Disbelieving your own eyes

In May of 2015, the brilliant and acerbic Andy Borowitz wrote a piece for The New Yorker entitled "Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans."  Borowitz wrote:

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them. 

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said.  “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.” 

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.”

I wonder if Borowitz realizes how literally accurate his satirical piece is.   Because Brian Schaffner, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, has just published research showing something that even given humanity's fact-resistance, is kind of mind-blowing.

In the first, and less surprising part of the research, Schaffner showed the now-famous aerial photographs from Obama's and Trump's inaugurations to 1,388 people, and asked them which was which.  Unsurprisingly, given the claims by Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, and others, a significant percentage of Trump voters thought the Obama photograph (clearly showing more people) was Trump's, and vice versa.

Obama's inauguration [image courtesy of photographer Senior Master Sergeant Thomas Meneguin, U. S. Air Force, and the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, all that shows is that people believed what Spicer said, and/or that the photograph itself had been misrepresented in the press.  So far, nothing too shocking.  But the amazing -- and alarming -- piece of Schaffner's research is best described in his own words:

For the other half, we asked a very simple question with one clearly correct answer: “Which photo has more people?”  Some of these people probably understood that the image on the left was from Trump’s inauguration and that the image on the right was from Obama’s, but admitting that there were more people in the image on the right would mean they were acknowledging that more people attended Obama’s inauguration. 

Would some people be willing to make a clearly false statement when looking directly at photographic evidence — simply to support the Trump administration’s claims? 

Yes.

In fact, about 15% of the Trump voters responded, with no apparent hesitation, that the photograph containing fewer people actually had more.  (I'm not sure if I find it heartening that 85% of Trump voters correctly identified the photo with the bigger audience, however, given that 41% still thought it was from Trump's inauguration.)

As Alan Levinovitz of Slate wrote:

The process of embracing a charlatan’s empowering vision is not rational, which means that rational arguments are unlikely, in isolation, to dispel it.  Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people cling tenaciously to their worldviews, and conflicting data may actually strengthen their beliefs.  (Just look at this family who thinks Trump is “a man of faith who will bring Godliness back.”)  To renounce Trump would mean admitting that one’s worldview—of a country wracked by carnage, as the president put it in his inaugural address, and a truth-telling hero who can heal it—is fundamentally mistaken.  And that can also mean confronting existential panic without a panacea.  It is much easier to forgive Trump for not locking her up than to wrestle with such truths...  It’s also much easier to convince yourself that a crowd is larger than it appears, particularly when the man you’ve put your faith in is arguing the same thing.  And in the case of the photographs, it didn’t take much to come up with an explanation for the apparent discrepancy.  Trump himself supplied it: Mainstream media manipulated both images to make it appear as if Obama’s had more.

Okay, I know I have biases just like everyone, and (like everyone) am probably wrong about some of my beliefs.  But what I completely do not get -- to the point of complete and utter bafflement -- is how people could be so wedded to their own biases that they would take incontrovertible hard evidence that they were wrong, and instead of changing their beliefs, disbelieve the evidence.

"No," they seem to be saying.  "I can't possibly be wrong.  It must be what I'm seeing right in front of me that is a lie."

Bill Nye compares this sort of thing to a belief in astrology, which persists despite huge amounts of evidence against it.  "For example, if somebody believes in astrology, it takes them about two years to get over it," Nye said.  "You have to show them over and over there’s no such thing as astrology, it doesn’t really work, and then they let go.  But everybody’s expectation that you’ll let go in a week is not going to met...  So we have to work, I think, diligently in the science community to fight back.  Of course there are the facts, we start with those.  But there’s this human nature thing on both sides to fight back.  We have our bubble over here, they have their bubble over there."

All of which means that rationalists have their work cut out for them.  I've seen over and over the extent to which humans react to new information primarily from an emotional, not a logical, standpoint; but over and over I'm astonished at how deep this tendency runs.  Andy Borowitz's quips about "fact-resistant humans" made me laugh, but I'm afraid in the last week or so my laugh has rung rather hollow.  Because the people currently in charge of the United States seem hell-bent on using this avoidance of the facts to their benefit, in terms of consolidating power and silencing the opposition.

And if it works, I'm afraid we're in for a really, really rough few years.

The conspirators shift gears

If, like me,  you find yourself perusing conspiracy websites every so often, you're probably wondering what the conspiracists are gonna do now.

I mean, the whole lot of 'em claimed that Hillary Clinton was in league with the Illuminati at the very least, and at worst was herself the Antichrist.  The election was rigged in her favor, they said, and anyone who got in her way would be steamrolled.  Some claimed that her opponents wouldn't only be shoved out of the way, they'd be assassinated.  She'd win the presidency, then proceed to destroy America.

And then two things happened.  (1) The election was pretty fraud-free, as anyone with any knowledge of the electoral process anticipated.  And (2) Donald Trump won.

Now, if we were talking about normal people here, the expected response would be for them to have a good laugh at themselves, and say, "Wow, I guess we were wrong!  What a bunch of nimrods we are!"  And then vanish into well-deserved obscurity.  Alex Jones, especially, who a few weeks ago was in tears on-air when he spoke of the inevitability of a Clinton presidency, should be clean out of a job.

