To sum up briefly:
You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.
We get stem cell research and the best beaches.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss.
We get 85 percent of America ’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama .
We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy
families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home.
We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have:
firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce
92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit
95 percent of America ’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners)
90 percent of all cheese
90 percent of the high tech industry – most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal all living redwoods, sequoias and condors all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus … – Stanford , Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with:
- 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs)
- 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes,
- nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes,
- 90 percent of the hurricanes,
- virtually 100 percent of all televangelists and their buddies like Rush Limbaugh, as well as Bob Jones University, Clemson College and the Univ. of Georgia.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you very much.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you nincompoops believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

Finally, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have the Mexican stuff when they knock your wall down.

Oliver Wendell Holmes recognized that it was nonsense back in 1842 when he wrote “Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions.” We long ago gave up the nonsense of trying to balance the four humors by bloodletting and purging, but the homeopathy Energizer Bunny is still marching on. What makes it so indestructible?
One reason is a lack of understanding about what homeopathy really is, even among health care providers. I recently heard about a nurse who thought “homeopathic” just referred to any mild natural herbal remedy. In case any readers are similarly confused, here’s a brief overview. Homeopathy was invented by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 1700s. It is based on the now-outdated principle that “like cures like,” and the lower the dose the better in homeopathy. If coffee keeps you awake, highly diluted coffee will put you to sleep. The more dilute the coffee, the better you will sleep.

To figure out what remedy works for what symptoms, you do a “proving” by giving a substance to healthy people and writing down every symptom they have for the next few days (without trying to determine whether the symptom was due to the substance or was just coincidental). You make a remedy by diluting that substance many times and shaking it (succussing) at each step. You look up a patient’s symptoms in a book listing all the different proving results, and you give him the remedy that best matches what ails him.

For one remedy, the book lists symptoms in 19 body systems, with entries such as this one: “Pain in back, with desire for some firm support. Every movement accelerates the circulation. Palms hot and perspiring. Nasal discharge or dry nose. Hangnails. Warts. Chill between 9 and 11 AM. Coldness of legs with congestion to head, chest, and stomach. Sleepy in forenoon. Dreams of robbers…” It goes on like that for pages. All of those symptoms were reported in provings by healthy people after they ingested Natrum muriaticum. That’s table salt. How could anyone seriously believe that table salt causes all those symptoms, or for that matter believe that a dilute salt solution could relieve all those symptoms?

How dilute? Serious dilution, as in comparable to one drop diluted in all the water on Earth. When they realized that no molecules of the original substance were left in most homeopathic dilutions, homeopaths rationalized that the water must “remember” what it had come into contact with — as in clusters of water molecules somehow holding the memory of their encounters with the allegedly curative substances. Unfortunately, homeopaths have failed to explain how water can remember what it’s supposed to remember, and forget all the other memories of coming into contact with various trace contaminants, elements, bacteria, and whatever else happened to float by at the time.

In homeopathy, any substance can be a remedy; even a non-substance. My favorite is “eclipsed moonlight.” I’ve been trying to find out how they collect it to prepare the remedy; no one’s talking. And then there was the homeopath who was selling homeopathic vaccines for smallpox and anthrax, which he said were made by diluting the real thing. I reported him to Homeland Security, because if he can get the real thing, so can terrorists. Jacques Benveniste is infamous for winning two IgNobel prizes for homeopathy studies: the first one couldn’t be replicated when proper blinding controls were used; in the second one, he claimed to have sent the electronic signature of the remedy over the Internet.

The Benveniste basophile degranulation study was a convoluted attempt to show that water could remember. It was supposedly replicated in other labs, notably by Ennis. Homeopaths are still citing these studies as evidence for the memory of water, but this is intellectually dishonest. In the first place, the studies are completely discredited by the fact that every attempt to repeat them with proper blinding has failed. When James Randi and a team from Nature visited Benveniste’s lab, his experiment stopped working. When Ennis’s experiment was repeated for Randi’s million dollar prize on the BBC show Horizon, it failed. If the experiment really worked under proper blinding conditions, someone could have easily won the million dollars by now.

