Sheeple update

Sometimes I have to check in on the r/conspiracy subreddit just to see what new nutty conspiracy theories are out there.  I try to make sure that I've girded my loins and stiffened my spine beforehand, because the level of complete batshit insanity demonstrated by the regular contributors really has to be seen to be believed.  On my most recent visit, I was not disappointed -- there are not one, nor two, but three truly amazing new conspiracy theories, if by "amazing" you mean "ideas that you would only come up with if you have a single Cheeto where most of us have a brain."

First, we have astronomer Paul Cox inducing multiple orgasms in the Planet X crowd by making a joke while analyzing a video of the recent transit of Mercury across the Sun.  "See that mysterious bright glow on the right side?  What do you suppose that is?" Cox asks, pointing to what is clearly a lens flare.  "Do you think it's the mysterious planet Nibiru?"  He then goes on to say, "We don't cover things up like NASA does."

Well, you don't joke about such matters, not when people like YouTube contributor "EyesOpen37" are listening.  "EyesOpen37" doesn't believe in lens flares.  "EyesOpen37" thinks it's much more likely that a vague, diffuse glow is unequivocal evidence that a huge planet inhabited by our reptilian alien overlords is coming into the inner solar system for a visit, and NASA is desperately trying to make sure that no one finds out about it.

"I wonder if these guys are using this transit of Mercury to warn us about Nibiru?" muses "EyesOpen37," in a tone of voice that indicates that the answer is obviously "yes."  And the people who posted comments on his YouTube submission agree wholeheartedly.  Here's a sampling:

• Thank you so much for uploading this video!!  And I'm so glad a reputable person has finally spoke out!  Paul Cox is a good person and so are you to release this info!! :)
• I hope you have this video backed up so you can keep re-posting if it gets deleted!!  WOW!!
• Want to know how it'll end?  Read Revelation 8:8 on.  Repent and seek your Saviour.  God bless.
• It's controlled.  How many dead astronomers do we have to date?  Maybe a joke is the only way he can put it out there. Bottom line....he was deliberate.

Yes, there are lots of dead astronomers.  Aristarchus, Hypatia, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Edmund Halley... the list goes on and on.  There's only one possible answer -- they were all killed to keep them silent about the Planet Nibiru.

Speaking of dead people, our second conspiracy theory is about how Osama bin Laden is still "alive and well and living in the Bahamas."  And of course, there's nothing that lends credence to a wacko idea like saying "Edward Snowden says so."  (The only thing that's better would be saying "Nikola Tesla says so.")  According to the site Humans are Free, Snowden had the following to say about it:

I have documents showing that Bin Laden is still on the CIA’s payroll.  He is still receiving more than $100,000 a month, which are being transferred through some front businesses and organizations, directly to his Nassau bank account. I am not certain where he is now, but in 2013, he was living quietly in his villa with five of his wives and many children. 

Osama Bin Laden was one of the CIA’s most efficient operatives for a long time.  What kind of message would it send their other operatives if they were to let the SEALs kill him?  They organized his fake death with the collaboration of the Pakistani Secret services, and he simply abandoned his cover. 

Since everyone believes he is dead, nobody’s looking for him, so it was pretty easy to disappear.  Without the beard and the military jacket, nobody recognizes him.

Of course, at the bottom of the page, we read the following disclaimer:

Note: The original source of this information has not been validated nor confirmed by any other source.

In other words, even though we're not sure if it's true, you're clearly a KoolAid-Drinkin' Sheeple if you don't believe it.

And since bin Laden is still alive, it must therefore follow that lots of other Big Bad Guys are, too.  For our last dip in the deep end of the pool, we go to the site OrionStar 3000, wherein we learn that Josef  "The Angel of Death" Mengele is not only still alive, he is also the "Zodiac Killer"  who killed seven people in the late 1960s in California.

Now, you might be thinking, "How can Mengele be alive?  He was born in 1911.  He'd be 105 years old by now."  But this just shows that you're not thinking outside the box.  (And by "the box" I mean "anything that makes sense.")  Here's what he looked like in 2001, when he was a mere 90 years old, in a photograph taken at a "Brotherhood of Aryan Nations/KKK/ Bush Fundraiser in Hernando, Florida.":

Which, you have to admit, is pretty good for a 105-year-old.  Here's Mengele during World War II:

So I think we have a definitive match.

