Doomsday translation

In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warned my students to avoid Google Translate.

It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far.  If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's reasonably solid.  The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin.  For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven."  Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo"  ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."

Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.

But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:

It's been infiltrated by the Powers of Darkness.

At least that's how I interpret it.  Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:

Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve.  We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.

Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.

Which brings up a few questions.

1. Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian?  It's kind of a random thing to do.  Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense.  But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had.  ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work.  Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu.  No luck there either.  The search continues.")
2. Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know?  It's not like we haven't all just watched Donald Trump hand over the control of government agencies to a mob of incompetents, degenerates, lunatics, and the downright evil, and nearly all of the Republicans responding by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald!  Naughty Donald!  If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies!  That will sure show you!")  So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
3. Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
4. Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them?  I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:

So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously.  Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:

As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them.  When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?

Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog etc." from Hawaiian.

So that's our trip into the surreal for today.  I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one.  Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though.  Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that Donald Trump has nominated Vladimir Putin to be the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.

At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.

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Word association

There's an odd claim circulating social media these days.  This is the form of it I've seen most frequently:

First, just to get this out of the way: there is no luciferase in vaccines.  Luciferase is a bioluminescent protein found in a variety of organisms, from dinoflagellates to fireflies, and was named not for Lucifer but because the root word of luciferase (and Lucifer as well, of course) is a Latin word meaning "light bearer."  Luciferase isn't used for "tracking" people (how the hell would that even work?  Would you be trackable because you'd glow in the dark?), but it is used as a fluorescent marker in antibody assays in vitro.

As easy as it is to laugh at Emerald for her obvious ignorance of (1) how vaccines work, (2) how bioluminescent markers are used, and (3) basic linguistics, what interests me more is how odd a claim this really is.  Because the idea here is that the name of the enzyme somehow creates a link between it and Satan, and this marks you -- in the sense used in the Book of Revelation.  

You know, the "Mark of the Beast."

I ran into another example of this kind of thinking a few weeks ago, with someone who recounts being in line at a convenience store, and the woman ahead of him had her total rung up, and it came out $6.66.  She got a scared look on her face, and said, "Oh, no, I don't like that total.  Better throw in a corndog."

The man who posted about it marveled at what a badass she is -- going into battle with the Forces of Darkness, armed with a corndog.

How do people come to believe so fervently in associations like this?  Clearly they were both taught in a religious context, since both of them made reference to the End Times, but how do you get to the point where any association with words or numbers connected with the Bad Place -- even an obviously accidental or circumstantial one -- causes an immediate and powerful fear response?

A study by Fatik Mandal (of Bankura College, India) found an interesting pattern:

Superstitious beliefs help to decrease [people's] environmentally-induced stress.  Superstition produces a false sense of having control over outer conditions, reduces anxieties, and is prevalent in conditions of absence of confidence, insecurity, fear and threat, stress, and anxiety.  When the events are interpretable, environment is transparent, and conditions are less ambiguous, individuals become less superstitious.

This was supported by a study in 2022 by Hoffmann et al., which suggested that holding superstitions -- especially ones that have the backing of authority figures (e.g. church leaders) -- gives you a sense of control over circumstances that are actually uncertain, random, or inherently uncontrollable.

But what still strikes me as odd is that the reason these people were fearful in the first place was because the church leaders had convinced them that the Antichrist and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and other assorted special offers were on their way, so they'd better get ready to fight.  The superstitions about avoiding vaccines and convenience store bills totaling $6.66 were incidental, and only occurred because the people holding them had already been convinced that the Book of Revelation was actually true.

So this can be summed up as, "Here's how not to be afraid about this thing that I just now made you afraid of."  Which strikes me as just plain weird.

What's certain, though, is how far back in our history this sort of thinking goes.  A study in 2023 by Amar Annus of the University of Chicago looked at the origins of superstitions in the Middle East, and found that the associations between certain words and (usually bad) outcomes has a deep history, and no more rational that the ones people hold today.  In the literature of ancient Mesopotamia, we see ample evidence of detailed superstitions, but:

Only exceptionally are we able to detect any logical relationship between portent and prediction...  In many cases, subconscious association seems to have been at work, provoked by certain words whose specific connotations imparted to them a favorable or an unfavorable character, which in turn determined the general nature of the prediction.

