Ghost Believers are Moronic

I think it's time that people who believe in ghosts just calm down for a second and realize that they are being idiots. I struggle to understand the correlation, but most of the people who I know that believe in astrology or ghosts (or both) are women. Perhaps I was even more right than usual when I suggested we fumigate vaginae in an earlier blog post.

The belief in ghosts or the supernatural is quite easily explained in todays population. When encountering a problem, as a species, we have a tendency to need it explained for our universe to work out nicely in our minds. A fine example would be the sun. Many, many cultures independently started worshiping the sun, realizing it was a keystone to their crops, day/night cycle and warmth. They couldn't explain what it was or how it had apparent movement across the sky. So, they did what we always do as a species: make some stupid shit up and then personify it.

People struggle with death and the concept of dying because we are narcissistic, anthropocentric and actually have some manner of issue with understanding that the world existed before we could perceive it and that there will be a day where the world moves beyond us. We find it troublesome to rationalize death of loved ones because we view people as objects, possessions that we have and hold. Our emotions get in the way, causing us to miss the person. When someone is grief stricken, it's a nice conciliatory pat on the back to tell them that their loved one went to heaven or is a ghost walking around in ether or some bullcrap like that. In essence we cheat death by living on in a different place that is undefinable, unmeasurable and therefore untouchable by rational thought. How convenient that we can circumvent one of the aspects of life that we struggle most with by relying on the supernatural. I'm observing a pattern here: when reality sucks, we make up something supernatural and then reverse engineer it to rationalize it belonging in a world with actual boundaries.

So when you have a hallucination or hear a sound, you may like to think it's something external like a ghost moving a chair or jesus giving a reacharound but infact you are stained by observers bias or preconceived notions. Not only do people stop looking once there is an 'answer' but they often go out looking for ways to apply that answer, such as ghost hunting. It's a sign of insecurity that these people try to cover the world in their own shitty idea, I take it as evidence that they understand on some level that they are childish morons but are too childish to think things through even on a basic level. It's why religion mandates spreading like a virus and why ghost hunters scour the globe for any shred of inexplicable event; if you get others to believe in your moronic ideas then it gives credibility to it, because it means someone other than you sees logic in it. Unfortunately, when people are suffering mass stupidity or hysteria, it's unreliable to say that they are logical at all. Then there's the topic of indoctrination, but that's in a different post.

Belief itself is intellectually irresponsible. Belief because an idea is old, or authority through antiquity, is among the greatest mental plagues mankind is currently enduring. It gives imagined legitimacy to such great fictional works as the bible, qur'an and of course the notion of ghosts. Just because people believed in it alongside such great brain children as alchemy 600 years ago doesn't mean it's a decent idea. It means that people have probably been wrong for longer than the onset of the idea, not that the idea has "stood the test of time". People love being told how something works, as it takes a genius to point out the obvious (see Darwin and Einstein), so if someone tells you it's your grandmothers ghost that is making the noises in the attic, you hit all the major aspects needed for ghost believing: Emotions, lost connection, death, being told by some jackass that it's a ghost and personifying a noise so you can identify with it. I wonder, in a world where a child is not told about ghosts, would they come up with the same silly conclusions? I suspect not, they'd likely make their own conclusions...hence why sun worshipers all played by different rules.

I'd encourage anyone reading this to provide some proof of the supernatural, especially ghosts, but we both know that you won't change how you think because that would require using your brain instead of being a stupid son of a bitch. Not only do two ghost believers never have identical experiences when experiencing them in the same place and time (so say goodbye to repeatability) but every single 'tool' used by ghost hunters is designed to measure something else! So electro-meters, thermometers and etc measure the thing they were designed to measure, not fucking ghosts. Further, there is no reason to believe that these things would be observable changes to the environment caused by a ghost.

Any photographed ghost is likely a fake, double exposure or some kind of dust (see: orbs). As I've said before, if ghosts exist and if they are trying to get in touch with or simply just fuck with us, WHAT BETTER TIME THAN WHEN WE ARE LOOKING? Either ghosts have some amazing union or something and have amazing plans with which to mess with people of low intelligence, succumbing to hysteria or living in CO rich places or, applying Occam's Razor, they don't exist.

It's been a while

Firstly, I was right. I was completely and totally right- exoplanet searches are for morons. Seriously less than a month after Gliese 581 was declared to have a planet in the so called "Goldilocks Zone" there is already a dispute about the 11 years of data. Why? Because you can't make solid assertions from looking at the wobble and flickering of a star millions of light years away. It's basically a bunch of systematic hand waving leading to whatever interpretation you want, in stark contrast to making a direct observation and getting a nice data point. I will now classify this crap as pseudoscience.

For some more coolness, how about that sexual selection eh?

These two lovely treats along with Mojoceratops should be enough to show that sexual selection can drive things to be maladaptive and outright nutty in evolutionary terms.


Finally, and this is really damn cool, a salamander that appears to photosynthesize to get some of its food, especially in ovo. Kind of a head scratcher as vertebrate immune systems don't get along so well with symbiosis, but if any group could do it, of course it's the caudates. They are so flexible, after all.