But these aren't normal people; these are conspiracy theorists.  Which means that the logical thing to do is to assume...

... that Donald Trump himself is part of the conspiracy.

I shit you not.  One week, and they're already turning on him.  Our first contribution from the Loose Grasp On Reality cadre is William Tapley, a right-wing evangelical loony who calls himself the "Third Eagle of the Apocalypse."  (What happened to Eagles #1 and 2, I don't know.)  Tapley says that not only is Trump being controlled by the Illuminati, so is Melania.

The evidence for this?  A mural in the Denver International Airport that has two figures, a man and a woman.  The woman looks vaguely like Melania Trump.  The man, Tapley says, looks as if he is having a lewd act performed upon him by the woman.  For some reason, the only possible conclusion we can draw from all of this is that Trump is a member of the Illuminati.

"Please don’t tell Anderson Cooper what you and I both see," Tapley says, in a video you can watch at either of the links posted above.

Don't worry, Mr. Tapley.  We're not telling Anderson Cooper anything.

If that wasn't enough, we have a second contention, which is that Donald Trump wasn't born in the United States, he was born "Dawood Ibrahim Khan" in the Waziristan region of Pakistan.

While this is funnier than hell from the perspective that Trump was one of the most prominent spokespeople for the whole Obama birtherism thing, I have to admit that as a hypothesis, it doesn't have much to recommend it.  As far as I can see, they just found a photograph of a blond kid in vaguely Middle Eastern garb, and proclaimed that it must be Donald Trump as a child.

Dawood "Donald" Ibrahim-Trump

So it was kind of reassuring to find that the other trending story on conspiracy websites these days is that the earthquake that struck near Christchurch, New Zealand a couple of days ago was caused by a "seismic blasting ship" sent for some reason by President Obama.  Wikileaks, which at this point has damn little credibility left even without this story, apparently said so.  "These is science showing disturbances that are linked to the earthquakes," one commenter said (verbatim).  Which is enough proof for me.

Thanks, Obama.

Anyhow, I find it fascinating how quickly the conspiracy nutjobs are pivoting on Donald Trump.  I guess if your baseline assumption is that you can't get elected without the blessing of the Illuminati, it stands to reason, if I can use the word "reason" in this context.  But at least it's a mood lightener after the last week, which I sorely needed.  Nice to know there are still people out there who are both crazy and relatively harmless.

Apocalypse whenever

I have an update for those of you who are worried about when the world is going to end, or civilization is going to fall, which honestly would happen anyhow if the world ended.

This update comes from sources that conveniently ignore the fact that previous predictions of the world's end have had a 100% failure rate.  Every time we're told that an asteroid is going to end it all, or the Rapture is going to happen, or the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons are going to run roughshod over the populace, what happens is...

... nothing.  Civilization, or what passes for it these days, just keeps bumbling along as usual.  There are no death comets, no killer plagues, no Second Comings of Deities.  All of which I find reassuring but at the same time vaguely disappointing, because I live in the middle of rural upstate New York and we could really use some excitement around here most days.

Of course, a batting average of zero isn't enough to discourage these folks.  This time it's gonna happen, cross our hearts and hope to die in horrible agony when the Earth explodes.

First, we have the Nibiru cadre, who have been predicting the arrival of Nibiru for decades, kind of like what happened in Waiting for Guffman but not nearly as funny.  This time, though, we can say for sure that Nibiru is approaching because there's going to be a "Blood Moon" (better known to those of us who aren't insane as a lunar eclipse).  Yes, I know that lunar eclipses happen every year, but this one is different.  Don't ask me how.

According to an article in Express, the fabled tenth planet is due to arrive any time now, and has been captured in a video.  Not a NASA video, mind you.  A video taken by an anonymous YouTube subscriber, which as we all know is a highly reliable source of scientific research.

"And now," writes the author of the article, Jon Austin, "conspiracy theorists have somehow tied it in with the infamous blood moon events of a year ago that appears [sic] to be happening again."

What?  Those events of last year wherein nothing happened?  Ah, yes, I remember thinking at the time, "Heaven help us all if this happens again!  Scariest non-events I've ever seen!"

According to this bizarre view of how the world in general, and astronomy in particular, works, the "blood moons" aren't caused by the Earth's shadow.  Nope.  The Nibiroonies have "now tried to tie together the two myths and even claim it is the shadow of Nibiru causing the blood moons."

Because it's not like if there was a planet near enough, and big enough, to cast a giant shadow over the moon, NASA would notice it, or anything.

Then we have the revelation that Obama and his evil henchmen are planning a scheme to destroy America and take down other major world governments along with it.  According to the site What Does It Mean?, the president and his collaborators have a Cunning Plan to unleash upon us, despite the fact that the guy only has five months left in office, so if he really has been intending to destroy the United States, he's gotten off to an awfully slow start.

But no, the article says, he's palling up with Hillary Clinton, who apparently rivals Obama himself for being the embodiment of pure evil.  And they've teamed up with the people who run Google for a conspiracy trifecta to accomplish the following:

1.) [D]isabling of advertisements on all websites critical of the Obama-Clinton regime, including the globally popular Antiwar.com, in order to destroy them.

