"The Georgia Guidestones, a 19-foot mysterious granite monument in the Peach State, was demolished on Thursday for safety reasons, after being damaged in a blast."

Newsweek reports.

The big mystery about the monument wasn't how it got there, but just who paid to buy the land and put it up. It looks a bit like Stonehenge, but it's not ancient. It went up in 1980, financed by someone who worked through a banker who was sworn to protect his anonymity. 

The stones were engraved with 10 principles (in 8 languages), and the first one is blatantly evil, once you penetrate the euphemism "Maintain":

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature

"It was neither psychic nor much of a massage... He was more like a $250-an-hour life coach who happened to have good hands..."

"... which he ran lightly over my arms, legs, lower back and abdomen. He said he did this to get a better read of my energy. And when he was done, he reported, 'There’s nothing wrong with you, Jeremy.' He reassured me I was just sensitive."

ADDED: In this week's episode of Skeptoid — #411 — Brian Dunning returns to what was the very first topic of the long running podcast: the human body's energy fields.

The "unmitigated disaster" of Broadway's "Spiderman."

"'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,' the Broadway show currently in previews in New York, aspires to redefine the genre with music from Irish rocker Bono and death-defying aerial stuntwork."

It's been death-defying so far, but not injury-defying. When you're watching a movie, you know that if somebody died making that stunt, they wouldn't show it. Remember Brandon Lee?

The mysterious death of Bruce Lee's son was sure to achieve a cult status all its own. The story goes that actor Brandon Lee was shot on the set of his final film, The Crow, in the middle of filming a scene; and that his death was left in the final cut of the movie....

Brandon Lee was indeed shot while filming. It was a tragic accident involving a gun firing blanks. A fragment of a dummy bullet, from a previous scene, was lodged in the gun and fired into Lee, fatally wounding him. Some mystery remains surrounding the film of the incident, with some saying it was destroyed, and others saying it was confiscated by police. It was not used in the movie. The scene was rewritten and reshot using a double, and the manner of his death is different than what happened in the fatal accident.

But if someone gets killed in a live-theater stunt, the audience witnesses the death. It's supposed to be part of the entertainment that the stunts look risky, but if you are not confident that the actors and stuntmen are perfectly safe, deriving pleasure from watching that feels wrong — or it should. And taking a child to the show becomes utterly unacceptable.

Which raises other questions: Why are Broadway shows aimed at children in the first place? Why did they move into the special-effects/adolescent domain that movies dominate? Remember when theater was aimed at adults, and the more snobbish adults would look down on things like "Carousel" and "South Pacific" as too middle-brow? Now, the heights of "Carousel" and "South Pacific" seem unreachable — except in revivals of "Carousel" and "South Pacific."

Broadway, it's all wreckage.

Irradiating food. Irradiating people.

Irradiation is a great way to improve food safety:

Bacteria, viruses, and everything else are all sterilized by the radiation. Ionizing radiation is used because it's high energy, and is extremely dangerous to living tissue.... [T]he food coming out the other end — be it bread, milk, meat, fruit, or cheese — is absolutely sterile and, if properly sealed, will last longer on your shelf than virtually anything else in the supermarket....

But Americans are too freaked out by it:

The circular green logo along with the words "Treated with irradiation" are so terrifying to much of the American public that the process has been put virtually out of business. Most Americans would prefer to accept a few E. coli deaths....

Even though there is absolutely no radiation in the food that we would buy:

Food irradiation... does not place radioactive material onto the food. The food is placed in the radiation field, and then it's removed. Run a Geiger counter over it, and it shows zero. Food that's been irradiated is not radioactive.

But we're too scared of this radiation to use it to protect ourselves from the very real bacteria in food that can kill us.

If we're overcautious to the point of irrationality about radiation, why then are we at all willing to let the government irradiate our bodies?

In April, four scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote a public letter to the White House warning that the government may have underestimated the dosage of ionizing radiation delivered to a person's skin from a backscatter machine by one or two orders of magnitude. The scientists, who have expertise in biochemistry, biophysics, oncology, and X-ray crystallography, pointed out that the government's estimate was based on radiation exposure for the entire body. During scanning, the majority of radiation will be focused on the surface of the body, meaning a more concentrated dose of radiation is delivered to the skin....

Ed Nickoloff, professor of radiology at Columbia University and chief hospital physicist at Columbia University Medical Center, says the data isn't yet clear either way. "At this point, until I knew more information, I'd tell people to take the pat-down," he says.

Is it that we are not only irrational, but we are also irrational in our choice of what to be irrational about? I don't think so. Food radiation was something that businesses were permitted to do, but they stopped because we avoided buying the product. The government isn't asking us whether we want our bodies irradiated if we want to travel by plane. It's not like going to the grocery store and picking one package of hamburger instead of another. We still get our hamburger. We don't have a choice of flying with radiation or without radiation. The only choice the government gives us is not to fly or to accept a groping.

Yay! Skeptoid takes on my favorite target for debunking: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test.

