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Another bad year for ‘psychics’ and quackery

'Psychic' con artistsThe year 2018 was another bad year for so-called ‘psychics,’ astrologers and others in the prediction business – and yes, it is a business – because nothing they predicted came true. Nothing specific or meaningful, that is. Sure lots of general “predictions” and vague lifestyle comments phrased as “predictions” were made – many which echoed what others have been saying in real news. But that wasn’t because of some astrological or ‘psychic’ effort.

When you read these sites you find a lot of that bloviated nonsense like “The main astrological indications of 2018 are those of releasing the past and preparing for new beginnings. There is a letting go of the old that will be taking place and emerging developments in new sectors.” And when I read “Jupiter is in the balsamic phase of semi-square to Saturn,” I thought more about salads than predictions. Gad, what utter balderdash.

How about this for nonsense?

Seeing as 2018 is a number 11 year in numerology, we are really going to be supported to start dreaming and conjuring up what we want from life. Even though part of our journey here is decided before we come into human form, we also have free will and the opportunity to create our lives.

Since you’re already wading in the murk of one pseudoscience, why not throw another – numerology – into the mix? Diaphanous piffle, as Conrad Black would say. As is all astrology, numerology, phrenology, iridology, reflexology and whatever the popular mumbo-jumbo-du-jour is. “Before we came into human form”…WTF is that all about? I hesitate to investigate lest it lead me to another rant on the gibberish generators these people use. Consider this intellectual pablum from Elle magazine:

You’re hosting structured Saturn in your tenth house of career from December 19, 2017 until December 17, 2020, a three-year period that could position you for new levels of leadership, as long as you’re willing to put in the work. While Aries CAN get by on charisma and a bounty of natural skills, Saturn demands that you pay your dues—no shortcuts allowed.

But predictions there are to be found, although a lot of the predictors have a habit of erasing or re-writing their predictions when they inevitably fail to come true. Or claiming after the fact they predicted something would happen. Fortunately for us, others copy and share them, so it’s hard to completely erase one’s failures online.
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Baby, It’s Politically Correct Outside…

Double facepalmI must have travelled to another universe because when I awoke, the world had gone mad. Radio stations were pulling a popular, rather over-played, 74-year-old, playful holiday song because some folks thought it was about rape. Sexual assault. Or at least non-consensual sex. The media was full of Chicken Littles screaming that the cultural sky was falling if radio stations continued to play it. The song was subject of weighty opinions on editorial pages.

What is going on in this strange, politically correct and apparently unhinged universe?

Let me back up. Two items appeared simultaneously on my Facebook timeline this week: one was a video of a peacock strutting around, trying to win over a pea hen by flashing his tail at her. The other was news that Baby, It’s Cold Outside was causing such a furor that radio stations were banning it. But these Facebook items are actually two aspects of the same thing.

The song is a duet, a playful banter between a man and a woman about, yes, sex. But not sex as in explicit. Inferred, yes, perhaps implied, but never stated. And never forced. The peacock video is also playful banter, albeit wordless and nothing is forced.

There are a hundred or more shows on Netflix you can watch right now that include graphic nudity, sex and even rape that don’t even try to hide behind innuendo. The abysmally-written mommy-porn novel, Fifty Shades of Grey was graphically explicit – and so popular it sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. Sex and seduction are in the Bible – read the Song of Solomon! As far as I know, no one is having these banned or burned.

Is there some strange hypocrisy at work here? CBC writer Jessica Goddard wrote,

…nothing says “happy holidays” like the death of nuance and frantic institutional overreaction…
The accusation that Baby, It’s Cold Outside is about sexual assault is absurd unless you isolate the entire duet down to the lines “Say, what’s in this drink?” and “The answer is no.” That ignores the lyrics that suggest that same character internally wrestling with wanting to stay (“I wish I knew how / To break this spell,” “I ought to say ‘No, no, no sir’ / At least I’m gonna say that I tried”).

Baby, It’s Cold Outside is not pornographic or even bawdy. It’s about seduction and the age-old mating game. You know: the old tail-flashing peacock routine in the video a few tens of thousands shared without anyone being offended. You want bawdy, go listen to some madrigals or early Renaissance love songs.