Because those connotations aren't logical, they have to be learned -- transmitted orally or in written form from one generation to another, and undoubtedly embellished as time goes on.  At that point, in just about every culture, you end up with adepts who claim that they know better than anyone else how to interpret the omens, and avoid the unpleasant outcome that would pertain if you get it wrong.  Annus writes about a Mandaean priest in Iraq who spoke with the anthropologist Ethel Drower in the 1920s, and who boasted,

If a raven croaks in a certain burj (= astrological house), I understand what it says, also the meaning when the fire crackles or the door creaks.  When the sky is cloudy and there are shapes in the sky resembling a mare or a sheep, I can read their significance and message.  When the moon is darkened by an eclipse, I understand the portent; when a dust-cloud arises, black, red, or white, I read these signs, and all this according to the hours and the aspects.

So it seems like part of it has to do with powerful or charismatic people saying, "Look, I understand everything way better than you do, and you'd damn well better listen to what I'm saying."  

If you can hook in strong emotions like fear, so much the better.  At that point it turns into a Pascal's Wager sort of thing; what if the scary stuff this guy is saying actually turns out to be true?  What if getting the vaccine does mark me as one of Satan's own?

Better not take the chance.

Of course, the solution to all this is knowledge and rationality, but I'm not sure how well that'd work with someone who already has accepted the fundamentally irrational premises of superstition.  As has been so often commented before, you can't logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.

So I'm not sure how helpful all this is in the bigger picture.  Superstition has always been with us, and probably always will be.  The best you can do is arm yourself against it in whatever way you can.

Here.  Have a corndog.

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The Nephilim visit Miami

If you needed further evidence that whoever is controlling the simulation we're all trapped in has gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us, today we have: giant shadow aliens visiting a mall in Miami.

The event in question took place over a month ago, so I have to apologize for being a half a measure behind the rest of the orchestra, here.  On the other hand, since then the story has taken on a life of its own, and has grown way beyond the original claim, which was bizarre enough.  Apparently on January 1, some rowdy teens started a large brawl at Bayside Marketplace, so the police were called in.  This isn't anything unusual for Miami, so you'd think it'd have passed for business as usual, but then someone -- no one seems quite sure who -- got on social media and claimed that the police weren't there to handle some teenage brawlers, but to deal with "eight to ten foot tall shadow aliens."

This would be eye-opening even by south Florida standards.  Oddly enough, despite the fact that everybody and his dog now has a phone capable of taking high-quality photographs, no one seems to have snapped a pic of these aliens.  So of course, very quickly people realized that it was just a stupid rumor, there were no aliens, and everyone calmed down and went home, chuckling about how silly they'd all been.

Ha-ha, just kidding!  Of course that's not what happened.  What happened is that the rumor exploded that the police had prevented people from photographing the aliens, even resorting to confiscating and/or destroying people's phones.  Or that the aliens were "interdimensional space beings" who could not be photographed.  Possibly both.  The Miami Police Department issued a statement that it had "just been an altercation between about fifty juveniles," adding, "There were no aliens, UFOs, or ETs.  No airports were closed, and there were no power outages," and followed it up with the facepalm emoji.

Which accomplished exactly nothing.  Because why would the police be denying it if it weren't true?

Inescapable logic, that.

After that, there were only two things left to figure out; why were the police suppressing information about the aliens?  And who exactly were these tall, shadowy beings that mysteriously could not be photographed? 

I think we can all agree that given the evidence, there's only one possible conclusion: we are seeing the return of the Nephilim, as hath been foretold in the Bible, and the police are under orders from the Illuminati to make sure that no one finds out.

You may think I'm making this up, but this claim went off on social media like some hundred-megaton stupidity bomb.  "Let's talk about these creatures that supposedly are UFOs," said one TikToker.  "If you're a Christian you should already know.  These UFOs are fallen angels.  Remember, the devil's main goal is to make sure you don't believe he is real, and that Jesus is also not real.  This is just a warning that time is running out, and you better get close to Jesus."  One guy calling himself "the Apostle Preston," who on the video appeared to be tuning into God via an earpiece, said, "I hear you, Lord.  Tell the people there will be sightings of giants.  Giants that have been in hiding.  There will be sightings of them.  He said, 'But tell my people also not to fear.  Because what's going to happen is that when these giants are sighted, there will be great fear among men, and many of you will forget who your God is.'  This is why you need to be in a place of preparation."  A TikToker called -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "endtimelady" did a long video about how the aliens in Miami are actually Nephilim but they're also demons, and they're going to come out and terrorize us.  Oh, and we should be careful to control our thoughts, because they're telepathic.  "This is going to get more and more common," she said.  "Because we're in the End Times."

