Everything in this blog is true

Regular readers of this blog may remember that about a year ago, a student of mine attempted to kill me by sending me a video clip of an apparently pathologically stupid woman attempting to defend the practice of homeopathy via misquotes from Stephen Hawkings [sic], a claim implying that mass and volume are the same thing, and a bizarre quasi-analogy that involves throwing a bomb at your neighbor's house because his dog pooped in your yard.  This student, who by all appearances is a moral and upstanding young man, nevertheless induced me to watch something which he knew might well have the effect of making me choke on my own outrage and die in horrible agony.

Needless to say, I survived the first murder attempt.  Not satisfied with failure, however, this same student has tried again, this time sending me a link to a website called “Truthism.com.”

I must say that as murder attempts go, this one was pretty inspired.  The homeopathy clip was only about eight minutes long, while this website took a half-hour to read thoroughly – thirty minutes of my life that I will never again get back, and a half-hour during which I made many muffled snorting noises, rather like a bulldog with a sinus blockage.  In case you’re understandably reluctant to waste that amount of time, or possibly risk dying of Exploding Brain Syndrome, I present below a summary of the gist of the Truthism website.

1. Everything on this website is true. 
2. If you doubt anything on this website, you are at best asleep, and at worst a mindless sheep who is being led about by evil government disinformation specialists. 
3. Many things which turned out to be true were disbelieved, even laughed at, at first.  Therefore if you disbelieve and laugh at this website, it must be true. 
4. You do not have access to government Top Secret facilities and records.  Therefore, anything this website claims is in those facilities and records must be true, because you can’t disprove it. 
5. Science is just another means for the ruling elite to control the populace. 
6. The ruling elite also invented religion and morality as a way to control the populace.  The fact that science and religion are often in conflict is an indication that they are both wrong. 
7. The current ruling elite are the same individuals who created the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Nazca lines. 
8. These individuals, for good measure, also created humanity itself. 
9. Because the ruling elite aren’t actually people, but are super-intelligent reptiles from another planet. 
10. Called “Annunaki.” 
11. Did I mention that everything in this website is true? 
12. The fact that many ancient cultures depicted snakes in their art is proof that the earth is being ruled by reptiles from outer space. 
13. The caduceus, the symbol of medical science, is a pair of snakes coiled together.  It looks a little like a DNA molecule, which is the repository of all the genetic information in the cell. 
14. There you are, then. 
15. If that doesn’t prove it to you, then consider the following chain of logic: Crop Circles, Area 51, Ancient Astronauts, the Face on Mars, Freemasons, the Hollow Earth Theory! 
16. Ha. That sure showed YOU. 
17. And as a last piece of evidence; everything on this website is true.

I have to point out, at this juncture, how much it cost me to write all this out for you.  I can hear the pathetic little death screams of the neurons in my frontal cortex as I’m writing this.  But being the selfless reporter that I am, on the front lines of investigation, I’m willing to undergo significant risks to my own health, safety, and IQ in order to bring this story to your doorstep.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons SacroHelgo, 96ccb1 0c4b6a2ddbb4425f89f032a6f6ec9a19а, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And you know, it’s not as if I can’t see the attractiveness of this as a theory.  Think how positing the existence of evil, super-powerful cold-blooded reptilian alien propaganda specialists would explain, for example, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  But alas, it’s not enough simply to like a theory, it has to fit with the data, and at the moment, the lion’s share of the evidence is in the “against” column.  So, sad to say, we must conclude that despite the website’s repeated claims of being true, its domain name should probably be changed to “EgregiousBullshitism.com.”

And with that said, I think I should go lie down for a while and recover from this latest assassination attempt.  If this keeps happening, I may have to hire a bodyguard.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.