hermits cranks pseudoscience and martin gardner

Es­ti­mated reading time is 7 min­utes.

MARTIN GARDNER WAS A SKEPTIC. He was oné of the first ‘modern skep­tics’ and one of the most im­por­tant. He made his liveli­hood as a math­e­matics and sci­ence writer. He is per­haps best known for cre­ating and sus­taining gen­eral in­terest in recre­ational math­e­matics for a large part of the 20th cen­tury through his “Math­e­mat­ical Games” column in Sci­en­tific Amer­ican mag­a­zine (1956–1981).

He was an un­com­pro­mising critic of fringe sci­ence and a founding member of the Com­mittee for the Sci­en­tific In­ves­ti­ga­tion of Claims of the Para­normal (CSICOP), an or­ga­ni­za­tion de­voted to de­bunking pseudoscience.

He also wrote a monthly column ti­tled “Notes of a Fringe Watcher” for Skep­tical In­quirer mag­a­zine (1983–2002). He wrote a third column ti­tled “Puzzle Tale” for Asi­mov’s Sci­ence Fic­tion mag­a­zine (1977–1986).

Martin Gardner was born in 1914 and died in 2010; in be­tween he pub­lished more than 100 books, many col­lec­tions of his columns. Carl Sagan said that Gard­ner’s books “pro­vide a taste of the broad, gen­eral ed­u­ca­tion the col­lege’s ought to pro­vide and to often do not.” 

He should be con­sid­ered one of the ‘fa­ther’s of modern Amer­ican skep­ti­cism and an in­tel­lec­tual hero to anyone who ra­ti­o­ci­nates at least once a day! 1

 

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In 1952, Putnam pub­lished a hard­cover edi­tion of In The Name Of Sci­ence with the amusing sub­title “An en­ter­taining survey of the high priests and cultists of sci­ence, past and present.” The book sold poorly and was quickly deleted from Put­nam’s in-print cat­alog. 2

Hermits, cranks, and pseudoscience

The fol­lowing is pulled from the ar­ticle “Her­mits and Cranks” by Michael Shermer for Sci­en­tific Amer­ican (May 23, 2010). I was re­ferred to it by a no­tice in an­other ar­ticle “Are You a Crank?” by Brian Dun­ning for the Skep­toid web­site (No­vember 2, 2015).

The orig­inal ar­ticle has more than 1,100 words; the ex­cerpted por­tions below are com­fort­ably under 400 words, so in­ter­ested par­ties should click on over and read the piece in its entirety.

Every­thing be­tween the im­ages of the books (Fads  & Fal­lacies marks the be­gin­ning and The An­no­tated Alice the end) has been lifted from the ar­ticle. Those sen­tences and para­graphs in quo­ta­tion marks are Gard­ner’s; every­thing else is Sher­mer’s. (The cap­tions and foot­notes are mine!) So here’s a little in­tro­duc­tion to Gard­ner’s take on her­mits cranks pseu­do­science and other irrationalities.

 

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In 1957, Dover re­pub­lished the book but ti­tled Fads And Fal­lacies In The Name Of Sci­ence (Dover). It had an even more en­ter­taining sub­title: “The Cu­rious The­o­ries of Modern Pseu­do­sci­en­tists and the Strange, Amusing and Alarming Cults that Sur­round Them – A Study in Human Gulli­bility.” Fifty years later it is still in print. 3

The scientist as hermit

n 1950, Martin Gardner pub­lished an ar­ticle en­ti­tled “The Hermit Sci­en­tist” about what we would today call pseu­do­sci­en­tists. The hermit sci­en­tist works alone and is ig­nored by main­stream sci­en­tists. “Such ne­glect, of course, only strengthens the con­vic­tions of the self-declared genius.”

In 1952, he ex­panded it into a book called In the Name of Sci­ence [that] sold so poorly that it was quickly re­main­dered and lay dor­mant until 1957 when it was re­pub­lished by Dover. It has come down to us as Fads and Fal­lacies in the Name of Sci­ence, ar­guably the skeptic classic of the past half a century.

