Exorcism for fun and profit

It's not just for priests anymore!

There are two good ways to tell if a psychic is a fraud: (1) They all are. (2) They don't cringe at the name of Steve Rubenstein.

Who is this Steve Rubenstein, you ask? He writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. He has an engaging just-the-facts style that might seem out of sync with New Age woo, but his wonderfully deadpan reporting deflates all pretensions in a delightfully effective way. Have you heard the one about the swordsman whose blade was so sharp his opponent didn't realize he had been decapitated until he turned his head and the whole thing fell off? That's Rubenstein.

He sent some heads rolling in the July 6, 2011, edition of the Chronicle with an article titled “What's in your closet?” Read the whole thing on the Chronicle website (where its title was changed to “Cleaning houses with psychic Sheldon Norberg”). Below I present some choice excerpts for your delectation:

What's in your closet?

Steve Rubenstein
SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

There had to be a reason why a perfectly nice $1.7 million Marin County house wasn't selling. Maybe it had something to do with ghosts.

If so, it couldn't hurt to call in an expert. And there is no greater expert in persuading stubborn and obstinate ghosts to leave a haunted house than Sheldon Norberg, 48, a slender man with a shaved head who has been driving demons, devils and negative energy from Bay Area houses for the past two decades, at $1,200 per dwelling.

“I'm not cheap,” Norberg said, sitting quietly in a lawn chair by the front door to get a feel for what he would soon be facing inside. “But selling a house is a million-dollar transaction. Why take a chance?”

How true! I mean, his remark about not being cheap. The $1200 fee seems really clever—not such a round number that it seems arbitrary. Sheldon put some thought into that!

He sat with his eyes closed, his palms upturned, to enhance reception. At last he declared that this particular three-bedroom house, on a shady corner on the banks of Lark Creek, was by no means hopeless. True, there was negative energy on the top floor and in the basement. But nothing he couldn't handle.

“We are vibrating entities,” he said. “Realtors don't like to deal with these things. They think it's all woo-woo stuff. But prospective buyers get a feeling the moment they walk into a house. If there is anger, or sadness, or unresolved feelings inside, you have to handle it.”

Please tell us, Sheldon: At what frequency do we vibrate? Is it best measured in Hertz or kilo-Hertz? Perhaps even mega? For some reason, they never tell us. The “woo-woo stuff” is apparently really hard to measure.

Although Norberg neglected to inform Rosenberg about any specific frequencies he might have detected, the self-proclaimed psychic was otherwise ready to demonstrate his powerful talents to the Chronicle reporter. The house in Marin, it turns out, was full of anger and sadness. What's more, Norberg knew where the anger and sadness were centered!

[The house] was being sold, Norberg said, because the owners were getting divorced. After two months on the market and no offers, it was time to find out why. He headed upstairs, to the master bedroom. There he closed his eyes once more and declared the room to have been the site of conflict and sadness.

Okay, folks. You have to give Sheldon this one. His awesome sixth sense has manifested its supernatural acuity. He could tell the divorced couple experienced anger and sadness in the master bedroom.

As a professional psychic, Sheldon knows enough to pretty things up a bit with some Eastern mumbo-jumbo while he's at it:

This could be, Norberg said, because of the feng shui of the room, and its orientation on the north-south axis, its proximity to the nearby creek, the lack of sunlight and the heavy crossbeam that ran across the middle of the ceiling, cleaving the energy flow.

Also there was the divorce. Perhaps that had something to do with it too, he said.

“There is anger here,” he said in a soft voice, calling on his store of psychic powers.

We scoffers must stand in awe of such a demonstration, faithfully and reverently documented by the Chronicle's ace reporter. Who can doubt Sheldon Norberg now?

The owner of the house, a young woman named Rosemary, pulled up in her Lexus to check on Norberg and see firsthand what she was getting for her $1,200. (She had already paid $10,000 to a real estate stager to make the house look nice, and that had bought her a few bowls of decorative seashells and plastic lemons, so another $1,200, she opined, was just the cost of doing business.)

“I never used a service like this before,” Rosemary said. “But if it works, it's not really that expensive.”

Oh, Jiminy Christmas! The “real estate stager” has an even better gimmick than the psychic. For a $10,000 fee I would have supplied real lemons! For an extra $5000, I'd even toss in a few limes!

Although Norberg had already demonstrated his skills were almost up to the level of the real-estate stager, he continued to strut his stuff. Rosemary was there to provide first-person validation of the psychic's amazing insights.

Norberg stood in the bedroom where Rosemary acknowledged that she and her husband had themselves some pointed misunderstandings, and the psychic announced that he was feeling chest constrictions, emotional sadness and compressed energy. Rosemary nodded. Then he descended into the basement, a dank windowless storage space with a lot of junk lying around, and said it was not the most cheerful room in the house, either.

Speaking just for myself, I have to admit that I have always regarded dank, windowless basements as cheerful places, but I guess that's because I'm not psychic. Sheldon's preternatural powers can penetrate mere façades.

To ensure that Rosemary could see that she was getting her money's worth, Sheldon banished the basement's oppressive miasma.

He proceeded to sit down and close his eyes. The psychic said he does his best work with his eyes closed. It concentrates the energy.

“I feel the Earth shifting with the relation to the rotational planes,” he said at last. “The magnetic field has changed.”

There will be scoffers, I know. Skeptics will demand to know what the heck “rotational planes” are supposed to be. People who are not entirely ignorant of science will point out that magnetic fields can be detected and measured. The absence of appropriate electronic gear suggests that Sheldon Norberg prefers not to document his psychic manifestations with hard data. It's probably because any trace of doubt is exceedingly harmful to psychic powers. I'll bet Rubenstein had to be on his absolutely best behavior.

Norberg sat motionless for three hours, until the psychic heavy lifting was done and the house, he said, was clear. Afterward, Rosemary said the house felt pretty much the same to her as it did before, but maybe that was because she was “not in touch with the major energy channels.”

Rosemary is an absolute jewel, isn't she?

I'll admit, though, that Sheldon is starting to impress me just a bit. While earning $400 per hour while sitting stock-still may sound easy, just give it a try. You'll get the fidgets within minutes. Sheldon is earning his fee. (I'll bet the entire time he was thinking about the advantages of going into real-estate staging instead.)

And now—quite obviously—it's time for the happy ending! No newspaper puff piece would be complete without it.

Two days later, her real estate agent threw open the doors to the public for an open house. Rosemary had high hopes. Seventeen couples toured the newly energized property.

“But nobody made an offer,” Rosemary said with a sigh.

I'll bet Rosemary forgot to bury a little plaster statue of St. Joseph on the grounds. You need to bury him upside-down, for some reason, but it always works. You can get one for just a few bucks from your local Catholic bookstore. (I suspect that many Catholic bookstores are surviving on the margin provided by hordes of superstitious real-estate agents.)