You can listen and also read an episode transcript here. Excerpt:

It's been found that 50% of test takers who retake it score differently the second time. This is because nobody is strictly an E or an I, for example, but somewhere in between. Many people are right on the border for some of the four dichotomies, and depending on their mood that day or other factors, may answer enough questions differently to push them over. Yet the results inaccurately pigeonhole them all the way over to one side or the other. This makes it possible for two people who are very similar to actually end up with completely opposite scores....

From the perspective of statistical analysis, the MBTI's fundamental premise is flawed. According to Myers & Briggs, each person is either an introvert or an extravert. Within each group we would expect to see a bell curve showing the distribution of extraversion within the extraverts group, and introversion within the introverts. If the MBTI approach is valid, we should expect to see two separate bell curves along the introversion/extraversion spectrum, making it valid for Myers & Briggs to decide there are two groups into which people fit. But data have shown that people do not clump into two separately identifiable curves; they clump into a single bell curve, with extreme introverts and extreme extraverts forming the long tails of the curve, and most people gathered somewhere in the middle. Jung himself said "There is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum." This does not support the MBTI assumption that people naturally separate into two groups. MBTI takes a knife and cuts the bell curve right down the center, through the meatiest part, and right through most people's horizontal error bars. Moreover, this forced error is compounded four times, with each of the four dichotomies.

"If you really want to help someone who suffers from Morgellons or any other psychogenic condition..."

"... you can't only rely on telling them they're wrong and depending on them to take all the steps. But you also don't have to dishonestly pretend their self-diagnosis is true."

Liberals out-organized conservatives in blogging, but conservatives are doing better with Twitter.

Or so the liberal bloggers say.

“Conservatives are always good at pushing that one concise message. The death panels are easy to tweet. The explanation for why there are no death panels and making that explanation takes much more explanation. You can’t do that on Twitter.”

So their ideas are sophisticated and fact-based, while their opponents throw around ideology and the fantasy that supports it. That's the politico's delusion, in a nutshell. But I've got to laugh at the way blogging now represents the in-depth development of ideas. I'm just too deep for Twitter. I'm a blogger. LOL.

***

That politico's delusion reminds me of Skeptoid's explanation for why he won't debate pseudoscientists anymore:

The pseudoscientist ... can say whatever he wants. If compelling rhetoric would benefit from any given argument, he can always make that argument. Pseudosciences have typically been designed around compelling rhetorical arguments. The facts of science, on the other hand, rarely happen to coincide with the best possible logic argument. Having the facts on your side is not an advantage, it's a limitation; and it's a limitation that's very dangerous to the cause of science should you throw it onto the debate floor.

"Sarah Palin is not stupid."

Skeptoid vs. ad hominem attacks.

"Why did I do that and write the story with the girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people..."

"... to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world."

A world-class bullshit artist, keeping up the bullshit.

Another memoir hoax, and once again, Oprah fell for it:

["Angel at the Fence"] was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him....

Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show....

Here's the New Republic article by Gabriel Sherman that exposed the hoax:

"It's a lie. It's one big lie," says Henry Golde, 79, who was liberated with Herman from Theresienstadt, in 1945. Rosenblat "was normal," Golde adds. "I don't know what happened. Something went haywire, to tell a lie like that on national TV. It's terrible." Golde, a former New York City cab driver who now lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, says he was angry when he first read about Herman's story in the 1990s. "What the hell? I said. What the hell is he writing about?" Golde remembers....

"A love story set in a concentration camp as a way of teaching about the Holocaust actually inverts the reality of the Holocaust, denies it in its own way," [Michigan State University professor Kenneth] Waltzer wrote me in an e-mail. "The reality of being in a concentration camp was that ... [n]ormal impulses like those of young lovers were disrupted, collapsed. The idea that two people in the circumstances described--a prisoner in a camp, in a group of brothers, the primary source of loyalty, and a girl in hiding under false identity with a family group, her primary source of loyalty--would put all up for grabs by meeting daily in the open at a guarded electrified fence means that the writer didn't really understand, and the publishers and moviemaker didn't really understand either. And this is why all this is so important. There is denial of the Holocaust, this isn't that, but there is also denial of the substance or reality of the Holocaust--and this is definitely that."

IN THE COMMENTS: A little pity, from Bissage:

Mr. Rosenblat is a world-class bullshit artist?

Gee . . . I don’t know . . . that sounds kind of harsh. Anyway, he’s certainly not the only guilty party in this false-memoir scheme.

Go to the link and look at the cover of the bound proof. Was the fence really a single strand of barbed wire? Is a white dove the same thing as an angel? Was there ever a white dove at all? Is that an illustration of an apple tree that actually existed near Buchenwald?

These are stupid questions, of course.

But so too is it stupid to ask whether Santa Claus lives at the North Pole and has a reindeer with a red nose that lights his way. Stupid for anyone except children, that is.

There are those who make it their purpose in life to jealously guard the memory of the Holocaust and that’s a good thing, for the most part.

