National Geographic promotes new show with magic crystals

Once, there were three edutainment channels that made an honest effort to raise the American masses’ scientific and historical literacy. Then History tossed out reality in favor of ancient aliens and finding Bigfoot, Discovery took up every “tough-guys brave the totally-not-staged wilderness” pitch in between fake documentaries, and as for National Geographic … well, it held out a little longer, but you knew things weren’t going well when it was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 2015, and they aren’t likely to get better.

Here’s what it’s up to these days: Magic rock water!

National Geographic, usually known for photos of animals and the adventures of rich people visiting other countries, is premiering their Will Smith-narrated, Darren Aronofsky-produced series, One Strange Rock, on March 26. I had a chance to watch one of the episodes at a screener last month—it was fine and very wide-eyed. There were lots of shots of Earth from space. It was very pretty. But I guess I’ve been concerned about Nat Geo ever since Fox bought them back in 2015—and this bottle makes me question whether they’re turning into a high-budget Goop.

The huge box Nat Geo sent me contained a book, some press material, and this glass water bottle with their name printed on the side. The >$70 bottle’s package advertises that it contains “carefully selected and ethically sourced gemstones representing the building blocks of earth,” including “wood,” “water,” “earth,” “metal” and “fire.” It came with an instruction and information manual.

Why does my water bottle have an instruction manual? It reads: “For the most precious moments in life! Gems raise the energy level of water. That’s been known for hundreds of years and scientifically proven. VitaJuwel Gemwater Accessories are not only Jewelry for Water, they’re a great tool to prepare heavenly gemwater like fresh from the spring.” The instructions are: screw in the gemstone vial, fill with water, and then wait 7 minutes.

Here’s the thing—this is a water bottle containing a sealed jar of gemstones. At no point will the water even come into contact with any of said gemstones. A warning tells you to discard the bottle if there is any way for water to seep into the vial of gems. All of the “science” cited in the brochure comes from widely debunked research from the likes of Japanese author Masaru Emoto—you know, the researcher who claimed humans could impact the chemical structure of water with their thoughts—or unnamed “German scientists.”

Hey now, they know precisely how many minutes you should wait after putting on the lid with the magic rocks, so it must be scientific. Or do you doubt the credibility of a company with a name like “VitaJuwel”?

NatGeo must have thought the article was harsh, man, because they responded, tut-tutting the author for “missing the point” of them sending a magic-crystal water bottle to a pop-science writer. The gist of their rebuttal:

The water bottle was just meant to be a clever and harmless representation of some of the themes of the show, and nothing more. Sure, the accompanying guide might read a little silly to some – but I think you are missing the point. […]

Of course National Geographic does not subscribe to pseudoscience, and I think you full well know that. But it doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun.

Even if they don’t believe in the woo they’re sending out with their name stamped on it, they’re forgetting that far too many people do subscribe to this bullshit – Gwyneth Paltrow’s shop wouldn’t be in business otherwise – and that they happily use it as a substitute for actual medicine, with predictably disastrous results. When you fleece the gullible, people inevitably get hurt. Trying to pass this nonsense off as a spot of harmless fun plays right into the hands of crock-mongers everywhere and undermines the efforts of actual science educators and medical experts who warn against this garbage.

I think it’s time to write NatGeo off as a lost cause. Once there were three; now there are none.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Daily Links #101: Constitutional crisis brewing in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered 7^th District

• US Supreme Court refuses to block a lower court’s order that Pennsylvania’s heavily gerrymandered, Republican-favoring district maps be tossed out and redrawn.

• … So now Pennsylvania Republicans want to impeach the Democratic state supreme court justices who ruled against them.
  (via @radleybalko)

• New Jersey is the latest state to protect net neutrality with an executive order.

• British appeals court refuses to extradite accused hacker Lauri Love because of US prisons’ inability to humanely handle mental health issues.

• Father whose teen is threatened with child porn charges over sexting does exactly as he should: lawyer up and don’t believe any promises made by school administrators or police.
  (via @JohnSMill_enial; retweet by @Popehat)

• More on the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s terrible idea to import a European-style “right to be forgotten” that’s invariably abused.

• Trump may finally get his military parade. I guess he thinks showing off the men and women doing a job he weaseled his way out of several times will demonstrate his strength.

• Finally, flat-Earthers’ best “proof” really just proves how incredibly silly they are.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 01/09/18 – Misconduct derails Bundy prosecution

• Flagrant prosecutorial misconduct by the US government both derails its case against the Bundys ^{[Cliven Bundy pictured]} and acts to validate Right-wing talking points about the FBI and the justice system.

