Tetherd Cow Ahead

Day 3 (cont):

~ And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

~ And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good

In other words, God made all the plants. And felt mighty pleased with himself. Then he remembered that maybe the plants would all DIE if they had no sunlight (at least they had plenty of water), so when he went home that night he obviously scribbled up a few ideas for the next day’s chores.

Day 4:

~ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

~ And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

OK, so I just want to go over that. In the first verse it says God made some lights in the firmament, and then in the next one he made the sun and the moon and the stars. What the fuck is the person who wrote this smoking? If he made lights in the firmament, what were they if they weren’t the stars? And didn’t he already make light anyway? Where the hell was that coming from if it wasn’t from the sun or the moon or the stars? ((Out of his ass is the obvious answer. OK, I guess if anyone can claim that the sun shines out of his ass, it’s God, come to think of it))

If these verses tell us anything, it is that God is very fucking badly organized. Why the crap didn’t he do the sun & the stars and so forth before he did the Earth? It’s like he was doing this for the first time or something. Oh, right.

Anyway, God set the sun & stars in place…

…to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

Here he is acting smug again, even though he’s royally screwed up Day 4. Can it possibly get any worse?

Day 5:

~ And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

~ And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

On the Fifth Day we find God creating winged fowl and whales. The most astute of you will have already noticed that God’s To Do List for Day 5 specifically describes ‘Birds and Fish’ and so again he has fucked up from the get-go by creating whales, which as anyone knows are mammals and not fish. As for the fowl, he has given them free reign to flap around the firmament, which, as we learned from the last installment he designated as Heaven. Yes, that’s right – Heaven is full of chickens.

Stay tuned to Tetherd Cow Ahead for Episode 3 of ‘What God Did’, where we find out what God got up to on Day 6, and examine in depth his obsession with ‘creeping things’.

As Reverend of the Church of the Tetherd Cow, one of my many duties is to ponder the Big Questions of Life so that I may duly pass my received wisdom onto you, my flock of faithful Acowlytes. Recently, I found my mind wandering onto one of the biggest puzzles of them all – that of the Creation of the Universe. Specifically, the kind of Creation as taught primarily (but by no means exclusively) by those who advocate the Christian view of things.

In case your Sunday School lessons have receded a bit too far into the foggy haze of memory, here’s a quick refresher on how the Almighty got things under way:

In the beginning there was nothing at all. Except, self-evidently, for God Himself. ((There may also have been a lot of water – see later)) This must have been deadly dull for dear old God. Imagine the most boring day you’ve ever had and then multiply that by ten gazillion. There wasn’t even so much as a crossword to fill in or some paint to watch dry. There was just a whole big heap of nothingness. Just God sitting in a chair, on his ass, wondering what to do with himself. No, wait, there wasn’t even a chair.

So God decided to bring the universe and everything we know into existence. ((Why He did this all of a sudden is anybody’s guess.)) The conventional wisdom has it that he did this over seven days. Well, technically six, but more of that in a bit. This was the To Do list:

Day 1: Light.
Day 2: Separation of the Waters.
Day 3: The Earth
Day 4: The Sky.
Day 5: Birds and Fish.
Day 6: The Animals including Humans.
Day 7: Rest.

Day 7 wouldn’t count as a working day in any job I’ve ever had, so we can only assume God filled in His timesheet something like this:

But really, if you start to scrutinize God’s first week of work, some interesting questions arise…

Day 1: How long, exactly, does it take to create Light? It’s not like you can carve it out of something, or cobble it out of stuff to hand – there isn’t anything. So you’ve got to conjure it up from scratch. To you and me this sounds rather daunting but it is of course no real problem for God, since He is omnipotent. This means he could easily whip up a whole batch of light in a good 8 hour day. But waiddaminute… if he’s omnipotent, why spend a whole day on it? He could do it in half an hour. A minute. A second even. Just what was God doing all that first day? Is it possible he rocked up to work, zapped light into existence, grabbed a cup of hot java ((OK, I guess he couldn’t have done that – he hadn’t created coffee beans yet)) and then sat on his fat ass all day? Are you with me here? Alright. Then, the very next thing that happened was: ((All biblical references are from the King James Bible, ‘cos I’m an old fashioned kinda Reverend and I don’t hold with these modern ‘interpretations’ of the Holy Bible where some joker has gone ‘I know God said that, but this is what he really meant’.))