2.) Deleting Donald Trump from the search list of candidates running for the US presidency. 

3.) Developing and employing a filter so that the name Donald Trump won’t even show up on anyone’s computer device or smart phone.

4.) Hiding in their search results information relating to Hillary Clinton’s health and the massive numbers of suspicions deaths associated with her.

5.) Being supported in their hiding Hillary Clinton health information by the New York Times, with one of their insiders admitting what they’re doing.

Myself, I would be thrilled if something would prevent my ever having to look at a photograph of Donald Trump again.  If that's what the conspiracy's about, I'm all for it.

And as evidence for all of this, they cite...

... InfoWars.  Yes, Alex Jones, who despite having a screw loose is still considered by some to have inside information about the plots that are running rampant in our government, but which never seem to accomplish a damn thing.

It's sort of like the "Obama's coming for your guns" thing you hear all the time from the far-right.  I mean, dude had eight years to take all our guns, and as a nation we're still as heavily armed as ever.  And the contentions that Obama's a radical Muslim.  Really?  He drinks beer, eats bacon, doesn't fast during Ramadan, and supports LGBT rights.  If the guy is a Muslim, he's the worst Muslim ever.

Last, we've got the weird coincidence of three separate lightning strikes that killed hundreds of reindeer (in Norway) and cattle (in the US), and which is said to be HAARP gearing up for a major strike on the populated places of the earth.  Add this to the fact that there's a hurricane in Florida as we speak, because that's not common or anything.  HAARP has done all this as a sort of test run, and next thing we know, there'll be earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and the works, and civilization will have no other choice besides giving up and collapsing.

What's funniest about all of this is that just last week, the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, which now owns HAARP, had an open house last week wherein they invited anyone with questions or suspicions to stop by for a tour of the place so they can see what it actually does, which is to study high-altitude atmospheric phenomena.  I coulda told them this strategy wouldn't work; if you demonstrate conclusively to the conspiracy theorists that HAARP was a harmless scientific study facility, they will either (1) tell you that the real HAARP had been moved elsewhere, or (2) that you are only saying this because you are under the influence of a mind-control beam, which is one of the things HAARP is supposedly able to do.  So you can't win.  These are people who think a lack of evidence is evidence.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Three ways in which we will almost certainly not be meeting the fall of civilization as we know it.  It's kind of anticlimactic, really.  We're moving into autumn, here in the northeast.  School's starting, the days are getting shorter, and we soon will be battening down the hatches for cold weather.  Myself, I think an apocalypse would be a nice change of pace.  I'm not in favor of wholesale destruction, mind you, but a minor catastrophe or two would go a long way toward alleviating the monotony.

Opening the floodgates

I was discussing with a friend a couple of days ago the devastating floods that have hit Texas, caused by an aberrant weather pattern that is showing no signs of going away any time soon.

"Given that there are so many climate change deniers in Texas," my friend asked, "what do you think they'll blame it on?"

"Oh, I dunno," I responded.  "Probably gay people and President Obama, I'd guess."

You know, there are times I'd rather not be right.

Flooding in Houston [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Just yesterday, a woman who called into Bryan Fischer's American Family Association-sponsored radio talk show Focal Point had the following to say:

If God is judging Texas, it’s because of the witchcraft and sodomy that we’ve allowed to run rampant...  [T]he places that are underwater [are] are overrun with witchcraft and sodomy.  If you go into those areas, you can just see it...  Houston has a whole area that is like Sodom and Gomorrah.  It even has a sodomite mayor.

What I'm wondering is how god could design a flood that would only hit witches and gay people.  I mean, it's not like there's any way to stop flood waters from wiping out pretty much anyone in their path, so unless god in his Infinite Wisdom and Mysterious Ways induced all of the sodomites and witchcraft practitioners to build their houses on low ground, he's pretty much smiting everyone at the moment.

It brings up the rather amusing mental image of god at a a giant computer that has a map with flashing red lights every time someone has the wrong kind of sex, and a pull-down menu for different kinds of natural disasters that can be unleashed.  "What?  Fellatio in Tulsa, Oklahoma?  THIS CALLS FOR A TORNADO."

But you'll be relieved to know that there's not just sex and witchcraft behind the floods, there's also the looming, sinister, evil, all-powerful figure of...

... Barack Obama.

Why would President Obama send floods to Texas, you might ask?  Is it just because Texas is conservative?  Because if that's it, he should be flooding most of the southeastern United States.  There has to be more to it, right?

Of course, right.  Obama is flooding Texas because they caught on to what he was doing regarding Jade Helm 15.

For those of you who have not been keeping up with the latest conspiracy theories, Jade Helm 15 is a set of military maneuvers taking place in Texas that were a front for a government takeover of the state that was so top-secret that the Army announced what they were intending to do three months early.  That's how sneaky these guys are.  "I have an idea!  Let's confuse and confound them by telling them all our plans!  They'll be so baffled by this ploy that when we follow through with them, they'll be caught completely unawares!"

