Fifty Billion Shades of Grey

There is an argument I hear a lot from delusional idiots like Ray Comfort and his ilk.  They make the point that even a kindergartener can plainly see that evolution is false and "God" is real.  I often get puzzled by why they use this argument...  are they really suggesting that we should base all of scientific fact on the cognitive capacity of a 6-year-old?  The thing is it's not even rare or confined to denial of evolution.  The insipid food blogger, Vani Hari, AKA "Food Babe" -- someone who ranks among the most dangerously stupid people in the country (which is quite an achievement in a world in which Louie Gohmert exists) -- once put out a little sound bite that "if a 3rd grader can't pronounce it, don't eat it."  Her adversary, Yvette d'Entremont, who uses the tongue-in-cheek name of "Science Babe", was quite quick to respond with her own sound bite: "don't base your diet on the pronunciation skills of an 8-year-old."

To those of us who have functioning brain cells, it would seem more than a little bit silly to ever think that decisions about something as complex and nuanced as personal health should be so cut and dry as "all chemicals are dangerous"...  or that quantum mechanics "proves" the existence of the afterlife, when life itself is so ill-defined...  or that climate change is clearly false because there's snow in your driveway.  It's so obvious that god is real because evolution isn't obvious!  Isn't that obvious?

It's obvious to me that your search for the obvious only obviates obliviousness.

The Theory of "Intelligent Valuation"

I reject the economic theory of inflation.  That's right.  I firmly believe deep in my heart that all currencies were created with their real values by intelligent valuators.  Inflationists will have you believe that real values of currencies have changed over time and that our modern reality is just the current state of that ever-transient change.  But were any of them there to see it happen?  These so-called economists will go so far as to suppress the teaching of Intelligent Valuation in schools so that our children will all be converted to their beliefs.  It's time that people learn that Inflationism isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In this post, I'll be highlighting the flaws that the inflationists don't want you to know.  I will be taking the method of tearing down a lot of the common arguments they spew and illustrating countless counterexamples to stand as evidence that intelligent valuation explains the reality better.  Sure, the inflationists will try to confuse you with all their talk of consumer price indices, Giffen goods, demand pull, and cost push.  They're all just ad hoc hypotheses that are built on the faith-based assumption that intelligent valuation can't be true.

On the Fear of Being Wrong

Recently, the anti-vaccine crowd got a taste of reality with a series of necessarily preventable outbreaks that prove that they are a harmful crowd that stupidly denies science with the end result of causing death and disease.  In the microcosm of a single topic, these people are every bit as anti-science and anti-fact as evolution-denying religious cretins*, or anti-GMO nutters.  To be clear, I am not saying that these groups are equal when you generalize across the entire spectrum of science denial, as there are certain groups that reject more scientific principles than others do.  Rather, I'm saying that when you look at the characteristics of abject ignorance of the pertaining subjects, the outright rejection of the evidence, the intransigence with respect to their opponents (vividly illustrated by their preference to hurl accusations rather than actually form a cogent argument), and the apparent belief that their lies are more likely to be true if they're more extreme and terrifying... All of that is basically the same for every science denial movement.

In arguing against these sorts of reality-hating troglodytes, we're most likely to fight back with the real facts on the subject often times because those are the things that we as critical thinkers and rationalists would value most of all.  It is easy to forget, though, that a large part of the reason we do value such things is because we are critical thinkers to begin with, and for those who are not, it just doesn't have any major impact.  A science denier isn't denying it because he or she thinks the facts are really in question, but because he doesn't think something is a fact unless he agrees with it.  The science denier belongs to social groups that hold certain ideas to be beyond reproach, and so anything that dares to challenge that is automatically false because it doesn't fit what they already convinced themselves is known to be true.  The truth is a hard pill to swallow, and the most bitter truth of them all is the one that says you're wrong.

Beyond Logic Lies... NOTHING

I briefly mentioned in my diatribe on astrology that I could dedicate an entire blog post to one particular argument.  Specifically, the argument that certain delusional beliefs are "beyond logic."  While it came up in the context of astrology and tarot card readings, I'm pretty sure we've all heard this dodge with respect to things like "spirit science" and most certainly theistic belief.  It's a convenient little cop-out for people who feel that the burden of proof is a yoke too heavy to wear.  Rather than actually try to back up their beliefs or pretend there is any substance to them, it is easier to proclaim by fiat that the rules of rational discourse don't apply to them.  It's also particularly amusing that they don't just say that logic and reason aren't applicable, but that they're "beyond" logic...  as if to imply that being reasonable and applying some measure of sensibility is beneath one who believes in bullshit.  While the example that I'm referencing was brought up in regards to astrology, it's just as common in nearly every nonsensical belief.  New age, "spirit science", religion, alt-med woo-woo, and anything that carries the hallmark of Deepak Chopra.

