The arms of the ancestors

My maternal grandmother was born Flora Meyer-Lévy, in the little town of Chackbay, Louisiana, in 1893.  I never knew her -- she died fourteen years before I was born, at the young age of 53 -- but I have photographs of her that show a striking woman with auburn hair and a serious expression (consistent with my mom's description of her mother as being a no-nonsense type).

Flora's grandfather, Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was an Ashkenazi Jew, born in the village of Dauendorf, in Alsace.  He emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, only to get caught up in the Civil War -- he fought for a time on the Confederate side, and after the war came home and gave a go at raising horses.  He never made much of a success of it.  One of his grandchildren told me, somewhat euphemistically, that "he made bad deals while drunk."  Solomon, like his granddaughter, died young, at the age of 44.  His widow -- a French Creole woman named Florida Perilloux -- outlived him by over forty years.  She never remarried, and lived most of that time in poverty, converting their home into an inn just to make ends meet.

When I had my DNA tested a couple of years ago, I was fascinated to find that it detected my Ashkenazi great-great grandfather's contribution to my genetic makeup.  I am, the test said, about six percent Ashkenazi -- just about spot-on for having one Jewish ancestor four generations back.  I was surprised that my Jewish heritage was so clear; I didn't realize that Ashkenazi DNA is that distinct.

Apparently, the Ashkenazi have retained their genetic signature because of two factors -- being reproductively isolated and having experienced repeated bottlenecks.  The former, of course, is due to the taboo (on both sides) against Jews marrying non-Jews.  (My great-great grandparents are an interesting counterexample; he was a devout Jew, she was a devout Catholic, and neither one ever changed their religion.  They apparently lived together completely amicably despite their religious differences.  All seven of their children were raised Jewish -- and every single one converted to Catholicism to marry.  Evidently such tolerance was not the rule in nineteenth century Louisiana.)

The latter -- a genetic bottleneck -- refers to the situation when a population has its numbers reduced drastically, and the resurgent population all descends from the small group of survivors.  The bottlenecks in the European Jewish population, of course, were due largely to the repeated pogroms (massacres) that at times looked like eradicating the Jews from Europe entirely.  In fact, this is why the topic comes up today; a paper in Science that came out this week about a genetic investigation of the remains in a Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.  Many of the dead there were victims of a pogrom in March of 1349, and their teeth -- which contain intact DNA -- confirmed that the Ashkenazi were even then a genetically distinct population, descended from a small group of people who came originally from the Middle East or the Caucasus, and settled in central Europe some time around the year 1000 C.E.

Interestingly, the DNA from Erfurt was strikingly similar to DNA from a twelfth-century Jewish cemetery in Norwich, England, the subject of a paper only four months ago.  The geographical distance, apparently, was not enough to erase the distinct Ashkenazi signature.  "Whether they’re from Israel or New York, the Ashkenazi population today is homogenous genetically," said Hebrew University geneticist Shai Carmi.

Which explains how the DNA test was able to pick up my own ancestry.

It's fascinating to me that, on that one line at least, my family tree can trace its origins to a little group of migrants from the Near East who made their way to what is now eastern France, survived repeated attempts to eradicate them, and eventually produced a branch that went to Louisiana, ultimately leading to me here in upstate New York.  I can only hope I've inherited some of the dogged tenacity these people obviously had.

It's interesting, too, to look at the stern visage of the grandmother I never met, and to know a little more about her heritage.  Even though she, like all the generations before her, now rests in the arms of the ancestors, her genetic legacy lives on in me and her other descendants -- a handful of the "countless stars in the sky" that represent the lineage of Abraham.

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Spellcheck eugenics

Yesterday we looked at a website haunted by the ghost of a little girl named "Repleh Snatas," which would be kind of creepy if she'd actually existed; today we continue in an appropriately surreal fashion, wherein we consider a link sent to me by a different loyal reader of Skeptophilia that gives you instructions to see if you're one of the targets of the Illuminati.

In the website Corruptico: All Answers Exist Within Your Actions (whatever the hell that means) a post appeared called "Microsoft Word 'Spell Check' Embedded Eugenic Code," wherein we learn that to tell if you're destined to be executed when the New World Order arrives, all you have to do is type your name into a Microsoft Word document and see if it flags as misspelled.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Here's how the author explains it:

There’s a program for that. One created by no other than Microsoft Crypto Jew eugenicist himself, Bill Gates.

According to former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s first nephew, Greg T Dixon, a Masonic High School friend and informant deeply connected to Freemasonry, included within Microsoft’s Word “spell check” lies embedded code that filters out the names of people not making the elitist final eugenic cut.  