So apparently Obama got mad that the Texans were on to his cunning plot, and weren't just cooperating and letting him and his thugs declare martial law and herd everyone into FEMA Death Camps conveniently disguised as WalMarts.  He got so mad, in fact, that he used his super-powerful weather weapons to teach Texas a lesson.  Says writer Susan Duclos:

As I'm looking through breakingnews [sic] headlines, and seeing the continuous references to the extreme weather so concentrated over TX, and coupled with the continuous chemtrailing that happens throughout the US, I can't help but think that what is going on right now as part of the Jade Helm "exercize" [sic], could not actually be the domestic roll out of weather warfare on an agressive [sic] scale. We know they can control the weather to at least some degree. We know that the chemtrailing over CA and in the Pacific moddifies [sic] the jet stream to both keep CA dry and to force that precipitation east towards TX and other southern states.  We know that Jade Helm is "pretending" that TX is a hostile enemy that must be engaged.  The millitary is already rolling out across the state as part of this "drill".  Why then, is it not reasonable to assume that as part of this "mock civil war drill" that they would not practice using the tools that they have in their arsenal?

Let me just recommend, Ms. Duclos, that you not only use your computer's function called "spell check," that you consult a dictionary and look up the definition of the word "reasonable."

So there you have it: this isn't a weather event, it's either a punishment by god for gay sex and witchcraft, or it's the result of a weather weapon wielded by Barack "Professor Evil" Obama.  Myself, I just hope that the rains stop, because there's been enough devastation and death already.  And also so that these loons will shut up and go back to their previous hobby, which is probably pulling on the straps of their straitjackets with their teeth.

Welcome to the persecution party!

It's a minor mystery to me why some groups seem to enjoy appearing persecuted.

Maybe they think it's some kind of bizarre pseudo-syllogism:

• Highly moral people often find that others reject their views.
• Having your views rejected is the same as being oppressed.
• Lots of people reject my views.
• I feel oppressed by this.
• Therefore I must be highly moral.  q.e.d.

Just in the last couple of days, we've had three examples from the fanatical evangelical wing of American Christianity wherein we learn that Christians in general are a persecuted minority, because, apparently, comprising 78% of the American citizenry and nearly 100% of the people who hold public office puts Christians in danger of imminent eradication.

Let's start with Franklin Graham, who's shown himself more than once to be an angry little man unworthy of the stature conferred upon him by his name.  His father, evangelist Billy Graham, was and is a thoughtful and moral man who participated actively in the Civil Rights Movement and worked against human rights abuses in the Eastern Bloc and apartheid-era South Africa.   So even though I disagree with his theology, I've always had a grudging admiration for him as a human being. 

Franklin, though, seems like a schmuck.  Not to put too fine a point on it.

In an interview with Gordon Robertson, son of noted wingnut Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham went on and on about the upcoming "storm of persecution" that Christians are facing in the United States.  He said:

We’re going to see persecution, I believe, in this country because our president is very sympathetic to Islam and the reason I say that, Gordon, is because his father was a Muslim, gave him a Muslim name, Barack Hussein Obama.  His mother married another Muslim man, they moved to Indonesia, he went to Indonesian schools.  So, growing up his frame of reference and his influence as a young man was Islam.  It wasn’t Christianity, it was Islam. 

There are Muslims that have access to him in the White House.  Our foreign policy has a lot of influence now, from Muslims. We see the Prime Minister of Israel being snubbed by the President and by the White House and by the Democrats and it’s because of the influence of Islam.  They hate Israel and they hate Christians, and so the storm is coming, I believe, Gordon.

What makes this even more ridiculous is that when Graham was asked last month by (of all people) Bill O'Reilly if he could name some of the Muslims who are influencing the president, he couldn't come up with a single name.  Not one.

Oh, but "he knows they're there."  That's enough, apparently, to make it a fact.

Next on the persecution hit parade we have radio talk show personalities Mat Staver and Matt Barber, who were offering their opinions on the Washington state florist who was sued because she refused to sell flowers to a gay couple who were getting married.  The florist, Barronelle Stutzman, has become something of a hero amongst the ultra-religious for her actions.  She said, "You are asking me to walk in the way of a well-known betrayer, one who sold something of infinite worth for thirty pieces of silver.  That is something I will not do."

Apparently in these people's eyes selling someone out to be tortured and executed is exactly the same as selling someone flowers.

But Staver and Barber, of the radio show Faith and Freedom, seem to have no problem accepting Stutzman's rather inflated opinion of the importance of her actions in the grand scheme of things.  Barber went even further than Stutzman, and issued the following dire warning:

If, God forbid ... the Supreme Court somehow defines and manufactures a constitutional so-called right to sodomy-based marriage this summer, in June, if they do that then the floodgates will be open.  There will be Christian persecution widespread across the United States and the so-called gay marriage agenda will be the sledgehammer used to crush the church and to crush religious liberty and the crush individual Christians, their finances, to ruin them.  That's what this agenda was always about and that's what we will see if the Supreme Court goes the wrong way in June.