Well, if the story can't have a happy ending, could it at least have a twist? Rubenstein digs deep into the story behind the story and comes up with a precious nugget:

Perhaps her optimism in Norberg was misplaced, she acknowledged, and perhaps her optimism in the real estate market was, too. According to the comps, which is real estate lingo for please-get-your-head-out-of-the-clouds, the house was worth not $1.7 million but $1.4 million.

I am not a real-estate expert. Neither, probably, are you. However, I have it on good authority that it is difficult to sell a house that is overpriced by $300,000. Imagine that!

“Hiring Sheldon, I was just covering all the bases,” she said. “It's good to have the positive energy. But we might have to lower the price just a little, too.”

You think? (Evidently not.)

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Cutting remarks

Cosmetic surgery?

Remember the episode of Seinfeld titled “The Bris”? Jerry gets quizzed by Elaine:

Elaine: Hey, Jerry, you ever seen one?
Jerry: Oh, you mean that wasn't ... uh?
Elaine: Yeah.
Jerry: No. Have you?
Elaine: Yeah.
Jerry: What'd you think?
Elaine: [wrinkles her nose] It had no face, no personality. It was like a Martian. But hey, you know, that's me.

I was reminded of this when Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle decided to have some fun with circumcision in her opinion column this morning:

The ballot measure bills itself as a ban on “forced genital cutting” and “mutilation.” Clearly the authors want to confuse voters by equating male circumcision to female genital mutilation, the barbaric, unsanitary butchering of a young girl's private parts in a procedure that has been known to leave girls severely infected and in pain.

Saunders is echoing the remarks of Rabbi Gil Leeds, who similarly complained that “mutilation” is a misnomer. I tend to disagree, since the permanent amputation of part of the penis should not be treated as a trivial matter, even if the results aren't on the same level as the brutality of so-called “female circumcision.”

Saunders tips her hand even while trying to be even-handed. She cites a pediatrician while ostensibly presenting both sides:

[Dr. Erica Goldman] informs parents of the pluses—reduced chances of urinary tract infection and sexually transmitted diseases—as well as the risks—it's a permanent cosmetic change.

Oy! The “risk” of circumcision is that it's a cosmetic change? It's not a direct quotation, so we can't simply blame Dr. Goldman for this conclusion. It's what Saunders picked out as the key item, ignoring all other factors. (Should we tell circumcised boys that the lack of a foreskin is why they need lube? Is Johnson & Johnson—manufacturers of K-Y Jelly—behind the push for more male circumcisions? This calls for an investigation!)

I snorted when I saw Saunders using the words “cosmetic change,” but I guffawed when I read her peroration. Like the dutiful right-wing columnist that she is, Debra has to complain about “nanny state” legislation and frame the anti-circumcision measure in those terms, slipping in an allusion to the city's ban on toy giveaways with unhealthy fast food. It's a poor fit:

A busybody law? Check. Does it address a problem most folks did not know existed? Check. Pun opportunities? Oh, yeah. First they came for the Chicken McNuggets, then they came for my son's ...

No, no, no, Debra. You're missing the point entirely. The ballot initiative says they have to leave your son's nuggets alone!

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Lettered ladies

Always the gentleman

The other day I found myself in the unaccustomed position of defending Sarah Palin. It was, I admit, a very mild defense, but a defense nonetheless. A member of the Friday lunch bunch was castigating the former half-term governor of Alaska for having attended five colleges (University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, University of Idaho, and Matanuska-Susitna College) on her way to a bachelor's degree in communications. Having attended and earned units at five different colleges myself, I did not consider persistence at a single institution to be a virtue in and of itself. (I did, however, complete degree requirements at four of them.)

The habitués of the Friday lunch bunch are mostly former journalists these days, the ink-stained wretches having supplanted the coterie of old legislative hands that used to frequent the TGIF observances. And “ink” is the right word, too. All of them served in the trenches when hot lead and metal plates and barrels of black goo were standard tools of the newspaper business. I don't go back quite that far, but I am accepted into this journalistic fraternity because I, too, have worked for a major metropolitan newspaper (but not for very long). Besides, I have seniority in the lunch bunch, being one of the last survivors of the original gang with state capitol experience.

We are a largely left-of-center group, naturally concerned that the president is not even close to being the extreme liberal of right-wing accusations, and cheerfully derogatory in our references to the various nut-case conservative cabals running Republican legislative caucuses throughout the nation and in entirely too many governors' mansions. Palin gets extra contempt from the Friday gang because of her journalistic pretensions and her slender résumé as a reporter (but not as slim as mine). It doesn't help her cause, of course, that even her prepared remarks come out as tossed word salads of right-wing talking points: blah, blah, blah ... American greatness ... blah, blah, blah ... Reagan ... blah, blah, blah ... God bless America ... blah, blah, blah ... war on terror ... blah, blah, blah. Jealousy is probably involved a little. Imagine pocketing $50,000 a pop for that kind of disjointed drivel, as Palin did at Stanislaus State University.

Despite her degree in communications (with an emphasis in journalism), Palin opted to hire a ghostwriter for her autobiography. She's apparently been too busy doing other things.

Like serving as a role model.

California has spawned a Palin camp follower who boasts that she is a “blogger extraordinaire” (that may be premature) with a master's degree in English on top of a bachelor's degree that included journalism coursework. This phenomenon was brought to my attention by a regular visitor to my blog (hi, Kathie!). She was puzzled by the prospect of an English major with a graduate degree who spews out this kind of breathless prose (spacing, spelling, and punctuation preserved from the original):

I'm a San Diego girl& patriotic American at heart!I graduated from San Diego State University in 2005 where I studied English & Journalism.I also have a Masters' Degree in English.I never thought I'd be setting up a blog,but feel I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to share with readers topics that are important to me & I hope to you as well.I will use this blog as a platform of sorts to promote not only conservative values,but strong,conservative female candidates.Sarah Palin is the epitome of this female.Strong,sincere,classy,intelligent & graceful.I have heard individuals describe her as a modern-day Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan.It is she who has inspired me to get involved politically.The mere mention of her name sends the main-stream media into a tizzy.It is also my hope this blog will become a platform for conservative females everywhere.(God knows we could use more representing us).And yes,I also hope to prove that,contrary to popular opinion,it CAN be cool to be a young conservative.You can also catch me from time to time as a guest on #1 AK Talk Radio Host Eddie Burke's show where I discuss Sarah and national issues.

Odd stuff. While the political sentiments are obviously contrary to mine, I am struck by what an admitted English major does to the language. That can't help but catch my attention, if only for the moment. Does San Diego State University offer a master's degree in English as a third language? Was writing part of the curriculum? Optional, perhaps?