You've probably heard it in several extraordinarily patronizing forms.  "You can't begin to understand XXXXX with logic."  "YYYY is above the limits of mere human reasoning."  "There's more to life than evidence and logic and all that."  "You're too dependent on your science and facts."  "There are things about the universe we cannot begin to understand with our limited reasoning."  And so on and on...  and on...  and on.  You might even occasionally see the roundabout form of "for those who believe, all things are possible" -- which is essentially saying that whatever they're selling works beautifully so long as you're gullible.  It's especially funny to see how they try to make it sound as if it's the rational thinker who has the problem, and not them.  Is there really such a thing as "beyond" logic?  Well, perhaps... if you want to spit on the very idea of true and false.

Dialogues with Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 3

This is a little switch from the prior entries in the series, but still fitting in the theme.  My previous two episodes involved religion and religious beliefs as the core topics of discussion.  This one is more on the alt-med end of the spectrum, mainly regarding anti-vaccine and autism-related nuttery.  Nonetheless, I'm still dealing with a hopeless delusional idiot here.  Let that be a reminder that idiocy of this scale is not limited to religion alone, and that this blog is about all kinds of stupidity.  It's things like this that make it bear mentioning that the moniker of "grumpy anti-theist" isn't enough by itself.  I'm "anti-" all kinds of insufferable stupidity.

There are several sub-movements within the set of alternative "medicine" believers, with a relatively minor amount of crossover between them.  It's not necessarily the case that someone who is anti-vaccine is also a believer in Ayurveda, or that someone who buys into homeopathy is also a reiki healing fanatic.  That's not to say, though, that such people don't exist.  In this case, I'm dealing with one such person.  It is pretty clear as things carry on that this person wasn't drawn to alternative "medicine" (read : quackery) because he really found them believable on their own terms, but because he was so staunchly opposed to real medicine that anything that was different was inherently better.

This conversation was taking place on an online forum for a site that is ostensibly about video games (one for which I was formerly a contributing editor for their press outlet back when I was still working in the games industry), but like many forums, they have sections dedicated to "off-topic" or "general" discussion, and topics like politics, current events, "new cool stuff" was always going around.  While I'm no longer super-active with this forum or the site that owns it, I still appear now and then.  This one started with a guy who was posting a lot of anti-medicine nonsense shortly after Steve Jobs died...  I ignored it for a while, and the thread carried on, but after a few posts in, it also started including some anti-vaccine and all the vaccines-cause-autism bullcrap that rested on the outlandish idea that a former Playboy bunny knows more about human biochemistry than all medical doctors in the world combined.

A New Theory of Computing

Anybody reading this blog knows I'm a coder.  I've been doing it for almost 30 years starting out from little toy programs straight out of tutorials to publishing papers on computer graphics to 7 years in gaming and 4 years in motion pictures...  and now embedded graphics platforms.  I've been around the block and gotten extremely jaded over the years.  Every experience I've been through has its moments which ring loudly with the words "Don't let this happen to you."  I could tell you stories about the way I've worked for people who were so utterly dense they believed that an octagon has 5 sides (yes, I'm being serious), and worked on codebases that were so riddled with cyclical dependencies that you couldn't link anything unless you compiled everything twice.  There is just so much power in the tools we have, but when you use that power irresponsibly, you get the kind of crappy software so many of us feel every package is.  Then I stumbled upon something new that really revolutionized my view of computing.  I want to share it with you today.

In one sense, it is entirely new, but in another sense, it is a rebirth of old ideas first hinted at as a deeper truth which underlay the works of al-Khwarizmi, Aryabhatta et. al.  It's really a very simple series of principles that many of the great technical minds out there like Bill Gates, Alan Turing, Steve Wozniak, Donald Knuth, Linus Torvalds, Dennis Ritchie and others have known for years.  It is something that the mainstream software engineering industry doesn't want you to know!  It is a truly intuitive, natural, and holistic approach to coding and it will completely overturn everything you thought you knew about writing software!  It is not a fad like eXtreme Programming, or Scrum, or anything else that appears as the new big thing every so often only to disappear shortly after.  And unlike all the charlatans out there, this isn't totally fake, and I'm going to give you the real secret right here, right now.  I am not being paid to provide this, nor am I trying to sell you a book.  This is free of charge and available to anyone and everyone.  The secrets will really be revealed here and now, just below the jump.

