Too wrong to be wrong

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, pseudoscience, sociology, humor

Imagine two utterly involatile items—tungsten ball bearings, say—orbiting one another in an absolute vacuum at a temperature very near absolute zero. The only force operating on them is their mutual gravitation. Based on the common meaning of the words, this system would be an example of perpetual motion. One could quibble that even in this microkelvin environment, an occasional tungsten atom volatilizes, such that over an extremely long time, occasional collisions between errant atoms and one or the other object would slow their orbital motion. I don't know how to calculate how long a time must elapse until the objects come to rest and, of course, settle into contact, nor how much longer before they evaporate away to a uniform tungsten gas. Certainly, our universe could not host a region in which this system is possible.

To would-be inventors, perpetual motion has a very different meaning: a system from which one can extract usable energy without adding energy.

This painting by Norman Rockwell, which graced the cover of the October 1920 issue of Popular Science, illustrates one of the many thousands of ingenious designs of perpetual motion machines. Just like all the others, a machine like this can be made with very low-friction components so that it will run for a very long time. But it will always slow down and eventually stop. If you try to extract some of its energy of rotation, it will come to a stop even sooner. Always, always.

The sociological phenomenon of "getting something for nothing" lies behind perpetual motion, and is the subject of Chapter 4 of  Pseudo Science: An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them by Lydia Kang, MD and Nate Pedersen.

The authors state at the outset that the book is not comprehensive. Indeed, they shied away from overly politicized areas (e.g. Lamarckist and Lysenkoist theories of evolution) and the grossly evil ones (e.g. eugenic programs and vivisection, human and otherwise). Such things aside, they gathered 25 categories of pseudoscientific beliefs in four sections: "Pure Nonscience", such as flat-earthism, perpetual motion, and phrenology (bumps and lumps on the head); "Aliens! Ghosts! Bigfoot! Atlantis!", including UFOs (or UAPs these days), cryptozoology, and the "2012 Apocalypse"; "Wishful Thinking", or sundry ways to "predict" the future such as astrology or superstitions; and "Grifters, Nihilism and Denialism", where they lump in sundry conspiracy theories and dowsing.

Among the conspiracy theories they discuss, they do make a political foray, although I suppose they don't think of it that way: Climate Change Denial. What was once the Greenhouse Effect, from the early 1800's until the mid-1900's, became Global Warming before morphing another time or two so that now we hear of Climate Change, usually "catastrophic climate change". Here they toe the party line, the party of totalitarians. Sadly. Let's take a side trip into the facts as I know them:

• Joseph Fourier (he of the "series") in 1824 concluded that a "greenhouse trapping" effect by, primarily, water vapor caused the average temperature of the Earth to be warm enough to keep most of the planet's water in liquid phase.
• Svante Arrhenius in 1896 calculated the added effects of other gases, primarily carbon dioxide. He concluded that CO₂ could add a few degrees to the warming. The relevant sentence on p. 254 has Arrhenius stating that the added carbon dioxide "from coal combustion could result in global warming and possibly the extinction of the human race." This is utterly false. Arrhenius actually wrote,

"…we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind." 

He was from Sweden, and thought a bit of warmth would be beneficial. Just for the record, I consider that Canada, Siberia, and Patagonia will benefit, possibly to become the new breadbaskets of their respective continents, along with the Scandinavian countries. Further,

• As a teen I repeated Arrhenius's calculations. Later I majored in four sciences, with a "hobby" of computer coding (with which I paid my way until retirement). 
• In the regime of CO₂ concentration below about 1% (10,000 ppm), the absorption bands in mid- to longwave infrared "max out", or become saturated, before a concentration of 500 ppm is reached. In other words, with a present concentration of 425 ppm, nearly all the warming possible has already occurred. CO₂ in the atmosphere is increasing about 2.5 ppm per year, so the little bit of extra warming we can expect over the next 25-30 years is minor to negligible.
• Studies of fossils from times of high CO₂ and experiments with enclosed stands of trees where extra CO₂ is added to the air have shown that trees and other leafy plants grow faster and larger when CO₂ concentration is about 1,000 ppm, or 0.1%. This goes for rice also, contrary to some recent claims in overly politicized reporting.

"Global warming" and its various aliases was appropriated by the totalitarian Left in the US and much of the developed world as a cudgel to gain political control of the populace and the energy economy. They reason that only by creating an impoverished populace, including elimination of the middle class, can they achieve the power they crave. The deplorable condition of the Leftist-controlled major cities in the US, and their surfeit of impoverished minorities, portends the condition of all the world under Leftism.