If people were really kerfuffled about sexually explicit lyrics or misogynistic treatment of women, they’d have banned rap music years ago. No, this is unfathomably different.

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More rapture, less reality

The end? According to some, the rapture is coming again, April 23. I’m so tired of this event. I’m still cleaning up after the last rapture. And the one before that. And the one before that, and before that, and before that… it’s even more frequent than an annual event. But next week it’ll come again. the whole shebang: Christians rising from the dead, the messiah prancing about, angels flitting about like birds, the confetti, the glitter, champagne corks and party balloons all over the place. Raptures are always such a mess.

Seriously. April 23, according to a report on Faux News. Sure, Faux News has almost as much credibility as any supermarket tabloid, but they wouldn’t lie, would they? (insert gales of laughter soundtrack). But according to a piece on Patheos, that’s just what Faux predicts: the rapture.

And like all alt-facts, fake news and other codswallop Faux spews, the story got picked up by media and the many wingnut websites, and soon spread around the fields of the internet like the manure it is. Which of course sparks the inevitable cycle of debunking and ridicule (these hoaxes are called viral for a reason: they are an intellectual disease).

This is good for David Meade, because it fuels his book sales about the end of times and Planet X (although whether the ignorati actually read their purchase is anyone’s guess – and why write anything if the world’s going to end?). It’s truly a sad comment that anyone credible feels the need to debunk such feather-brained codswallop, but I’m sure they are alarmed at how many people are gullible enough to fall for it. It and the many other woo hoo ideas, hoaxes, conspiracies, cons and scams online.

The hoax is fanned by the self-described “Christian numerologist” David Meade (a pen name for one of the internet’s uber-wingnut conspiracy theorists). But this is an oxymoron: Christians are forbidden from practicing witchcraft, and numerology is one of the things witches practice. But that doesn’t stop Meade, who has predicted this event several times in the past (September, October and then November last year; each one failing to occur).

Well, sure, witchcraft and numerology are puerile superstition, but that doesn’t mean they can’t find a comfort zone among the fringe Christian eschatologists or hoaxers like Meade when it suits their purposes (and sells their books). Being a “Christian numerologist” is one of those made-up job descriptions like nail technologist or dog chiropractor. Who will dispute your title?

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Raw water: the New Age death wish

Drinking from a stream: stupid ideaWould you willingly expose yourself to cholera? While treatable, this highly infectious disease causes great physical distress and suffering to its victims, and is even fatal to some. Most readers have never experienced it because it’s rather a rarity in developed nations, those that have the benefit of modern water and wastewater treatment systems. That’s thanks to decades of stringent and effective health and safety standards and constantly improving treatment systems.

But for some, it seems, those systems are a terrible burden; a worrisome threat to their natural state. The very notion of clean, hygienic water bereft of bacteria and pollutants threatens their peace of mind. They demand to be fed unfiltered water, bravely willing to accept the threat of travellers’ diarrhea, Giardia, Cryptosporidium (from cattle feces), dysentery, Salmonella, Escherichia coli 0157:H7 (E. coli, found throughout the natural environment), Typhoid Fever, Cholera, Hepatitus A, Hepatitus E, Campylobacter (from bird guano), Norovirus, Shigella and other infections and parasites.

It’s better, these New Age adventurers believe, to risk illness, pain, paralysis and even death than drink water from a municipal tap that might have come into contact with chlorine or fluoride. The taint of civilization, of modernity, or – gasp! – chemicals shall not pass their lips. Seriously: this is truly one of the most bizarre, stupid, and dangerous, wingnut fads to emerge.

“Raw” water – or as The Verge more appropriately called it, “raw diarrhea” – is the latest craze among those obsessed with the internet-driven fads-du-jour.

These are the same people who worship the Queen of Pseudoscience Fads, Vani Hara aka The Food Babe. These are the warriors who spent thousands more to buy free-range chicken, organic avocados, tomatoes, corn, and kale, then crusade against GMOs (oh, the irony, the irony…). These are the folks who refuse to get their children vaccinated because they think having children suffer and possibly die from diseases like rubella, smallpox, polio and whooping cough is more natural than having them artificially healthy through medicine. These are the people who crusaded against the ubiquitous chemical, dihydrogen monoxide in foods (insert laugh track).

