Col’s Rational World

Ireland’s Environment Minister = nutjob

According to BBC News, the Environment Minister of Northern Ireland, DUP’s Sammy Wilson, has just said something job-losingly-stupid.  Yes, My Wilson thinks that climate change, if it exists, is probably not due to human activity, and whatever it does we should just accept it and move on.

That woud be inexcusably daft even for a junior minister, but for a senior minister it’s downright idiotic. For an Environment Minister, it’s both idiotic and intellectually fatal.  It just underlines the need to vet our government more closely.  Is there some way we could actually require ministers to pass a test of competency on the area over which they are to be placed in control?  Can we require them to have some reasonable level of qualification?  This strikes me as a sensible solution to the current problem.  After all, we seem to be in a position at the moment where the blind are leading not only the blind, but they’re also trying to direct those with 20/20 vision (no offence to the incidentally incompetent Mr. Blunkett - it was a metaphor).

And as for Mr Wilson, well… appointing someone like him as environment minister strikes me rather like appointing Richard Dawkins as secretary for religious affairs, or George Bush as Presid…. hmm…  Yeah, this has happened before, hasn’t it?

Today’s game card - Kevin Trudeau

This is the last of this current selection of game cards as, quite honestly, I’ve run out of big names.  Actually, I’m quite pleased about that - it’s nice to know that there really aren’t very many high profile frauds, idiots and loonies.  But today’s, as the last in the series, is a real corker - Kevin Trudeau is all three: a fraud, an idiot and a loony.  As a skeptic, it’s not often that you can legally say about a human being that they are not only a multiply-convicted felon, a fraud, a larcenist and a serial liar, but also perhaps the greatest purveyor of pseudoscientic snake-oil bullshit that I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across.

Trudeau is the author of a number of ridiculous pseudoscientific books teaching gullible Americans how to achieve a number of medical miracles using only easily-obtainable household products.  He’s a hard-hitting opponent of pretty much all established science, especially anything in the medical sphere.  He’s on record as saying that suncream causes cancer (imagine the damage that could cause if people believed him), that scientists have never ever successfully managed to cure a single disease, that animals never get sick and that bacteria and viruses don’t causes disease.  That’s not just wrong: it makes even young-Earth creationists look sane by comparison.  And, of course, Trudeau has zero training to qualify himself for this, and zero studies behind any of his claims.

Despite serving two years in jail for larceny and credit card fraud, being restricted by federal court orders from selling anything whatsoever, and warned that if he misrepresents any fact in his books he might get a hefty fine and/or a jail sentence, Trudeau has still somehow managed to sell five million copies of his latest conspiracy-theory-laced brain-rottingly insane drivel to people too gullible or poorly educated to see that it’s merely the demented rantings of a pathological, self-obsessed, money-crazed fantasist.  For that fact alone, he gets a low stupidity rating despite the fact that the nonsense he’s writing about is insane to the point of being farcical.

A quick tally shows that Trudeau has paid over $5 million in several fines for various counts of deception and misrepresentation during his business activities.  The fact that US law permits cretins like Trudeau to continue to operate despite his undeniably seditious track record and a series of books so chock full of highly dangerous lies and nonsense, shows just what a mockery a dedicated con man can make of the present laws of the world’s richest country.  It is a cause for intense shame that this man is outrageously rich when so many decent human beings are struggling to pay their bills.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my own personal recommendation for the Biggest Douche in the Universe, edging out John Edward and Sylvia Browne by a whisker: Kevin Trudeau.

Kevin Trudeau

Today’s game card - Ken Ham

I’m almost out of people for the card game - I only have one left (but it’s a good one!)  Today’s penultimate card, for the time being at least, is of a famous young earth creationist, Ken Ham.  We’ve had quite a few of these guys in our card set, so I won’t go over again what they believe, but let’s just say that the only reason his stupidity score is below ten is that he does actually have a degree, and has managed to cobble together a few books with some surprisingly long words in them.

Ham was born in Australia, then moved to the US where he works very closely with the Institute for Creation Research and runs the Answers in Genesis website.  [Yes, I actually linked directly to the real site - I have no problem giving people both sides of the argument and, in all honesty, the best argument against young earth creationists is a short chat with one of them.]

I gave Ken a 6/10 for wealth because, like most of these creationists, he seems to have published a few books which the faithful are snapping up in handfuls.

