Prophet’s Prey
One of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. If you think that Big Love and Sister Wives represents a realistic depiction of what it’s like to live in a polygamist sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints you could not be more mistaken. If anything these programs are convenient distractions from horrors that are really going on behind the walls of most FLDS communities.
Yes, popular TV programs like to portray modern polygamist groups as just a bunch of quirky little consenting adult Christians who live normal healthy lives, they just all consented to being married to the same guy. However in most FLDS areas, especially those under the control of Warren Jeffs, these shows couldn’t be further from the truth. Most live in squalor because they consecrate everything they earn back to the church. They live on church owned land with no legal lease arrangement so the “prophet” can kick them out for any perceived infraction, the most common of which is just happening to have been born male because that means they will eventually be a competitor for the little girls in the group. Yes I said girls, not women or females. These are little girls that are being married off to much older men to gain political clout within the community. Some of these girls are as young as 12 and most are married off well below the legal age of consent.
So if you happen to be born as a girl in a FLDS community the odds are that you will be denied to play with dolls because the prophet has said that girls “should learn to raise real children”. You won’t have any other toys. You’ll be home-schooled but most of that will be only church sanctioned propaganda, like the fact that we never landed on the moon. Then in your early teens you’ll be married off to some man three times your age and brutally raped before you’ve even had the basics of sex education (see comment above about propaganda). You see if girls knew what normal sex was supposed to be like they’d surely resist what the men in the FLDS culture force on them. Now you’d just better hope that your husband overts his eyes from the prophet fast enough ‘cause if he's too slow he might get banished from the cult and you and your sister wives are doled out to the prophet’s political cronies and you just have to submit to him and his abuse and hope the cycle doesn’t repeat itself.
Being born male isn’t exactly an easy life either. You’ll be put to work on church projects when you are so young that the hammer you’ll be given reaches all the way to the ground when you sling it in your work belt. The only way the church elites can maintain their high number of wives is to restrict the number of men in the community. So the odds are pretty good that right about the time you start thinking about starting your own family that you’ll be driven out of town and dropped off on the side of the road adn told never to return. If you get lucky enough to be allowed to stay well hog dog, You will be allowed to follow in your indoctrination and become a serial child abuser. But don't get too comfortable in your role as abuser/rapist. You still could lose all that at the drop of a hat if the prophet decides he doesn't like you anymore.
No matter what your gender your odds are the greatest in the world to develop serious genetic defects due to inbreeding. FLDS geneologies boggle the mind. There are only about four suranmes and they recycle a lot of the same given names and middle names. Wives are sometimes taken from a father and given to his son, or from one brother to another. So you'll have children growing up in the same house whose father is also an uncle or a brother or a cousin. The CDC has estimated that over half of the world’s cases of fumarase deficiency are in Short Creek UT/AZ. So you may be stillborn or only live a few weeks.
The author of this book is LDS. Not FLDS, just LDS. He lived only an hour away from where much of these atrocities were taking place but just didn’t give it much thought. The FLDS were just the red-headed step children of the “true” church. Not until he got involved as a private investigator on a simple eviction did he come to understand the lawlessness and church sanctioned abuse that was taking place in his backyard.
As American’s we are proud of our First Amendment. We like the government to stay out of our worship. People should be able to believe or not to believe what ever they want to and the government is supposed to let that be. But when beliefs turn into actions there is something that the government does care about and does make laws to prevent. You can believe that god will bring destruction on the world, but if you try to fly a plane into a building to start the process then we should expect some intervention, not against the belief, against the action.
Somehow religions that profess a link to Jesus get a little more of a pass than others. If I were to tell you that the Taliban had taken control of a small city in Utah had completely converted to Sharia law all hell would break loose to end the process and establish order. However since the FLDS claims a link to Jesus’ teachings all the same Taliban-like behavior is tolerated now and has been tolerated for almost a century. It’s a serous double standard.
As if he had a chance before, this book more than convinced me to vote against Rick Perry. When close to 500 children were in the custody of the state of Texas Perry went before cameras and read all his talking points about, "safety of the children" etc. etc. Yet the Department of Child Protective Services was pressured from above to release all of these kids back to their abusers for no logical reason except that it was costing too much. Just confirmed my suspicions about him. He'll say whatever he has to to look good, but not offer any real support where it is really needed. I'd like to see how he would have responded if it had been a Taliban group and not an FLDS sect.
Polygamy would not exist to the extent it does in the United States if it were not for one man, Joseph Smith. Joseph took his desire for sexual impropriety and canonized it. Officially the mainstream LDS church has since stopped practicing polygamy a century ago, however the FLDS still claim Joseph as their justification for continuing.
Read this book. It’s not a pleasant read. It will challenge a lot of what you believe and think you know about polygamy in the United States. Bower had unique access to the facts that put Warren Jeffs behind bars. It’s quite an eye-opener. Far from just being a quirky little sub-culture, in every measurable way FLDS communities are the most lawless cities in the United States and generation after generation of children are being taught that this is normal and god’s way.
