentioned above if you've never had the displeasure of watching this man's infomercials. Most of his claims, which should be evident enough from the title of the book, are very conspiratorial. He's saying that all of these natural cures are out there, but there are all these cover-ups to keep them from being known, so that drug companies can continue to make money. While I'm not willing to dismiss the power of greed in driving people to certain actions, you really have to consider how many people would have to affected by such a conspiracy, and you really have to have a low opinion of people on top of that. I mean, consider just how many people work for drug companies doing research. It's a huge industry. Not one of those people has a high enough moral standard to speak out for the greater good of the world? And what about other research institutions, like universities? Are all of those professors, not to mention their grad and undergrad students that are doing large parts of their research, also a part of the conspiracy? It just seems ludicrous. They're human beings, with the same compassion for humanity as everybody has. They'd jump at the chance to find a cure to save all of those people. Even at a selfish level, don't you think somebody would want the fame of being the one to uncover a conspiracy and give the world the cure for cancer? or any of the other maladies Trudeau is claiming are being covered up?

And just to wrap up the discussion on this book, here's a link to the book on Amazon.com. At the time I posted this, there were 1734 reviews of the book, so go ahead and read some of them for yourself. Apparently, the book doesn't even have all of the content that Trudeau claimed it would in those infomercial interviews.

It just boggles my mind that so many people are buying into what this huckster is claiming. I mean, it's not just his claims that get me worked up - anybody can be an idiot on their own time - it's that he's got one of the best selling books in America based on those claims.

Exorcism

Yet again, watching T.V. with my wife, we saw a show on the National Geographic Channel, Is It Real? (which is turning out to be one of my favorite shows, by the way). This particular episode dealt with exorcisms. Actually, at the time of writing this, if you go to National Geographic's Video Archive, and do a search on "exorcism," you can find a short clip from the episode. And really, I don't know exactly how many people are buying into this, but from the video clips you could see on the show, there were some pretty big crowds at the services of one particular exorcist, Bob Larson.

While I was watching this man perform his exorcisms, I was struck by one thing, before they ever even introduced the skeptics (so I don't think I was being biased by their views), and that was how much the whole thing looked like stage hypnosis. There was the preacher, up at the front of a big crowd, with his "patient" there with him, and he kept talking to "the demons" possessing these people. I mean, the susceptibility of the human mind to the power of suggestion is a lot greater than most of us would like to believe. And it's not necessarily stupid people (Nobel laureate Richard Feynman discusses being hypnotized by a stage magician in one of his books), it's just that certain people have a disposition towards being hypnotized. So, I told my wife that's what was going on, and lo and behold, a few minutes later when National Geographic showed the experts, that's exactly what they thought was going on.

Although I'm a bit skeptical, I tend to be very trusting of people. So I saw this man doing his exorcisms, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he believed in what he was doing just as much as the people being exorcised. I told my wife that, but she doesn't have quite as high of a regard of human nature. Her response was, "I bet he's selling something and making a lot of money off of this." And just a few minutes later, they show how he sells books and videos at his services.

I wish I could find a transcript of this episode, or maybe catch it on T.V. again to get this certain quote. One woman said that she'd been excorcised by Larson many times, I think in the double digits. That right there should be a signal that these people aren't doing what they say they're doing. I guess you can come up with lots of rationalizations for this (more than one evil spirit, getting re-possessed), but I'd seriously question the validity of an exorcist who needs repeat business. And this helps bring up the point of what is wrong with people buying into this - they're not getting the real help that they need.

These people have problems. They wouldn't be seeking out help if they didn't. And obviously, many of these people believe that the exorcists are really doing some good for them. I had a brief discussion on this topic with an acquaintance of mine, who said that maybe the psychological effects of believing that you've been helped really do help. Well, that may be true to some extent, but I think the case of the woman going back to the exorcist multiple times shows the problems with that. She's not getting the help that she needs. People may argue that psychologists don't cure you in one visit, either, or that some psychologists are too quick to give out drugs, but at least they're trying to find and treat the actual problem, not just hypnotizing you and shouting "Devil be gone."

Well, I'd like to rant on this a little bit more, but without having a transcript of the episode, or writing this while the episode is still fresh in my memory, I just can't remember enough to bring up any good points, so I'll just move on to discussing alternative medicine in general.

Homeopathy and Alternative Medicine

Americans seem to be embracing alternative medicine these days, and I really just don't understand it. A few years ago, I was with a group of acquaintances, and one other man who knew them that I had just met that night and never saw again. But I still remember one statement this man said. We were out having dinner, and the topic came up of what we all did, and what our wives did. He told how his wife was into homeopathy, and the statement that really sticks out in my mind, "Western medicine can't explain it, so they just dismiss it." And that seems to be a common mantra among people that are into this sort of thing. Now, medicine is just like any other science, there are unknowns. But, just like any other science, it's based on experiment and evidence. Doctors perform studies on large groups of individuals, and study the results of those studies, and from that determine what treatments work and what treatments don't. And you know what, sometimes the doctors don't understand why exactly a certain treatment performs the way it does, but if they find a signficant statistical correlation from their study, they'll dig into it further. They don't just dismiss things things that they can't explain. You'll find examples of this all the time, such as a recent article on news@nature.com, explaining how a certain drug originally intended to combat Lou Gehrig's disease also caused a loss of appetite. The doctors couldn't explain it at first, but after some studying found that it had to do with growth of new cells in the hypothalamus. And they still don't understand exactly what's going on, but they can see that something's happening.