Climate change has become a political tool, such that reasoned dialogue is no longer possible. OK, end of my soap box rant.

Much of the humor in the book is found in picture captions, such as, from the chapter Phrenology, an old illustration captioned, "An 1886 illustration of parents annoying children by stressing about their future careers," and in Cryptozoology, by an etching of a kraken dragging a ship into the sea, "This giant octopus would like a word about your sushi order." The text itself is straightforward, light-hearted in general, and a pleasure to read.

In the Personality Psychology chapter some ink is spent on MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Many businesses use this to categorize (or label) employees. The category I fit is INTP, for Introverted-iNtuitive-Thinking-Perceiving. If the sixteen Types are taken as some fixed construct, being thusly labeled can lead to managerial abuse, which the authors dwell upon. However, at my company, at least, we learned the details of our assessments. Each Type Indication was based on our answers to a couple dozen questions. The final Indicator, such as the T applied to me, is a balance between opposing traits. Thus T and F, or Thinking and Feeling, go together. With up to 100 points to dole out, the T=7 in my score actually indicated 49T-42F, which means I am strong in both traits. As it happens, my career was built on my analytical skills, but I am also well known for my tendency to weep at weddings, and the way my son played the Toccata by Khachaturian at a recital also brought me to tears. The other three Indicators were also balances. I-E (Introversion-Extraversion), for example was stronger for I with a good dollop of E, and this is further influenced by the fact that I am somewhat bipolar: When I am "up" I am more sociable than otherwise, and "otherwise" tends to last longer. In this case, treating MBTI Types as prison cells is the pseudoscience. The authors rightly decry such practices.

In the chapter on the "2012 Mayan Apocalypse" it is a pity that they don't mention the excellent book, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, by Mark Van Stone, PhD, co-author of Reading the Maya Glyphs. In Dr. Van Stone's view, frequently stated, "December 22nd, 2012 will be akin to January 1 on our calendar."

The book is fun, interesting, and contains a bit of an Easter egg: The cover is printed in three colors of fluorescent ink, as these photos show.

This is a library book, and the dimmer section at lower left of the UV image is caused by library tape—which absorbs most UV—holding the catalog number to the spine.

============

My turn to give the copywriter a wrist-slap:

• On p. 105, the phrase "…more likely of the reeds' displacement" is missing a word and should read, "…more likely cause of the reeds' displacement."
• On p. 139, a picture of the Aztec Calendar Stone is labeled "The Maya Calendar." This is a very common error. The Mayan civilization fell before 900 AD. The Aztec civilization, featuring a different ethnic group, began about 1300 AD, four centuries later. The inscriptions of both cultures are distinctive and unique to each.
• On p. 155, pipes bursting due to freezing water are likened to a soda can bursting in the freezer. Sorry, but the latter eruption is due to CO₂ being driven out of the soda as it freezes. There is room in the can for water-to-ice expansion, but the CO₂ raises the pressure much higher.
• On p. 259, a more basic typo: a temperature rise of 2.5°F is equated to -16°C. This is a category error. As a temperature difference, 2.5°F equals nearly 1.4°C (of course, when the temperature is 2.5°F on a winter's day, that does equal -16°C).

The folly of evangelical anti-theism

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, science, religion, faith, pseudoscience

The human ape is a religious animal. It is part of our evolutionary heritage and we cannot escape it. Given that we must, by our nature, dedicate ourselves to something, what shall that something be?

To be religious does not require belief in God or a god or gods. Buddhism, for example, says nothing about the existence of any deity. Taoism at best only hints that some kind of god may be behind the scenes; that "Tao" might be personalized.

Mathematician Amir D. Aczel writes about a book a year, and his offering for 2014 is Why Science Does Not Disprove God. Several debates and discussions about science and religion in which he participated provided the initial fodder for writing the book. While he makes it clear he does not believe in the Lord God described by a literalist reading of the Bible, he is sympathetic to religion and even favorable.

The thesis of the book is simple: It is a misuse of science and scientific methods when the New Atheists use them to claim, not only that there is no God, but that there cannot be any kind of god. Who are the New Atheists? In order according to noise level, chiefly Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Lawrence M. Krauss, Christopher Hitchens (deceased), and Sam Harris. While atheism has long been with us, what is comparatively new is the evangelical tone of at least these five (although evangelical atheism is not particularly new, as an apparent conflict in the 1760's between Leonard Euler and Denis Diderot illustrates).

