Everything is false. Including this post.

I suppose it had to happen.  Eventually, if you buy into conspiracy theories -- where you consider the people in charge, and the media outlets, to be lying to you in order to push forward some sort of secret agenda -- you'll come to the logical end point of that belief system.

That everyone is lying to you.

That, at least, is the contention of a guy who posted on the website Above Top Secret a couple of days ago, heading his post, "Could Every Story on the News be Fake?"  Wondering how anyone could think that, of course I clicked on the link.  After all, this would mean that stories in my local paper this morning reporting on last night's Winter Festival Parade in my home town were false, and that the police closed Route 96 for two hours as some kind of diabolical False Flag, perhaps using coded Illuminati messages cleverly backmasked in Christmas carols.

So the post directed me to a video by Ed Chairini (published under his handle "Dallas GoldBug") called The Truth Exposed!  Basically, we seem to have arrived at Conspiracy Theory Nirvana, here.  I only made it through part of it, though, I'll be honest -- the video is an hour long, and that's just Part One of Three.  But on this video, which is like some sort of insane version of James Burke's Connections, we discover that some of the survivors of the the Virginia Tech massacre are "Seal Team Six," which supposedly was the group who participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, except that it never happened.  Another Virginia Tech survivor is actually kidnapped California teenager Jaycee Dugard, who is actually Casey Anthony, who is actually one of the actors on The Bachelorette, who is actually dress designer Rachel Zoe, who is connected to vanished airplane hijacker D. B. Cooper.

Oh, but that's not all.  South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone engineered the Columbine shootings, which, incidentally, also never happened.  And Miley Cyrus is actually murdered child fashion show model Jonbenet Ramsey.

And at that point, I gave up.

The problem with people like Chairini isn't just that they exhibit confirmation bias on a scale never before seen in the history of humankind; the problem is that they have moved out past doubt, past cynicism, into some kind of rarefied atmosphere where you can't trust anything.  Everything you see is suspect.  Everyone you know is lying.  Everything you hear is a manufactured falsehood, there to mislead and misinform.

The difficulty with even addressing people like this is that after they've arrived at this place, they're stuck there forever.  The most convincing evidence against their stance, the most logical argument you can craft, only means that you're either deluded (in conspiracy theorist parlance, you've "drunk the KoolAid") or you're actually one of the disinformation agents yourself.  In either case, they have no reason to listen to you, and it cements their feet even more firmly in place.

Why someone would go to such lengths to do all of this -- to engineer a fake child murder and subsequent investigation, and shelter the child for years, and then bring her back out so she can "twerk" at the Video Music Awards -- he never tells us.

Or maybe that's just in Part Two, which I am not going to watch.

Cynicism, and its bizarre younger brother conspiracism, are sometimes passed off as sophisticated, worldly stances.  I see students sometimes who act as if statements like "the government always lies," "all of science could be wrong," and "the world is going to hell" are some kind of brilliant intellectual declarations, and that the speaker is therefore a smart and perceptive individual who has seen past the smokescreen.

In reality, of course, cynicism is just as lazy as gullibility -- and it is perhaps worse, because the confidence with which cynics proclaim their "worldview" gives them the veneer of deep thought.  The truth is that disbelieving everything is as bad as believing everything, with the added filigree of making you a generally miserable person to be around.

At least gullible people are usually happy.

Better to do the hard work of thinking; better to trust others unless there's evidence to the contrary.  Most people, I maintain, are just ordinary folks who want what we all want -- love, shelter, security, and a good laugh every once in a while.  Peopling your fantasy world with evil manipulators doesn't make you brilliant; it just makes you a bitter, joyless pain in the ass.

Chemtrails on Venus

Yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and frequent contributors of topics thereto, sent me a link with the note, "Nothing like explaining one crazy idea using another crazy idea, is there?"

The link brought me to a page on Above Top Secret entitled "A Possible Reason for Chemtrails: A Form of Galactic Protection?" in which we learn that the government might have a positive reason for chemtrailing the absolute hell out of all of us.

They are trying to create a screen to shield us from the sensors of alien spaceships that intend to destroy all life on Earth.

At this point, you're probably already facepalming.  But in the words of the 1980s infomercials -- "Wait, there's MORE!"

How does the author know that this is possible?  Because that's what happened to Venus:

'Under all those sulfuric clouds [on Venus] there is a whole ecosystem'...  [W]hat if it's possible that there IS and ecosystem under those clouds, but not just an ecosystem; a whole civilization!