At least we can rest assured that she does not suffer from a narcissistic obsession with her own prose.

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And still counting...

Predicting the future

The 2010 general election is not yet over in California. The secretary of state's office in Sacramento continues to issue updates as it aggregates the returns trickling in from California's fifty-eight counties. As of the last report, time-stamped 5:00 p.m. on Friday, November 19, twenty-six counties still had untallied ballots to count. By adding up the counties' estimates of vote-by-mail and provisional ballots, the secretary of state announced that approximately 629,634 votes remained to be processed.

It's not a moot point. While attorney general Jerry Brown trounced Meg Whitman in winning his third term as governor and Barbara Boxer convincingly defeated Carly Fiorina on her way back to the U.S. senate, one statewide race remains too close to call. The Democratic nominee to succeed Brown as attorney general currently has 4,291,854 votes to her Republican rival's 4,248,804, a margin of only 43,050. Taking into account a scattering of votes among minor party candidates, that breaks down to 46.0% to 45.5%.

Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Steve Cooley have swapped the lead back and forth a few times since the vote tallies began to be published after the November 2 election. Cooley actually declared victory election night (see the video below), but woke up the next morning to discover that Harris had edged ahead. When the vote count moved him back into the lead a few days later, he was smart enough not to make yet another premature victory speech. When Harris regained the lead, she prudently kept her own counsel.

My own opinion? For a couple of weeks now, I have been expecting a Harris victory. It's in the numbers.

I looked into the numbers because one of my friends, a retired journalist, was scoffing at the superficiality of the news articles on the election results in the attorney general's race. Except for striving heroically for different ways of saying “too close to call,” none of them offered any substantive analysis.

“It all depends of where the remaining votes are,” he said. “Instead of just paraphrasing the press releases from the candidates, the reporters ought to dig into the details. They should do some reporting.”

He prodded me into action. I downloaded the secretary of state's report on unprocessed ballots (well over two million at that time) and loaded it into a spreadsheet. Then I perused the secretary of state's report on the percentages accruing to each candidate in each county. By way of example, consider Tulare county, where California's most conservative voters gave Harris only 29.8% to Cooley's 62.4%. Tulare's county clerk estimated that 3,350 ballots remained to be processed. Applying the percentages to this number, I computed that Harris would get 998 more votes and Cooley would get 2,090. (I'm sure Mom & Dad's vote-by-mail ballots are in the latter batch.)

I applied this process to all of the counties with outstanding ballots, obtaining an estimate for the additional votes likely to be obtained by Harris and Cooley. Upon adding the estimates to the votes counted to date, I found myself looking at a razor-thin Harris victory. Every so often I would return to the secretary of state's website to tweak the percentages to reflect the completed count. Those numbers were very stable, seldom moving more than one-tenth of a percent. The predicted Harris margin varied, but never vanished.

My latest computation, based on yesterday's numbers, suggests that Kamala Harris will defeat Steve Cooley for the office of attorney general by 45,902 votes. I'm not sure about the 2, though.

If the numbers hold up, the Golden State will have handed the Democratic Party a clean sweep of every statewide office. May it make the most of its opportunity.

---

Note: I should give a tip of the hat to Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star. He had the same idea that I did and published his estimate on November 9 on his blog. In my opinion, however, Herdt pulled up just a bit short by confining his attention to the 21 counties with the most votes remaining to be processed. In so close a contest, it was unwise to scorn the little counties and risk that much round-off error. On the basis of his computations, Herdt figured that Cooley had an edge.

While I obviously think Herdt was wrong, my ex-journalist friend can be relieved to learn that at least one reporter is willing to go digging for news. It's not quite obsolete yet.

---

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Judging a book by its author

Something I don't need to read

Nepotism poster child Tori Spelling is on a signing tour to promote her new book. The formerly reputable McClatchy Company is helping out with breathless little stories like an interview article in The Sacramento Bee:

There's an anecdote in it about you contacting the late Farrah Fawcett.

It was during a reading on the phone with (celebrity psychic) John Edward. We have the same publicist. I thought, “Oh, this'll be cool, maybe my dad will come through.” Instead, John said, “Farrah Fawcett's coming through.” He was really surprised, too. She wanted me to let her family know she's happy and OK. I wrote a letter to Ryan O'Neal, explaining the story. I said, “Please don't think I'm crazy, I'm simply passing on a message.”

Gosh, Tori? Think you're crazy? Never! Think you're gullible and maybe just a little bit stupid? From now till eternity!

Perhaps I am being too mean. After all, she shares a publicist with John Edward, famous for being “The Biggest Douche in the Universe.” It may be that Tori is just a good little trouper who cooperates with her p.r. person in trying to gin up some press coverage for a fellow celebrity from the same stable. I can't tell, though, if Tori is being cynically manipulated or just cynically playing along.

In a way, of course, it doesn't matter. The stupid is right there on the page for us to see.

Let's look the other way.

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Fear of dead peeping Toms

Or Thomasinas

Sometimes I can't resist getting into the act. I see an advice column in my morning newspaper—for the Internet generation, be advised that a “newspaper” is a sheaf of large sheets of paper with printed news on them—and I want to rewrite the responses. Yesterday's Dear Abby is a case in point:

Woman Fears Being Watched by Ghosts of her Loved Ones

Dear Abby: I am in my 40s and have never lost anyone close to me. Unfortunately, my darling mother-in-law has terminal cancer. I am now preoccupied that people's spirits are near us after they die.

Please don't laugh, but it gives me the creeps. I don't want to think my mother-in-law will watch me making love with my husband, that my father will watch me in the bathroom, or that my mother will be critical of my spending more time with my kids than cleaning the house as she did.

Am I crazy to think I might not have any privacy after my loved ones die? — Spooked in Spokane

Dear Spooked: Calm down. The departed sometimes “visit” those with whom their souls were intertwined, but usually it's to offer strength, solace and reassurance during difficult times. If your mother-in-law's spirit visits you while you're intimate with her son, it will be only to wish you and her son many more years of closeness and happiness in your marriage.

As to your parents, when they travel to the hereafter, I am sure they'll have more pleasant things with which to occupy their time than spying on you. So hold a good thought and quit worrying.

Now doesn't that set your mind at ease? Abby sure is an expert on souls and what happens after you die. The afterlife will have too many distractions to make it likely that your dearly departed will hang around and watch you as you rut like bonobos with your love interest, or go to the bathroom, or pick your nose, or vote Republican. They won't spy on such shameful behaviors.

Good to know.

Of course, if I were to try my hand at replying to Spooked in Spokane, the response would have come out a bit different:

Dear Spooked: Calm down, Spooked. Being dead is a full-time occupation. The deceased lie mouldering in their graves, settling in their urns, blowing in the wind, or lost at sea. Whatever. Once they've passed on, they're just dead. Finished. Kaput. They lack senses and cognition and any trace of prurient curiosity. They're gone forever and can't bother you.