Non Sequiturs as a Cultural Rule

I'm sure, if any of you follow any of the other atheist blogs, you've probably seen by now the recent furor over a textbook being sold in Indian schools which attempts to espouse the virtues of vegetarianism.  The grounds for their advocacy are mostly religious, and among the awesomely hilarious arguments they use include that God did not include meat among Adam & Eve's diet (because death didn't exist until after the fall, this apparently includes the death of animals).  Among other things, the book claims that the Japanese live very long because they're largely vegetarian...  Huh??  That claim, of course, is patently false, as Japanese eat more fish per capita than any other culture.  Hell, I've been to Osaka, and I was at my wit's ends trying to find any real substantial -- read : "meals", and not snacks/desserts -- items that were really vegetarian (shojin-ryori) to eat half the time.

The one really bizarre claim that stood out was the claim that people who eat meat are more likely to curse, lie, cheat, steal, commit violent crimes, rape, you name it.  In other words, eating meat apparently causes you to be a bad person....  or so the writers are brazenly willing to insinuate.

Now to anyone who reads that sort of claim, they're sure to scratch their heads and wonder how on Earth one follows from the other.  That's because it doesn't.  It never possibly could.  But then, this sort of non sequitur is nothing new.

GMO Foods and Prop 37 Malarkey

There is a lot of hullabaloo going on throughout California right now regarding Proposition 37.  This is a measure that will require foods that are made using genetically modified (GMO) crops to be labeled as such.  So I have some mixed feelings about this whole thing.  There are a lot of strong arguments that can be made for or against this measure, but the problem is that no one seems to be making them.  There is very little out there which does not constitute a weak or even sometimes entirely false argument for either side of the equation here.  I can only say that there is a great deal about this whole thing which is just wrapped up in stupidity.

Ultimately, though, the big effect that Prop 37 would have if passed would be a shift away from mass-market products towards the organically-grown products (at least within California where the law applies).  This is why pretty much every supporter of Prop 37 is an exclusively organic food producer and/or an activist group of some sort.  Plenty of companies like Kraft engage in both conventional and organic practices and do not support 37.  However, while you know my position on organic food already (i.e. that it's basically a big fat sham), it doesn't change the fact that people are gullible enough to fall for it.  More importantly, GMO is something that is so poorly understood that it is going to be the subject of fear, which means that people are going to shy away from that fearsome stuff just because they don't know any better.  And this is why I'm not 100% in favor.  People are just going to see it as "Frankenfood" and react in irrational fear.

Transparency on the part of the producers is the only strong argument, but 37 is not that.

Martial Woo-Woo.

I, like most males out there, have a certain interest for the martial arts.  Even those who never learn a bit of it are at least generally aware enough to find it pretty cool.  The influx of fight flicks from Hong Kong cinema made everybody everywhere want to do chop-socky movies.  Sure it gave us everything from Black Belt Jones to some abomination of a Bollywood flick simply called Karate, but it was hard to escape the draw.  I particularly hold Bruce Lee in pretty high regard, as does pretty much anyone.  What really separated him from others, though, is not just his skill and physical presence, though.  The real mark that he made is that he was one of the first to really intellectualize martial arts.

I know this may seem a bit odd considering the movie image we have of the guy who waxed philosophical about water going into a cup and thereby becoming the cup.  Or the senior in Enter the Dragon who tells one of his junior trainees to feel rather than to think.  If you look at the work he published, and especially at the series of volumes that were collected from his notes after his death, you'll find a pretty hefty amount of collective research, and descriptions of the kinematics of various motions.  There's more than simply saying "here's how you throw a punch"...  it's "here's how you throw a punch, and here's why it works."  Here was a guy who not merely trained and worked out, he analyzed the patterns and structures of several styles, he consumed and distilled the theoretical foundations of Western sports including boxing and bodybuilding, and actually did the hard work and research on the subject well before anybody knew him as the guy who created Jeet Kune Do.