Righty-o.  Apparently a few people finally being able to have public and official recognition of their committed relationships will lead to wild hordes of out-of-control gays running around smashing Christians with sledgehammers.

But even that is sensible as compared to what Gordon Klingenschmitt came up with.  Klingenschmitt is a member of the Colorado House of Representatives, winning in 2014 by a 70-30 margin of the popular vote even though he appears to have been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Klingenschmitt decided to weigh in on last month's murder in North Carolina of three young Muslims:

An American atheist has killed three Muslims in North Carolina because they were like Christians.  This man obviously had something against people of faith, whether they're Muslim or Christian, and the three young Muslims were sadly found shot in their homes on Tuesday.  Well, the murderer allegedly of these three young Muslim students is an atheist man named Craig Stephen Hicks, who is not just a person who doesn't believe in Islam, but he is so radically atheist that he was arrested on suspicion of three counts of first-degree murder.  Hicks is reportedly a vocal supporter of United Atheists of America, and according to his Facebook page, was a fan of television shows like The Atheist Experience, and also the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Here's a radical left-wing atheist who is going around killing people of faith.  He's posted a number of anti-religious images and messages on his Facebook page.  One of the images he posted said, and I quote, "Why radical Christians and radical Muslims are opposed to each other's influence when they agree about so many ideological issues."  So he killed the Muslims because they think like Christians.  

Wow.  Where do I start?

First, Hicks was not arrested because "he is so radically atheist," he was arrested because he almost certainly murdered three people.  It seems unlikely that he did so solely because the three were Muslim; his ex-wife, Cynthia Hurley, described Hicks as an angry and confrontational man who once watched a movie that involved a man going on a shooting rampage and found it "hilarious."

"He had no compassion at all," Hurley said about Hicks.

So Hicks was an atheist who didn't like Muslims, but he was also a violent man who is very likely to be mentally unbalanced.  He'd had repeated angry exchanges with his three victims over parking spaces, and it's thought that this might have actually been what set him off.

But Klingenschmitt doesn't like things complicated.  In a bizarre screed that should win the 2015 Pretzel Logic Award, Klingenschmitt has Hicks thinking, "Wow, these Muslims, they think just like Christians!  And Christians deserve to be killed, because that's what I found out from the Southern Poverty Law Center!  I think I'll go kill them right now."

Which may have edged out James Inhofe's Senator-with-a-Snowball act as the single stupidest thing an elected official has said so far this year.

So there you have it.  Between Obama and his invisible Muslim advisors, and crazed gays forcing florists to sell gay men flowers at sledgehammer-point, to people killing Muslims because they're so much like Christians, I give you: the evangelical pity-party talking points of the day.

Which brings me back to my original question of why this worldview is so appealing.  Is it because people are more likely to rally around the cause if they feel threatened?  It seems the only logical explanation to me.  Because by any other standard of rational discourse, these people are sounding increasingly like they've lost their minds.

Time's wasting, Mr. President!

What is it about President Obama that has brought out the conspiracy wingnuts in droves?

Maybe it's just that I wasn't as aware of such things back then,  but I don't remember crazy conspiracy theories erupting around George W. Bush.  There were lots of people who suspected that he had that IQ of a baked ham, but you didn't hear the sort of loony claims that we're seeing with Obama.

Yes, I know he's African American, but can it really be that simple?  It's not like other African Americans are the targets of this sort of thing.  No one is saying, for example, that Kanye West is in league with the devil, except possibly Beck.  But being in league with the devil is only the beginning of what you hear, where Obama's concerned.  Being in league with the devil is mild.

Here's a sampler of some Obama conspiracy theories I found -- all from the last couple of days:

From a letter to the editor in the Davidson County (Tennessee) Dispatch:

God states that seven kings must come before the rise of the Antichrist. Revelations 17:10 says the seventh king will reign for a short amount of time. Is Barack Obama the seventh king? 

Obama's lifted sanctions off Iran with promises that a peace treaty will be made but does nothing to inspect Iran as they continue to make nuclear weapons. Does Obama already know Iran's actions and is helping Iran? God says Israel must be attacked by Iran to start a war between all nations before the Antichrist can rise to create a peace treaty between these nations. Everything God said is happening. The Lord can return for God's children at anytime.

From an article in The Daily Coin:

The ever encroaching police state, the fact that all financial markets, over the entire global, are rigged. Since when does the President come out and tell Congress that he needs omnipotent powers to continue to expand the wars of aggression? What next, maybe world war; cast a dragnet across the internet to begin scooping up owners of alternative news websites? Perhaps begin systemically killing the bankers in the back office with the codes and programs that run the derivatives markets and rig the equities markets?

From Family Research Council's commentator Craig James, in response to a caller who claimed that Obama was planning to stay in office for a third term, and using that term to convert all Americans to Islam:

Obama trying to stay in power for an illegal third term is a concern of mine.  I plan to pass a note along to [FRC President] Tony Perkins on how we could escape that. 

