Tonight at 2 am, most Americans will go through the inane, ridiculous exercise of advancing their clocks one hour. I’ve bloggedseveral timesabout the twice-annual scam that is Daylight Saving Time. Once again, I’m taking this opportunity to point out that it’s fraudulent, in every possible way.
As I’ve said previously, everything we’ve been told about DST is a lie. It wasn’t invented by Benjamin Franklin (except as a joke); it had nothing to do with farmers, and does nothing for them; and it doesn’t save energy.
Back when I first blogged about the fraudulent nature of DST, mine was pretty much a “lone voice in the wilderness” calling for it to be ended. But over the last couple years I’ve noticed more folks realizing it’s a scam. Today, Gothamist took note of how DST is predicated on lies and foisted on Americans for no good reason.
I’ve had one correspondent call me “whiny” and told me to get over it; we’ve always done DST, so just deal with it. Unfortunately, we haven’t “always done DST,” it wasn’t consistently implemented until Congress passed the Uniform Time Act of 1966. (Which itself was a lie, since this Act did not, in fact, make time “uniform” through the country … some parts of the country were left out of it.) But even if we had “always” had DST, that’s not a valid reason to keep doing it. Instead, it’s an appeal to tradition, and is fallacious.
It’s time for everyone just to admit, we need to end the twice-annual fraud which is daylight saving time.
With Christmas approaching, the mass media are, as one would expect, catering to the country’s prevailing religiosity. That’s understandable, and normal. But this effort goes beyond annual re-showings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Even their journalists get into the act, manufacturing news stories that reinforce religious sentimentality. An example of this is ABC News, which is reporting that Noah’s Flood has been proven to have occurred (WebCite cached article):
The story of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.
In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News, Robert Ballard, one of the world’s best-known underwater archaeologists, talked about his findings. His team is probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah.
Unfortunately for believers in the Abrahamic religious tradition, this is not really the “proof” that the article implies, or that ABC would like its readers/viewers to think it is. The ways in which they support the very-thin contention, are as varied as they are stupid:
Ballard’s track record for finding the impossible is well known. In 1985, using a robotic submersible equipped with remote-controlled cameras, Ballard and his crew hunted down the world’s most famous shipwreck, the Titanic.
Unfortunately for both ABC and Ballard, that Ballard had been able to locate the Titanic, does not mean he’s now found proof of Noah’s Flood. It’s a clever appeal to authority, I admit, but that’s all it is. Next comes this gem:
Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah. He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.
This is not actually news. Most of us learned of the Ice Age back when we were in school. The idea that the Noah’s Flood story might be a reflection of one or more flooding events spawned by the end of the Ice Age, is not new at all.
Curiously, after covering this ground in their effort to “prove” that Noah’s global Flood had occurred, ABC News veers off into something else:
According to a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was one in the Black Sea region. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path. …
The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah.
The story goes on to discuss the fact that the Black Sea appears to have had a different coastline than it does now. Yet again, however, this is not news. It’s well-known. This also seems to be the linchpin of Ballard’s theory … which, by itself, is neither novel nor unreasonable — even though ABC News is reporting it as a “new” discovery.
But as I said, this means we’ve actually drifted away from the original Noah’s Flood story, and are in different territory. The Great Flood described in Genesis was a global flood that wiped out all of humanity and all the world’s fauna except the refugees aboard the Ark. An inundation from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, as colossal as it may have been to those who were near it, was not the global event recorded in Genesis! It could not have wiped out any person or animal beyond the Black Sea basin.
What Ballard and his religionism-satisfying sycophants in the mass media have done, is to take a localized event for which there is some genuine evidence, and stretched it far beyond what’s actually there, in order to make it appear to support the Bible. Logicians know this as shoehorning, and ultimately, it’s a lie.
Look, I get that ABC News and the mass media feel as though they need to pander to religiosity. The majority of people in the US are Christians, and the majority of them like hearing their Bible has a basis in fact. But lying to them in order to curry their favor and make them feel more secure in their beliefs, is still lying, and it’s still wrong. Journalists like Christiane Amanpour have no excuse for lying to people just to make them happy. The cold fact here is that there is no evidence — zero, zip, zilch, nada, none, not a speck of it! — that the Great Flood tale in Genesis happened. Ballard ahs uncovered nothing that supports any such event. And ABC News had no business suggesting he did.