The program works simply enough, for which anyone, even children, can easily access to check and see their chromosomal eugenic status. All you have to do is type in your last name (surname) to see if it is underlined by a red squiggly line underscoring the surnames of those NOT making the genomic eugenic cut.  

That it [sic], you’re done!

Which brings up a variety of questions, the first of which is, what the fuck is a "Crypto Jew?"  Is this some kind of superhero who runs around with a yarmulke and a black cape, defending liberty by using pieces of matzo like ninja throwing stars?  Because that would be kind of cool.  My wife is Jewish, and if I knew she had a secret identity that involved fighting crime by wearing a mask and slinging kosher food at wrongdoers, it would make her even more awesome.

But considering the claim itself, we're on shakier ground.  Spellcheck?  Really?  It couldn't be that the spellcheck feature includes lists of the more common names, so that you don't get flagged every time you write "Smith?"  I guess I'm fortunate; my own last name is also an English word, so I don't get red-lined.  Lucky thing:

Apparently, many people who are being told they are elite and making the “eugenic cut” are actually not going to be around after the Democide, if the true elites have their way, by proxy, their names were purposely left off of earlier editions of MS Word, and this is why older versions prove more accurate.  

Go ahead.  If you dare, type your surname into MS Word to see your fate, it’s a fun and simple way to see what side of the railroads tracks you’re on.  

Just remember that, if the RED LINE appears, your fate is most likely sealed, and you will probably be killed at a FEMA death camp here very shortly via a hollow point bullet to back of the head.

Well, I'm not sure I would call this "fun," since it involves death camps and gunshots to the head, but it certainly is... interesting.

I do have a few questions, however.  What if your last name gets flagged and your first name doesn't?  This seems kind of unfair for people of Polish descent, such as "John Szczpanski."  Do Our Evil Overlords kill him because of the Szczpanski part, or let him go because his first name is John?

And what about people whose parents were trying to be clever, and gave them first names that appear to be deliberately misspelled?  A few years ago, I taught a girl whose name was "Kaytlynne."  This gets autocorrected to Kaitlyn (in fact, I just had to type it three times to get the Blogspot software to believe me that NO, THIS IS REALLY WHAT I WANT TO WRITE, DAMMIT).  Is this some kind of plot on the part of the parents to get rid of her?  This happens all the time to my wife, whose last name is Bloomgarden.  Autocorrect separates it into "Bloom garden," and then the red lines go away.  Is it telling her, "Maybe you really want to start spelling your name like that from now on.  Hint hint wink wink nudge nudge?"

So anyway, I encourage you to check your own name.  (Sorry for the bad news if you're Polish.)  I'm lucky -- neither my first, middle, nor last name gets red-lined.  Of course, the Illuminati Crypto Jews may change their minds after reading this post.  I'll be able to tell if I start getting mail addressed to "Gordin Bonnetski."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

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

Speaking truth to power

My mother's grandfather, Joseph Meyer, was one of a small community of French Jews near Donaldsonville, Louisiana.  His family, like many Jewish families, had their names changed in the 19th century -- Joseph's paternal grandparents were born Schillen Lévy and Mindel Bloch in Dauendorf, Bas-Rhin département, Alsace, France.  But the French authorities decided their names were too Jewish-sounding, and altered them by decree to Joseph and Minette Meyer.

Some of my Bloch and Lévy relatives chose to stay in Alsace, and a couple of generations further along one of my Bloch cousins, Céline Bollack, was born in the little town of Wintzenheim in 1893.  When the Nazis rose to power, Céline and her husband, Armand Simon, became involved in the French Resistance.  They passed out anti-Nazi literature, worked to organize people to fight the German infiltration into France, and even as circumstances looked darker and darker, would not be silenced.

In spring of 1944 they were in the town of Brive-le-Gaillarde, in the département of Corrèze in south-central France.  Brive-le-Gaillarde was a hub of the Resistance, and in fact had been the home of Resistance fighter Edmond Michelet (who was imprisoned at Dachau, contracted typhus, but survived both).

Armand and Céline were not so lucky.  They were arrested along with their fifteen-year-old daughter Irène in Brive-le-Gaillarde on April 4, 1944 for sedition and agitation (and not least because they were Jewish themselves).  They were transferred to a holding camp in Drancy, northeast of Paris, and on April 29 were part of Convoy 72 from Drancy to Auschwitz.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers.  There were 1,004 men, women, and children on Convoy 72.  Only 100 of them were chosen to work in the camp; the other 904 were gassed.

Armand, Céline, and Irène Simon were among the 904 executed shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz.