Even more to the point: The past couple of decades have been marred by increasingly shrill denouncements of Western and Judaeo-Christian institutions by extremist Islamic clerics. Over the same period, Dawkins and others have become equally shrill in their anti-religious campaign. The language of Dawkins in particular is just as inflammatory as any fatwa by a shrieking Imam. (BTW, this is me speaking; Dr. Aczel is too gentlemanly to point this out.)

Anti-theist claims are many and complex. The book tackles the most serious abuses of science by these "scientific" atheists in twelve chapters; three other chapters limn the history of the relationship of religion and science, and deal with more general matters. Along the way, Dr. Aczel shows how the New Atheists have grossly misused archaeology, cosmology, mathematics, probability, evolutionary theory, and the philosophy of science. Put it all together, and what do you have? A new religion based on pseudo-science, whose adherents are just as fervent, even rabid, as the most bigoted Bible-thumper (and, sad to say, there are all to many of those).

Scientists tend to overstate the power of science. The best scientists are humble and humbly grateful that science works as well as it does in so many realms. Unfortunately, they are a minority; most are simply "science workers", getting results and publishing as often as possible without giving much thought to the philosophy of science. Even more unfortunately, those "best" are outnumbered by those who arrogate divine powers to science, expecting all questions to be answered, if only we gather enough evidence, theorize deeply enough, and perhaps one day craft a "Theory of Everything."

Dr. Aczel demonstrates that such claims are overblown. He invokes the following:

• The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle demonstrates that it is impossible to know with perfect accuracy both the position and the energy of a particle. Accuracy can be very, very good, but there are limits beyond which it will forever be impossible to measure. Even more, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics states that even in the absence of measurement, the precise path a particle will take has an irreducible amount of uncertainty. Diffraction in optical systems is evidence of this.
• Chaos Theory describes nonlinear systems (those in which the ongoing process influences itself) that are hypersensitive to initial conditions. In practical terms, when such systems are described mathematically, the equations cannot be solved in what we call "closed form". The simplest such system is the gravitational Three-Body Problem. Certain special cases have been mathematically solved, but it has been proven (in the mathematical sense) that the general case cannot be solved. Numerical (computer) simulations can be crafted over a limited span of time and space, but they are always dogged by the accumulation of rounding errors, until those dominate the result, and you are no longer simulating the system you began with. Even in "linear" systems (those with no feedback), successive iterations of a computer simulation still accumulate rounding errors, and special methods must be used if you need to test the magnitude of those accumulated errors. That greatly increases the computational cost of such simulations. And wouldn't you know it: Nature presents very few linear systems.
• The Schrödinger Wave Equation and other work by Edwin Schrödinger show that "things can go where you think they can't", and the poor cat of his paradox, being both dead and alive, actually illustrates our inability to know in detail the fate of any quantum event. By the way, I count the cat as an observer: it knows whether the cyanide got released, before the "official observer" opens the box to look.
• The Incompleteness Theorem of Kurt Gödel shows that it is possible to ask questions that cannot be answered using the mathematical (or "formal") system in which the question was asked. For example, formal logic is full of paradoxes that require one to step outside the system to elucidate. A famous example is the Barber of Seville: He shaves all men in Seville who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the Barber? Of course, the question has no answer in the system as set up. But if we bring the matter into the real world, we find that, of course, the Barber is bearded and is not shaved at all. The false premise of the paradox is that all men in Seville are clean-shaven.

The anti-Theists have formed a new church. You could call it a religion without any of the benefits. Of course, I agree that religious motivations have led to great abuses. For political reasons, couched as religion but really in a land grab, a Medieval Pope wrote a death warrant for the entire population of a province (or was it 3 provinces?) in France. Some 3 million persons were to be slaughtered. This was not carried out. Anti-Theists invoke the Crusades. Again, the motives were a mixture of religion and politics; for political gain the leaders incited religious fervor in ignorant knights and peasants. In fact, the terrible abuses of the history of Christianity in Europe and the Near East can just as well be invoked to prove that politics are evil…and they are!

But let us not forget the greatest slaughters of history. Do the names Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong mean anything to you? Atheists one and all, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions or, in the case of Mao, more than 100 million. Compared to any of these four (and a couple of others), the Pope mentioned above was a piker, even had his order been carried out.

But we must remember that today's New Atheists claim the mantle science. Dr. Aczel has shown that at best they skew their science, and more frequently they abuse it all out of recognition. To put it baldly, the New Atheists, today's anti-Theists, are charlatans.