• Last year, California banned the practice, common elsewhere, of billing parents for the costs of their kids’ incarceration. Now one county is refunding parents who were wrongly billed.
  (via @ultracasual; retweet by @radleybalko)

• From prosecutorial reform in Philadelphia to jailing drug court participants for smoking cigarettes in Tennessee, it’s another round of criminal (in)justice news from Radley Balko. Also, 2017 was shitty for North Americans but pretty damn good for the rest of the world.

• Former Arizona sheriff and wrongly pardoned criminal Joe Arpaio is running for Senate. I wish him all the luck – specifically, Roy Moore’s luck.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally, Gwyneth Paltrow’s crock shop Goop charges $135 for the privilege of spraying coffee up your butt. Because wellness!

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 12/04/17 – SCOTUS okays Trump’s Muslim travel ban

• US Supreme Court greenlights Trump’s Muslim travel ban, though legal challenges continue.

• The ACLU is getting involved in the case of an unidentified US citizen who’s been imprisoned by the military for months without access to a lawyer.
  (via @ggreenwald)

• Texas substitute teacher triggers police and CPS investigation after accusing a 6-year-old special-needs Muslim boy who can’t speak of being a “terrorist”.
  (via @SachinKalbag; RT: @Popehat)

• It’s your average day in America as Trump nominates a Milo-Yiannopoulos-loving, race-baiting, far-Right troll to represent the US at the United Nations.

• Current Affairs’s Nathan J. Robinson ably debunks the notion, recently peddled by the New York Times, that Ben Shapiro is anything other than a garden-variety Right-wing agitator.
  (via @ggreenwald)

• Finally, for some reason, flat-Earther limousine driver “Mad” Mike Hughes is having trouble getting his homemade, scrap-metal, steam-powered rocket off the ground. I’m starting to wonder whether I got his Darwin Award all polished up for nothing.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Man wants to prove Earth is flat with homemade rocket

In which a California flat-Earther announces his goal to enshrine his name in the Darin Awards hall of fame:

Mike Hughes and his rocket

Seeking to prove that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth, a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Mike Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

“It’ll shut the door on this ball earth,” Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday’s flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

And don’t worry about him: His grasp of actual rocket science is as airtight as you’d expect.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home — though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

“This whole tech thing,” he said in the June interview. “I’m really behind the eight ball.”

Now, you may laugh (and laugh). It’s okay, I’m laughing too. In fact, everyone is. But still, I think it’s important to show support when someone dares to follow their dreams in the face of impossible odds (and math, and science, and reality generally). So to Mr. Hughes, I say: Go you! Launch that rocket! I bet you’ll have a blast. In fact, a lot of us are betting on it.

Alternatively, as Ed Brayton put it: “I only hope that his epitaph says ‘Here lies an idiot. Don’t be an idiot.’”

Daily Links: 10/18/17 – Trump ban gets court-blocked again, redux

Daphne Caruana Galizia

• Trump’s latest travel ban gets court-blocked again by a Hawaiian federal judge the day before it was to take effect.

• Jesus. Journalist ^[pictured] who led the Panama Papers investigation was murdered with a car bomb.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Family business bankrupted by IRS told they can’t get their stolen money back, and other civil asset forfeiture horror stories.

• Lawsuit: New Orleans DA used fake subpoenas and bogus arrests to force witnesses and victims to testify.
  (via @ethanbrown72; RT: @radleybalko)

• After weeks of player protests over criminal (in)justice, the NFL now backs a criminal justice reform bill.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Antivaccination, a play in three acts: 1) Cranks publish study claiming a link between vaccines and autism. 2) Study is widely debunked. 3) Study is retracted. And scene.

• Finally, all aboard Trainy McTrainface … train.
  (via @fark)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Poll: Too many (and growing) Americans believe in nonsense

Chapman University has a yearly Halloween-time survey where they poll Americans about their paranormal and superstitious beliefs. Below are their findings for 2017:

My first reaction is those numbers are significantly lower than I was expecting. I wonder what that says, and about whom.

Second, regardless of my expectations, those numbers are still a few orders of magnitude above their ideal, reality-adhering positions of zero.

Third, here’s how those those beliefs are shared amongst the populace:

# of Beliefs	Percent
No paranormal beliefs	25.3%
1 paranormal belief	20.8%
2 paranormal beliefs	13.8%
3 paranormal beliefs	12.3%
4 paranormal beliefs	9.6%
5 paranormal beliefs	8.4%
6 paranormal beliefs	4.7%
All 7 paranormal beliefs	5.0%

On the one hand, only a quarter of US adults are free from the noted paranormal beliefs (note, of course, that this doesn’t include religion or vague “spirituality”). On the other, only a fraction of that superstitious majority believes in more than one puffy silliness at once. The article also points out that greater belief in hokum is correlated with socioeconomic status, religiosity (obviously) and rural conservatism, and that’s no surprise – preying on the impoverished and disenfranchised is organized religion’s entire m.o., after all.