As far as how Mengele could still be so spry despite his age, we're told, "Mengele looks much younger than he really is due to years of face-lifts, anti-aging hormone injections & alleged cannibalism!"

And if that wasn't enough, we also find out the following alarming stuff:

• [SS Lieutenant Colonel] Otto Skorzeny faked Hitler's death!  Nazi Germany Really Won WWII!
• Hitler lived to be the oldest man in America until he died at the age of 114 years in 2/2004 in the Bethesda, MD Naval Hospital.
• The son of Tesla's illegal immigrant German Born accountant George H. Scherff Sr., SS Nazi spy George H. Scherff Jr. aka: US Navy Pilot: George H.W. Bush murdered his two TBF Avenger crew members by bailing out of his perfectly good airplane.  Bush became a heroin junkie to try to escape his guilty conscience.

Scarier still, this site doesn't have a disclaimer.  So it must all be true, right?

Of course right.

So that's our fun excursion through CrazyTown for today.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Myself, I'm wondering if I can get a hold of any of that anti-aging stuff.  I'm hoping I don't have to resort to cannibalism.

The end of the world as we know it

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we're all gonna die.

Sorry if that's kind of a downer of a way to start your morning.  But it's best to face facts, you know?

Some time in the next week, according to multiple sources, god is going to play a game of cosmic Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  Never mind that none of those sources have any apparent understanding of astronomy, nor necessarily even contact with reality.  Just believe 'em anyway, because what do those cocky fancy-pants scientists know, anyway?

First we have Pastor John Hagee, whose motto is "Jesus accepts MasterCard."  This guy has made a career out of passing along the cheerful message that god thinks we're all sinners and we're doomed to the fiery furnace and the only way to escape our (well deserved) fate is if we make a generous donation to John Hagee Ministries so that John Hagee can purchase another Yacht for Christ.  (Why Christ needs a yacht remains to be seen.  Didn't the dude walk on water?)

This time, though, god is serious, and he's going to show us how pissed he is at our iniquity through an unequivocal sign: a lunar eclipse this Sunday.  Or, as Hagee likes to put it, a "blood moon."  Because the moon turns kind of red during an eclipse, which means blood.  And god and prophecy and hell and all the rest, so you damn well better give generously, or else.

Is it just me, or does Pastor Hagee look really... happy about the whole thing?  You get the impression that here's a guy who is just thrilled that Rivers Will Run Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers.  After all, the unbelievers don't donate to John Hagee Ministries, so fuck 'em, right?

But it isn't just Hagee saying that we're in trouble.  A lot of folks down in Costa Rica are up in arms over the appearance a couple of days ago of a weird cloud, because there's obviously no other explanation for this other than the imminent end of the world.

Eladio Solano, meteorologist at Costa Rica's National Meteorological Institute, said the phenomenon is rare but perfectly natural.  The iridescence, he says, is caused by the refraction of light through high ice crystals in the atmosphere, and has happened before without the world ending.  But what does he know?  He's just a scientist.  We all know it's better to get your information from superstition based on a Bronze-Age understanding of the universe.

Then we have the fact that the physicists over at CERN are firing up the Large Hadron Collider today, and the rumor has started that they're trying to "recreate the Big Bang."  The result will be that the new Bang will rip the current universe apart from the inside out.  And/or create a black hole.  Either way, we're pretty much fucked.

Because that's what all scientists are after, right?  When they're not busy distracting you from the actual meaning of weird clouds over Costa Rica, they're plotting to destroy the world.  Why else would they have gone into science?

And if that wasn't enough to ruin your morning, add to that the fact that Mercury goes into retrograde starting on Thursday.  And this means that all hell is going to break loose on Earth, even though (1) it's only an apparent backwards movement because of the relative motion of Mercury as seen from Earth, (2) the movement of a planet against a backdrop of impossibly distant stars has zero to do with anything happening down here, and (3) Mercury goes into retrograde three times every year, and the world hasn't ended any of those times.