I think that a lot of homeopathic remedies work to some degree not because there's anything beneficial about the remedy itself, but because of the placebo effect (more info at Wikipedia). Basically, if you believe something will work, no matter how ineffectual it actually is, you will at least perceive less of the symptoms, and might actually get somewhat better. Not too long ago, I went on a cruise with my family. The first night out, the seas were a little rough and lots of people were getting seasick. The crew had two remedies to sell- dramamine tablets, or metal bracelets. The crew seemed to be recommending the bracelets quite a bit, and I saw quite a few people buying them. I heard one customer ask if they really worked. I really wanted to tell him that it would work just as much as he wanted to believe that it did, but I bit my lip.

There may be some home remedies or alternative medicines that do legitimately work, not just the placebo effect, but actually having a measureable impact. After all, modern medicine has gotten several of its treatments from traditional remedies. For an example, look at how we've gotten aspirin from the traditional remedy of using willow bark (More Info). The difference is, though, that modern medicine approaches the problems more scientifically. Not just to try and figure out what works and how it works, like I've already discussed, but also what side effects there might be from the treatment, or how a certain new drug might interact with other drugs. Sure, a home remedy might alleviate a certain symptom, but if you later found out that it was a carcinogen, or that it had bad side effects when mixed with the cough syrup that you take, you might have been better off to never use that home remedy, and that's one of the important safeguards that comes with the way modern medicine works.

So really, the biggest problem that I see for alternative medicines, is, like I had discussed for exorcism, that people who need help aren't getting the treatments that they really need. Not just that, but because these remedies aren't studied as extensively as conventional medicine, there could be bad side effects that people don't realize.

Religion- The Good and the Bad

My wife and I recently went on a medical mission trip to Guatemala. Since it was a mission trip, pretty much everybody that went was a pretty devout Christian. And it seemed like a big part of the reason that many of these people went was to do God's work to help these people. So obviously, religion can inspire people to do good things. I think I had the most liberal interpretation of the Bible of anybody there (see my Bible Interpretation Essay), and that most of those people accepted the Bible as a divinely inspired book. Like I said, this is a topic I've been thinking a lot about, recently, so seeing all of these people going to Guatemala to help so many strangers made me think that maybe I'd been thinking too harshly about religious fundamentalism, if it creates good things like this. But then, towards the end of the trip, we learned about all the mudslides Hurricane Stan had caused in that country, and about a bad earthquake that had just hit Pakistan (and don't forget that Hurricane Katrina had just caused all of that devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast), and it got the people to discussing those natural disasters. And what seemed to be the consensus was that the Bible talks about the end of the world coming, and these were just signs. And that really bothered me. It's a type of complacency - natural disasters happen, it's God's will so there's nothing we can do about it. What about global warming? We're screwing up the planet right now, and hurricane seasons are just going to get worse. Maybe this was just an anomolous year (random variability is going to make some years have more hurricanes than others), or maybe it was a symptom of global warming. Why not try to figure out the real reason - maybe we'll be able to change something to prevent this from happening in the future, or maybe we'll be able to predict these things better so that we'll be able to get people out of harm's way. But to just pass it off as God's will really irritates me.

So, after that conversation, it got my head back out of the clouds. Religion can inspire people to do good things, but I think that fundamentalism, or extremism in any sense, is bad. Let me repeat that, so that you don't skim through and miss it - the religious fundamentalism in our country right now is bad. You may say that you believe in Christ, but your actions are harmful. In the past, fundamentalism has lead to the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, all of the fighting in Ireland, and countless other evils. The bad things that have been done in the name of religious fundamentalism (not religion in general, but fundamentalism) more than outweight the good things that have come out of it. So, be religious, but don't abandon sense and reason.

Okay - A Little Bit of Evolution

I know said I wasn't going to bring up evolution, but, well, I just came across this article in the Washington Post (linked to from Pharyngula), written by Sally Jenkins. The basic gist of it is that somehow, ahtletes are good evidence against random evolution and for intelligent design. (Really. Go ahead and read the article.) Wow. I just really don't know how to respond to this, so I'll just link to the thread on Pharyngula. Bottom line: this woman should not be allowed to write another article for a newspaper, ever.

And as long as I'm on the topic of evolution, here's a link to a poll done by The Pew Research Center. Nothing I'm going to go into much detail over, just more data confirming that nearly half of Americans reject evolution.

Final Remarks

Right now, the U.S. is a country where an e-mail that blames the World Trade Center attacks on taking prayer out of our public schools is making its rounds and being accepted by a large number of the people that read it; where the public is so willing to accept the claims of a huckster hawking "snake oil" that they've made his book one of the nation's best sellers; where some people would rather go back to the dark ages of exorcism to have demons banished, instead of going to a doctor to get real treatment; where almost half of the people reject evolution despite the overwhelming scientific evidence. It really just astounds me that those statements describe a modern society. Two hundred years ago, maybe those things might not have been so unbelievable, but we've had so much time to understand how the universe works. I mean, I don't know how this country can be so backwards. It seems like we're losing ground, abandoning science in favor of the mystical. Like I've said in a few previous essays, education's the answer, but it really is a daunting task when you look at the state of our country, and know that this isn't just the product of ignorance, but in many cases people actively trying to resist the real science. I just hope that we can fix this problem, before it advances further and hurts our country worse.

Posted by Jeff on A, Feb 6 | Permalink | Comments (40) | TrackBacks (0)