*Formerly, the CORI Bulletin
for Members of
In this issue:
Interview with Daniel Dennett; Profile of Penn
Jillette; Articles
re Aloe Vera & Male Nipples; "Fallacious Assaults" ;
PLUS a
movie featuring a conversation with RICHARD
FEYNMAN!
YOURS FOR
“What you think you know
may not be so.” [Rev. Art]
Editor’s Note: Your Digest for April is a bit tardy. I’ve been
running late a lot lately – but I will endeavor to snap out of my
post-viral funk and do better…
(Click on any image to EXPAND IT)
QUOTE / UNQUOTE
"People in the long run are going to do more to promote
peace than governments." – [Dwight D. Eisenhower]
"It's when you're safe at home that you wish you were
having an adventure. When you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at
home."
[
"I remember another gentle visitor from the
heavens - he came in peace and then died, only to come back to life, and his
name was E.T., the extra-terrestrial. I loved that little guy."
[Reverend Lovejoy, “The Simpsons”]
UNSUBSCRIBED: FOUNDING CORI MEMBER, TOBY GAUNT
Toby
served as treasurer for Central Ohioans for Rational
Inquiry (CORI) for several terms. Toby served on several occasions as guest
lecturer or discussion facilitator for the organization. In particular, we
will miss his gusto – and his humor. - Ed
Excerpted
from the Columbus Dispatch: Abbot "Toby" S. Gaunt, Professor emeritus, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal
Biology (previously Zoology), The Ohio State University, Columbus,
Prof. Gaunt was born in Methuen, MA and
was a graduate of Amherst College (BA) and the University of Kansas (Ph.D). He
was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of
the American Ornithologists' Union. He was an avid music lover, bird watcher, fly
fisherman, and Buckeye fan, and his wit and intelligence will always be
cherished. A celebration of his life is to be arranged at a later time.
CORRESPONDENCE
Rev. Art,
I am a former member of C.O.R.I. When searching the web for C.O.R.I. I could
not find a web page. My former link for the group was invalid, it seems. Your
site is the closest thing I could find (I remember your name).
___________ Shawn
Olson www.shawnolson.net
www.artisticnetwork.net
From the Editor:
I remember you, Shawn, and I’m sure our other former members recall your
journalistic efforts on behalf of CORI. While
the organization has formally quit business (at the end our 9th year
of bologna detection) due to a dwindling membership, we continue to keep in
touch. I continue to post the Skeptics’
Digest – or the “Son of the CORI Bulletin” - on this website. I am unable to link to the old CORI website. You’re
encouraged to keep in touch and let us know what is going on in your life these
days. Thanks for your interest. – Ed.
DISSECTING GOD
Philosopher Daniel Dennett
argues that
By Gordy Slack - Salon
Daniel C. Dennett
is a big man with a big appetite for intellectual fights. A celebrated
philosophy professor and the director of the Center for
Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, he is best known for his arguments that human
consciousness and free will boil down to physical processes. When theologians,
New Agers and other philosophers and scientists complain about scientific
reductionism -- the effort to reduce everything, including human behavior and
spirituality, to material properties -- they are complaining about Dennett. To
which he retorts: "'Reductionism' has become a meaningless code word for 'I
don't like that theory.'"
In 1995, with "
In his new book, "Breaking the Spell:
Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," Dennett provokes readers to examine
religion as a product of evolution rather than a transcendental force. Research
into religion, he says, should be "based on empirical studies with all the
controls in place, just like in medicine," and draw from biology,
psychology, history and art. "I appreciate that many readers will be
profoundly distrustful of the tack I am taking here," he writes.
"They will see me as just another liberal professor trying to cajole them
out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right about that -- that's
what I am, and that's exactly what I am trying to do."
In person, Dennett is imposing. He is tall,
bald and barrel-chested, with a great white beard not unlike
What spell are you trying to break?
I'm proposing we break the spell that creates
an invisible moat around religion, the one that says, "Science stay away.
