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.
Merchants of Doubt
So the other day I was trying to convince one of my kids to stop playing video games and get studying one of the school subjects in which they aren’t doing very well. No response. So I looked at their grades so far and did my best to persuade them that if they didn’t do a remarkable job in the last few weeks of the semester that they likely would not pass the course. Again, no response. At this point I was getting more than a little irritated at the lack of action. “Why aren’t you doing anything about this?” The response I got, “You don’t know for sure that I’ll fail if I don’t study today and you can’t guarantee that I’ll pass if I do study right now.” This little logical fallacy is one that has bugged me for years. While it is true that I could not know for sure the outcome of doing homework it’s ridiculous to argue that playing video games is a better use of that time.We see this type of fallacious reasoning all the time. Sometimes it is accidental. I know people who avoid the interstates because don’t know if there will be any construction work going on and they can’t be 100% sure that the off ramps will be open. Other people turn off all passenger side airbags because they can’t be 100% sure that theirs won’t be the one that goes off accidentally. I have even heard of one friend of mine who never wears his seat belt because he can’t be 100% sure that he won’t drive off a bridge and drown because he can’t get out of his car. All of these situations are based on an emotional response to something that had happened to them or a persuasive story they heard or saw on the news. Despite ample evidence to the contrary they still stick to that emotional assessment of risk and a desire for 100% surety.
What really bothers me is when others recognize this fact that you can never be 100% sure and exploit it for political and personal gains. Merchants of Doubt is the history of just such political exploitation of science and the public’s misunderstanding of certainty, statistics and risk.
Industry funded scientists focused on and magnified the uncertainty when dealing with the link between cancer and cigarette smoking. The implication being that since they can’t prove 100% that smoking is what gave this guy cancer then we don’t know what did. And therefore smoking is safe. Later on Industry funded scientists focused on and magnified the uncertainty when dealing with the consequences of the arms race. Then after that it was the link between industries and acid rain. Etc, etc, etc. Time and time again Industry funded experts have used the same tired script to justify their in action. What I found most surprising in this book is that time and time again it is the very same scientists pushing this uncertainty on the public, even when the topics are far afield of their area of training and expertise.
I took this book as a warnign to be skeptical anytime somebody encourages action or inaction just based on the fact that we can't be 100% certian. Do the research and weigh the risks. Sure, absolute certianty is rare, but relative certianty is much more common. I many not no for sure if I'm gonna get driven off a bridge, but I'm far more likely to get into an accident that does not involve a bridge and so I'm gonna continue to wear my seat belt. And the same goes for the other controvertial issues detailed in Merchants of Doubt.
What Happend to Civility?
Here’s a not entirely hypothetical situation I’d like to discuss.Suppose a friend came over to your house unannounced. You invite them in and they begin to tell you their views on what is wrong with everything from your politics to how to you raise your children. They quote celebrities and politicians to back up their position. You listen politely for a while. Then when they are finished you attempt to point out a few misquotations and other errors in the facts they presented to you. They then get insulted and react as if you are personally attacking them. They make one last speech and storm out of your house telling you that they never want to hear from you again.
The above example is an amalgam of several different events that have actually happened to me in the last couple months. It sounds absurd doesn’t it? But they really happened, several times. If this had happened to you how would you feel? Suppose this was a beloved family member, who you had great respect for, you just disagreed on politics? In my situation each time I just sat there stunned. Where did that come from? Why did they bring this to me?
Now I have concealed one small detail until now. These encounters didn’t happen in person. They happened via email. Yet other than that the details are correct. Why does the fact that their message came via an email excuse them the civility they might have granted me in person? Is it really so all or nothing with some people? What has happened to this world that we are so readily willing to cut all ties with people because we don’t march in lock step with them? Is their value as a person so contingent upon me accepting the premises of the email that they mass forwarded to everybody in their address book?