~And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Whoa! Wait just one damn minute there Big fella! Everyone knows that night and day are the result of the earth’s rotation ((Anyone going to argue with me over that? No? I thought not.)), and the Earth doesn’t get created until Day 3, according to the List. What the crap is going on here pal? You’ve got days, but you ain’t got rotation! Or even a planet. How the heck does that work?

Day 2: To me, creating Light sounds pretty damn tricky, but that’s a snack compared to what God did next:

~ And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

~ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

OK, now did you get that? It seems there was a lot of water (I don’t exactly know where that came from, because there is no mention of it actually being created, as such. The water was just there.) and God divided it into two portions, separated by a firmament – a sort of watery firmament sandwich. God then called the firmament Heaven. Just so you’ve got a visual picture here, there’s Heaven, with a whole lot of water above it, sitting in a whole lot of water. I trust that God made sure Heaven has good caulking.

Day 3:

~ God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

From here on in, there is no mention at all of the waters that float somewhere above Heaven. Like it doesn’t matter. What bothers me is if this supra-water was not important, then why bring it up it in the first place… What has it got to do with ANYTHING? And, as far as I know, we never again hear about this extra water in the whole course of the Bible! ((Although I guess God had to get the water for the Great Flood from somewhere…))

Well, I’ll leave you to ponder that until the next installment, when we will learn some more about the Creation of the Earth and then about the Sky, including the Sun and the Moon (Yes, yes – I know we have days already without the Sun being in place… if you think that’s daffy, wait till you see God make all the trees and plants and then the Sun. Talk about workflow inefficency.)

I was browsing in a local shop the other day and I noticed a pile of these curious volumes. It looks like a book, right? But no, dear Acowlytes – it’s a cunning ploy to make you think it’s a book. It’s actually a box in which you can hide your valuables!

Brilliant! I’m going to get one of these tomorrow – it will totally solve my problem with illiterate thieving Creationists! ((It will only work on the illiterate ones – the literate ones will spot the title blunder instantly)) And just to really screw with them, I’m going to hide all my fossils in it!

A Tetherd Cow Ahead Public Service Post.

A little ways back I threatened to write something with the above title, and Cowpokes, that day has arrived! Using this handy guide whilst simultaneously stroking your lucky ShooWooWoo™ talisman will absolutely guarantee that you will never again run afoul of swindlers and mountebanks.

I don’t need to tell you that the aforementioned snake oil vendors have about a million tricks up their sleeves when it comes to separating a sucker from his cash, but fortunately, most of their chicanery settles into fairly well worn patterns. So. Let us begin:

1. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Most forms of flim-flam promise a quick and/or disproportionately large profit on the back of a small outlay. ((The down-payment may not necessarily be monetarily small – a good example of this is ‘alternative’ medicine, where the treatments can in fact be outrageously expensive, especially given the actual expense being outlaid by the practitioner. In this case, the proportionate size of the return is based on the low impact of the treatment in the initial instance. For example: the moderate process of undergoing homeopathic treatment in contrast to, say, chemotherapy or surgery.)) The mantra here must surely be: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

This seems to me to be so self-evident that it hardly bears mentioning, but plainly, a great number of people never develop the appropriate neural pathways to comprehend it sufficiently, even, it seems, after they’ve been burnt many times. If you obey this one rule alone, you’ll avoid falling into the clutches of most con artists.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: When you hear of something that seems like a remarkably good exchange, ask yourself what the other person stands to gain. If it’s your money or your soul, walk away.

2. It’s Not Rocket Science

Beware of claims that invoke ‘fuzzy’ areas of science, like quantum mechanics, magnetism, plasma, ‘energy fields’ and so forth. Particularly if used in conjunction with ‘feel good’ concepts like ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘non toxic’.

