Christopher Hitchens, 13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011

Reese Hershey, notable alchemist and part-time plumber, stumbled upon a previously unknown element. He found that when placed in the nostril, the element gave off a pleasant odor, and when placed on the tongue, it had a pleasant taste. He named it “candy” after his favorite stripper, John Kandi, who, according to Hershey, also had a delightful aroma. (Hershey later changed the spelling to “candy” to avoid confusion).

Candy was rare and initially only available to royalty and the very wealthy. It was thought that due to its pleasant odor, candy had heeling properties for the common affliction of stinky feet. It became popular to cut candy into squares with a razor blade, and ingest both.

As candy became more widespread, parents of poor families would send their children into rich neighborhoods to beg for this new remedy. They would often wear masks to avoid embarrassment as they went door-to-door asking the wealthy to smell their feet. If the homeowner felt the child’s feet were stinky enough, candy would be given in exchange for toilet paper—an homage to Hershey’s plumbing hobby.

This tradition of smelly kids begging the rich for handouts became known by the name of the road where it is first thought to have occurred as “Occupy Wall Street.”

And then there was something about pumpkins.

Happy Halloween!

Download this episode (right click and save)

The hiatus ends with Ryan Haupt of the Science… Sort Of podcast!

• Find out more about Science… Sort Of by visiting the website.
• Read Ryan’s stuff on iFanboy.

Stuff we talk about in this episode:

• Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com
• Rationally Speaking podcast
• Matt Dillahunty and The Atheist Experience
• Great Lakes Brewing Co.
• Harpoon Brewery
• Agora at the Atheist Film Festival

Theme music, “Lazy White Atheist Blues,” by T. Randolph Scott

This one is for all the plussers out there. But don’t worry, even if you don’t use Google+, you can still get in on the action.

This Tuesday, Jennifer Hancock will be entering the Studio via a G+ Hangout to talk about her new book, “Jen Hancock’s Handy Humanism Handbook,” and whatever else we feel like discussing.

The party starts @ 7 PM Eastern/4 PM Pacific. Plussers can join the fun by circling +Atheists Studio or +Jennifer Hancock, or by visiting hangoutparty.com, where it will also be broadcast live to the public for those who don’t use G+ or who can’t get into the hangout.

Mark your calendars and spread the word!

Here’s a clip from Jen’s appearance on ITAS last year:

I don’t have an interesting story about what I was doing 10 years ago today. I wasn’t in New York or D.C. I didn’t have family or friends in harm’s way. I was 21 years old, driving a sandwich truck in Cleveland, gathering bits information from construction workers as I went from site to site.

The chaos and tragedy of the news I was hearing stood in stark contrast to the mundane nature of my life and that day, making it particularly surreal. The day stands as a vivid memory of a foggy experience. I imagine this is not an unusual recollection of September 11th.

10 years later we are all looking back on that day and it’s important not to oversimplify when reflecting on the role religion played. Like with most things, we see a division between the left and right—one insisting that Islam is not to blame for the attacks and the other holding all Muslims responsible.

They’re both wrong. At least on those two points. And, in other ways, both sides are right. Do we really need  fall into one of these camps? Can we not say that, yes, the attacks were carried out because of Islam, and no, the Muslim family down the street are not terrorists?

Of course it would be unjust to hold all Muslims responsible and of course the blame should be laid with the disgusting perpetrators, but to suggest that the September 11th attacks were not religious or that Islam was not the driving force. And please, let’s avoid making false Scotsmen out of Osama Bin Laden and friends by claiming that they are/were not “real” Muslims.

Even President Obama, speaking to the nation after killing Bin Laden, sought to downplay Bin Laden’s religious motives, if not eliminate them. Could anything be more vile than to create a fiction about such an important event and attempt to sell it to the victims’ families just to avoid saying anything critical about any religion at any cost?

To say that Islam was not the driving force behind the attacks is to rationalize to the point of self-delusion. The Quran is filled with verses explicitly instructing Muslims to slay the unbelievers. Read them. Read them in context. See the mental gymnastics involved every time the mantra Islam is peace is uttered. Hearing what Bin Laden has said in countless interviews, fatwas, and grainy videos, can anyone really say that his actions do not stem directly from Islam and the Quran? The following are just a few kernels I picked out of the bag of Bin Laden references to God:

I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God. Our fight now is against the Americans. (Wikiquote)

Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God. (PBS)

For this and other acts of aggression and injustice, we have declared jihad against the US, because in our religion it is our duty to make jihad so that God’s word is the one exalted to the heights. (PBS)

The flip-side is that some use the undeniable blood on hands of Islam as justification for bigotry.

