Guerrilla Skepticism

The forces of evil are all around me even at work. In this case it is what could be laughably called the company health fair. This is what happens when you have a crediphile who is a pilates instructor and a believer in too much new age B.S. help organize. And it clearly shows how much critical thinking skills the HR department has.

OK, so what exactly happened. First the good, you get some represenatatitves from some local gyms come out to try and drum up membership, and even have a few give aways. Some pampheletes from the American Cancer Society and some recipe books from Whole Foods Market and some fruits, juices, and nuts.

Now the bad, we get the other type of nut out there, or more accurately the quacks. The hit of the fair was this guy with this machine from Pharmanex. The machine is called a biophotonic scanner and it is supposed to measure the levels of cartinoids in your system to determine the levels of anti-oxidants in your system. Basically this is to see if the vitamins you are taking are working. Of course, if the scan is low these wonderful people will have all the wonderful vitamins you can take to boost your anti-oxidant levels.

I asked the other person workin with this machine, an acupuncturist, if there were any double-blinded studies on this machine. He said that there were plenty on the website. I looked. I couldn't find anything other than marketing type puff pieces.

Looking through about 5 pages worth of Google searches, I still couldn't find anything other than a clue that this seemed to be another MLM company. Then I found more here. So the most impressive presentation at the fair is from the person using a machine of which I have not seen any evidence of giving any useful date. Even better from their literature I see the following paragraph:

The SCS [Skin Cartenoid Score] will help you determine where you are consuming an adaquate amount of antioxidant containing nutrients. Unlike other biomarkers that you may be familiar with, it does not predict or diagnose disease.

Interesting. Let us now procede to translate bullshit into english:

The SCS score aparently has no validation by the FDA or any legitimate studies so we are not going to make any specific medical claims lest we get busted by the FDA.

Oh, I did get tested by the magic machine. Normal, which they claim is low is 19,000 by their apparently unvalidated numbers and probably no peer reviewed "research." What did I score? 32,000. This is good but the goal should be somewhere above 40,000. Now to be honest they didn't really push any vitamins while I was there, but I do see I can purchase their great LifePak vitamins directly billed for only $52.10 a month. Wow, and I get a pretty good score by trying to eat more fruits and vegtables and taking a CVS housebrand multivitamin that at a cost of $15 that should last me untl 2007.

Now where does the guerrilla skepticism come in. Simple when I saw the fair's A-list was going to be a bunch of quacks I went out to Steven Barrett's Quackwatch site. And printed out a few things quickly made 20 or 50 flyers on the office copier and tossed them on the table with a bunch of the other "literature." You might try this at work as well.

So what is some of the good bits of info I found. You might check these out:

To combat the acupuncturist I set out this:

Acupuncture, Qigong, and "Chinese Medicine"

And for the vitamin pushers this was good:

Dietary Supplements: Appropriate Use

Antioxidants and Other Phytochemicals: Current Scientific Perspective

Until next time, Non illigitamus carborundum. I know I'm trying.

Stifling the Internal Monolog

Some time back I heard 2 coworkers talking about how to talk about death to young children. And it just put the fingernails on a blackboard sound in my head. From the bits of the conversation I heard, it sounds like someone’s Grandmother had just died and her 4 year old asks. "Well Jesus rose from the dead, when will my grandmother."

Gee, a fairly young child expecting internal consistency from the world. Well that is helpful and hopeful situation. Of course, the one worker is telling the other how it is a challenge to explain that the two deaths are not the same.

At the same time I am walking away forcing my internal monolog to stay internal:

Well honey that is because the bible is just pretend and we adults tell these stories so we don’t have to come to terms with the fact that we are a random event in a universe that doesn’t care about us. And we don’t want to come to terms with our own mortality, but maybe when you grow up you will be able to do better.

From Here the Days Get Longer and Brighter

Took the day off work today. Took it as a religious holiday. So what kind of religious holiday can an atheist take? The Winter Solstice, for while no one can necessarily agree on what the truth is. We cannot argue where the Earth is around the Sun. The nice thing about making your own holiday is you can choose how to celebrate it.

