HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: dmcanzi@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca (David Canzi)
Subject: Re: "Satanic Ritual Abuse" in the media
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 22:10:16 GMT

In article <93022.24797.L629159@LMSC5.IS.LMSC.LOCKHEED.COM> L629159@LMSC5.IS.LMSC.LOCKHEED.COM writes:
>From: falcao@felix.metaphor.com (Ronnie Falcao)
>>... if I were trying to get my hands on babies, no questions
>>asked, I know how I'd do it.  I'd set up a Crisis Pregnancy
>>Center in an area with a lot of teen pregnancies. ...
>>...  How accurately are records kept for
>>adoptions across state lines?  What are the opportunities
>>for babies to "disappear"?
>
>  The controls on adoption in the US are so stringent that attempting
>to adopt a child is an extremely frustrating experience for most.
>very large numbers of would-be adopters are ultimatley driven to
>go outside the US to find children.

"Stringent controls" are also a good camouflage for a shortage of
adoptable babies, such as would result from large numbers of ritual
sacrifices.

>>Brokering babies for ritual abuse would explain why some
>>anti-choice activists seem so much more interested in
>>a baby's being born than in the baby's growing up
>>happy and healthy.
>
>  Are you suggesting that the fundamentalists who want to make
>abortion illegal are themselves the "satanic ritual abusers"?

He did not say or imply that all fundamentalists are really Satanists
under cover.  The word "some" is plainly there right in front of your
eyes.  But sometimes people find an idea so disturbing that they must
try to defend themselves from having to consider it by misunderstanding
it in some way that makes it seem, to them, obviously false.  The
technique you have used here is fairly typical -- universalizing a
statement which was not universal in the first place.

Nothing, as far as I know, prevents Satanists from infiltrating
pro-life organizations, placing themselves in key positions, and using
those positions to advance the cause of Satan.  They can even
infiltrate your congregation and do a fine simulation of Christian
fervor.  *Nothing* will prevent them from pretending to praise God
without meaning it.  God won't stop them:  not all who say "Lord, Lord"
are bound for the Kingdom of Heaven.  And the Father of Lies can be
counted on to view their duplicity with approval.  It must be assumed
that all large pro-life organizations and Christian congregations and
many of the smaller ones have Satanist infiltrators.  But it will be
very difficult, or perhaps impossible, to tell the Satanists from the
true Christians.
-- 
David Canzi
Xref: sparky sci.skeptic:22822 alt.atheism:26968
From: cjhs@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.atheism
Subject: Re: Eve Mitochondia?
Date: 25 Jan 93 10:40:46 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England

Jacques Guy (jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU) wrote:
: Let there be traits only transmissible via females.
: Let us consider those traits in restituting the phylogeny of
: the species.
: Since those traits are transmitted only by females, the
: nodes of the tree, and therefore its root, represent females.
: Therefore, all individuals are descended from the same female.
: 
: Intellectual dishonesty and hocus pocus, nothing more.

I don't understand these criticisms.

Certainly, the so-called "Eve" study has been flawed, but I am not
convinced that anyone here has actually pointed out the real flaws.

It is surely not contentious that there exists at some point in the
past a unique female individual who is the most recent female from whom
all people now living are descended in the female line.

The problems are rather to do with the methodology used to estimate
the time at which this individual existed, and the conclusions drawn
about where she lived, and ignoring that there were certainly many
other indivuals existant at that time from whom we are also descended
by mixed male and female lineages -- and that those other individuals
may have lived all over the place, so that the location of "Eve" is
not necessarily the location for the genesis of humanity.

Thought experiment: assuming that the human race lives long enough
and that there continues to be some minimum level of interbreeding
among distinct cultures, anyone want to guess how long it will be
before all people living will be descended in the female line from
some contemporary female?

Cheers -- Chris Ho-Stuart
From: mcirvin@husc8.harvard.edu (Matt McIrvin)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: New Physics, Healing, Paranormal
Date: 27 Jan 93 22:00:17 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc.mcirvin.728172017

lindsay+@cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay) writes:

>You're understating. Geller has been outright caught cheating, by
>plural people, plural times.

