The future according to Adam Sandler

It's not often that you get to witness the birth of a conspiracy theory.

Most of the time, I suspect, they start out with someone speculating about something, finding circumstantial evidence that seems to support the conjecture, and then telling a few friends.  Who tell a few friends, who tell a few friends, and there you are.  Hard to pinpoint, and (therefore) hard to squelch.

But today I'm going to tell you about a conspiracy theory whose provenance we can identify with near exactitude.  And since it involves not only conspiracy theorists, but The Onion, Princess Diana, neo-Nazis, and Adam Sandler, you know it's gonna be a good story.

The whole thing started with a story run in August by Clickhole, a satirical website that is an offshoot of The Onion.  Entitled, "Five Tragedies Weirdly Predicted by Adam Sandler," the article tells about five instances when Sandler gave hints (or outright statements) in his movies or comedy acts about upcoming world events, to wit:

• The Waco Siege.  Sandler, supposedly, would intersperse his standup act with repeating "for several minutes" the phrase, "Something's coming to Waco.  Something dark."
• Princess Diana's death.  In the movie Happy Gilmore, Sandler looks directly into the camera and says, "The Queen's eldest, our beautiful flower, will wilt under a Parisian bridge."
• The 2010 BP Gulf oil spill.  In an interview in 2005 on Conan O'Brien, Sandler was wearing a t-shirt that said, "BP OIL SPILL IN FIVE YEARS."
• The Haitian earthquake.  Sandler predicted that one on Funny People, but underestimated the death toll at 220,000.  (Guess even a "modern-day Nostradamus" can't get every detail right.)
• The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.  All the way back in 1993, Sandler was in a skit on Saturday Night Live in which he sang, "A missing plane-ah / It’s from Malaysia / Make me insane-ah / This will all make sense in due time."

So there you are, then.  Pretty amazing, yes?

Well, no, and for the very good reason that Sandler didn't say (or do) any of the things that the Clickhole article said.  In other words, the whole thing was made up from top to bottom.  Not surprising; it's satire, remember?

[image courtesy of photographer Franz Richter and the Wikimedia Commons]

But that didn't stop people from falling for it.  Lots of people.  Not only did they miss the "satire" piece, they also never bothered to fact check, even to the extent of watching the damn movies and television shows where all of these shenanigans allegedly happened.  It started popping up all over the online media, making appearances on blogs, Twitter, and conspiracy theory websites like Godlike Productions and Literally Unbelievable.  Then, the neo-Nazis got a hold of it, and it ended up on their site Stormfront, where the link was posted with the following wonderful message: "If any of this is true, it just shows how Jews do make shit happen and probably communicate via movies."

You'd think that communicating via communicating would be easier, wouldn't you?  I mean, why go to all of the trouble of making a movie, including all of the lengthy and costly post-production stuff, marketing, and so on, when you could just pick up a phone and tell your Evil Illuminati Henchmen your future predictions?  After all, in the movies, anyone could be watching.  Even a neo-Nazi could be watching.  And then the secret's out, you know?

I mean, I have some first-hand experience in this regard.  My wife is Jewish, and when she wants to tell me something, she doesn't make a movie about it and wait for me to go to the theater and watch it, she just tells me.  She's kind of direct that way.

But the whole thing blew up so fast that it ended up having its own page on Snopes, wherein we are told in no uncertain terms that Adam Sandler can not actually foretell the future.

I'm not expecting people to believe this, though.  Any time Snopes posts anything, they get accused of being shills or of participating in a coverup.  Which means that I probably will be accused of the same thing, especially now that I've revealed that my wife is Jewish.

As I've observed so many times, with conspiracy theorists, you can't win.  And that goes double for the neo-Nazis.

Flight of the dead

If there's a group of people that I enjoy arguing with even less than I enjoy arguing with young-earth creationists, it's conspiracy theorists.

At least the young-earth creationists admit that there's evidence out there that needs an explanation.  Fossils?  Left behind by the Great Flood.  Genetic and morphological homology between related species?  Coincidence.  Light from stars further away than 6,000 light years?  The speed of light changes as it goes.  Or light stretches.  Or weakens.  Or something.