It bears mention, however, that even of the 100 who were allowed to live after arriving in the camp, only 38 survived to the liberation of the death camp on January 27, 1945.

What always strikes me about the Nazi atrocities is the complicity of ordinary folks.  It is easy enough to imagine horrific things being done by people who are truly evil; what is hard to wrap my brain around is how thousands of regular people, with families and friends and hobbies and jobs and pets, not only sat idly by while the Nazis arrested their neighbors, but actively helped.  These are the people who became informants, prison guards, collaborators.

These are the people without whom the Holocaust would never have happened.

I would like to say that such atrocities could never happen again.  But I see the same things going on today -- ordinary folks excusing elected officials for saying and doing terrible things; ridiculing, denigrating, or threatening people who speak up; agitating anger against those who look different or think differently.  If you believe that such behavior couldn't escalate into violence and oppression, if you think we've learned our lesson from the horrors of World War II, you're fooling yourself.  Those same tendencies are still with us, waiting to be whipped into a frenzy by leaders who gain power from inciting hate, making us afraid, and teaching us to distrust the truth.

The only way to stop this is to speak up and continue speaking up.  Such acts of courage are risky; my cousin Céline and her husband and daughter paid for their resistance with their lives.  But the risks -- whether they are minor ones such as ridicule and condemnation, or major ones such as imprisonment or execution -- do not abrogate our responsibility to stand up for what is right.

When I have attended Passover celebrations and the time comes for remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust, I have spoken the names of Céline, Armand, and Irène Simon along with the words "May they never be forgotten."  But I'll go a step further.  May we never lose our courage to do what they did, to speak truth to power.  We must not simply remember the ones who gave their lives for a noble cause, but be like them --  be unafraid to put ourselves in harm's way to stop those who would see our country and our world once again descend into a maelstrom of hatred, violence, and despair.

I owe most of what I know about my cousin and her family to the research of my dear friend Dr. Diana Wagner, Holocaust Educator at Salisbury University (Maryland).  She has been working with the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center to hand-transcribe hundreds of documents related to the Holocaust, and to make those documents available through the World Memory Project.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Diana for not only my personal knowledge about my own family, but for all of the hours she has put in to make sure that these stories truly will never be forgotten -- and to help us to vow that we will never let such things happen again.

Doomed to repeat

This weekend, I inadvertently started an online argument about the Syrian refugees.

I rarely get involved in political discussions online (or anywhere else) because of this very thing.  It's the most fruitless of pursuits, really; it usually accomplishes nothing but eliciting shouts of acclamation from the people who already agree with you, and snorts of derision from the people who don't.

In other words, nothing.

I got the ball rolling by comparing the plight of the refugees, and the reluctance of the United States government to give them asylum, to the attitudes of the majority of English policymakers during the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, and the blocking of Jews before World War II trying to flee Germany into the Netherlands (and from the Netherlands and elsewhere into the United States).  Some of you may not know that Anne Frank and her family applied for, and were denied, passage into the United States in 1940 -- a move that would have saved their lives.

Well, that was apparently pasting a bullseye on my chest.  How dare I compare the Syrian refugees to the Jews?  The situation is completely different.  Plus, you know, those people want to kill us.  They are uniformly hostile to the United States and everything we stand for, so we're right to deny them entry.

So I thought it was time to set aside my reluctance to discuss political matters, and offer a little history lesson.  I have pulled some quotes, all from primary sources, that refer either to the Irish during the Potato Famine, the Jews prior to World War II, or the Syrian refugees now.  See if you can tell them apart.  (The only editing I did was to remove obvious giveaway references.)

1. The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach [them] a lesson, and that calamity must not be too much mitigated. … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil... but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of those people.
2. [They are] more like squalid apes than human beings... Only efficient military despotism [can succeed in this situation], because [they] understand only force.
3. It is probably unwise to say this loudly... but [this situation] is and has been since its beginning guided and controlled by [people] of the greasiest type, who have... absorbed every one of the worst phases of our civilization without having the least understanding of what we really mean by liberty.
4. Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity.  Every problem that has arisen can be traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.  And our current actions serve no purpose but to depart even further from those.
5. [They] can go [back home] and stew in their own juice.  The rest had better stop being what they are, and start being human beings.
6. It looks like to me if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our... problem.
7. I see no solution to the... problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.
8. [They] could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of.  As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence.
9. A policy that will not kill more than one million [of them]... will scarcely be enough to do any good.
10. [They] are a cancer that must be cut out of our society, whose goal is the destruction of civilization from within.
11. [They] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion.  This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with [our] character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry.  Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.
12. When neighborhoods are occupied by [these people], they establish their own laws and don't respect our own. 

