Nuclear spy lizards

Sometimes it's reassuring to know that the wackos aren't confined to the United States, although I will admit up front that we seem to have way more than our fair share of them.

My reason for saying this is a story about a government official in Iran who has apparently been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  His name is Hassan Firouzabadi, and he is a retired ophthalmologist who is currently Senior Military Adviser to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  Firouzabadi was being questioned by the press about the death of Kavous Seyed-Emami, who had been head of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation.  The official story was that Seyed-Emami had committed suicide in prison after being picked up by the police in January on charges of espionage.

Seyed-Emami's arrest and death are certainly suspicious.  The Wildlife Heritage Foundation has connections to Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American businessman whose wealth predates the Iranian Revolution and who is therefore suspected of being anti-government.  The powers-that-be, however, say that Seyed-Emami killed himself because he was guilty and was afraid of punishment.

"This person was one of the accused," said Tehran's chief prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabidi, "and given that he knew there were many revelations against him and that he himself had made confessions, unfortunately he committed suicide in prison."

Tragic, and almost certainly further evidence of the Iranian government's determination to squelch dissent, but otherwise not far out of daily business for the Middle East.  But there's another top Iranian official who was a little more forthcoming.  Seyed-Emami was not just an ordinary dissenter, nor even an ordinary espionage agent.

He was a spy who used trained lizards to detect uranium deposits and nuclear missile sites, and then passed along the information to the Israelis.

Look at those beady eyes.  Would you trust this guy?  I didn't think so. [Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This statement came, in all seriousness, from the aforementioned Hassan Firouzabadi, Senior Military Adviser to the Ayatollah.  What Seyed-Emami was doing was using the natural ability lizards have to "attract atomic waves" (whatever the fuck those are), with evil intent:

In their possessions were a variety of reptile desert species like lizards, chameleons…  We found out that their skin attracts atomic waves and that they were nuclear spies who wanted to find out where inside the Islamic Republic of Iran we have uranium mines and where we are engaged in atomic activities.

Needless to say, this is idiotic.  Lizards respond to being around highly radioactive materials pretty much like any other life form does, namely by dying.  If you're trying to find out where the radioactive stuff is, there's an easier way.

It's called a "Geiger counter."

But facts seldom matter to people like Firouzabadi, who sounds like he should find some like-minded souls over at InfoWars, Before It's News, and the Flat Earth Society.  As far as Seyed-Emami, my guess is that he was tortured while in jail -- it seems pretty common practice in Iran -- and under that kind of duress, confessed to whatever they were asking of him.

Secret Agent Radioactivity-Detecting SuperLizards?  Yes, sir, absolutely.  I train them.  Now please unhook the jumper cables from my nipples.

To the rest of us, though, this is more evidence that getting into a high position in government does not necessarily mean you're smart, or even in contact with reality.  As for Firouzabadi, sounds like he'd be best off if someone patted him on the back, said, "There, there," and sent him off to resume picking at the straps of his straitjacket with his teeth.

Of course, I can say that.  I'm safely over here in the United States.  On the other hand, this is the home of Alex Jones, David Icke, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Donald Trump.  So maybe I shouldn't act so superior after all.

Speaking out for Raif and Soheil

As a blogger, I am thankful every single day that I live in a society where I am free to write, to criticize, to be provocative.

I try not to offend, but I know I occasionally do.  On those occasions where the offense was my fault, when I cross the lines of propriety, I apologize.  Because that's how civilized, rational people act.

Not so in many parts of the world.  There are dozens of countries where to write what I write, to be who I am, would be to take my life, liberty, and safety into serious risk.  Yet there are still brave individuals who continue to speak out, who are willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of freedom of speech.

Such a man is Raif Badawi.  Badawi is a Saudi blogger who set up a network for freethinkers, and who made plain his views about the control the religious establishment has over the Saudi government (i.e., total).  And last year, Badawi was arrested, tried for "insulting Islam," and sentenced to ten years in jail and 600 lashes.

His lawyer filed an appeal.  The judge responded by increasing his sentence to 1,000 lashes.

