Analysis of a cataclysm

Any idea what volcano is responsible for the largest known eruption?

Krakatau?  No.  Vesuvius and the Campi Flegrei?  Not even close.  Tambora or Toba?  Nope.  The Yellowstone Supervolcano?  Closer, but still not right.

The biggest volcanic eruption on record came from an extinct caldera I'd never heard of until a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia mentioned it a couple of days ago.  It's the La Garita Caldera in southwestern Colorado, near the little town of Creede, and when it last erupted -- during the Oligocene Epoch, on the order of 28 million years ago -- it did so with an estimated force of 250,000 megatons, which is five thousand times the explosive force of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.

The eruption resulted in something called ignimbrite -- a rock layer created from a frozen pyroclastic flow.  When a volcano powered by viscous high-silica (felsic) magma erupts, it's usually explosive, quite unlike the runny, flowing lava from one made of low-silica (mafic) rock.  Instead of creating a liquid flow, the force of the eruption pulverizes the magma and surrounding rock, creating a superheated cloud of ash, dust, and volcanic gas that then rushes downhill, incinerating anything in its path.  This is what did in Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 C. E., and more recently, occurred during the devastating eruption of Mont Pelée on Martinique in 1902 that killed thirty thousand people in the space of a few minutes.

An ignimbrite forms when the pyroclastic flow loses speed and settles, and the ash, pumice, and glass shards (still plenty hot) fuse together to form a solid layer of rock.  If you've seen pictures of Pompeii (or better yet, been there) you can picture what this looks like, and your mental image is probably of something like a meter's worth of consolidated ash.

The La Garita Caldera eruption produced an ignimbrite an average of a hundred meters thick.

The amount of rock and magma blown to smithereens in the eruption is estimated at around five thousand cubic kilometers -- compare that to the one cubic kilometer blown skyward when Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, and you have an idea of the scale.  The resulting rock formation, the Fish Canyon Tuff, covers 28,000 square kilometers.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer G. Thomas]

The most interesting part of this is what caused the eruption.  It's part of the larger San Juan Volcanic Field that was created when the center of the North American continent was stretched and cracked by the Rio Grande Rift.  This is a long, north-south trending fault running from northern Mexico up through New Mexico and into central Colorado, and was responsible for a number of eruptions between forty and eighteen million years ago (although none as big as La Garita).  The reason for this fault, in the middle of the stable continental craton, is still being puzzled over by geologists, but here's one possible explanation.

Starting during the Cretaceous Period, a huge slab of oceanic crust called the Farallon Plate subducted underneath the North American Plate.  This had a couple of major effects -- cementing a number of island arcs onto the west coast of North America (called suspect terranes because they don't have the same geology as the neighboring land they're welded to), and triggering the Laramide Orogeny that created at least parts of the Rocky Mountain Range.

[Nota bene: the geology of the Rocky Mountains is ridiculously complicated, so what I'm presenting here is a vast oversimplification.  If you want a great overview of it, as well as the geology of other parts of North America and the people who study it, a good place to start is the excellent quartet of books by John McPhee, Rising From the Plains, Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.]

In any case, the Farallon Plate was eventually consumed by the subduction zone, leaving only three small pieces still in existence -- the Gorda, Juan de Fuca, and Explorer Plates, which I considered in my post about the Cascadia Fault a month ago.  The rest of Farallon is now underneath western North America.

And, more germane to our topic, the rift zone that powered it eventually got dragged underneath as well.  This meant that the force pushing the Farallon and Pacific Plates apart was now beneath the North American continent.  The result was that the continental crust was stretched, creating a topography called horst-and-graben (or basin-and-range), where extension cracks the rock layers and some of them sink downward, creating an alternating step-up and step-down landscape that you see all over Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.

But along the Rio Grande Rift, the cracks ran so deep that it didn't just cause earthquakes and topographic change.  The fault went down far enough that magma upwelled into the fissure, resulting in a chain of volcanoes -- the aforementioned San Juan Volcanic Field, one of which is the cataclysmic La Garita Caldera.

Eventually -- and fortunately -- the convection current powering the spreading center ran out of steam due to friction with the thick, cold continental crust, and the whole thing simmered down.  The last ignimbrite from the San Juan Volcanic Field is about eighteen million years ago, and the entire area has been geologically quiet since that time.

Whenever I find out about something like this, I'm awed by the power of which the Earth is capable.  We tend to flatter ourselves about our own capacity for controlling nature, but by comparison, we're pretty damn feeble.  Being reminded of this is not, of course, a bad thing -- especially since at the moment our activities stand a good chance of unleashing a backlash from the climate that could be nothing short of catastrophic.

It's best to keep in mind that in a war between nature and humanity, the odds are very much in favor of nature.

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License to hate

By now, I'm sure all of you have heard about the 6-3 decision by the United States Supreme Court in favor of a Colorado web designer who felt like it was her right to refuse service to a gay couple on the basis of her "sincerely-held religious beliefs."

What you may not have heard is that upon looking into the details of the case, investigative reporters found that:

1. ... the man, named only as "Stewart" to protect his privacy, whom the plaintiff Lorie Smith said was one half of the gay couple who asked for her services, has never attempted to hire her, and in fact had never heard of her before the case became public;
2. ... he's a web designer himself, so in his own words, "It would make zero sense to hire a web designer when I can do that for myself;"
3. ... his gay fiancé, "Mike," doesn't exist;
4. ... and Stewart himself not only is not gay, he's been happily married to a woman for fifteen years.

So the upshot of it all is that Smith is so motivated by hatred of LGBTQ+ people that she invented an imaginary grievance, lied about it repeatedly through the various tiers of the court system, and eventually got license to deny service to a gay couple who doesn't, technically, exist.