Ready for the answers?

1. The Irish.  Charles Trevelyan, head of the English Administration for Famine Relief, 1845.
2. The Irish.  James Anthony Froude, professor of history, Oxford University, 1860.
3. The Jews.  General Montgomery Schuyler, 1919.
4. Syrian refugees.  Representative Don Davis of North Carolina.
5. The Jews.  George Bernard Shaw, 1932.
6. Syrian refugees.  Representative Virgil Peck of Kansas.
7. Syrian refugees.  Representative Charlie Fuqua of Arkansas.
8. The Jews.  H. L. Mencken, 1930.
9. The Irish.  Nassau Senior, chief economist to Queen Victoria.
10. Syrian refugees.  Representative John Bennett of Oklahoma.
11. The Irish.  Benjamin Disraeli, 1878.
12. Syrian refugees.  Representative Carl Gatto of Alaska.

If you're curious, the sources of the quotes can be found here for the Irish Potato Famine, here for the pre-war antisemitism, and here for the rhetoric against Muslim immigration.

Only the details change.  The hate speech, the fear and loathing of the "other," the wild claims that those people are trying to destroy our society, all stay the same.

It doesn't even seem to do any good to point out how many of the refugees are children or the elderly.  It doesn't help if you tell people that none of the Paris attackers were Syrian -- every last one of them was a citizen of the E.U.  Nor were any of the 9/11 bombers Syrian.

None of that matters.  They may look like starving, homeless refugees, but they're still implacably hostile to us.  You know how They are.

It's just that every generation has a different They.

I will end with a quote from the great Elie Wiesel.  As a survivor of the concentration camps during World War II, he has as good a reason as any to give in to hate, fear, and intolerance.  Instead, here are his words on the subject.

Spellcheck eugenics

And to end the week in an appropriately surreal fashion, yet another reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that gives you instructions to see if you're one of the targets of the Illuminati.

The website Corruptico: All Answers Exist Within Your Actions (whatever the hell that means) a post appeared called "Microsoft Word 'Spell Check' Embedded Eugenic Code," wherein we learn that to tell if you're destined to be executed when the New World Order arrives, all you have to do is type your name into a Microsoft Word document and see if it flags as misspelled.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's how the author explains it:

There’s a program for that. One created by no other than Microsoft Crypto Jew eugenicist himself, Bill Gates. 

According to US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s first nephew, Greg T Dixon, a Masonic High School friend and informant deeply connected to Freemasonry, included within Microsoft’s Word “spell check” lies embedded code that filters out the names of people not making the elitist final eugenic cut. 

The program works simply enough, for which anyone, even children, can easily access to check and see their chromosomal eugenic status. All you have to do is type in your last name (surname) to see if it is underlined by a red squiggly line underscoring the surnames of those NOT making the genomic eugenic cut. 

That it, you’re done!

Which brings up a variety of questions, the first of which is, what the fuck is a "Crypto Jew?"  Is this some kind of superhero who runs around with a yarmulke and a black cape, defending liberty by using pieces of matzo like ninja throwing stars?  Because that would be kind of cool.  My wife is Jewish, and if I knew she had a secret identity that involved fighting crime by wearing a mask and slinging kosher food at wrongdoers, it would make her even more awesome.

But considering the claim itself, we're on shakier ground.  Spellcheck?  Really?  It couldn't be that the spellcheck feature includes lists of the more common names, so that you don't get flagged every time you write "Smith?"  I guess I'm fortunate; my own last name is also an English word, so I don't get red-lined.  Lucky thing:

Apparently, many people who are being told they are elite and making the “eugenic cut” are actually not going to be around after the Democide, if the true elites have their way, by proxy, their names were purposely left off of earlier editions of MS Word, and this is why older versions prove more accurate. 

Go ahead. If you dare, type your surname into MS Word to see your fate, it’s a fun and simple way to see what side of the railroads tracks you’re on. 

Just remember that, if the RED LINE appears, your fate is most likely sealed, and you will probably be killed at a FEMA death camp here very shortly via a hollow point bullet to back of the head.

Well, I'm not sure I would call this "fun," since it involves death camps and gunshots to the head, but it certainly is... interesting.

I do have a few questions, however.  What if your last name gets flagged and your first name doesn't?  This seems kind of unfair for people of Polish descent, such as "John Szczpanski."  Do Our Evil Overlords kill him because of the Szczpanski part, or let him go because his first name is John?