When I studied both aikido and kenjutsu, I did so on the cheap at a community college, and my shihan was a reasonably well-educated lady.  She was the sort to get into the kinematic explanations behind the motions and not into the mysticism of flow of ki/qi energy and so on.  Rather than talk about the harmonizing of souls, she would talk about orthogonal forces to change the momentum of a moving attacker.  But that's actually a little out of the ordinary.  And in fact, when she was stumped for a really solid physics-based explanation, that's when even she would resort to some weird babble like "[imagining] yourself as a tree," and what not.

I imagined myself as a tree and then I expressed imaginary annoyance at the imaginary dog imaginarily peeing on me.  Maybe that was the secret.

Order Now! Pseudoscientists Are Standing By!

Yesterday, I saw a rather interesting claim in a mattress commercial.  We've all seen the ads for things like memory foam pads and how it "relieves" pressure points that inner spring mattresses cause.  This one had a far more interesting claim.  This one happened to be some mattress that apparently had a gel top-layer, apparently to act a little bit like a waterbed without having to be as expensive or heavy.  So, like every exotic mattress material, though, you'd expect the advertisers claim that it adjusts to your body...  Not this one!  No.  It automatically bio-adjusts to your body!

It...  bio-adjusts?  Bio?  The mattress is alive?  Will it become self-aware?  And here I thought bedbugs might have been an issue, but the beds themselves could be coming to get us.

Oh, but that's just the least of it.  There was another ad I saw on the sidebar of another blog about a waterbed.  And that one distinguishes itself from normal beds by pointing out the value of waterbed mattresses.  The distinction?  "Nothing is more natural than water!"  Wait...  what?  What does that even mean?  We had varying degrees of "natural-ness"?  I guess that means that there's a lot of stuff out there we can't consider quite so natural like trees and air.  Maybe we should also consider things that aren't really substances.  Radiation, for instance...  how much more or less artificial is it than say, electricity?

Maybe instead of a waterbed, we should have a bed filled with all-natural homeopathic medicine...  Oh, wait...

Christian Dogma Gone "Deepak Chopra"

It's normal in the course of dealing with creationist dimwits that people are going to reject science and pretty much all facts.  Hell, the entire Republican party is about that.  Even those right-wingers who seem to have some semblance of sanity like Ron Paul throw their hats into the crazy ring on scientific matters.  All the members of the CSE, DI, or whatever fountainhead of creationist stupidity you can imagine all have some fundamentally anti-science bend to them.  Science and intellectual formality are illegal in their minds.  So that's why you always hear these sorts of self-defeating arguments like saying that "science always changes, but the Bible remains the same"...  which in turn only demonstrates that religion is all about never learning from mistakes and simply digging your heels deeper in the mud after the mud has been smeared on your face.

Hinduism and many of its offshoots have always seemed to have had a different approach to taking on scientific discovery.  Rather than taking some new discovery and shouting "that's HERESY!! BURN THE FOUL WRETCH!!!", Hindu apologists always seem to reinterpret some bit of religious literature (or create new literature on the spot) to say that ancient philosophers knew it all the time.  One thing about Hinduism, being what I call "disorganized religion", is that people create random tales all the time that just become accepted as canonical within a localized community, and in essence, everything becomes ancient and traditional because nobody remembers how these legends made their way into the ether of random noise.  As such, it is very easy to just find one or twist its otherwise vague meaning to match what science says and posture in that "I told you so" kind of way.  A good example of this would be how people twist the Dasha Avatara (10 avatars) of Vishnu into something that shows ancient people already knew about evolution...  citing that the order of the avatars vaguely resembles the evolutionary line of humans (fish, aquatic reptile, terrestrial mammal, half-man-half-beast, pygmy/hobbit, followed by a series of homo sapiens)...

Modern scientific knowledge, especially quantum mechanics, happens to get a lot more detailed, and thus a lot more specific, and a lot more difficult to comprehend, which makes it hard to really fit it in so nicely with ancient pseudo-intellectual ramblings.  But then you have guys like Deepak Chopra who found that because it's so difficult to grasp and even serious scientists will tell you its virtually impossible to explain in layman's terms, you can pretty much make anything sound right by taking advantage of the general public's lack of understanding.

Well, it seems Christians are also taking a page out of Chopra's playbook.  Apparently, quantum theory proves everything Jesus ever said...

