Hmmm . . . that boy’s never going to be a paleontologist (or biologist or research scientist or astronomer or even a good comedian). Unfortunately, neither are your sister’s kids because the association with him is too strong.
I know it seems difficult to beleive, but everything I listed for my brother-in-law is something he absolutely believes. I have not exaggerated at all. Even on the Roger Moore thing.
BTW, has anybody else ever heard the “all the stars are relatively close to earth” thing? Have I stumbled onto a new fundie crackpot idea? Do I get to name it?
My good friend Ryan and your brother-in-law would consider themselves to be mortal enemies but in fact they are variations on a theme. Whenever my wife and I hang out with Ryan and his girlfriend he always says something that irritates the hell out of me. A sampling:
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The JFK assassination was a massive government conspiracy and the entire Warren Commission was in on it. George Bush Sr. was also in on it and that’s how he got to be VP. The attempt on Reagan’s life was to be the final chapter in the conspiracy that was to make Bush president. Somehow the Bildeburg Group and the Trilateral Commission were part of it too.
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In the next 20 years there will be chronic shotages of virtually every important commodity (oil, natural gas, food) and there will be a world wide Depression. Malthus lives!
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Space aliens helped to build not only the Egyptian pyramids but also the Mexican and Central American pyramids.
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He believed that the Y2k “problem” would be a major world wide catastrophe. (I won $20 off of him on that one.)
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If breast cancer was a “man’s disease” it would have been cured 20 years ago.
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Your astrological sign is a very accurate indicator of your personality. One should consult their horoscope before making any important decision.
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Some of the crop circles are not hoaxes. (He told me this one two weeks ago!)
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There are alien space craft and corpses in Area 51.
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Many people who suffer from illness or depression have problems with their auras, chi or other invisible energy fields.
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Al Gore is an authority on scientific matters.
Hajario
I’ve heard of most of these theories, and even met some people that have held a few of them, but I am now truly scared.
Anyone want to help me finish this bunker?
This is purely absurd. Does he mean to deny that it was the Cubans, working in connection with the Mafia, who cloned Lee Harvey Oswald and had him assassinate Kennedy?
**
However, human inginuity was behind the West African pyramids.
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Cash registers malfunctioned in Greece and trains in Norway didn’t run on time. If that’s not a major world wide catastrophe, I don’t know what is.
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Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is the only authority on scientific matters.
I learned tonight that my older sister firmly believes that the initial moon landings were hoaxed. Oh, we went there later on, sure, but the Fox special was so scientific that it had to be true.
I almost cried. I thought about refuting the argument, point by point, and culminating by sending her to NASA’s webpage debunking the hoax-conspiracy, but she’s less technically inclined than wallpaper.
[slight hijack]
I then thought about how happy math teachers must be, given that Fox isn’t really going to provide pseudoscience in their direct field. I mean, are we going to see “Squaring the Circle: Ancient Mysteries Revealed” or “Pi = 3 : When Geometers Go Bad”?
[/slight hijack]
- Space aliens helped to build not only the Egyptian pyramids but also the Mexican and Central American pyramids.
Not enough people point out the racist nature of this Von Daniken crap: why is it the brown-skinned people of the
world who needed help from outer space?
About 80 years ago Robert Benchley, bless his heart, reacted to an article about Egyptian excavations that talked about a “remarkably accurate and artistic painting
of a goose” that was 3300 years old.
Benchley: “Why is it any more remarkable that someone drew a goose accurately 3300 year ago than that someone should do it today?”
and: “We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born. We are constantly remarking on the fact that things are done well by people other than ourselves. ‘The Japanese are a remarkable little people,’ we say, as if we were doing them a favor.”
Going back in my split-level pyramid…
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To get healthy…uhhh…pretty much anything listed on www.quackwatch.com.
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Those damn New Mexicans should go back to where they came from. Stop speaking Navajo and speak an American language, god damnit.
I heard this one from my brother-in-law, who I’ll call Forrest, when I was telling my sister about my engagement. My fiancee happens to be Filipino, which Forrest calls a “mongrel” race, a term that he seems to believe is not racist, merely an objectice description. He then followed with a variation of the statement quoted above.
What I find most amazing about this isn’t the racism; I expect that. It’s the idea that there is anything “pure” about Anglo-Saxons. The very term Anglo-Saxon literally means a mixture of Angles and Saxons. Anglo-Saxon specifically refers to people whose ancestors come from England (the name means Angle-land, or land of the Anglo-Saxons). A cursory inspection of the past 3000 years of history shows that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a mixture of Moors, Celts, Romans, Mongols, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, and Vikings. Somehow, to Forrest, this qualifies as a “pure” race. The man is impervious to reason.
Is his name Archie Bunker?
I heard this one from my brother-in-law, who I’ll call Forrest, when I was telling my sister about my engagement. My fiancee happens to be Filipino, which Forrest calls a “mongrel” race, a term that he seems to believe is not racist, merely an objectice description. He then followed with a variation of the statement quoted above.
What I find most amazing about this isn’t the racism; I expect that. It’s the idea that there is anything “pure” about Anglo-Saxons. The very term Anglo-Saxon literally means a mixture of Angles and Saxons. Anglo-Saxon specifically refers to people whose ancestors come from England (the name means Angle-land, or land of the Anglo-Saxons). A cursory inspection of the past 3000 years of history shows that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a mixture of Moors, Celts, Romans, Mongols, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, and Vikings. Somehow, to Forrest, this qualifies as a “pure” race. The man is impervious to reason.
Sorry about the double post. I hit the “back” button on my mouse, and accidentally resubmitted the same post. :o
Trains in Norway never run on time. What was so special about that incident? (Seriously, it was more likely a leap year problem than a Y2K problem - the railway authorities apparently thought it was less embarrassing to blame it on some obscure Y2K bug than to admit that the onboard computer hadn’t been informed that a year could have 366 days.)