And what about people whose parents were trying to be clever, and gave them first names that appear to be deliberately misspelled?  A few years ago, I taught a girl whose name was "Kaytlyn."  This gets autocorrected to Kaitlyn (in fact, I just had to type it three times to get the Blogspot software to believe me that NO, THIS IS REALLY WHAT I WANT TO WRITE, DAMMIT).  Is this some kind of plot on the part of the parents to get rid of her?  This happens all the time to my wife, whose last name is Bloomgarden.  Autocorrect separates it into "Bloom garden," and then the red lines go away.  Is it telling her, "Maybe you really want to start spelling your name like that from now on.  Hint hint wink wink nudge nudge?"

So anyway, I encourage you to check your own name.  (Sorry for the bad news if you're Polish.)  I'm lucky -- neither my first, middle, nor last name gets red-lined.  Of course, the Illuminati Crypto Jews may change their minds after reading this post.  I'll be able to tell if I start getting mail addressed to "Gordin Bonnetski."

The right to criticize lunacy

At what point are you allowed to say, "That may be your religion, but it's completely insane," without being accused of crossing the lines of propriety?

I ask the question because of a comment made by Pope Francis that many are interpreting as implying that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists brought their deaths upon themselves. "You cannot provoke," the Pope said.  "You cannot insult the faith of others.  You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

Okay, I admit that it's not nice to do something deliberately that upsets people, but other than that, why should we place religious faith outside of the reach of criticism?  What if the "faith of others" is completely absurd?

For example, consider a story that appeared a couple of days ago in The Times of Israel, which describes a reporter who traveled in Algeria, asking people who they thought were responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  And apparently the response she got was:

The attacks were done by shape-shifting Jews.

Illustration from Goethe's Werke (1882) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

"Many Muslims in north Africa," Dana Kennedy said, "are of the opinion that Jews staged the series of terror incidents to make Muslims look bad... (and) that they weren’t just regular Jews that were doing this, but in fact but a race of magical shape-shifting Jews that were master manipulators that could be everywhere at the same time."

Oh, those wily, wily Jews.  Creating such convincing personae as Cherif and Said Kouachi (the gunmen responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attack, who shouted "Muhammad is avenged" after killing the twelve staff members) and Amedy Coulibaly (the self-proclaimed member of Islamic Jihad who killed a policewoman and four civilians in separate attacks, and who deliberately targeted Jews).  

And their response to all of this is that the attacks were by Jews impersonating Muslim terrorists?  What, are the Jews also the ones who are beheading people in Syria right now?  Is it Jews who are responsible for flogging, hanging, or beheading people in public because they've been found guilty by a criminal justice system that would have seemed unfair to Tomás de Torquemada?

I dunno.  It seems to me as if the Muslims are making themselves look bad enough without any outside assistance, from the Jews or anyone else.

And to Pope Francis I would say: if you are not allowed to criticize ideas freely, then how are you supposed to combat ideas that are batshit insane?  Is anyone allowed to claim anything, free of repercussions, because it's under the aegis of faith?  How can he not see that treating "It's my religion" as a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card is tantamount to giving license to lunacy of all kinds?

So while Pope Francis has certainly met with my approval over some of his statements, that encourage dialogue and ecumenism rather than rancor and recrimination, I think this one is ridiculous.  We have to be able to point out the absurdity of beliefs.  Without that freedom, there is no filter for telling fact from fiction, reasonable claims from insanity.

Shape-shifting Jews, my ass.

I know I've said it before, but it's important enough that I'll reiterate: I'm all for treating people with compassion.  We all come to understanding by different roads and at different speeds, and most of us are striving to figure things out in whatever way we can.  But there is no such requirement that we treat beliefs as if they could have their feelings hurt by criticism.  Beliefs stand and fall by the same criteria as any other sort of claim; by their agreement with facts and evidence.  Without that standard for acceptance, you are adrift in a sea of wild conjecture, without a touchstone for reality.

Zombie nanobots from hell

For the latest reason that you should avoid being vaccinated, as long as you have zero understanding of science, we have:

The medical establishment puts nanobots into vaccines, which then eat your brain.

This, at least, is the contention of one Jim Stone, who runs a site called Environmental Terrorism.  And it turns out that the nanobot doesn't eat your whole brain, it just destroys the part of it that allows you to go to heaven:

(A) virus they are creating will attack the “God Center” of the brain and destroy it! He tries to sell it by saying that this will stop suicide bombers by people that believe in God but of course this is just the sell job.  He says it will take somebody that believes in God and turn them into a “normal” person!  So if you’re a Christian it will make you no longer believe in God and Jesus Christ which is your key to eternal life!  This is the pure evil that is the new world order government running the US!