I used it to let go. I have spent a long time grieving over breaking up with a girlfriend, one name she goes by is Lady Isis. I spent a long time in the grief stage of bargaining. If only she would return to me. If only she would do X we could continue on. Over time the concept of what X is kept changing, pretty much picture something in spirit some thing similar to the climax of the movie Secretary. Then finally the realization has come that nothing is enough. I have a woman who I still love but no longer respect. It is time to let go.

When we first got together she gave me a polished stone. It was nothing of value, but was something good to keep in a pocket and hold on to when I needed to be reminded of her. I think she imbued with some mystical properties in her own mind. In my mind it is just a rock, but it is a nice symbolic piece. I have over the course of this year been wanted to get rid of it, mail it back to her perhaps. But just could not do it, knowing the day I did meant I would have giving up on ever trying to rekindle a relationship.

Today was that day. Today is the shortest day of the year. After today the days get longer again. It is a time of endings and beginnings. It also in some ways seems appropriate. I had forgotten Lady Isis' birthday is the 26th of December, and that the goddess Isis' birthday was celebrated on December 25th long ago. So today is time to remember and then move on.

I took the stone she gave me and took at walk in a park by the Big Darby Creek. Then I said goodbye and took the stone and threw it into the creek. It has been cold so I watched it skip across the ice and settle in the middle of creek. And I think I can now move on. Traveling back in the car I was listening to Alan Parsons' The Time Machine and the song No Future in the Past just seemed very fitting.

So much as many of us done want to carry stuff into the New Year the Winter Solstice seems a good time to let go from items in the past, and it is a fact that the days get longer and brighter from here.

No Long Lines for Me

I am back in the US. I was at work today and all I could hear was everyone who went to vote this morning telling me. "Man, I went to the polls early to avoid the long lines, and still had a 2 hour wait." I couldn't help but gloat and say, "I voted absentee." So far I have not been hit, but the day is not over yet.

There is something good to be said about the long lines though. For the longest time people have been complaining about voter apathy in the US, and it seems that there has been a good reason for it. Basically, most things in the U.S. work well. They are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they are good enough, so why get your fat ass off the couch and do something as difficult as voting.

That has changed. We elected George Bush, and he has inspired (read pissed off) enough people to get out and get active enough in politics to get some changes made. Forget Iraq, regime change starts at home. So here is to having a government that works well enough again to get let people to get on with the important parts of their life, like eating food with way too much fat and watching reality TV.

The Election is Over

Well, for me anyway. I will be flying back from Hungary on election day. So I have just finished punching my absentee ballot. Yes, I said punching and yes there were instructions not to leave any hanging chads. I didn't.

I will say this was a good experience. I had a chance to sit down with the absentee booklet, and just sit in front of Google, and look up all the more obscure candidates. Highlight all my choices and then make my punches. Voting calmly in my own home with a cup of coffee, and time to think. No rushing to the polls before work, not being unsure about the board of education candidates. (I voted against the incumbent pushing for creationism in the curriculum. That Rocks!)

I think I am going to make plans to be out of the county the first Tuesday in November from now on.

And take a wild guess, I voted for John Kerry. I really don't want to deal with the harsh reality of Bush administration for another 4 years. I also think I will get less grief from Europeans when I can honestly say I didn't vote for Bush. But more on that later.

.COM .ORG What's the Difference?

Or: Open Mouth Insert Opponent's Message Here
Or: Computer Literacy for World Leaders

If you followed the Vice Presidential Debate last night you might have heard Dick Cheney defend his record at Haliburton by referring people to factcheck.com, pity the actual site is www.factcheck.org . What is factcheck.com? Well for a little bit it was one of those annoying advertising sites that cybersquatters or people trying to get traffic from typos put up. I happened to go to the site during the debate and that is exactly the type of site that was there. However, the traffic at the site was so much the owners decided to re-direct it to www.georgesoros.com. This is the web site of billionaire financier George Soros who has committed 15.5 million dollars of his own money to oust President Bush. The owners of factcheck.com decided he could afford the additional traffic.

Way to go Dick! Might I suggest some additional URL's you could put in future debates:

www.thebushpresidency.org
www.whitehouse.org

Or just plain and simple: www.johnkerry.com

Never let it be said that here at Harsh Reality we are unwilling to help...

shoot yourself in the foot.

