Tetherd Cow Ahead

From the Washington Post this morning:

Thousands of blackbirds birds fall from the sky in Arkansas, fish deaths reported worldwide. Dozens dead in Sweden, hundreds washed ashore in New Zealand. Is the world witnessing the end of days or is this just a case of coincidence fueled by wild speculation?

Oh criminy. I wonder what the correct answer to that question could possibly be?

The area where I’m staying in Los Angeles has a large Orthodox Jewish population. I’m quite fond of experiencing diversity in my surroundings but I have to say that I find being among strong religious communities rather off-putting. It emphasises for me the way that religion is a kind of mass delusion that encourages people to do very silly things.

For example: the Talmud states that, as a devout Jew you should ‘Cover your head in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you’ and Jewish men are strongly recommended not to walk more than four cubits with their head uncovered. To this end, I see many local men in this neighbourhood wearing the small skull cap called a kippah (or yarmulke) as they go about their business.

Yesterday while I was in the supermarket, I noticed a guy wearing a kippah which must have been pretty much the most minimal thing you could put on your head and get away with calling a ‘head covering’. It was not much more than the size of a Ritz cracker, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that he bent down to take something off a lower shelf, I doubt I would have seen it at all.

The problem I have with this kind of thing is the way that humans have decided to interpret an edict from the Holy Scripture to suit their own, human, purposes. Followers of many religions propose that something is The Word of God and then seem comfortable with adding as many human caveats and qualifications as they see fit. They act like disobedient children, who, when asked to do something they don’t like, interpret it to suit their own agendas. Where is there any kind of rigor in this way of thinking? It is yet another example of the countless double-standards that riddle religious doctrine. ((Not that I’m advocating fundamentalism, you understand, but at least the logic of it is coherent.))

I’m betting that the original intention of the Talmud was that you should wear a proper head covering like a hat or a scarf. ((Which, even in itself, is a berserk religious instruction that makes little rational sense.)) It’s obviously a pain in the ass to wear a hat all the time, so someone, somewhere got the idea that they could interpret the ruling a little more loosely, and a generous head covering became a cap, and a cap became the kippah we usually see today. The ridiculous little cheese cracker that I saw yesterday seems to me to be the most grudging acceptance of religious commitment. It prompted me to wonder why, instead of wearing the daft thing at all, the guy didn’t just go bare-headed and pretend that the supermarket was less than four cubits from his house. As far as I can see, it’s exactly the same kind of logic.

You’ll all have heard about the mysterious and sad case of Kristin and Candice Hermeler, the Australian twins who apparently attempted to commit a double suicide ((Only one of them succeeded.)) at a Colorado shooting range a couple of weeks back. The weekend’s Australian Herald Sun ran this headline for the incident:

Suicide twins Kristin and Candice Hermeler had God Delusion in their luggage

The headline is, of course, referring to Richard Dawkin’s book of that name. I say no more than that the two women also had a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment’ ((Tolle is, as you may know, Oprah Winfrey’s guru du jour. I am deeply suspicious of people who think they’ve found the ‘answers to everything’ and especially of those who feel the need to impart this wisdom to others at a price.)) and The Wisdom of the Native Americans among their belongings as well, but apparently those weren’t as headline-worthy. Funny that. ((Shout out to Bruce Hood for catching this one.))

In other Australian newspaper news in the same vein, Cardinal George Pell, a religious man of big pretensions and small intellect, has called those without faith ((We are to take this as Christian faith, it goes without saying. I don’t think Cardinal Pell believes for a minute that Muslims have any leverage with the Invisible Sky Man.)) ‘coarse, uncaring and without purpose’. He accuses atheists of having ‘nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss’, which is odd since it seems to anyone with half a brain that it’s much more appropriate to describe people who hold the fanciful beliefs of religion with those words. Atheists, as anyone with the faintest grasp of philosophy understands, don’t ‘confect constructs’ of any kind, because atheism is simply a lack of belief. And, unlike religious people, we don’t attempt to ‘cover’ the abyss with anything – we just accept it’s there. ((Cardinal Pell’s fear of the unknown is plainly profound. His contemplation of the ‘abyss’ obviously terrifies the wits out of him.))

In the same sermon Pell goes on (quite embarrassingly, in my opinion) to invoke the hoary old Atheism = Nazism argument, and so, via Godwin’s Law, automatically loses all credibility. ((C’mon. We’re tired of this one. It makes no sense. It never did, and it never will.))