Well.  Isn't that special.  But in the parlance of the 1980s infomercial, "Wait!  There's more!"

There have been many reports about nanobots being developed that will destroy people. This report actually identifies that nanobot and what it is based upon. Once this nanobot is received via a tainted vaccine, it inserts DNA into your cells which instructs your own cells to produce more copies of itself and THAT is how it replicates. And it NEVER backs off, it simply orders your own cells to keep producing it until your cells die from being over worked doing exactly that. And it’s completely verified this thing came from a lab in 2007.

You have no idea how relieved I was when I read the last sentence, because I got the majority of my vaccinations before 2007.  Which, presumably, is why I still have a brain.

Who would do this evil stuff, you might ask?  And of course, the answer is:

The Jews.  But you probably already knew that.

I plan on asking my wife, who is Jewish, why she would do such a thing.  I mean, making me eat matzoh balls, which in my opinion taste like chicken-flavored play-doh, is one thing.  Infecting me with a microorganism that eats my brain is quite another.

Then Mr. Stone shows us a picture of the nanobot that does all of this nasty business:

When I saw this, I said to my computer, and I quote:  "What the fuck?  That's a bacteriophage."

But this doesn't stop Mr. Stone.  He claims that this creature didn't exist prior to 2007, which will surprise the hell out of my AP Biology students because I've been teaching them about bacteriophages ("bacteria-eating viruses") since 1994.  It's also quite natural, and completely harmless unless you're an E. coli bacterium.

You'd think that an amount of research that's as microscopic as the virus itself would be sufficient to convince Mr. Stone that his claim is complete and utter horse waste.  Starting with the fact that it's called a "bacteriophage," and not a "brainophage."  But no.  Not only is this thing going to turn you into an irreligious zombie, you can tell it's a Jewish nanobot because of its shape:

(T)heir little hexagonal leg patterns and star of david phage bodies (are wreaking) havoc on the rest of mankind.  And on that note, I may have stated above that the reason for re engineering a phage to do the job rather than a known infectious virus would be to make good and sure it could not spread to other people in the wild, but I can´t help but imagine that such a profoundly Jewish looking micro organism would not be selected simply for its appearances.

A passage which, I suppose, demonstrates why Mr. Stone himself is immune.  If you don't have a functioning brain, that would presumably make the Jewish brain-eating nanobot virus less interested in infecting you.

At the end, we get the coup de grâce:

(E)verybody must make their own decisions about vaccines.  I’m not a doctor and cannot give you medical advice.  All I’m saying is that evil men control the medical system and they already have a virus that can change your brain so you no longer believe in God!

Have a nice day.

So, there you have it.  The least plausible reason yet that the anti-vaxxers are suggesting that you not get vaccinated.  At least it's more fanciful than Jenny McCarthy and her hand-waving "vaccines cause autism" nonsense.  Given a choice between Jenny McCarthy and brain-destroying nanobots, I'll take my chance with the nanobots.

Geopolitical let's-pretend

When secular types think of instances of the religious demanding that we treat counterfactual beliefs as if they were real, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the ongoing non-debate over creationism being taught in public schools.

I call it a "non-debate" because there really is no basis for argument.  Either you accept the scientific method -- in which case the evidence for the evolutionary model is overwhelming -- or you don't.  If you don't, then debate is fruitless, because the two sides aren't even accepting the same basic ground rules for how we know something is true.

But this is hardly the only example.  We just got another striking case of the religious claiming that the world is other than it is, and demanding that everyone else simply play along, in the decision by Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of Harper-Collins, to publish maps of the Middle East without including Israel.

I'm not making this up, although I wish I were.  A representative for Collins Bartholomew said that if they included Israel on maps in atlases destined for classrooms in the Middle East, it would be "unacceptable to Muslim customers" and "not in line with local preferences."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In other words: because the majority of Muslims in the Middle East would like it if Israel didn't exist, they not only get to pretend it doesn't exist, they have a major book publisher playing along in the charade.

Apparently, Collins Bartholomew's defense for the decision was that if they'd included Israel, no one in the Middle East would have bought the atlases.  Or else, they would only have allowed them in the country if each one of them had the name "Israel" crossed out with a black marker, a practice that apparently really happens.

The first group to object to the expectation that everyone pretend that the world is other than it is was the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, which should make it an odds-on contender for the Irony Award 2015.  "The publication of this atlas will confirm Israel’s belief that there exists a hostility towards their country from parts of the Arab world,” said Bishop Declan Lang, chairman of the Bishops' Conference Department of International Affairs.  "It will not help to build up a spirit of trust leading to peaceful co-existence."