The lawyers from the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ Alliance Defending Freedom, who defended Smith, don't seem at all upset by this.  After all, they got what they wanted; a court-sanctioned right to discriminate.  Kellie Fiedorek, who represented her, responded with a verbal shrug.

"No one should have to wait to be punished by the government to challenge an unjust law," Fiedorek said.

Apparently this allows you to invent a grievance, along with imaginary adversaries, and carry it to the highest levels of the judicial system.

And win.

Smith immediately took the mic on right-wing news to crow about this being a "victory for free speech and freedom of religion."  Because, of course, the explicit outcome was to allow her to get away with discriminating against a particular group she despises.  But what baffles me is how neither the six justices who sided with Smith, nor Fiedorek and the Alliance Defending Freedom, nor Smith herself, seem to realize how quickly this could be turned around.  What's to stop a queer-owned business from putting up a sign saying "No Straight People Allowed"?  Or an atheist-owned business refusing to serve Christians?  Or a liberal-owned business stating that no Republicans are allowed on the premises?

You have to wonder what the Religious Right will think if this decision starts being used against them.

Wasn't there already a battle over this sort of thing?  And didn't the bigots lose?  [Image of the February 1960 sit-in at Woolworth's, Durham, North Carolina is in the Public Domain]

Discrimination laws are there to prevent one individual's prejudice and hatred from impinging on the rights, security, safety, or life of someone based upon their demographics -- and especially, to protect members of oppressed or marginalized groups.  And before anyone comes at me about how oppressed and marginalized Christians are, allow me to point out that an overwhelming majority of Americans -- 63% -- self-identify as Christian.  In large swaths of the country, a non-Christian has a snowball's chance in hell of being elected to public office.  And in any case -- as I pointed out earlier -- Lorie Smith's grievance was completely spun from lies.  She created a bullseye herself, pasted it on her own forehead, and then claimed she'd been unfairly targeted.

And two-thirds of the Supreme Court agreed with her.

It's not just queer people who should be worried about this.  This ruling blows a gaping hole in prior protections from discrimination, not only on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, but race and religion.  "The worry is that this provides a green light to any business owner that they can refuse service to any person on the basis of their identity, whether they’re gay or lesbian, or Jewish or Black, or anything, because they have an objection to those sorts of people being in their business,” said Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School.  "There was nothing in the opinion that limits it to objections to same-sex marriage."

The only thing that keeps me from despairing completely about this situation is the sense that this is the last gasp of dying ideological bigotry.  Younger people are overwhelmingly in support of full rights for LGBTQ people, including the right to marry, and against the bogus outrage of people like Lorie Smith and the Alliance Defending Freedom.  So inevitably, as the younger generation becomes an increasingly large percentage of voters, it is devoutly to be hoped that the pendulum will swing the other way and sweep away the ugly vestiges of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

In the interim, of course, a lot of damage can be done.  Queer people and our allies need to stand up and speak.  Shout, even.  Friday's decision was a travesty of justice, driven by a warped definition of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and flies in the face of every piece of civil rights legislation back into the 1960s.

But now's not the time to give up, as tempting as it is.

We can't let the hatred and bigotry of the Lorie Smiths of the world win.

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Life finds a way

I've dealt more than once here at Skeptophilia with the repeated mass extinctions the Earth has undergone.  Part of this is that I have an admitted fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  These include:

• tornadoes and hurricanes
• lightning
• earthquakes
• volcanoes
• death asteroids from outer space

The latter is thought to have been the prime mover of the Cretaceous Extinction, which occurred 66 million years ago and killed an estimated 75% of the species on Earth, including all of the large dinosaurs (the exception being the lineage that led to modern birds).  Here's a cool, if terrifying, simulation of what it'd be like if the Earth got hit by an asteroid five hundred kilometers in diameter (the Chicxulub Meteorite, which caused the extinction, is estimated to be about a tenth that diameter, so you can scale down your picture of that event accordingly):

But dwelling on that stuff is a little morbid, even if it's kind of awe-inspiring.  So today, I'd like to look at some recent research that looks at how life recovered after the cataclysm -- discoveries that suggest the encouraging idea that even with a catastrophe, life can bounce back amazingly quickly.

A few years ago, Ian Miller and Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science were involved in a fossil dig in Corral Bluffs, Colorado, and made a rather astonishing discovery.  Initially the area seemed to be rather fossil-poor, but it had a great many concretions (roughly spherical blobs of cemented sediment).  When Miller and Lyson split one of these open, they found it was full of skeletal remains.

It turns out Corral Bluffs represent sedimentary layers of rock deposited immediately after the collision, so it provides an incredibly detailed record of the years following.  Large animals and flowering plants (especially trees) were hit the hardest by the extinction; despite the prevailing wisdom that "dinosaurs died and mammals didn't," the more accurate statement is "big species were much more likely to die than little ones."  The bottleneck, in fact, seems to have taken out all the mammals larger than your average rat.  (Miller and Lyson found no evidence of mammals larger than six hundred grams that survived the extinction.)  Miller, who is a paleobotanist, concentrated not on the animal remains but the plants -- especially the 37,000 pollen grains he found fossilized in the sediment layers.  And from this, a picture began to emerge of what things were like in the years following the collision, which was described this week in a fascinating paper in Science.