Still, a little poetic license can be a good thing too.

Does it really change the horribleness of the Holocaust to say a little girl tossed an apple over a fence?

In early drafts of "Angel at the Fence" the little girl tossed over a hot pastrami on rye and an egg cream.

The editors thought that was going too far and they were right!

And William:

Let us come together in the sunlit, upland pastures and gather cow patties. Let us pile these patties one upon another and build such a towering edifice that God in his heaven looks down upon us and says "What a pile of bullshit"...The idea that the Holocaust is the one atrocity of the past century that should be immune from evasions and myths and denial is itself a cow patty that can be used as the keystone for the arch of a lofty cathedral of bullshit.....Some addled old man packed his wounds with a poultice of bullshit. I can relate to that. We all try to invent a usable past. He tried and failed, but the attempt was not evil.

AND: Glenn Reynolds links like this:

HEH: “Another memoir hoax, and once again, Oprah fell for it.” She’s a sucker for a good life story, true or not.

The Obama angle. You know, Oprah's gullibility is no joke. She's hugely influential. Skeptoid put her first on his list of "Ten Most Wanted: Celebrities Who Promote Harmful Pseudoscience."

To her estimated total audience of 100 million, many of whom uncritically accept every word the world's wealthiest woman says, she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack celebrity diets, past life regression, angels, ghosts, alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy, anti-vaccination, detoxification, vitamin megadosing, and virtually everything that will distract a human being from making useful progress and informed decisions in life. Although much of what she promotes is not directly harmful, she offers no distinction between the two, leaving the gullible public increasingly and incrementally injured with virtually every episode.

When you have a giant audience, you have a giant responsibility. Maybe you don't want such a responsibility, in which case, fine, keep your mouth shut; or limit your performance to jokes or acting or whatever it is you do.

At some point, the real hoax is Oprah herself.

Althouse meets Skeptoid, on the new Bloggingheads.

I love the Skeptoid podcast, and it was a big thrill to talk to Brian Dunning.

Topics:

Lost cosmonauts and shortwave-radio spies (04:01)
Why do we believe conspiracy theories? (06:13)
Debunking subliminal sexual imagery in ads (09:02)
Quack remedies’ tenacious hold on the infirm (12:48)
The real-world consequences of our irrational beliefs (10:10)
What does “Free Tibet” really mean? (04:45)

I'll have some clips in a few minutes, including the context of the "smack in the face" clip I blogged here.

ADDED: Here's the part where we talk about why people believe in conspiracies, miracles, and extra-terrestrial and supernatural beings:



(Hey, it looks like I'm wearing an earpiece!)

AND: Here's the context for my "smack in the face" line, in which I also talk about the irrational things educated, intelligent people think. (Remember my asking you for some input?)

"Clintons are lizard people and they are punishing Obama."

Links mentioned:

David Icke's theory of the lizard people

Skeptoid on Reptoids

Goodbye to podcasting.

I've gone a year without putting a podcast up over here, where I've been paying $10 a month. Every month when I see the email telling me they've billed my credit card, I've felt a little pang. Why don't I podcast? And if I don't podcast, why don't I cancel my account? For one thing, if I cancel, my 87 old podcasts will disappear. That was something of a deterrent. But I've just canceled, and the disappearance is coming, so download them while you can. I'll still have my old digital files, but they will become unavailable in a month or two — along with all the many spam comments — buy wow gold cheap wow gold buy cheap wow gold — that I haven't been bothering to delete.

I started podcasting in September 2005, and for a while, I felt that it was the coolest thing. I'd eagerly podcast twice a week, but those days are over. What happened?

1. Podcasts are not searchable. Unless you make a transcript, they seem to fall into oblivion. You can't see them.

2. YouTube! It undercut my interest in podcasting. It's free, it makes you part of a lively website, and I can embed the clips in blog posts — so it has more to do with the blog (which is the main thing for me).

3. Bloggingheads. Involvement in this project extracts a lot of my talky material. It's the same idea of taking subjects I've blogged about and expanding and digressing. And, like YouTube, it gives me the feeling of being in a lively place — and by contrast, my podcast page looked lonely and desolate.

4. I really did love the idea of developing an audio style that was eccentric and funny, but after 87 episodes, it just feels too obscure to energize me.

If you liked the podcasts, thanks for listening. You've already noticed the year's silence. This is just the announcement that I've pulled the plug.

ADDED:

1. I still like to listen to podcasts. I subscribe to rushlimbaugh.com so I can listen to the radio show in the evenings and without commercials. I go for a walk or clean the house at the same time. Useful. I'm also very fond of Skeptoid. Don't judge it by the new episode, though. That's unique... but hilarious.

2. This post made me realize how important it is to keep my blog on the free and extremely well-established Blogger. You might think it's no big deal to pay for your server, as I paid Libsyn to host my podcast. But are you thinking long term? If you stop blogging regularly, will you have to keep paying to keep your archive on line? If so, how long will you do that? Have you provided for payments to continue after you die? Or don't you care? I do!