Thank­fully, there has been some progress since Gardner of­fered his first crit­i­cisms of pseu­do­science . . . in­cluding dis­cus­sions of home­opathy, natur­opathy, os­teopathy, iridi­ag­nosis, food fad­dists, cancer cures and other forms of med­ical quackery, Edgar Cayce, the Great Pyra­mid’s al­leged mys­tical powers, hand­writing analysis, ESP and PK, rein­car­na­tion, dowsing rods, ec­cen­tric sexual the­o­ries, and the­o­ries of group racial dif­fer­ences.

Gardner cau­tions that when re­li­gious su­per­sti­tion should be on the wane, it is easy “to forget that thou­sands of high school teachers of bi­ology, in many of our southern states, are still afraid to teach the theory of evo­lu­tion for fear of losing their jobs.” 

How can we tell if someone is a sci­en­tific crank? Gardner of­fers this advice:

(1) “First and most im­por­tant of these traits is that cranks work in al­most total iso­la­tion from their col­leagues.” 4

(2) “A second char­ac­ter­istic of the pseudo-scientist, which greatly strengthens his iso­la­tion, is a ten­dency to­ward para­noia,” which man­i­fests it­self in sev­eral ways:

(a) He con­siders him­self a genius.
(b) He re­gards his col­leagues, without ex­cep­tion, as ig­no­rant blockheads.
© He be­lieves him­self un­justly per­se­cuted and dis­crim­i­nated against. 
(d) He has strong com­pul­sions to focus his at­tacks on the greatest sci­en­tists and the best-established theories. 
(e) He often has a ten­dency to write in a com­plex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he him­self has coined.

“If the present trend con­tinues, we can ex­pect a wide va­riety of these men, with the­o­ries yet unimag­in­able, to put in their ap­pear­ance in the years im­me­di­ately ahead. They will write im­pres­sive books, give in­spiring lec­tures, or­ga­nize ex­citing cults. They may achieve a fol­lowing of one—or one mil­lion. In any case, it will be well for our­selves and for so­ciety if we are on our guard against them.” 

 

Crank_GardnerAlice_book

One of Gard­ner’s best books is The An­no­tated Alice (Bramhall House, 1960), in which his notes on the book’s meanings—its jokes, puns, al­lu­sions, ref­er­ences, etc.—are ex­plained to the modern reader. A must-read for anyone who en­joyed the book. As a col­lec­table, it is rather easy to find as it sold well since pub­li­ca­tion and has re­mained in print since 1960.

About those elusive platters

In his ar­ticle, Shermer quotes Gardner on flying saucers: “I have heard many readers of the saucer books up­braid the gov­ern­ment in no un­cer­tain terms for its stub­born re­fusal to re­lease the ‘truth’ about the elu­sive plat­ters. The ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ‘hush hush policy’ is an­grily cited as proof that our mil­i­tary and po­lit­ical leaders have lost all faith in the wisdom of the Amer­ican people.”

Shermer notes that “Ab­sence of ev­i­dence then was no more a bar­rier to be­lief than it is today,” the state­ment that mo­ti­vated this ar­ticle. Ex­cept that when I read it what came to my mind was pol­i­tics, es­pe­cially the never-ending in­ves­ti­ga­tion of Hillary Clin­ton’s in­volve­ment in what can now be called ‘Beng­hazi­gate.’

De­spite the fact that ten (!) Rep*blican-led (mostly Con­gres­sional) com­mit­tees have done their best to turn up dirt on Clinton, they have found the following:

• no ev­i­dence of wrong-going
• no ev­i­dence of blundering
• no ev­i­dence of a cover-up
• no ev­i­dence of lying
• no ev­i­dence of yada yoda blah blah you get the picture

Yet every—and I know of no ex­cep­tions, al­though I as­sume there is at least two out there—Rep*blican voter I know plus the thou­sands of “con­ser­v­a­tives” on the In­ternet everyday are con­vinced that this total lack of ev­i­dence can only mean one thing: that Hillary Clinton is the World’s Biggest Liar!

At least since Bill Clinton, an­other person upon whom Grom­mett only knows how many man-hours of in­ves­ti­ga­tion were spent racking up more than $100,000,000 in ex­penses, all of which turned up nothing about his pur­ported evil do­ings: no pay­offs, no bribes, no this and no that, and not a single one of the in­fa­mous 43 bodies buried in Arkansas.

Un­less, of course, we count his sex life.

Which ap­par­ently mat­ters to his opponents.

In which I as­sume their rather prurient in­terest is based on their lack of same.