Don't try to study religion." But if we don't understand religion, we're
going to miss our chance to improve the world in the 21st century. Just about
every major problem we have interacts with religion: the environment,
injustice, discrimination, terrible economic imbalances and potential genocide.
In our own country, the religious attitudes of people are clearly interfering
with the political discussion. So if we fail to understand why religions have
the effects they do on people, we will screw up our efforts to solve these
problems.
Why do you say religion interacts with the
world's major problems?
Because people decide what to do, and whom to
listen to, and what to take seriously, partly on the basis of their religious
convictions and practices. So things that might seem reasonable and attractive
solutions may not be remotely feasible without a great deal of carefully guided
presentation to those who must live with the policies.
Some people would argue that by dissecting
religion you are destroying it.
Yes, some people are afraid that if you look
too closely you'll break the spell of religion and make it impossible for
people to gain whatever benefits come from it. But I've considered the
worst-case scenarios and just don't find this to be a persuasive argument. The
cat is out of the bag. The confrontation between religious faith and the modern
scientific world is underway and it's not going to stop. The question is, Are
we going to carefully and conscientiously study the phenomena or close our eyes
and put our fingers in our ears and just go on a roller-coaster ride?
Studying religious faith sounds as futile
as studying love. You either feel it or you don't.
The relationship that many people have with
religion is basically a kind of love. This has to be appreciated and understood
and not denied or belittled. One doesn't interfere with a love relationship
lightly. But that doesn't mean that it can't be studied closely. Certainly the
wave of research on sex, by Kinsey and
Masters and Johnson, was deeply upsetting to many people, who thought it was a
bizarre intrusion that should never have been made. In retrospect, though, we
learned a lot that has helped us. Sex is as wonderful as ever, or maybe even
better, because we've dispelled a lot of really painful and harmful myths.
Many people say they experience God deep within
themselves. There's nothing you could say that would convince them otherwise.
The question is whether you'd want to.
There's no policy that I've recommended that everybody should be utterly
disillusioned about everything. Look at Santa Claus. Am I in favor of banishing
him? Of course not. But some illusions really do hurt people, either the people
holding them or others. If you have a friend who thinks she is talking to her
dear departed husband, and she is paying some "trance channeler" her
life savings for this illusion, I think we want to say, "No, you're being
defrauded." Even if the illusion does give her comfort.
Are you comparing religious faith to a
belief in channelers?
Well, right now we say, "Hands off all
that is really religious." But what's that? Where do we draw the line
between the scam religions and the real ones? I'm not playing philosopher's
tricks and asking for impossible definitions. I'm quite prepared for this to be
a political process, where we work out the best way to distinguish them. But if
you want to reserve for special treatment some particular practices and
traditions, you're going to have to say what they are and why they deserve such
special treatment.
Don't you think people's faith in God is
more important than their faith in Santa Claus?
Yes, that's why the issue of how, and even
whether, to approach such questions must be very carefully addressed. I decided
that it was important to explore people's faith scientifically, that the risks
we run if we don't are much more pressing than the risks we run if we do.
Are you saying a person is better served
by relinquishing his faith in search of a more rational truth about the
universe?
That's a very good question and I don't claim
to have the answer yet. That's why we have to do the research. Then we'll have
a good chance of knowing whether people are better served by reason or faith.
If society doesn't get its moral
foundation from religion, where will that foundation come from? What will keep
us being good to each other, if not rules laid down by God?
Rules that we lay down ourselves. We've been
doing this for centuries. There've been revisions about what counts as a sin in
God's eyes. It has changed quite a bit since the days of the Old Testament. It
has changed because people thought about it hard and could no longer stomach
some of the old rules and practices and changed their minds. It became
politically obvious that something had to give, and so it has, and will
continue to do so. Now we can continue to expand the circle and get more people
involved, and do it in a less disingenuous way by excising the myth about how
this is God's law. It is our law.
The political consequences of undermining
faith are monumental, spurring riots and killings around the world. Are you --
is science -- willing to take responsibility for these deadly outcomes?