>For example, the reporter who visited Geller in a hotel room.  She
>noted that the edge of the coffee table had three notches in it, just
>as if someone had bent a key, three times. When Geller "psychically"
>bent her key, she noticed that the coffee table had just sprouted a
>fourth notch.

Obviously, the powerful psychic energies with which Geller bent keys
had the inevitable side effect of paranormally notching nearby tables!

:) :) :) :) :)
-- 
Matt McIrvin
From: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Veda debunking needed.
Date: 24 Jan 93 16:01:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: IASTATE.1993Jan24.100145
Reply-To: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Organization: Iowa State University

In article <kHHVXB6w165w@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us>,
system@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us (Kalki Dasa) writes:
> True, but "seeming silly" is not really a very reliable criterion for
> making a final conclusion. One has to realize that the ancient world
> culture was full of people no stupider than those of today.

   No, just more ignorant of physics, medicine, etc.  Hell they may
even have had the occasional valuable herbal remedy we didn't but on
average we know more.  They, for instance, couldn't spread information
the way we do on UseNet...

> Their
> science was expressed differently, but they were not fools. To
> understand what they wrote, one must accept that it does make sense.

   You assume AS A HYPOTHISIS that they had a correct picture and then
try to understand it?  Sheee-eeee-ittt.  You'd better figure out _what_
they had a correct picture of.  The idea that some of what they were
writing were teaching fables or stories for entertainment explains too
much to be dismissed lightly.

   What if a good chunk of the Vedas did for the Hindus in antiquity what
Star Trek, Haraldodo, and Law and Order do for us today?

Dan
Danwell@IASTATE.EDU
(no, that was not a typo)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.atheism
From: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Subject: Re: Eve Mitochondia?
Reply-To: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Organization: Iowa State University
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 17:53:28 GMT

In article <1993Jan22.144307.22509@nastar.uucp>, phardie@nastar.uucp (Pete
Hardie) writes:
> I think you miss the point of the Eve studies.  Certainly they will point to
> a female as the 'source' of all people, because they can only look at females
> anyway.  They are looking for the number of 'family trees' in mankind - are
> we ALL descended from one family, or did H. sapiens develop independently
> in several areas of the world?  The Eve studies are an attempt to find if
> all humans have a single common (hominid) ancestor.

   The studies assume there is a common ancestor and attempt to approximate 
her location in time and space.  The time coordinate would resolve the 
hominid/nonhominid question (and everyone would be shocked if the
answer was "nonhominid").

   The scandal is that the initial report was of sucess when in fact the
software used to derive the descent tree sucked so bad that other people
got diferenct results by rerunning it.  This is what happens when biologists
write software without getting help from _real_ programmers.

Dan
Danwell@IASTATE.EDU
From: smlacke@isrc.sandia.gov (Scott M Lackey)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: tv & science education
Date: 22 Jan 93 01:32:10 GMT
Article-I.D.: isrc.1993Jan22.013210.20802
Distribution: sci
Organization: Sandia National Labs, Org. 1600, Albq., NM

From article <1993Jan20.4286.31906@dosgate>, by "dan mckinnon" <dan.mckinnon@canrem.com>:
>     [......] 
>          We could argue about how well informed "average" people can be
> expected to be. By definition, about 50% of people are less than
> average. It is a problem in our society - You can claim to belong to
> 
	Actually, by definition 50% are below the *median*.  It is only because
the distribution is approximately "normal" that about 50% are below
average.  Sure I'm picky, but we're talking about well educated
people so I'm allowed to be picky.

>      [......]
> Though I am not handsome, I know from reading that well-formed men and
> women get less sympathy when they have problems, almost being denied the
> right to have problems.

	And I thought that people just didn't care about my problems.
Apparently I'm just a lot better looking than I thought I was! :-)

	Seriously though, I do think it is depressing that TV has only got
NOVA and that is written at a rather low level of sophistication.
I would love to see a science show for people at the level of education
and intelligence we are talking about here, but I'm not holding my
breath waiting for it.  