I guess if your handle is "endtimelady" you gotta bring that up somehow.

My favorite, though, is the guy who kept saying, "Why is nobody talking about this?" when, in fact, every lunatic on social media seems to be doing nothing but talking about this.

It's been a month and a half since the incident took place, and it's showing no signs of slowing down.  You'd think that questions like, "Where have the giant aliens been hiding since January 1?" and "If the powers-that-be are so desperate to prevent anyone from finding out about this, how are there videos and posts by the tens of thousands all over the internet, and no one's doing anything about it?" would come to people's minds.  Not to mention, "Why am I paying any attention to the crazed ramblings of people who obviously have a pound and a half of Malt-O-Meal where the rest of us have a brain?"

But this is social media, where everything's made up, and logic and evidence don't matter.

Anyhow.  You might want to keep an eye out for giant shadowy aliens.  Seems like they'd be hard to miss, but you never know.  I'm going to place my three dogs on High Red Alert Mode, usually reserved for Extreme Danger Situations like the arrival of the UPS guy.  So we'll all be watching for new developments.  If "endtimelady" is right and these are the End Times, I'd actually be thrilled, because I live in rural upstate New York and it's kind of boring around here.  The arrival of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and the Beast With Seven Heads And Ten Crowns would be a welcome relief from the monotony.

On the other hand, if my initial take is correct and none of it is real and it is the result of superintelligent beings messing around with the computer simulation we're in, y'all just need to stop.  In the last few years the weirdness dial has already been turned up to eleven, and I think that's about all we can cope with, down here.  So y'all just sober up and simmer down, okay?

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Apocalypse yesterday

I find it simultaneously amusing and terrifying how steeped in self-delusion some folks are.

Now, it's not that I think I'm always right, or free from biases.  Those of you who are regular readers of Skeptophilia will no doubt be aware of my opinion of the accuracy with which our brains function; I'm no more immune to getting things wrong than anyone is.  But still, one thing the scientific, rationalistic point of view does have is a clear protocol for figuring out when you are wrong.  At that point, you have no choice but to reconsider the theory in question.

But some people work the whole thing backwards.  It brings to mind the wonderful quote from Doctor Who in the episode "The Hand of Fear," in which the Fourth Doctor says, "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

And at that point their altered facts, miraculously enough, always seem to support their model.  So without any apparent realization that they've just committed circular reasoning, they announce that their claim is vindicated.

Perhaps you remember the whole nonsense ten years ago about the Rapture, that came into the news largely because of the late Harold Camping, extremist religious wingnut extraordinaire.  Camping, you might recall, announced a date for the Rapture, and stated his case so vehemently that more than one of his followers sold all of their belongings and gave away the proceeds, or else used the money to purchase billboard space to warn the rest of us that the End Was Near.  The day before the Day, many of them bid tearful farewells to their loved ones, promising to say a good word in Jesus's ear on their behalf after all the dust settled.

Then, the next day, nothing happened.

So Camping revised his prediction to a new date, six months later.  This time he was right, he said, cross his heart and hope to vanish.  But once again, the faithful stayed put on Earth, and worse still, the Antichrist never showed.  So Camping closed up shop, and two years later, died of a stroke at the ripe old age of 92, disappointed to the last that he hadn't lived to see the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers.  What fun that would have been!

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

You'd think that sort of failure record (100%) would be a little discouraging to the faithful, wouldn't you?  We keep having predictions of the End Times, and the world refuses to cooperate, and end already.  No Beasts appear, no Antichrist, no Seven Seals; everything just kind of keeps loping along as usual.  Eventually, you'd think people would say, "Hey, you know what?  Maybe we need to reconsider all of this apocalyptic stuff, because so far, it's running a zero batting average."

But no.  They'd never let a little thing like no results change their minds.  And now we have a guy who takes the alter-the-facts approach and pushes it to its ultimate endpoint: he says that the Rapture did too happen, and if you didn't notice, it was your own damn fault.