We cannot let any group, however devout,
blackmail us into silence by their expressions of hurt feelings whenever
they feel that we are getting close to the truth. That is what con artists do
when their marks begin to get suspicious, and that is what children do when
they can't have their way, and it should be beneath the dignity of any
religious group to play that card. The responsibility of science is to
safeguard the well-being of those it studies and to tell the truth. If people
insist on taking themselves out of the arena of reasonable political discourse
and mutual examination, they forfeit their right to be heard. There is no
excuse for deliberately insulting anybody, but people who insist on putting
their sensibilities on a hair trigger demonstrate that they prefer pity to
respect.
Does it worry you that American politics
under the current administration have become infused with religion?
It does. The separation of church and state
is very important and is not as uncontroversial today in the
You have "faith"?
By faith, I don't mean an irrational belief.
I've got to leap and secular democracy is the lifeboat I leap to. Somebody else
may think, "If I have to choose between my religion and country," I
choose religion. We're beseeching people in
How does President Bush do on that test?
His religiosity seems quite sincere, but it
may be more of a political display than a real commitment. I hope he's smarter
than he seems! I'd rather he be faking than be deadly earnest about his
conviction that God tells him what to do.
What evidence do we have of an
evolutionary basis for religion?
Nothing persists in the living world without
constant renewal. Religions depend on human brains and bodies just as much as
language and music and art do. It has been designed by evolution and human
religion tinkerers to thrive in the human environment.
Why does religion have such a powerful
hold on us?
Our fundamental instinct -- and this really
is in our genes -- is that whenever something surprising and novel happens, we
say, "Who's there? What do you want?" That's a very good response to
have because maybe what that somebody wants is you. Always being on the lookout
is a sort of built-in alarm system that flavors everything we do.
In every culture, people are inclined to
personify the forces of nature. What do the weather gods want? What does the
sun god want? Out of this bias, built into our nervous systems, comes a machine
of sorts for generating ghosts and phantoms and gods and goddesses and goblins
and imps. That's not religion, that's superstition. But I think that's part of
the biological underpinning of religion.
Are you saying God is a product of our
biology?
I'm saying that if God does not exist, many
of us would believe in him anyway because of the way we have evolved, both
genetically and culturally.
How does evolution contradict the idea of
God as creator?
Probably as far back as Homo habilus, there
was this sense that it takes a big fancy thing to make a less fancy thing. You
never get a horseshoe making a blacksmith, never a pot making a potter, always
the other way around. The trickle-down-from-on-high theory of creation is
extremely natural. It's a way of seeing the world that is probably built right
into our genes.
Then along comes Darwin, who simply shows how
all of that design work, all of that creation, can be done by a process that
has no purpose, no intelligence and no foresight. It is a very strange
inversion of reasoning and it's very upsetting to people to see that something
that seems so obvious is being denied.
Darwin does away with the reason for believing in a divine
creator. This doesn't prove there is no divine creator, but if there is one, it
-- he -- need not have gone to all that trouble because natural selection on
its own would have created all the biological diversity we see.
Some neuroscientists have isolated
spiritual impulses, a belief in God, in the brain's limbic system, the seat of
emotions. Do you agree with them?
I think the pioneering work on this is,
inevitably, too simple to be true. But there may be something to it. In one
sense it is obvious. Everything we believe -- like the fact that the
Earth goes around the sun and that
California -- has its signature in the brain. So of course if
you believe in God, your brain will be somewhat differently arranged -- at the
microscopic level! -- than if you don't believe in God. That just follows from
the fact that the mind is what the brain does.
Tell us the story from your new book about
the ant and the blade of grass.
Suppose you go out in the meadow and you see
this ant climbing up a blade of grass and if it falls it climbs again. It's
devoting a tremendous amount of energy and persistence to climbing up this
blade of grass. What's in it for the ant? Nothing. It's not looking for a mate
or showing off or looking for food. Its brain has been invaded by a tiny
parasitic worm, a lancet fluke, which has to get into the belly of a sheep or a
cow in order to continue its life cycle. It has commandeered the brain of this
ant and it's driving it up the blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle.