In the meantime, you're not dead yet, so consider getting a life and outgrowing the fantasy stories of youth and religion.

I guess I could offer my services to Dear Abby as a ghostwriter, but I don't want to spook her.

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Ragging on the daily rag

Journamalism

Back when the Sacramento Bee prided itself on being the journal of record for the state capitol, the newspaper had a local news section that billed itself as “Superior California.” It was a dig that irritated many of the southern Californians who worked under the capitol's golden dome, since it implied that the lower part of the state was “inferior California.”

The Bee still covers the state capitol and still carries news of the Sacramento Valley region, but it has long since abandoned any pretense of superiority. In fact, it has in recent years abandoned any pretense of journalism. The Bee's lack of editorial integrity and journalistic judgment was in full display on page one of the edition for Tuesday, March 16, 2010. The day's top story was emblazoned with an eye-catching headline:

Speaker's top aide
gets $65,000 raise

The article had the undoubtedly desired effect: hundreds of people crowding into the Bee's website to post denunciations of the greedy profiteers in state government and a raft of furious letters to the editor. The Bee basks in the glow of cupidity revealed.

There is only one problem with this supposedly newsworthy story. It turns out that the Bee could have published the exact same article with the following headline instead:

New Speaker's top aide gets exactly
same salary as old Speaker's top aide

Of course, that would hardly be interesting, exciting, or rabble-rousing. Not front-page news. The Bee knows its job, but that job does not appear to be journalism.

The focus of the Bee's faux exposé is a woman who worked as chief of staff for John Pérez, who until last month was merely one of eighty members of the state assembly. Now, however, Pérez has been elevated to the position of speaker, the lower chamber's top job. He brought his office chief of staff into the speaker's office, appointing her to a brand-new job that now involves working with all eighty assembly members' offices at the same time.

Am I splitting hairs when I insist that it is misleading to describe her new salary as a pay raise in a newspaper headline? What she has is an entirely new job. She will be making significantly more money than before, but her responsibilities have taken a great leap upward. The Bee makes it sound as if her boss simply decided to capriciously give her a big fat pay raise.

One is welcome to debate whether the speaker's top staff assistant should earn more than he does (she'll make $190,000 while he earns $110,000—recently cut back from $134,000 because elected officials' salaries were reduced in consequence of the recession). That's a legitimate argument. What the Bee is doing, however, is a bastard form of journalism.

It's mere sensationalism.

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What's the frequency, Kenneth?

Suburban superstition

Pacific Gas & Electric has been installing new meters throughout its service area. I've had one since last year. The PG&E meter reader no longer needs to bustle up to the side of my house to check on my electricity usage. Instead, my meter dutifully reports in wirelessly. No more hassles with locked gates, growling dogs, or other yard hazards.

No more meter readers, either, but I'm sure that workforce reduction was part of what PG&E was going for.

There were reportedly some initial problems when people started receiving ridiculously high utility bills. (No one complained about ridiculously low bills, so I assume there must have been none of those.) PG&E recalibrated or reprogrammed the new meters (or something like that) and the complaints faded away.

Time for new complaints!

The meters, you see, are trying to kill us.

Perhaps you thought the new complaints would be about the prospect of PG&E using the remote-control features to impose arbitrary and capricious black-outs and brown-outs during power shortages. (I think we're saving those concerns for the next round of complaints.) But, no, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the fearmongers have seized on the tiny, tiny emissions when the PG&E SmartMeters transmit their reports.

Some Sebastopol residents have questioned whether radio frequency radiation from the meters, which transmit their data to the utility via wireless communications, could threaten their health.

Their concerns grow from the heated debate over whether radiation from cell phones, Wi-Fi computers and other wireless devices can cause cancer or other ailments. They want a moratorium on installing the SmartMeters to measure electricity and gas use.

The meters are zapping us with electromagnetism! Arrggh!

There is solid science behind this concern, of course. Recall that microwaves from cell phones cause ear cancer. Or maybe not. A well-known Danish study followed a large cohort of cell-phone users for decades without finding any sign of increased incidence of cancer.

But absence of evidence is no reason to put off a panic attack. San Francisco is considering legislation to require a “radiation” warning on cell phones. Such a good idea. And, of course, concerned citizens want to stop the SmartMeters.

“We are being increasingly exposed to an exponential amount of radio frequency radiation,” said Sebastopol resident Sandi Maurer. “Now there are going to be two of these things in every home.”

Maurer is the founder of the EMF Safety Network, a clearinghouse for information on the possible dangers of electromagnetic fields. She and other residents persuaded the Sebastopol City Council this month to ask California energy regulators to stop SmartMeter installation while the possible health risks can be assessed.

Oh, good. An information “clearinghouse” is involved. Not surprisingly, the EMF Safety Network's website offers a plethora of advice and links about protecting oneself (and one's kids!) from EMF.

What we really need is a kind of early-alert system that warns concerned citizens whenever anyone installs any kind of transmission device anywhere.

We could use the radio!

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"The Simpsons" did it

Where's the scoop?

The San Francisco Chronicle went berserk when Mark McGwire finally admitted to having used steroids to pump himself up during his baseball career. The weirdly wonderful Bay Area newspaper splashed a transcript of McGwire's remarks as its headline story, and accompanied it with an opinion piece by a sports columnist. On the front page!

Like I said, the Chronicle went berserk.

Normally this is the sort of story that would not hold my attention. My inclination is to snort in disgust and turn the page. If especially exercised, I might mutter, “Don't these idiots remember that they have a sports section?” (That's the part of the paper where game reports and box scores are conveniently sequestered so that I can conveniently dispense with them all by discarding that section of the newspaper.)

I put mendacious McGwire out of my mind and would probably have forgotten all about it except for a paragraph I encountered in John Ortved's The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. Here it is, from page 253, where Ortved is discussing the celebrities who flocked to lend their voices to episodes of The Simpsons:

Of course, boys being boys, the real draw was always the sports figures.

Larry Doyle: The biggest hullabaloo was when Mark McGwire came in. That was when loads of people who didn't have any reason to be in the recording booth ended up there. All the girls and all the guys were there. He seems like a nice guy, but he looks like a monster. His arms are as big as your legs—that's not an exaggeration.

And I guess we now know why that was, don't we?

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Rejection is such sweet sorrow

The art of the turn-down

Something weird happened last summer. I don't really have an explanation for it. Perhaps it's like what occurs to a super-saturated solution. Some seemingly imperceptible disturbance perturbs the solution and—zap!—it sudden crystallizes.

Anyway, something similar happened to me and—zap!—I became a novelist.