The largest group of plants to come through the bottleneck were ferns, which thrive in disturbed areas and have spores that are pretty damage-resistant.  Unfortunately for the animals, fern leaves and roots are rather low in nutrients, so for a while, body sizes remained small because there simply wasn't enough food around to support big, or even medium-sized, herbivores.  But within a few thousand years -- a flash, evolutionarily speaking -- Fern World was replaced by Palm World, as proto-monocots (the group that contains not only palms, but grasses, lilies, orchids, irises, and a variety of other familiar plant families) evolved to be more robust.  Palms have oily fruit that are high in sugar, and there's a commensurate jump in mammalian body size, with species showing up that weighed five kilograms.

Palms were superseded by the ancestors of today's walnuts and hickories a hundred or so thousand years after that, and in "Pecan Pie World" (as Miller and Lyson call this era), and the higher nutritional quality of those seeds fueled another jump in body size, with the largest ones reaching thirty kilograms (the size of a large dog).  And after seven hundred thousand years, legumes diversified, and the high protein content of these species triggered another growth spurt, topping out at fifty kilograms -- a hundred times larger than the survivors of the collision, in less than a million years.

Nota bene: the growth in size wasn't done yet.  The Oligocene Epoch, from 34 to 23 million years ago, saw the largest land mammals that have ever existed, including the enormous Baluchitherium, a behemoth that could have converted an African elephant into an African elephant pancake:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Waqas-anees2014, Baluchitherium, The Largest Land mammal at Pakistan Museum of Natural History (PMNH), CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Miller and Lyson study offers us a message that is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying.  First, the human-caused "Sixth Extinction" that we are almost certainly undergoing as we speak is not going to eliminate life on Earth, and the species that survive will quickly spring back and diversify once we stop doing whatever we can to make the planet uninhabitable.  But the cautionary tale is that no matter what, it won't be what we had.  The diversity of flora and fauna that existed before the Chicxulub Collision was gone forever, and even though "life found a way" (to borrow a phrase from Jurassic Park), what evolved afterward was dramatically different than what was lost.  And, to put not too fine a point on it, the years immediately following the bottleneck were pretty freakin' horrible for all concerned, with an entire planet laid waste, and the animals that weren't directly killed by the impact itself largely facing habitat loss and rampant starvation.

So we shouldn't be so quick to adopt the Pollyanna-ish "it'll all be fine, nature is resilient" attitude toward our current fossil-fuel-crazy, pollution-blind willfully ignorant behavior.  If anything, we should recognize how fragile it all is -- and how, if we push too hard, we're likely to see a collapse of catastrophic proportions.  While we can pretty much count on evolution eventually producing a whole new set of what Darwin called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful," there's more than a passing chance that we won't be around to see them.

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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

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

Dog days

Yesterday, we found out that the president of the United States ordered his lawyer to commit perjury before Congress, and has taken his "Oh, yeah, well you're a great big poopyhead!" style of interaction to new levels with revealing the details of a (formerly) secure visit to the troops in Afghanistan by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, presumably to get back at her for denying him the opportunity to deliver his State of the Union speech.

Oh, and there's another "caravan" on the way.  And Ivanka Trump has been tapped to help select the next leader of the World Bank.

*looks around desperately for something, anything, else to think about*

Okay, folks, today we're going to consider: why have sightings of "dogmen" been on the rise lately?

Yesterday we considered eyewitness accounts of seeing pterodactyl-like flying creatures, which is weird enough.  But now we're having to contend with scary visitations by bipedal canines.

As if the quadrupedal kind weren't enough trouble.  Our rescue dog, Guinness, is a truly wonderful guy, but his nickname of "El Destructo" is well earned.  In the past two weeks, he's chewed up a bottle of red ceramic underglaze, a visitor's shoe, a magazine, a pillow, and a single piece from a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.  About the latter, I'd almost have preferred if he'd eaten the whole puzzle; having one piece gnawed is just maddening.

Oh, and he swiped a chunk of gourmet cheese off the counter and ate the entire thing.

Do NOT let this innocent expression fool you.

So the idea that there might be intelligent bipedal dogs, perhaps even with opposable thumbs, is kind of alarming.  But that's just what people have been seeing.

Starting with an anonymous (of course) eyewitness in northern Arkansas, who two months ago saw a fearsome doglike creature while driving home from his job as a roofing worker.

"I came across this evil-looking wolf creature," he said.  "It was carrying something in its hands, like a leash or a rope.  It was standing on two feet on the left side of the road.  It was gray, maybe seven feet tall, three hundred pounds."

That, in the words of a friend of mine, is "a big bow-wow."

Then there's the guy in Colorado who was driving home with his own dog, and saw Fido's scary cousin.  He'd stopped the car and let his dog out to pee, but evidently that was the last thing on her mind.  "She wouldn’t do her business," he said.  "She started barking.  At first I thought she was barking at the traffic, but there was no traffic."

The fact that he even considered the explanation that she was barking at traffic that wasn't there makes me wonder about his reliability as a witness, but let's hear the rest of his testimony.

"I noticed five lights hovering in the sky in the distance...  I quickly put the dog in the car and went to investigate.  The lights rose higher and then got smaller and zigzagged, then vanished."

This did not calm his dog down, and in fact, she seemed even more scared than before.  Then...

"I tried comforting her, and that’s when I noticed something moving in the corner of my eye.  I looked up and saw something running behind my car, through the taillights... It had red fur and a tail, but it also had a human face...  It's hard to describe."

Understandably, the guy hauled ass back out onto the road, but he adds that his dog was still terrified when they arrived home, and he had nightmares for several nights thereafter.