George Pell accuses those without faith as being ‘fearful’, when it is plain to all but the most obtuse who’s really the scaredy cat in this picture.

I don’t know about you, but when I read things like the above snippet from the Austin Business Journal, ((Notice how uncritically the ABJ just spouts the guff about the ShooTag ’emitting an electromagnetic frequency’ (and the rest of ShooTag’s completely unsubstantiated pseudoscience). It does nothing of the sort, of course, but this is how pieces of unfettered stupidity get lent ersatz credibility. Shame on you Christopher Calnan. Do some research before you spout such rubbish!)) my blood boils. There is a tendency, when it comes to silly pseudoscientific beliefs, for people to say ‘Well, OK, but what’s the harm?‘ I probably don’t even need to elaborate on what the harm is for a nation of poverty-stricken desperate people who face the very real possibility of death from mosquito-borne diseases.

In case it’s not obvious, let me simplify what is going on here: ShooTag is, in the name of ‘charity’, ((…and a little bit of advertising doesn’t go astray…)) sending bits of plastic that cost nothing and do nothing, to a country in dire need of real help. In addition, they are almost certainly displacing effectual disease-control methods by foisting their useless garbage on uneducated people whose lives depend on proper scientific medicine. The only thing for which we can be thankful is that they sent so few of the damn things. I mean, seriously – a hundred of each? What would that be in actual manufacturing cost? Say (generously) ten cents per tag… wow, 20 bucks. It gives a new definition to the word ‘cheap’. The ShooTaggers are, in fact, doing less than the average school kid who sent some pocket money to the Haiti Red Cross appeal. You really have to question their motives with such a flimsy gesture.

I note in passing that Mission Life International, the company distributing the ShooTags, is an organisation that appears to specialize in providing aid through the proselytisation of chiropractic, another flavour of pseudoscience that we haven’t, as yet, touched on here at The Cow. It’s unlikely that they’d have much discrimination when it comes to spotting flying pigs, then.

It is impossible to know how much damage these people and their superstitious beliefs cause in places like Haiti, but it makes me sad and angry to think that there is not some better control over these irrational intrusions into places that are in serious peril. ((I wonder if these people even know how dangerous malaria is. The line from the ABJ ‘helping Haitian refugees in a big way by ridding them of small pests’ has a flip jocular quality about it that makes it seem like the insect problems in Haiti are some kind of vague nuisance. Do the ShooTag people even have the faintest idea about the magnitude of this disease, which claims something like a quarter of a billion people every year?))

(Read the comprehensive Tetherd Cow Ahead investigations into ShooTag here.)

Speaking of alternate universes…

A YouTube video by Pleiadian spokesperson Colleen Thomas, in which we learn that US President Barack Obama is one of the lizard people, that the Reticulans are preparing to ‘ennhilate’ us with an electromagnetic pulse that will immobilize ‘all electronics on this planet all the way down to the central core’ and that the US will be attacked with ‘dirty bombs’ that will be ‘detonated and let loose’ on the 8th of November. ((I apologize if I got any of the details wrong – whenever I try and watch this video, my mind is clouded over by the Reticulans and Colleen’s words just sound like one long stream of incomprehensible gibberish.))

8th of November? Wasn’t that yesterday?

It’s just a jump to the left…

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Thanks to Headspectre for digging this one up…

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It’s Just a Jump to the Left!

It doesn’t matter what kind of goofiness you can imagine in your wildest flights of fantasy – there is always some woo-monger who can out-goofy you.

Dear oh dear. Where to start? OK, you may know that the current attempts to explain the quirky mathematical conundrums that are thrown up by modern physics lead to all kinds of unusual and counter-intuitive conjectures of how our actual reality manifests itself. One of these hypotheses calls for a situation where every conceivable possible consequence of every possible event is quite literally executed in one of an infinite number of alternate universes. I want to emphasize that this is just a mathematical speculation and there is no actual reason to think it’s anything more than an abstract concept. One thing is for certain – our feeble human brains don’t cope very well with strange ideas like this.

The problem is, Faithful Acowlytes, that even feebler human brains than yours or mine think they can understand this kind of thing. Or, at least, they want to convince other feeble-minded people that they do. Not only that, they also claim that they can somehow communicate with these multiple universes and by doing so fix things up for themselves in our own universe.