So, on to the game card. I apologise for the picture - it was the best one I could find and, unfortunately, it makes him look like a gibbon.  Sorry, Ken - I know how much you hate the idea of common ancestry. Mea culpa.

Ken Ham

Today’s all-star game card - Tom Cruise

I’ve been waiting for this one for ages. Yep, today’s card is everyone’s favourite massively wealthy actor and Scientologist, Tom Cruise.

This one was a really difficult one.  How do you judge someone who has brought enjoyment to many with some truly great Oscar-winners like Rain Man, clever science fiction works like Vanilla Sky and Minority Report, and cult films like Top Gun? How do you judge someone who, in most of their life, seems to be a thoroughly decent bloke but who, despite all this, is a member of a deeply sinister organisation which is responsible for several deaths, multiple cases of espionage and a legendary litigious record?  (I speak, of course, of Hollywood. Who else?).

How do you evaluate a man who jumped up and down on a couch on a global TV show, and is on record as saying that chemical imbalances in the brain do not exist and that psychiatry is evil?

That’s the problem with Tom Cruise: if any other person had idiotic views like these then it would be sad but otherwise irrelevant; but Cruise is an international movie star, with audiences in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. Most people acknowledge that Cruise is nuts, but a few don’t. When someone with that level of power and influence promotes himself as a mouthpiece of an organisation that spouts this kind of dangerous nonsense, then he becomes a problem.  And that’s why Cruise gets reasonably high scores for evil and danger.  I don’t think that Cruise is an evil man - I think he honestly believes that he’s doing the right thing - but often the line between evil and misguided is a very fine one.

I won’t say what I really think about Scientology because it appears that they sue anyone who tries to criticise them.  However, apparently a lot of other people believe that Scientology is a dangerous and insidious moneymaking cult based on a clever brainwashing scheme dreamed up by an insane science fiction hack and habitual liar. But I wouldn’t know if that’s true or not - it’s just something I read somewhere on the Internet.

Tom Cruise

Justify thyself

I was wondering today how I justify even writing this blog.  My intention is not to be a cynic - I’m not a cynical person, I’m a skeptic.  I’ve said before what skepticism is all about.  A cynic is someone who questions everything except, perhaps, a certain dogmatic core of beliefs that they hold without questioning.  A gullible person questions nothing.  A skeptic is in the middle, simply requiring sufficient evidence for the beliefs that they hold.

I criticise the pseudoscience I see in the world around me not because I get kicks from being negative - quite the opposite.  I believe passionately in the amazing things that science tells us about the real world, and I see pseudoscience as an obstacle to the progress that science brings.  Every time a nutjob stands up on national television and complains about how science is wrong and scientists are holding back the truth of whichever brand of conspiracy nonsense he’s selling, I feel like that’s another brick in the wall that’s holding back the only force that can actually bring real solutions to this world’s problems.

I don’t think that people like John Edward and Sylvia Browne are just harmless entertainment - I worry about what they’re doing to the minds of millions of people around the globe who lack the education and critical faculties necessary to see through their farcical routines, or who are perhaps in such a position of emotional vulnerability that they are easy prey to anyone who wants to make a forrtune by lying to them.  Anyone who  earns a living from duping others puts themselves up for criticism by their very nature.

I came across this quote recently, and I think it sums up my position perfectly:

“To defy the authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue”

Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama

By all means hold crazy positions - but if you do so then either keep quiet about them, or else you must engage in rational dialogue and the scientific process, by which we can evaluate any hypothesis in a reliable way.  If you refuse to engage in rational scientific discourse, or if you reject its findings, then you disqualify yourself from any future discussion.  If people persist with their claims and insist on being invited to sensible discussions, or attempt to influence public policy or, worst of all, the minds of children, then they need to be stopped.  I can’t do that, but I can at least spread the word in the hope that enough people start to agree with me and democracy begins to work its magic.

I’m not a negative person - I really want a lot of this pseudoscience to be true.  I think it would be great if (benevolent) aliens were visiting Earth, or if we had latent psychic powers that we could devlop, or if we could communicate with the dead or cure ourselves of all manner of nasty diseases by doing a few cheap and painless things.  But the bottom line is that those things are just fantasies - they’re not real.  If they were true then they would be provable.  Clinging to fantasies is not healthy, and it holds us back from what we should be doing: exploring the Universe as it is, using scientific principles.  This is the only way we can derive real, dependable results from the world around us.