In the second place, homeopaths don’t seem to realize that if the results of those experiments were valid, it would mean that homeopathy couldn’t possibly work as advertised. The effects went up and down with consecutive dilutions rather than steadily upwards, and it appears that they got a similar effect from a dilution as from the full strength solution, rather than getting the expected opposite effect.
Homeopathy is about as silly as it gets. Silly wouldn’t matter if it worked, but it doesn’t. People think it works because they get placebo effects and the homeopath keeps them entertained while they get better on their own.

One recent meta-analysis claimed to have found that homeopathy worked better than a placebo in general, but that it didn’t work better than placebo for any specific condition. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that. That’s like saying broccoli is good for all people but it isn’t good for men or women or children. Other meta-analyses have been negative, especially the ones that looked at only the higher quality studies. A recent editorial in the British medical journal Lancet proclaimed “The end of homeopathy.”

Perhaps the most promising development is that Edzard Ernst, MD, has spoken out strongly against homeopathy. This is important because he was a practicing homeopath and the world’s first professor of complementary medicine. For the last 15 years he has led a team of researchers studying the evidence for alternative medicine, and he now concludes, “With respect to homeopathy, the evidence points towards a bogus industry that offers patients nothing more than a fantasy.”

Despite science and reason, homeopathy isn’t about to go away. It has some really good things going for it. When you visit a homeopath, he wants to know all about you. He gives you far more time and attention than your MD does. He picks a special treatment designed just for you. If it’s not working he has an explanation and something else to try next time. He’s always confident he can help you get better. Homeopathy is inexpensive. It has no side effects. It’s the ideal placebo. It’s great for the worried well and the hypochondriac. It’s great for those elusive symptoms scientific medicine cannot diagnose and cure. It’s harmless except in cases where patients are persuaded to forgo effective medical treatment, or when homeopathic vaccines are offered in lieu of real vaccines.

It’s popular in Great Britain where Queen Elizabeth uses it, Prince Charles promotes it, five homeopathic hospitals are still operating, and the National Health Service is paying a good chunk of its budget for it.

Let’s say you aren’t sleeping well. You could go to an MD and get a prescription sleeping pill that only works a little better than a placebo and has side effects, or you could go to a homeopath and get a placebo that has no side effects and is a lot cheaper. You’re probably better off with the placebo. Why don’t MDs prescribe placebos? Because it’s unethical: we don’t lie to patients; we can’t tell them a remedy is effective if we know it is no more effective than a sugar pill.

It’s easy to see how doctors could be persuaded that homeopathy works. Patients tell them they feel better. That’s why bloodletting and purging lasted so long: patients got better despite the treatment and the treatment got the credit. That’s why we have to do randomized controlled trials to make sure just as many patients don’t get better without treatment.

The arguments homeopaths use to support their beliefs would earn an F in a Logic 101 course. Here are just a few taken from “Presenting 50 Facts About Homeopathy” by Louise Mclean.

• Hippocrates said there was a law of similars. [Hippocrates also said all illness was due to an imbalance of the four humors.]
• Homeopathic provings are a more scientific method of testing than the orthodox model. [If you say something totally false often enough, someone might start to belief it.]
• There are more than 4000 homeopathic remedies. [None of which work]
• The exact substance in a homeopathic remedy is known, unlike most modern drugs where we are rarely informed of the ingredients. [What? We are informed if we know how to read!]
• Homeopaths treat genetic illness, tracing its origins to six main genetic causes: Tuberculosis, Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Psora (scabies), Cancer, Leprosy. [Geneticists would be surprised to hear this.]
• Homeopathy got better results than conventional treatment in epidemics of cholera and typhoid in the 19th century. [Only because 19th century conventional treatment did more harm than good. Today’s conventional medicine is a bit more effective.]
• Lots of people believe in homeopathy. [Lots of people believe in ghosts and angels, but that doesn’t make them real.]
• Big Pharma doesn’t want us to know how well homeopathy works. [Conspiracy theories are alive and well.]
• Queen Elizabeth never travels anywhere without her homeopathic vials of medicine. [And Madonna uses Kabbalah water.]

