Thank heavens for stupid people

How would the rest of the world make money if it weren't for people who believe in things which are obviously stupid?

How about people who believe in alien abductions? Some of them are putting us on, of course, but some of them actually believe they've been abducted. Of course, there are people who believe the earth is hollow, too, but that isn't evidence it's true. And why would a race with the superior technology to travel through space (and through time as well, given the unimaginably huge distances involved) come here just to stick probes up our asses and vaginas?

How about people who believe in the "out of body experience"? One hospital had a shelf all the way around the room at ceiling level where a researcher placed a message that, because of the shelf, could not be read from floor level. None of the people in this hospital who claimed to have hovered over their bodies remembered seeing this message. Of course, this leaves aside the question of how one might see without eyeballs, and a functional nervous system. It reminds me of the people who straightfacedly and seriously will tell me that after being guillotined a disembodied head uttered some words. Now, how does a head utter anything without access to the lungs? Tell me that!

How about people who believe in this John Edwards huckster? A friend of mine tells me basically that "He knows things he couldn't know without being in touch with people on the other side." My reply is, "He appears to know things, but if you change the channel you're likely to see a chimpanzee who appears to speak English or a man who appears to be wielding a light sabre who can also with a wave of his hand send his opponent flying across the room. I'm sorry...I just can't buy the argument that because it's on TV it must be true.

I also love the street preachers who are telling us "The end is near! Get right with God!" Did you ever ask yourself if they said anything different 500, 1000, or 1500 years ago? "Don't worry! The end is still pretty far off! Break The Ten Commandments with impunity for now because the end is still many hundreds of years off in the future!"

This reminds me: By using abstruse mathematical means on the vast amount of data in The Torah, various scholars (not many of them actual scientists) have discovered or found what they feel are significant "codes" in The Bible. One of them dared skeptics to find predictions of assassinations of major assassinations in Moby Dick. Brendan McKay, a professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University, took up the challenge and found a number of such references. However, what Bible Code believers fail to understand is that a bunch of words, even in proximity (a "cluster," as they call it) are not a prediction. Predictions have a subject-predicate structure using the familiar parts of speech: "Schlomo Christenson will slip on a cow pie and fatally hit his head on a rock," or something like that. If you find "Robert Kennedy" and "gun" in a cluster, this only has real significance in retrospect, and yet code researchers seem to feel that the so-called code can make predictions. They do not tell us how. When codes start appearing in whole sentences, they can be verified or tested, but not untilthen. Read more here.

Stupid people. You gotta love 'em for all the amusement they provide.