Disaster relief

Today we have three stories from the "I Swear I Am Not Making This Up" department, all of which revolve around various natural disasters.

In the first, we are featuring a repeat performance by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "Firefighter Prophet."  You may recall that Taylor was in Skeptophilia only two weeks ago, when he claimed that Satan's followers were using chemtrails to stop us from "tuning in to God's frequency."

This time, however, he's outdone himself, which is no mean feat given the fact that most of what he says sounds like he's spent too much time jumping on a pogo stick in a room with low ceilings.  Just two days ago, Taylor felt like he had to comment on the outbreak of tornadoes in the American Midwest, and tweeted the following:

Coincidence that Missouri was hit with Tornadoes right after they signed the abortion bill?  That same line of storms had Tornado warning in DC yesterday right before Trump gave ok for declass.  The enemy is trying to intimidate.  It won’t work, your [sic] a defeated enemy!  Victory!

So, Satan is sending tornadoes to intimidate the Christians (and also Donald Trump, who is about as Christian as Kim Jong-Un), and coincidentally sends tornadoes to places that already get lots of tornadoes, during the part of the year that's the peak season for tornadoes?  You know, intimidation-wise, I think Satan would be more advised to do something unexpected, like having a volcano erupt in downtown Omaha, or a blizzard in Miami, or a hurricane in Utah, or something.  Saying, "Fear my wrath!  I will make sure that what always happens to you continues to happen!" really lacks something, evil-wise.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]

Next we have news out of Kentucky, where the "Ark Encounter" museum, designed to convince children that the mythological explanations of a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age sheepherders somehow supersedes everything we know from modern science, has run into a legal snafu.  Apparently they are suing their insurance carriers because of refusal to pay out a claim...

... for damage from flooding.

I like to think of myself as a compassionate guy, but my exact reaction when I read this was:

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, snort, choke* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

So you need help covering the expenses of damage from a two-day rainstorm?  I thought this particular design was good for at least forty days and forty nights.  And besides, don't they call natural disasters like this "Acts of God?"

Seems a little presumptuous to expect compensation from something like that.

Or maybe, if you apply Mark Taylor's "logic" to this situation, it was just Satan trying to intimidate Ken Ham et al.  In which case Ham should just yell, "Your [sic] defeated, Satan!  Victory!" and call it good.

Last, we have an actual warning sent out by the Lawrence (Kansas) Police Department, that you should not try to stop a tornado by shooting at it.

Which you would think would be obvious.  After all, air is pretty impervious to bullets, and a tornado is basically just a big spinning blob of air.  Plus, there's the problem that since it's spinning really fast, if you shoot into it, you're likely to find that five seconds later, the tornado has flung the bullet right back at you.  After all, tornadoes are capable not only of massive devastation, but of whirling quite heavy objects up into the air, which is why if your house is hit by a tornado, it not only has to withstand the strength of the wind, but being hit by an airborne Buick.  Whipping a little thing like a bullet around, and hurling it right back at Bubba and his friends, would be child's play.

It's kind of amazing to me that anyone would have to make a point of telling people not to do this.  What's next?  "If you're trapped by a flood, beating the rising waters with a stick is not going to help."  "Do not attempt to stop a lava flow by spraying it with insecticide."  "You should seek medical help rather than trying to cure your diseases by drinking bleach."

Wait.  People actually did have to be warned about the last one.  Never mind.

You know, maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I do not recall bizarre stuff like this happening when I was a kid.  I'm thinking that once again we have evidence we're living in a giant computer simulation, but the aliens running it have gotten bored and/or drunk and now are just fucking with us:

"Let's see what happens if we make a narcissistic, nearly illiterate reality TV star lose the popular election, but win the presidency anyhow!" 

*aliens laugh maniacally and twiddle a few knobs* 

"Oh, hell yeah!  That was great!  How about, let's have people in England attempt to generate popular support for left-wing candidates by throwing milkshakes at politicians!" 

*aliens do tequila shots, more knob-twiddling, more laughter* 

*Ha!  Did you see Nigel Farage's face?  Oh, hey, I've got one.  Let's come up with a song that's super annoying, more annoying even than "Copacabana" and "The Piña Colada Song" put together.  Only we'll target it to kids, but we'll get everyone to play it because there'll be a really stupid video to go with it.  It'll be called "Baby Shark."  That and "do do do do do" will be about the only lyrics." 

*aliens fall off their chairs laughing*

Well, I suppose as long as someone is amused by how absurd humans are.  On the other hand, our species's reputation for idiotic behavior probably wouldn't be harmed any if Mark Taylor would just shut the hell up.

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In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

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

Literal antennas

That loony people have loony ideas is kind of a tautology.  But what amazes me is when other people listen, and continue listening, once the person has established himself as a raving wackmobile.