There were other sightings in the last couple of months in Michigan and California, the latter by a retired Air Force security officer who was in a park with her daughter and saw "a large male dogman," six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, long arms, dog-like legs, a tail, and amber eyes.  She pulled a gun on it, and started speaking to the thing in her native language (she is Shoshone), and that stopped it from advancing on them.  She and her daughter hightailed it back to their car, and got home safely.  She decided to return the next day with her husband, and see if she could find more evidence (or possibly see it again), and there was no certain trace of the dogman, but they did find a cat skeleton "stripped clean down to the bones."

Skeptic though I am, if I'd seen something like that, I don't think you could pay me enough to return to the same spot.  So major props to her for doing this, and I'm glad that the Shoshone-speaking cat-eating dogman of California didn't harm any of them.

But as far as our initial question -- to wit, why there have been more sightings of dogmen lately -- the only thing I can come up with is that the dogmen have decided we humans had our shot at running the world, but we've fucked things up so royally that they're going to take matters into their own, um, paws.  Maybe they'll team up with yesterday's pterodactyls to form a really New World Order.  Myself, I say let 'em.  Can't be any worse than what we have now.

Of course, if the dogmen are anything like Guinness, they will stubbornly refuse to even consider running the government until you throw the ball for them 459 times, and follow it up by saying "whoozagooboy?" and giving them a dog cookie.

So that's today's cryptozoological news.  And now, sad to say, I've dithered around long enough, and I should probably gird my loins and check the news.  Who knows what might have happened in my absence?  Maybe Donald Trump threw a mud pie at Nancy Pelosi.  Maybe Mitch McConnell finally decided that his title of "Senate Majority Leader" means he should actually lead the Senate.  Maybe Ivanka Trump will be appointed to replace Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House Spokesperson, given that Sanders is allegedly resigning, probably because she's used up her quota of egregious lies, so now has no option other than telling the truth.

And we can't have that.

But in any case, be on the lookout for dogmen, but play it safe.  A seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound dog could do a lot of damage to shoes and jigsaw puzzles.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Fluid morality

I try not to let my skepticism slide over into cynicism.  The latter, a disbelieve-everything-they-say approach, seems to me to be as fundamentally lazy as gullibility.  Being a skeptic is harder, but ultimately more likely to land you near the truth; keep your mind open, wait for hard evidence, and then follow that wherever it leads.

But there are some realms in which I am reminded of Lily Tomlin's line, "No matter how cynical I get, it's just not enough to keep up."  And one of those is the way fracking is being presented by the powers-that-be.

Consider the highly publicized publicity stunt by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who in 2013 drank a glass of fracking fluid to show how safe it was.

"You can drink it," Hickenlooper told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.  "We did drink it around the table, almost rituallike, in a funny way.  It was a demonstration… they’ve invested millions of dollars in what is a benign fluid in every sense."

[image courtesy of photographer Joe Sullivan and the Wikimedia Commons]

The gas companies have stated outright that the ingredients are "sourced from the food industry," but still refuse to give a complete formulation for how it's made, saying such information is "proprietary."  Hickenlooper agrees, and said, "If we were overzealous in forcing them to disclose what they had created, they wouldn’t bring it into our state."

Under pressure from environmental groups, the gas industry has released a list of "the chemicals used most often" in fracking fluid, along with their purpose.  They state that "there are dozens to hundreds that could be used as additives" above and beyond these, although this is downplayed.

They look like they're doing everything they can to be completely transparent, up to the point where it starts to jeopardize their trade secrets.  "Here, we'll show you what we're doing!" they seem to be saying.  "You want the water supply protected, and safety to be paramount?  Well, so do we!"

Then you have to wonder why the industry has not rushed into the breach when people have been injured by the chemicals in their "benign" fracking fluid.  Makes you almost think they're... covering something up.

In 2008, a gas driller, Clifton Marshall, came into the emergency room in Durango Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, Colorado, after he had spilled fracking fluid on his clothes and boots.  Marshall was in a bad way, but it didn't end there; Cathy Behr, an emergency room nurse, spent ten minutes working on Marshall without using adequate protective equipment.  By this time, the emergency room had to be cleared because the smell of the chemicals was strong enough to make people gag.  But Behr, who had come into direct contact with the contaminated clothing, was to experience worse.  Two days later, the nurse found herself back in the emergency room, but this time because she was sick; she had jaundice, and was vomiting and feverish.  The doctors found that Behr was in multiple organ failure from "poisoning by an unknown chemical."

Pressed by the hospital to tell them what was in the fracking fluid that sickened Behr and Marshall, the gas company -- Halliburton Industries -- refused, saying it was a trade secret.  If anyone released what was in the fluid, they said, they would sue -- and then pull their multi-million-dollar drilling operation from the state.

Hospital officials backed down.  To this day, no one knows what was in the fluid.

In a rural community in Pennsylvania -- no one knows exactly where, for reasons you'll see in a moment -- the owners of a 300-acre dairy farm signed a land-use agreement with a gas company, allowing fracking on their land.  The disturbance would be minimal, the gas company said, and the risk slight.  After the drilling began, though, the family who owned the farm, the "Rogers" family (not their real name), began to question the effects that the operation was having on their drinking and agricultural water, and agreed to participate in a study by an independent agency to monitor what was happening.

But they couldn't do that, they found out quickly.  Here's how TruthOut reported the story:

The Rogers did not realize they had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the gas company making the entire deal invalid if members of the family discussed the terms of the agreement, water or land disturbances resulting from fracking and other information with anyone other than the gas company and other signatories... 

Mrs. Rogers initially agreed to participate in a study Perry [the scientist coordinating the study] was conducting on rural families living near fracking operations. She later called Perry in tears, explaining that her family could no longer participate in the study because of the nondisclosure clause in the surface-use agreement. She told Perry she felt stupid for signing the agreement and has realized she had a good life without the money the fracking company paid them to use their land.