So, okay, they're wrong, about nearly everything scientific that you could be wrong about.  But at least they don't come up with batshit crazy nonsense for which there is no evidence, and then argue that your evidence doesn't exist.

Which is, by and large, the conspiracy theorist's favorite modus operandi.  Take, for example, the latest wacko explanation (if I can dignify it by that name) of the recent tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17 by Ukrainian separatists: the whole thing was staged in order to force a confrontation between the United States and Russia, and the plane itself was being flown remotely and was peopled entirely by corpses.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

My first thought upon reading this was that the originator of this "theory" must have believed that the Sherlock Holmes episode "A Scandal in Belgravia" was a historical documentary.  What evidence, you might rightly ask, does anyone have that this conjecture is true, other than that provided by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Cumberbatch?

A statement that rebel leader Igor Girkin made that a number of the bodies at the crash site did not appear to be "fresh."

Well, if the plane I'm on gets blown out of the sky, and I fall 30,000 feet, I'm guessing I won't be looking my "freshest" at that point, either.  And afterwards, Girkin reportedly said that he could "neither confirm or deny" the claim.

But that was all it took.  The plane was full of corpses.  The whole thing was a setup.  This, despite the fact that one of the passengers on the doomed plane, Mohammed Ali Mohammed Salim of Kuala Lumpur, took a video of himself and other passengers getting settled right before the plane was preparing to take off, and uploaded it to Instagram along with the message that he was "a little nervous."

For good reason, as it turned out.

But no, say the conspiracy theorists, Salim's video itself is a fake, made hurriedly by the Evil Conspirators once Pillars of Sanity and Rationalism like Alex Jones and Jeff Rense began to figure the whole thing out.

Then, of course, we had the people who said that it couldn't be a coincidence that disaster has struck Malaysia Airlines twice within just a few months.  Maybe... maybe it wasn't a coincidence.  In fact, maybe MH 17 and MH 370, the flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean this past March were...

... the same plane.

At least, I think that's what is being claimed on this site, wherein we are treated to the following brain-boggling chain of thought:

How brain dead do they think we are??? 

Our previous articles have covered the MH370 who, when, where and why but not the WHAT. What happened to MH370 after they whisked it into the airport hangar at Diego Garcia? 

The WHAT question has now been answered. MH370 was remarked and became Malaysian flight MH17. It was flown to Amsterdam where it picked up passengers and flew over the western allied Ukraine where it "disappeared from radar" and was shot down and destroyed. The Russian government was blamed in order to alienate and inflame existing Ukraine tensions with Russia. Now who would want to do that exactly???? Duh... 

In view of the unlikely coincidence of two Malaysian Boing 777's being downed within 3 months of each other, there's undoubtedly a connection! 

Over 500 passengers have been murdered on board two "downed" Malaysian Boeing 777's within 3 months of each other. This is NOT a coincidence. 

Well, yes, actually it is.  That's what you call it when two events coincide.

Oh, and from March to July isn't three months.  But maybe I'm splitting hairs, here.

What gets me about this, and (in fact) what gets me about all conspiracy theories, is how the proponents of these nutty ideas think that an absence of evidence is actually a point in their favor.  No conclusive proof that the dead bodies at the MH 17 crash site were already badly decomposed?  Well, it must be true, then.  No trace whatsoever of missing flight MH 370?  It must have landed on Diego Garcia.

Which, of course, makes them impossible to counter.  Any evidence you can produce against their argument has been manufactured; any lack of evidence on their part is just proof of how sneaky these false-flag-loving illuminati are.

All of which kind of makes me pine for a nice rip-roaring argument with a young-earth creationist.  Ken Ham?  Kent Hovind?  Andrew Snelling?  Anyone?

Damn.

Elegy for an unpredictable universe

I was asked not too long ago how, as an atheist, I cope with tragedy.

"I don't see how you could possibly find a way to understand loss and grief," my friend said, "without some sense that there's a larger meaning in the universe."

In some ways, of course, I don't.  Not only do I not believe there's meaning in the universe (at least not in the sense he meant), I don't understand loss and grief at all.  I experience it, all too deeply -- I've lost both parents and a beloved grandmother, not to mention friends and colleagues.  It's impossible to live 53 years without going through the sorrow that comes with knowing that you will never, ever see someone you care about again.