I share this because I am truly saddened. There are people that I have known for decades who have abandoned having any relationship with me because we disagree. What happened to having a civil disagreement? In many of my cases I didn’t even get around to stating my opinion. I was just correcting the facts they presented. It doesn’t bother me that we disagree on some points. But why can’t we discuss the issue civilly?
In stark contrast to these examples I do have a few close friends with whom I frequently disagree. I enjoy discussing things with them. I know that neither one of us is likely to have a complete change of opinion but the conversation is stimulating. And I believe that we are willing to accept when our opinions are based on flawed data and reconsider. I want to thank these friends for accepting me as one who is still looking for answers. I enjoy the search. I hope I never get so many answers that I no longer need the search. And I hope that no matter how much we may disagree you will still walk away knowing that I still value you as a person.
Common Nonsense
A few months ago I heard a great podcast interview with Alexander Zaitchik about his new book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. The interview was very eye opening and inspired me to read the book.
I’ve always felt that Glenn Beck was just a failed shock jock who couldn’t keep up with the likes of Howard Stern. So he switched to am radio and started using the same shock jock strategies and even some of the same skits to shock am listeners.Zaitchik successfully illustrates that Beck is a brilliant marketer. He is always looking at how he can spin anything to promote himself. As a FM DJ he called and taunted the wife of a competing station on the air because she had recently had a miscarriage. When other people are genuinely distraught about a national tragedy, Beck is trying to figure out how he can make the event improve his brand. And for those of you who would like to claim that this was the “old Glenn” before he found Jesus and converted to Mormonism, I have seen no change at all in his strategies since. He switched sides on the Teri Schiavo case after he realized that siding with Michael Schiavo would be a death nail for his new am gig. He vilified liberals for opposing Bush’s polices “..while we have troops in harm’s way” yet didn’t think twice to compare Obama to Stalin and Satan while pretty much all of those troops are still “in harm’s way”.
I’ve always felt that’s Beck’s tears were just a tool to manipulate. Sure they may have been genuine at first, but they have grown to be a great marking strategy. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that his emotional outbursts started shortly after he converted to Mormonism. Anybody who has attended an LDS, first Sunday service will recognize the pattern. You go up and stand before everybody and the firmness with which you believe something replaces logic, facts and evidence. Tears are just the ace in the hole. There can be no further argument on that issue once somebody has cried. I am sure that most of what happens on Sunday is genuine. With Beck I’m not so sure. Zaitchik interview several of Beck’s co-workers who detail examples of him getting all choked up before a commercial break then ordering a pizza on the phone and then turning the tears back on when he’s back on air. I’m just not buying it.
Another little strategy of Beck’s that he has commandeered from the LDS is church is his persecution complex. If people picket him or criticize it only can mean one thing. He is doing the right thing. Beck capitalizes on protests and disagreement and he has no desire for them to go away. His books are literally covered with quotes from those who oppose him. He eats it up.
His claim that his 8-28 rally was just “coincidentally” scheduled for the anniversary of Dr. Kings speech is very hollow. In my mind there are two options: 1. He didn’t know it was the same date. In which case he’s a moron and should have known. Or option 2. He knew full well and was planning on capitalizing on the controversy. Considering his history of doing things that upset his opposition and using their protests as free advertising I have to accept the later. As a shock jock he worked up PETA supporters into a lather and then relished the free publicity they gave him.
The really disgustng part of Beck’s rally and his whole “reclaim the civil rights” rhetoric is that it’s just patently false. Had he been a contemporary of King's he’d have been standing right beside his John Birch Society role models W. Cleon Skousen and Ezra Taft Benson condemning King as a communist.
In the book Zaitchik was referring to a couple Cleon Skousen books and he called them, “…elaborately imagined, feverishly argued, and poorly researched.” I think the same could also be said for everything I’ve hear come out of Glenn Beck’s mouth. I think Beck is counting on the ignorance of his audience. He expects them to just connect the dots the same what his conspiracy theory mind connects them on that chalkboard without any further research.