It is not bigotry to speak ill of Islam, especially considering the harm it has done. It is not bigotry to be fearful of someone or something, whether it be justified fear or not. It is bigotry to discriminate against innocent individuals for simply belonging to a group, to deny those people the rights we all enjoy, to commit violence against them.

The controversy that arose following news that an Islamic Center was being planned to go up on privately owned property in the general vicinity of Ground Zero is an easy example of a blatant attempt to take away the rights of others. Do we really want to start ignoring the right of the people to freely exercise their religion? (I ask this mainly of the majority Christians that made up the outspoken opposition.)

Islam is the problem. Some Muslims are the problem. I see no reason to shy away from saying this, and no reason to exaggerate it.

ITAS is now on Google+. You can join in the conversation and “hangout” by going to http://gplus.to/AtheistsStudio, or you can find the new icon in the social section of the sidebar!

If you need an invite, I have 150 available here.

The sticker above was leading the pack (by a lot) before Hement Mehta encouraged readers to vote for the second place sticker, which doesn’t include the motto.

PZ also mentioned the poll and a repeat-voting campaign on the Cleveland Freethinkers Facebook page cropped up. Soon the numbers were close—very close.

The result? God got voted out of Ohio!

Well, sort of—it’s just a stupid sticker and the motto remains. A victory nonetheless. Congratulations, secular Ohio!

On show 203 of Common Sense, “Upgrading the Electorate,” released July 20, Dan gives us the following in the last five minutes:

I know it seems like we’ve had this internet around forever, but because presidential elections—which are the really big ones that most americans get all hyped up about—only happen every four years, we haven’t really had that many presidential election since the world wide web became something that people, you know, by and large used ubiquitously. We haven’t had a ton of time to have the really creative people amongst us figure out really good uses for this internet to keep us politically informed and aware—really creative ways to do it. I mean, if you want to get voting information there’s all sorts of sites, but i’m talking about like, wouldn’t it be interesting—and there may actually be a site out there like this, but I’m thinking about something that’s eventually on everybody’s bookmark the way Google and Wikipedia and Dictionary.com and those places are, right? A site where you could go and the first page starts asking you questions about what you care about and what you think is important, so that by the time your three clicks into this webpage the stuff you’re looking at on the pages is stuff you care about. And then you start clicking around, “I like this, I don’t like that, I like this.” And eventually the very end, you know, boom boom boom boom, you get to see the candidate who’s running who most scores, you know, highly on the things you care about, the way you want.

Interesting idea, yeah? Well two days later, AmericansElect.org launched. The following is from te website:

Start by building your profile and identifying your colors, not just red or blue, but your true colors. The more you define your views, the more unique and vivid your palate will become. Maybe you’re light purple. Maybe you’re turquoise. Maybe you’re lime green. Choose where you stand on each of the issues and find out.

But don’t stop there because Americans Elect is just getting started. Soon you’ll be able to join discussion groups, connect with others and share the topics you care about most. You’ll also have the option to search a variety of candidates to find someone who matches your values, preferences and goals for the country. You might only be a 40% match with your neighbors or a 55% match with your state, but wouldn’t you want to match close to a 100% with your president?

In actuality, Americans Elect goes much further than Dan suggested. Users sign on as delegates and will actually choose a ticket to appear on the ballot in all 50 states for the 2012 presidential election.

It’s very cool and I’d recommend signing up and answering the questions. The site is in it’s infancy now, but looks promising! You can read more about it from Thomas Friedman.

Anytime I hear “organic foods” my skeptical ears perk up. Not because I am opposed to the consumption of organic foods (I’m quite sure I eat plenty of it myself, whether I know it or not) or because I think it’s not as good as conventional agriculture, but because I think purported benefits that using these overpriced products has on the environment and health are greatly exaggerated when they are not completely made up. I also think the labeling of a product as organic or natural (and I don’t mean to conflate the two—natural has no legal definition) is more than anything a marketing ploy—a contention that Sawyer himself seems to make. Perhaps I’m guilty of the same with the title of this post (but those are the perils of attempting to be clever).

I won’t go into too much detail on the organic foods debate here. If you’d like to get all the ins and outs, Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com has done the research here and here, and has provided the citations. I’m going to focus on Sawyer’s talk and where he get’s things wrong.

Let me start by saying I agree with Sawyer on some of his fundamental points, such as the problem of obesity and corruption of the organic foods industry. I also realize that the format of TED, while desirable for many reasons, often allows little more than an overview of the speaker’s message and doesn’t provide a Q&A for the speaker to defend their claims. Sawyer as the speaker and I as the critiquer are both put at a disadvantage in this regard. That being said, let us begin.