But never mind all that logic and rationality stuff.  This time it's gonna happen.  Blood moons + weird clouds + LHC + Mercury retrograde = really bad shit.  You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that.

In fact, it's better if you're not a scientist at all.

Whole lot o' shakin' going on

To all of my readers in California:  I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you're all gonna die.

I know, I know, I should have told you about this sooner, so you could do something about it, but I didn't even know about it myself until yesterday, and by then it was too late.  I mean, just think if everyone had tried to leave the state yesterday evening.  The traffic would have been worse even than usual, and where would they all have gone?  I mean, it's not like Oregon wants 'em.

If you're wondering what all this is about, I'm referring, of course, to the fact that California is going to be destroyed by an earthquake today.  9.8 on the Richter scale, no less, and caused by the alignment of Mercury and Venus, or something.  Scary shit.

How do I know this?  Well, there's this article in IN5D Esoteric Metaphysical Spiritual Database, which as authoritative sources go, is pretty much unimpeachable.  In it, we learn that Nostradamus predicted this, and since Nostradamus's predictions have proven as accurate as you'd expect given that they're the ravings of an apparently insane man who did most of his writing after a bad acid trip, we should all sit up and pay attention.  Here, according to IN5D, is the quatrain in question:

Le tremblement si fort au mois de may,
Saturne, Caper, Jupiter, Mercure au boeuf:
Vénus aussi, Cancer, Mars, en Nonnay,
Tombera gresle lors plus grosse qu’un oeuf. 

English translation: 

The trembling so hard in the month of may,
Saturn, Capricorn, Jupiter, Mercury in Taurus:
Venus also, Cancer, Mars, in Virgo,
Hail will fall larger than an egg.

The site goes on to clarify:

On May 28, 2015 towards the end of the day UTC time, and continuing on May 29, there will be a series of very critical planetary alignments whereby Venus and Mercury are really being charged up on the North-Amerca [sic] / Pacific side.

Wow.  Pretty scientific.  Bad things happen when Venus and Mercury get "really charged up."  Time to get outta Dodge, apparently, not to mention Los Angeles.

Okay, astronomer Phil Plait says we should all calm down.  In his wonderful column Bad Astronomy in the magazine Slate, he says:

First, there is simply no way an alignment of planets can cause an earthquake on Earth. It’s literally impossible. I’ve done the math on this before; the maximum combined gravity of all the planets under ideal conditions is still far less than the gravitational influence of the Moon on the Earth, and the Moon at very best has an extremely weak influence on earthquakes. 

To put a number on it, because the Moon is so close to us its gravitational pull is 50 times stronger than all the planets in the solar system combined. Remember too that the Moon orbits the Earth on an ellipse, so it gets closer and farther from us every two weeks. The change in its gravity over that time is still more than all the planets combined, yet we don’t see catastrophic earthquakes twice a month, let alone aligning with the Moon’s phases or physical location in its orbit.

He goes on to say that Mercury and Venus aren't aligning anyhow, at least not the way the prediction claims (I mean, they're always aligned with something; two objects always fall on a straight line, as hath been revealed unto us in the prophecies of Euclid, and said line includes an infinite number of other points).  So the whole thing is pretty much a non-starter.

This hasn't stopped it from being shared around on social media, of course.  It'd be nice if articles like Phil Plait's would get shared around as often as the idiotic one in IN5D, but that, apparently, is not how things work.  People still gravitate toward predictions of doom and destruction, even though said predictions have had an exactly zero success rate.

So my guess is that if you live in California, you have nothing to worry about above and beyond the usual concerns over wildfires, mudslides, droughts, earthquakes, and Kylie Jenner spotting 75 chemtrails in the sky and posting a hysterical claim that they're killing honeybees.

The usual stuff, in other words.

A confluence of bad luck

I don't know if you are aware of this or not, so let me make sure you know: today we are having a full moon that falls on a Friday the 13th, and you know what that means.