[A third term] would be horrible.  It’s not like we’d have Ronald Reagan staying in office for another year or so while we’re in a state of emergency.  It’s not like we’d have someone who really cares about you and me.  We’re talking about someone who is there in that office as the leader of the free world, the United States of America, who doesn’t get it.  That’s the concern.  It fires me up, the thought that the guy can stick around in that office beyond a year and three-quarters.  He’s got to be gone.  We will follow up on that.

From conservative talk show host Michael Savage, who claims that Obama caused the measles outbreak:

I was asked about the origins of the measles outbreak in America and it’s pretty clear to me that it came in with the illegals.  We know that Obama committed a crime against humanity by dumping many, many, many, many ill people, mothers and children primarily, on us this summer unscreened, many of them brought in a killer virus, measles, tuberculosis and other illnesses. 

And all of these are just from the past couple of days.

What gets me about all of this is how these claims keep sprouting, like crabgrass in a garden, even though they never come true.  We've been hearing for years now about how Obama was the Antichrist (or some other wicked dude from the Book of Revelation), and that this means the End Times are imminent.  And lo, here the world still is, un-Ended.  We've heard over and over about how Obama wants to herd us all into FEMA camps and cut our heads off with guillotines, and we're all still running around with our heads firmly attached.  We've heard that Obama wants to silence people who dislike him by any means necessary up to and including assassination, and yet Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Alex Jones and Ann Coulter are still alive and kicking and spewing their rhetoric on a daily basis.

So if Obama is an evil mastermind, he's kind of an incompetent one, you know?  He's like one of those guys on Scooby Doo who has everyone convinced that there is a scary ghost haunting the carnival, and no one can figure it out except for a bunch of goofy teenagers, who unmask the ghost and it turns out to be the carnival owner, who would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for Those Meddling Fox News Commentators And Their Stupid Dog.

I'm kind of sick of waiting, frankly.  I mean, at this point I've been warned so many times that I'm ready for something to happen, and now's as good a time as any.  We're all snowbound, here in the Arctic tundra (a.k.a. upstate New York), and I'm feeling a little stir-crazy with the cabin fever.  Let's stir things up, okay, Mr. President?  Get together with your wicked Illuminati friends, and cast your spells to summon up Satan or whatever, and let 'er rip.  Because so far, you've kind of sucked at establishing a New World Order (or converting us all to Islam or bringing forth the Beast With Seven Heads, or whatever people think he's doing over there in the White House).  So far, you look pretty much like a typical politician, doing what politicians do.

And life can't be that prosaic, right?

Of course right.

Mob brain

I told myself that I wouldn't blog about the government shutdown.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a very political person.  To my untrained ear, most politics seems to fall into one of two categories; (1) arguing about things that are blatantly obvious (such as whether gays should have the same rights that straight people do), and (2) arguing about things that are so impossibly complex that a reasonable solution is probably impossible (such as how to balance the federal budget).  Given that impression, it's no wonder that most political wrangling leaves me a little baffled.

So, any opinion I might have on the government shutdown, or what to do about it, wouldn't be worth much.  But I did hear one commentary on the shutdown, and President Obama's role in it, that left me feeling like I had to respond.  It came from one Larry Klayman, the attorney who founded the right-wing organization Freedom Watch:

I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Qu'ran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.

This unusually stupid statement was made at an event called the "Million Vet March on the Memorials," which was an accurate name only if you believe the mathematical equation 200 = 1,000,000, but which did attract noted wingnuts Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz.  And when Klayman made his wacky pronouncement, the crowd went wild with glee and waved their anti-government flags they'd brought along for the occasion.

My thought was, "Are you serious?  You people still think President Obama is a Muslim?"  I thought that had finally been laid to rest along with the whole birth certificate nonsense and the question of whether Donald Trump is wearing a toupée or if a raccoon had simply crawled on top of his head and died.

But no, the whole thing is still a burning issue with these people.  Klayman apparently arrived at the position using the following logic:

1.  I don't like Barack Obama.
2.  I don't like Muslims.
Therefore:  Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Possibly augmented with a second airtight argument, to wit:

1.  Muslims have funny names.
2.  Barack Obama is a funny name.
Therefore:  Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Logicians describe two basic kinds of one-step reasoning, the modus ponens and the modus tollens.  The first is when you have an implication, and can show that the first part is true, and deduce that the second must be true ("If today is Wednesday, then tomorrow must be Thursday.  I know today is Wednesday.  Therefore I know that tomorrow will be Thursday.")  The second is the converse; if I have an implication, and the second part is false, the first must be false as well ("If it's July, the weather is warm.  It's not warm this morning.  Therefore I know it must not be July.")

Klayman appears to have invented a third mode of reasoning, the modus morons.  I guess I need to revise my notes next time I teach logic in my Critical Thinking classes.

But what gets me most about all of this is how ridiculous it is from another standpoint, which is to consider how President Obama would act if he were a Muslim.  Let's look around us at Muslim-dominated countries in the world, and see if we can see some commonalities.  Here are a few:

• Religion is overtly present pretty much everywhere you go.
• Religion drives law, policy, and jurisprudence.
• School curricula incorporate religious principles, and schools that are predominantly religious in nature are fully supported by the government.
• The holy book of the dominant religion is to be considered as literal fact.
• Women are subjected to subordinate roles, and any kind of reproductive rights issues are completely off the table.
• Homosexuality is condemned; acceptance of homosexuality is considered a sign of moral decay, to be eradicated by any means.
• Obedience to authority is one of the most fundamental virtues.
• The death penalty is justified for a variety of crimes.