I'm not making this up.  According to the website Now the End Begins, the holy actually did get Raptured.  Millions are missing, the site says:

Well, we told you it was coming.  Perhaps you were a casual reader of this site, but never got really involved, "too many religious nuts" you said.  Maybe you had a family member who would plead with you night after night to "get right" with Jesus before His return.  "Nah, never happen", you said, "people been saying that for ever. Nonsense!".  But, it wasn't nonsense, was it?  Turns out the religious nuts were right after all.  The Rapture of the Church actually happened.  Now we are gone, and you remain.  Left behind.  I can only imagine the shock - terror - panic - and questions that must be running through your head right now.  My heart breaks for you, and that's why I made this page, to get you through what the Bible calls the time of Jacob's Trouble, the Great Tribulation, and it's moments away from starting.  Are YOU ready?

I... what?

What do you mean "we are gone?"  If you're gone, who is writing for and maintaining the site?  Are you suggesting that Heaven has WiFi and a fast internet connection?  Is the server hosted by the Lord of Hosts?  What do you do if Christ wants to use the Holy Computer while you're updating the website?  Do you tell him, "I'm sorry, Jesus, but you'll have to surf the web another time?"

But my main objection is, if all of those people really had disappeared, don't you think someone would have noticed by now?  Sure, the website tells us.  We all did notice.  And apparently, we're all pretty puzzled about it:

And that's exactly what just happened, and where we have now gone.  Oh, knowing the media as I do, I am sure that there are many attempts to explain it - UFO's, alien abductions, a harmonic convergence, a government program, FEMA camps, cosmic shift, worm holes, and the list goes on and on.  But none of those explainations [sic] really satisfy you, do they?  I mean, it's hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people, right?  Could any one government, no matter how corrupt, really process that many people in the "blink of an eye".  No, they could not.  You know better than that.

I do?  I mean, yes, of course I do.  I'd never fall for the media telling me that hundreds of millions of people were sucked into a wormhole!  That'd just be silly!  I'll believe instead that hundreds of millions of people vanished, and no one has mentioned it in the media at all!

Because, of course, the teensy little problem with all of this is that everyone seems to kind of... still be here.  While I understand that given the circles I travel in, it's understandable that none of my immediate friends and family were Bodily Assumed Into Heaven, you'd think that at least one or two casual acquaintances would be amongst the hundreds of millions who were holy enough to be Raptured.  Strange to say, I haven't noticed anyone in my community vanishing lately.  I really don't think that I'd have missed something like that.  There are even a few I can think of that I'd be happy enough to wave goodbye to, as they floated off into the sky, but no such luck.

The rest of the site consists of suggestions about what to do now that we've been Left Behind (number one piece of advice: don't accept the Mark of the Beast).  But all of that really pales by comparison to the opening bits, wherein they tell us that the Rapture happened while we were otherwise occupied, and we Ungodly Types have yet to notice.

I've said before about the extremely religious that they'll never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their beliefs, but this may be the best example yet.  The whole thing reminded me of the words of George Aiken, Republican senator from Vermont, who said, when it became obvious that the United States was losing the Vietnam War, "The best policy is to declare victory and leave."  Or in this case, don't let the fact that the Rapture didn't happen interfere with your conviction that the Rapture has actually happened.

Bringing to mind a final quote, this one from George Orwell's 1984: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command."

Me, I'm just going to do what the world does, namely, keep moseying along and not worry about it.  Even if the UltraChristian crowd is right, I'm pretty certain to be Left Behind anyhow, a possibility that doesn't scare me much.  I've read the Book of Revelation more than once, and I have to point out that whatever else you can say about it, the apocalypse sounds interesting.  There's the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Beast with Seven Heads and the Star Wormwood and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and various other special offers from the God of Love and Mercy, any one of which would certainly alleviate the boredom around here.  So if the Rapture really has already happened, let's get this apocalyptic ball rolling, okay, people?  The End Times are a-wastin'.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Apocalyptic performance art

I try not to devote too much time to claims that are simply crazy.  After all, wacko claims are a dime a dozen, and some of the delusional folks who make them are more to be pitied than censured.

But every once in a while, along will come a claim that is so bizarre, so inspired, that it rises above the background noise to the point that it almost seems like a work of performance art.  And thus, I think, is the mélange of mishegoss that calls itself Unveiling Them, which was brought to my attention by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia two days ago because one of the predictions of the site is that Jesus's Second Coming is currently scheduled for December 22, 2020, which is exactly one year from yesterday.  (So evidently the quote in Matthew 24 will have to be amended to, "No one knoweth the hour, except this one guy, who hath figured it out somehow.")