Raif Badawi [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yesterday, Badawi was brought out into the city square in Jeddah, stripped to the waist, had his wrists tied to a post, and was given fifty strokes with a whip on his bare back.

Only 950 to go, which are to be given in sessions of fifty lashes each, every week for the next twenty weeks.

What are you implying, Saudis?  That your Allah is so weak, so fragile, that a blogger who criticizes him deserves to be whipped?  That a single man with a computer is so strong by comparison that the only response is to give him a sentence that probably will never be completed, because he'll have died of his injuries first?  Badawi's criticisms of you, your regime, and your religion were mild, so let me up the stakes.

Your leaders and your judges are barbarians.  Their acceptance of violence for thought crimes makes them no better than the Inquisition.  Your religion and your holy book, which do mandate such penalties, is a skein of lies that is one of the worst things that the human race has ever invented.

Is Allah outraged?  Good.  Because Je Suis Raif.

In Iran, another blogger is likely to be hanged soon, for similar "offenses."  Soheil Arabi, a thirty-year-old writer from Tehran, was convicted in August of "insulting the prophet of Islam" and "sowing corruption on the earth" for posting material critical of Muhammad on several Facebook pages under assumed names.  Had he been found guilty of being critical "while drunk or when quoting others," he would "only" have been given 74 lashes in the public square.

But instead, he confessed, probably under torture, and the judge handed down the death sentence.  Arabi said that he is "remorseful," but under Iranian law, that doesn't make any difference.

Soheil Arabi [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So once again, we have a lone man who has so much influence that his posting on Facebook is going to make people question their reverence for the Prophet?  That'd imply that the Prophet must not have much going for him, if he can be so easily insulted.

But yes, that's what they're implying.  And it is likely that soon Arabi will find himself standing on the gallows, with a noose around his neck and a black hood over his head, all because he did not show enough respect for a worldview that merits none.

Je Suis Soheil.

Human rights include the right to think freely and to speak freely.  A religion that can be destroyed by questions and criticisms deserves to be.  The vicious barbarians currently in charge in Saudi Arabia and Iran are, perhaps, correct to be afraid that such freedoms would represent a threat to their power; when people are given an opportunity to point out the evils in society, they can no longer be painted over with a coating of sanctity and holiness.  The inhumanity and outright cruelty become obvious to all.

And you'd think that the crowd that witnessed Raif Badawi being whipped yesterday, that the ones who may soon witness Soheil Arabi hanging by his neck from a rope, would have the same awakening, even if seeing such horrors make them unlikely to speak out.  But now that we have the internet, now that such things cannot be kept hidden away, now that people can speak and write and interact with others across political borders and barriers of religious ideology, such criticism cannot be crushed forever.

So to the people in power in Saudi Arabia and Iran, I have this to say: your days are numbered.  You may be able to torture or kill your citizens for thought crimes now, but the number of people who are willing to put their lives at risk for the right to speak out is growing exponentially.  And they have millions of supporters worldwide who will make sure that the message gets out there.

Je Suis Raif.  Je Suis Soheil.

Race, ethnicity, Einstein, and King Tut

Today we have two stories that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, we have an article by Jo Marchant over at Medium entitled, "Tutankhamun's Blood," wherein we hear about the work done by Yehia Gad to sequence the young pharaoh's DNA -- and how it set off a war over what race/ethnic group gets to claim him.  First, there was concern that the test would show a connection between the Egyptian king and... *cue dramatic music* the Jews:

The editor of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, reported in 2002 that [proposed DNA testing] was cancelled “due to concern that the results might strengthen an association between the family of Tutankhamun and the Biblical Moses.” An Egyptologist with close links to the antiquities service, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, agreed: “There was a fear it would be said that the pharaohs were Jewish.”

Specifically, if the results showed that Tutankhamun shared DNA with Jewish groups, there was concern that this could be used by Israel to argue that Egypt was part of the Promised Land.

This might seem an outlandish notion, but given the context of the Middle Eastern history, it is understandable...  For many Egyptians, the idea that their most famous kings could share some common heritage with their enemies is a hard one to cope with.