So, really, folks; who does that sound more like, the Democrats or the Republicans?

I mean, okay.  Even if you think that Klayman and his idiot friends are right, and that President Obama is a Muslim, you have to admit that he's a really lousy Muslim.  I think that if he is a Muslim, he should turn in his membership card, because he's acting like...

... well, like a liberal American.  Go figure.

And even so, when Klayman said his piece about the President "putting down his Qu'ran," the people listening didn't seem to react that way.  They applauded.  They yelled for more.  Instead of doing what I would have done -- which was to laugh directly in Klayman's face and take away his microphone -- they cheered him on.

There's something, I think, that happens to people's brains when they're in mobs.  Somehow, being part of a mob makes you incapable of thinking rationally.  So maybe that's all that happened here -- one fool got up and babbled foolish stuff to the crowd, and the crowd simply agreed, because that's what crowds do.  It's like the inimitable Terry Pratchett said: "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of the stupidest person in the mob, divided by the number of people in the mob."

Considering that this particular mob contained Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Larry Klayman, I think this formula results in a small number indeed.

Orson Scott Card, and separating creator from creation

Today I'm going to ask a question that I'm not at all certain I have an answer to:  Is it possible to separate creative people from their works, especially in cases where the work is good but the creators themselves are reprehensible?  Or outright crazy?

I bring this up, of course, because of Orson Scott Card, whose book Ender's Game is brilliant, but who personally seems to be a grade-A wingnut.

First, we had the revelation that Card had served for years on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, an organization whose entire raison d'être is opposing gay marriage.  (He quietly resigned in 2009, possibly because he knew that it would result in bad press for the upcoming movie version of his book.)  The story came out anyway, of course, as did homophobic vitriol he'd written that included the following [Source]:

The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

He still refers to the gay marriage question as requiring the "radical redefinition of marriage," which I find wryly amusing, given that he's a devout Mormon.

Be that as it may, his anti-homosexual opinions are sadly commonplace.  Not so his more recently revealed opinions, which move him from "narrow-minded right-winger" directly into the "card-carrying loony" column.  Because now Card is now claiming that there is a leftist conspiracy to trash the Constitution and turn President Obama into an emperor [Source]:

Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press. He circumvented Congress as soon as he got into office by appointing "czars" who didn't need Senate approval. His own party hasn't passed a budget ever in the Senate.

In other words, Obama already acts as if the Constitution were just for show. Like Augustus, he pretends to govern within its framework, but in fact he treats it with contempt...

Michelle Obama is going to be Barack's Lurleen Wallace. Remember how George Wallace got around Alabama's ban on governors serving two terms in a row? He ran his wife for the office. Everyone knew Wallace would actually be pulling the strings, even though they denied it. Michelle Obama will be Obama's designated "successor," and any Democrat who seriously opposes her will be destroyed in the media the way everyone who contested Obama's run for the Democratic nomination in 2008 was destroyed.

How will Obama accomplish all of this? By hiring gang members as his personal hit men, of course:

Where will he get his "national police"? The NaPo will be recruited from "young out-of-work urban men" and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.

In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies.

Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people "trying to escape" -- people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.

All righty, then. I guess that's clear enough.

What is a bit perplexing is how little of this nuttiness comes through in Ender's Game, a book that is rightly popular and is (in fact) required reading in 10th grade English classes in the high school where I teach.  How could someone who has so clearly gone off the deep end can write a book as morally complex as this one?   (I know more than one person who is boycotting the movie, largely because of a desire not to put more money in the hands of a person who has such repellent ideas.)

Of course, Card is hardly the only author whose odd personal life has given readers pause.   Robert Heinlein, whose Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers are classics of science fiction, was during his life a peculiar mix of forward-thinking and reactionary. (What other nudists who supported Free Love can you think of who worked on the Barry Goldwater campaign?)

And of course, you get into even deeper water when you throw actors, artists, and musicians into the mix.  I know one person who can't even watch a Tom Cruise movie because of his role in suppressing negative press for the Scientologists.  I have less of a problem here, because when Cruise is on the screen, he's playing someone else, after all.  (There's still the difficulty of bankrolling someone who is morally reprehensible -- I do get that.)

So, it's a question worth asking.  Do the repulsive and (frankly) counterfactual beliefs of people like Orson Scott Card give us a reason to avoid their creations, even if those creations have their own merit?  To what extent can you separate the creation from the creator?  I suspect, from personal experience, that this may not even be possible. In addition to writing Skeptophilia I write fiction, and it is undeniable that my views of the universe have a way of creeping in -- however much I try to make the characters their own people, with their own worldviews and their own motivations.  And sometimes it works better than others.  For example, I deliberately tried to shake up my own sensibilities when I wrote the novella Adam's Fall -- the point-of-view character is an elderly and devout Anglican clergyman, and (I think) a highly sympathetic and complex man. The separation isn't quite so clear in other cases, though, and when a friend read my novel Signal to Noise, she said about the main character, "Um... you do realize that Tyler Vaughn is you, don't you?"

I'd be interested to hear what my readers think about this question, particularly apropos of the homophobia and conspiracy-theory aspects of Orson Scott Card's beliefs.  Do these diminish your enjoyment of his fiction?  Or stop you from reading it entirely?  Should it matter what sort of personal life an author or artist (or, for that matter, a scientist) leads?  Should it matter that geneticist James Watson thinks that Africa will never amount to much because "their intelligence is [not] the same as ours"?  Does the child molestation conviction of biologist Carleton Gajdusek decrease the worth of his research into the etiology of mad cow disease, research that led to protocols that have undoubtedly saved lives?  Does it make a difference that Isaac Newton, the "father of mathematical physics," was a narrow-minded religious fanatic who spent his spare time poring the bible for secret messages so he could figure out when the Antichrist was coming to Earth?

Myself, I think this just points up something that bears remembering: humans are complex. We are all combinations of good and bad -- some of us, really good and really bad.  What positive things we might accomplish don't excuse us from the repercussions of our darker sides, of course; but perhaps we should stop being surprised when they occur in the same person.

Maybe the problem here is our desire for clear-cut heroes and villains.  People are never two-dimensional, however easier it might make the world if they were.  Realistically, we shouldn't expect them to be.  When we are surprised at how odd, and seemingly self-contradictory, the human mind can be, perhaps it's our assumptions that are at fault.

A linguistic analysis of the Antichrist

Despite the fact that I scour the internet daily for weird news, sometimes I miss good ones.   I try not to fret about these oversights, however -- because one characteristic of woo-woos is that they never, ever let a claim die.  So if I miss a crazy, outlandish story, no worries; it'll be back.

Again and again and again.

One such bizarre claim, that I missed on its first go-round but which is recently repeating its circuit of ultra-religious right wingers (I've seen it posted on Facebook twice in the last week), is a story that contends that Jesus actually revealed the name of the Antichrist in the bible.  Never mind that wackos who are way too fond of the Book of Revelation have tried before to pin that title on various world leaders; Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, the Emperor Nero, and Ronald Reagan, for example, all had their supporters as being Satan's Right-hand Man.  (As for Reagan, his candidacy came about when someone noticed that his first, middle, and last names all had six letters -- 666, get it?  But my vote goes for Pope Benedict, who looks just like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.  I mean, can't you just picture him throwing lightning from his fingertips, and vaporizing protesters who support marriage equality, all the while cackling maniacally?)

But they're not the ones that the End Times crowd are after these days.  The whole thing apparently started with a 2009 YouTube video that claimed that the biblical passage "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from the heavens" (Luke 10:18) was actually encoding the real name of the Antichrist.  Here's the excerpt that's been making the rounds recently:

When I started doing a little research, I found the Greek word for 'lightning' is 'astrape,' and the Hebrew equivalent is 'baraq.'  I thought that was fascinating...  And I wondered what the word 'heights’ is, and I looked it up in the dictionary, and it’s 'bamah...'  If spoken by a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by the poetry of Isaiah, he would say these words in Hebrew … 'I saw Satan as Baraq Ubamah.'

 Righty-o.  Obama is the Antichrist.  Not that we have any kind of political agenda here, of course.

The only problem is, don't use a linguistic argument when there are lots of linguists around who are smarter than you are.  An expert in Hebrew and Aramaic, Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, weighed in on the contention in an article in Salon, and he said that there are several problems with it.  First, Ehrenkrantz says, the Hebrew root "bamah" doesn't mean "heights" as in "heavens," it means "heights" as in "hills."  Sticking a "u-" prefix on the word is consistent with Hebrew morphology, but doing that alters stops to continuants -- in this case, changing the /b/ to a /v/.  So, it would be "uvamah," not "ubamah."  And even so, the "u-" doesn't mean "from," it means "and."  So "baraq uvamah" means "lightning and hills."

The actual phrase "from the heavens," Ehrenkrantz says, should be "min ha-shamayim."  So the passage "lightning from the heavens" would be "baraq min ha-shamayim."  Which doesn't sound like much of anything except Hebrew.

Couple that with the fact that Obama's first name, Barack, does come from an Aramaic root, but it isn't "baraq," it's "barak," which means "blessing."  It's a cognate to the more common name Baruch.  So, if you're really trying to pull some apocalyptic linguistic analysis on the president's name, you would probably be more justified in concluding that Obama was sent to Earth by god as a blessing, and is undoubtedly going to kick some satanic ass while he's here.

Because the problem with twiddling around with language is that two can always play that game.  Linguistic coincidences and peculiarities in word root structure abound.  So let's have some fun, okay?  Let's start with the Hebrew word "rosh," which means "head, chief, or leader."  ("Rosh Hashanah" means "head of the year.")  And we all know the Latin word "limbo," the ablative form of "limbus," meaning "the edge, or outer circle, of hell."  So:  "the chieftain of the outer reaches of hell" would be "Rosh Limbo."

Hey, maybe this stuff works, after all.