At first glance, it seems to be nothing more than an End Times/Book of Revelation site, but it's much more than that.  They only start there, and afterwards, go off into reaches of weirdness the likes of which I haven't seen in a long time.

Viktor Vasnetsov, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Besides the usual Number Of The Beast stuff, we find out that:

• A mass population die-off is "set to commence now."  Consider yourselves forewarned.
• Iron is a nutritional toxin; we need copper instead.
• AB negative is the original human blood type; all of the others arose from mutations within the past five hundred years.
• The Ebola virus only affects people who are suffering from iron poisoning.  Since all human blood contains hemoglobin, which contains iron, that's kind of... everyone.
• Contrary to what the census bureau would have you believe, the population of the United States peaked in 1980 and is currently decreasing.
• There are 14,270,410 Evil Satanic Operatives in the United States right now.  Why is this number relevant?  It's 6.66% of the whole population.  Get it?  666?  (Okay, I know it's only 6.66% if you think the population is way smaller than it actually is.  Just play along, all right?)
• Baby Boomers are being exterminated in Secret Death Camps.
• What Jesus actually meant to say was "Do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you."
• Radiation, including wi-fi, "vibrates your blood proteins" and accelerates aging.
• Barack Obama lied about his birth certificate, but not in the way the "Truthers" claim.  He wasn't born in Hawaii, but neither was he born in Kenya.  He was born in Alabama in 1916.  So he's 98 years old.
• Because he's smart enough to consume copper instead of iron, and stays away from wi-fi.

See? I told you this'd be fun.

Of course, there's the warning posted on the website, threatening supernatural vengeance against scoffers like myself, which I reproduce here in toto:

Any attack on the words of these pages (and links) herein, whether it be directly or indirectly, by those whom these words speak of or by their agents or any instrument of theirs, will receive a thousand times what they gave to others, and the plagues and miseries they unleashed upon others, will abound in them.

So I consider myself forewarned as well.  Of course, given that the author of this website has a serious grudge against... well, pretty much everyone, it remains to be seen who would be left un-plagued after all was said and done.  He says that the bad guys who are doomed to destruction include anyone involved in "universities, colleges, foundations, research, corporations, legal system, intelligence organizations/contractors, the churches, media, medicine, police departments, military, all government agencies, school districts, water departments, energy & communications, financial institutions, music/movie industries, sports/entertainment, television/radio, funeral homes/cemeteries, insurance and real estate."  If you exclude all of the aforementioned, who do you have left to Inherit The Kingdom Of God?

The author of the website.  And maybe a handful of scattered peasant-sheepherder types in random locations.  The Lord Of Hosts will more be The Lord Of A Few Guys Who Are Wandering Around Wondering Where Everyone Went.

And there's lots more, which I invite you to peruse.  We apparently will know who the Elect are by their DNA, which is the same as Christ's DNA, which was secretly isolated from the Shroud of Turin.  We are told that the main goal is to "Put an end to violence and bloodshed," but that we are to accomplish this by "Rounding up every man, woman, and child for the abyss prepared for them," which seems a little counterproductive to me if ending violence is your goal.  (I suppose, of course, that if by the end of all of this, there's only seventeen people left on Earth, then it's gonna be de facto a more peaceful planet than it has been for a very long time.)

Anyhow, I'm about done with this, so I'll just leave you to cogitate on all of it.  Me, I 'm going off to prepare myself to be Smitten A Thousandfold By Plagues And Miseries.  You'd think one plague would do it, wouldn't you?  A thousand seems like overkill.

Literally.

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As technology has improved, so has our ability to bring that technology to bear on scientific questions, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In the fascinating new book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past, archaeologist Sarah Parcak gives a fascinating look at how satellite photography has revolutionized her field.  Using detailed photographs from space, including thousands of recently declassified military surveillance photos, Parcak and her colleagues have located hundreds of exciting new sites that before were completely unknown -- roads, burial sites, fortresses, palaces, tombs, even pyramids.

These advances are giving us a lens into our own distant past, and allowing investigation of inaccessible or dangerous sites from a safe distance -- and at a phenomenal level of detail.  This book is a must-read for any students of history -- or if you'd just like to find out how far we've come from the days of Heinrich Schliemann and the excavation of Troy.

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

Notes from the multidimensional realm

In today's episode of Missives From Insane People Who Still Somehow Get A National Platform, we have: Paul McGuire, self-styled "End Times author," who appeared last week on the Jim Bakker Show.