Yet the possibility that Tutankhamun could share some DNA with ancient Jewish tribes is not far-fetched, says Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist and mummy specialist at the American University in Cairo. After all, the royal family might well have shared genes with others who originated in the same part of the world. “It is quite possible that you might find Semitic strains of DNA in the pharaohs,” she says. “Christians, Jews, Muslims—they all came from a similar gene pool originally.”

Yehia Gad finally was allowed to do the DNA testing, under the direction of an Egyptian antiquities expert, the archaeologist Zahi Hawass, and the results turned out to be controversial, but for a different reason:

A Swiss genealogy company named IGENEA issued a press release based on a blurry screen-grab from the Discovery documentary. It claimed that the colored peaks on the computer screen proved that Tutankhamun belonged to an ancestral line, or haplogroup, called R1b1a2, that is rare in modern Egypt but common in western Europeans...  This immediately led to assertions by neo-Nazi groups that King Tutankhamun had been “white,” including YouTube videos with titles such as King Tutankhamun’s Aryan DNA Results, while others angrily condemned the entire claim as a racist hoax. It played, once again, into the long-running battle over the king’s racial origins. While some worried about a Jewish connection, the argument over whether the king was black or white has inflamed fanatics worldwide. Far-right groups have used blood group data to claim that the ancient Egyptians were in fact Nordic, while others have been desperate to define the pharaohs as black African. A 1970s show of Tutankhamun’s treasures triggered demonstrations arguing that his African heritage was being denied, while the blockbusting 2005 tour was hit by protests in Los Angeles, when demonstrators argued that the reconstruction of the king’s face built from CT scan data was not sufficiently “black.”

If that's not ridiculous enough, just yesterday we had a story from Haaretz about an apparently insane Iranian cleric who claims that Albert Einstein was actually a Shi'a Muslim:

The report cites a video by Ayatolla Mahadavi Kani, described as the head of the Assembly of Experts in the Islamic Republic of Iran, who says that there are documents proving the Jewish scientist embraced Shiite Islam and was an avid follower of Ja'far Al-Sadiq, an eighth-century Shi'i imam.

In the video, Kani quotes Einstein as saying that when he heard about the ascension of the prophet Mohammed, "a process which was faster than the speed of light," he realized "this is the very same relativity movement that Einstein had understood."

The ayatollah adds: "Einstein said, 'when I heard about the narratives of the prophet Mohamad and that of the Ahle-Beit [prophet's household] I realized they had understood these things way before us.'"

What I find wryly amusing about all of this he's-mine-no-he's-mine tug-of-war over famous historical figures is how it ignores the reality of what race and ethnic identification actually are.  There is some biological basis for race, which is how we can generate cladograms for ethnic groups like the one pictured below:

Note what is, for some people, the most surprising thing about this tree; two very dark-skinned individuals, one a Native Australian and the other a Bantu from Zimbabwe, are far more distantly related to each other than an Englishman is related to a guy from Japan -- even though both the Bantu and the Australian are routinely lumped together as "Black," and the Englishman and the Japanese consider themselves different races.

Professor Emeritus Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the acclaimed and much-cited population geneticist at Stanford, writes, "Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear…  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones.  From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus…the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection."

That's not to say that there's nothing to race at all.  Self-perception, privilege, culture, religion, and language are all strongly connected to, and influenced by, race and ethnicity.  But the genetic connection is tenuous at best, which is why I always find it funny when someone tells me that (s)he is "1/32 Native American," and then decides to adopt a Native name, wear Native-style jewelry and clothing, and so on.  By the time your ancestry has that small a proportion from any ethnic group, you are hardly Native American in any cultural sense, so doing all that sort of stuff -- and yes, I know more than one person who does -- is little more than an affectation.