The technique at work here is one of ‘blinding the sucker with science’. It typically takes the form of the scammer picking some kind of scientific concept that is tricky for the layperson to understand, and attempting to make it sound plausible in relationship to their product. We see mild versions of this in advertising, where white-coated ‘scientists’ talk about the scientific principles at work behind washing powders ((Detergent chemistry is seriously dull, and any advertiser knows that ‘dull’ is never going to move units. So the brainless ‘oxy-whiz’ and ‘ultra-brightoids’ that get invoked in these ads are just made-up nonsense.)), but it really comes into its own in scams. Peddlers of nonsense as diverse as ‘electromagnetic’ pest control and ‘vibrational’ water just love to try and make you think that there’s science behind their wares – quite baffling, really, when the very same peddlers typically vilify scientists for ‘pretending to know everything’.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: Beware words and phrases that sound like they come from Star Trek.

3. Gurus are Bad News

People who proclaim that they can help you change your life for the better for a fee, ((And be cautious here – the fee doesn’t have to be money.)) almost always mean ‘better for them’.

There is a kind of person (among the most despicable of the despicable) who seems supremely adept at finding unhappy, lonely or damaged people and happily taking away their money (or their dignity – or anything else they can get their grubby mits on). Unfortunately, these kinds of crooks are almost always uncannily charismatic, and more often than not, intelligently cunning. They often have an innate understanding of brainwashing techniques, and many have even studied such methods for manipulating their victims. They appear to have no conscience, and if exposed, often take up their racket again at the first available opportunity.

Such people frequently claim to be in possession of ‘special knowledge’ imparted to them under supernatural circumstances. There is, of course, no effective refutation ((You can’t easily demand proof of an experience of this kind – the Guru will characteristically claim that the knowledge is the proof.)) of these kinds of claims, and that is leverage of considerable power for fragile or disenchanted people. Examples include:

•L Ron Hubbard
•Peter Popoff
•Rael
•The Pope

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice:Ask yourself what the most notable achievement of the guru is. If the answer is ‘Being a guru’, walk away.

4. Ancient Wisdom is Most Likely Past its Expiry Date

Just because something has history behind it, doesn’t mean it has logic or evidence behind it. This is a problem we find particularly, but not exclusively, with medicine. ((Most religions have this card in play. I submit that the only reason that Scientology is not more successful than, say, Catholicism is because it doesn’t have a couple of centuries of mythology behind it. Rationally speaking, there’s not a lot of difference between what Scientologists believe and what Catholics believe.)) There is a strong belief among many people that ‘we were better off in the olden days’ because we ‘weren’t so technological’, the logical extension of that being that technology is a bad thing.

Now, while there’s a lot to be said for being careful about what we do with technology and the planet, there is no evidence that we were ‘better off’ in any quantifiable way before we had it. ((The concept of ‘technology’ being evil is, in itself, an absurdity as I’m sure you are aware – humans have had technology since one of our enterprising ancestors sharpened a stick to toast marshmallows)) Take vaccination, for instance. A dangerous idea that is currently doing the rounds is that vaccination is somehow a bad thing ((The rationale being that vaccination is some kind of Evil Plot concocted by the pharmaceutical companies to fleece us of our money)). The evidence is in fact quite to the contrary if you know even a little history and a little science. And yet, thousands of people are currently climbing on the anti-vaccination bandwagon to their own detriment, and ultimately to the detriment of us all. Equally worrying are 18th century notions like homeopathy, or folk wisdom such as that which dominates ‘traditional’ Chinese medicine.

In general, the bucolic and happy world of our forefathers is a shiny myth, and most people couldn’t even survive a month without running water, food delivered to their door, modern medicine and technological forms of shelter and transport.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: If you are tempted to think that the ancients knew all the answers, remember the last time you went camping. Now, imagine doing that for a year, but without the tent, the bug repellent and the single malt whisky ((Oh, OK – they had the whisky. That’s why it was invented.)).

5. Mother Nature Doesn’t Necessarily Know Best

(This is related to #4, but has some shades of difference)

Just because something is ‘natural’ doesn’t mean it is:

A): Better than something artificial, or:
B): Harmless.

There has been over the last few decades a vogue for ‘natural’ therapies of various kinds, the understanding being that something that comes from ‘nature’ must be superior to, and less harmful than, something created by humans. ((It’s logically stupid anyway, considering that humans are ‘natural’ so it follows that anything they do is also ‘natural’, even if it is to create something that doesn’t occur naturally.)) This is plainly absurd for so many reasons. Sickness and disease (and indeed, death), are quite natural, so doing anything to thwart their process is actually interfering with a ‘natural’ process – whether you choose to chew a herb or have genetic therapy. How you determine the acceptability of ‘naturalness’ of the treatment must, therefore, necessarily be a subjective judgement. Aside from anything, you can quite easily damage or kill yourself with things found in the natural world – nature is as good at concocting lethal chemicals as humans. Better, even.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: Ponder on the established fact that, for the most part, people in countries with access to modern ‘unnatural’ medicine live for longer in better health than people in communities that rely on their natural surroundings for survival.

6. The Eyes Don’t Have It

Seeing isn’t necessarily believing. Human senses, and our ‘instinctive’ feeling for what is true or not true, is highly fallible. Ask any stage magician.

The human brain is a magnificent organ, but its capacity for being fooled is vast. If you think you’re far too clever for that, go watch this clip on YouTube. And that particular trick is a doddle – just factor in some self interest and watch the punters line up to throw their money down the toilet. In short, if someone tells you ‘I saw it with my own eyes!’ be aware that what they saw, and what they think they saw may well be two entirely different things.

The peddlars of woo ((I don’t much like that term, but there’s nothing else that encompasses all the facets of the exploitation of irrational belief quite so neatly, unfortunately)) are keenly aware of our bottomless capacity to be misled and have over the years tried on every psychological trick in the book and then some. The ol’ Shell Game is still very much in play.

This should not really come as any surprise. In this age, we are in the peculiar situation of attempting to survive in a world into which we have not so much evolved as found ourselves thrust. Our brains, pandering to eons of evolutionary imperative, make mistakes. Often. We should be aware of that fact.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: When you see something that looks like a miracle, before you get too excited, cast your mind back to when you were eight years old and Uncle Ben made a coin appear from behind your ear. Same thing.

7. Best Intentions Are Often the Worst Reasons

I call this the Canute Rule: A genuine belief in the illusion that you are peddling is no guarantee that it contains any truth. Be keenly aware that many purveyors of hogwash sincerely believe that their own particular brand of irrationality is efficacious. ((Even if they sometimes vocally belittle other irrational claims. It could be said that most modern religions including Christianity fall victim to this fantasy; how is it that your particular set of strange myths is true yet no-one else has that privilege?)) In a way, these are the worst kinds of snake-oil sellers, inasmuch as it is almost impossible to sway them from their claims. Their interests are not just in the claim itself, but in their personal investment in the claim as well. To admit that they are wrong about their belief means an admission of gullibility into the bargain.

In my experience, numerous so-called ‘psychics’ fall into this category. These people fail to understand that their criteria for accuracy are so vague that they can fool even themselves about the magnitude of their ‘success’. And often, it may well be that they are completely genuine at heart. This does not make them right, nor does it make their advice helpful. Unfortunately, their sincerity is often the persuasive factor that convinces others to buy into their delusion.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: Look for the condescending look of pity when you question their claim. You’re obviously too damaged to understand, poor thing.

8. Third-Person-Removed Endorsements

Besides not necessarily being a reputable source, Glen or Glenda’s father’s best friend might not even exist. In fact, the odds are he doesn’t.

We’re all aware of the old ‘friend-of-a-friend’ phenomenon when it comes to urban legends. You know the deal: that story about the guy with the headless corpse on the car must be real – it happened to a friend of a friend of mine! This same phenomenon appears again and again in pseudoscientific claims. One place I’m sure you’ve heard it is if you’ve ever challenged a believer of homeopathy: ‘But my friend Wanda’s mother was completely cured of her her acne by a homeopathic treatment!!’ This kind of declaration uses two levels of obfuscation – the ‘friend-of-a-friend’ ploy and the appeal to a diffuse evidence base; even if Wanda’s mother does exist, and does endorse homeopathy, the reason for her acne disappearing may well have been due to some other medication or it may have even just cleared up of its own accord. But because Wanda’s mother is not actually here putting her case it’s instantly impossible to make efforts to get to the bottom of the claim. In legal terms, this is called evidence by ‘hearsay’ and is not admissible in a courtroom for very good and obvious reasons.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: Don’t bother arguing with someone who invokes the testimony of a third unpresent person. You cannot win.

9. Damned Lies and Statistics

Be very wary when someone calls on statistics or probability to support a questionable contention. It is a well known fact that nine out of ten people have problems understanding statistics.

Well, that was a joke, but you see how easily it slipped by. Seriously though, the human brain does not handle accumulations of numbers very well, especially when they appear inconsistent with ‘common sense’. An example of one such situation is the Monty Hall Problem, which we have discussed previously.

We see this kind of phenomenon in arguments advanced by Creationists, who have much difficulty grasping the vast amounts of time which evolution has been able to exploit, and in the claims of homeopaths, who are unable to understand the ramifications of dilution. ((Those who do understand the numbers have had to resort to advancing even more implausible mechanisms in an effort to explain how homeopathy is meant to work))

Statistics and probability are useful mathematical functions and can bolster an argument very effectively if in capable hands. If wielded by untrained people, though, they usually just cause confusion and misunderstanding.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: Ask the claimant how much of his or her brain a typical person uses. If they immediately spout “10%”! You will know that in their case the number is probably right.

10. The Shell Game

If one of the above methods for spinning fantasy is successful, then it follows that combinations of two or more are even better! When it comes to irrational claims, there is nothing quite so effective as piling up the misdirection – the more complicated the flim-flam, the harder (and more exhausting) it is to counter. Most modern forms of trickery need to resort to more than one of the methods I’ve outlined here, in order to obfuscate their questionable status.

For example: homeopathy uses a combination of #4, #5, #8 & #9 (with #7 thrown in on some occasions). The Shoo!TAG phonies proffer elements of #2, #5 and #9 (I don’t for a moment believe that they can claim any #7). The Anti-vax crowd use #5 & #9, with a nice element of paranoia mixed in for good measure. Frauds like John Edwards exploit #3 & #6 mostly, but will typically resort to any of the above if it suits them.

Tetherd Cow Avoidance Advice: If in doubt, ask The Reverend. He will know.

This strange cloud anomaly over Moscow was captured on video last week. Predictably enough, the loonies are out in force attempting to ‘explain’ it and we’ve had everything from a ‘HAARP mothership’ ((If you don’t know what HAARP is, do a Search™, but be warned, your brain may rot due to a deluge of stupidity)) to a Sign of the End Times. More than a few have obsessed over the black dots that fly across frame at about the 5 second mark (birds, you idiots) and the most perplexing thing about the whole phenomenon is that there doesn’t seem to be – anywhere that I could find – a single rational attempt to explain it. I also note that there doesn’t seem to be any other footage of this odd event – in this era of ubiquitous image-capturing devices that does seem to me to be slightly unusual. Unless of course everybody who was actually there found it unremarkable, which is another fairly hefty indicator that it’s not a spaceship from Zeta Reticuli.

For the record, my hypothesis is that underneath it somewhere there is a source of thermal disturbance, perhaps a power station, which has caused some kind of convection activity in the low clouds above.

UPDATE: A single user comment on one of the many propagations of the video led me to a possible expanation: a hole-punch or fallstreak cloud. You can see lots of examples by doing a Search™. Hole-punch clouds are caused by aircraft disturbing thin cloud layers. If this is a hole-punch cloud, it is particularly unusual for its symmetry.

Few things annoy me as much as complete out-and-out pseudoscience, but one of those few things is motivational/aspirational vampires speakers like Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra. While I have no doubt that some motivational speakers really believe what they’re saying, and have the best intentions to make people’s lives better, it is certain that many of these lecturn-huggers are nothing more than carnival sideshow spruikers selling a glimpse of a two-headed chicken. ((And in most cases a glimpse of a two-headed chicken would be better value for your dollar.))

Normally, I can’t be bothered with these idiots, but when they spam the Reverend, well then, they’re fair game.

Today I received an email extolling the virtues of some guff called ‘Brain Power – Peak Performance Training’. The person we can expect on stage with the boater and cane is someone called Mark Jansen, whose credentials are so ephemeral that an extensive Search™ turns up little more than a bunch of links back to his Brain Power site. ((Assuming he is not also the lead singer of a heavy metal band.)) The number one endorsement of Mr Jansen on his spam email comes from a personage named Max Kaan, who does have some credentials… as a stage hypnotist. I leave you to reflect on that for a moment.

I don’t aim to reproduce the entire Brain Power spam here – it’s long-winded and tedious – but it does have a few clangers that I know you will appreciate.

The email begins with a bunch of questions, among which are:

Oh no! Not again. The hoary old ‘we only use 10% of our brain’ myth. Man, that thing has been thoroughly debunked for the better part of two decades – if it ever had any credibility in the first place.

Then we have:

Accredited expert Mark Jansen will help you understand and unleash your innate Brain Power. It’s the fascinating bridge between logic and magic…

Uh-oh. The only bridge between logic and magic is of the precarious long wooden suspension kind, with frayed rope at both ends and a lot of slats missing.

With Brain Power Peak Performance Training, you can, so the email promises, enjoy many benefits, including:

8. Access the Infinite Potential that resides inside everyone; and not just the Einstein’s of the World.

Infinite Potential that is not quite infinite enough to cover grammar, punctuation and sentence structure, it would appear.

Elsewhere on the Brain Power site (oh yes, I visited) we find a lot of dreary guff about all manner of things, including numerous references to ’emotional intelligence’, a staple of touchy-feely fringe psychology which basically says that if you’re not actually intelligent then that’s OK, because there’s another kind of intelligent which is probably the kind you’ve got! There’s no way you could really be genuinely stupid right? Especially if you’re thinking of spending your hard-earned Rand ((Mark Jansen and his buddy Max Kaan are both South African. As is the location of the seminar being advertised. And for this they spammed probably millions of email accounts worldwide. Now that’s brain power.)) on a Brain Power seminar.

They also wheel out this piece of insipid idiocy:

While reason will allow you to solve a linear mathematical problem, a creative brain will allow you to find inspiring solutions that are beyond the obvious. Eg:- E = MC2

Oh for fuck’s sake. Like other snake-oil venders with whom we are familiar, the ‘brains’ behind Brain Power are spewing out the only piece of ‘high end’ math they know because they think it will be impressive. Well, impressive it may be to the Zombie Armies of the Emotionally Intelligent but any genuinely intelligent person can simplify out that equation for this special context to mean: ‘I am an ignorant twat! Look – I have a Rolex!’.

The site also has the most boring and least informative FAQ I’ve seen in quite some time, which asks only one relevant question and provides an illuminating answer:

6. Is it worth it?

That will be up to the individual. If the attendee absorbs the material and applies the concepts daily, it can and will have the effect of changing one’s life. In terms of value, twelve years of research on the Human Brain in one day. How does one place a value on knowledge?

Alrighty! There we have it – the old Get Out of Jail Free card. You can fork out for Mr Jansen’s seminar, but if you walk away the idiot you were when you handed over your money, then IT’S YOUR FAULT! Perfect!

It remains for us to ask only this question of our own – if Mark Jansen’s ‘Brain Power’ is so successful at turning people (including himself, if he’s behind his own product) into Einstein’s, ((Einstein’s what????)) what the fuck is he doing spamming me and schlepping around the motivational speaking circuit?

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