My sister claims that dinosaurs were wiped out in the Flood… Noah didn’t take them on the Ark for some reason. I haven’t bothered to ask her why this omission was not mentioned in the Bible, and come to think of it I don’t think I want to hear the explanation.
I’ve never heard the “all stars are close” explanation; the Young Earth Creationists I’m familiar with seem to prefer the explanation that the light was created in transit. Which is logically consistent, but dangerously close to Last Tuesdayism.
Hajario, you can tell Ryan that I’m looking at a copy of the Medical Billing Guide, published by the Ontario Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation in 1988 (sorry I don’t have an online cite or a more current source).
Anyway, according to this source, the International Classification of Disease (ninth revision) code for a malignant neoplasm (that is, cancer) of the male breast is 175. The ICD9 code for female breast cancer is 174. (Hope I’ve phrased that correctly; I’m not a medical person, although with my wife working in health care, we do have some interesting sources on our shelves.)
Have some fun with Ryan–ask him why, since it can be a man’s disease, it wasn’t cleared up 20 years ago?
An otherwise intelligent, yet very conservative/libertarian friend of mine insists that Clinton was in on Iran Contra. That the plane carrying the weapons to Iran took off in Arkansas-and in order to get permission, they promised Clinton a load of cocaine.
I actually did explain to him that around 8% of breast cancer victims are men and that men who get breast cancer are much more likely to die due to the fact that it is usually detected later. He also couldn’t answer why there is no cure for prostate cancer which affects men 100% of the time. I further explained that the mortality rate for breast cancer has dropped dramatically over the last 20 years (in a very large part due to the reaearch of men) and both my Mother and Step-Mother are alive as a result. I then went on to explain that although twice as many people die from prostate cancer in the U.S. than from breast cancer and that the mortalilty rates are nearly identical, breast cancer gets twice the funding from the U.S. government allocated by a Congress that is overwhelmingly male.
I have heard the same statement made by several celebrities and I find it to be shockingly sexist. Many of these same people would pitch a fit if I referred to a Flight Attendant as a Stewerdess. Somehow people who are hypersensitive to the slightest hint if misogyny find it acceptable to classify an entire gender as being indifferent to hundreds of thousands of deaths. It boggles the mind.
Hajario
Number Six, running that list, I’m not surprised to see them all in one place. A little frightened, but not surprised.
Sorry, that’s a variation on the young-Earth creationist belief. It fits better with the geocentric and flat-Earthers. There’s even the hollow Earth crowd who think that Earth is an inverted sphere, concave not convex. We’re on the inside. The reason it looks like we’re on the outside is a property of light that makes it bend in strange curves, and thus we get an optical illusion.
flodnak replied:
I’ve heard of both. See they don’t have to agree on the same explanation, they can make up more than one explanation. Certain ones work better in certain frameworks.
LNO, ask your older sister what was scientific about that Fox special. Ask her where the data is on how radioactive the Van Allen belts are. Ask her if she knows anything about photography - focal point, depth of field, shutter speed, f-stop settings, perspective. Ask her if she believes that we have intercontinental ballistic missiles and have control systems that would allow us to steer those missiles at targets in Russia, and if we had them in the '60s, and if so, how come a moon rocket wouldn’t have the same guidance and navigation systems. Ask her why their credibility is so high - what makes them believable, just because they put it on TV? Because the NASA rebuttals shown weren’t very specific and effective? Because Bill Kaysing was a former employee of Rocketdyne, working in the space program? Point out that Kaysing was a technical writer - that requires no real technical knowledge of engineering. Point out that the NASA rebuttals were heavily edited by the producers to give the impression they wanted to convey - that there are no good answers. In fact, all of those claims have been looked at and answered numerous times. Here’s a simple one that she can see for herself, if you have a tape of the show. See how much they make about the flag flapping around. Then ask her to find a single incident that the flag moves without an astronaut wiggling the pole.
Folkie said:
Sorry, I fail to see anything inherently racist about it. The dark-skinned people were the ones needing help because the light-skinned peoples weren’t attempting any building of the sort during those times. It’s a matter of timing, not a matter of race. The question is, Why did the aliens pick the dark-skinned people to help, and not the light-skinned ones? Now that’s racism for you. (It’s all a matter of perspective.)
As a point of explanation, part of it is probably due to expectation set up by the quality of most finds of the same time period, and part of it is probably due to artistic notions that were not mastered until later - like perspective.
I do agree with this one. Part of the reason people believe the aliens built the pyramids is because it boggles their mind at how such a “primative” culture should have accomplished something so staggeringly huge and lasting. They fail to grasp the resources available - engineering tools like the pulley and the block and tackle, and the ruthless use of a human labor force. It’s incredible to be sure, but a little specialized knowledge through trial and error goes a long way.
Gee, I think I’m getting too worked up over a MPSIMS thread. 
Number Six, is there any chance we could arrange for your sister to be seduced by a handsome stranger in a bar, then wake up in a hotel room in a bathtub full of ice water with a note that says “Call 911. Your ovaries have been removed”?
[sarcasm]Well, considering that the metric system is based on multiples of 10 and the English standard is based on multiples and factors of 12, it would only be natural to choose the English standard because 10 is such a difficult concept to understand compared to factors and multiples of 12…[/sarcasm]
Having had to use both systems, I understand the metric a lot better even though I have about two thirds less usage of it. I don’t have a clue what a quart or pint is supposed to look like, but I do know what a liter and 50 Ml looks like. I have to use the English standard all the time [living in America means that most of the time you will either see both or only English standard] and muchly prefer metric when possible.
English Standard? The English are as metric as anybody. What you mean is Imperial Measurements.