It bears mention that Bakker himself is nuttier than squirrel shit.  Bakker, you may remember, is the one who predicted a couple of years ago that we atheists were imminent to start publicly beheading Christians.  As of right now, my total is a shameful Zero Christians Beheaded, which either means Bakker is a fucking loon or else I'm way behind on my Decapitation Quota.

Then, last year, Bakker railed against liberals for "blaspheming against Donald Trump."  Direct quote, that, despite the fact that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English says that "blaspheme" means "to speak irreverently about God or sacred things."  Which elevates Trump just slightly beyond his station.  Oh, and if that weren't enough, Bakker's also the one who claimed that the U. S. government was being run by witches.

So it's not like Bakker himself is exactly a pinnacle of normality.  But his guest, Paul McGuire, makes Bakker look like Mr. Sane Rationality 2018 by comparison.

Although it bears mention that Bakker treated everything McGuire said as if it were revealed truth, so maybe they're not that far apart after all.

In any case, here's what McGuire had to say:

President Trump is currently engulfed in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of all mankind...   The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm...  There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called "The Scientific Dictatorship," and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics. 

The highest level of the pyramidic organizational structure in which the highest ranking officers, if you will, of the New World Order and Mystery Babylon are ruling the earth through an organizational structure that looks like the pyramid on the back of the U.S. dollar.  And they control the world because they understand that the true control of the world is done through supernatural mechanisms.

So there you have it.

You know, I have to admit that if I were a Luciferian multidimensional being in charge of Mystery Babylon, I would definitely use my supernatural Pyramid Powers to smite the shit out of Donald Trump.  It may seem petty of me, and there are probably more worthy targets, but I'd love to use occult magic to seal his mouth shut.  Or make it so every time he tweets, no matter what he writes, it comes out "I [heart] the New World Order."  Or attach a thousand-watt LED to his forehead that lights up every time he tells a lie.

Of course, it'd be lit so often that it'd interfere with air traffic.  So that'd be bad.

Looks like Lucifer has been hitting the gym lately.  (Fallen Angel, Alexandre Cabanel, 1847) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But what strikes me about McGuire's claim is that despite all of his dire warnings... nothing is happening.  Trump is still in office, his toadies in Congress are looking like they've greased the rails for Brett "Documents Withheld" Kavanaugh to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and the administration as a whole has undone decades of progress on environmental and social issues without anyone being able to stop them, or even slow them down.  So if there really are Luciferian multidimensional beings, I would be really glad if they'd get off their asses and do something about this.  Because it's increasingly looking like we've invented time travel, and transported the entire nation back to 1830.

In any case, that's the view from the lunatic fringe for today.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm late for a meeting of the Pyramidic Organizational Structure.  I hope one of the other Invisible Realm Operatives brings donuts.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

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

Doomsday translation

In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warn my students to avoid Google Translate.

It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far.  If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's pretty solid.  The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin.  For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven."  Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."

Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.

But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:

It's been infiltrated by the Powers of Darkness.

At least that's how I interpret it.  Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:

Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.

Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.

Which brings up a few questions.

1. Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian?  It's kind of a random thing to do.  Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense.  But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had.  ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work.  Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu.  No luck there either.  The search continues.")
2. Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know?  It's not like we didn't all just watch Donald Trump wink at Vladimir Putin and then commit high treason in full view on television, or witness all of the Republicans respond by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald!  Naughty Donald!  If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies!  That will sure show you!")  So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
3. Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
4. Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them?  I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:

So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously.  Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:

As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them.  When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?

Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog" from Hawaiian.

So that's our trip into the surreal for today.  I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one.  Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though.  Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that the US has been renamed the "Amerikan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republik," and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.

At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Questioning the holy man

I know I've said this before, but one of the most baffling things for me about the Trump presidency is that evangelical Christians (most of them, at least) not only voted for Trump, but consider him to be the Anointed One of God.

You would think that listening to Trump for five minutes would be enough to disabuse you of that notion.  The man is a crude, vulgar, greedy, grasping, dishonest, misogynistic, narcissistic philanderer.

To put not too fine a point on it.

Okay, I know people make a deal with the devil in politics sometimes.  You vote for someone who agrees with you on some cause you are passionate about, and overlook his/her faults in other realms.  But that doesn't seem to be what this is.  These people not only agree with his agenda -- especially regarding restricting the access to abortions, eliminating LGBT rights, American isolationism, and protecting the rights of churches to discriminate based upon their religious precepts -- they actually seem to think that he's some kind of modern-day holy man, without fault, appointed by God to bring our nation back from the brink of hell.