Scott Lackey
From: lindsay+@cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Krishnas, Vedas, and all that (was: TM debunking needed)
Date: 24 Jan 93 18:18:35 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon


system@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us (Kalki Dasa) writes:
>> >Eclipses are explained as the result of the planet Rahu passing
>> >between the sun and the earth, or the moon and the earth.
>> 	There is no such thing as a planet separate from the Moon that
>> causes eclipses.
>
>So you say, but this is only your opinion. You cannot see Rahu, but that
>does not mean it doesn't exist.

Some that we *cannot* see causes eclipses that we *can* see? Just
exactly how does something invisible cast shadows?
-- 
Don		D.C.Lindsay	Carnegie Mellon Computer Science
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
From: dfox@quack.sac.ca.us (David Fox)
Subject: Re: Eve Mitochondia?
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
Date: 27 Jan 1993 06:23:33 UTC

In article <1k077lINNrkq@gap.caltech.edu> carl@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU writes:

>C'mon, you've got to be kidding!  You actually expected something other than
>bullshit from a Hindu fundamentalist like Kalki?  You wanna buy a bridge? 
>Cheap?  Fundamentalists have one thing in common:
>	NO MATTER WHAT EVIDENCE MAY BE FOUND IN THE WORLD, THEY'LL FIND A WAY
>	TO WARP THAT EVIDENCE TO FIT THEIR SCRIPTURES.
>Kalki is no exception.  He's quite willing to wave his arms about and chant
>about multi-dimensional bullshit to justify the Vedas, despite the fact that
>the mathematics he's invoking was entirely unknown to the authors of the Vedas,
>in an effort to "prove" that the Vedic authors knew their asses from holes in
>the ground.  Those same Vedic authors would almost certainly look askance at
>Kalki's sophomorisms and condemn him as a heretic.

Yes, but can Kalki (or any other Hindu 'fundamentalist') distinguish as to 
whether these ideas are really part of Hindu scriptures (as in the divine
word of God) or simply ideas stemming from other, later interpretations of what
Krsna wrote?

>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Carl J Lydick | INTERnet: CARL@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU | NSI/HEPnet: SOL1::CARL
>
>Disclaimer:  Hey, I understand VAXen and VMS.  That's what I get paid for.  My
>understanding of astronomy is purely at the amateur level (or below).  So
>unless what I'm saying is directly related to VAX/VMS, don't hold me or my
>organization responsible for it.  If it IS related to VAX/VMS, you can try to
>hold me responsible for it, but my organization had nothing to do with it.


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
in real life: david fox            email: dfox@quack.sac.ca.us
5479 Castle Manor Drive,                  
San Jose, CA 95129                 "Thanks for letting me change some
USA                                 magnetic patterns on your HD" -me
408-253-7992                        
"You've just won an absolutely FREE trip to the Isles of Langerhans" -me
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Krishnas, Vedas, and all that (was: TM debunking needed)
Organization: LLNL
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 01:40:56 GMT

In article <kHHVXB6w165w@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us> system@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us (Kalki Dasa) writes:
>lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
>
: 	Yes, I know it was snide. And you may believe that I am a
: blockhead if you wish. But if _Back to Godhead_ contains lots of
: things that seem silly, then one might be tempted to come up with some
: unflattering nicknames for the publication.
>
>True, but "seeming silly" is not really a very reliable criterion for
>making a final conclusion. One has to realize that the ancient world
>culture was full of people no stupider than those of today. Their
>science was expressed differently, but they were not fools. To
>understand what they wrote, one must accept that it does make sense.

	"They weren't dummies". Can't you think of a better argument
than that?

: 	But try looking at the Moon through a small telescope sometime
: and see if it looks like "cosmic fire".
>
>In truth, I must say yes, the Moon does look like cosmic fire to me. So
>does the earth, for that matter.

