5G fantasies

A week ago, I got my first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.  I was lucky enough to have the opportunity because I work part-time for a home health agency providing companion care to homebound seniors, and even though I'm currently furloughed because of the pandemic I still qualified -- and I certainly wasn't going to turn it down.  I'm happy to say that all I had as a side effect was some very minor arm soreness the next day, but otherwise, it was no big deal.

However, my mentioning this to a friend prompted an immediate concerned eyebrow-raise.  "Didn't you hear that the vaccine is being used to implant 5G surveillance microchips?" she asked me.  "You're not worried?"

I reassured her that no, I wasn't worried, and in any case if the FBI wants to surveil me, they can knock themselves out because it would be the most boring surveillance job ever.

First FBI Agent: What's he doing now?

Second FBI Agent: Same thing as for the last five days.  He's sitting at his computer drinking coffee and watching funny dog videos.

First FBI Agent: I thought this guy was a writer? 

Second FBI Agent: Supposedly he is.  Have you seen him actually write anything?

First FBI Agent: Well, four days ago he added three lines to his manuscript, deleted two of them, then told his wife that evening he'd been "very productive."

Secondly, even if I was up to no good, I'm not really that confident the FBI would catch on.  These are the same people who had several days before the Capitol riots where the far right was posting stuff all over Parler like, "Wow, that's really some riot we have planned for the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, isn't it?" and "Here's a list of the people who are signed up as drivers when we go to the riot where we intend to break into the Capitol and threaten lawmakers" and "Here I am in my home at 512 Swamp Hollow Road, East Bunghole, Tennessee, planning to riot in the Capitol!  I bet the FBI will never know!" and still claimed they didn't have enough warning to prevent it.  And they took days afterward to start arresting people despite the fact that numerous rioters took selfies and videoed themselves breaking shit and vandalizing the place, and then posted them online.

Of course, the fact that the rioters did that sort of thing points to general low intelligence on their part, too.  I'm not saying I'm any kind of genius, but I do know that if I was inclined to break the law, I would not video myself with my phone and post it to my Twitter with the hashtag #CriminalActivityFTW. 

Anyhow, I tried to explain to my friend that there's no way you could inject a microchip via a vaccine, and she said she'd "seen it online" and that "they said it was possible."  So I said as gently as I could that it was an unfounded conspiracy theory, but that I'd look into it, and with a very small amount of digging found out that one of the most widely-circulated claims showed a circuit diagram alleged to be of the top-secret injectable microchip, but turned out to be the circuit diagram for a Boss Metal Zone MT-2 guitar distortion pedal where they'd cropped out words that would have been a dead giveaway, like "treble" and "bass" and "volume" and "footswitch."

Just for the record, I can vouch for the fact that the nurse who gave me the COVID-19 vaccine did not inject me with an electric guitar pedal.

You know, what strikes me about all this is that the caliber of conspiracy theories has really been going to hell lately.  They're not even trying to make them plausible any more.  Back in my day, you had your Faked Moon Landing Conspiracy and your Hollow Earth Conspiracy and your Roswell Alien Conspiracy and your The CIA Killed JFK Conspiracy, which were quality.  Now?  With QAnon in charge of our conspiracies, we're being told that a pizza parlor with no basement has a pedophilia ring operating out of its basement.

So I'm issuing a challenge to you yahoos to up your game.  I mean, really.  Is this the best you can do?  Because if it is, I want a refund.

But now I better wind this up and get back to watching funny dog videos.  This novel isn't gonna write itself, and besides, I gotta make the guys in the FBI surveillance van earn their paycheck.

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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

A hue and cry over sunspots

The argument from ignorance is a curious phenomenon.

The gist is that people take their lack of understanding of some phenomenon, and from that ignorance deduce that their own particular explanation must be the correct one.  Of course, you can't deduce anything from a lack of understanding.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you don't know, that's where your conversation should stop.  You don't then say that it must be anything."