Today’s game card - Stanton Friedman

Today I bring you the first game card after my summer holiday, and it’s perhaps someone you won’t have heard of. But he’s a great example of the sort of craziness that even an intelligent human mind can fall to if left for too long without rational thought.  Today’s card is Stanton Friedman, once a fully-functional nuclear physicist, and now a professional ufologist.

Yes, that’s right, a man with a degree who actually thinks that UFOs are real and have been visiting Earth.  This man used to work on classified defence programs for McDonnell Douglas!  This is extraordinary, and really does illustrate the way in which a crazy idea can inflict pretty much anyone, regardless of intelligence.

I’ve given Friedman a 2/10 for stupidity.  Whatever he says, the guy used to be a nuclear physicist.  However, he’s pretty much as crazy as they come with regards to other aspects of his life - perhaps beaten only by certifiable nutjobs like Richard Hoagland.  I gave him 2/10 for evil too because, well, let’s face it, he looks like a fun kind of guy.  3/10 for danger represents the fact that people with scientific degrees who actually intellectually subsidise pseudoscience and idiocy are, of course, also giving ammunition to those who put forward ridiculous arguments claiming that lots of scientists massively question the solidity of scientific knowledge.

Stanton Friedman

Back from holidays

I’m finally back from holidays and will begin updating the site tomorrow.  In the meantime, as something to chew on, try this: I’ve just watched the wonderful episode of “Who do you think you are” about the London mayor, Boris Johnson.  He came up with a great quote near the end of the episode that must have been scripted because it was so utterly brilliant.  He said “we aren’t the end product of our genes, we’re just their custodians.”  And of course, that’s true.

It would be so easy to see ourselves as the end product of billions of years of evolution, and that in itself is inspiring enough - but the reality is something far greater.  In actual fact, we are not only the end product of billions of years of evolution, but we are but one link in an unbroken chain that began with the first few self-replicating organisms in the primeval seas of our young Earth, and have evolved over time to such a wonderfully diverse family of organisms.  And yet, without the social lens of technology, our link in that chain is otherwise unremarkable - one more tiny meander in the river of life. For most of us, we are a link, but not the final one.

I personally find it inspiring to think of myself as a component in that huge story of life - to sense that I am very much a component part of the Universe, not simply a separate observer.  However, I know that there are many who are insulted by this truth.  It seems a great shame that our own egos often cloud the light of reason from our sight.

If you haven’t seen that episode of the wonderful BBC series I mentioned above, then I suggest you do so - in fact, all the episodes are fascinating as they each tell a story of how we became to be who we are, and that’s a story that I believe ought to be told.  I only differ in that I suggest the greatest stories unfold when we look a lot further back.

Climate resistance, holidays

I’m off on holiday in a few hours, expected back late on Sunday night (31st August). I’m not expecting to add any more posts until Monday 1st September.

Just in the mean time, I thought I’d say something to the folks at Climate Resistance, whose blog was shown to me a few days ago.  Now, before I start, I have no intention whatsoever of pretending to be an expert on climate change, though I do claim to be an expert on the scientific process.  I put forward a few thoughts rather more as speculative questions and ideas that may well have perfectly valid answers, but which I feel ought to be considered.  Also, I agreed with their recent post on the activities of charities in Africa and how the modern world seems to be rebelling agaisnt the modern science and technology that gives them such an unprecedented standard of life. For what it’s worth, I think that the current trend of sending aid to Africa is massively destructive, but that’s a story for another time.

So, to climate change.  To get my opinion out first, as I am (like all humans) biased: I believe that climate change is a real and potentially dangerous scenario, with human activity the major contribution to this. I believe that most scientists are conservatively underestimating the scope of this effect. I view all theories which disagree with the IPCC findings to be substantially against the scientific consensus and are, therefore, conspiracy theories. And, as I’ve said before, all conspiracy theories are wrong.

Firstly, it seems to me that most criticism of the theory of human-induced global warming seems to centre around the concept of uncertainty.  Most critics admit that there’s some warming effect and that humans are causing some of it, but they are highly dubious of the concept that we’re causing most of it, and that we can do something to stop it.

The IPCC seems to disagree, stating in its most recent report that “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.“  Very likely, in their definitions, means more than 90%. The IPCC, in order to generate such an opinion, surveys the peer-reviewed scientific literature, not just the Daily Mail.