Proofiness
Years ago I my dad had a book laying around the house called How to Lie with Statistics. The book took the form of a how-to book. The entire premise being that people don’t really understand statistics or even math very well so it presented some tongue in cheek suggestions on how to spin your numbers to say something that they don’t really. The book was intended to be used as a defensive tool to teach the readers how to notice when somebody else is lying to them with numbers. If How to Lie with Statistics was the 101 course then Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife is the masters level course. If you are uncomfortable with uncertainty you might want to avoid this book. Seife successfully shows that many of the numbers that control our lives are at best gross estimations and at worst deliberate fictions. Instead of saying "Hey there are a bunch of Communists in the Justice Department.” Joseph McCarthy knew that we would give more credence to a number so he made one up, 205. Where did he get that number? He just made it up. And people bought it. Seife shows that people tend to believe numbers even if there is no reasonable expectation that the number is even correct. This reminds me of the story of the surveyors who were measuring Mount Everest and found out that it was exactly 29,000’. The supervisors in charge altered the data because 29,000’ looked like and estimate so they added a few feet to the mountain and called it 29,029’.
Seife shows how pervasive our trust of numbers are in everyday life. Most people accept that 98.6F is the normal temperature for a human. Is this number really accurate to one decimal point? No it isn’t. The doctors who determined the average normal temperature for humans only claimed it was accurate to the decimal point in Celsius and even then it could vary by person. 37C is the normal temperature, but when you convert that to Fahrenheit you get a number that appears more accurate than the number you started with. The real average temperature for humans is somewhere between 36C and 38C or 97F to 100F but we really can’t be more accurate than that. Yet how many times have you assumed that you had a fever at 99.0F? Not to say you weren’t really sick, but you don’t need the artificially accurate number to tell you that. This is Proofiness.
Seife explains case by case how proofiness has been used to free the guilt; O.J. Simpson, execute the innocent, elect Presidents and Congressmen, justify military action, justify backing out of arms treaties, support just about every type of legislation on both sides of the aisle on issues ranging form abortion to gun control etc. etc. etc. The abuses of math in our society were very disheartening. Personally I think Seife had his own bias as to which side of the aisle was more guilty of proofiness than the other. That being said he was just as thorough in his rebuke of the right as he was the left.
Many parts of the book were quite depressing. The specific cases, especially those were lives were lost seriously caused me to question the motives of some of our elected official. However, overall I thought the book was an excellent primer on what to look for and what follow up questions to ask when you are given information, especially information that involves counting , math and statistics.
The whole time I was reading this book I keep thinking about this one joke. 5/4th of American’s have problems with fractions. Seife has convinced me that this number may even be higher.
Proofiness
Years ago I my dad had a book laying around the house called How to Lie with Statistics. The book took the form of a how-to book. The entire premise being that people don’t really understand statistics or even math very well so it presented some tongue in cheek suggestions on how to spin your numbers to say something that they don’t really. The book was intended to be used as a defensive tool to teach the readers how to notice when somebody else is lying to them with numbers. If How to Lie with Statistics was the 101 course then Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife is the masters level course. If you are uncomfortable with uncertainty you might want to avoid this book. Seife successfully shows that many of the numbers that control our lives are at best gross estimations and at worst deliberate fictions. Instead of saying "Hey there are a bunch of Communists in the Justice Department.” Joseph McCarthy knew that we would give more credence to a number so he made one up, 205. Where did he get that number? He just made it up. And people bought it. Seife shows that people tend to believe numbers even if there is no reasonable expectation that the number is even correct. This reminds me of the story of the surveyors who were measuring Mount Everest and found out that it was exactly 29,000’. The supervisors in charge altered the data because 29,000’ looked like and estimate so they added a few feet to the mountain and called it 29,029’.
Seife shows how pervasive our trust of numbers are in everyday life. Most people accept that 98.6F is the normal temperature for a human. Is this number really accurate to one decimal point? No it isn’t. The doctors who determined the average normal temperature for humans only claimed it was accurate to the decimal point in Celsius and even then it could vary by person. 37C is the normal temperature, but when you convert that to Fahrenheit you get a number that appears more accurate than the number you started with. The real average temperature for humans is somewhere between 36C and 38C or 97F to 100F but we really can’t be more accurate than that. Yet how many times have you assumed that you had a fever at 99.0F? Not to say you weren’t really sick, but you don’t need the artificially accurate number to tell you that. This is Proofiness.
Seife explains case by case how proofiness has been used to free the guilt; O.J. Simpson, execute the innocent, elect Presidents and Congressmen, justify military action, justify backing out of arms treaties, support just about every type of legislation on both sides of the aisle on issues ranging form abortion to gun control etc. etc. etc. The abuses of math in our society were very disheartening. Personally I think Seife had his own bias as to which side of the aisle was more guilty of proofiness than the other. That being said he was just as thorough in his rebuke of the right as he was the left.
Many parts of the book were quite depressing. The specific cases, especially those were lives were lost seriously caused me to question the motives of some of our elected official. However, overall I thought the book was an excellent primer on what to look for and what follow up questions to ask when you are given information, especially information that involves counting , math and statistics.