I saw a particularly good example of the argument from ignorance a couple of days ago, with the hoopla that is arising around a mysterious action by the FBI over a solar observatory in New Mexico.  On September 6, the Sunspot Solar Observatory near Alamogordo, a research facility operated by New Mexico State University, was closed without explanation and all of its staff sent home.  The observatory has been closed since then, and all requests for more information have been met with steadfast silence.

Alisdair Davey, a data center scientist at the National Solar Observatory, which works with the SSO, said, "We have absolutely no idea what is going on.  As in truly nothing, which in itself is just weird."

The Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope at the SSO [Image licensed under the Creative Commons uıɐɾ ʞ ʇɐɯɐs from New York City, USA, Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope (5508694434), CC BY-SA 2.0]

What is even more peculiar is that a post office on the grounds of the SSO has also been shut down without explanation.  Rod Spurgeon, a USPS spokesperson, said he didn't think the two were related.  "Whatever’s occurring there has nothing to do with us...  I haven’t heard of anything like [a biohazard or bioterror incident] going on."  Liz Davis, a public information officer at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, concurs.  "There is no criminal activity, which is what Postal Inspection Service would be dealing with," Davis said.

So as of right now, what we have is... nothing.  And there's nothing like nothing to get the conspiracy theorists having multiple orgasms.  This becomes obvious if you peruse prominent conspiracy theory websites, which I did so you won't have to do so and risk valuable brain cells.  Here are just a few of the ideas I've seen, all of which were presented as if they were statements of fact:

• The SSO sighted the spacecraft of an advanced alien race with which the US government is having dealings, so the whole place was shut down to prevent anyone from finding out more.
• The SSO intercepted a top-secret communiqué from a top-secret government satellite, and the result is that all of the staff has been rounded up and put under house arrest until they'll sign non-disclosure agreements.
• Because the SSO isn't far from Roswell, something something something crashed spaceship in 1947 something something.
• The SSO discovered that a solar flare was on that way that was going to incinerate the Earth, and the powers-that-be didn't want the astronomers telling everyone and causing havoc.  Given that the observatory closed on September 6, and here we all are, un-incinerated, you'd think this one would have been discounted.  Maybe this is a really slow-moving solar flare, I dunno.
• Some of the scientists at the SSO found out that the secret mission of the facility was using magic tractor beams to mess with the weather, and they had to be silenced.  The argument here, if I can dignify it with the name, is that since HAARP closed down a couple of years ago, the Evil Government Weather Manipulation Program had to be moved elsewhere, and this is the elsewhere to which it had been moved.  The fact that in the last few days we've seen two amazingly powerful killer storms -- Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut -- is displayed as "evidence."  Because powerful hurricanes don't occur every year, or something.
• The FBI took over the SSO because they're going to modify the station to send out mind-control rays and turn Americans into mindless sheep.  From the fact that 36% of us apparently still support Donald Trump, it appears to be working.

And so on.

What, you may ask, do I think about all this?  Easy: what I think about all this is...

... I don't know.

'cuz that's what you say when you have no information.  I agree with the conspiracy theorists insofar as the FBI's action is rather curious; what earthly reason they could have to take over a remote solar observatory without explanation is beyond me.  It may be that at some point we'll find out why the incident happened, or -- because we're talking about the FBI, here -- we may never know.

Which, of course, will just fuel the conspiracy theorists further.  More nothing?  Yay!  That just proves we're right!

But if we're going to approach this whole thing skeptically, we have to be willing to allow ourselves to remain in ignorance -- indefinitely, if need be.  It's not a comfortable position for a lot of us.  People like to have explanations for things.  Certainty is reassuring.  The universe makes sense, everything has a reason.

To once again quote Tyson, "You can't be a scientist if you're uncomfortable steeped in ignorance.  Because scientists are always at the edge of what is known.  If you're not at the edge, you're not doing science."

In any case, keep an eye on the news, and watch out for stories about spaceships or satellites or weather modification or mind-control rays.  Or, perhaps, some more reasonable explanation of what happened.

The latter is what I'd put my money on.

UPDATE (as of Tuesday morning) -- the SSO has reopened, and while the details are still not entirely clear, authorities are saying that "a suspect in the investigation potentially posed a threat to the safety of local staff and residents."