The notion had been kicking around in my head for years, goaded by various family members. We have dozens of stories in my extended clan. Happy stories, funny stories, sad stories, bizarre stories. All kinds of stories. (Some have appeared on this blog.) I'm sure this is true of all families, but my relatives are certain that our family's stories are more fascinating than most. Retellings of family legend and lore are often followed by a canonical couplet:

“Whoa! Someone really ought to write that down!”

“Yeah, but it would have to be as fiction! No one would believe it really happened!”

A seed was planted in my brain, watered regularly by family gatherings at which I'd hear that closing couplet after a raconteur's storytelling. A critical point of some sort was reached last summer and I wrote my family's story—with all of the names changed to protect the guilty. I became a novelist!

An unpublished one, that is.

After some dithering and some encouraging feedback from friends who read the manuscript, I shopped the novel around a little bit. I sent some sample pages to a big-time literary agent in San Francisco. After a few weeks, I got my first rejection notice. She doesn't want to represent me.

You might naturally assume that I was crushed upon reading the rejection notice. Actually, I was richly entertained.

Yes, I was disappointed. The disappointment, however, was mitigated by my enjoyment and appreciation of the rejection letter itself, which struck me as a masterpiece of its genre. Here's my favorite part:

[R]ejecting manuscripts that become successful books is a publishing tradition. Assume we are wrong. Persevere until your books reach the goals you set for them.

Isn't that splendid? I was breathless with appreciation. Surely she was talking to me and was admitting that my book was fated to be one of the successful books that she would someday rue having rejected!

I had not expected to laugh out loud at a rejection notice, but I did. Perhaps when I have the experience of more of them, I'll find that they are all similarly clever and the novelty will wear off.

And then I won't be special anymore.

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Triple-action Jesus (only $9.97)

While supplies last, of course

There used to be these things called newspapers. They'd magically appear on your doorstep each morning (usually; sometimes in the afternoon). On weekends they would contain an item called a Sunday supplement. Before newspapers, in their dying throes, began to sprinkle color throughout their publications, the Sunday supplement was often referred to as “the color section.” I used to pore over the color section in utter fascination. It brimmed over with exciting weirdness.

Some things never change. The surviving newspapers and their Sunday supplements continue to uphold the weirdness standard. This morning, for example, the USA Weekend section that accompanies my local paper sported an advertisement that took me back to the good old days. If I were my hyper-religious and ultra-superstitious maternal grandmother, I'd be calling the toll-free number right now to get a heaping helping of Jesus-based magnetic copper pain relief. (Since copper itself isn't magnetic, I gather that some ferrous material must be embedded in the copper. Or maybe it's just a miracle.)


As those enamored of woo-woo health nostrums are given to understand, copper bracelets suck the pain out through your wrists, magnets align the iron in your hemoglobin for smoother blood flow, and Jesus ... well, he's just the Son of God, you know. One might think that divine intervention should suffice on its own, but a dash of pseudoscience can't hurt, right? Triple-strength Jesus-copper-magnet healing is here!

COMBINES THE MOST POWERFUL FORCES
OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

Do you believe? Wear this solid COPPER MAGNETIC THERAPY JESUS BRACELET for the most powerful healing and comfort you’ve ever experienced! COPPER has been relied on for centuries to ease the pain of arthritis. MAGNETS are used therapeutically to ease muscle pain, tendonitis, bursitis, back pain, poor circulation and more. And faith in the miracles of JESUS can not only protect you from physical pain, but soothe your soul in times of stress! Fully adjustable to fit most wrists.

Act now! Operators are standing by.

I've also heard that laughter is the best medicine. (I think I'll try some now.)

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The world ends again

Just as I was getting the hang of it

In 1994 I was teaching an evening math class at my college in addition to my usual day schedule. By some divinely inspired coincidence, this put me on the road at just the right time to catch Harold Camping holding forth on the radio with his Open Forum question-and-answer program. Camping's dry-as-dust mode of declamation is probably dangerous to listen to while driving, for fear of falling asleep and causing a traffic accident.

Nevertheless, I faithfully tuned in for several days in a row because of Camping's fascinating topic. He had, you see, figured out the day the world would end. As a clever Bible scholar, he had apparently figured out a way around Matthew 24:36 (“But of that day and hour knoweth no man”) and had computed that Jesus was getting ready to return on September 6, 1994.

Camping was giddy during the September 6 broadcast, knowing, as he did, that he might not even manage to finish the program. The blast of God's last trumpet could preempt him at any moment. But finish it he did. September 6 passed without a redeeming revisit.

Camping refused to be crushed by his experience of rapture interruptus. He did some more mystical math and announced he had found an error in his calculations. The second coming of Christ would actually occur between September 15 and 17.

Again, Jesus was a no-show.

It was only fair, of course, that Harold Camping suffered the fate of all false prophets. In brief, he just kept plugging along in his ministry, still leading his flock of credulous sheep.

It's a tradition! History gives us the example of Charles Taze Russell, who promoted the idea that the end of the world would occur in April 1878. When the great disappointment occurred instead, despite some defections, the Russellites soldiered on. The loony door-knockers known today as the Jehovah's Witnesses are their direct descendants.

They never learn. Their failures merely demonstrate the need for stronger faith.

In token of their invincible ignorance, believers are now being presented with Harold Camping's brand-new prognostication of the end of the world. This time it's going to be May 21, 2011. (Perhaps I should hold off on grading the final exams for the spring 2011 semester, just in case.)

Camping's new prediction was featured in an article by Justin Berton in today's San Francisco Chronicle. It appeared on the front page of the newspaper's C section (“Bay Area”).

Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011.

“Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.,” he began. “Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years.”

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days—the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 × 10 × 17) × (5 × 10 × 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement × Completeness × Heaven), squared.

“Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story,” Camping said. “It's the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you're completely saved.

“I tell ya, I just about fell off my chair when I realized that,” Camping said.

And I just about fell of my chair when I read that in the morning paper. Camping thinks this is some kind of proof. It's both amusing and sad.

Berton does a good job in his article in conveying the pseudoscientific environment in which Camping's mumbo jumbo flourishes. Unfortunately, the journalist makes one significant mistake in his reflexive application of the balanced treatment approach to reporting:

Camping is not the only man to see truths in the Bible hidden in the numbers. In the late 1990s, a code-breaking phenomenon took off, led by The Bible Code, written by former Washington Post journalist Michael Drosnin.

Drosnin developed a technique that revealed prophecies within the Bible's text. A handful of biblical scholars have supported Drosnin's theory, lending it an air of legitimacy, and just as many scholars have decried it as farce.

Hold on just a second there, Justin. Did you really mean to equate the detractors of the Bible code with the “handful of biblical scholars” who accept it? It's demonstrably false to say “just as many scholars” denounce it. Very few embrace it. Many disbelieve it. There is no parity. (Only parody.)