Well, it doesn't mean anything, really, except that it's Friday the 13th and the moon is full.  And the latter isn't going to matter where I live because we're in the official upstate New York Cloudy Season (scheduled this year from January 1 till December 31), and the weather forecast says we're under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch all day long.  So the full moon will just have to rise without me watching, because I'm going to be safely inside, attempting not to get struck by lightning.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the coincidence has the woo-woos engaging in a  mini-freak-out, to judge by sites like this one:

Friday the 13th has been a taboo that has been carried for generations.  Usually, Friday the 13th brings many symptoms from fear, anxiety, and panic attacks.  It dates back in Christianity as the 13th guest at the last supper was Judas who betrayed Jesus but also it was also on Friday that Adam and Eve were tempted.  However, identified in a positive sense, is that there are 13 states of the afterlife in the Egyptian philosophies and 13 black cats are a symbolism of femininity. 

But for many 13 has been a very lucky number; people have won lotteries, have had their business change, and even opened businesses during that day.  Therefore, your perception and your thought will drive the root of existence and a full moon always brings endings to prepare for new beginnings.

So, basically, it'll be good if you think it's going to be good, and bad if you think it's going to be bad, bringing the concept of confirmation bias to whole new levels.  "Whatever happens to you that day, you can attribute it to the moon being full on Friday the 13th if you want to!"  Pretty convenient, that.

But add to the mix the fact that Mercury is currently in retrograde, and you have an astrological confluence that might well leave the gullible unwilling to step outside the safety of their houses.

Of course, there's nothing mystical, or even all that interesting, about any of this; whenever you have cyclic occurrences (as all of these are), eventually all of them will line up.  The Mercury-retrograde thing has been going on for twelve weeks, now; it's supposed to end on July 1.  Fridays the 13th occur between one and three times a year, and full moons once a month, so we're bound to see them come together sooner or later.  In fact, the site Universe Today did a piece on how common it was to have a full moon land on Friday the 13th, and it turns out it's way more frequent than you might have guessed.  Counting today, it's happened nine times since 1992, and will happen another six times by 2030, including a highly unusual two full moons on Fridays the 13th in the year 2025.  (I can barely wait to hear what the astrologers have to say about that one.)

So the whole thing is nothing more than an interesting pattern coincidence, and really doesn't tell you anything about what might or might not happen to you today, or whether it will be (for example) a good day to buy a lottery ticket.  (Actually, my considered opinion is that there is no good day to buy a lottery ticket.  I tend to agree with a friend of mine, who says that the lottery is a tax on people who don't understand statistics.)

So anyhow, that's the latest from the astrologers, which turns out to be the usual vague generalities that could apply to anything you want them to.  Myself, I'm not going to worry about it.  On the other hand, if I end up getting struck by lightning today while walking to my car after work, I'll give you my express permission to say "Toldja so" at my funeral.

A planetary pirouette

Well, you know what time it is, at least if you are of an astrological bent.  Me, I had to have it pointed out by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Now that I know, I'm all in a tizzy.

Mercury is in retrograde.  Time to head for the hills.

Of course, the whole thing is a completely natural occurrence that happens because the planets are moving with a different angular velocity than the Earth is.  The phenomenon has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks, and is in fact what gave rise to the name "planet" ("planetes" means "wanderer" in Greek).  The planets are all actually traveling in nice, neat ellipses; the whole thing is a trick of perspective because we're also in motion.  The outer planets go into retrograde when the (faster moving) Earth "overtakes" them in orbit; the inner ones, when they go around the outer curve of their orbit and appear to go into reverse as they curve back in toward the Sun.  (For an excellent discussion of why this happens, with diagrams, go here.)

The apparent retrograde motion of Mars [image courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

So we've moved one step past the astrological silliness of our lives and fates being controlled by the positions of the planets relative to the stars; now we have to factor an optical illusion of backwards motion that isn't even actually happening.

The complete wackiness of this claim is, apparently, not evident to the astrologers, who consider a Mercury retrograde to be a calamity of the first water.  Consider the article that appeared over at Elephant called "13 Ways to Avoid Getting 'Mercury Retrograded,'" wherein we find out that at least we'll have almost a month's worth of excuses for fucking up everything we try:

How Mercury functions in our birth charts explains a great deal about how we formulate ideas and how we share them. It indicates how we make sense of the everyday world we live in. During these three weeks when Mercury is retrograde, our mental faculties are not functioning well; in fact they go on vacation.