I’ve blogged before about the worthless Power Balance bracelets, which supposedly enhance people’s athletic performance. It turns out — by their manufacturer’s own admission! — that they do nothing at all. Despite this concession, and the fact that the bracelets haven’t been shown to do anything but drain the checking accounts of idiots foolish enough to fall for their manufacturer’s laughable pseudoscience (WebCite cached article), Power Balance bracelets continue to sell. Celebrities of all types continue to be seen wearing them. And the NBA, among other entities, has decided to go along for the ride and cash in on the public’s gullibility, by shilling these useless pieces of plastic. This hasn’t stopped Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, from speaking out against the deal, as ESPN reports, and calling it what it is — a scam (cached):
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban believes that one of the NBA’s marketing deals is “a scam,” and he said Monday that he banned the product from the team’s locker room.
Cuban made his opinion clear in a video he posted to YouTube last week in which he criticized Power Balance bracelets before throwing the display case that was in the Mavericks’ locker room in the garbage.
“See this stuff?” Cuban said on the video, grabbing the display. “It was a scam when they were on ‘Shark Tank.’ It’s still a scam. I don’t care if the NBA was dumb enough to sign an agreement; this is going where it belongs.”
At that point, Cuban put the display case in a trash can.
It’s nice to see at least one NBA team owner taking on his own league, against this scam. Would that more owners did so, and more celebrities spoke out against Power Balance and the fraud it’s perpetrating on the public, rather than embracing and fostering it.
I’ve blogged a couple of times about the joke that is the TSA … you know, the people who make you take off your shoes and your belts, throw away your coffee, scan your innards — and in some cases pat you down thoroughly — before you go into the gate area of an airport. Interestingly, someone who once ran the TSA, from 2005 to 2009, agrees with this assessment. Kip Hawley wrote a book — and penned a piece for the Wall Street Journal — in which he makes this concession (WebCite cached article):
Airport security in America is broken. I should know. For 3½ years — from my confirmation in July 2005 to President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 — I served as the head of the Transportation Security Administration. …
More than a decade after 9/11, it is a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people whom it is meant to protect. Preventing terrorist attacks on air travel demands flexibility and the constant reassessment of threats. It also demands strong public support, which the current system has plainly failed to achieve.
The crux of the problem, as I learned in my years at the helm, is our wrongheaded approach to risk. In attempting to eliminate all risk from flying, we have made air travel an unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas, while at the same time creating a security system that is brittle where it needs to be supple.
I applaud Hawley for finally admitting that the TSA does not actually serve its stated purpose and needs to change its ways. But even having given him that credit, I must point out that the man is a brazen hypocrite. Back in 2008, he was interviewed by Leslie Stahl in the course of a 60 Minutes piece on the broken nature of TSA security. In that interview, Hawley insisted to Ms Stahl that everything TSA was doing, was required in order to thwart al-Qaeda … and to skip any of it would be to let the terrorists through and risk another 9/11/2001. He was adamant that nothing TSA was doing amounted to “security theater.” You can read the article on the CBS News Web site (cached)*, or watch the 60 Minutes segment right here:
I invite Mr Hawley to supplement his welcome comments on the TSA’s ineffectiveness, with an apology for having himself been part of the fraud behind it. (I don’t use that word lightly … the TSA is a fraud, in every sense of that word, except for the fact that the people who created and run it will never be prosecuted for having rammed their scam down the throats of American travelers.) Few people have the courage to make such an apology, so I don’t expect Hawley will ever offer it. This, I fear, is the closest he will ever come to doing so.
Daylight saving time begins this weekend. From coast to coast, most Americans will dutifully “spring forward” by one hour early Sunday morning. We’re told this helps save energy and allows us to enjoy more sunshine during the summer months.
But a number of critics say this is all a big fat waste of time. Daylight saving time does nothing but create chaos and confusion, they say, and might actually waste more energy than it tries to save. It should be abandoned immediately, they contend.
It looks as though my complaint about daylight saving time being a scam — and yes, folks, it most assuredly is a scam — has finally been taken up by more people, and the problems it creates are getting increased attention. I welcome the company of all these new DST skeptics. It’s time we jettisoned DST … the sooner, the better.