There are also dozens of cases where gas companies have been sued because their operations have permanently contaminated drinking water supplies, and have settled in the litigants' favor -- but only on the condition that the litigants sign a statement mandating that they never disclose what the gas companies did.  This is an easy out for the gas companies; people will usually settle for an amount of cash that the gas industry considers a pittance as compared to the bad press they'd receive if such information became public.  "At this point they feel they can get out of this litigation relatively cheaply," Marc Bern, an attorney with Napoli Bern Ripka Sholnik LLP in New York, who has negotiated on behalf of homeowners, said in an interview.  "Virtually on all of our settlements where they paid money they have requested and demanded that there be confidentiality."

There are also multiple cases where doctors have appealed to gas companies to release what is in fracking fluid, to allow the doctors to treat patients poisoned by exposure to it, and the industry has complied -- but only if the doctors themselves agree to a lifelong nondisclosure statement.

And state governments are caving in from the pressure by the industry.  Just last year, North Carolina passed a bill that made it a crime for anyone to disclose the constituents of fracking fluid.  The name of the bill?  The "Energy Modernization Act."

Still think that the gas companies are all about safety and transparency?  Then consider one more story, again from southwestern Pennsylvania, only two years ago.

Chris and Stephanie Hallowich lived with their two children, then 7 and 10, in a house in rural Washington County, when they started experiencing health issues from water that had been fouled by a fracking operation nearby.  They were desperate to get out of their house, and sued the gas company, Range Resources, for enough money to cut their losses and move.  Range Resources agreed to a $750,000 settlement, but required (guess what?) a nondisclosure agreement.  The Hallowichs could not speak to anyone about fracking, or the Marcellus Shale, or Range Resources, or their symptoms, or the contamination to their water supply, ever.

And that lifelong gag order also applied to their children.

The Hallowichs' attorney, Peter Villari, said directly to Washington County Common Pleas Court Judge Paul Polonsky, who heard the case, "I, frankly, your Honor, as an attorney, to be honest with you, I don’t know if that’s possible that you can give up the First Amendment rights of a child."  Pozonsky didn't have an answer to that except that this is what the Hallowichs had to agree to if they wanted to settle.

"That someone would insist on confidentiality of a minor child," Villari said, "or that it would be discussed within the context of a proposed settlement was unusual.  I have not encountered it before and I have yet to encounter it again."

"Unusual" isn't the word I'd use.  I think "unconstitutional" comes closer to the mark.

The frightening part of this is that because the gas industry is wealthy and powerful, they are pulling the strings here -- and everyone else is dancing to their tune.  They have no reason to bend.  They've been getting their own way at every turn, from politicians and courts that conveniently ignore the dangers to ordinary citizens because (frankly) money talks.

Where this skein of lies comes full circle, though, is in asking why the gas companies are this protective of the ingredients in the fracking fluid.  I simply don't believe that this is a trade secret that is worth keeping simply from a proprietary-protection argument alone.  Surely each of these companies can't have discovered a formula that they think is so wonderful, so much better than their rivals', that they'd engage in all of these dubiously-legal shenanigans to protect it?

Isn't it just slightly more likely that there's something in this fluid that is not exactly "benign?"  Something that might, in fact, be toxic enough that to make it public would alert the public to how much danger they're actually in?

But surely the Toxic Substances Control Act would protect the public from this kind of thing.  That's why it was passed.  Right?

Wrong.  TSCA has an exemption for reporting "Tier 2" exposure to chemicals -- i.e., exposure that happens after the chemicals leave the site of manufacture -- for "petroleum process streams."  If you're exposed to fracking chemicals, you have no federal leverage to force the industry to give you information, much less to force them to stop what they're doing.

So the only way all of this will halt is if enough people know about it, and refuse to sign the fracking leases.  Already we're seeing cases of eminent domain being invoked in laying in pipelines to carry the gas; the only way to halt the industry is to cut off its source.

Which is why it's so critical that people find out about these things.  Because as we've seen, once the damage is done, the industry has been more interested in hushing it up than cleaning it up (or, heaven forfend, changing their ways).  And if that doesn't justify some level of cynicism about their commitment to decency, safety, and public health, I don't know what would.

The pink glove agenda

I try not to repeat myself, I honestly do.  Recycling topics -- the way Ann Coulter's column always seems to boil down to liberals being morons who hate America -- is a lazy way to run a blog.

But sometimes the temptation is just too strong.  Such as the topic of my post earlier this month, that the fundamentalist Christians are running out of sane arguments against equal rights for LGBT individuals, so now they're making up stuff that is batshit insane.

In that post, we had A. J. Castellitto claiming that gays were secretly commies, and Rick Santorum opining that if gay marriage becomes legal, there'll be more single moms.  But just in the last couple of days, we have had some further rants from the right that make Castellitto and Santorum sound like the voice of reason.

First, we have a film from Truth In Action Ministries warning Christian parents that public schools are actually being run by people who are determined to lead children astray:

Public schools, and this is right on some level, want to teach kids right and wrong.  But what if their definition of right and wrong says, "Opposing homosexual behavior is wrong, and embracing homosexuality is right"?  Then of course you're going to start seeing that in the public schools.  I've noticed that in textbooks the words "husband," "wife," "family," "worship," "pray" have been taken out...  I know there is a controversy in California right now about teaching gay history in the public schools.  Many Christians and others are concerned about this agenda being foisted upon children who are being required to attend public schools.  I know a girl in my home town who was flunked because she refused to write a paper about gays having the right to adopt kids.  So they actually flunked her from the school.  When that happens, Christians need to speak up and say, "Wait a minute.  What about my constitutional rights?  I'm being denied my right of free exercise of religion."    If my state denies me the right to refuse to participate in a classroom project I disagree with, then I should have the right to refrain from doing it.  So, mom and dad, if you have a school district where in fact they are introducing pernicious ideas that are antithetical to the word of God, then you are going to ask yourself who you are going to serve: Mammon or God.