What does God think of this? The first six verses of Psalm 2 provide a clue:

¹ Why do the nations conspire
    and the peoples plot in vain?
² The kings of the earth rise up
    and the rulers band together
    against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,
³ “Let us break their chains
    and throw off their shackles.”

⁴ The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
    the Lord scoffs at them.
⁵ He rebukes them in his anger
    and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,
⁶ “I have installed my king
    on Zion, my holy mountain.”

US is science ignorant - what did we expect?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, education, polemics, pseudoscience

It did not make me happy to read Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality by John Grant. Not happy, no; but sadly, I'm right there with him. I did a little searching (it took no more than ten minutes, on today's Internet, a product of the technology so many malign), to find the following:

• 40% of Americans believe evolution.
• 40% believe creationism, including "intelligent design", and most of those believe Earth's age is between 6,000 and 10,000 years.
• 48% of Americans think that warnings about Anthropogenic (human caused) Global Warming (AGW) are exaggerated.
• 39% of American parents now either refuse to vaccinate their children or delay most vaccinations.

Then there are the beliefs in "phenomena that science can't explain":

• 34% believe in UFOs.
• 34% believe in ghosts.
• 31% believe in Astrology.
• 73% believe in ESP and other Paranormal phenomena (including ghosts and astrology). 

Finally, there are the more political items, of which I'll just mention two:

• 90% of Americans believe the US government is covering up some or all of the "real" 9/11 story.
• 34% believe the government "did it".

 Now, let's contrast that with some figures for education in America:

• 87.6% finish High School (but only 78% in the state where I live).
• 30.4% attain a BS or BA college degree.
• 40.5% of college graduates studied Business or Management.
• 39.5% studied a STEM discipline (Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics). 39.5 times 30.4 = just 12% of Americans who understand science at the Bachelor of Science level (and half of those squeaked by with C's).
• 20.0% studied a Humanities subject such as English, History or Philosophy.

So about 40% of college graduates liked science enough to finish a degree in it. Is it safe to assume that about 40% of high school graduates who didn't go to college are "science friendly"? Probably not, particularly when you see that figure of 73% who believe in the paranormal. One must assume that most of the science majors have stopped believing in paranormal stuff.

A side note: Many science majors, myself included, retain a belief in God, and do not consider Him to be "paranormal". Like many, I have had inner experiences that convince me of God's reality, yet I accept science as by far the best way to understand how the natural world works. We need to be careful how we use the word "believe". At my dissertation defense, once I had presented my conclusions, one of the first questions was, "Do you really believe that?" (clearly, the questioner did not). I replied, "I do not use the word believe in that way. I believe in God. This scientific stuff cannot save my soul, but God can. I understand and defend my hypothesis as the best explanation for the phenomena I have been studying."

Though Denying Science has 19 chapters, there are really four subjects: Vaccination, AIDS, Evolution, and Global Warming. A full third of the book is devoted to those who deny AGW. The author really, really did his homework, so there is a lot of detail. For me, it made for fast reading, because I already knew a lot of it, on all four subjects.

Rather than go into detail myself, I prefer to buttress the main point behind all four subjects. People stand to make a lot of money if the majority of us are persuaded that the science is wrong. When politicians or journalists seem to act irrationally, just follow the money. Almost a full page is devoted to a list of the names of anti-AGW organizations that are supported by Exxon-Mobil. There are 58, and it is a partial list, because lots of organizations are layered or decline to report their sponsors. Another half page lists 34 organizations known to be funded by the Koch brothers, as of 2008. They are also anti-AGW, and anti-science in a variety of other ways (even though their company sells Lycra and other products of science).

If you want someone killed, you can get it done for less than $100 in some neighborhoods. In "better neighborhoods", a great many people would "do a hit" for $50,000 or more. Once the stakes go into the millions, people of conscience get harder and harder to find. The world's biggest corporations do huge amounts of business. Four, Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, WalMart and BP, each have revenues that exceed $1 Billion per day. When business proceeds of a third or a half a trillion dollars a year is at stake, you're in a realm where ordinary human concerns simply go out the window.