Apart from that one faux pas, however, the Chronicle's report on Camping's apocalyptic prediction gives us a clear perspective on religion's ability to erode a man's thinking processes. Until a stupid pill is developed, religion can serve that purpose.

Those of us who are not befuddled by a religion can make plans to get together to celebrate the post-apocalypse on May 22, 2011. See you there!

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A creationist fossil

No evolution here!

The academic calendar offers some generous vacation intervals between school terms. I normally try to take advantage of the time to catch up on cleaning and organizing my residence, which looks like an uncurated archive at the end of each semester. I never get as far as I intend, however, because each dig into the stacks of books and papers produces bright, shiny distractions that draw my attention away from the task.

This week I made one of those bemusing discoveries that stops the housework and drives me back to the computer. It's a photocopy of an opinion piece from the October 11, 1981, edition of the Sacramento Bee. (Perhaps you have something similar lying around in your house!) More than twenty-eight years ago I was inspired to preserve this precious piece of prose. Why, pray tell?

It is a deep-frozen example of creationist cant from an engineer—although from Pittsburgh rather than Salem. Creationism keeps disguising itself with new labels in hopes of sneaking into school science classes, but its arguments are predictably familiar and stale.

The item speaks for itself, but I can't resist interpolating a few remarks:

Creationist Claims Evolution Fails The Test Of Science

R.G. Elmendorf is a registered professional engineer and a graduate of Cornell University, who lives near Pittsburgh, Pa. Five years ago, he issued a $5,000 challenge to anyone who could show how evolution can operate in the same world as the second law of thermodynamics. He says he hasn't paid off yet.

By R.G. Elmendof
Special to The Bee

I am one of a few creationists who do not agree with the “two-model” approach to the teaching of origins in public schools, believing that this approach (1) distorts science, (2) misrepresents creation, and (3) is an unnecessary compromise with evolution.

First, within its own very restricted area, science is a valuable tool In the search for truth, but outside this area, science becomes a distorted, subjective and misapplied thing, no longer true science at all and in great danger of generating philosophical and religious opposition. Not everything that scientists think, say and do is science.

A great deal of misunderstanding about this exists that affects the creation/evolution controversy, for example In the promotion of evolution as a scientific fact on Carl Sagan's Cosmos series and in the term creation-science by proponents of the two-model approach incorporated in “balanced treatment legislation.” The whole question of origin is more accurately history, not science, no matter how much scientists like to investigate and speculate about history. After all, what scientist observed the steamy landscape and erupting volcanos of the evolutionary scenario, or the zap-zap of the creation scenario?

Secondly, if origin is not accessible to science, a choice between creation and evolution must be made on a different basis. As a creationist, I believe, by faith, that the universe, the world, the earth and man came about by the purposeful action of a “clockmaker.” An evolutionist believes, also by faith, that matter by itself was able to make the uphill journey from molecules to man, without any clockmaker being required.

Paging William Paley! Someone just found your watch!

These are the only two options on origins. No rational compromise between them exists. It is possible to compare these two faiths about the past in a logical, organized way, using “models” as conceptual frameworks for the ideas incorporated In each, and it is also possible to examine scientific evidences which seem to “fit” one or the other model better. But it is not possible to put either scheme to an actual scientific test. You can't go back and repeat the experiment. Who's to say what actually happened In the past, except by faith in creation or evolution?

Here we have an engineer who is fixated on running experiments (although I'll bet he's never run one since graduating from college). Elmendorf subscribes to a straitjacketed version of science that can scarcely exist outside of a laboratory. It's funny that an engineer doesn't understand field work. He also suffers from a poverty of imagination. While science can be performed in only one way, the question of origins admits of only two models. Either God did it or Darwin did. This false dichotomy is popular among creationists because any perceived flaw in the theory of evolution is then automatically a point in favor of divine creation. (Hallelujah.)

Whether such faith is equivalent to religion Is beyond the scope of this article, but there definitely is an underlying religious construct involved in the creation/evolution controversy. It is futile for creationists to studiously avoid mention of biblical creation, and for evolutionists to hide the fact that evolution is a basic tenet of humanism and other non-theistic religions. The heart of the creation/evolution controversy is the Bible vs. evolution, and everybody knows it.

I guess that proves that secular humanism is a religion. I am definitely falling behind in my non-prayers to non-God.

On the third point, there is a very important distinction between creation and evolution that is not widely recognized. Evolution, in addition to its historical claims about the past, makes the further claim that it is still operating in the present. Creation specifically excludes such a claim, being a once-only phenomenon, now finished.

This is an extremely significant difference, because by making such a claim, evolution brings itself into the here-and-now natural world where science operates. It can therefore be presented as a legitimate scientific hypothesis, which creation cannot do. However, by taking this position, evolution also subjects itself to scientific testing and possible falsification—a criterion of true scientific ideas.

Elmendorf has creationism retiring (undefeated) from the field of battle because it is not subject to scientific testing. His fellow creationists would probably not be willing to cede this point. It's hardly a good way to get creationism into the science classrooms of America.

The bad news for evolution is that the test has already been made, by direct comparison of evolution with well-established scientific laws, and evolution has flunked the test. Evolution claims to be a self-caused, uphill process, but the principle of the second law of thermodynamics is that all processes are downhill. Evolution claims that life can come from non-life, but the law of biogenesis asserts that life comes only from life. Evolution postulates limitless change in living things, but the laws of genetics set absolute limits on such variation.

Were these arguments ever fresh? The “second law” and “biogenesis” and “absolute limits” on variation. These claims were refuted the first time they got trotted out. How many refutations are necessary before creationists give them up? (Sorry: “infinity” is not a number.)

These and other insurmountable scientific barriers flatly preclude evolution happening by natural means in the here-and-now world, and that means that evolution can be said to have been scientifically disproven. This is an embarrassing predicament for evolution, and the problem has the best evolutionist brains in the country trying to find a way around, over, under or through these scientific laws to save evolution from disaster. But whether evolutionists like it or not, it's all over for evolution's claim to be “scientific.” There is then really no justification for creationists to compromise with evolution by propping it up to look alive in public school science classes with the two-model system.

If evolution was already dead and buried back in 1981, then it sure has become a lively zombie. Remember when D. James Kennedy (the late D. James Kennedy) declared the death of evolution? Good times!

Common sense and fair play certainly call for an end to the present exclusive domination of evolution in public school curricula, but In their efforts to achieve this end, I think that the two-model creationists have misled some important points, and I would like to challenge their thinking with the following questions: Why distort science by leaving the question of origins in science class? Science cannot answer the question. Why deny that creation is essentially a religious faith about the past? Historical evolution is the same thing. Why treat evolution as if it were still a worthwhile “scientific” idea? It's already been scientifically tested and falsified.