And since I have men­tioned ir­ra­tional­i­ties above, I have to con­fess to one of my own being a mo­ti­vating factor in this ar­ticle: bullies—because I hate fucking bullies . . .

 

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HEADER IMAGE: Great photo of Martin Gardner that I found on a BBC Néws page that does not date or lo­cate the photo or credit the pho­tog­ra­pher. Gardner was a life­long fan of Lewis Car­roll and I searched for an ad­e­quate photo of him posing with the Alice in Won­der­land statue in New York’ Cen­tral Park to no avail. For more, readMartin Gardner 1914–2010: Founder of the Modern Skep­tical Move­ment.” (Thanks to William Bull of Skeptic for bringing this back to my attention!)

 


FOOT­NOTES:

1   Arthur C. Clarke said that Gardner is “ur­gently needed as an an­ti­dote to the tide of ir­ra­tionalism that is en­gulfing the world.” Noam Chomsky wrote, “Martin Gardner’s con­tri­bu­tion to con­tem­po­rary in­tel­lec­tual cul­ture is unique—in its range, its in­sight, and un­der­standing of hard ques­tions that matter.” And one of my in­tel­lec­tual he­roes Stephen Jay Gould called Gardner “one of the most bril­liant men and gra­cious writers that I have ever known.” 

2   This may not be an easy book to find in fine con­di­tion: Amazon has only four listed for sale and the best is de­scribed as “VG/G hard­cover with jacket, 1st edi­tion 1952 Putnam. No mark­ings, jacket has edgewear in­cluding small tears and chips.” The asking price is $14.50, so a clean, un­dam­aged copy should be worth con­sid­er­ably more.

3    This may also be a dif­fi­cult book to find: there have been many edi­tions since this and Amazon does not dis­crim­i­nate in its ads. So there are dozens of copies for sale but it may take a while to find an ac­tual Dover edi­tion from 1957 in nice shape.

4   “Cranks typ­i­cally do not un­der­stand how the sci­en­tific process operates—that they need to try out their ideas on col­leagues, at­tend con­fer­ences, and pub­lish their hy­potheses in peer-reviewed jour­nals be­fore an­nouncing to the world their star­tling dis­covery. Of course, when you ex­plain this to them they say that their ideas are too rad­ical for the con­ser­v­a­tive sci­en­tific es­tab­lish­ment to ac­cept.” (Michael Shermer)

7 thoughts on “hermits cranks pseudoscience and martin gardner”

  1. I greatly ad­mired Martin Gar­dener when I was young and he was writing for Sc. Am.​ And the skeptic looked oh! so in­tel­li­gent and rea­son­able until I grew up and watched the skep­tics in prac­tice. We should not forget that to­bacco smoking was en­dorsed by all the pro­fes­sional sci­en­tists and med­ical ex­perts until the 1950s. Grandma told us smoking would stunt the growth and Grandpa warned us of “coffin nails,” but no rep­utable sci­en­tist chal­lenged the thickly gold-plated to­bacco in­dustry. Grandma was just an old woman who lis­tened to old wives tales, and Grandpa had nothing but anec­dotal ev­i­dence. Money from Roth­mans In­ter­na­tional PLC was every­where, even spon­soring sports events. Big to­bacco could tell any lie it pleased with never a whisper of protest from the “skep­tics.”

    Other ex­am­ples of sci­en­tific fraud are le­gion, from the Pilt­down Man to promis­cuous X-ray ma­chines, tran­quil­izers, and the “Food Pyramid.” What were the “skep­tics” doing?

    “Sci­ence” is, prac­ti­cally and eco­nom­i­cally speaking (even under the “skeptic” label), little more than the voice of Big Money -- just an­other group-think or­tho­doxy. A cult. A re­li­gion. The skep­tics never at­tack Big Phar­macy, re­gard­less of the sci­en­tific fraud. The skep­tics will never take on the trav­esty of public school ed­u­ca­tion, even as it turns our chil­dren into a na­tion of drooling il­lit­er­ates, dumber by half in every gen­er­a­tion. The skep­tics have never as­sailed the bar­barity of our prison cul­ture, psy­chi­atric brain butchery, the mills clear-cutting the Amazon jungle, or the bil­lion­aire in­dus­tries that pol­lute of the en­vi­ron­ment. Skep­tics have no problem with “sci­ence” driven pri­marily by weapons re­search and the war budget. You will never hear a “skeptic” crit­i­cize the mil­i­ta­riza­tion of public schools. In­stead of for­warding the march of civ­i­liza­tion, skep­tics use their au­thority to prop up racism and sexism -- never the first in any great change, but al­ways among the last. Even now, what is the racial and sexual makeup among the pro­fes­sional classes where the skep­tics hang out? Sta­tis­ti­cally, they are be­hind the team­sters and the stevedores.