That's how this tiny lancet fluke does its evolutionary work.
Is religion, then, like a lancet fluke?
The question is, Does anything like that
happen to us? The answer is, Well, yes. Not with actual brain worms but with
ideas. An idea takes over our brain and gets that person to devote his life to
the furtherance of that idea, even at the cost of their own genetics. People
forgo having kids, risk their lives, devote their whole lives to the
furtherance of an idea, rather than doing what every other species on the planet
does -- make more children and grandchildren.
The capacity of human beings to devote their
energy, time, safety and health to the stewardship of an idea is itself a
biological phenomenon. That's what distinguishes us from all the other species.
We're the only species that can set aside our genetic imperatives and say,
"That's not that important, I've got more important things in mind."
That uniquely human perspective, unknown by any other species, is a gift of
cultural selection.
In an interview with Alan Alda, you said
the key to being happy is to find something larger than yourself and work for
it. What are you working for?
Truth and freedom. These are terrible times
and our ability to destroy the planet has never been greater. But if we can
educate each other, listen to each other and learn more about each other -- and
as long as we can preserve the free-society traditions of informed political
discussions -- I think we have some hope.
the
middlebrow 
PENN JILLETTE (shown with partner Teller)
The magician-comedian-writer's secrets revealed!
By Bryan Curtis - Slate
Penn Jillette's place in show
business is less as a magician or comedian than as a thinker. A very deep
thinker. Consider The Aristocrats, the 2005 documentary he made with
his friend Paul Provenza. The movie emerged out of a series
of late-night discussions between Jillette and Provenza, in which the pair
would sit in restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip, gulping decaffeinated coffee
and discussing (to borrow Jillette's phrase) "the most pretentious shit
possible." For example? "We talk an awful lot about whether you have
to stop at libertarianism or go onto to anarchal capitalism," Jillette
said the other day. Luckily, Jillette and Provenza steered themselves away from
anarchal capitalism (Death to Aristocrats?) and toward the science of
dirty jokes. Out popped The Aristocrats, which had a small theatrical
release but ignited a cultural interest in filth. (The new DVD hovers near the top
of the Amazon.com sales charts.) If The Aristocrats was a celebration
of bawdy free expression and the vanishing art of joke-telling, it was also a
celebration of Penn Jillette's peculiar worldview—something like the academic
art known as radical deconstruction.
Jillette would make for an odd academic.
Standing 6 foot 6 inches, wearing his hair in a ponytail, he
looks like a man who spends a great deal of his time in a bowling alley. His
formal education after high school consists of a stint at the Ringling Bros.
and
Indeed, Jillette has made a career out of
pulling back the curtain. In his Showtime series Bullshit!, which he
hosts with Teller, he investigates everyday scams like heavenly signs appearing
in cheese sandwiches; in his book How To Cheat Your Friends at Poker (written
with Mickey D. Lynn), he explains the art of card-sharking while informing his
readers, "Your loyalty is to neither people nor ideals." But
poker, signs from above, and magic acts seem ripe for deconstruction. The
Aristocrats was a different matter. Comedy, E.B. White contended, can't be
broken into its constituent parts, or else it ceases to be funny. "That
cliché, that truism, is based on the fact that people who know nothing about
comedy will take it apart and make it not funny," says Jillette, who,
along with Provenza, was determined to put the job in the hands of comedy
professionals.
In The Aristocrats, Bob Saget,
Paul Reiser, Sarah Silverman, and others deconstructed the titular joke, each
comedian infusing it with his or her own brand of bowely humor. Somehow, the
exercise was funny. On the DVD, Jillette and Provenza push the conceit even
further: They contribute a commentary track in which they add on yet another
layer of deconstruction, spotlighting the comedians' words, delivery, and the
common notes. "At first glance, it looks like Bob is commenting on the
joke. …" "Fabulous point by Carlin here, this is really important
…" And the strange thing is, this third-generation material (a
deconstruction of a deconstruction of comedy) is still funny.