Yuppers.  I'll just leave that right there.  Because that's bush-league crazy compared to Flip Benham, of Operation: Save America, who claims that the whole thing boils down to Satan wearing gay gloves:

Ours is a gospel battle.  We see the gospel battle.  Homosexuality is the same fist with a different colored glove...  Homosexuality is a pink-colored glove covering the same fist, the fist of the devil...   (Islam, abortion, and homosexuality) are three of the greatest physical manifestations between the two seeds -- the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.  It’s the same battle, it’s the same fist, we’re fighting the Devil and his lies in the world and the flesh, and moving it to a thing called the homosexual agenda – and it’s the Devil’s agenda.  But now, we're not allowed to speak against it.

I'm thinking that pink is really not Satan's color.  The overall Infernal Theme seems to be red, you know?  Pink would clash terribly.

Satan and Job by William Blake (1826) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Maybe some nice elbow-length gray suede gloves would be less gauche.  Fashion is everything, especially when you're trying to seduce souls into an Evil Agenda.

Then we had Gordon Klingenschmitt, Republican nominee for congress in Colorado, who in an email to supporters warned that the presence of an openly gay man in congress would lead to Christians being beheaded:

The openly homosexual Congressman Jared Polis introduced a revised bill to force Christian employers and business owners to hire and promote homosexuals with ZERO RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS for Christians who want to opt out. 

Polis ‘wants sexual orientation and gender identity treated the same way as race, religion, sex, and national origin, when it comes to employment protections,’ claims the Advocate, under the headline ‘Polis trims ENDA’s religious exemption’... 

The open persecution of Christians is underway.  Democrats like Polis want to bankrupt Christians who refuse to worship and endorse his sodomy.  Next he’ll join ISIS in beheading Christians, but not just in Syria, right here in America.

Man, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Klingenschmitt later posted -- well, not a retraction, exactly, but a snarky followup that claimed he was "joking" and that the Democrats "don't recognize hyperbole."  Unsurprisingly, no one except his ultra-religious followers were much impressed by this, and the general consensus is that he may just have torpedoed whatever chance he had at his party's nomination.

And I'll only give the briefest of mentions to Pat Robertson's claim that homosexual male teenagers will turn straight if they have male companionship, and a post on the website of the Louisiana Tea Party claiming that the Common Core was designed to turn children gay, and that the "first wave" had  already been converted.

What always strikes me about this is to wonder why god, not to mention his various mouthpieces, are so damn worried about what consenting adults do in their bedrooms.  It's just one more aspect of God-As-Micromanager, but while most of the devout have jettisoned all of the picayune rules from Leviticus about what you can eat, and touch, and do on Sundays, they still have this bizarre hangup about how people get off.

Worse yet, there's the fact that these people's prejudices are denying loving couples the right to have that love recognized and protected under the law.   You'd think that devout Christians would have the attitude that the statement from 1 Corinthians -- "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" -- kind of outweighs the verse from Leviticus that says, "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination."  It's pretty clear that most of the religious ignore most of Leviticus -- except, apparently, the parts governing behavior they find icky.  I mean, there's the line from Leviticus 11 about the devout being prohibited from touching pig skin, and that hasn't stopped Tim Tebow.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I find the whole thing baffling.  I've come to expect that these people will be Johnny One-Note on their favorite bible verse, even though it does call into question why they think about that one so often.  But the fear mongering, not to mention babbling about pink gloves and gay agendas running public schools and gay congressmen supervising the beheading of American citizens, is simply bizarre.  I surmised in my previous post that this wacko behavior was a sign that they were running out of ideas, and I fervently hope this is true.  But whatever is driving it, I wish they'd stop.  They're turning me into a Johnny One-Note myself, and I'd rather avoid that if I can.

Gays, god, and forest fires

Many of you have undoubtedly been following the news of the horrific wildfires, last week in Colorado and this week in Arizona.  Thus far these fires have cost millions of dollars in damages and at least 21 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite firefighting team who died this weekend in a blaze near Phoenix.

These fires are thought to have multiple causes.  The southwest saw record or near-record temperatures last week, coupled with low rainfall.  Some people also attribute the severity of the fires, especially in Colorado, to the population explosion of the pine bark beetle, which has killed huge stands of ponderosa pines all through the Rocky Mountains.  But in so attributing the fires to these reasons, people are ignoring the role of the most powerful natural-disaster-creating force known to man:

Gays.

Yes, gays.  According to Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner, the recent fires are god's wrath against the people of Colorado for their liberal attitudes toward homosexuality.

In an interview on Generations Radio, the two ministers were clearly in agreement about what was going on here.  Said Buehner, "Why Colorado Springs?  Understand that Colorado itself is a state that is begging for God's judgment.  How did we do that?...  Our legislative session opened up this year and their very first order of business, their most pressing order of business..."  Swanson then interrupted with, "... they could hardly wait, they could hardly wait..."  And Buehner finished, "Like the first day, was to pass a Civil Union Bill, which is an uncivil bill."

And, of course, the whole thing wouldn't be complete without some mention of gay guys kissing, in this case State Senate Majority Leader Mark Ferrendino kissing his partner when they found out that the Civil Union Bill had passed, a photograph of which appeared on the front page of the Denver Post.  Said Swanson:

"When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago?  Does God read the Denver Post?  Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post?  He gets it.  God gets the Denver Post."