    In prac­tice, the skep­tics are just sheep dogs, shame­less ser­vants of Big Money and Or­tho­doxy. They at­tack mi­nority re­li­gious nuts and they boast of de­feating as­trol­o­gists and people who channel Edgar Casey, but where are the skep­tics when the real threats to hu­manity come to call? They are sleeping hap­pily under the porch, ut­tering not even a growl.

    Reply
    • “Some people be­lieve that skep­ti­cism is the re­jec­tion of new ideas, or worse, they con­fuse ‘skeptic’ with ‘cynic’ and think that skep­tics are a bunch of grumpy cur­mud­geons un­willing to ac­cept any claim that chal­lenges the status quo.

      This is wrong.

      Skep­ti­cism is a pro­vi­sional ap­proach to claims. It is the ap­pli­ca­tion of reason to any and all ideas—no sa­cred cows allowed.

      In other words, skep­ti­cism is a method, not a position.

      Ide­ally, skep­tics do not go into an in­ves­ti­ga­tion closed to the pos­si­bility that a phe­nom­enon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are ‘skep­tical,’ we mean that we must see com­pelling ev­i­dence be­fore we believe.

      Skep­ti­cism has a long his­tor­ical tra­di­tion dating back to an­cient Greece, when Socrates ob­served, ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ But this pure po­si­tion is sterile and un­pro­duc­tive and held by vir­tu­ally no one.

      If you were skep­tical about every­thing, you would have to be skep­tical of your own skep­ti­cism. Like the de­caying sub­atomic par­ticle, pure skep­ti­cism un­coils and spins off the viewing screen of our in­tel­lec­tual cloud chamber.

      Modern skep­ti­cism is em­bodied in the sci­en­tific method, which in­volves gath­ering data to for­mu­late and test nat­u­ral­istic ex­pla­na­tions for nat­ural phenomena.

      A claim be­comes fac­tual when it is con­firmed to such an ex­tent it would be rea­son­able to offer tem­po­rary agree­ment. But all facts in sci­ence are pro­vi­sional and sub­ject to chal­lenge, and there­fore skep­ti­cism is a method leading to pro­vi­sional conclusions.

      Some claims, such as water dowsing, ESP, and cre­ationism, have been tested (and failed the tests) often enough that we can pro­vi­sion­ally con­clude that they are not valid.

      Other claims, such as hyp­nosis, the ori­gins of lan­guage, and black holes, have been tested but re­sults are in­con­clu­sive so we must con­tinue for­mu­lating and testing hy­potheses and the­o­ries until we can reach a pro­vi­sional conclusion.

      The key to skep­ti­cism is to con­tin­u­ously and vig­or­ously apply the methods of sci­ence to nav­i­gate the treach­erous straits be­tween ‘know nothing’ skep­ti­cism and ‘any­thing goes’ credulity.

      Over three cen­turies ago the French philoso­pher and skeptic René Descartes—after one of the most thor­ough skep­tical purges in in­tel­lec­tual history—concluded that he knew one thing for cer­tain: Cogito ergo sum (I think, there­fore I am).

      But evo­lu­tion may have de­signed us in the other di­rec­tion. Hu­mans evolved to be pattern-seeking, cause-inferring an­i­mals, shaped by na­ture to find mean­ingful re­la­tion­ships in the world. Those who were best at doing this left be­hind the most offspring.

      We are their de­scen­dants. In other words, to be human is to think: Sum Ergo Cogito (I am, there­fore I think).” (http://www.skeptic.com/about_us/)

      As for the Pilt­down Man, there as not one but sev­eral and they were some­what tal­ented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utaXjl6nt7s

      As for promis­cuity, it is easier to argue that Man is by na­ture promis­cuous than it is to argue he is nat­u­rally monog­a­mous. I my­self favor polyamory, but I’ll be damned if I can get my wife to concur.

