Chatting with Jehovah’s Witnesses

On Saturday morning there was a knock on my door. This is unusual since the condominium complex that I live in is not on a through street and hence the only people who knock on doors tend to be delivery people and I rarely order anything. When I opened the door, there were two women aged 65 or thereabouts standing there and I immediately guessed that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

After saying hello, one woman (let’s call her A) asked me whether I read the Bible and I said that I used to but no longer. She asked me why and I said that it no longer made any sense to me. The other woman (let’s call her B) then asked me whether I stopped reading because of the way that the world was these days and I said no, that was not it, but that I could not reconcile the idea of a god with what the laws of science said about how the world works. B was curious and asked me what scientific field I was referring to and I said physics.
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The psychology of conspiracy theory believers

Conspiracy theories, by which I mean beliefs that lack any solid evidentiary foundation but are believed by a surprisingly large number of people who sustain them by postulating elaborate explanations that involve powerful people and organizations colluding to hide what they believe is ‘the truth’, have been around for a long time. The internet has enabled much greater awareness of such beliefs, in addition to allowing them to flourish.

Naturally, this has provoked curiosity about the phenomenon, such as what makes a particular theory catch hold of the imagination of some people, what kinds of people are drawn to them, what kind of dangers they pose, and how they might best be combated.

Not all conspiracy theories are pernicious and need to be countered. Some are mostly harmless and can be ignored. The belief that the moon landing was faked, for example, does not do much harm. Neither does the belief that the Earth is flat. The belief that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job also seems largely innocuous. This is because the people who are thought to. be engaged in a conspiracy to hide the truth are not clearly identifiable or are so big (‘the government’ or ‘the deep state’) that particular individuals and communities are not placed at risk.
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The puzzling allure of extreme diets

I was astonished to read of yet another new dietary fad that seems to have attracted adherents. They call themselves ‘carnivores’ and that label alone should give you some idea about what their diet consists of. I expected a variation of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets (such as Atkins) that were in vogue some decades back. But I was not quite prepared for how much more limited and extreme this diet was. It consists almost exclusively of beef, bacon, butter, and eggs. Just reading it made me feel queasy, even though I eat each of the items. It was the thought of eating almost only those four things that made me feel sick.

For some reason that I cannot quite fathom, there are people who are drawn to the idea that what most of us think is a good nutrition habit of eating balanced diets that avoid highly processed foods (food writer Michael Pollan memorably encapsulated the idea in just seven words: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”) is a myth foisted upon us by government and scientists and the food industry, and that they have discovered an alternative healthy way of eating that only they know about and now wish to promote. There seems to be something appealing about seeing oneself as part of a small community of people who have special knowledge that the vast majority of people are unaware of. It seems to be even more appealing if the ideas are so extreme that ordinary people would never have thought of it.
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The IVF problem is coming next for Trump

Creepy Donald Trump has tried to have it both ways on abortion, claiming credit for appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade while trying to wash his hands of the extreme anti-abortion measures that some states have imposed in the wake of that overthrow. That attempt to walk a fine line got destroyed when he was forced to say how he would vote on the Amendment 4, referendum measure that seeks to overturn Florida’s extreme law that bans abortion after six weeks and, after trying to waffle on the issue and getting pushback from conservatives, he said that he would oppose the Amendment.

He will face a similar dilemma with IVF treatments. These are very popular and the decision by the Alabama supreme court that said that frozen embryos are children under state law effectively banned the practice since IVF clinics feared prosecution if unused embryos get discarded. That decision sent shock waves across the country and resulted in Republican politicians trying to find ways to dance around the issue without alienating their base.
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What do windmills and bacon have in common?

They both occupy an inordinate amount of space in creepy Donald Trump’s brain.

His obsession with windmills is well known. For one, he thinks that that they kill birds in vast numbers. This has a superficial plausibility since some birds do die by hitting the blades. But that number is far fewer than the number killed by cats, power lines, or by flying into windows.

But bewilderingly, he also thinks that windmills kill whales in large numbers and that the sound of the windmills causes cancer.

So why does creepy Trump hate windmills so much to the point of delusion? Back in 2022, Philip Bump ventured an explanation.
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Noooo! Not chemtrails again!