I doubt one of them knows how municipal water is treated, how the infrastructure or facilities work, what technologies have evolved or changed, and how many millions of technicians, scientists and engineers work every day to improve our water systems. I doubt one of them actually knows the science or history behind chlorine or fluoride. To New Agers, science is a dark art: scary, mystical, untrustworthy.
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Oumuamua: just a piece of rock

If you can watch the whole bit of this piece of New Age woo hoo without flinching or giving up, you will likely shake your head at the utter, mindless gullibility of humankind. And it’s not even political. But by now you know the Net is crammed full of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, food fads, creationism, homeopathy and other claptrap. And you already have seen how the wingnuts can easily bend and twist everything, taking stuff out of context or simply making it up to suit their wacky beliefs.

Oumuamua
That blue circle shows the best magnification from the biggest Earth-based telescopes of the rogue asteroid Oumuamua.

The latest codswallop is that scientists claim a tumbling cigar- shaped (or was that penis-shaped?) chunk of rock that passed through our solar system in October was actually an alien spaceship. Well, no, they didn’t. And they certainly did not CONFIRM anything of the sort no matter what some UFO-addled wingnut claims.

Oumuamua – or more technically, 1I/2017 U1 – zipped by us about 33 million kms away, reaching a speed of 87.71 km/s (196,200 mph) before slowing. The eccentricity of its path made astronomers hypothesize that it came from outside our own solar system and thus was the first recognized interstellar traveller we have encountered. That’s only a hypothesis based on its trajectory, not even a full theory yet, because no one has seen it close up, let alone sent a probe to examine it closely. And never will.

The minimal data available says it’s a chunk of rock, roughly 180 by 30 meters (600 ft × 100 ft) in size. Even if it did come another stellar system, and even if it’s oddly shaped, there’s nothing to indicate it wasn’t natural.
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Why the panic over Julie Payette?

Governor General Julie Payette made comments in a speech to the Canadian Science Policy Conference on Nov. 1 in which she encouraged her audience at a science convention to ignore misinformation, fantasy and conspiracy theory, to support facts and science, and to engage in “learned debate.” That has the right furious, and as is their wont, making both fallacious claims about her words while launching ad hominem attacks against her.

It’s particularly galling to the right that not only is Payette a woman, she’s smart and accomplished: a former astronaut and an engineer. That means the right gets wildly incensed when she says anything vaguely interesting, let alone true. And so they’re trying to make this into a wedge issue about religion. The undertext being that Payette, being a Liberal appointee, is touting Liberal anti-religion screed.

Andrew Scheer, the pasty-white leader of the Conservatives who recently hired as his party’s campaign chair a former media director of the vile Rebel media organization, said,

It is extremely disappointing that the Prime Minister will not support Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians and other faith groups who believe there is truth in their religion.

Which is bullshit. Scheer, of course, completely ignores the actual truth and substance in Payette’s comments. How dare the GG make any statements that are not the most innocuous, content-removed, pastel puffery? Yet nowhere in her speech did Payette mention any religion or indigenous people, so where does he get this allegation? Probably from his misogynist, racist Rebel media buddies. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to see Scheer’s attack as an anti-feminist one: that’s been Scheer’s way since he took charge.

What colossal arrogance for Scheer to think he can speak for millions – even billions, because he doesn’t specify there are just Canadians he’s speaking for – of people with whom he has no contact, let alone consulted about their reaction to Payette’s comments. And why does he think that any Canadian, not just our Prime Minister, has to have blanket, unquestioning support for every bit of religious myth, pseudo-health or pseudoscience claptrap? That’s simply nuts. And cowardly. We elect people to have opinions, to take stands, to advocate for issues, and to stand up for truth, not simply agree with everyone and everything. A toy bobblehead doll does that. That’s not what Canadians expect from their leaders. Unless, it seems, they are Conservatives.
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