See?  I told you it wasn't aliens.

There's still no information on exactly what kind of threat the suspect posed.  That should settle that, but of course it won't, because the conspiracy theorists will take the lack of details and spin that into a whole new set of claims.  You can't win, which we sort of already knew.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

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

FBI versus Facebook

For the latest reason to freak out, consider the claim over at America's Freedom Fighters that some of your Facebook friends are actually FBI agents conducting surveillance on your activities.

Now, there's good reason to be careful of what you post, and it has nothing to do with some undercover cop posing as your old college drinking buddy.  Doing anything online leaves a digital footprint so big it can be seen from space, and potential employers and college admissions officers now do routine checks to make sure that the person they're considering hasn't done anything too sketchy.  

Or stupid.  There are hundreds of stories of people who have been reprimanded, fired, or expelled for posting inappropriate stuff on social media, and most of them make you wonder how the people in question manage to tie their own shoelaces.  Examples include:

• The bank teller who told his boss he had to be away for a family emergency, and then the same day posted photos of himself at a Halloween party dressed as Tinkerbell.
• An Ohio school bus driver who was fired after posting photographs of herself drinking beer -- while seated behind the wheel of the school bus.
• A woman who called her boss a "total pervvy [sic] wanker" who made her "do shit stuff just to piss her off" on Facebook, evidently forgetting that she had recently friended him on Facebook.

And so on.  So yes, it is possible to get yourself into hot water from what you post.  It's why I'm pretty careful; I'm a teacher, a public figure in our little community, and I try to be fairly guarded about what I say and do online.  (Not, mind you, that my life is rife with drunken debauchery, or anything.  I'm such an introvert that I consider drinking a beer and watching an episode of Lost in Space a wild night.)

But still, there's such a thing as taking paranoia too far.  And the article "How Many of Your Facebook Friends are Undercover Feds?" takes the concept of being cautious about one's digital footprint, and runs right off the cliff with it.  The writer contends:

U.S. law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting.

Which applies to me how, exactly?  They can check me out all they like.  Oh noes!  The Justice Department is going to see my vacation photographs!  Horrors!

The best part, though, is the article's signoff:

We urge you to very careful about who you ‘friend’- They could be a part of the government or the Left’s attack on Conservatives… GOD BLESS AMERICA!

And of course, they never tell you how you might tell your true friends from the Undercover Leftist FBI Covert Operatives.  You're left suspicious of everyone, which I have no doubt is the intent.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What I find funny about this is two things.

First: you seriously think that you're that important?  Unless the person reading this blog is some kind of master criminal or terrorist or spy, the FBI clearly has better things to do with their time and resources than to go through photographs of what you had to eat at the Chinese restaurant last night.

Second: do you really think that if the FBI were interested in you, they wouldn't be able to find out about you unless they friended you on Facebook first?  That's so naïve, it's kind of adorable.  I mean, can't you just hear the conversation?

Agent #1:  "We've got to crack this case, and it all depends on finding out what Steve Hickenlooper had for dinner last night!  But dammit, he won't accept my friend request!" 

Agent #2:  "He's a wily one, Steve is."  *snaps his fingers*  "Hey, I've got it!  Maybe if you sent him a friend request posing as his high school girlfriend, LouEllen Finkwhistle!  He'd fall for that!" 

Agent #1:  "Isn't LouEllen the one who got fired for calling her boss a 'pervvy wanker'?" 

Agent #2:  "Yup.  She deleted her Facebook account after that happened.  So if you pretended to be her, Steve would never know it wasn't actually her." 

Agent #1:  *rubs his hands together*  "EX-cellent."

So anyway.  My advice is continue to have fun on social media, but do be careful what you put out there.  The rule of "once you put it online, it's online forever" is a pretty good one to follow.  But as far as thinking that your online contacts are all undercover agents spying on you -- relax.  No offense, but you're honestly not that interesting.

Of course, that's what I would say, isn't it?  So thanks for clicking on this post, and all.

*reaches for little black book to write down your name and email address*

EX-cellent.