Subject by subject:

• Vaccination: side effects of early vaccines led some parents to question the requirement to vaccinate. Once there had been some lawsuits, more lawyers got involved, then sellers of "alternate" nostrums, and now the anti-vaccination hordes are a source of lots of revenue. The result: a few thousand unfortunate deaths per year, that vaccines could have prevented.
• AIDS is more politicized and less a financial football, primarily because of the paranoia of certain dictators (who are justified in having a certain level of paranoia!). However, lawyers and sellers of "alternative" treatments are making hay while they can, millions of dollars' worth. The toll, perhaps a third of a million deaths per year, maybe more.
• The Evolution versus Creationism debate hasn't led to any deaths that I know of (unless it is true that William Jennings Bryan died of embarrassment). But it certainly has led to millions of dollars spent on "textbooks" such as Of Pandas and People, and more millions, perhaps a few billions, on creationist "museums". I've seen a couple of these, and viewed a couple of well-produced anti-evolution or pro-young-earth videos. The science is various kinds of bad, bad, bad.
• Global Warming denial is where the big money is. At stake: trillions of dollars. First, three of those four mega-corporations I listed above will make trillions from fossil fuels. Once sea levels have risen by a meter or so, companies like Bechtel and Halliburton will make trillions by relocating seaport facilities to higher ground (at present the three largest construction companies, all in China, combined make about a half billion dollars daily). Oh, there will be lots of ways to make money as the reality of AGW hits home with the population of Earth. Just funding the arms buildup for "water wars" is going to be a huge business. What will be the death toll? Estimates range from a few millions to the majority of the human population.

The "almighty dollar" is indeed almighty, particularly among those who deny the Almighty. It reminds me of a joke by Johnny Hart in The Wizard of Id comic. The knight asks the king, "Why do ballplayers get such huge salaries and scientists don't?" The king replies, "Would you pay to watch a scientist?"

Barnum was more right than he knew

kw: astronomy, photographs, comets, pseudoscience

Here is how the popular cult comet Elenin looked more than three weeks ago, on the evening of August 27, as photographed in Australia by Michael Mattiazzo. The image accompanied this Sky and Telescope article.

Why should this interest me? I usually only care for naked-eye comets, and there has not been one since Hale-Bopp about 15 years ago.

There is a subtle feature of this image: the nucleus of the comet appears elongated, where it was pointlike just a day or two earlier. The comet is breaking up. Yet just this morning (here is why I am interested), I was up extra-early, listening to Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory, and he and a guest were talking about this comet as some kind of celestial messenger. I wonder if they even knew the comet is already in "rest in pieces" condition.

On those occasions that I am up before 5:30 AM I listen to Coast-to-Coast AM purely for its entertainment value. It is great fun to listen to. I have yet to hear anything that I'd call scientifically verifiable. I simply add what I hear to my store of the bottomless fund of human credulity.

Crack it, Doc...one more time

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, pseudoscience, chiropractic

Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". This phrase came to mind soon after I began reading One Minute Wellness: the natural health & happiness system that never fails by Dr. Ben Lerner with Dr. Greg Loman. I also found myself thinking, "I sure wish these guys were right."

The book is a long apologetic for Chiropractic, of a specific type. Drs. Lerner and Loman are not your grandfather's Chiropractors...or perhaps they'd say that only they and their ilk really are. They write more about God than about medicine. Thus, the book is really a presentation of faith healing, and all the more so as they claim the practice of "Body by God" Chiropractic has facilitated the healing of asthma, colic, arthritis, chronic ear infections, and bipolar disorder. They also write much about nutrition, contrasting "Food by God" with "Food by Man".

Chiropractic is a useful medical discipline. Its semi-allopathic cousin Osteopathy equally so. I learned an exercise from an Osteopath that I periodically need to combat sciatica. It works fast, and it works well. Many of my family members and friends see a Chiropractor from time to time. All of us also take advantage of allopathic ("ordinary") medicine as needed. I'd never have gone to a Chiropractor to either detect or treat colon cancer (my 2000-2001 "inner space" odyssey). However, one of my brothers did use a Chiropractor who practices Kinesiology to check for colon polyps. He claims there are none, but I'm frankly skeptical. Nothing substitutes seeing for yourself, via a colonoscopy.

A word about subluxations. Luxation is a synonym of dislocation. Sub-Luxation, or subluxation, is a displacement of a joint that is less than a dislocation, but is not quite normal. A genuine subluxation is painful, but not as agonizing as a luxation. A slightly jammed finger from catching a basketball wrongly is a common sort of subluxation; a harder jam, a dislocation, usually requires medical treatment. A genuine subluxation in the spine is also painful. If it doesn't hurt, it's not out of place. If you have a sore neck from reading too long with your head too far forward, a Chiropractor can probably help you. However, it has been repeatedly shown that the "silent" subluxations most Chiropractors point out on X-rays are imaginary, and different practitioners reading the same X-ray point out different "subluxations". Remember, if it doesn't hurt, it's not out of place.