This useful trick is achieved using the technique of Quantum Jumping, the discovery of ‘The American Monk’ – one Burt Goldman, an 82 year old man who seems to have no real credentials other than as a purveyor of other different, but equally silly, flavours of flim-flam. Visiting the Quantum Jumping website is a frustrating and mind-numbing experience. It takes you several links to find out that the website itself is never going to give you any real indication of how the technique is supposed to work – but you do (naturally) have numerous opportunities to divest yourself of money. For your edification, as near as I can make out, this is Quantum Jumping in a nutshell:

1: Scientists ‘have proved’ that there are multiple universes.

2: In those multiple universes there are copies of you that are more successful/attractive/wealthy/happy than you are in this universe.

3: Somehow ((There’s no real detail ANYWHERE about how this is achieved. You have to pay for the DVDs/books to get this information. Numerous commenters on Burt Goldman’s websites claim that you don’t even get it when you pay, which doesn’t surprise me.)) you can get in touch with these ‘better’ versions of you, and, for reasons that are exceptionally unclear, they will reveal to you the secrets of their wonderful lives.

Of course, the real sleight-of-hand here comes underneath the term ‘quantum’; quantum stuff is weird, and therefore all bets are off and anything is possible. Never mind that the ‘logic’ of this concept leads to all kinds of unhappy paradoxes (One of these is that if it’s possible to alter this reality for the better, then it’s also equally possible to alter this reality for the worse. For every reality where there is a helpful ‘other self’ there’s one that’s malign and has every intention of doing you harm. How are you EVER going to tell the difference, eh?)

Mr Goldman claims that after employing the technique of Quantum Jumping he was able to accomplish the following feats:

•Started fine art painting (‘My artwork hangs in a museum to prove it’)

•Achieved status as a photographer (I got my photographs shown in multiple galleries throughout the US, Europe and Asia)

•Became a writer (Claims several books including Goodbye April Moon)

•Started a Million Dollar Online Business

Here is an example of Mr Goldman’s painting:

One has to speculate that the museum that it hangs in is, perhaps, in another universe. A universe where talentless artists get their work hung in museums.

Elsewhere you can read an excerpt of Mr Goldman’s book Goodbye April Moon, which is of a similar calibre, except with words. It seems like an awful shame to me that given the infinite number of possible universes and unlimited iterations of doppelgänger Burt Goldmans, the Miracle of Quantum Jumping could only manage to put him in contact with versions of himself that have aspired to achievements of monumental mediocrity. ((Of course it is possible that Burt Goldman is revered as an absolute GENIUS in another universe… this multiple universe thing is so damn convenient!)) His last claim to have ‘started a million dollar online business’ is possibly valid – it’s the business that gets people to fork out money for stupid and completely unfeasible self-improvement schemes like Quantum Jumping.

And, as is too often the case, Burt Goldman has a convenient disclaimer if Quantum Jumping doesn’t deliver the promised results. This, in his own words in a reply on his site:

No proof is necessary! Brilliant! He’s selling you something that may or may not work, and, if it doesn’t, he doesn’t have to explain why it should. It just doesn’t! Man, I wish I had his chutzpah.

One thing that was striking about trawling through Burt Goldman’s various sites is that the experience is eerily familiar. The endless screeds of utter twaddle, interspersed with blocks of exhortations in capital letters and promises that lead to more promises and deliver nothing at all, reminds me vividly of none other than our old friend Prophet Peter Popoff. Burt Goldman is like Peter Popoff without the God factor. An ‘alternate universe’ Peter Popoff, you might say. Unfortunately BOTH of them are in this universe.

I’ll end this post with one of the many stories that Mr Goldman tells on his site, and with a video from him on how you can improve your life simply by ‘tapping’. Yes, that’s right, tapping. Tapping on things. Ping.

I meditated until I was satisfied I was in alpha and then jumped into a parallel and got an impression of my alternate self. He obviously knew what I was there for and handed me a [propeller] beanie hat. I looked at the hat and asked what is it for. “Healing,” my twin self said. “Put it on and spin the propeller when you want to heal someone.”

The image of Mr Goldman wearing a propeller beanie seems somehow astonishingly apposite. Imagine him wearing it throughout the following clip for best effect.

Happy tapping Cowpokes! I’m off to find the universe where people properly understand the words ‘quantum’ and ‘fractal’, and where Burt Goldman, Peter Popoff and Melissa Rogers are nothing more than characters in a fictional daytime soap opera. It has to be out there somewhere.