From my window I see clear blue skies and airplanes flying in an out of the nearby airport and on occasion I can sometimes see thin white clouds trailing behind high-flying jets. One of the weirdest conspiracies is that the government is spraying population control chemicals through the exhaust of planes, leaving those white clouds.. It appears that RFK Jr. believes this nonsense, just like a lot of the other conspiratorial nonsense he believes, and he is trying to use his new-found alliance with creepy Donald Trump to get him to endorse it.

He has also suggested that Trump would join him in seeking to criminalize the spraying of “chemtrails,” promoting a debunked conspiracy theory about the government releasing toxic chemicals into the air to kill off undesirable elements of the population.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is declining to condemn Kennedy’s latest conspiratorial remarks, instead telling Salon that its “proud” to have him on the former president’s “transition team.”

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John Oliver excoriates RFK Jr.

In a detailed analysis, Oliver looks at RFK Jr.’s history and reveals a very unpleasant, dishonest man who has spread dangerous misinformation about AIDS, autism, vaccines, and other topics throughout the world. He says that he did good work on environmental issues earlier in his career that he has exploited to get the support by many young people who may not be aware of the dark anti-science turn he took later and how damaging his ideas became, and that he might be able to sway enough voters to swing the election on creepy Donald Trump’s favor.

Meanwhile, the RFK Jr. dead bear story keeps on giving. I had taken at face value his claim that a vehicle ahead of him had hit the bear and that he decided to collect the carcass as roadkill to skin and eat later, because he knew that you can get a legal permit in the state of New York to keep a bear that is roadkill. It seemed a little suspicious that he knew about this specific and esoteric law because how often does one encounter a bear by the side of the road that has just been killed by a vehicle? Or indeed, any dead animal at all? But he is a lawyer who likes to go falconing, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt for knowing weird trivia.

But then I read this article that aroused my suspicions.

On Wednesday a spokesperson, Stephanie Spear, told the Associated Press that Kennedy, a longtime falconer who also trains ravens, used roadkill to feed his birds.

She also said Kennedy once had a 21-cubic-foot refrigerator, used for roadkill, at his New York home.

Wait, he has a freezer dedicated to just roadkill? How much fresh roadkill does he encounter in his daily life? I can understand that people who spend a lot of time on the highways (truck drivers, highway patrol officers, highway maintenance people) can see a lot of roadkill. But ordinary people? I have seen dead animals by the side of the highway but not often. And you should never go near it because you do not know how long it has been rotting there.

But apparently this weird guy has a preternatural sense that enables him to be frequently in the vicinity of fresh roadkill.

The challenge of lab grown meat

Commenter birgerjohansson was kind enough to send me this link about how the UK has become the first country in the EU to approve the use of lab grown meat as pet food.

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock.

Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves.

The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a paté-like paste.

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The menace of plastics

I try to be conscientious about recycling. I carefully separate out plastics according to the number embossed on the bottom, putting only those numbers that are wanted by the recycler in the appropriate receptacle. I also recycle aluminum and other metal cans. My building also recently started accepting organic waste for composting, so now food waste goes into a separate container that is periodically emptied into a common bin outside that is collected by the waster disposal company to be composted.

At least I hope it is.

While I do all these things in an effort to contribute in some small away to protecting the planet and reducing greenhouse gases, I sometimes wonder if all this is mere theater, to divert our attention from the real menace to the planet, and that is the manufacturers who churn out plastics and other forms of packaging in massive amounts without thought for the consequences, and to the fossil fuel industries that are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases.
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The inner life of plants

When I was a boy in Sri Lanka, I was fascinated by a small plant that grew close to the ground. It had tiny leaves that looked like miniature versions of coconut palm fronds. When you gently touched even a single leaf, the entire set of fronds would immediately curl themselves in, as if to escape from me. It was extraordinary. I used to go through the plant bed, touching each one until they all were curled up. After being left alone for some time, they would unfurl themselves.

Did the plant have intelligence? Was it seeing me as a threat to withdraw from and re-emerge only after I left? It never occurred to me then to wonder. To even pose such a question is to invite controversy, if not outright ridicule. We tend to think of an intelligent organism as having a mind, which presupposes the existence of a material brain and a nervous system, and also having a body which enables the organism to have agency and move around freely in response to external conditions. Plants were long thought to lack pretty much all those features, although they have limited movement in response to light and water and other features of the environment. Some can also trap and devour insects. But we tend to stop short of using the term intelligence to describe those actions.
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