Happy Patriot Day, Whatever

Well, it seems the politics were fairly quiet yesterday. Everyone took 9/11 to be a respectful time. Although for the people who didn't know, yesterday was Patriot Day. Today, however is not Patriot Day so now we can be free to make some comments about it.

In what seemed a a good idea at the time by a joint resolution of Congress and the President's signature on 9/4/2003. We have another non-holiday on the calendar for 9/11 called Patriot Day. Is this a bad thing? I suppose it depends on your definitions of patriot.

If you take Princeton's : "one who loves and defends his or her country" it is certainly fine.

If you take Ambrose Bierce's "n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors." Then I think we have a problem.

The problem is that we have too many people who seem to fall into the second definition. People who think any dissent of the government is unpatriotic, and people who fall for the line line that Bush and Cheney keeps subtly suggesting that we went to war with Iraq because in some way they were behind the 9/11 attacks. To them I say, "oh really":

Responding to a presidential tasking, Clarke's office sent a memo to Rice on September 18, titled "Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in the September 11 Attacks." Rice's chief staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its conclusion that only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al Qaeda. The memo found no "compelling case" that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks.
The 9/11 Commission Report Section 10.3

Part of being a patriot should mean you have your own opinions. You might criticize the government, not because you hate it, but because you want to see it improve. I think there might even be a rule somewhere that says that's OK. Otherwise we are going to be stuck in a national case of groupthink that is going to lead us down some very bad roads. In some ways, it has already.

So next year on Patriot Day go ahead and take a moment of silence at 8:46 AM. And if you want to feel good about the USA go ahead. We really have been able to do some amazing things. And if there are some things that bother you speak out and work, peacefully(hey some people need practical advice), to change them. That is the reason the United States has been able to do those amazing things.

Perhaps also consider this. Just as in the pictures posted yesterday I would point out that 9/11 wasn't a national tragedy, it was a global tragedy. Just as terrorism isn't a national problem; it is a global problem. As the Russians recently found out. I keep think that perhaps a Patriot should also occasionally look at a different flag.

From http://www.earthflag.net/

In Memoriam

There have been harsher realities we as a world we have had to deal with then September 11, but today it is hard to think of them as we remember. What I want to remember is what you might call the beauty of 9/11. Of course you are all saying, what beauty? The beauty is in what happened in the rest of the world on that day. The set of spontaneous memorials that happened all around the world. On that day we had tragedy, but we also had a unity I have very seldom seen. Here are some of those images.

European Union

French President, Jacques Chirac. Forget all the recent politics and look in his eyes on that day.

Palestinian School

U.S., Embassy, Tel Aviv

Back in the days of the cold war did you ever think the Russians would be flying their flag at half mast over the Kremlin for us.

Berlin in front of U.S. Embassy

Sydney Australia

Athens

The Good News: The world is not as divided as people make it out to be.

The Harsh Reality: The power to destroy outstrips the power to create. How many fools does it take to destroy a world? Less every day.

I Pray & I Vote

How much do you want to bet she's voting for Bush.
Wait just a minute now, doesn't that imply that prayer doesn't work. I mean you have an all powerful god that answers prayers, but you are still going to vote. I mean isn't that just a bit presumptuous. You also have all the religious people that will tell you sometimes god's answer is no. Hey, maybe the answer is no or maybe it just doesn't work at all. The evidence in any case seems sketchy.

So if you pray for your candidate to win and then go vote for him aren't you presuming to know what god wants. You, this mortal human who barley counts as a speck of dust in the vast universe, knows what God (omnipotent being, first cause of all things, the unmoved mover, etc.) wants. Maybe you should just skip the whole voting thing this year. Let god figure it out.

But for those of you who want to do your civic duty might I make a suggestion.

Las Vegas Is Not Built On Sin

I recently attended The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. While attending Penn and Teller's Vegas show. Penn Gillette pointed out a very good point Vegas is actually built on bad math. Where else would you consider a 98% payout a good thing.

The harsh reality is that Vegas might be a little more interesting if it was based on a little more sin. I spent the off time from the conventions roaming around the myriad casinos on the strip. Certainly you can see some people having fun and socializing around some of the gambling tables, but there are too many people just focused at the slot machines. Alone and lost in there own little world. I don't see them having fun. Just a bunch of people hoping for the big score that doesn't come.