Oh, and here’s a fun portent: those beliefs are growing, some by more than 10% since last year alone:

Belief	2015	2016	2017
Ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis once existed.	--	39.6%	55%
Aliens visited earth in our distant past.	20.3%	27%	35%
​Aliens have come to earth in modern times.	18.1%	24.7%	26%

Gee, I wonder if that may at all be related to the anti-intellectual, education-fearing attitudes we’ve seen growing in the US over the last couple decades, particularly as nurtured by the “elite”-hatin’ demagogic Right.

(via Pharyngula)

Bill Nye has had it with dingbats and antivaxxers

Bill Nye

I’ve always known the Science Guy as a passionate yet mild-mannered promoter of reason and critical thinking, but it seems his patience is wearing thin with the rise of unscientific attitudes in the United States. He explains where the country’s anti-intellectual bent is likely to take it:

[I]t’s hard not to be critical of people who want to be ignorant, but I don’t think it can last. I don’t think the celebration of “dingbatitude” can stick with us because we’ll get out-competed by the non-dingbats. People will want to look to non-dingbats to innovate and keep the United States competitive.

It’s simple logic: Smart, healthy people will outperform and outlive dumb, sick people. This goes for individuals as well as entire nations. It’s only too bad the US is currently ruled by a party of cranks, morons and shills, all voted into power by an electorate that increasingly distrusts education. Already the country’s reputation is slipping around the world, and that trend isn’t likely to reverse itself within the next four years.

But Nye saves the brunt of his frustration for the special, dangerous kind of stupid that is antivaccination lunacy:

And for all the anti-vaxxers out there [in the theater audience], you have to get vaccinated. I don’t care about you. If you go ahead and get sick and die, knock yourself out. The reason I insist you get vaccinated is to protect me from you. Me! You get sick, the virus, the bacteria, mutates inside of you. You are the petri dish of death for the rest of us. Vaccines were discovered in the 17-freaking-hundreds, people. It’s not some new freaking thing! So we push back against that.

The thing with vaccines is that whilst they protect you (obviously), the larger goal is to protect your community at large through herd immunity. The more people are vaccinated, the easier contagious diseases are contained, which also ensures that more vulnerable people who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons (such as AIDS sufferers, chemotherapy patients, and those with actual allergies to vaccines) remain protected by the wall of immunized people around them.

This is why when it comes to vaccines, the community’s right to not get sick trumps the individual’s right to reject modern medicine. People, especially children, die every year from vaccine-preventable illnesses, either because their parents refused to vaccinate them or because they couldn’t get vaccinated and there wasn’t enough herd immunity around them to keep them safe.

That strikes me as a far greater injustice than forcing people to vaccinate their kids and penalizing those who don’t.

Daily Links: 07/11/17 – Attempted doggycide in Minneapolis

Ciroc, injured dog

• Attempted puppycide in Minneapolis, MN, caught on video: Cops respond to false burglar alarm, don’t alert homeowners, instead scale backyard fence and shoot both their non-aggressive dogs ^[pictured]. Police chief later responds, promising to implement mandatory training for dealing with dogs.
  (via @FreeSpeechTemeber; RT by @radleybalko)

• The Daily Beast handily debunks the History Channel theory, based on a single undated photograph, that Amelia Earhart wound up imprisoned in Japan.

• Survivor of 2016 Baton Rouge, LA ambush of cops anonymously files lawsuit blaming Black Lives Matter – who had no affiliation with the shooter, condemned his actions and rejects all violence.
  (via @fark)

• 1992: Church of England allows women priests. 2014: They allow women bishops. Last week: They demand a ban on “pray the gay away” therapy. Now: Their governing body welcomes trans people. I think they’re trying to show the Catholic Church how to stay relevant.

• And finally, it’s genuinely frightening that not only is the Flat Earth movement not dying, it’s expanding around the world.

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

Edit (07/14/17 @ 5:52 PM ET): Typo fix (“Flat Earth moment” to “movement”).

Daily Links: 07/02/17 – Attempted doggycide in Houston, TX

Injured Akita puppies

Slow news day today (a rare but good thing these days), so have a somewhat shorter wall o’ links as a result.

• Attempted puppycide in Houston, TX ^[pictured]: Cops respond to burglary call, warned by homeowner about two Akita puppies in the backyard, shoot them anyway. Both dogs survived, though their owner had to give them away due to soaring vet costs.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Egyptian cleric has a novel argument for female genital mutilation: It’s good for the economy. (It isn’t.)

• Florida Republicans pass law enabling any citizen to challenge the validity of what’s taught in science classrooms.

• And finally, flat-Earthers: still, inexplicably, a thing. Also still very, very dumb.

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.