History Channel must change its name to Comedy Central

It is a funny thing when the single most trusted source of news in the country (and quite possibly the most trustworthy source in the world) is Jon Stewart.  In some ways, it's all but inevitable, because as a comedian, it's part of his job to tell it like it is.  He also comes off much more impartial than most people because he is just as prone to rip on the likes of Obama for double-talk bullcrap to hide a failure as he is to rip on the likes of Rick Santorum for...  being Rick Santorum.  So all of a sudden, you find the comedy on Comedy Central to be worthy of note not simply because somebody said something funny, but because somebody made a point which is just so true.  It's something you tend not to find on other channels. 

Once upon a time, I rather enjoyed the History Channel.  Though the schedule was largely dominated by the show Modern Marvels at the time, I would still have categorized that as "history" since it at least addressed how various industries have progressed over the years.  Some time after that, though, it degraded from the History Channel to the History-of-World-War-II Channel.  I'll admit I was fairly impressed when they apparently displayed rare color footage of Nazi rallies.  That at least was a significant find.  Nonetheless, it more than slightly saddens me what has become of it.  It's become a sea of pointless reality shows about the mundane lives of blue-collar rednecks and bizarre competitions.  Sure, there's Top Gear, but the American version still pales before the Brits.  I suppose I could say the same for all the networks out there -- Discovery has also become a sad collection of meaningless reality shows...  TLC went from Discovery Lite to being all about home improvement and psychics...  G4 was once a channel about gaming, and the most frequent show on there now seems to be Cops.  Lately, when History Channel does show something to do with history, chances are 50-50 that it's going to be about the last stand of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

History Channel, however, still has a saving grace for me in the random noise that makes up its content that makes the channel worth watching -- and that's the series titled Ancient Aliens.  Don't get me wrong;  I don't find it thought-provoking or worthy of consideration in a serious academic sense.  It's just outstandingly hilarious.  It's like a never-ending Monty Python sketch, except these people are actually dead serious.

More CTMU Nonsense...

It has been a while since I've posted something here, and that is the price of academia combined with illness.  But I probably would have gotten over said illness sooner if I hadn't worked through every day of it without much if any sleep (including the weekends).

I spent the better part of the month until recently doing something that creationists don't do -- working on actual academic literature.  Granted, my field is not among the hard sciences, but the work we were doing was pretty darn interesting.  I can't really go into detail on the subject matter because we barely hit the submission deadline and it's still in review as I write this, and the work here is due to be patented by my employer.  Nonetheless, the first author is an intern I co-mentored over the summer who will also be using this work as part of his doctoral dissertation.  I spent most of the time adapting and generalizing his quite specific work to other applications and running countless simulations which became test results for the paper itself.  It's in the nature of these types of jobs that you also find bugs and issues as you go along, and Murphy's Law dictates that these things always seem to come up late in the game.  So as I was fixing all these issues and then re-running and re-generating datasets, everything just came down to the wire after endless nights without sleep.  I remember all the other times I had to go through this sort of thing, and it's always been the same story...  except I was an undergrad the last time.

Anyway, that means that in addition to not having any time to work on the blog, I haven't had much time to work on the book, and I only managed to solve some problems with my personal research because it just happened to come up in the course of testing some hypotheses (ooh! another thing creationists don't do).  I also haven't had any time to continue reading through Chris Langan's bullcrap.  What I've managed to get through so far seems to lead down the path of a sort of divine solipsism...  incredibly stupid, and inherently unprovable.  At the very least, I did want to respond to a defender of the idea who posted in the comments on my prior CTMU post.  As his response was very long, I figured I'd put my reply in an actual blog post.

Chris Langan's "theory"

Pretty much every person out there who tries to support creationism on some claimant scientific and/or logical basis have one thing in common -- all of them lie, distort, and make a mockery of reality in order to get the job done.  I've had a number of whirls at the joke that is William Demsbski, and I allude quite a bit to core failures he makes in the nonsense he publishes when I did my post about creationists and their screwy ideas about math.  Well, recently, someone pointed me to this fellow named Chris Langan.  I'd never heard of the guy until then, and I really didn't care.  Among the reasons given as to why I should consider taking what this guy says seriously is because his IQ has been tested as being around 195-210...  Ummm...  okay.

Well, I tried looking up what I could about the fellow, and actual examples were pretty sparse.  I did find a rather dismal performance on 1 vs 100...  a show I had never even seen prior to this, but whatever.  It's not really fair to judge someone's intellect based on knowledge of trivia, as it is called 'trivia' for a reason.  But I think it is also worth mentioning that even if I am to take his intellectual capacity at face value, that doesn't really serve in any way to validate anything he has to say.  So already, the fact that the man's work was suggested to me on the basis of what can effectively be called an invocation of the argument from authority fallacy does not bode well.