But it's also not to say that I'm not proud of my roots.  My family is predominantly French and Scottish, with some Dutch, German, English, Irish, and Native American thrown in for good measure (and the latter, I'm afraid, isn't much more than 1/32 of my heritage).  Ethnically, I'm a southern Louisianian, and if you don't think that's an ethnic and cultural group, you should spend some time in Lafayette, Louisiana.  But I am, at the same time, fully aware of how fluid a concept ethnic identification is.  I've lost most of my Cajun accent in the three decades I've lived in YankeeLand, and my children -- who share about the same proportion of Cajun blood I do, since their mother was also half south-Louisiana-French by ancestry -- were raised in upstate New York and therefore aren't ethnically Cajun at all.

And all of this is why the wrangling over whether King Tut was "actually" European (or Black, or Semitic, or whatever) and whether Albert Einstein was "actually" a Muslim, is ridiculous.  We are all mixtures of genetics and culture; and each of those brings along with it physical and cultural baggage.  It's wonderful when someone embraces his or her ethnicity for the positive features (the perspective on the world, the music, the language, the food) and jettisons the negative aspects (the divisive us-vs.-them mentality, the notions of superiority and inferiority, the assumption of privilege).  An understanding of what ethnicity and race are, and are not, is a critical step in growing into a world where we value each other's shared humanity more than we worry about what labels we choose to place on ourselves.

Psychic alien Nazi spies

Some of my readers may remember that last year, Iranian news agencies announced that they had invented a spaceship that ran on "regular matter, dark matter, and antimatter."  The whole thing came as a bit of a shock to scientists in other parts of the world, given that astrophysicists have been trying for several years even to detect dark matter, and suddenly here's this guy saying he has a whole ship full of the stuff.

A few months later, we had the story of another amazing Iranian invention -- a machine which, at a touch, could correctly identify your age, gender, occupation, number of children, and education.  The English translation of the story, originally in Farsi, called it a "time machine," but that seems to have been a mistake -- not that the actual claim had any better grounding in reality.

So when I saw yesterday that there was a new story from Fars, the semi-official Iranian news agency, and it was making the rounds of conspiracy theory sites, I said (and I quote) "Uh-oh."  And sure enough, we have another winner.  This one beats dark-matter spaceships and psychic machines put together.  Are you ready?

Edward Snowden, of NSA-whistleblower fame, is in cahoots with evil aliens, who are secretly running the NSA and pretty much everything else in the US government.  Back in the 1930s and 1940s the aliens were behind the Nazis, but once the Nazis were defeated the aliens decided to infiltrate the allies, and more or less took over.  These days, Snowden himself is channeling a message from the aliens, which is designed to distract everyone from their real agenda, which is domination of the ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM.  *insert evil laugh here*

It does bring up a question, however; isn't just dominating the Earth enough?  There's no one much to dominate on, say, Mercury.  Mercury is so close to the Sun that if the aliens landed there, they would just have time to leap out and say, "Ha ha!  We are dominating Mercury!" before they burst into flame.  And Neptune, as another example, is also a place that would be rather pointless to try to dominate.  Neptune is largely made of extremely cold methane, making it essentially a giant frozen fart.

So as far as I'm concerned, the aliens can go ahead and dominate the majority of the Solar System.  It's pretty inhospitable out there.

Be that as it may, the Iranians seem mighty serious about this accusation.  There's only one problem with it -- and that is that Fars seems to have lifted the story, in toto, from a completely wacko conspiracy website called What Does It Mean?  The people in charge of this site believe, amongst many other things, that the key to enlightenment is carried by a group of esoteric mystics called the "Order of Sorcha Faal," which was founded in County Meath, Ireland in 588 B.C.E. by Tamar Tephi, the daughter of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah.

 Tephi, by John Everett Millais [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

How she got from Palestine to Ireland is a bit of a mystery.

In any case, what we have here is a loony website about Irish Israelite princesses and psychic Nazi alien overlords, which the media over in Iran evidently took as literal fact.  And because the Iranians quoted it in their news, it's gotten into Huffington Post and various other US news sources, meaning that the entire thing has essentially gone viral by jumping halfway around the world.