It's also well known that better nutrition supports better health. But I find myself puzzled by the lists in Appendix B, "Food by God, Food by Man" (FbG, FbM). I'll just pick an item or two in my idiosyncratic way.

First, the only sweetener on the FbG list is Honey. Yet a vegetable on the same list is the Beet. If I puree a boiled Beet and filter it, I can crystallize sugar (sucrose) from the juice, sugar that is chemically identical to the sugar you buy in 5# bags at the store. As a matter of fact, those bags are full of sugar from "sugar beets", a variety that has a much higher sugar content than the ordinary red beet. Does my "processing" of the beet somehow make the sucrose molecule into a poison? Half the sugar content of honey is also sucrose, and the other half is fructose, which you can crystallize from grape juice (Grapes are also FbG).

People get so bothered by "refined" sugar or salt (also on the FbM list). What refining? Just crystallizing a couple of times to remove contaminants. Do you prefer "sea salt" to refined salt? Be prepared for your daily dose of mercury, cadmium, and other things that refining removes. Actually, salt crystallized from filtered sea water (gotta filter out the bacteria and parasites...) contains enough sulfate and magnesium ions to act as a mild laxative, which makes it an annoyance if your bowel is already producing a healthy movement or two daily! Such salt also sticks together and won't pour because those same extra ions absorb water from the air, making true sea salt perpetually moist.

For another, the FbM list contains the item "Regular use of animal products". (Creeping vegetarianism alert!) Just what is "regular"? If I eat chicken, pork or beef once a week only, is that FbG, but twice or more makes it FbM? This is nonsense! And why call Shellfish FbM? Did Man create shrimp ex nihilo? How about crabs, mussels, or octopi (great as sushi!).

Apparently, cooking food is OK; it must not be a process that turns FbG into FbM, the way recrystallizing sugar or salt does. Oh, Oh! I just found Butter Buds on the FbG list!! Isn't that processed fat? Yet it's actually advertized as fat free. At www.bbuds.com, we read,

"Butter Buds Food Ingredients uses proprietary enzyme modification technology to 'unlock' the hidden, potent flavor in butter, cream, cheese and other flavorful fats, delivering highly concentrated flavor in convenient powdered form. These natural dairy concentrates deliver up to 400 times the flavor strength of standard dairy ingredients, and are used at extremely low application levels (usually less than 1.0%)."

I don't know about you, but modifying various fats using enzymes is "processing" of a rather extreme type. There is no way this could be "by God". I don't know what god these folks are invoking, but this process removes 99% of what God puts into natural fat.

So, let's come to God. Dr. B. J. Palmer, the "father of Chiropractic," said a century or so ago, "If God thought we needed aspirin, He would have created an aspirin tree." As a matter of fact, God did just that; He created the Willow. If you chew a mouthful of the bark from smooth willow branches, you'll get a dose of salicylic acid (named for salix, the Latin word for willow). Your pain will be relieved, but you'll also get a stomach ache. About the time Dr. Palmer did his first spinal adjustment, a chemist named Gerhardt buffered salicylic acid with sodium acetate (salt plus vinegar) to produce the chemical we call Aspirin today; this is much easier on the stomach, and is equally good as a pain reliever. God's original product causes a lot more indigestion, but I am so glad God inspired folks to improve on it a little.

The authors of One Minute Miracle write a lot about God. The book is actually two books. The right side of each page is the exhortatory text, and the left side of each page is a story about two people who benefit from Chiropractic, better nutrition, and faith in God. But the story has all the worst elements of over-sentimentalized religious fiction. My chief complaint about religion in the West today is that most people's religion is unalloyed sentimentality. I encapsulate it in a statement I've heard often, whenever anything "unpleasant" like sin, hell, repentance, or contrition is mentioned: "Oh, God is so loving! He would never do that!!" Read your Bible, folks: Yes, He would, and the old Spiritual that sings, "Everybody talkin' 'bout heaven; ain't goin' there" is talking about sentimental religionists who are no more heaven-bound than the average doorknob.

So, to be frank, the god these authors tout is not my God. "God" is not a name, it is a title; I prefer to use a direct translation from both Biblical languages, the term "the God." The only Name claimed by the God is the name Jesus: "For there is no other name given among men under heaven by which you must be saved."