Arguments like these just highlight the intellectual bankruptcy of the homeopathic belief system. They would love to find scientific validation, but they reject science when it doesn’t support them. One repeated excuse is that the remedies are individualized so they don’t lend themselves to controlled trials. That’s just nonsense. A homeopath could prescribe individualized remedies and third parties could randomly dispense either what had been prescribed or a placebo control. Neither patient nor homeopath would know which the patient got.

Homeopathy was humbug in 1842. It’s still humbug today. That’s a diagnosis you can prescribe to everyone.

Contents are Copyright © 2008 the Skeptics Society and the authors and artists. Permission is granted to print, distribute, and post with proper citation and acknowledgment. Contact us at skepticssociety@skeptic.com.

Some marketing genius presented this to a board and it was accepted?

Some parent sees this on the shelf and says, “Aha! There’s the answer!”

Really?

WOW!!!!!!

Comments?

A funny thing happened to me earlier today and I thought I would share it in the hopes that it brightens your day as much as it brightened mine.

As some of you may know, Hynix Semi-Conductor up here in Oregon is closing its doors. Whether or not this site will be picked up by another company is still an unanswered question. Even if it is, it is not known if the new owners will even want the machines that are here. It’s times like this when the truly entertaining people emerge.

In any event, I have been working on shutting down all of the Nikon machines that are here. Earlier today I was draining coolant from a couple of Body 12s. I was taking the screws out of a panel at the bottom of the Air Handler Unit to access a low point to drain coolant when I dropped one of the screws. It fell through a hole in the floor and went down into the sub-fab.

I thought that after 20 machines, only dropping one screw wasn’t a bad track record.

About 5 or 10 minutes later, this guy bursts into the service bay where I’m working and stares at me. I stare back at him. He starts yelling at me. “Is this your screw?!”

I looked at it. Then I looked at the pile of identical screws in the little plastic container I was using to keep them all together. “Looks like one of mine,” I replied. “Cool! Thanks, man.” I plucked it from his outstretched hand.

“It hit me in the top of the head!” he shouted, pointing at the top of his head.

“Really? Wow, I bet that stung.”

“You’re &@$ #@&% right it stung!!”

“Ah, well.” I paused for just moment and then said, “You’re welcome.”

“WELCOME?!!!!! Welcome for what?!”

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “You were obviously not wearing a hard-hat, in an area where hard-hat wearing is strictly required, when my screw fell thirty feet to hit you in the head. You are quite naturally grateful that I only dropped this tiny screw instead of, say, this 12-inch crescent wrench I’ve been working with, which weighs two or three pounds and would have killed your dumb ass.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well……we’re shut down now, so I didn’t think we really needed to worry about that anymore.”

I could contain myself no longer.

“Dude!” I exploded. “We’re tearing this whole building apart! I can’t think of a better time for crap to be falling out of the sky!”

It’s little moments such as this that make life truly worth living.

Workers at a marble company in Dallas say they have a slab of natural granite that has the image of Jesus in it.

Verona Marble Company Inc. takes pictures of every slab of stone in their inventory and posts them on their website. Wednesday, the owners say a customer in West Texas spotted the image among dozens of pictures and called to tell them about it.

Those who look at the 6×10 foot slab say they can see the head and arms of Jesus, along with either a belt, sword or glowing book. (Source)

I say all 3 are wrong. This is clearly an image of Jesus with a gas pump handle and I am sure this is a direct response to the many Americans who, lacking understanding of market economics, are actually praying to God for relief from “high” gas prices. (I didn’t make that up).

Keep Praying! Today – a message on a slab of granite, yesterday – any number of bizarre manifestations, tomorrow – gas prices back in-line with the rest of the world.

Oh wait, . . . Dammit!

Fear, the Foundation of Religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

What We Must Do

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

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