Perhaps these questions will be answered during the current American Civil Liberties Union challenge to the Arkansas Balanced Treatment Legislation. I hope so, because the creation/evolution controversy involves far more important issues than many people realize. Creation-science? T'aint so. Evolution-science? Impossible.

As we all know, the Arkansas Balanced Treatment law was struck down in 1982 by the famous McLean decision written by Judge Overton. Perhaps Elmendorf felt vindicated by this defeat of the two-models approach. He has not, however, become an icon of anti-evolution. A Google search has little to say about our editorial writer.

Still, “little” is not the same as “none.” Elmendorf apparently divides his time between two forms of crackpottery: creationism and geocentrism.

That's right. When not fighting evolution, R.G. Elmendorf tries to get people to believe that the sun orbits around the earth. He says he'll pay $1,000 to anyone who can prove heliocentricity.

Can flat-earth theory be far behind?

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The unpardonable sin

An insanity plea might work

The collective irrationality of today's right-wing pundits makes it relatively easy to be a comparatively sane conservative. So why are there so few of the latter? I guess there's nothing like the freedom-loving right-wing extremists for enforcing absolute adherence to a rigorous standard. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders tries her best to be an independent voice, but often fails. And, unfortunately, her occasional successes have problems of their own.

Last week, for example, Saunders penned a ridiculous column with whose premise I paradoxically agree. Does that sound weird enough for you? Allow me to explain.

On November 24, 2009, the Chronicle published a Saunders column that took President Obama to task for his stingy application of his pardoning powers. Here she shakes an admonitory finger at the nation's chief executive:

Obama hasn't pardoned a single ex-offender, even though about 1,200 people have asked for pardons because they have turned their lives around, expressed remorse for their crimes and now want to wipe the criminal slate clean of long-past offenses for which they paid the penalty.

That's right. Debra Saunders is a bleeding-heart conservative. It's one of her favorite ways to step to a different drummer while the rest of the right-wing crowd march in lockstep to the tempo of the teabaggers. Her particular concern is the number of nonviolent offenders who are serving disproportionately long sentences for minor crimes. The nation's draconian anti-drug laws have jammed the jails and prisons with people who scarcely deserve to be called criminals. I agree with Saunders that we have an unhealthy penchant for incarceration in this country (USA! Number One!) and that the presidential pardon could help to right some of the injustices.

When you think about it, the pardon petition is the rare Washington exercise that encourages politically unconnected people to petition their president for relief. But like Bush and Clinton before him, Obama seems to be hoarding this power. It's as if Team Obama sees justice as perk, not an equal right.

Yes, indeed. President Obama should get busy commuting some sentences and righting some wrongs. And the friends and political allies of Debra Saunders will rally around him and praise him for his devotion to the principles of justice and fairness.

Yeah. Right.

Now Debra Saunders did not claim that people would cheer such presidential action. To be fair, she actually said, “This is where a number of readers no doubt are talking back to the paper and saying that it's just fine with them if Obama keeps career criminals behind bars, thank you very much.”

Ha, ha, Debra! You jolly joker! She could have been just a little more honest and said something like, “We conservatives would then have Obama for lunch, crunch his bones with our teeth, and spit out the splinters!” The language is just a shade too florid for the gentle Saunders, but it captures the sense of what we know would occur in reality. Right-wing pundits would “Willie Horton” the president in a nanosecond. Teabaggers would demand his impeachment for various imagined crimes (as they are already doing).

The cherry on the Saunders silly sundae was delivered this week, when Debra returned to the topic of executive clemency. On December 3, 2009, the Chronicle ran her column on Mike Huckabee, a candidate in 2008 for the Republican nomination for president and the former governor of Arkansas. Huckabee, you see, was a soft touch for criminals who had “found Jesus” and was quick to give them “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. One of those pardoned criminals is the late Maurice Clemmons, the man accused of ambushing and killing four policemen in Washington state. No doubt Saunders was wishing she had not written her earlier column on the eve of the Clemmons crime spree.

I am especially angry at Huckabee because I support the pardon system. With so many nonviolent, first-time drug offenders serving long federal sentences, there should be more—not zero—sentence commutations from the Obama White House.

I say again that I agree with Saunders in principle, but I also would like to point out a couple of things that she utterly fails to address, stripping her argument of any realistic context:

First, the right wing in American politics is responsible for debasing the level of discourse in this country to such a degree that any measured approach to executive pardons is impossible. There is no doubt—none at all—that every single presidential pardon would be the occasion of screaming, braying, chest-pounding, rending of garments, frothing at the mouth, and scattering of ashes. These are the people who routinely accuse their political opponents of treason, dishonesty, and conspiratorial plans to destroy the nation. Civil discourse is entirely beyond them.

Second, Huckabee is merely one example of the power of clot-minded religion to turn people into credulous simpletons. The Republican Party, in particular, is infested with candidates who think the world was created in six days less than 10,000 years ago or pander to those who do. Huckabee was a member in good standing of this Dark Age fraternity. While his remaining political aspirations, if any, are now dead and gone (and unlikely to experience resurrection), there are still plenty of politicians who give religious dogma priority over rational thought. With Sarah Palin on the scene, backward thinking still has a future.

Pardon me for retching.

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The S.F. Chronicle flips over creation

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an Associated Press story on Thursday, November 19, 2009, about a new book that discusses Michelangelo's approach to creating the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. What would a story about famous artwork be without an appropriate illustration? The Chronicle ran an image provided by the AP—a detail of the famous “Creation of Adam.” With a fine sense of artistic taste and discrimination, the Chronicle's layout artist determined that Michelangelo made an elementary mistake in his composition and was good enough to correct it for him. And it's not as though anyone is going to notice, right?

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An outlier goes mainstream

Measures of Central Valley Tendency

During a recent weekend down in California's Central Valley, I had breakfast with my parents at a restaurant in the city of Tulare. There I picked up a copy of the Valley Voice, a free weekly newspaper whose coverage area spans Kings and Tulare counties. In general, its pages reflect the conservative perspective of its rural readers. I hope, however, that the paper's editorial policy has erred on the side of free speech in deciding what to permit in its Letters to the Editor column. Some newspapers would balk at publishing the spittle-flecked ravings of the emotionally unhinged.

The following is not annotated in any way, but think of it as being labeled with one big “[sic]”:

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

For 230 years, men and women were willing to fight and die for “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” President Obama says we now need a new “Declaration of Independence” and the U.S. Constitution is too restrictive.

On Nov. 4, 2008, we switched enemies. Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Israel, are now our enemies and Castro, Hamas, Hugo Chavez, are now our friends. We can't call Al Qaeda terrorist, now those attending the Town Hall Meetings are terrorists.