There’s nothing natural in [American cheese] whatsoever…. There is no product in American cheese that is naturally produced by any animal. True statement.

Is it? One of Sawyer’s main points, which I agree with, is that the terms natural and organic have lost meaning and do little to inform us of what is in a food product labeled as such. How then can he propose to tell us about the “nature” of American cheese? I’d like to know what definition of natural he is using when he makes this claim.

American cheese is made mainly from milk, whey, milk protein, and whey protein—all ingredients most of us would consider “natural” and “naturally produced by animals.” Even the package of what many might consider the most unnatural version of American cheese, Kraft singles, contains these ingredients, and you’ll likely find a similar list on any version you’ll find in the store.

More importantly, the implication that natural = good and unnatural = bad is erroneous, and dangerously so. Try hiking through the woods without a wilderness guide, eating berries along the way, and you might not make it back to tell of your nature walk. And I doubt Sawyer would tell sufferers of diabetes, which he is rightly concerned about, to stop taking their synthetic medication.

I don’t mean to pass judgement on American cheese as either healthy or unhealthy, but Sawyer seems to be confused about it’s makeup and his example serves to only further the confusion over the definition of terms such as natural.

This [popcorn] represents the amount of herbicides, pesticides, growth hormones, my family of four would consume in one year…. 20 lbs a year, in a conventional, commercial diet. Now had this been pesticides I would challenge anybody in this audience to come up here right now and eat a handful of this and tell me it’s not harmful when ingested in small amounts.

I don’t think anyone claiming pesticides are not harmful in small doses would consider a handful to be small. As it turns out, once we break down the analogy it becomes clear that Sawyer simply made up the idea of a handful without any thought (or with willful ignorance) of the actual amount of pesticides an individual would ingest in a single sitting.

The first problem is that he conflates pesticides and growth hormone—two very different things—resulting in an inflated handful, or “small amount.” We’ll let that slide. He continues this inflation by including his family of four in the total amount, then making his challenge apply to individuals. Let’s do some simple math, shall we?

20 lb / 4 persons = 5 lb per person per year

5 lb / 365 days = .014 lb per day

.014 lb / 3 meals (let’s say) = .005 lb

That’s less than 3/4 of an ounce of pesticides and growth hormone combined in one sitting. I’ve never been good at this stuff (in fact, somebody should check my math), but even an English major like myself can see that a handful of that popcorn would weigh substantially more than that. Toss in the fact that a handful of pesticides/growth hormone would certainly weigh a lot more than light, airy popcorn and the whole analogy goes out the window. 3/4 of an ounce of pesticides/growth hormone wouldn’t be anywhere close to a handful. Keep in mind, we haven’t even investigated whether that initial 20 lb a year is even accurate.

This exceptionally egregious—and I’m being generous when I say—distortion of the facts is more than just shoddy math, it’s blatant dishonesty. Sawyer presumably took the time to look up the numbers and craft a demonstration in which he purposefully inflates, conflates, and makes a specious comparison in order to sway distracted audience members to ignore the facts—or so it seems to me. And the facts are that public perception that pesticides and growth hormone are hazardous in the quantities consumed has been influenced by politics and is NOT supported  by the scientific research.

One of our favorite collaborators is Farmer Lee Jones, on screen, from Chef’s Garden in Huron, Ohio. His farm exemplifies the most stringent, sustainable, and green business practices of any farmer we know. And like us, they are completely transparent about those practices… A couple great farmer friends of mine, whose produce is of no less quality of Farmer Lee Jones, would love to be certified Organic, but they simply can’t afford it. I know for a fact they do not use chemicals.

I contacted The Chef’s Garden and inquired about their use of pesticides and fertilizers. After getting passed around a bit, I was told an owner would call me back. I haven’t received that call yet, but if I do I’ll be sure to include an update here.

The fact is many of these farmer friends Sawyer speaks of probably use organic pesticides and they almost certainly use organic fertilizers. To say these are not chemicals—regardless of how those chemicals are arrived at—is just false. My guess is that he is probably referring only to synthetic chemicals. Perhaps because he believes the word chemical only applies to unnatural things, which we know means they must be bad. Whether it’s from manure, worm castings, and guano (organic fertilizer) or extracted from the air, rocks, and ocean (synthetic fertilizer), you still end up with the same chemical load of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate.

I sympathize with Sawyer’s quest to make food healthier, but in the end he just gets too many things wrong, resulting in a talk that is at best, lazy and at worst, dishonest. He would do better to educate himself on the scientific research that is available and use that to get his message across without resorting to sensationalism an deceptive tactics.