Anyway, the so-called "theory" I was pointed to and suggested to read (by someone who had not read a word of it himself, of course) was something that Langan calls his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" or CTMU.  To be honest, I've yet to completely read through this work, as even a small section reveals massive wrongness within.  I guess I can probably agree with the theists on one thing, though : This work may well be the very best that theists can offer.

... and it's still eminently moronic.

In search of Scientific Journalism

There are very few cases out there of science in the media which I can actually take as reliable.  Those of you out there who have read some of my earlier rants know how badly I wanted to eviscerate the fools who wrote about DCA and cancer treatment.  There is a general trend I find when it comes to science stories in the mainstream media.  They tend to be obscene scare stories, or stories of outrageous new breakthroughs.  Occasionally, you get something about strange occurrences or weird anomalies, but they are pretty silent entries on the back pages and nobody ever really remembers them.  The stuff that makes the front page are either stories that say how terrifying something is, or stories that say how amazingly wonderful something is.

Your iPhone could be giving you brain cancer!  But acai berry cures Alzheimer's!  The Large Hadron Collider will cause a black hole to form in the center of the Earth...  and they predict that it will happen on December 21, 2012.  Make sure to stock up on chocolate and red wine, because they will prevent all illnesses with their "essential" flavonols.  Don't you have a flavonol deficiency?  Well, it shouldn't bother you anyway, because every vaccine you take is full of poison!

It amazes me at times when you see a news program where someone will have a doctor interviewed, who has the benefit of decades of research, large-scale data, longitudinal studies, and scientific development on his side...  and then they will ensure that his time on air is shared with some horseshit peddling activist whose knowledge of medicine lies somewhere in the realm of a tapeworm's understanding of quantum mechanics...  or maybe even as poor as Michele Bachmann's grasp of anything that happens to actually be true.

Wherein I cite a different problem.

Not that long ago, I brought you a ridiculing look at WorldNet Daily's hilarious review of the film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  That review of the review can be seen again by following the blog link here -- Worldnuttery on Film Once Again.  Well, at the time, though, I had not actually seen the film.  Obviously, the first time I ridiculed one of WND's reviews, I had seen the film -- obviously, I would have considering that I worked on it and have my name in the credits.  This time around, I only got around to seeing the film much later...  and of course, for free (one of the perks of working in movies is that people actually share their stuff for review ...  It's SOCIALISM!!!)

Well, they had a rather laughable complaint based on the absence of a "Monkey Fall" and a "Monkey Moses" leading the "Monkey Jews" out of Egypt followed by a "Monkey Jesus" being crucified to absolve all "Monkey sins."  Okay, not quite, but pretty close.  Well, I had no problem with any of that...  or the lack thereof, to be precise.  The idea of a mother chimp being protective of her young is hardly a shock, nor is it in any way a misrepresentation of how actual apes would behave.

No, you're talking to the Grumpy Anti-theist here.  Overall, I rather liked the film, and I liked how it tied into the original series.  The space travel aspect of the film looked on the surface like a meaningless detail, but it actually serves to explain how the first film even happened, making this a nice prequel that wraps things up with a bow.  Tack on little niceties, like a reprisal of the "damn dirty ape" line from the original Charlton Heston flick, and you get something quite entertaining.  My only issue with the film is the way science is represented.

There is Only Nonsense in the Stars

I felt the need to put this up as I spent some time expressing my unbounded grumpiness when I saw this post on a mailing list at my office.  For the sake of protecting the innocent, I will leave out the original post and merely describe its message, posting only my rant.

Basically, a certain person had recommended a particular astrologer who offers his readings for an apparently reasonable fee (about 35% less than the average astrologer)...  and described this individual as a "No-Nonsense Astrologer."  Now, to those of you who have a little understanding of my character...  I think you know how I would react to such a description.

Of course, I prefaced the message by pointing out that there was no way I could ever possibly restrain my boundless anger at such a proposition.  What follows is the bulk content of the rant.  Removed are only the points where I preface the message by pointing out the necessity of it, and the closing statements which were more specific to the content of the original post.  The rest is entirely generic in where I eviscerate the very concept of astrology itself, and could apply to any message about recommendations thereof.