      I con­fess to having been at times in my life both promis­cuous and a se­rial monogamist, but I’ll be damned (again I guess) if I will apol­o­gize for it.

      Nay, I say!

      Would rather I apol­o­gize for once thinking ill of Frankie Valli and the Four Sea­sons, tat­tooed women, and spinach . . .

      Reply
  2. 1) Did you know my re­mark about “promis­cuity” had nothing to do with sex? X-rays were known by re­searchers to cause cancer from about 1920.

    2) But the med­ical es­tab­lish­ment con­tinued to use X-rays into the 1960s with not the slightest pre­cau­tion for pa­tient or therapist.

    3) I re­call in 1959 my sister fell and broke her arm. The doctor set it using a “flu­o­ro­scope,” a live X-ray ma­chine that showed the doc­tor’s bone ma­nip­u­la­tions in real time. I was 11, and I was present in the room watching him work. He held his hands in the X-ray beam along with my sis­ter’s arm, none of us with lead shields. The beam was string enough to light a flu­o­res­cent screen with a con­tin­uous glow. I wonder what the mil­lirem count was for each of us that day.

    4) And a few years ear­lier, maybe 1957, the shoe stores had coin op­er­ated X-ray ma­chines. A parent could in­sert the child’s foot in the bottom and view the bones of the foot rel­a­tive to the shoe.

    5) That is what I meant by promis­cuous. They didn’t care. They were in­dis­crim­i­nate. Those who knew made no ef­fort to tell those who did not know.

    6) If a sci­en­tist were truly benev­o­lent, would he work to cor­rect the peo­ple’s un­der­standing of the Lord Bugbug Cre­ation Myth, or teach people to stop X-raying their chil­dren and killing them­selves with tobacco?

    7) Would he use his tele­vi­sion time to teach people about the stars and black holes?

    8) Or would he ed­u­cate people about the harm to human health from white sugar, and the tril­lion dollar Big-Sugar in­dustry that pushes sugar addiction?

    Reply
    • A SCENE FROM THE RE­CENT BENG­HAZI HEAR­INGS, I mean from a movie I once saw . . .

      CROWD: “We found a witch! May we burn her?”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “How do you know she is a witch?”

      CROWD: “She looks like one.”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “Bring her forward.”

      WITCH: “I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “But you are dressed as one.”

      WITCH: “They dressed me up like this!”

      CROWD: “No, we didn’t.”

      WITCH: “And this isn’t my nose! It’s a false one!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “Well?”

      CROWD: “Well, we did do the nose. And the hat. But she is a witch!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “Did you dress her up like this?”

      CROWD: “No, no! Yes. A bit. She has got a wart.”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “What makes you think she is a witch?”

      CROWD: “She turned me into a newt!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “A newt?”

      CROWD: “I got better. Burn her anyway!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.”

      CROWD: “Are there? What are they? Tell us. Do they hurt?”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “Tell me: what do you do with witches?”

      CROWD: “Burn them!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “And what do you burn, apart from witches?”

      CROWD: “More witches! Wood!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “So, why do witches burn?”

      CROWD: “Be­cause they’re made of wood?”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “So, how do we tell if she is made of wood?”

      CROWD: “Build a bridge out of her.”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “But can you not also make bridges out of stone?”

      CROWD: “Oh, yeah.”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “Does wood sink in water?”

      CROWD: “No, it floats. Throw her into the pond!”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “What also floats in water?”

      CROWD: “Bread. Ap­ples. Very small rocks. A duck?!!?”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “Ex­actly. So, logically . . .”

      CROWD: “If she weighs the same as a duck—she’s made of wood.”

      SIR BE­DE­VERE: “And therefore . . .”

      CROWD: “A witch!”

      Aside from the sci­en­tif­i­cally ver­i­fi­able fact that witches are made of wood, they are also known to be quite promis­cuous. And not in the polyamory sense or the sub­tler se­rial monogamy sense, but just out­right promiscuous!

      The non-academic ex­ploits of Charles Manson has poi­soned the well, so to speak, but his ground­breaking work in ex­trap­o­lating the hidden mean­ings out of Bea­tles lyrics is under-appreciated. He quite ca­pably tied “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” to Paul’s having been se­duced by one of Lon­don’s many (highly promis­cuous) witches at a pri­vate screening of an avant garde doc­u­men­tary on the X-Ray Specs phe­nom­enon of the ’50s.