Which could be a direct quote from the writings of St. Obvious of Duh.  I think the Israelis already know that, Bishop Lang.

The question, of course, is whether people in other countries are willing to play along.  Yes, we get that a lot of you people in the Middle East don't like Israel.  Yes, you can put your hands over your eyes and play let's-pretend.  But the rest of the world doesn't have to pat you on the back and say, "Of course, dear, of course bad nasty Israel doesn't exist.  I checked under the bed and in the closet, and I didn't see it anywhere.  Don't pay attention to the big black mark on the map.  It doesn't mean anything."

Now, understand me; I'm not making a statement one way or the other about who is right and who is wrong in the perpetual state of conflict in the Middle East.  My general feeling, non-political-type that I am, is that the situation is so complex that assigning blame would be a fruitless task.  The whole area is so rife with issues of poverty, territorial claims, religious frictions, ethnic frictions, militarism, and arguments based on hereditary rights, that any attempt to divide the players into Good Guys and Bad Guys is doomed to failure right from the outset.

But the Catholic Bishops' Conference is right about one thing; the situation isn't going to be helped by publishing companies pandering to people's desperation that a counterfactual worldview be reality.  The proper response -- both to the Muslims who object to Israel being in atlases, and to the creationists who object to evolution being taught in public school science classes -- is "suck it up and deal."

Lost and found

Every once in a while I'll run across something and think, "Yeah, I remember hearing about that," but even after thinking about it, I can't bring back to mind much in the way of detail.  So it was today when a friend of mine, who is a loyal reader and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, sent me a link along with the message, "Take the bait, little mouse... take the bait."

Of course, I couldn't let something like that just sit there, so I clicked on the link.  Which is just what he intended.  And the link turned out to be about the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.  And I thought, "Don't they have something to do with the Babylonian Captivity?  And Mormons?  Or something?"

So before I tell you what the link had to say -- which is truly stunning, and for which I should give you a while to prepare either your mind or else a strong drink -- let's look at what I found out when I did some research on the Ten Lost Tribes.

Apparently the idea is that of the twelve tribes of ancient Judea, ten of them were overrun by the Assyrians somewhere around 722 B.C.E. and deported, presumably because they had done something naughty in god's sight, which always seemed to be what kicked off these kinds of mass genocides.  In any case, the whole lot of them were killed or else sold off into slavery, and were never more seen or heard of.  Except that (1) a good many reputable historians seem to think that the whole thing is a myth, and (2) now everyone and his next-door-neighbor is claiming descent from them even though there seems to be no hard evidence of any of it.

We have the Chinese (Kaifeng) Jews.  We have the Bnei Menashe of India.  We have the Igbo Jews of Nigeria.  We have the Pashtun of Afghanistan.  We have the Cimmerians of the Caucasus.  We have the Beta Israel of Ethiopia.  Further afield, we even have a few wackos who think the Japanese are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes.  And further afield yet (in fact, given the spherical nature of the Earth, about as far afield as you can get) are the Mormons, who think that the Native Americans are actually of Ten Lost Tribes descent, despite no archaeological, genetic, or any other kind of support for the contention.

So a great many people are of the opinion that the Ten Lost Tribes aren't really all that lost.  In fact, if you believe half of the tales out there, you'd come away with the impression that you can't swing a stick without hitting a Ten Lost Tribesman.

What may come as an even greater surprise, though, is that I haven't told you the wackiest theory on record about these Palestinian Hide-and-Seek World Champions.  Because the website that my friend sent me claims that the Ten Lost Tribes are actually...

... inside the Earth.

And I don't mean underground, as in caverns or something.  I mean that the Earth is hollow, and the Ten Lost Tribes vanished because they found a big hole up at the North Pole and went down there and haven't come out since.  And they're not the only ones down there, either:

What is Our Hollow Earth like?

It is a terrestrial paradise,
...where the original Garden of Eden is located today
...where the Lost Tribes of Israel live
...where the Political Kingdom of God is located
...where the Lost Viking Colonies of Greenland migrated to
...where vanquished Germans migrated to after World War II
...where flying saucers come from
...where people live to be hundreds of years old in perfect health
...where peace and prosperity exists for everyone
...where Heaven is located (the inner sun)

Well, with all of that inside the Earth, no wonder they stayed lost, although you have to question how nice it would be given the presence of Vikings and Nazis.  But maybe if everyone has been living for centuries in peace, prosperity, and health, there's no reason for the Vikings and Nazis to engage in rape, pillage, plunder, and mass executions any more.