Critisicm of the IPCC seems to focus on a few points.  Firstly, they are a review body - not actually carrying out research themselves, but rather aggregating and reviewing the research carried out by others.  That doesn’t worry me - if anything, not having spent their entire lives dedicated to proving one particular side of the debate makes them more reliable.  Around 90% of the members of the IPCC seem to be from the various member governments who, as far as I can see, have a massive incentive to underestimate the effect. After all, dealing with climate change will negatively affect the nations involved, and will have a greater negative effect on those that are the richest, and (presumably) send more people to the IPCC.

So the IPCC is apparently composed principally of individuals with a vested interest in underestimating the potential effects of climate change, and they review the entire corpus of scientifically peer-reviewed literature.  The viewpoints of a few scientists who disagree with this, perhaps due to personal prejudices, should be weighed against the majority.

As a final point, I would compare the concept of climate skepticism against something more readily understandable as a human. Let’s say you felt unwell and went to the doctor to get a checkup.  Imagine that the doctor said that the test showed that it was 95% chance that you had some sort of advanced medical condition like liver disease or cancer, that the disease was 90% likely to be caused by your own diet and lifestyle, and that there was a chance of reducing or totally curing this disease by coupling a substantial change in lifestyle with some more radical medical treatment.  Let’s say that 9/10 doctors agreed with this sentiment, but a few weren’t certain and thought that perhaps the risk was overstated and that maybe the tests could be explained in other ways.

Of course, the human desire would be to believe this minority of doctors who had the good news, not the majority with the bad news.  Perhaps some of those dissenting doctors were selling a pill that could help to cure you of your alleged ills.  Some probably weren’t - they were just genuinely skeptical.  That’s ok, I like skepticism - in fact, I insist on it.  But here’s the problem - the majority of doctors have said that there is almost certainly something very wrong with you that could kill you if left untreated, and which could at least be tackled by a substantial change in diet and lifestyle, and may well be cured completely.

Who amongst you could honestly say that, faced with this information, you would say “Actually, thanks for that, but I’m going to keep smoking and drinking heavily and I’ll see what happens.  Let me know when you’re 100% certain that I’m dying and tell me if there’s still anything I can do or if it’s too late.”  That, to me, sounds like suicide.

Today’s game card - William Dembski

Today’s card is a difficult one.  William Dembski is a very smart guy - he’s got more degrees than you could safely count and, well, he just looks smart too.  But the problem is that he believes something outrageously stupid - that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.

Dembski is another victim of the human propensity to trust our instincts in areas where they are unreliable, and then to back up our strongest emotionally held beliefs whatever the cost, instead of looking for the truth with an open mind.  The Earth, let’s face it, is very old indeed.  To believe that it’s less than 10,000 years old you need to be either (a) very stupid, (b) very brainwashed, (c) very self-deluded or (d) very ignorant.  There are no other options, as far as I can see.  And (d) isn’t really an option, because remaining ignorant whilst living in the Western world, with ready access to information, is also a sign of (a), (b) or (c) - or usually all three.

I gave Dembski a 2/10 for stupidity, not the minimum 1, simply because *nobody* who believes in a young earth could get the minimum here.  His wealth isn’t as high as some others, based on his publications. He’s not particularly evil, except that he believes in the wedge strategy, which is essentially a declaration of war by evangelical christians against reason and rationality. Anyone supporting something so insidious and destructive can’t be all good.

Dembski claims that his works have been peer reviewed, but unfortunately it doesn’t count if your peers are all halfwitted morons. Nice try though Bill.

William Dembski

Today’s card - James van Praagh

Today’s ‘fraud, idiot or loony’ is James van Praagh, a man whose name sounds like he was stabbed in the middle of it.  Van Praagh is, of course, a psychic spirit medium, which means he is one of the very few people on Earth lucky enough that the deceased souls in the spirit world have deigned him worthy of earning lots of money by selling books about how they whisper to him indistinct consonants, obscure medical or genealogical information and suspiciously generic platitudes.

Van Praagh, just like all other spirit mediums, relies on the skill of cold reading to achieve his ends.

Praagh has got an almost uniform sevens across all the categories.  Despite his many agonisingly painful misses, he’s probably not quite as evil and egotistically selfish as Sylvia Browne.  He has published a few books, but I doubt he’s made as much money as John Edward.  He’s funnier than either of them because, despite the fact that he’s lying to the recently bereaved, he is at least doing it in a hilariously camp manner.

James van Praagh