      “No one will be watching us, why don’t we do it in the road . . .”

      Not your normal Macca sen­ti­ments, you must admit. But he was under a spell when he wrote it, so what can you expect?

      I tried to make it with a witch once.

      It was 1973, it was.

      But I couldn’t get it up! 

      She was con­vinced we had been lovers torn ter­ribly apart in a pre­vious life.

      And that she taken part in a long-distance murder with her coven.

      This did not help matters.

      When she re­al­ized that I was not going to “per­form,” she got ticked off and turned my member into a newt!

      See how these things work?

      PS: Dar­ling Witch (who shall go name­less) (need­less to say), if you are reading this, I thought you in­cred­ibly beau­tiful and I was VERY at­tracted to you (just like in the life be­fore) and I am sorry for my lack of oompah-oompah that day (I don’t re­member if that was a problem in the pre­vious life) (hope not) and we would have made a very in­ter­esting and lovely couple as basic black en­hanced your Lisa Edelstein-like looks (of course you came first, Lisa later) and set off my blue eyes.

      Oh, yeah—the newt thing?

      It got better . . .

      Reply
      • First, con­sider the au­di­ence for the ser­mons of the skep­tics. Do the people in Beng­hazi listen to the skep­tics? No? Do the people who listen to the skep­tics burn witches? No? Hm. Why then would the skep­tics preach to white lib­eral Amer­i­cans about witch burnings?

        But let us ask what the skep­tics could be doing with all that ed­u­ca­tion and mass media band­width? What should they be saying? They could start by pointing out the most pro­lific killer of Amer­i­cans today is morbid obe­sity caused by soft drinks, candy, pastry, and white sugar ad­dic­tion. The skep­tics could point out the mech­a­nisms of sugar ad­dic­tion and throw shame on the tril­lion dollar in­dus­tries that thrive on the death of Americans.

        Obe­sity is common, se­rious and costly (http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html):

        * More than one-third (34.9% or 78.6 mil­lion) of U.S. adults are obese. [Journal of Amer­ican Medicine]
        * Obesity-related con­di­tions in­clude heart dis­ease, stroke, type 2 di­a­betes, and cer­tain types of cancer, some of the leading causes of pre­ventable death.
        * The es­ti­mated an­nual med­ical cost of obe­sity in the U.S. was $147 bil­lion in 2008 U.S. dol­lars; the med­ical costs for people who are obese were $1,429 higher than those of normal weight. 

        But sadly, the skep­tics do not ad­dress the ac­tual mytholo­gies and false sci­ence among those who listen to the skep­tics. Skep­tics do not of­fend Big Money, and they do not of­fend their au­di­ences with un­pleasant truth. The sad truth is, white lib­erals feel better about them­selves when they are told that they are better than people who burn witches, and they would not feel good about them­selves if they were told how hor­ribly they are poi­soning their own children.

        Reply
        • MARK

          No no no. Skep­tics’ ser­mons are in­tended for shoe fetishists, top­less dancers, those who prefer straw­berry to both choco­late and vanilla ice cream, and ex-Dylanologists.

          Mass media band­width is being used to batten the hatches, as usual. I’m sur­prised you’d ask.

          Sugar ad­dic­tion is a choice: it is caused by the con­sump­tion of sugar; there is no other way to get it. It is a “lifestyle choice”—like shoe fetishism.

          I keep won­dering when some en­ter­prising com­pany doesn’t just market a one-step ad­dic­tion package. Save people years of glut­to­nous stupid but nonethe­less vol­un­tary self-poisoning.

          As for Big Money—I say HAH!

          And then I say HAH! again.

          We keep waiting for the Big Money and it no come. That’s why there are so many ex-Dylanologists . . .

          Ad you KNOW that I am a vanilla bean ice cream man all the way.

          Do the clam, baby!

          NEAL

          PS: I called both of the other skep­tics that I know and we con­fess: white lib­erals feel better about them­selves when they are told that they are better than people who burn witches. So tell me! Tell me!

          Reply
  3. DEAR READERS

    This is a reply to Mark’s com­ment above dated No­vember 11, 2015. It was sent to me via email by someone who does not want his name, email ad­dress, URL, what­ever, on the In­ternet. We will call him The Dood.