What I am getting at is what if the reason that the TPTB (or whatever you'd like to call them) are spraying chemtrails is to create a layer of atmosphere that will constantly reflect sunlight (When viewed from the outside of our atmosphere) hence making us look as bright as Venus at the moment. This in turn will hide us from any alien predators IF there are any lurking out there looking for a place to conquer and devour. 

Of course, there's just one teensy problem with this idea, besides making me wonder if the author's skull is filled with PopRocks.  And that is that the temperature on Venus is so high that the first probes to land there got fried.  To quote Universe Today:

There are many geophysical similarities between Venus and the Earth. Average temperature is not one of them. Where the Earth has an average surface temperature of 14 degrees Celsius, the average temperature of Venus is 460 degrees Celsius. That is 410 degrees hotter than the hottest deserts on our planet...  The atmosphere has made visual observation impossible. It contains sulfuric acid clouds in addition to the carbon dioxide. These clouds are highly reflective of visible light, preventing optical observation. Probes have been sent to the surface, but can only survive a few hours in the intense heat and sulfuric acid.

So our alleged "ecosystem and civilization" down there would be a little on the toasty side.

The whole thing reminds me of one of the funniest moments on the wonderful 1970s science series Cosmos, written and hosted by Carl Sagan, in which he describes an earlier set of "inferences" (if I can dignify them by that term) about what might be on Venus:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds. Well, what are clouds made of? Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore, the surface must be wet. Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp. If there's a swamp, there's ferns. If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs.

Observation: we can't see a thing on Venus.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who think this way, and with a small amount of digging, I found that there are still apparently folks who believe that there are aliens down there under the clouds on Venus.  Here's an excerpt of a "top secret file" I found, which I know is top secret because it says so at the top of the page, and which is so incredibly secret that you can find it with a thirty-second Google search using the keywords "Venus civilization:"

UFOlogia Top Secret File
TOP SECRET FILE

FORM INFRA D.I.P. PROJECT MARXEN UF088

EVIDENCE OF CIVILIZATION ON VENUS


It is scientifically possible for material plane beings to live in an atmosphere on another planet, that is too hot or chemically fatal to Earth humans, by constructing underground air-conditioned bases or cities protected from the elements on the surface. It is also feasible to create air---conditioned domes on the surface of other planets that have artificial atmospheres exactly like on Earth, and American scientists admit they already have the technology and plans to create these bases on Mars and our Moon. Therefore extraterrestrials with the superior technology to create disc--shaped U.F.O.s, that are detailed in dozens of photos and documents in the U.S. Air Force released Project Bluebook files, could logically possess the advanced science to create such bases on the surface of the planet Venus.

The physicists William Plummer and John Strong stated that Venus may have large areas of bearable temperatures. The regions near the Venusian north and south poles would be much cooler than the areas reportedly monitored by space probes. Furthermore, according to Professor Alexander Lebedinsky, in the Soviet Union, in data suppressed by the United States Pentagon complex, the usual surface temperature of much of Venus must be about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even though "radio---electric" measurements indicated 700 or more degrees. Similar observations can be made on the relatively COOL surfaces of gas tubes used in neon signs, because the radio--electric equivalent of those tubes is also several thousand degrees! 

Yuppers.  There you have it.  The Venera, Mariner, and Magellan probes, which sent back photographs from Venus's surface, just accidentally landed over and over on Venusian neon signs, and it confused the sensors.   Never mind that every single photograph they took looked like this:

So whatever "civilization" the Venusian chemtrail-cloud-anti-alien-shields are there to protect must not mind being red hot and swimming around in liquified rock.

On a more somber note, I hope that there's not a grain of truth to all of this nonsense -- that what we are currently doing to the atmosphere, in the form of excessive fossil fuel use, might not generate a runaway greenhouse effect.  In the same episode of Cosmos that Sagan quipped about dinosaurs, he threw in his own cautionary note -- that the reason Venus is so hot is only partially its greater proximity to the Sun.  It is largely due to the huge amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.  So while the author of our original webpage perhaps didn't intend it, there's a way in which there is a connection -- enough injection of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, via the burning of hydrocarbons like jet fuel, and we might well raise the surface temperatures out of the narrow range in which carbon-based life is possible, altering our Earth into a planet like Venus -- a place that, to once again quote Sagan, "is very much like hell."