What motivates Jillette to such heights of
erudition? It may be because he comes from the seedy milieu of magic, which
Jillette has called a "trash art form." Whereas the card manipulator
Ricky Jay has turned to serious scholarship to distance himself from magicians
in cheap suits, Jillette has lashed out at inferior artists. (The Amazing
Kreskin, the renowned "mentalist," is a
"scumbag lying to children.") Moreover, Jillette's itinerant
scholarship seems to be a vestige of his former career as a failed novelist.
Jillette says he set out at 18 (and I'm pretty sure he's serious) to become the
"great existential American writer." While he was an autodidact (he
later wrote a novel), he was no Jack Kerouac, and his literary ambitions gave
way to magic. "I never wanted to be a magician," he once told the Chicago
Sun-Times. "I never wanted to be a comedian. I never wanted to be
onstage. I always had these ideas that were passionately important to me."
Short of producing great fiction, his brain gets emptied on the stage.
Jillette's
motormouth doesn't shut off when the curtain falls. He's a public intellectual
in the most public sense, always on the verge of another revelation. (It's how
he keeps himself and his ideas alive in the press.) In addition to announcing
his libertarianism, he has told reporters that he is devoted to skepticism,
that he is an avowed enemy of Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, and that he is an
atheist—the latter revealed in an essay on National Public Radio's Morning
Edition. ("Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in
family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O ...") In our
conversation, Jillette felt moved to declare that he had devised a method by
which to place every artist in human history into a matrix: separating those
who had genuine skill, those who had genuine passion, and those rarefied
geniuses who had both. In the latter category, he explained, he would place
Johann Sebastian Bach, Pablo Picasso, and the comedian Gilbert Gottfried. He
could go on like this all night—really, he could—but we both felt the
deconstructing had reached its logical endpoint. When I started to thank him
for his time, he replied, "This is what I do!"
DO MALE NIPPLES SERVE A PURPOSE?!
Posted @ Bacon Eating Atheist Jew
…Why do men still have nipples? Why haven't
our bodies evolved to the point where men no longer have nipples? Well,
evolutionary changes usually only occur to adjust to the environment. As far as
breeding is concerned it doesn't matter whether males have nipples or not
because women don't seem to look at nipple size as a type of attraction, thus
men never evolved to the point where they would be removed.
Most mammals have a few vestigial body parts that haven't been removed yet by
evolution. It's nothing to get worked up over, just remember that evolution is
a very slow process.'
And continuing along these lines, author of The
Puzzle, Louis Berman, has a
pretty good theory on how this actually
relates to homosexuality: "male
homosexuality results from an interaction between inborn and social factors,
and that an important inborn factor is low brain masculinization. Read
the full post here .
WHY
CATS DON’T HAVE A SWEET TOOTH
from RATIONALLY SPEAKING by Massimo Pigliucci
April 05, 2006
Cats don’t care for chocolate
and other sweets. Interestingly, neither do their wild cousins, like tigers and
lions. That observation has prompted speculation among biologists that perhaps
the ability to taste sweets was lost early on during the evolution of this
group, probably as a byproduct of natural selection for carnivory. Since
carnivors don’t seek sugar-laden foods, selection maintaining that ability
would be relaxed, leading to the loss of both the taste for sweet and the
gene(s) that make it possible (in reverse causal order, of course).
Now, contrary to creationist claims, evolutionary biology is a legitimate
science because it makes testable predictions. If the above scenario is
correct, one would expect to find in cats what is called a “pseudogene,” i.e. a
segment of DNA that used to code for a functional protein (in particular, the
protein that makes possible to taste sweets), but is no longer working because
of a damaging mutation that was not eliminated by natural selection (since the
gene wasn’t necessary any more anyway). Moreover, such pseudogene should also
be present in all the closely related species to cats, such as tigers and
lions.