Today we're referring to Mark Taylor, the self-styled "firefighter prophet," who has already appeared twice here at Skeptophilia.  The first time was back in 2017, when Taylor appeared on the radio program Pass the Salt, and gave us a terrifying warning that the Freemasons and Illuminati are controlling our DNA by making orchestras tune to A = 440 hertz, with the result that we get sick and dislike Donald Trump.  Then last year, he announced that Hurricane Michael was sent to Florida by the Democrats because they were angry over the fact that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, despite the fact that Kavanaugh wasn't anywhere near Florida at the time.

So there's no reason we'd expect that anything Taylor is saying would be correct, or even make sense.  Despite that, he's still a frequent flier on programs geared to right-wing conspiracy nuts and evangelical Christians, who seem to eat this stuff up.  In fact, last year some people at Liberty University made a movie about Taylor called The Trump Prophecy wherein we find out that Taylor struggled with persistent nightmares caused by the fact that one of his ancestors had been a Freemason, so he had to "rid himself of the generational curse" before he could throw himself into helping to fulfill God's will that Donald Trump had to win the election.

Oh, and the border with Mexico is the site of a "demonic gate" that will only be sealed if Trump builds his border wall.

So a pinnacle of reason and logic this guy isn't.  But this time, he's outdone himself.

Because he appeared last weekend on the evangelical radio program Blessed to Teach with his latest warning, which goes something like the following:

Everything gives off frequencies.  So does God.  When you pray, you're tuning into God's frequency.  But now Satan is using chemtrails to "block God's frequency" so that humans turn into "giant antennas" tuned in to Satan's frequency instead.

How does he know this?  Because, he said, he was researching chemtrails, and he found that they are primarily composed of barium and aluminum.

"The chemtrails, all the spraying is to detract us from hearing God’s frequency," Taylor says.  "They are spraying aluminum and barium in the chemtrails and if you look on the periodic table—barium is BA, aluminum is AL; it spells BAAL.  That’s deep.  That’s no coincidence."

He's right that it's no coincidence.  The symbols for barium and aluminum are "Ba" and "Al" because that's the first two letters of each of their names.

For fuck's sake.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But Taylor never lets anything like logic get in his way.  "We are literally walking antennas because we’ve been breathing the aluminum, we’ve been breathing the barium," he says.  "We are literally giant antennas, which was intended.  If you want to get really deep on this, these entities that the devil has put down here that these satanist worship or tap into for this knowledge, if you will, they have told them how to do this stuff.  They’ve showed them how to do this stuff for decades, for thousands of years, but they’ve tapped into this stuff about how to clog up man’s ears and eyes to be able to sense and feel God every time you’re walking around."

I hesitate even to lend him any credence by refuting his claim, but the origin of the whole chemtrails idiocy was a guy in Louisiana who collected some dew in a bowl, claimed it was from a jet contrail, and had it tested.  Then he notified a television station, and the reporter mistakenly stated that the amount of barium contained in the water was being measured in parts per million of barium instead of parts per billion, with the result that it appeared the water had a thousand times the amount of barium it actually did.  (The minuscule amount of barium it did contain almost certainly came from airborne dust.)

And that's how chemtrails started, which continueth lo unto this very day.

But the good news is you don't have to worry about "literally turning into a giant antenna."

Anyhow, that's the latest, but almost certainly not the last, from the "firefighter prophet."  Even writing about this is making me wonder if the contrails over my house might be contaminated with beryllium and erbium, because it leaves me feeling like I need a beer.

That's BeEr, you know.

And that's no coincidence.

*************************************

I grew up going once a summer with my dad to southern New Mexico and southern Arizona, with the goal of... finding rocks.  It's an odd hobby for a kid to have, but I'd been fascinated by rocks and minerals since I was very young, and it was helped along by the fact that my dad did beautiful lapidary work.  So while he was poking around looking for turquoise and agates and gem-quality jade, I was using my little rock hammer to hack out chunks of sandstone and feldspar and quartzite and wondering how, why, and when they'd gotten there.

Turns out that part of the country has some seriously complicated geology, and I didn't really appreciate just how complicated until I read John McPhee's four-part series called Annals of the Former World.  Composed of Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California, it describes a cross-country trip McPhee took on Interstate 80, accompanied along the way with various geologists, with whom he stops at every roadcut and outcrop along the way.  As usual with McPhee's books they concentrate on the personalities of the people he's with as much as the science.  But you'll come away with a good appreciation for Deep Time -- and how drastically our continent has changed during the past billion years.

[Note:  If you order this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Storm's a-risin'

You might recall that when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast in October 2012, devastating large areas and taking 147 lives, we were quick to find out what had caused the monster storm.

It wasn't warm water and low shear in the western Atlantic.  It wasn't, in a larger sense, due to climate change providing more heat energy to juice up big storms.  No, it was caused by the most powerful meteorological force known:

Gays.