But it is when the magnitude of the loss is amplified -- as it was yesterday with the announcement that Malaysia Flight 370 was almost certain to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people on board -- that we struggle hardest to wrap our brains around what has happened.  How could the world be so built, we think, that something like this could occur?

It brings back one of the formative books of my teenage years, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  This book chronicles the search by the 17th century Franciscan monk Brother Juniper, who is shocked when a bridge in his Peruvian village collapses, killing six people.  He is a devout man, and is certain that god must have had a reason for bringing those six onto the bridge, and no others, in time to die when the cable holding the bridge aloft snapped.  So he traces the life history of each of the six, trying to see if he can discern a pattern -- to see if he can read god's mind, determine what it was that led those particular six people to die when hundreds of others crossed the bridge daily and survived.

In the end, of course, he fails; and he concludes that either god's mind is too subtle, too deep to parse, or else there is no pattern, and things simply happen because they happen.

 It is a devastating conclusion.

Brother Juniper's search for meaning in apparent chaos is the genesis, I think, of religion, not to mention other worldviews perhaps less sanctified.  When you think about it, conspiracy theories come from the same place; a desperate need for there to be a reason, even a dark one, behind all of the bad stuff that happens in the world.  It seems that many of us would rather there be an explanation -- even if, in Christopher Moore's vivid turn of phrase, it involves "heinous fuckery most foul."  Better that than the universe being some kind of giant pinball game.

And in extremis, even we atheists still look for explanations, don't we?  Faced with tragedy, the first thing I've asked is, "Why me?", as if there is some answer to that question that is even possible given my philosophical worldview.  But it's a natural inclination, and seems to be universal to the human condition.  It is this aghast recognition that the world could treat us this badly that was captured in the starkly beautiful painting by Eugène Delacroix, depicting a Greek woman looking at the ruins of her home after her town was sacked by the Turks:

Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Sometimes there is no reason, no pattern; the world's machinery seems to work much of the time without any regard to us at all.  I flew Malaysia Airlines a year and a half ago, from Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong, and arrived there safely; two weeks ago, a similar bunch of passengers, expecting (as I did) nothing more than a few hours of tedium, ended their lives in the turbulent waters of the Indian Ocean.  And if you think that the phrase "there but for the grace of god go I" hasn't gone through my head more than once in the last few days, you're sorely mistaken.

Of course, for an atheist, that phrase is only a metaphor, and perhaps not even a very good one.  I don't have the recourse of falling back on "they're with god now" or even "god has a plan."  All I'm left with is a sense that the universe is a strange, chaotic, and unpredictable place, full of beauty and goodness and love and pleasure, and pain and danger and fear and death, sometimes meted out in unequal parts and in ways that I will never really comprehend.  But I do know one thing: we need to be more conscious, right now, about the gratitude and compassion with which we treat the people around us.  None of us have any idea how many minutes we will be given; none of us have time to waste.  Hug your loved ones, your friends, your pets -- hell, hug total strangers if you want to.  There is nothing certain about tomorrow, so you damn well better make every second of today count.

As Thornton Wilder put it in the last line of The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead; and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

The disappearance of Flight 370

Well, I'm happy to say that The Weekly World News has been supplanted as the world's first and foremost disseminator of bullshit.  The crown has now officially been passed to Natural News. 

It's not that the competition wasn't stiff.  The Weekly World News has had some doozies.  (My all-time favorite TWWN headline: "Santa's Elves Actually Slaves From The Planet Mars.")  But Natural News has edged them out, on two bases: (1) they have better writers, so their stories actually sound plausible and therefore sucker more people, and (2) they have mastered the art of distributing bonkers "news" stories via social media.

At first, it was just health stuff (and their site is still sub-headed, "Natural Health News and Scientific Discoveries").  And as such, they confined themselves for some time to articles telling you about how Big Pharma is trying to kill us all, how you can cure cancer with lemon juice, how putting onions in your socks draws out toxins, and how you won't get heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or old age if you eat Indian gooseberries.  (You thought I was going to say I made those up, didn't you?  Well, ha.  Those are real article topics from Natural News.  Teach you to make assumptions.)