	Then, what _doesn't_ look like cosmic fire?
-- 
/Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
/lip@s1.gov
Xref: sparky sci.skeptic:22794 alt.atheism:26922
From: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.atheism
Subject: Back to Blockhead and the Eve study.
Date: 24 Jan 93 15:40:28 GMT
Article-I.D.: IASTATE.1993Jan24.094028
Reply-To: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Organization: Iowa State University


   In an earlier flame I asked why Back to Blockhead articles took the form:

   Misrepresentation of Event
   
   followed by

   Vedic Gibberish playing off the event?

   Well this one fit the mold pretty well except it was a study not an event.

In article <8okTXB1w165w@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us>,
system@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us (Kalki Dasa) writes:

                                   [deletions]

> For example, tree (1) has four mutations, and tree (3) has eight.
> Scientists would argue that (1) is therefore more likely to resemble the
> real ancestral tree. This seems promising, since in this case tree (1)
> is in fact the real tree. But tree (2) requires five mutations, and so
> it is nearly as parsimonious. Yet (2) shows a completely different
> pattern of ancestors.

   But the study in question had 135 characters.  Try figuring out how many
characters you need to make the probability of ambiguity extremely low.
I bet it's far more than were used in your example.  The problem with the Eve
study WAS NOT ambiguity of the descent tree; it was FAILURE TO LOCATE the
parsimonious descent tree.  Back to Blockhead misreports the news again.
 
> The problem with the parsimonious tree method is that in a complex case
> there are literally millions of trees that are equally parsimonious.
> Searching through them all on a mainframe computer can take months.
> According to Templeton, the original findings on African Eve came from
> computer runs that missed important trees. When further runs were made,
> a tree with African roots turned out no more likely than one with
> European or Asian roots.

   Wrong, wrong, wrong:  the parsimonious tree hasn't been located yet.
 
          [Wild oversimplifications of evolution deleted]

> WHY MAN AND APE ARE SIMILAR
>
      [Descent from Bhrama replaces Descent from simple cells] 
 
> 
> INTELLIGENT DESIGNER

   You dishonest worm.  The "intellegent designer" idea is complete bullshit
and you have yet to answer (on talk.origins) the objections raised to it.
Who are you, the Hindu equivalent of Bob Bales?

   The Bales Cycle, extensively studied on talk.origins, goes:

   Post unsupported claim
   Wait for objections and flames to die down
   Post unsupported claim again without modification 

        
                            [more deletions]

   If you're going to repost total bullshit could you at least summarize a bit?


Dan
Danwell@IASTATE.EDU
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Healthy skepticism
From: lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard)
Date: 23 Jan 1993 11:11 MST  
Distribution: world,local
Organization: University of Arizona
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    

In article <1993Jan22.003310.1073@pages.com>, kevin@pages.com (Kevin Sven Berg) writes...
>     ... iridology
> 
>I understand the results are "inconclusive" in this area, not
>that it has no benefit. In particular, Dr. Jensen seems to have
>done nice work for these studies. The premise (theory) is that
>certain body parts (namely the iris) reflect the state of other
>parts of the body. This isn't far fetched, in fact it happens to
>be current study in immunology (neuropeptides, I believe).

Perhaps the results are "inconclusive" if you take Jensen's self-published,
non-refereed, poorly controlled, pro-iridology work into consideration.
They aren't if you look at the controlled, peer-reviewed, published
studies of iridology (i.e., A. Simon, et al., "An Evaluation of Iridology,"
_JAMA_, Sep. 28, 1979).  Jensen himself participated in this study and
performed no better than chance at diagnosing kidney dysfunction from
color photographs of patients' eyes.

Also see Russell S. Worrall, "Iridology: Diagnosis or Delusion?"
   _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 7, no. 3, Spring 1983, pp. 23-35.

Jim Lippard              Lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy      Lippard@ARIZVMS.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
From: btd@iastate.edu (Benjamin T Dehner)
Subject: Re: Krishnas, Vedas, and all that (was: TM debunking needed)
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 17:28:57 GMT

In <7VHVXB7w165w@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us> system@kalki33.lakes.trenton.sc.us (Kalki Dasa) writes:

>lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:

...

>>       And is the Moon _closer_ in linear distance, or isn't it?