This, at least, was the contention of John McTernan, who said that Sandy was divine punishment for our acceptance of LGBTQ people.  Which makes me wonder why God's aim is so bad.  Sending a huge-ass storm to target one, fairly spread-out group of people, is poor planning.  My guess is just as many holy people were harmed by Sandy as unholy ones.

Oh, well. "God works in mysterious ways."

It's nice to know, though, that our LGBTQ friends aren't the only ones who are capable of stirring up killer storms.  On right-wing commentator Chris McDonald's show The McFiles, we learned a couple of weeks ago that Hurricane Florence was created by Democrats to destroy any evidence that they're committing massive voter fraud in North Carolina.  Here's the exact quote:

I saw where North Carolina had done the voter fraud stuff for the machines, for this, that, and the other; they had caught it or something like that and they were going after it.  I said, ‘Oh boy.’  Sure enough, there is was; here comes the hurricane.  Bigger than life, there is was.  And I just found out, literally, though another source of mine, contact this morning, sure enough, they said it was in fact made by man and generated by the HAARP system, basically, and it was meant to try and flood North Carolina and flood out the evidence of what was going on with the voter fraud.

My opinion is that if Democrats could create and steer storms, there'd already have been tornadoes at Lindsay Graham's doorstep.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But as we've seen before, there's no claim that is so completely batshit crazy that it can't be bettered, and we saw this last week with a proclamation by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "firefighter prophet," who said that we've seen yet another storm that has nothing to do with plain old ordinary meteorology.  Hurricane Michael, which devastated the panhandle of Florida, was sent there by Democrats because they're angry about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Here's what Taylor said:

Does anyone else think it's strange that Justice K is sworn in and we have a major hurricane inbound?  DS scared?  They should be.  Retaliation?  Absolutely.  We will not be intimidated.  Warriors arise, time to go to work!  You know what to do...

Okay, I have just a few questions about this.

1. Isn't it kind of funny that when the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) get mad, they only send hurricanes to places that always get hurricanes anyhow?  And only during hurricane season?  If the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) sent a hurricane to Omaha, Nebraska in February, I might be impressed.
2. Even if you believe this, it's another example of abysmal aim.  The storm came nowhere near Brett Kavanaugh.
3. If Taylor's "warriors" do arise, and go to work, what the hell are they planning to do?  Maybe they're taking a page from the Persian Emperor Xerxes's book, wherein he attempted to bridge the Hellespont and his bridge got destroyed in a storm, so he sentenced the ocean to three hundred lashes.  His men duly carried out the sentence, whipping the waves.  I'd have done the same thing, since saying to Xerxes, "I'll do no such thing, because it's a really stupid idea" was a good way of finding yourself next in line.  And unlike the sea, which probably didn't care, I'm guessing when a human gets three hundred lashes it hurts like a motherfucker.
4. Does Mark Taylor always come up with this kind of stuff?  Because right now he sounds like someone whose skull is filled with cobwebs and dead insects, but who is somehow still talking.

So anyhow.  I can pretty much guarantee that none of the above-mentioned storms were generated by anything but atmospheric conditions at the time, and no one is able to summon a storm on command and then steer it.  Maybe God can, I dunno.  I'm certainly no expert in that realm.  But even he seems to be a little sketchy about the "steering" part.

I know that's kind of prosaic, and not nearly as interesting as divine retribution or evil HAARP-using Democrats or gays generating hurricanes with their giant rainbow-colored Storm-o-Matic.  But really, people.  Get a grip.  We're coming into snow season here in the Frozen North, and we have enough trouble with the ordinary kind of weather.  If every time we have a Winter Storm Warning I have to worry about whether it's an ordinary storm or some group with a vague vendetta creating bad weather to make me miserable, it's gonna be a really long winter.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

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

The Satanic Symphony Orchestra

Here at Skeptophilia, I try not to focus day after day on people who believe crazy stuff.  After all, loony ideas are kind of a dime a dozen, and loony people just as common, so at some point this kind of thing starts seeming like low-hanging fruit.

But every once in a while, I run into an idea so loony that it almost seems kind of... inspired.  Which is why today we're going to discuss: how the Freemasons are altering your DNA using a musical pitch to make you hate Donald Trump.

This may sound like a ham-handed attempt at satire, but sadly, it appears to be real.  According to a link sent to me by a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, this is the claim of one Mark Taylor, self-styled "firefighter prophet," who has this to say about his own credentials:

I am no longer simply Mark Taylor, but also Shakina Kami, a name that translates from a combination of the African and Indian languages into “Beautiful One Whose Desires Are Fulfilled, and in Whose Life the Lord Dwells with the Divine Wind of Providence.”

So I think we can all agree that sounds pretty authoritative, even though I have to admit that I speak neither "African" nor "Indian."  Be that as it may, Taylor/Kami used his Divine Winds of Providence to write a book with the somewhat cumbersome title The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story Of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow… And What He Says Is Coming Next, wherein we find out that not only is Trump the Anointed One of God, Taylor himself had a vision in which he saw how Trump would win, and how this would be a tremendous defeat to the Forces of Darkness.  It's filled with passages such as the following:

The Spirit of God says, ‘America, get ready, for I AM choosing from the top of the cream, for I AM putting together America’s dream team, from the president and his administration, to judges and congress to ease America’s frustrations!’  The Spirit of God says, ‘Rise up, My Army, and get in the fight…  Rise up! stomp the enemy’s head with bliss; send the enemy back to Hell and into the abyss.’

All I can say is that even if we're being ruled by the Dream Team Cream, lately the news has made me want to Scream.  Overall, I can't say my frustrations have been eased much.  In fact, most of the time I feel like I need to double my anti-anxiety meds just to make it through the day.

Anyhow, I guess Taylor et al. didn't stomp the enemy's head blissfully enough, because the Bad Guys are now fighting back.  According to an interview he gave on right wing activist Sheila Zilinsky's radio program, Pass the Salt Live, last week, we are now being bombarded by "frequencies" designed to alter our DNA:

I believe what happened on November 8th is that the enemy has sent out a frequency, if you will -- and if you'll remember, when we did your show on "frequency" we literally got shut down and had to start over again... those who are tapped into this frequency, and it agitated and took control of those who had their DNA that was turned over to the enemy.  And that's what's happening.  The Illuminati, the Freemasons, their main goal is to change the DNA of man, and they're doing it through these frequencies, whether it's the bombardment of the news media, whether it's rock and roll music, I mean we could go on and on with these frequencies as we've talked about before.  So you need to surround yourself with the good news, not the apocalyptic messages right now.  Not to say that things aren't going to happen, because we're always going to have fires and earthquakes and hurricanes.  It's not the apocalyptic message that everyone's talking about.   

I'm being bombarded by emails from Christians right now, saying, "Look, I support Trump.  But everybody in my family has isolated me.  Everybody in my church is not talking to me."  It's because their DNA is being controlled by the enemy.  By broadcasting the news media, the audio part of it, at 440.  That's why when you watch the news media you get agitated.  It creates fear, it creates panic.  And this is what is going on in the church.  The body of Christ has got to stop being vulnerable to this stuff.  You've got to stop listening to the mainstream news media.  Look, if I want to know what's happening, I'll go to Fox's website to catch the headlines...  That's not being broadcast, where I'm hearing it in a frequency or anything like that.  See, the thing about that 440 hertz is that it will damage your body organs.  That's another reason why people are so sick.  It changes your DNA.  That's the goal of the Freemasons, the Illuminati.  They want you to be part of that Illuminati bloodline.

Okay, I have only one question about all of this, which is:

What?

A news broadcast sent out solely at a frequency of 440 hertz wouldn't be damaging so much as it would be annoying, because it would be a single continuous musical tone at A above middle C, which would make it a little hard to glean information from, good or bad.  Also, if 440 hertz caused DNA to change, orchestra members would undergo horrifying mutations every time the oboe plays an A so the rest of the musicians can tune their instruments.

Which could be kind of entertaining, even if it wouldn't really be conducive to a good performance afterwards.

Also, you really get the impression here that, besides the fact that Mark Taylor is nuttier than squirrel shit, he also has no concept of how DNA works.

Or maybe I've just listened to too many symphonies in my life, and I'm now part of the "Illuminati bloodline."  Which, now that I come to think of it, would be kind of cool, especially if it came with evil superpowers.

But I'm guessing that's not really all that likely, because here I sit, drinking coffee and trying to reboot my brain with only marginal success thus far, instead of cackling maniacally while shooting lightning from my fingertips, which would be a lot more fun.

The real problem, of course, is that once you start looking into this stuff, you very quickly go down the Bottomless Rabbit Hole of Lunacy, and start watching videos with names like "432hz vs 440hz pt 2 Nazi Fluoride How Illuminati 440hz Music Poison Pineal Gland," which not only has to do with Nazis, fluoride, the pineal gland, and "frequencies," also involves astrology, the All-Seeing Eye, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, the year 1776, and pacts with the devil.  It ends by asking, "Did they deceive the mass and Themselves while they didn't knew IT?", which I think is a pretty good question.  After watching all of this stuff, I'm not sure what I knew anymore, myself.

So many thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link, which has left me feeling like I need a double scotch even though it's only eight in the morning.  I suppose I should buck up, as I have a big day ahead, retuning all of my musical instruments to 432 hertz so that my pineal gland doesn't freeze up and turn me into a Trump-hating Nazi Freemason.  I hate it when that happens.