But now, they've branched out.  And because of this, we have a monumentally screwy piece of journalism, to wit: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared because it... disappeared.

[image courtesy of photographer Aero Icarus and the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup.  Disappeared.  "Poof."  Or "zap," or whatever noise you prefer your teleportation device to make.  And admit it: it's not really that surprising.  Given that we're talking about the loss of a huge passenger jet, it was only a matter of time until the conspiracy theories started flying around.

Author Mike Adams does it right, I have to give him that.  First, it's hammered into our brains how MYSTERIOUS and BAFFLING it is that the plane vanished (words to that effect appear dozens of times), and then we're offered a possible explanation:

This is what is currently giving rise to all sorts of bizarre-sounding theories across the 'net, including discussions of possible secret military weapons tests, Bermuda Triangle-like ripples in the fabric of spacetime, and even conjecture that non-terrestrial (alien) technology may have teleported the plane away.

But no, Adams says, that would be ridiculous.  We couldn't believe that without evidence.  Instead, he asks us to believe the following:

The frightening part about all this is not that we will find the debris of Flight 370; but rather that we won't. If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence.

If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever control it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power. That thought is a lot more scary than the idea of an aircraft suffering a fatal mechanical failure.

Righty-o.  Because planes have never disappeared before, or anything.  It's not as if there's a list of 122 airplane disappearances that have never been resolved, right there on Wikipedia -- 36 of them since 1966, when black boxes were required on commercial aircraft.  It's not as if there is precedent for it taking a long while to locate wreckage -- such as the remains of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, which took three years to recover.  (The black box was finally found under 13,000 feet of water in the South Atlantic.)

Marginally more plausible theories have been trotted out, mostly centering on some kind of Chinese-led terrorist attack designed to get rid of one or more people who were on the plane.  To that, I can only respond: why the hell would the Chinese blow up an entire airplane to get rid of a few people?  The plane was headed to Beijing, fer cryin' in the sink.  Couldn't they have just arrested them when they got there?  It's not like the Chinese are shy about doing that sort of thing, after all.

So, then, you might ask: what do I think happened to the plane?

Are you ready? 

I don't know.  There's no evidence at the moment, and in the absence of evidence, that's what we say.  It's not that hard, really -- say it after me:  I don't know.  It might have been an equipment malfunction; it might have been a terrorist bomb; it might have been shot down by someone on the ground.  It might have been any number of other things.  We don't have any information yet, so any speculating is kind of pointless, and it sure is a little premature to start talking about alien teleportation.  But that didn't stop the commenters on the Natural News article from writing stuff that was, if you can believe it, even loonier than the original article:

Why Does Mike Adams not offer any speculation about The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing charging Israel with genocide? Also the Former Malaysian Prime Minister until 2003 who once stated 9/11 was a false flag and it's Jews that run the world. The plane being fitted with the Boeing uninterruptable autopilot system?

The possibility exists that this plane instead of moving towards the ground has moved away from the ground. In other words it has moved into outer space. It is beyond Earth orbit because it would have been detected in orbit by some instrument. This would explain why the black box signal is not detected.

Have you seen LOST!!! What if this is just like LOST! The radiation from Fukishima [sic] is probably changing the sky now too.

Mike is blessed with a unique ability to analyze, rationalize and discern evil. For those who want Mike to ignore politics, remember that millions more innocent people have been murdered by governments than from toxins in their food.

So, the reason that they haven't found the wreckage yet couldn't be the fact that the Gulf of Thailand, where the plane disappeared, is fucking huge?

Nope.  Has to be a "new, mysterious force that plucks airplanes out of the sky."

Look.  I'll grant you this:  I don't know what happened, either.  (Cf. what I wrote several paragraphs ago, and then asked you to say along with me.)  The difference is, I don't pretend that I do, and I don't have any interest in getting people all freaked out over idle speculation that will almost certainly turn out to be false.  But I'll go this far -- if it does turn out to be a "new, mysterious force," or aliens, or time warps, or the fact that the Bermuda Triangle decided to go on vacation in Southeast Asia, I'll happily publish a retraction.

It'd be nice to receive the same from Mike Adams if, on the other hand, I turn out to be right -- but I'm not expecting it.