A few people have pointed out to me that Vegas is better than Atlantic City. Most people in Vegas are at least playing with money they can lose, Atlantic City too many are playing with the rent money.

One of the locals I met is pointing out that the current mayor is trying to legalize prostitution in the city. To me this seems like the the better idea. If the place is going to be called Sin City wouldn't it be somewhat better to legalize some of the sin (plus then you can tax it and enforce health codes on it.) A bit more debauchery would be better in a city that right now has too many people in it just mindlessly losing money, and not having that much fun. Just my observation.

You're Gonna Die

I have bad news. You have a terminal illness. It is called life, and it is 100 percent fatal. You will tell me you already knew this, but you choose not to think about it or dwell on it too much. Then I have some worse news for you. There is no afterlife. That nice white light at the end of the tunnel people with near death experiences talk about--random firings in a brain partially deprived of oxygen. When you actually die, they turn the light at the end of the tunnel off.

Now do I have proof that there is no afterlife, of course not. I have no more proof that is doesn't exist than you do that it does. Yes, I could be wrong, but so could you. But you have books that tell you that there is a wonderfull afterlife if you just...kiss Hank's ass, for example. I say you have a nice collection myths and fables. They are the stories everyone has told themselves for millenia to get away from the harsh reality that there is nothing out there and you are all alone. Pre-historic people I am sure had great stories. The Greeks, Romans, and Vikings wrote down a bunch of good ones too. Jews, Christians, and Muslims wrote some good ones too. Oh wait I am not supposed to say that. Those aren't myths and fables they are reality, and you are part of the one true group, and everyone else is going to hell for their disbelief, especially me for telling you, "You're whistling in the dark." Maybe there is a myth that is true, unfortunately it was about the god Mithras, and we are all doomed for not believing.

Perhaps you are not a fundamentalist fill in the blank, and don't already hate me. (If you are then you are not going to listen to a word I say anyway because you already know your myth is the One True Way and I am dammed anyway.) "So I am going to die", you say. Can it be any worse?

It's worse. The sun will continue to grow hotter in about 900 million years it will be hot enough to cause photosyntheis to fail and all life on Earth to die out. Of course we are hopefull and by that time we should have colonized the planets are the stars.

Except in 5 billion years the sun will become a red giant char the inner planets into cinders and collapse into a cooling white dwarf. The other stars will suffer similar fates as the universe exhausts it's resources of hydrogen. Eventually the debris will get sucked up by massive black holes lurking at the centers of galaxies. These will evaporate by Hawking radiation and eventually explode, and the universe will keep expanding. You see there doesn't seem to be enough matter to stop it so what debris are now left are spread over a vaster and vaster space.

So you are going to die, and so are all of your descendants. All of your acomplishments will be destroyed and there will be no one to remember them. I have seen the future and it is cold, dark, empty, and it is going to last a very long time. Almost enough to have you make up a nice comforting myth to temporarily chase away the darkness.

So why the look into the abyss? Because Truth matters. Yes, that is Truth with a capital T, and no I don't claim to have it. But the harsh reality I presented you has enough of a sting to make you stop and think. If nothing ultimately matters what does? The answer is everything. Every moment in your life is transitory and all it is special for that reason. Take pleasure in your life become an uncommon hedonist.

What is an uncommon hedonist? The more evolved version of a common hedonist. A common hedonist is someone chasing the big fantasies and the big pleasures. This is not to say you can't dream of having Carrie Anne Moss in Black PVC cheerleader outfit, but unless we are in the Matrix it is a safe bet it is not happening. An uncommon hedonist is someone who will take the big pleasures if available, but will also take all the small ones. This could include taking the time to clean your home because it pleases you to have a pleasant environment. Or writting a blog because it helps to clarify your thoughts.

We started with the premise you are going to die, and that doesn't sound good. If you think about, where were you before you were born. I would say you were dead. That amounts to some 13.7 billion years--counting from the begining of the universe--that you were dead, and it really didn't seem to bother you that much. So the many googleplex years of your future death won't bother you either. We have been afraid of death all along and now we realize it wasn't that big of a deal. The real fear is life. Are you going to live it fully or will you squander it on some future promise that may not exist?