Consider, for example, the recently-released book by David Brody and Scott Lamb called The Faith of Donald Trump: A Spiritual Biography, which claims that Trump's agenda is "spiritually motivated" and his rapacity and apparently insatiable libido are evidences of a "quest for God."  You'd think no one would be able to read this without guffawing -- and hearteningly, 42% of the reviews are one-star -- but one reviewer said:

Great biography of a man of God.  Well written to understand about D Trump's character and can see clearly who he is in Christ.  I don't question anymore why he speaks & act such a way but trust him as loving person in depth.  No one can be without fear if the person does not stand on God's truth.

Recall that Trump is the same man who was asked if he ever asked God to forgive him for sins, said that he couldn't remember ever doing that.  "When I drink my little wine -- which is about the only wine I drink -- and have my little cracker," Trump said, "I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed."

The people who espouse the view that Trump is Jesus's right-hand man believe this with a fervor that borders on obsessive mania.  Consider the photograph of the back of a car that has been making its way around social media in the last week:

Well, honestly, he "left his great life" primarily to make sure that legislation gets passed that lines his own pockets and those of his cronies.  Trump and his family are using his position as a way of bringing in cash -- witness Ivanka's recent win of exclusive trademarks from China -- followed by her father rewarding them by promising to bail out Chinese telecom firm ZTE.

Because that doesn't violate the Emoluments Clause, or anything.

But no one exemplifies the bizarre characterization of Trump as Savior better than televangelist Jim Bakker, who steadfastly refuses to Go Gently Into That Good Night even though he appears to have completely lost his marbles.  Last week, Bakker had End Times prophet Paul McGuire on his show, and McGuire warns that because Trump is God's representative on Earth, the Forces of Darkness are amassing to fight back:

America right now is in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of all of mankind.  In fact, in America, we are undergoing the greatest spiritual battle in the history of the world…  So this is it.  We don’t get another chance.  This is it.  We’ve arrived at the moment Jesus told us we would, the Old Testament prophets told us we would.  We are at that time, somewhere near the return and the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to the earth.  We are very close! 

Since we’re in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of mankind, one would think that the majority of God’s people, who claim to have Jesus living inside them, would be awake to the reality that we’re in the greatest spiritual warfare of all time. 

President Trump represents the one last chance to cry out to God in repentance and see God intervene... we are the last generation of Americans… before the return of the Lord... 

The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm.  There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called ‘The Scientific Dictatorship,’ and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics.

Well, all I can say is, if hating Trump qualifies you for supernatural multidimensional power, sign me right up.  But I've hated Trump for ages, and I don't have wings or telepathy or the ability to turn invisible or anything.

I feel kind of ripped off, frankly.

(It does bear mention, however, that one of the people who responded to this story wrote, "I think Paul McGuire has been smoking way too much covfefe lately.")

Anyhow, it's all kind of baffling to me.  I mean, this goes way beyond the sunk-cost fallacy and wishful thinking right into the more rarefied atmosphere of complete self-delusion.  I suppose, given how much evidence you had to ignore to support Trump in the first place, I shouldn't be surprised.  It never was about rationality in the first place.

But it still leaves me feeling like I want to board the next spaceship to Alpha Centauri.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Apocalypse later

Several times here at Skeptophilia headquarters we've made fun of people predicting the end of the world, be it from a collision with the planet Nibiru, an alien invasion, and the Borg cube draining the Sun of energy (no, I swear I'm not making that one up), not to mention the depredations of the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons.  Until yesterday, however, I didn't know the scale of the problem.  A friend and loyal reader sent me a list of predicted end dates -- and all I can say is, we're not out of the woods yet.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about, what with impending ecological catastrophes, wars breaking out, and sociopaths in leadership roles in government, now we have to worry about the world ending over and over.  So without further ado, here's what we're in for:

• June 9, 2019 -- the Second Coming of Christ, according to Ronald Weinland, founder of the Church of God - Preparing for the Kingdom of God, an apocalyptic Christian sect headquartered in Colorado.  This is far from the first time Weinland has predicted the End Times; he also said Christ was coming back in 2012 and 2013, the latter of which would have been during his prison term for tax evasion.  (Weinland's, not Christ's.)  Oh, and Weinland also said that anyone who mocks him or his church would be divinely cursed with a "sickness which will eat them from the inside out."  I'm still waiting for that, too.
• An unspecified date in 2020 -- Armageddon, if you believe the late Jeane Dixon, a self-styled prophet and professional astrologer who died in 1997, so she won't be available for commentary when it doesn't happen.  Dixon was famous for touting the few times her predictions came true (such as a well-publicized one that whoever won the 1960 presidential election would die before his term was out), while ignoring all the wrong ones (such as her certainty that the person who'd win that election was Richard Nixon).  Speaking of Nixon, apparently he believed she was the real deal, which makes me wonder why she didn't warn him not to do all the stupid shit that led to Watergate.
• Some time in 2018, or possibly 2020, 2021, or 2028 -- Kenton Beshore, pastor of the Mariners Church in Irvine, California, says that Jesus will return within one generation of the founding of the state of Israel (1948), as hath been foretold by the scriptures.  He said that the usual upper bound of "one generation" -- forty years -- is wrong, because Jesus didn't return in 1988.  So q.e.d., apparently. He says that a "biblical generation" is more like seventy or eighty years, so we might have to wait as long as 2028 for Jesus to come back.  Or not.  He doesn't seem very sure, himself.  I guess the line in the Gospel of Matthew about how no one knoweth the hour includes Pastor Beshore.
• 2026 -- an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, according to Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, a Sufi prophet from Pakistan, and founder of Messiah Foundation International.  Shahi is a bit of an enigma.  He fled Pakistan upon learning that he was being accused of blasphemy, and was tried in absentia and sentenced to 59 years in prison.  He ended up in England, but disappeared from there in 2001.  Some say he's in prison in India, others that he's in hiding in England, a few devotees that he was assumed bodily into heaven, and some more pragmatic types that he simply died.  Despite all this, there are reports of his devotees seeing him "all over the world."
• 2060 -- according to an apocryphal story, physicist Isaac Newton said the world was going to end in some unspecified fashion in 2060.  Apparently, this came from an unpublished manuscript wherein Newton was trying to put apocalyptic predictions to rest, and said that from the motions of known objects in the Solar System, the world was not going to end before 2060, which I'm sure you can see is not the same thing as saying the world is going to end in 2060.  Nevertheless, you still hear the claim that Newton predicted the end of the world in 2060, lo unto this very day.
• 2129 -- Kurdish Sunni prophet Said-i Nursî said that according to his interpretation of the words of Muhammad, the world was going to end in 2129.  Myself, I wonder why you'd need an interpretation, if that's what Muhammad meant.  If he wanted to say that, the simple thing would be to come right out and say, "Hey, y'all, you know what?  The world's gonna end in 2129," only in Arabic.  Of course, if religious leaders were that direct, they wouldn't need prophets, ministers, et al. to interpret their words, which would put a whole industry out of business.
• 2239 -- according to some interpretations of the Talmud (cf. the previous entry), the "period of desolation" marking the start of the End Times has to occur within 6,000 years of the creation of Adam, which apparently happened in 3,761 B.C.E., which must have come as a hell of a shock to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, who had already been around for a thousand years by that time.  Then there follows a thousand years of "desolation," followed by the actual end of the world in the year 3239.  Although given how desolate things already are, you have to wonder how we'll tell the difference.
• 2280 -- Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian-American biochemist and scholar of the Qu'ran, said that from numerological analysis of the Qu'ran he predicted the world would end in 2280.  That's far enough ahead that I'm not really worried about it, and in any case (1) numerology is a lot of bunk, and (2) Khalifa was murdered in 1990 and didn't foresee that, so I think we can safely say that he wasn't worth much as a prophet.

So there you have it; eight times the world's gonna end.  And those are just the ones in the future.  The same list includes 173 dates the world has ended in the past (I shit you not) including several by such luminaries as Martin Luther, Jerry Falwell, Christopher Columbus, and Cotton Mather (Columbus and Mather each predicted the end three separate times).

Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (ca. 1497) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Interesting that 173 failures in a row doesn't stop the apocalyptoids from claiming that okay, we've been wrong before, but this one's real, cross our hearts and hope to die in shrieking agony as the world burns.  Myself, I'd be a little discouraged by now.  It must be disappointing to think you're going to see the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers a week from next Tuesday, and then you have to go to work the next day as if nothing happened, which it did.  At least we only have till June to wait for the next time the world is going to end, so we won't be kept in suspense for much longer.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.