Delivered right to His Almighty Doorstep, I'm sure.

Then, the question came up as to why, if god was trying to smite Colorado for supporting gays, the fires hit the religious and conservative areas near Colorado Springs, rather than far more liberal bastions of Denver or Boulder.  Buehner said, "Judgment begins in the House of God," as if that made complete sense, and added that the fact that god hadn't yet destroyed the entire state was an "act of grace."
 
What strikes me about all of this is that god, for all of his supposedly omnipotent smiting power, so often chooses to smite parts of the world with disasters that they pretty much already had happening beforehand.  He sends earthquakes to places that are on fault lines and near subduction zones, hurricanes to the Gulf Coast and US Atlantic Seaboard, tornadoes to the American midwest, and catastrophic forest fires to the southwestern United States and the arid parts of southern Europe.  Funny thing, that.  If I didn't know better, I would think that this meant that these events are purely... natural.

The other thing that crosses my mind, here, is that if gays really are behind all of this, maybe they should flex their muscles a little.  Hey, if you have this kind of power, why not enjoy it, especially since god's aim seems to be a bit off?  You guys could be the next generation of Mad Scientists -- but instead of rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally before firing up your Laser Cannons, all you do is stand around and kiss, and god smites, say, Omaha.

It'd be even better if you could figure out how to target this force a little better.  Wouldn't it be cool if, for example, you could kiss and have god send a tornado to destroy the Westboro Baptist Church?  If I thought that would happen, I would happily kiss a guy, and I'm not even gay.

So anyhow, that's today's news from the Wacko Fringe Religion Department.  As I've pointed out before, however crazy this stuff sounds to nonbelievers -- and even, I hope, to most sensible Christians -- it really is completely consistent with the behavior of god as laid out in the Old Testament.  So these guys, however they seem like they're in dire need of jackets with extra long sleeves, are actually just preaching what the Holy Book says.

I'm not saying it's sensible, mind you.  I still think the folks who believe this stuff are crazy as bedbugs.  All I'm saying is that it's consistent.

Anyhow, I guess I'll wind things up here.  It's time for me to go take a shower and get dressed, which will offer me several more opportunities to break some Old Testament rules.  Maybe if I wear a shirt woven from two different kinds of thread (such an important rule that it was mentioned twice, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11) then god will smite Ann Coulter.

Hey, it's worth a try. 

Source credibility and the legalization of marijuana

A particularly subtle problem in establishing whether a claim is pseudoscience, or at least flawed, has to do with source credibility.  Note that I didn't say credentials; there are plenty of smart, well-read, logical people with no degree in the field in question, and whose arguments I would consider carefully, and I've met more than one Ph.D. who gave every evidence of being a raving wackmobile.

Credibility is a different thing than a piece of paper with some Latin hanging on your wall.  It has to do with establishing that you understand the basics of rational argumentation, that you are familiar with the fundamental principles of science, and that you don't have a particular vested interest or agenda.

A particularly good example of this came my way yesterday, in the form of a New York Times editorial piece written by Dr. Ed Gogek, entitled "A Bad Trip for Democrats."  The gist of the article is that the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington last week is a terrible idea.  His arguments:

• 90-some-odd percent of patients who have been prescribed medical marijuana received it to alleviate pain.  Pain, Gogek says, is "easy to fake and almost impossible to disprove."  Further, chronic pain patients are mostly female, while 74% of marijuana users are male.
• Medical use of marijuana for glaucoma is no longer recommended.
• Marijuana is addictive, despite claims that it's not.
• Use of marijuana lowers cognitive function.

He then ends with an interesting statement:

In effect, America now has two tea parties: on the left they smoke their tea; on the right they throw it in Boston Harbor. Both distrust government, disregard science and make selfish demands that would undermine the public good. 

Now, let me be up front about the fact that I am not a pharmacologist, and am not qualified to evaluate the soundness of clinical studies of the efficacy of THC for treating glaucoma.  I do know enough neuroscience, however, to doubt his claims that marijuana is addictive; most addictive substances create addiction one of two ways, either by activating the brain's dopamine-loop pathway (such as cocaine) or by creating a rebound effect if you stop (such as heroin).  Marijuana does neither, so I have a hard time seeing how it could be addictive in the strict sense of the word.

I'm also skeptical of his suggestion that claims of chronic pain are being used as excuses to obtain marijuana.  While in one sense he is right -- it's impossible to prove, or disprove, that someone is in pain -- the idea that a significant number of patients who claim to be in chronic pain are lying remains very much to be seen.

However, even with all of those questions about Gogek's statements, I would not have been prompted to write about him on Skeptophilia if it hadn't been for one additional thing I discovered about him:

Dr. Gogek is a homeopath.

He doesn't state that anywhere in his piece; at the end, his bio statement says, "Dr. Ed Gogek is an addiction psychiatrist and a board member of Keep AZ Drug Free."  But whenever I have questions about a study -- or even a brief editorial, like this one -- I always want to find out what the writer's background is, to see how credible a source (s)he is.  And lo and behold, a quick search brought me to Dr. Gogek's homepage, wherein he makes the following statement:

Many people think homeopathy refers to all forms of alternative medicine, but it’s actually one specific type of alternative practice, very different from nutrition and herbs. Classical homeopathy works well for most medical and psychiatric problems. For people in psychotherapy or suffering from addictions, it removes roadblocks, and speeds the recovery process. And the right homeopathic remedy will also transform marriages and other significant relationships. Nothing heals and transforms a person’s life like the right homeopathic remedy.