>Yes, the Moon is closer in linear distance, but higher than the sun in
>the "z" coordinate. However, this is a 3-dimensional analogue of what is
>actually a higher dimensional situation.

	Please describe the geometry of this situation.

>> >Eclipses are explained as the result of the planet Rahu passing
>> >between the sun and the earth, or the moon and the earth. In modern
>> >astronomy, the planet Rahu is identified as the moon's ascending node,
>> >which is indeed in line with the sun-moon-earth system during an
>> >eclipse.
>> 
>> 	There is no such thing as a planet separate from the Moon that
>> causes eclipses.

>So you say, but this is only your opinion. You cannot see Rahu, but that
>does not mean it doesn't exist.

	BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  I ain't seen one this good in a long time.
Does this also apply to the pink elephants I didn't see at the bachelor party
I was at this weekend?
	Or, to more serious matters, you are positing the existence of a
body which is capable of blocking light and causing a shadow, yet, at the
same time, cannot be seen?  (Or detected by radar, gravitational perturbations,
causes no stellar occultations, ...)
	Also, in a couple of other threads, you metion something about 'higher
planes'.  Could you please give a geometrical description of what these are
like?  For example, current theories have space-time set up as a Riemannian
geometry with the metric determined by the mass distribution (this is what
Gneral Relativity tells us) which means that the universe is really non-
Euclidean, although this is difficult to detect in the solar neighborhood.
	Sorry, but this handwaving mystical nonsense about 'higher planes'
is not an answer, and the claims of religious document which as it's only
support is your belief in them is no evidence.  This is SCI . SKEPTIC .  
Please either give hard evidence, a repeatable experimental procedure, a
method of objectively verifying your statements, or silence.  Somehow, I
am of the impression that 'none of the above' will be the case.

>Sincerely,
>Kalki Dasa


Don't forget to chant:

	Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benjamin T. Dehner    Dept. of Physics and Astronomy 
btd@iastate.edu       Iowa State University 
                      Ames, IA 50011

Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
From: mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu (Robert McGrath)
Subject: Re: Glub Glub... Any Floods in Human History?
Reply-To: mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept of Computer Science
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 21:15:25 GMT

In article <8402@tekig7.PEN.TEK.COM>, alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher) writes in part:
|> In article <1993Jan22.013809.7159@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
|> |
|> |	And the worst part of these catastrophic floods:
|> |....
|> |	The first writing known is from the neighborhood of the
|> |Eastern Mediterranean, which is rather far from any of the Pleistocene
|> |continental glaciers.
[...]
|> This book I quoted in an earlier post describes catastrophic flooding
|> due to glacial outbursts in Scandinavia (the Baltic Ice Lake), the
|> Caspian Sea region, and parts of Siberia, as well as North America.
|> This is apparently an active field of research.  Some people have
|> proposed that the Caspian Sea region flooding, rather than
|> Mesopotamian flooding, gave rise to the earliest Flood legends.
|> The dating of the last floods is just late enough to be tantalizing.

This is all silly.  There have been gazillions of floods big enough to
be total disasters for the people present.  EVERY flood is a disaster
if your home is washed away, and if "everybody" is washed away, then
it may as well be the whole world.  Tales of such floods are passed
down through generations and, in the absence of careful records,
blend together, as they are all pretty much the same.  It is no mystery
where people learned what floods were like.

The biblical flood myth contains much that is obviously intended to
instruct:  warnings of divine punishment, descriptions thereof, and
so on.  Extrapolating from the memory of real floods to a really,
really big one is a simple and understandable literary device, 
especially since the intention was to point out the unlimited 
power of god.

It is abundantly clear that the biblical flood tale is not, and was
not intended to be, a historical or scientific record of a real event.
For one thing, the concept of a "historical" or "scientific" record
probably didn't make any sense in the culture out of which the story
comes.

Forget all this geological speculation and go back to anthropology:
  examine the story, trace it's cultural history, and try to find
  out what it REALLY meant to whoever invented it. 

Applying you own cultural standards to it is silly.

-- 
  Robert E. McGrath
  Urbana Illinois
  mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu