Ministry of propaganda

Is it too much to ask that the Trump administration simply tells the damn truth?

That's all I ask.  Just stop lying.  I'm fine with having differences of opinion over policy.  For example, claiming that unhooking from fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy would be an unreasonable burden on our economy is not the same thing as saying climate change isn't occurring.

The first is a policy question we could discuss, and perhaps, come to consensus about.  The second is a lie.  And as long as you're simply lying about the facts, there is no discussion to be had.

Take, for example, the person who would have to be included in the top five most dangerous members of this regime; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He is an anti-science ideologue of the worst sort, and because of him the CDC is now limiting access to COVID-19 vaccinations and canceling funding for this year's flu vaccine -- including the potentially pandemic bird flu.

All part of his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign.  Because horrible policies are just fine as long as you give them a snappy name, right?

Of course right.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the U. S. Air Force]

It doesn't end with anti-vaxx nonsense, either.  Just this week, RFK stated that gender-affirming care for individuals with gender dysphoria should be discontinued -- once again, flying in the face of scientific study after scientific study.  Ignore the science, he says; instead, listen to the directives from the government.

And what is the government suggesting instead?

Why, "conversion therapy."

Yep, the same thing that was touted to "cure homosexuality," and which (once again) study after study has shown to be (1) ineffective, and (2) psychologically damaging.  RFK's letter to healthcare providers states that they should uphold their oaths to "do no harm" by following a strategy that has been conclusively shown to do harm.

Then there's his report on "gold-standard" scientific research that allegedly supports his viewpoints on holistic health and the sins of Big Pharma -- which contains (1) dozens of citations that were identified as mischaracterized by the actual authors themselves, and (2) at least seven citations for studies that appear to be nonexistent.  In other words, RFK pulled the middle-school bibliography-boosting stunt of making up plausible-looking sources, taking others and claiming they said things they didn't actually say, and hoping like hell no one notices.

Well, someone noticed.  But did he retract the report and apologize?

Ha.  Of course he didn't.  This administration never apologizes for anything.  Confronted by their own blatant lies, they just double down, stamping their feet and saying "it is so true!", and rely on the fact that their supporters have no scientific training and very short memories.

Oh, and also this week, he promised a ban on federally-funded medical researchers from publishing in top-flight journals like Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of the American Medical Association.  Why?  Because they're "corrupt."  Instead, he wants them to publish in a journal he's going to run, after vetting researchers as "good, legitimate scientists" -- meaning, of course, that they agree with him.

Look, it's not (as I've said many times before) that I'm unaware of the problems inherent in the American medical system.  My wife is a nurse, so I hear about a lot of it from her, and I've witnessed the misery that friends and family members have gone through trying to navigate their way through predatory insurance companies, inefficient and understaffed medical care providers, and ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals.  I have one friend who's had a ton of chronic health problems, and has gone through the wringer with misprescribed medications and unmanaged side effects.

But RFK is making a bad situation much, much worse.  His outright lies and barrage of unapologetic misinformation are going to kill people, pure and simple.  But my guess is that no one is going to pull on the reins, because we can't stop a program called "Make America Healthy Again," right?  What, do you want to Make America Unhealthy Again?

Honestly, I put the lion's share of the blame here on the members of Congress who voted to approve his appointment to the Cabinet.  It's not like his views were some kind of a secret; we knew about incidents like his lies about the measles vaccine resulting in an epidemic in Samoa that killed eighty people.  The man goes way past "unqualified," into the territory of "outright dangerous."  He should never have been appointed, much less confirmed.

So this is episode #352,981 of "We Tried To Warn You."  And now we're seeing the results of that dreadful lapse of civic responsibility on the part of our elected officials.

All I can say is that insofar as you can, take care of your health.  Take precautions, get the vaccines that are available, and educate yourself using actual scientific research and not Ministry of Propaganda doublespeak.  Even so, my suspicion is that it's going to be a rough few years.

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Trojan horse

Well, I just ran into the single stupidest conspiracy theory in existence.

Don't even try to convince me there's a dumber one, because I don't want to hear it.  HAARP controlling hurricanes and tornadoes to target enemies?  Pshaw.  A global network of Illuminati in league with Reptilian aliens to control major world governments?  Amateur hour.  Big Pharma putting mind-control microchips in our meds to turn us all into soulless automata?  Little League.

Because now we have: the COVID vaccine is "installed with payloads" of the Marburg virus, which will be activated in October by a signal broadcast from 5G networks, triggering the zombie apocalypse and killing billions, starting with all of the people who were foolish enough to get vaccinated.  This will result in the Evil Democrats winning (for that, read stealing) the 2024 election.

*brief pause for you to regain your equilibrium*

Okay, some background first.

Marburg virus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. https://www.utmb.edu/newsroom/article11484.aspx, 137488 web, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Marburg virus causes a deadly hemorrhagic fever similar to the better-known (and related) Ebola virus.  It's a bad one; there's no vaccine yet, and even with treatment the mortality rate is somewhere between sixty and eighty percent.  It's endemic in certain parts of Africa, and seems to be carried by bats and monkeys.  It's considered to be of significant concern with regards to epidemics, given how contagious it is.

However, there is no way to (1) put it into some kind of Trojan horse in a vaccine, and (2) activate it using a 5G signal (or any other kind of signal).  In order to believe this, you have to know essentially nothing about viruses, vaccines, or 5G.

Which is apparently the case with Todd Callender, who seems to have been the origin of this particular lunacy back in 2022.  He appeared in an interview with Jeffrey Prather on his program The Prather Point, and we're assured that Callender isn't "some hare-brained fringe theorist" because Prather vets all of his guests and he says so.

So that's good to know. 

"A broadcast from 5G cell towers at 18 MHz, for a specific duration and sequence, will cause affected cells to rupture," Callender said, "unleashing Marburg payload bioweapons into the blood of those who took the mRNA injections.  This, in turn, would instantly unleash a Marburg pandemic and produce a sudden rush of symptoms including bleeding out (hemorrhagic fever isn't pretty), cardiovascular deaths, seizures and more.  Some of the symptoms that could appear would even resemble classic zombies as depicted in pop culture; biting, loss of cognitive function, aggression, confusion and extreme alterations in the appearance of skin and eyes, among other similarities."

The ultimate outcome is that the Democrats (who, of course, engineered all this) will swipe the 2024 election.  "If this theory pans out, the obvious timeframe for the powers that be to release the binary weapon would be before the [next election]...  With a whole new pandemic hitting the scene -- with far more serious symptoms and a higher death rate compared to COVID -- the elections could either be cancelled or altered into a universal vote-from-home format which would favor the highly organized vote rigging and ballot counterfeiting of the Democrats (who are only in power because they stole the last election, of course)."

For all the doubters in the studio audience, we're told to stop being KoolAid-drinkin' sheeple.  "Critics might say this all smacks of science fiction.  But we are living through a science fiction dystopian scenario right now, with extreme censorship, an Orwellian global cabal trying to exterminate the human race, the rise of the robots and the mass injection of billions of people with exotic nanotechnology that seems to have a rather nefarious purpose, far from merely offering 'immunity.'"

The last bit reminds me of the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.  They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers.  But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

In any case, we don't have long to wait, since the latest intel is that this is all going down in October.  Me, I'm kind of bummed by that, because my birthday's in October, and I was rather looking forward to having a nice quiet celebration with my wife, and not having to stumble around the village bleeding from the eye sockets and looking for brains to eat.

But I'll return to my original point, which is that if there is a stupider conspiracy theory out there, I don't want to know about it.  Writing about all this made me long for the good old days when the antivaxxers were content to inject bleach and swallow horse dewormer.

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Magnetic nonsense

Loony people are hardly a new invention.  Any claims that "people are crazier now than they used to be" generally springs from one of two things, the first of which is a bad memory.

The other, though, is more interesting, as well as more troubling.  In the past, when Great-Aunt Ethel started babbling in public about being visited at night by a sexy alien who wanted to take her up to his spaceship and bring her back to Zeta Reticuli to be his immortal love slave, we had the option of saying, "That's wonderful, auntie, but let's go inside and get you a nice cup of tea and watch The Beverly Hillbillies, okay?  Wouldn't that be fun?"

Now, the Great-Aunt Ethels of the world have computers with internet access, where they can connect with all the other Great-Aunt Ethels.  And influence people who are already on the borderline, so as to create the next generation of Ethels.  And because a lot of social media sites now allow you to monetize your content, they're able to make tons of money off it, extending their reach even further.

We're in a world where the Ethels have just as great a capacity for being heard as the scientists do.

And this brings us to Sherri Tenpenny.

Tenpenny is an anti-vaxx activist who was identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the "Disinformation Dozen" -- the twelve people who, put together, are responsible for 65% of the vaccine misinformation out there online.  (Other shining lights on this list are Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Christiane Northrup.)  Tenpenny, though, brings things to a whole different level, way beyond the usual "vaccines cause autism" nonsense.  Here's one example:

The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things.  I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House Committee in Columbus, [Ohio].  Well, guess what?  It’s all true.

The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the "Internet of Things," the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected.  You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop.  It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God-given body that we were born with.  And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about.  All of these things are real...  All of them.  And it’s happening right now.  It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.

Sure it is, Great-Aunt Sherri.  Here, have a nice cup of tea.

The trouble is, Tenpenny and others like her are getting rich off this stuff.  Some social media sites -- notably Facebook and YouTube -- have taken steps to stop her from spreading her insane lies, but even so, her message is still getting out there.  Business management information provider Dun & Bradstreet reported that her clinic, the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, has an average annual sales total of a bit over four million dollars.

And that's despite the fact that the State Medical Board of Ohio recently revoked her medical license.

What gets me is that nothing she says, however ridiculous, seems to diminish her popularity.  In June of 2021 she stated that she had "spent over ten thousand hours studying the origins and effects of COVID since the pandemic began," despite the fact that at that point only eleven thousand hours had passed since the pandemic was declared.  She also claimed that the vaccine turns you into a human magnet:

I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized.  They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks…  There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.

Well, I can state definitively that based upon an experiment I just ran with my car keys, this is incorrect. 

And this is considering that I've now had four COVID shots (the original two plus two boosters), and have been vaccinated against all the usual childhood diseases, as well as typhoid, yellow fever, shingles, hepatitis A and B, and a yearly flu shot since (if memory serves) 1995.  Despite all this, as the above highly scientific photograph shows, I am not even a tiny bit magnetic.

I have also not been turned into an electronic avatar or a transhumanist cyborg, which I honestly feel a little disappointed about, because that sounds badass.

Given the fact of the connectivity we have now for information of all sorts, we no longer have the option of hustling Sherri Tenpenny back into the house and getting her settled in the recliner in front of The Beverly Hillbillies.  The best thing we can do is to shine as bright a light as possible on her nonsense.  We can't let her go unchallenged, especially on such subjects as vaccination, where peoples' health and lives are at risk.

It'd be one thing if she was talking about sexy aliens from Zeta Reticuli.  She's not.  Her rhetoric is, literally, killing people.

We're not going to be able to stop her from shouting.  The important thing is that the sane people, the ones who actually know what they're talking about shout back -- louder.

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Monkeying around with the truth

I don't think I'll ever understand the conspiracy theorist mindset.

It's not, mind you, that I think conspiracies never happen.  It's just that the vast majority of them get found out or otherwise fall apart through gossip and sheer ineptitude.  Humans are lousy at keeping secrets -- and the more people are in the know about the secrets, the faster they get found out.  If you don't believe me (hell, maybe I'm one of the conspirators and am trying to fool you -- mwa ha ha etc.), check out this study I wrote about last year that actually showed there's an inverse relationship between the number of people in a conspiracy and how fast it collapses.

Also, if there were a successful conspiracy -- the likelihood of it being figured out by stupid people is fairly low.  Which was my reaction when I read that the recent outbreak of monkeypox is already being branded a left-wing fabrication by people like Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who amongst (many) other things buys into the idiotic claim that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election, and that the voter fraud that put Joe Biden into office was the work of "seditious Jews."

So it's pretty clear that Wendy Rogers has spent too much time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  But being crazy and stupid doesn't, unfortunately, make you quiet, so it came as no surprise to me that she is now saying the following about the monkeypox outbreak:

• Monkeypox is an invention of the Democrats to compensate for falling approval ratings and to "reestablish tyrannical control" over rights and freedoms.  (Unfortunately for Rogers, monkeypox was discovered in 1958.)
• The fact that the virus is spreading much faster than monkeypox usually does should make us suspicious about "what Gates, Fauci, and the rest of the so-called 'public health experts' have been up to for the last few years."  (Which ignores the fact that viruses are excellent at evolving to become more transmissible.  Oh, but wait, she doesn't believe in evolution, either.)

Then her followers started yapping along with her, and adding to the foolishness:

• Monkeypox is a side-effect of the COVID-19 vaccine.  (It's not.)
• It's a complete fake; the entire outbreak is a hoax.  (It's not.)
• Okay, maybe it's not a hoax, but it's only spreading in Blacks and gay people.  (It's not.)
• Just like COVID-19 is the same thing as the flu, monkeypox is the same thing as shingles.  (It's not, and it's fucking not.)

Unfortunately, the last bit was made considerably worse when someone found a photograph on a Mumbai-based website that was labeled as monkeypox, but was actually a photo of a shingles rash that had been taken from the website of the Queensland Health Department.  The Mumbai health website apologized for, and fixed, the error as soon as they found out about it, but by then it was too late.  Honestly, the confusion was understandable; they do look similar, and you probably know that the causative agent in shingles is the chickenpox (varicella) virus, which is in the same genus (Orthopoxvirus) as monkeypox.

Thus the similarity.

But did I mention that they are not the same thing?  

Monkeypox virus [Image is in the Public Domain]

I know whereof I speak; last year, because 2021 wasn't already enough of a shitshow, I got shingles.  It was pretty mild as such things go, but still hurt like hell, giving me the characteristic "electric zaps" of pain.  But -- unlike monkeypox -- I had no fever, no swollen lymph nodes, none of the other warning signs that it was anything but ordinary shingles.

And, most significantly, when I took a week's worth of aciclovir, it went away.  As shingles does.  As monkeypox does not.

But I'm not expecting any of this to convince anyone who isn't already convinced, especially not Wendy Rogers, who appears to have a half-pound of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain.  As I've mentioned before, once you've decided everyone's lying to you, you're unreachable.  Anyone who tries is either a dupe or a shill, so What I Already Believed q.e.d.

Or, put another way, you can't logic your way out of a position you didn't logic your way into.

What's most upsetting, though, is how many people immediately jump on the bandwagon with horseshit like this.  Epidemics and outbreaks are scary, I get that.  We live in a big, chaotic, unpredictable world.  But sometimes stuff just happens.  Everything isn't a plot, a conspiracy, wheels within wheels.

But with people like Wendy Rogers, that's not good enough.  Not only does attributing everything bad to some grand conspiracy appeal to her mindset, it also allows her to scapegoat the people she already hated.

For me, I'd rather side with Carl Sagan, as he expressed the philosophy in his wonderful book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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Snake in the grass

Okay, now I've heard everything.

If you ever run across a more ridiculous claim, I do not want to know about it.  This one already lowered my opinion of the average intelligence of the human species by ten IQ points.

You've probably heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19 -- that it was deliberately started by the Chinese, that the vaccine contains microchips so The Bad Guys ™ can keep track of us, and so on.  But none of them can hold a candle to what one Bryan Ardis is saying.  Ardis is allegedly a "chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical researcher," but after you hear his claim, you will probably come to the conclusion that his medical degree came from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.

Ready?

Ardis says the Catholic church created the COVID-19 virus from cobra venom, and is using it to turn us all into Satan worshipers.

So far, it's just a wacko guy who came up with a wacko idea.  Nothing special, because after all, that's what wacko guys do.  What sets him apart is that radio broadcaster Stew Peters took him seriously enough that he made a documentary about Ardis and his idea -- a documentary called "Watch the Waters" which has already gotten 640,000 views and is trending on Twitter.

I'd like to hope a significant chunk of the views are by people who are saying, "Whoa, listen up to what this nutcake is saying," but chances are, there are enough people who believe him that it's troubling.  Here's what Ardis says, which I feel obliged to state is verbatim:

The Latin definition historically for virus—originally and historically, virus meant, and means, "venom."  So, I started to wonder, "Well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?"  So I actually looked up what’s the definition and on Dictionary.com, it brings up thirteen definitions: ‘Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.  So, this actually could read, "The Pope’s Venom Pandemic."  In Latin terms, corona means crown.  Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.  So put that together for me: king cobra venom.  It actually could read, "King Cobra Venom Pandemic."

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world.  If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? …  You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA.  I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s—the Evil One’s—DNA into your God-created DNA.  And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA [vaccine] technology.  They’re using mRNA—which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom—and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.

 Probably needless to say, I read this whole thing with this expression on my face:

It does leave me with a few responses, however:

• Satan has DNA?
• Linguistics is not a cross between free association and a game of Telephone.  
• When mRNA is injected into you (e.g. the COVID vaccine), it degrades in only a couple of days.  By that time, if the vaccine worked, you've begun to make antibodies to the protein the mRNA coded for (in this case, the spike protein).  It doesn't get into your DNA, nor affect your DNA in any way.  So if the COVID vaccine was engineered to turn us into demons, we'd all turn back into ordinary humans a couple of days later, which now that I think of it could be kind of fun.
• Injecting king cobra venom into you would kill you within minutes, given that this is basically what happens when you get bitten by a king cobra.
• "Corona" is Latin for "crown," that bit is correct.  But coronaviruses are a big family of viruses that has been known to scientists since Leland Bushnell and Carl Brandly first isolated them in 1933, and were named not for the pope's miter but because the rings of spike proteins on the surface look a little like a crown.
• Is Bryan Ardis stark raving loony?  Or what?

So there you have it.  We are now in the Pope's King Cobra Venom Pandemic.  Despite these dire warnings, my wife and I have both been vaccinated three times, and we haven't turned into hybrids of Satan.  But we have, so far, avoided getting COVID, which is kind of the point.

But I will end with reiterating my plea: if you find a crazier claim, please don't tell me about it.  Reading about this one made countless cells in my cerebral cortex that I can ill afford to lose die screaming in agony.  From now on in Skeptophilia, I think I'll focus on happy bunnies and rainbows.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Hopefully a while, at least.  The last thing we need is my brain cell loss contributing to a further drop in the average human IQ.

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Bias amplification

Last week I had a frustrating exchange with an acquaintance over the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.

He'd posted on social media a meme with the gist that there'd been so much waffling and we're-not-sure-ing by the medical establishment that you couldn't trust anything they said.  I guess he'd seen me post something just a few minutes earlier and knew I was online, because shortly afterward he DMd me.

"I've been waiting for you to jump in with your two cents' worth," he said.

I guess I was in a pissy mood -- and to be honest, anti-vaxx stuff does that to me anyhow.  I know about a dozen people who've contracted COVID, two of whom died of it (both members of my graduating class in high school), and in my opinion any potential side-effects from the vaccine are insignificant compared to ending your life on a ventilator.

"Why bother?" I snapped at him.  "Nothing I say to you is going to make the slightest bit of difference.  It's a waste of time arguing."

He started in on how "he'd done his research" and "just wasn't convinced it was safe" and "the medical establishment gets rich off keeping people sick."  I snarled, "Thanks for making my point" and exited the conversation.

It's kind of maddening to be told "I've done my research" by someone who not only has never set foot in a scientific laboratory, but hasn't even bothered to read peer-reviewed papers on the topic.  Sorry, scrolling through Google, YouTube, and Reddit -- and watching Fox News -- is not research.

Unlike a lot of anti-science stances, this one is costing lives.  Every single day I see news stories about people who have become grievously ill with COVID, and whose relatives tell tearful stories after they died about how much they regretted not getting the vaccine.  Today's installment -- from a man in Tennessee who has been in the hospital for three weeks and is still on oxygen -- "They told us not to worry, that it was just a bad cold.  They lied."

The problem is -- like my acquaintance's stubbornly self-confident "I've done my research" comment -- fighting this is a Sisyphean task.  If you think I'm exaggerating, check out the paper that came out this week in Journal of the European Economic Association, about some (actual, peer-reviewed) research showing that not only do we tend to gloss over evidence contradicting our preferred beliefs, when we then share those beliefs with others, our certainty we're right increases whether or not the people we're talking to agree with us.

The phenomenon, which has been called bias amplification, is like confirmation bias on steroids.  "This experiment supports a lot of popular suspicions about why biased beliefs might be getting worse in the age of the internet," said Ryan Oprea, who co-authored the study.  "We now get a lot of information from social media and we don't know much about the quality of the information we're getting.  As a result, we're often forced to decide for ourselves how accurate various opinions and sources of information are and how much stock to put in them.  Our results suggest that people resolve this quandary by assigning credibility to sources that are telling us what we'd like to hear and this can make biases due to motivated reasoning a lot worse over time."

I don't even begin to know how to combat this.  The problem is, most laypeople (and I very much include myself in this) lack the expertise to comprehend a lot of peer-reviewed research on immunology, which is usually filled with technical jargon and abstruse details of biochemistry.  And every step you take away from the actual research -- from university or research-lab press releases, to summaries in popular science magazines, to blurbs in ordinary media, to Some Guy's blog -- introduces more opinions, oversimplifications, and outright misinformation.

And I'm completely aware that Skeptophilia is also Some Guy's blog.  I will say in my own defense, however, that I do try to base what I write on the actual research, not on Tucker Carlson quoting Nicki Minaj's tweets about how her boyfriend got the COVID vaccine and afterward his balls swelled up.  (No, I am not making this up.)

So that's today's rather discouraging scientific study.  It's sad that so many of us have to become gravely ill, or watch someone we love die in agony, before we'll admit that we might have been wrong.  I'll just end with what the research -- from the scientists themselves -- has to say: the COVID vaccines are safe and effective, and the vast majority of people who have had severe COVID are unvaccinated.  The "breakthrough cases" of vaccinated people testing positive almost never result in hospitalization, and when they do, it's because of comorbidities.

But don't take my word for it.  If you honestly want to know what the research says, and you're willing to keep an open mind on the topic and shape your opinion based upon the evidence, start here.  And after that, go out and get the fucking vaccine.

Seriously.

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London in the nineteenth century was a seriously disgusting place to live, especially for the lower classes.  Sewage was dumped into gutters along the street; it then ran down into the ground -- the same ground from which residents pumped their drinking water.  The smell can only be imagined, but the prevalence of infectious water-borne diseases is a matter of record.

In 1854 there was a horrible epidemic of cholera hit central London, ultimately killing over six hundred people.  Because the most obvious unsanitary thing about the place was the smell, the leading thinkers of the time thought that cholera came from bad air -- the "miasmal model" of contagion.  But a doctor named John Snow thought it was water-borne, and through his tireless work, he was able to trace the entire epidemic to one hand-pumped well.  Finally, after weeks and months of argument, the city planners agreed to remove the handle of the well, and the epidemic ended only a few days afterward.

The work of John Snow led to a complete change in attitude toward sanitation, sewers, and safe drinking water, and in only a few years completely changed the face of the city of London.  Snow, and the epidemic he halted, are the subject of the fantastic book The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Cities, Science, and the Modern World, by science historian Steven Johnson.  The detective work Snow undertook, and his tireless efforts to save the London poor from a horrible disease, make for fascinating reading, and shine a vivid light on what cities were like back when life for all but the wealthy was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (to swipe Edmund Burke's trenchant turn of phrase).

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Untruth and consequences

In Dorothy Sayers' novel Gaudy Night, set (and written) in 1930s England, a group of Oxford University dons are the targets of an increasingly vicious series of threats and violence by a deranged individual.  The motive of the perpetrator turns out to be that one of the dons had, years earlier, caught the perpetrator's spouse in academic dishonesty, and the spouse had been dismissed from his position, and ultimately committed suicide.

Near the end of the novel, the main character, Harriet Vane, experiences a great deal of conflict over the resolution of the mystery.  Which individual was really at fault?  Was it the woman who made the threats, a widow whose grief drove her to threaten those she felt were smug, ivory-tower intellectuals who cared nothing for the love and devotion of a wife for her husband?  Or was it the don who had exposed the husband's "crime" -- which was withholding evidence contrary to his thesis in an academic paper?  Is that a sin that's worth the destruction of one life and the ruining of another?

The perpetrator, when found out, snarls at the dons, "... (C)ouldn't you leave my man alone?  He told a lie about somebody who was dead and dust hundreds of years ago.  Nobody was the worse for that.  Was a dirty bit of paper more important than all our lives and happiness?  You broke him and killed him -- all for nothing."  The don whose words led to the man's dismissal, and ultimately his suicide, says, "I knew nothing of (his suicide) until now...  I had no choice in the matter.  I could not foresee the consequences... but even if I had..."  She trails off, making it clear that in her view, her words had to be spoken, that academic integrity was a mandate -- even if that stance left a human being in ruins.

It's not, really, a very happy novel.  One is left feeling at the end that the incident left only losers, no winners.

The central theme of the book -- that words have consequences -- is one that seems to escape a lot of today's political pundits here in the United States.  Or, more accurately, they seem to feel that the fact that words sometimes have unforeseen consequences absolves them of any responsibility for the results.  A particularly egregious example is Fox News's Tucker Carlson, who considers himself blameless in the recent surge of Delta-Variant COVID-19 -- a surge that is virtually entirely amongst the unvaccinated, and significantly higher in the highly conservative Fox-watching states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.  Carlson told his viewers on the air that they should accost people wearing masks in public, saying that mask-wearers are "zealots and neurotics" who are "the true aggressors, here."  Anyone seeing a child wearing a mask should "call 911 or Child Protection Services immediately" -- that if you see masked children you are "morally obligated to do something."

Then, as if to drive home his stance that you should be entitled to say anything you want, free of consequence (as long as what you're saying conforms to the Trump-GOP party line, of course), he was outraged when a couple of days ago he was confronted by an angry guy in a fly-fishing store in Montana, who called Carlson "the worst human being in the world" for his anti-vaxx stance.

So, Mr. Carlson, let me get this straight: after telling your viewers they're morally obligated to accost people who disagree with them, you object to the fact that someone accosted you because he disagrees with you?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Tucker Carlson (50752390162), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Not only does this give new meaning to the words "sanctimonious hypocrite," it also shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what the principle of free speech means.  Yes, you're entitled to say what you want; but you are not entitled to be free of the consequences of those words.  To use the hackneyed example, you can shout "Fire" in a crowded theater, but if there's a stampede and someone gets hurt or killed, you will (rightly) be held responsible.  You can call your boss an idiotic asshole, but if you get fired, no judge in the world will advocate for your reinstatement on the basis of free speech.

You said what you wanted, then got the consequences.  End of story.

So the Trump-GOP members are now trying to figure out how to spin the surge of Delta-Variant COVID-19 amongst the unvaccinated after having played the most serious public health crisis we've seen in fifty years as a political stunt, and efforts to mitigate its spread as the Left trying to destroy fundamental American liberties.  Even Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, long one of the most vocal anti-mask, anti-vaxx elected officials -- just a few weeks ago his website had for sale merchandize with the slogan "Don't Fauci My Florida" printed on it -- has made an about-face, and is urging people to get vaccinated.

The result?  Conservatives in Florida are furious with DeSantis for "selling out," some even suggesting he had taken bribes from vaccine manufacturers to change his message.  What the fuck did he expect?  He's spent the past year and a half claiming that the pandemic is overblown and any attempt to push vaccines is a conspiracy against freedom by the Democrats.  Did he think that the people who swallowed his lies hook, line, and sinker would simply forget what he'd said, and go, "Oh, okay, I'll run right out and get vaccinated now"?

Another mealy-mouthed too-little, too-late message came from Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama, the state with the overall lowest vaccination rate (39.6%) in the country.  Alarmed by the dramatic upsurge in new cases in her state, she said, "It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks."

So, Governor Ivey, let's just go one step backward in the causal chain, shall we?  Why exactly are so many Americans unvaccinated, when the vaccine is available for free whether or not you have health insurance?  Why is it that if you drew up a map of Trump voters, a map of Fox News watchers, and a map of the incidence of new cases of COVID-19, the three maps would show a remarkable similarity?

You can say what you want, but you can't expect to be free of the consequences of what you say.

I'm appalled not just because political hacks like Tucker Carlson have callously used this tragedy to sledgehammer in their own views with an increasingly polarized citizenry, nor because re-election-minded governors like Ivey and DeSantis jumped on the anti-vaxx bandwagon because they didn't want to alienate the Trump-worshipers who form a significant proportion of their base.  The most appalling thing is that they have done this, blind to the end results of their words, just like the Oxford don in Gaudy Night whose dedication to the nth degree of academic integrity made her blind to the human cost of her actions.  Words are tools, and these hypocrites have used them with as much thought and responsibility as a five-year-old with a chainsaw.

And now they are expecting us to hold them faultless when the people who trusted them are, literally, dying by the thousands.

I suppose I should be glad that even DeSantis and Ivey are pivoting.  Carlson, of course, hasn't, and probably never will; his motto seems to be "Death Before Admitting Error."  Perhaps a few lives will be saved from a horrible and painful death because some conservative leaders are now changing their tunes.

But honestly; it's far too late.  A study released in February in The Lancet ascribed forty percent of the 610,000 COVID deaths in the United States directly to Trump's policies.  "Instead of galvanizing the U.S. populace to fight the pandemic," the authors state, "President Trump publicly dismissed its threat."

And unless there is a concerted effort to hold accountable the ones who caused this catastrophe -- legally, if possible, or at least at the ballot box -- we are allowing them to get away with saying, "I had no choice in the matter, I could not foresee the consequences" and doing nothing while every public health expert in the world was begging them to take action.

**************************************

One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Zombies, asteroids, and apocalypse buckets

Is it just me, or has the Religious Right completely lost the plot?

And surprisingly, I am not referring to their continuing support of Donald "Two Corinthians" Trump.

To be fair, I've never been a fan of the Evangelicals.  I was in college during the height of the Jerry Falwell/Moral Majority years, when they seemed to follow the Puritan doctrine of disapproving of anyone, anywhere, having fun.  But back then, they had a sense of decorum.  I didn't agree with their beliefs, but at least they were consistent and articulate, and were able to sustain some glancing connection to reality.

Now?  To see how the Evangelicals have completely gone off the rails, look no further than Jim Bakker, who despite setbacks up to and including spending time in federal prison for fraud, is back to raking in the dough.  His program The Jim Bakker Show has millions of viewers, and while I'd like to think some of them watch it for the "what the fuck is this guy gonna say next?" factor, I'll bet it's a small minority.

(It bears mention that Jerry Falwell himself, shortly after he forced Bakker to hand over control of his church and shortly before Bakker went to prison, called him "The greatest scab on the face of Christianity in the entire two thousand years of our history."  That assessment doesn't seem to have cost Bakker anything in the way of viewership -- or monetary profits.)

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, that appeared on the YouTube channel Telltale a couple of days ago.  And in it, Bakker is interviewing prominent Evangelical speaker Steve Quayle, and the topic is...

... zombies.

At first, generous soul that I am, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and thought, "Oh, they're using the term metaphorically, for someone who is brainwashed or mindlessly acting under the influence of someone else."  Which would be ironic coming from them, but at least not batshit insane.

But no.  They're talking about literal zombies.  Like Dawn of the Dead. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gianluca Ramalho Misiti from São Paulo, Brazil, Zombie Walk 2012 - SP (8149613310), CC BY 2.0]

Bakker says to Quayle, "Zombies that are on the Earth are a disease like any other disease that affects people, and they become like zombies.  Is that right?"

And instead of saying what any normal person would say to a question like that, which is, "Time to lay off the controlled substances, bro," Quayle responds -- completely seriously -- in such a way as to make Bakker sound almost sane:

Forgive me, but that's only part of the story.  Zombies also have the evil spiritual entity known as demon possession, ok?  Because there is no rationale with a zombie...  The best way to explain zombie bloodlust is this: the appetite of demons expressed through humans.  It should be astonishing to people that the richest people in the world, not all of them but some of them, are into occult ceremonies where they have to drink, you know, blood that's extracted from a tortured child.  Now that's sick, but that's the appetite of demons expressed through humans ...  What I'm saying, Jim, is they can induce zombieism.  At least the appetite for human flesh.

Oh, and you'll never guess how Quayle and Bakker say the rich demon-people are turning their innocent victims into zombies.

Go ahead, guess.  You'll never get it.

They say that the contagion is being introduced into unsuspecting Americans via the nasal swabs they use to test for COVID-19.

I wish I was making this up, but listen to the clip I posted, which comes along with highly entertaining commentary from the guy who runs Telltale.  You will see that I am not exaggerating one iota.

Zombification from nasal swabs.  And yet another reason for the Religious Right not to trust the CDC and the medical establishment, and refuse vaccination.  Which makes it even more likely that the Evangelicals will contract COVID and get weeded out of the population by natural selection.

Speaking of irony.

If zombies aren't bad enough, another guest of Bakker's, one Tom Horn, says that we're going to be hit in ten years by the asteroid Apophis (we're not), that it's carrying an alien virus (it isn't), and that it's the "star Wormwood" mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

Oh, and he pronounces "contagion" as "cawn-tay-jee-on."  Which isn't relevant but is kind of hilarious.

What amazes me here is not that some wingnuts said something loony.  That, after all, is what wingnuts do.  What astonishes me is that the other three people sitting at the table with Bakker kept nodding and frowning, as if this was the most reasonable, rational philosophical discourse they'd ever heard, instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to burst into laughter, say, "You people are out of your ever-loving minds," and walk off the set.

But concerned head-nodding is, apparently, the reaction of the lion's share of Bakker's watchers, who not only now believe that we're at risk from demonic, blood-drinking, flesh-eating zombies and killer cawn-tay-jee-on-carrying asteroids, but have two more reasons to purchase his "Apocalypse Buckets" containing food to tide them over during the End Times (from which apparently he makes money hand over fist).

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end of the pool for the day.  I'd be discouraged to hear that Bakker has anyone who believes what he says; that he has millions of devoted viewers is kind of devastating.  It points up how far we have to go here in this country to counter the deeply-ingrained irrational, fearful, anti-science beliefs held by a significant number of people who live here -- and, unfortunately, who vote.

It also gives us further evidence that ignorance and fear combined with someone determined to profit off it is a very, very dangerous combination.

****************************************

Ever get frustrated by scientists making statements like "It's not possible to emulate a human mind inside a computer" or "faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible" or "time travel into the past will never be achieved?"

Take a look at physicist Chiara Marletto's The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.  In this ambitious, far-reaching new book, Marletto looks at the phrase "this isn't possible" as a challenge -- and perhaps, a way of opening up new realms of scientific endeavor.

Each chapter looks at a different open problem in physics, and considers what we currently know about it -- and, more importantly, what we don't know.  With each one, she looks into the future, speculating about how each might be resolved, and what those resolutions would imply for human knowledge.

It's a challenging, fascinating, often mind-boggling book, well worth a read for anyone interested in the edges of scientific knowledge.  Find out why eminent physicist Lee Smolin calls it "Hugely ambitious... essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of physics."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

Thus sayeth Rick Wiles

I have a question: how completely batshit insane does someone have to be before the far-right evangelical Christians will stop listening to them?

It probably will come as no shock that I'm referring here to Rick Wiles, who runs TruNews and his mouth with equal fervor.  Wiles has appeared here in Skeptophilia before, for such pinnacles of rationality as claiming the COVID-19 pandemic was a punishment sent by God because of the United States's support for LGBTQ people, and that if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, she'd have rounded up conservatives and put them in concentration camps.

Rick Wiles on one of his frequent insane rants

So expecting any kind of reasonable statement from Wiles is probably a forlorn hope, but even by his standards this week's contribution is way out there.  On this week's TruNews broadcast, he said that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be tortured until he admits that he conspired with the Chinese to create the COVID-19 virus and release it into an unsuspecting populace.

If you're thinking, "Wait... how can it be a punishment sent by God and a deliberate creation of Fauci and his cronies at the same time?", believe me, that's only the beginning of the questions you could ask.

First, lest you think I'm making this up, here are Wiles's exact words:

You’re a liar! You know what you did, Fauci.  You worked with the Chinese Communist Party for years, and you used our own taxpayer money to work on a coronavirus with bats.  And you did it behind our back, deceiving the American people, and you participated in the creation of this virus.  And I’ll say it again, Fauci.  You should be taken to Guantanamo Bay and waterboarded until you cough up the truth, including the names of the other traitors who have helped China damage the United States of America with this virus.

The next day, in case anyone thought he might have come to his senses upon reflection overnight, he basically said the same thing again.

Now, I'll admit up-front that I don't get the evangelical mentality.  To start out with, to buy it, you have to have a completely different standard for reliable evidence than I do.  But all the same... isn't there some point where even the holiest of holy rollers will sit back and say, "Hang on a moment.  This makes no sense whatsoever."?

Because if "jumping the shark" exists in the evangelical world, Wiles has just done a double backward somersault with an aerial cartwheel over the shark.  He's claiming that the guy who has been instrumental in directing our fight against this lethal virus is some kind of mad scientist who created the thing in the first place, and that the American government needs to torture him until he 'fesses up.  Why a virologist with a lifelong career of managing epidemics and saving lives would suddenly go off the rails and create a pandemic, Wiles hasn't told us.

What possible motivation would Fauci have to do this?  Job security?  Seems like there are better ways to keep yourself in business.

But honestly, it's probably not even worth my time to try to put a rational spin on this.  Wiles and his ilk -- such exemplars of sound thinking as Greg Locke, Jim Bakker, Kat Kerr, Dave Daubenmire, and Paula White -- seem to spew out whatever their own particular biases and opinions of the moment are, then add "thus sayeth the Lord" at the end.  Doesn't matter if it makes sense; the only things that matter is keeping their place in the public eye and keeping the donations rolling in.

But you do have to wonder how people can listen to this and nod and say "Right on!"  Isn't there a point, even for bible-thumping literalists, that they will hear something and say, "Okay, that guy is a complete lunatic"?  Or does the fact that they all hate the same people -- LGBTQ folks, minorities, atheists, refugees, liberals -- mean that the listeners will just accept everything else the preachers say as if it was a pronouncement from on high?

So I'm back to where I started: I don't get it.  I know, there's free speech and all, so I know Rick Wiles et al. have the right to air their opinions.  What baffles me is that there's anyone left to listen.

********************************

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Isolation and anxiety

Last September I took a job working half-time, providing companion care for a senior gentleman who lives in a full-care facility about twenty minutes' drive from where I live.  The work was easy -- mostly what he wanted to do was go for long walks -- and it helped replace a little bit of the income I lost when I retired from teaching.  It also got me out of the house, and (in my wife's words) kept me from turning into a complete recluse.

Then in November, I was furloughed because of the pandemic.

I was in the fortunate position that the financial hit of not working wasn't the dire situation it is for many.  The loss of my weekly paycheck didn't mean we would go without food or miss our mortgage payment.  What it did mean -- both for my client and me -- was that since then, we've been pretty well totally isolated.  My client still sees the nursing staff at the facility; and, to be clear about this, they are stupendous, doing their best to see not only to the physical but to the mental and emotional health of their residents.  For me, it's meant that other than occasional quick trips to the grocery store, the only person I see is my wife.

That's been the situation since the first week of November.

I honestly thought it would be easier for me to deal with isolation.  I'm an introvert by nature, and pretty shy and socially awkward at the best of times.  But the last few months have been dismal, with the fact of it being the middle of an upstate New York winter not helping matters.  I've been fighting bouts of depression and anxiety -- something I've dealt with all my life, but lately it's seemed a lot worse than my usual baseline.

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by the director of the facility.  Because I've been vaccinated against COVID, and the residents were also receiving their vaccines, they were reopening to non-essential visits, and my client was eager to resume our daily time together.  Yesterday was my first day back at work after being stuck at home, pretty much continuously, for four months.

This is where things get weird.  Because instead of it relieving my anxiety, it made it spike higher.  I'm talking, to nearly panic-attack levels.

In case this isn't clear enough, there is nothing rational about this reaction.  My client has some developmental disabilities, and frequently needs a lot of help and encouragement, but he's kind, funny, and a pleasure to be with.  The job itself is the opposite of stressful; the worst part of it is having to keep track of the paperwork required by the agency and the state.  Being stuck home made my anxiety worse; if anything made sense about this, you'd think being given the green light to work again would assuage it.

Edvard Munch, Anxiety (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, though, I'm not alone in this rather counterintuitive reaction.  A paper last week in the journal Brain Sciences found that the social isolation a lot of us have experienced over the past year has caused a measurable spike in the levels of a hormone associated with stress called cortisol.  Cortisol is a multi-purpose chemical; it has a role in carbohydrate metabolism, behavior, resilience to emotional stressors, and reducing inflammation (cortisone, used for treating arthritis and joint injury, and topically for relieving skin irritations, is basically synthetic cortisol).  This last function is thought to be why long-term stress has a role in many inflammatory diseases, such as ulcers, acid reflux, and atherosclerosis; just as overconsumption of sugar can lead to the body losing its sensitivity to the hormone that regulates blood sugar (insulin), continuous stress seems to lower our sensitivity to cortisol, leading to increased inflammation.

Apropos of its role in emotional stress, the authors write:

There are important individual differences in adaptation and reactivity to stressful challenges.  Being subjected to strict social confinement is a distressful psychological experience leading to reduced emotional well-being, but it is not known how it can affect the cognitive and empathic tendencies of different individuals.  Cortisol, a key glucocorticoid in humans, is a strong modulator of brain function, behavior, and cognition, and the diurnal cortisol rhythm has been postulated to interact with environmental stressors to predict stress adaptation.  The present study investigates in 45 young adults (21.09 years old, SD = 6.42) whether pre-pandemic diurnal cortisol indices, overall diurnal cortisol secretion (AUCg) and cortisol awakening response (CAR) can predict individuals’ differential susceptibility to the impact of strict social confinement during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on working memory, empathy, and perceived stress.  We observed that, following long-term home confinement, there was an increase in subjects’ perceived stress and cognitive empathy scores, as well as an improvement in visuospatial working memory.  Moreover, during confinement, resilient coping moderated the relationship between perceived stress scores and pre-pandemic AUCg and CAR.

I thought it was pretty interesting that heightened cortisol has the effect of improving visuospatial working memory, but it makes sense if you think about it.  When a person is in a stressful situation, there's a benefit to being on guard, to keeping constant tabs on what's around you.  The downside, of course, is that such perpetual wariness is downright exhausting.

The last bit is also fascinating, if hardly surprising.  People who were capable of resilient coping with stress beforehand were less affected by the new emotional impact of being isolated; people like myself who were already struggling fared more poorly.  And interestingly, this was a pronounced enough response that it had a measurable effect on the levels of stress hormones in the blood.

This may explain my odd reaction to being taken off furlough.  Cortisol can be thought of as a sort of an "adrenaline for the long haul."  Adrenaline allows a fight-or-flight reaction in sudden emergencies, and has a rapid effect and equally rapid decline once the emergency is over.  Cortisol handles our response to long-duration stress -- and its effects are much slower to go away once the situation improves.  For people like myself who suffer from anxiety, it's like our brains still can't quite believe that we're no longer teetering over the edge of the cliff.  Even though things have improved, we still feel like we're one step from total ruin, and the added stressor of jumping back into a work situation when we've been safe at home for months certainly doesn't help.

In any case, yesterday's work day went fine.  As they always do.  I'm hoping that after a couple of weeks, my errant brain will finally begin to calm down once it realizes it doesn't have to keep me ramped up to red alert constantly.  It helps knowing I'm not alone in this reaction, and that there's a biochemical basis for it; that I'm not just making this up (something I was accused of pretty much every time I had an anxiety attack when I was a kid).

But it would also be nice if my brain would just think for a change.

***************************************

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The necessity of safety

I suppose it's a good sign when what I write grabs me by the emotions and swings me around, and it bodes well for the story having the same effect on my readers.  There are a few scenes that make me choke up every time I read them -- one of which boils down to a single line of dialogue.

In the story, one of the main characters wakes up in the middle of the night to find that his partner, who has gone through some terrible emotional trauma, is crying silently, obviously trying not to wake him up.  He pulls his lover into a hug and whispers, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you.  You're safe in my arms."

What got me thinking about this scene is a conversation I had with some online writer friends, one of whom asked the provocative and fascinating question, "How could you tell someone 'I love you' without using those words?"  My immediate response was "You are safe."  Those words resonate with me for a great many reasons, not least because I virtually never felt safe as a child or young adult.  Everything around me always seemed precarious -- I spent the first half of my life feeling like I was a tightrope walker, always a single misstep from utter ruin, and because of that needed to be constantly vigilant and wary.

It was exhausting.

The pragmatists in the audience might point out that in reality none of us are safe, and technically they'd be right.  Bad stuff can happen any time, for any reason or no reason at all, and as the line from Fight Club says, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."  But still, that feeling of safety and security, that there's someone looking out for you and that your friends have your back, is pretty critical for our emotional health.

These days, a sense of safety is hard to find.  We're still in the midst of a pandemic, trying to guard ourselves against an invisible enemy that can jump from one person to another with frightening speed.  Here in the United States almost a half a million people have died of COVID, and countless others have become desperately ill with complications lasting for months.  Everywhere people are losing their jobs, businesses closing down, schools going entirely virtual.  Health care workers are facing the awful double-whammy of dealing with incredible overwork and the fact that despite their best efforts, some of their patients aren't going to survive.  Add to all that the fact that in many parts of the world we've seen unprecedented social unrest, with deep-seated hatred and prejudice bubbling up nearly everywhere -- and its victims are often people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Security is in very short supply lately.

Three separate studies conducted late last year track the outcome.  The United States Center for Disease Control, Boston University, and Johns Hopkins University independently found that the incidence of anxiety, severe depression, and serious psychological distress has tripled since the start of the pandemic.  Unsurprisingly, the effect was larger in vulnerable populations -- low-income individuals, minorities, people with prior mental health issues, people who have lost friends or family members to COVID.  Most alarming, young adults across the board showed skyrocketing incidence of emotional distress -- the CDC study found that almost two-thirds of the people from eighteen to twenty-four who participated in the study reported experiencing severe depression since the outbreak started, a quarter reported greater use of alcohol or drugs to cope with the stress, and a quarter said they'd seriously considered suicide in the last thirty days.

This is horrifying and alarming.  We already had a built-in mental health crisis ongoing because of the stigma of mental illness and our society's unwillingness to radically revamp the way it's monitored, treated, and covered by insurance.  COVID has taken a dreadful situation and made it much, much worse, and I fear the repercussions will far outlast the pandemic itself.

The worst part is that the nature of the pandemic has taken away the one thing that can make emotional distress bearable; comfort from our friends and loved ones.  I was talking with some friends (online, of course) a few days ago about what we miss most from the pre-pandemic days, and one that came up over and over was "long hugs from friends."  I'm terribly shy by nature, but that one was spot-on.  Even we introverts are struggling with the isolation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smellyavocado, Bromances, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Unfortunately, it looks like we are going to be going without long hugs from friends for quite some time, and that means we need to be especially assiduous about looking out for each other.  Check in with the people you care about, especially the ones who don't seem to need it, who are used to being the strong, secure, competent ones who put everyone else's needs in front their own.  Okay, we can't have the level of physical and emotional real-time contact we had before, but we can do things to compensate -- Zoom or Skype visits, phone calls, even something simple like a text message saying, "Hi, I was thinking about you.  How are you doing?"

In times like these we have to lean on our friends -- and let our friends lean on us.  Be honest about what you're feeling, and reassure yourself that right now we're pretty much all feeling that way.  If you're having a hard time coping, let the people you love know rather than suffering in silence.  If you are really at the end of your tether, get on the phone -- the suicide prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255.  There's help to be had if you are willing to reach out for it.

We'll get through this, but if we're to come through as unscathed as possible, it will be because we've banded together and helped each other through.  Don't be afraid to show others you're hurting; it's how you'll get past this horrible low point.

And don't be afraid to tell your friends and loved ones, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you."  It may be a while before we can back it up with a long hug, but for now, it's the best we can do.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds go to support Skeptophilia!]