I dunno.  But on the website there are all sorts of testimonials from people who claim to have been inside the Earth, so I took a look at the first one, which was written in the 19th century by one Willis Emerson, who was (he said) recording the narrative of an Olaf Jansen of Sweden.  Jansen claimed to have sailed north into the Arctic and ended up going down some kind of hole into an "inner land" inhabited by giant beautiful people who spoke "something like Sanskrit."  The whole thing sounded like Jules Verne on acid, so I can't say I was all that impressed.

We also have Phoebe Marie Holmes, who claims to have visited the Sun.  Yes, the real Sun, not the "inner sun" that the Hollow Earth people claim is where the Earth's core should be, along with the stars and galaxies and all:

Note: diagram not to scale.

Holmes wrote all about it in a book called, surprisingly,  My Visit to The Sun, in which she claims that the New Jerusalem is being built there for us by Jesus and all the Saints, in the interior of the Sun, because apparently it's hollow, too.

How she got there, being that the Sun is kind of hot and all, I'm not sure.  Perhaps she went at night.

In any case, the whole site reads like an Encyclopedia Wingnuttica, so I spent most of it torn between laughing and looking around for the footnote that said, "Ha ha.  This is a satire."  But no, however bizarre it seems, these people are sincere.

What did sort of impress me, though, is that the header for the site says that the information contained therein qualifies as "WORLD TOP SECRET."  So secret, in fact, that you would never find it unless you Googled "World Top Secret Hollow Earth."

Or else had a friend who knows just how to bait you just right to get you to open a ridiculous link.

Jewish dinosaur evolution hoax!

Yesterday I came across the world's dumbest conspiracy theory.

I know I've said this before.  I said this about the claim that President Obama was selling us out to the Canadians.  I said this about the claim that CERN was designed to reawaken the Egyptian god Osiris.  I said this about the claim that Siri was programmed to open the Gates of Hell this coming July.

Each time, I thought we'd reached some kind of Conspiracy Theory Nirvana, that there was no way anyone could come up with something more completely ridiculous.

I was wrong.

Yesterday, I ran across a conspiracy theory that is so perfect in its absurdity that it almost reads like some kind of bizarre work of art.  You ready?

Dinosaurs never existed.  The whole thing is an elaborate hoax designed to give us the impression that organisms have evolved.  All the fossils ever "found" were either manufactured from plaster ("Is it possible," the author writes, "that dinosaur skeleton replica are secretly assembled or manufactured in private buildings out of public view, with bones artificially constructed or used from a number of different modern-day animals?  Why bother having any authentic original fossils at all if alleged replicas can please the public?") or are assembled from the bones of contemporary animals.

[image of Triceratops skeleton courtesy of photographer Michael Gray and the Wikimedia Commons]

Along the way, we learn that (1) radiometric dating is a method fabricated to give the dinosaur claim credibility, (2) fossilization is impossible, (3) the biblical creation story is true and the Earth is about 6,000 years old, and (4) paleontologists are big fat liars.  All of the evidence, in the form of fossil beds such as the ones at Dinosaur National Monument and the extensive fossil-rich strata in North and South Dakota, were planted there.  "Finds of huge quantities of fossils in one area, or by one or few people, goes against the laws of natural probability," we are told, despite the fact that once something occurs, the probability of its having occurred is 100%.

But so far, there's nothing much to set this apart from your usual run of creationist nonsense.  The pièce de resistance, though, is who they think is behind all of this falsehood, duplicity, and deception.  Who is it that has invented all of these fake "theories" about radioactive decay, geostratigraphy, and evolutionary descent?  Who planted all of these artificial fossils all around the world?

The Jews, of course.

I shoulda known. 

So last night, over dinner, I had a chat with my wife, who is Jewish.  I asked her why she spent her spare time creating a fake Jewrassic Park in Utah.  She already has her art -- isn't one hobby enough?

"I'm just that evil," she responded.

I asked her if she had any kind of Official Statement to make, now that her wicked plot has been uncovered.

She thought for a moment, and then said, "I'd have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you crazy kids and your dumb dog."

So there you have it.

She did ask one question, though, after making her Official Statement:  "Don't these people realize that the creation story is in the Jewish bible, too?  That, in fact, the first five books of the Christian bible are exactly the same, word for word, as the Torah?"

I said I didn't know, but if I had to hazard a guess, that logic had very little to do with any of this.

So that's it, folks: the Jews have gone all over the world, including Antarctica, planting fake fossils so as to fool the true believers.  Then they invented radiometric dating, evolutionary biology, and the entire science of geology.  There it is -- the single dumbest conspiracy theory ever.  If you run across a dumber one, please don't tell me, because then I'll have to post about it, and I feel like my IQ dropped at least 20 points just in doing the research about this one.