The whole time I was reading this book I keep thinking about this one joke. 5/4th of American’s have problems with fractions. Seife has convinced me that this number may even be higher.
The Panic Virus
When Seth Mnookin and his wife found out they were expecting their first child they got all sorts of unsolicited advice form friends and family about vaccines and their safety. He decided to investigate for his personal reasons and in the process felt it would be an intriguing topic for a book. In an interview he stated that his original intent was to just present the controversy. However, after finding that all of the evidence was on one side he turned the book into an expose’ on those that preach fear at the expense of logic, evidence and children’s safety. The Panic Virus is that book.The anti-vaccination groups out there are really good at getting you to ignore the logic and the lack of evidence. They focus on a few heart breaking stories of kids who were diagnosed with autism at roughly the same time they were vaccinated and then try to get use to connect the dots and link the two. The stories are truly heart-breaking but no matter how sad they are that doesn’t prove that the vaccines caused these kids’ conditions. What makes Mnookin’s book stand out over the many others out there is that he fights fire with fire. Rather than just focus on the statistical and epidemiological evidence that shows absolutely no casual link with vaccines, Thimerosal or mercury; Mnookin bests the antivaxers at their own game. He tells much more emotional stories of children being crippled or dying of Polio, Pertussis and Measles because they were not vaccinated. Jenny McCarthy has stated that she is just fine with this kind of collateral damage.
The Panic Virus is a brilliant and timely history about the manufactured controversy about vaccine safety. From the initial Lancet report all the way to Dr. Wakefield’s complete and thorough discreditation, Mnookin shows that vaccines are safe and effective and do not cause autism.
My only criticism of the book is the same that I’ve had with others too. I have become so familiar with this topic that I was waiting for him to tell me something new. I‘ve grown used to reading articles daily on autism and vaccines. I have news aggregators send me any story with the word Andrew Wakefield in the body. But I had to take a step back and look at the book from the perspective of somebody not as familiar as I was. It is a great resource.
I encourage anybody who has an questions at all about the safety of vaccines to please read this before you hesitate to vaccinate your children. You should be convinced by the evidence that getting vaccinated is much safer than not vaccinated. And if that’s not enough the evidence of fraud, shoddy research, dishonesty, conflict of interest and foul play by the anti-vaccination community should sway you the rest of the way. And if there is still any doubt left in your mind the heart-breaking stories of children dying from easily preventable illness should completely tip the scales.
The Panic Virus
When Seth Mnookin and his wife found out they were expecting their first child they got all sorts of unsolicited advice form friends and family about vaccines and their safety. He decided to investigate for his personal reasons and in the process felt it would be an intriguing topic for a book. In an interview he stated that his original intent was to just present the controversy. However, after finding that all of the evidence was on one side he turned the book into an expose’ on those that preach fear at the expense of logic, evidence and children’s safety. The Panic Virus is that book.The anti-vaccination groups out there are really good at getting you to ignore the logic and the lack of evidence. They focus on a few heart breaking stories of kids who were diagnosed with autism at roughly the same time they were vaccinated and then try to get use to connect the dots and link the two. The stories are truly heart-breaking but no matter how sad they are that doesn’t prove that the vaccines caused these kids’ conditions. What makes Mnookin’s book stand out over the many others out there is that he fights fire with fire. Rather than just focus on the statistical and epidemiological evidence that shows absolutely no casual link with vaccines, Thimerosal or mercury; Mnookin bests the antivaxers at their own game. He tells much more emotional stories of children being crippled or dying of Polio, Pertussis and Measles because they were not vaccinated. Jenny McCarthy has stated that she is just fine with this kind of collateral damage.
The Panic Virus is a brilliant and timely history about the manufactured controversy about vaccine safety. From the initial Lancet report all the way to Dr. Wakefield’s complete and thorough discreditation, Mnookin shows that vaccines are safe and effective and do not cause autism.
My only criticism of the book is the same that I’ve had with others too. I have become so familiar with this topic that I was waiting for him to tell me something new. I‘ve grown used to reading articles daily on autism and vaccines. I have news aggregators send me any story with the word Andrew Wakefield in the body. But I had to take a step back and look at the book from the perspective of somebody not as familiar as I was. It is a great resource.
I encourage anybody who has an questions at all about the safety of vaccines to please read this before you hesitate to vaccinate your children. You should be convinced by the evidence that getting vaccinated is much safer than not vaccinated. And if that’s not enough the evidence of fraud, shoddy research, dishonesty, conflict of interest and foul play by the anti-vaccination community should sway you the rest of the way. And if there is still any doubt left in your mind the heart-breaking stories of children dying from easily preventable illness should completely tip the scales.
Totally Looks Like…
So there is this website where people post pictures of two things that look similar called totallylookslike and a few weeks ago a friend had an experience where he found two book covers that looked really similar. Well the same thing happened to me last night. I was in bed Reading Proofiness by Charles Seife and Victoria comes up stairs and puts her book on the nightstand next to mine, Slights of Mind by Stephen L. Macknik. You be the judge.