    So The Dood asked me to post this for him, and being the paragon of coöper­a­tion that I am, I am!

    To make this easier to follow, The Dood’s re­marks en­closed in quo­ta­tion marks. To allow the reader to verify that the words here are the same as those in Mark’s orig­inal com­ment above, I have num­bered the paragraphs.

    ......................................................................................................................................................

    SO, THE DOOD BE­GINS HERE:

    “This is so full of mis­state­ments that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’s a mish­mash of half-truths, in­ac­cu­ra­cies, and out­right lies whose only le­git­i­macy lies in that it takes pot­shots at nearly everyone with equal abandon.”

    1) Did you know my re­mark about promis­cuity had nothing to do with sex? X-rays were known by re­searchers to cause cancer from about 1920.

    “Um, no. The sus­pi­cions were there of var­ious ef­fects, but X-ray use was so un­common, and studies on the sub­ject so few, that no real con­clu­sions could be made until after WWII.”

    2) But the med­ical es­tab­lish­ment con­tinued to use X-rays into the 1960s with not the slightest pre­cau­tion for pa­tient or therapist.

    “Ab­solutely false. I re­call going to the doctor in that time pe­riod, and they used lead blan­kets and con­trolled ex­po­sures, as they do now.”

    3) I re­call in 1959 my sister fell and broke her arm. The doctor set it using a “flu­o­ro­scope,” a live X-ray ma­chine that showed the doc­tor’s bone ma­nip­u­la­tions in real time. I was 11, and I was present in the room watching him work. He held his hands in the X-ray beam along with my sis­ter’s arm, none of us with lead shields. The beam was string enough to light a flu­o­res­cent screen with a con­tin­uous glow. I wonder what the mil­lirem count was for each of us that day.

    “Yes, flu­o­ro­scopes ARE used (still), but this is an ex­cep­tion, not a rule. And the ra­di­a­tion is kept at the lowest pos­sible set­ting. This state­ment proves nothing.”

    4) And a few years ear­lier, maybe 1957, the shoe stores had coin op­er­ated X-ray ma­chines. A parent could in­sert the child’s foot in the bottom and view the bones of the foot rel­a­tive to the shoe.

    “False. Such shoe ma­chines date from the early 1900s, and were not en­dorsed even by the med­ical es­tab­lish­ment of the time, or by any other sci­en­tists. An­other phony state­ment that proves nothing.” 

    5) That is what I meant by promis­cuous. They didn’t care. They were in­dis­crim­i­nate. Those who knew made no ef­fort to tell those who did not know.

    “Such things were not made by sci­en­tists, but by pri­vate man­u­fac­turers. Ca­su­ally grouping everyone to­gether as ‘they’ is dishonest.”

    6) If a sci­en­tist were truly benev­o­lent, would he work to cor­rect the peo­ple’s un­der­standing of the Lord Bugbug Cre­ation Myth, or teach people to stop X-raying their chil­dren and killing them­selves with tobacco?

    “A lot of sci­en­tists did sus­pect both to­bacco and x-rays of being dan­gerous, but proving that con­nec­tion is dif­fi­cult, time-consuming, and not their job un­less they were specif­i­cally in med­ical re­search (which was largely un­funded until the 1960s).

    Sci­ence isn’t about spreading sto­ries, it’s about gath­ering data and making prov­able con­clu­sions. And lumping all sci­en­tists to­gether, whether they are ge­ol­o­gists, as­tronomers, or ma­rine bi­ol­o­gists along with med­ical prac­ti­tioners is again dishonest.”

    7) Would he use his tele­vi­sion time to teach people about the stars and black holes,

    “Most sci­en­tists are not tele­vi­sion ed­u­ca­tors, and even the few ex­cep­tions are not obliged to parrot any par­tic­ular per­son’s ideology.”

    8) Or would he ed­u­cate people about the harm to human health from white sugar, and the tril­lion dollar Big-Sugar in­dustry that pushes sugar addiction?

    “This is just ranting. Sugar is sugar is sugar, white or any other color, and the only harm done is by the quan­tity consumed!

    Neal, this is cra­zier that than even your wildest rants!”

    THE DOOD

    .................................................................................................................................................

    The end?

    Reply

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