Sure enough, recent work carried out by Xia Li and a host of collaborators has
found exactly what evolutionary theory would predict (their paper was published
in PLoS Genetics, July 2005). The ability to taste sweets in mammals depends on
the action of two genes, Tas1r2 and Tas1r3. These produce two proteins – rather
unimaginatively called T1R2 and T1R3 – which have to combine with each other in
order to make a receptor for sweets in the taste buds. Li and coworkers found
that cats, tigers, and lions have a functional version of Tas1r3, but also that
Tas1r2 cannot make a functional protein because of mutations that stop the
translation and transcription processes (from DNA to RNA, and eventually to
protein) too early. Interestingly, the damaged gene exists in other mammals
(such as ourselves), and works normally (allowing us not only to taste sugar,
but artificial sweeteners as well). In other words, Tas1r2 is a pseudogene
shared by domestic and wild cats, in accordance with the predictions of evolutionary
theory.
Now, I ask you, would this piece of elegant detective work have been possible
based on the “theory” of Intelligent Design? What would ID “scientists” have
predicted, and why? Besides, what kind of intelligent designer would deprive cats
of the taste of chocolate? I’d say that comes pretty close to animal cruelty.
Thanks to PZ Myers @ Pharyngula:
See the late physicist Richard
Feynman interviewed here…
Posted @ skepchick
Dr Lynette Davidson lectures and writes
on history. She lives in a charming market town in the south of
Demelza the Torturer had just given
me a laser facial (I would have changed Demelza’s name for the purposes of this
article, but how could I possibly rob her of such a brilliant handle?). At the
end of the procedure, she told me that there might be some redness and
irritation, so I might go to the chemist and get myself some 99% aloe vera gel
to soothe my skin. It was important, Demelza said, to get the 99% sort because
otherwise there could be perfumes or other additives that might make the problem
worse.
This seemed like perfectly good advice to me.
I remember as early as high school that when I broke off an arm of my
boyfriend’s mother’s aloe plant, some yellowish goo came out. It smelled awful,
but even in my tender youth I knew it was supposed to be good for burns,
especially sunburn.
So when Demelza told me to get some gel, I
naturally went to Boots. (Boots, you see, dominates the British high street
drugstore trade). Boots had all kinds of aloe vera products--aloe vera baby
oil, aloe vera hair removal cream (in about six varieties!), aloe vera body
lotion, aloe vera hair conditioner, aloe vera colour revitalising shampoo, aloe
vera lip balm, aloe vera anti-perspirant (for men in both roll-on and spray),
aloe vera antibacterial handwash, and aloe vera after-sun gel. (On a recent
trip to the
I must have underestimated the smelly gel
that came out of that aloe barbadensis plant. Not only can aloe vera soothe
burns, it can also bridge the gender gap so vital to the toiletries trade.
Apparently, the same stuff can be used to sell men’s anti-perspirant and
women’s depilatories.
All of these products were from major
manufacturers. Approximately half of the creams, lip balm and anti-perspirants
were made by Unilever. The hair removal products were all made by
Reckitt-Benckiser, the makers of, among other things, Lysol. The hair products
were made by Alberto-Culver and several other products were Boots own name
brand.
The aloe vera after-sun gel was made with
camomile and other additives, and that was the closest to pure aloe that Boots
seemed to have, but I bore Demelza’s advice in mind. I wandered out of the shop,
but on the way encountered the Clinique concession.
Clinique loves aloe. They have after-sun balm
with aloe and men’s shaving gel with aloe. (No “vera” for Clinique though. I’m
betting the branding consultants told them that “vera” sounds common). Their
“moisture surge” line (at £54 to £63.33 per 100ml in the
When I learned that Clinique’s £63 pots of face cream also had aloe in them, I
decided to give my local health food shop a try. There, along with all the
miscellaneous herbal things, essential oils and interesting cheese, I found a
tube of 99% aloe vera gel. I picked the least expensive and paid about £5 for a
tube (I had the option of paying up to £10 for the same size tube). I then took
it home, put it on my face and was pleased to note that it didn’t smell like I
had remembered.
It did, however, make my face shiny. You see,
they fail to mention that aloe vera gel does not really absorb into the skin.