You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

So anyway.  Watch out for that Snowden character, he's on the side of the aliens.  As far as the Iranians, it's hard to tell whose side exactly they're on, because when they're not busy blowing the cover of the aliens who are running the United States, they're building dark-matter spaceships and time machines and whatnot.  My general sense is that we here in the North America have nothing to lose by just sitting back and letting the aliens do what they like.  Maybe the "Order of the Sorcha Faal" will get involved, and we'll end up having the Irish run the world, which seems like it would be kind of cool.  I'll take the Irish over either the Nazis or the Iranians, on the basis of having great music and really awesome beer, not to mention being less generally inclined to commit large-scale genocide.

Who'll stop the rain?

In Umberto Eco's brilliant novel Foucault's Pendulum, three worldly and skeptical book editors whose company specializes in publishing woo-woo nonsense decide to skip the middle-man.  Enough with trying to lure in writers with manuscripts about astrology, psychic phenomena, secret societies, and conspiracy theories; given the amount of time the three editors have spent reading all of this stuff, they have the background to out-woo-woo the woo-woos, and write a book themselves that will trump all the rest.

So they do.  Their manuscript ties together the Templars, the Masons, ley lines, the Holy Grail, black magic, Atlantis, and psychic super-energy.  Their tale is left open-ended, though; the final resting place of the Object of High Magic that has been sought by every secret society in the history of humanity is still being researched, and the Object itself is yet to be found.  After all, everyone knows how irresistible a mystery is!  When their book is printed, the editors congratulate themselves on having taken advantage of the gullible and credulous, and laugh up their sleeves at how anyone could be foolish enough to buy it.

But then, one of them is kidnapped by the very people they've catered to.  A ransom note is delivered to the other two, demanding to know what the solution to the puzzle is.  There is no way, the kidnappers say, that you got that far with putting the clues together, and didn't actually figure out where the Holy Grail is.  Tell us -- or we'll kill your friend.

And, of course, the more the kidnapped man and his two friends insist that there is no mystery, there is no Holy Grail, no Super-Powerful Magical Device hidden in some sacred spot in the world, that they made the whole thing up, the more convinced the kidnappers are that they're lying.  Why would they argue so hard if they didn't have something, something big, to hide?

It's the problem with conspiracy theorists, isn't it?  No power on Earth can convince them they're wrong; facts can be spun or made up, and the people arguing against them are either deluded, stupid, or else part of the conspiracy themselves.  And the trouble -- like with our skeptical book editors in Foucault's Pendulum -- is that sometimes, you end up convincing someone you wish you hadn't.

Which brings us to the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Ahmedinejad has long belonged to that unfortunately extensive list of world leaders who have a rather tentative grip on reality.  He's a hard-line Muslim, is (by all accounts) extremely superstitious, and is a raving Holocaust denier.  Now, however,  he's made statements that indicate that he's also spent too much time reading websites like AboveTopSecret.

Iran is currently suffering through one of the worst droughts in thirty years, and last week Ahmedinejad issued a statement claiming that hostile countries have used their technology to change the weather and cause the drought.  (Source)

"The enemy destroys the clouds that are headed towards our country and this is a war Iran will win," Ahmedinejad said on Monday of last week.  The West, he says, is "using special equipment" to "prevent rain clouds from reaching regional countries, including Iran."

Well, well.  I hope you HAARP conspiracists are proud of yourselves.  You have spent the last ten years blathering on about how the US military now can control the weather (and, according to some, cause earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic eruptions), and now you've convinced a hostile world leader that you were right.  And not just any hostile world leader; a hostile world leader who (1) hates the United States, (2) is currently trying to develop nuclear weapons, and (3) already showed signs of being a delusional whackjob.

Nicely played, gentlemen.  Nicely played.  But what are you going to do now?

Of course, saying, "Ha-ha, we made it all up," like the editors in Foucault's Pendulum, isn't really an option, because you still believe it's all true, don't you?  So now we have to wait and watch while a nutcase threatens us with war because he believes an elaborate lie concocted by a bunch of other nutcases.