In my experience, homeopathy can help all psychiatric problems except ADHD and schizophrenia. However, it works exceptionally well for anxiety disorders (panic attacks, social anxiety, specific phobias, PTSD and OCD), bulimia, sex and love addiction, and anger. It’s also very helpful for personality disorders and unusual problems that defy easy diagnosis.

My immediate reaction was, "And you're lecturing other people about disregarding science?"

Now, please note that the immediate loss of scientific credibility that this engenders doesn't mean that Dr. Gogek's original argument was entirely wrong (any more than a Ph.D. means a person is always right).  But it does tell me one thing; he has a serious difficulty with looking at a body of evidence, and concluding correctly whether that body of evidence supports a particular conclusion.  There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of controlled, double-blind experiments testing homeopathy, and not one has produced any clinically relevant results.  Not one.  The fact that he is unaware of this, or perhaps ignoring it or rationalizing it away, makes me look at other conclusions he draws with a wry eye.

Now, as far as the legalization of marijuana, please understand; I don't have a dog in this race.  I'm not a user, and have no intent to become one.  I do find it curious that tobacco, which is clearly a more dangerous drug, is not only legal, but federally subsidized, while marijuana possession can land you in jail in most states; but that isn't the only weird internal contradiction in our legal code.  What I do want to make abundantly clear, however, is that when something appears in print -- even in The New York Times -- it is always worthwhile to check source credibility.  Things, as Buttercup points out in H.M.S. Pinafore, are seldom what they seem.

Alpacas, flying humanoids, and bi-locating nuns

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we're keeping our eyes on two breaking cryptozoological stories.

First, we have a report in from West Berkshire in the UK, where a resident has called in a sighting of a mysterious creature that's been nicknamed "the Creature from Curridge."  [Source]

Spotted on October 3 by a businessman named Don Prater, Curry (you just know eventually that's what they'll call it, might as well start now) was described as being a gray, oddly-proportioned quadruped that was unlike anything Prater had ever seen.

Prater was out for an early-evening walk with his border collie, Bozzy, when he saw the bizarre creature.

"After the footpath bends left, about 25 yards ahead of us were two animals," Prater told reporters for Newbury Today.  "One of the animals looked like a domestic cat but the other one stunned me.  It was a dark or grey color.  The height of its head was about two foot but it had the head of a deer.  The neck was about eight to ten inches long and thin like a swan’s neck.  The body was a cross between a cat and a dog.  It had a bushy tail.  Everything about it was wrong."

"I hadn't been drinking," Prater helpfully added.

Prater went around the neighborhood, asking if anyone else had seen anything like it, but all he got were negatives.  He did provide reporters with a sketch of what he'd spotted:

 For comparison purposes, here's a photograph of an alpaca:

So I think we can all agree that we've got a pretty good match, here.


A little harder to fathom is a story that came to my attention through reports from several of my students.  "Have you heard about the Colorado... um, Mosquito Men?" one asked, and when I said, in some incredulity, "Mosquito Men?", he replied, "Well, not Mosquito Men.  But I'm pretty sure they fly."  So I did some searching for "Colorado Flying Men," and lo and behold, there have been a number of reports lately from the San Luis Valley of flying creatures that look like "a cross between Mothman and Dracula."  [Source]

Notwithstanding the fact that Mothman and Dracula share the characteristic of both being fictional, I began to do a bit of digging, and I found that the San Luis Valley is a hotspot of all sorts of weird stuff -- it has some of the USA's highest numbers of UFO sightings, reports of cattle mutilations, reports of cryptids, and reports of various other odd goings-on.  Besides the flying humanoids, there have been sightings of thunderbirds, and no, I'm not talking about the car:

In fact, so much bizarre stuff happens in the San Luis Valley that it's beginning to get a reputation as a magnet for wackos.  "When the going gets weird, the weird end up in Colorado's San Luis Valley," writes Christopher Weir in Metroactive.  "Hometowns are like families.  You always think yours is more bizarre or dysfunctional than the next.  Not so, of course...  As for hometowns, yours has nothing on Crestone and the surrounding San Luis Valley.  Wondrously depicted by self-appointed paranormal investigator and Crestone resident Christopher O'Brien, the San Luis Valley -- a breathtaking expanse that straddles southern Colorado and northern New Mexico -- is plagued by flying saucers, cow vandals, space guns, serial killers, spook lights, ghost trains, coma healers, prairie dragons and even something called a 'bi-locating nun.'"

So this led me to wonder what a "prairie dragon" was (I found out that they are semi-transparent reptiles that appear in groups and try to get into your home), and of course, any mention of a "bi-locating nun" was bound to stir my curiosity (turns out that this refers to a 17th century Spanish woman, Sister Marie de Jesus Agreda, who visited the San Luis Valley in spirit form, successfully converted some natives, and because of the claim narrowly escaped being executed by the Inquisition).

So, anyway, about the Flying Men.  Apparently, they've been seen by several people over the past two years, flapping along with huge membranous wings, and making "high-pitched hissing or screeching sounds."  Of course, no one has any hard evidence of this, or even any photographs, not that this would exactly count for evidence in these days of PhotoShop.  But the reports continue, and cryptozoologists worldwide are now excitedly turning their eyes toward the Rocky Mountains.

As usual, I wish them all luck.  Being a biologist, no one would be more thrilled than me if some of these reports of bizarre creatures, unknown to science, turned out to be true.  And if I were a betting man, I'd say that they'll have a greater chance of success searching around in the high deserts of Colorado than they would looking for Curry, the Wild Alpaca of West Berkshire.