My best friend Mel tried it on her legs which were dry and itchy, and it made
her skin feel sort of slimy and awful instead. The gel then dried and left
white stuff flaking down her trouser legs. This property of pure aloe is
probably why a big, mainstream shop like Boots doesn’t sell it. Instead of the
satisfying feeling of rubbing something into the skin and having it disappear,
this stuff forms a shiny, slightly sticky layer. Apparently, it is much more
marketable to put a wee bit into more usual cosmetics and just mention the aloe
on the label.
I wore this shiny mask on my face for a
couple of days before deciding that if it was soothing, it wasn’t soothing
much.
“Everyone knows” that aloe vera soothes
burns. How, I wondered, does this plant do it? Clinique apparently thinks that
aloe (without poor vera) hydrates extra thirsty skin. But how?
I had to hack through a lot of rot like “Aloe has the unique ability to help
skin renew itself by stimulating cellular metabolism, thereby promoting oxygen
exchange and increasing the absorption of nutrients”, which I found here. Even
so august an organisation as the
After a while, I realised the answer was
simple: aloe vera doesn’t do any of that. No amount of research has turned up
anything medical that aloe can do for your skin (beyond some very small studies
which had some success using aloe vera in a cream base, but less success using
the gel on its own). While it might provide some soothing or cooling by the
evaporation of moisture from the gel--it’s very slick, and just having
something moist and gooey on your skin may be soothing to a burn-- the bottom
line is that aloe vera is simply plant snot.
There is, however, one thing aloe vera can do
for you: it can make you poo if you ingest it. In fact, aloe vera is a powerful
enough laxative that it can actually dehydrate you. It may even be possible
that by using aloe vera as a laxative, you can poo your way to a lower
cholesterol level.
Now, I’ve been around the block from a
cosmetics point of view. I’ve bought all sorts of creams containing chemical
compounds with trademarked names that mean absolutely nothing. (Boswelox™ is my
favourite name because I can pretend it was discovered in the 18th Century by
James Boswell, the biographer of “Dictionary” Johnson.) I shouldn’t be
surprised that one more advertised additive in shampoo, conditioner, hair
remover or shaving gel is pretty much inert.
I am also old enough to remember when shampoo used to advertise that it
contained beer (beer shampoo apparently gave hair added texture and shine).
Lemon, lime, beer, camomile, rosemary, so why not a powerful laxative? I can’t
get any more annoyed over their hair remover “with aloe” than I would over the
same company’s furniture polish “with lemon.”
Still, the Clinique stand bothered me. On one
hand, I know that Clinique is just the division of Estée Lauder where the sales
staff wear white lab coats and matte makeup. I even have friends who get fierce
skin reactions to Clinique’s products (which cause the girls in the white coats
to express disbelief as their products have no “additives”). On the other hand,
I’m silly enough to think that because their packaging is so sensible, the
contents must be too.
Like the zillions of consumers who buy
products from Unilever and their corporate cousins, I assumed that aloe vera
had some soothing medicinal effect. I can’t really blame Clinique for using the
same marketing trick to get me to buy from them too. If it wasn’t aloe, then it
would be beer or rosemary or tarragon.
However, the question remains: whatever the
next big additive is, will we be gullible enough to buy into its hype?
FALLACIOUS ASSAULTS
People say, “Rev – you shouldn’t
make fun of fundamentalists. It’s mean…”
In my reply, I say, “But the nut-fundies are
SO damn FUNNY! Their own words reveal them to be fools, or idiots, or both... consider
these posts @ this
fundie forum:
“3/4 people believe God exists. Thats over half of the world!”
“We have more proof that Jesus Christ existed than we do of George Washington, you can look that up if you like.”
If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Is that were chinese, blacks, polands etc came from? Different types of monkeys? Just because monkeys are smart, does not mean we came from them.Velocoraptors from my understanding were very inteligent animals, why didn't they evolve into some higher creature?
If we still have monkeys, why arent they humans? What is taking them so long? Why were we humans back in the 1600s, and still have monkeys, and after all these years they havent changed a bit.
Posted by [I_Heart_Jesus777]
Good fortune. COMMENT! Please spread the
meme. Don’t smoke in bed…