The whole thing is absurd enough that it almost does sound like the plot of a novel.  It makes me think that when the aliens from the planet Nibiru actually do arrive here on December 21, 2012, they're just going to destroy the planet on the basis of there being no intelligent life present.

Cockeyed optimism and the Gospel of Barnabas

I suppose that it's only human to be optimistic.  A 2009 study at the University of Kansas found that 89% of people predicted that the world was going to be as good or better than it is now in five years -- and this pattern held irrespective of ethnic, religious, and national identification.  (Source)

Of course, what "better" means can differ fairly dramatically from person to person.  Witness the recent pronouncement from the powers-that-be in Iran.  (Source)

The whole thing started in 2000, when Turkish authorities broke up a gang that was involved in the illegal acquisition and sale of antiquities.  Amongst the haul was a leather book written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic.  Turkish scholars analyzed the book, and announced that it was a copy of the lost Gospel of Barnabas, one of the early Christian converts and a companion of St. Paul.  The document, the Turkish linguists said, could date from the 5th or 6th century.  Its value to the field of archeology was obvious, and the book was transferred under armed guard to Turkey's National Ethnography Museum in Ankara, where it has been under lock and key ever since.

All of this was well and good, and of interest only to religious historians, until the recent announcement that a line in Chapter 41 had been translated as follows:  "God has hidden himself as Archangel Michael ran them (Adam and Eve) out of heaven, (and) when Adam turned, he noticed that at top of the gateway to heaven, it was written 'La elah ela Allah, Mohammad rasool Allah' (Allah is the only God and Mohammad his prophet)."

When I read this, I did an immediate facepalm, because I knew what was coming next.

The Turkish linguists lost no time at all in proclaiming that this manuscript predicted the rise of Islam and the role of Mohammad as its chief exponent, and that it proves that Islam is the One Correct Religion.  Catholic authorities quickly responded, "Now, wait just a moment, here," or words to that effect, and demanded to see the book, a request that is being "considered."  Prominent Catholics rushed to shrug the whole thing off as a non-issue -- Phil Lawler of Catholic Culture calling it a "laughable... challenge to Christianity."  So, basically, all of the people who weighed in on the story reacted with optimism -- proclaiming that circumstances would vindicate whatever view of the world they already had.  But no one had as inadvertently amusing a reaction as did Iran's Basij Press:

"The discovery of the original Barnabas Bible will now undermine the Christian Church and its authority and will revolutionize the religion in the world," a press release from Basij last week states.  "The most significant fact, though, is that this Bible has predicted the coming of Prophet Mohammad and in itself has verified the religion of Islam."

Basij goes on to predict that the "Gospel of Barnabas" will result in the downfall of Christianity.

Okay.  So, what do we actually have here?  A book that only a few people have seen, and whose provenance has yet to be demonstrated conclusively.  That book may have a line that seems to predict the coming of Mohammad, but this has only been verified by people who have a serious vested interest in its being true -- and in any case, the fact of its being a prediction is highly doubtful given that we don't know how old the book actually is.  And now, a government that has shown itself to be relentlessly hostile to Christians throws the whole thing into a press release -- and seriously believes that their pronouncement is going to cause a worldwide exodus from Christianity.

I mean, really.  Pollyanna is one thing, but those folks at Basij really have turned the whole Cockeyed Optimism thing into performance art.   I have this highly amusing mental image of Fred and Vera Fuddle of Topeka, Kansas calling up their minister and saying, "Sorry, Brother Steve, we won't be in church this Sunday -- we read about those folks in Turkey who found a book that says that over the gateway to heaven, it said something about Allah and Mohammad.  No offense, but I'm thinkin' that kind of undermines the church's authority, know what I mean?  Give my regards to Sue Ellen and the kids.  Oh, and one other thing... you know of a nice mosque in the area?"

So, anyway, I think that the Gospel of Barnabas will have little to no effect on anyone, even if the Vatican isn't allowed to send in their experts.  And that's just what we should expect.  89% of people think that the world is going to be as good or better in five years than it is now -- so the Iranians will continue to predict the downfall of all the people they despise, and the rest of us will just go on believing what we've always believed.