A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.
The study’s investigators pulled no punches:
“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”
Wakefield, of course, isn’t having any of it, and is playing the martyr:
Speaking to CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Wakefield said his work has been “grossly distorted” and that he was the target of “a ruthless, pragmatic attempt to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.”
My guess is that all the famous committed antivaxers — such as Jenny McCarthy, Bill Maher, Suzanne Somers, etc. — will side with Wakefield and his persecution complex. The evidence of Wakefield’s fraud that BMJ turned up, will mean nothing to any of them.
Earlier this spring, I blogged about the fraud known as daylight saving time (DST). Given that it will end in the United States a week from today, on November 7, 2010, I thought I would reiterate the point I made then: Everything that people believe about it, and which is commonly used to justify it, is wrong. Flat-out wrong.
To sum up: It was never established to help farmers, and has absolutely nothing to do with agriculture; it does not save energy, and may actually expend more of it; and it was not invented by Benjamin Franklin (belief that it was, is an anachronistic misinterpretation of a satirical piece he wrote about the Parisians of his own time).
Oh, and it’s not “daylight savings time,” it’s “dayight saving time” (the word “saving” in that phrase is not a noun, but an adjective, so it shouldn’t be used in the plural form).
It’s long past time we dispensed with the myth-based fraud known as daylight saving time. I’m all for beginning a campaign to petition Congress to end it. Not that it will happen, especially if those in Congress continue to invoke the (false!) mantra that DST “saves energy.” That will definitely be a hard sell: We all know that legislators — at any level — prefer an appealing lie to an uncomfortable truth. At any rate, maybe it’s worth a try, nonetheless?
The Shroud of Turin went on public display Saturday for the first time in 10 years, drawing long lines of people to see the linen some believe is Christ’s burial cloth and others dismiss as a medieval fake.
Turin Cardinal Severino Poletto led the opening ceremony in Turin’s cathedral. He referred to the debate over the shroud’s authenticity, saying it was ”not up to the church but for science to decide.”
By late Friday, 1.5 million people had reserved their three-to-five-minute chance to gaze at the cloth, which is kept in a bulletproof, climate-controlled case. Viewing continues through May 23.
It’s interesting the Cardinal has left the matter up to “science.” In fact, science decided it … over two decades ago. The truth about the Shroud of Turin is that it dates to the Middle Ages, not to classical times. The carbon-dating done in 1988 — while it used an admittedly small sample — was nevertheless quite sound, and the results are solid.
Critics of the testing, who insist the Shroud is a genuine 1st-century relic with a magical photograph of Jesus Christ on it, have come up with nearly-endless rationales and excuses for why the tests all arrived at a 13th or 14th century date for it. Most of these rationales and excuses are based on ignorance and stupidity, and have been responded to at length. No response, however, appears to put a dent in Shroud veneration. People who believe in its authenticity as Jesus’ own burial shroud are not concerned with little, insignificant things like “facts.”
Christians who venerate the Shroud should, however, be concerned about what they’re doing … because it’s decidedly against the expressed, explicit wishes of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, which can be found in their own Bibles:
You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20:4)
Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves molten gods; I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19:4)
You shall not make for yourselves idols, nor shall you set up for yourselves an image or a sacred pillar, nor shall you place a figured stone in your land to bow down to it; for I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 26:1)
You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. (Deuteronomy 5:8-10)
Little children, guard yourselves from idols. (1 John 5:21)
But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death. (Revelation 21:8)
Isn’t it odd how all these thousands of Christians who will stream past the Shroud of Turin, devout in their belief in the idea that it’s a magical photograph of Jesus Christ, are all actually disobeying the very God they claim to honor by doing so? Hypocrites.
The bottom line is that the Shroud of Turin is nothing but a pious fraud. I’m sure a lot of Shroud-venerators are sincere, but that doesn’t change the fact that the object of their veneration, is fraudulent.
Tonight at 2 am, most Americans will go through the inane, ridiculous exercise of advancing their clocks one hour. I’ve blogged several times about the twice-annual scam that is Daylight Saving Time. Once again, I’m taking this opportunity to point out that it’s fraudulent, in every possible way.
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