Barak Obama, Bill Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, all have the same goal, overthrow our government.

All Communist dictators have one thing in common, they will squelch all opposition, public execution of their own citizens.

Obama's first action as President was to murder more unborn, now passing health care will allow Obama to get rid of old people who are resisting his transforming America into a Communist regime.

How is it possible to have a Commander In Chief who hates what America stands for and loves our enemies.

All Czars should have been vetted, but the truth of the matter is that Barak Obama was not vetted. Obama would not have passed the F.B.I. background check and he did not submit the proper documents, birth certificate that was sealed, to the Election Committee. This committee should be held accountable.

It's so sad that we have an inept President that has never run a business, made payroll and paid payroll taxes.

Vernon B

This is another example of what David Neiwert has been documenting as the mainstreaming of extremist rhetoric. Mr. B's letter is an incoherent rant, a scatter-shot blast at a list of things he's heard about on talk radio and Fox News (and perhaps Free Republic). And this example comes directly from my old home turf. (Is it safe to drive down Highway 99 with an Obama sticker on your car?)

Perhaps after national health care reform is enacted, Mr. B will finally be able to get the psychiatric treatment he so desperately needs.

A lesson in grammar and punctuation would help, too.

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Counting cows

Accidentally in glut

People have been bringing a recent New York Times article to my attention: “From Science, Plenty of Cows but Little Profit.” (If the New York Times is behind a subscription wall for you, try the News & Observer's reprint here.) Just when milk prices crash and dairy farmers are taking it on the chin, science has foolishly tampered with nature and created more cows! As reporter William Neuman explains,

Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.

Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country—and the timing could hardly be worse.

There's less to this story than meets the eye.

It's true, of course, that any dairy farmer who invested in sex-selection technology wasted his money. Money he almost certainly cannot afford in these straitened times. The extra heifers are of no benefit, since he certainly does not need more milk cattle while the market for fluid milk is glutted. Dairy farmers are now receiving about $11 per hundred-weight, while a year ago it was over $19. The dairymen who went into debt to expand their herds at the price peak are now losing those herds at the low point. (My brother, who is a dairy farmer, knows of two men who got out of the business the hard way: one used a rope and the other used a gun.) It's a disaster out there, as depicted recently on ABC World News (“Dairy Farms Disappear”).

The problem, therefore, is real. The sex-selection technology, however, is the merest blip. It might be a significant boon in the future, supposing that there is a recovery in the dairy industry, but in the short run it has minimal impact. You see, each milk cow needs to give birth in order to start lactating. You may remember that fact from basic biology. Perhaps at some point we will overcome that limitation, but for now it still holds true.

This basic law of milk production means that each cow in a milking herd is a mother, implying the existence of a calf. The number of calves isn't going to change. In the past, you had a fifty-fifty split in the number of heifers (female calves) and bull calves (male calves). As reported in the New York Times,

The male calves are usually sold for little money to be raised as meat, and the females are raised as milk producers.

All too true. The occasionally bull calf may be raised to adulthood for stud services, but most of the boys go right to the auction block (along with an excess girl or two).


Such a waste of breeding time and effort, producing all those useless males!

It looked for a moment like the problem of excess males had been fixed. Unhappily, under current circumstances, the fix merely means that we have begun producing useless females—in a one-to-one substitution for the useless males. The excess heifers will be sold off instead of being bred and joining the milk herd. The unneeded heifers will command the same meagre meat-product prices as the unneeded bull calves. The girls will, unfortunately, have cost more than the boys used to because of the investment in sex-sorted semen for artificial breeding purposes, but they won't be adding a single drop to the milk glut.

They'll never be milked.

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Trompe l'oeil

Not what it seemed

I was pulling apart Wednesday's issue of the Sacramento Bee when a photograph caught my eye. I didn't immediately recognize that it was a photograph. When I first glimpsed it, I thought it was a realistic painting in the style of Norman Rockwell (as in his self-portrait). Only when I looked right at it did I realize it was a news photo.

I have no idea whether Bee photographer Manny Crisostomo was going for this effect when he snapped the shot. Or perhaps it was something in the way the photo was processed for publication in the newspaper. Does it strike you the way it struck me?

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Calories cause obesity!

Shocking discovery from the world of “duh”

Why is this even news?

Sugary soft drinks contribute to obesity. That's because they have lots of calories.

The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research surprised a lot of people when it issued a report on soft drink consumption. I'm not sure why.

I won't denigrate the report itself. UCLA is making a positive contribution when it documents the degree to which we are guzzling high-calorie low-nutrition beverages. I am bemused, however, by the general public reaction and the response in the news media.

It's not really news, folks. We've been lamenting the increase in the U.S. in both adult and childhood obesity. The increase unavoidably requires some combination of greater consumption and lesser combustion. Either we're burning fewer calories or stoking our bodies with more calories—or some “weighted” average of the two. We can't get around that (and, perhaps, it's increasingly difficult to get around ourselves).

The focus has been on soft-drink consumption among young people. The reported increase of soda-slurping among children and adolescents has led to much hand-wringing and an unfortunate level of satisfaction. Aha! Now we have found the culprit! Slay the sugary soda monster and all will be well!

Oh, good. “The” culprit.

It's never that simple, folks.

The UCLA researchers are correct, of course, to point out that a reduction in soda consumption will be a key element in fighting the national obesity problem (report coauthor Dr. Harold Goldstein of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy says it has to be “the top priority”). But UCLA's research brief also notes that “Additionally, childhood eating habits and weight status are important determinants of health as adults.” It's nice to see that the researchers mention eating habits in general instead of just citing soft-drink consumption.

A predictable result of the UCLA report (and the attendant media blitz) will be a stampede toward reduced-calorie diet sodas. We can confidently expect a future research brief that focuses on the negative or unknown effects of long-term consumption of aspartame (more attractively labeled as “NutraSweet” for marketing purposes) or saccharin.

No, thanks.


Here's your Diet Coke, sir

I have a bit of a sweet tooth and normally have a soft drink with lunch. (I refrain from alcohol because I have no taste for it.) I like the sugar and the gentle caffeine kick of a cola. The real thing, please.

For some reason, however, servers in restaurants really want me to drink diet cola. I hate the stuff, but I must belong to a key diet-soda drinking demographic. Do all middle-aged men order diet soft drinks when they choose to drink a soda? It sure seems like it.

Maybe I look fat to the impossibly young and slender wait staff. (They must not be drinking the stuff.) However, I'm over six feet tall and I'm under two hundred pounds, so I'm not exactly a pudge. I think it must be my demographic.

But give me the stuff with sugar in it, please. Since I would be perfectly happy to drop a few pounds, I can just drink less of it.

I'm sure that solution is too simple.

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