When this unique event happens (three times this year), communications of all types go haywire!

Suddenly, normal communication becomes unreliable, filled with misinformation where important data is missing or misunderstood. The passage of information from one person to the other seems to be unintentionally cloudy or confused in some way.

Well, this sounds like the way my life usually is, but that may be because I'm a high school teacher.

Then we hear some guidelines regarding how to avoid the problems implicit in this event, which include:

• Don't argue with your spouse.  My wife will be glad of that one.
• Don't purchase computers or install software.  I'm afraid that's a rule that may have to be broken, because my computer is on its last legs, and I get the Spinning Beachball of Death whenever I expect it to do anything complicated, such as loading a website, scrolling down a page, or typing at a rate of more than three characters per minute.
• Don't make changes to your appearance.  Well, it's not like I was considering dyeing my hair green, or anything, so I think I can manage that one.

Other than that, we have prohibitions against buying new cars, a new home, or starting a new job, all of which I wasn't planning to do in any case.

But then, we find out the much more alarming news that this time, Mercury is traveling retrograde in Pisces.  *gasp of horror*  Think I'm being sarcastic?  You'll be gasping, too, when you read the article called, "The Return of Past Lovers as Mercury Retrogrades in Pisces," wherein we find out the following:

All Mercury retrograde periods tend to stir up people from your past. You'll perhaps run into an old colleague on the street, get a call from a friend you haven't heard from in years or suddenly get an email from someone you met but never fully connected with, many Moons ago. Retrogrades are all about returning, going back to something that we started but never quite finished. And when you factor in the magical Pisces energy, it's all about the return of past lovers.

Whether you're single or attached, you can bet that "the one who got away" will pop up in your mind in the coming weeks. And he/she is probably thinking of you too, perhaps at the exact same moment. Will your lost love call you? Will your amazing lover from last year suddenly reappear with a middle-of-the-night sext? Mercury Retrograde in Pisces will stir your emotions and make you question romantic decisions made long ago. What's done is not necessarily done -- yet.

All of which makes me respond as follows:  AAAAAAUUUUGGGGGHHH *hides under coffee table*

Can I just say that the lion's share of my former romantic entanglements are "former" for a reason?  I actually want what's done to be done.  I'm perfectly happy with my wife, and can think of one former girlfriend, in particular, a call from whom would make me hop the next plane to Madagascar.  Not to imply that I had a knack for dating wackos, exactly; but let's just say when I see those Facebook things that ask you to describe your love life using a book title, the one that always comes to mind is All's Well That Ends Well.

What I find funny about all of this is that the starry-eyed types are wiggling their eyebrows significantly about something that happens for weeks at a time, three times a year.  So, basically, what we have here is a giant blob of confirmation bias, wherein we are encouraged to attribute any weirdness during twelve weeks of 2014 -- almost a quarter of the year -- to the fact that one of the planets appears to be doing a little pirouette in the sky.

Me, I think life is just weird, and it's got bugger-all to do with the stars.  But if any of my former girlfriends thinks that this would be a fine excuse to look me up, allow me to state, for the record, that I have an unlisted phone number and live in Madagascar.  So sorry I missed you.

Cloaked Romulan spacecraft and the strength of Ockham's Razor

It is an inevitable danger of being a self-styled rationalist skeptic that I may not recognize credible evidence for something bizarre when I see it, because I'd already be looking for ways to dismiss it before the dust even settled.

It's a charge that's been levied at me with some regularity.  You don't believe in ghosts, eh?  All of the photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts are just natural anomalies and human senses being fooled?  You wouldn't accept a ghost as real if one bit you on the ass.  How about Bigfoot?  All of the accounts of Bigfoot are fakes?  Seriously?  And the psychics... just because some psychics have turned out to be frauds, you have decided that all of them are?

"Skeptic?  Pfft.  You're just as stuck in your own worldview as the rest of us."

I have to admit that these comments do give me some pause, every time I receive one.  I lean pretty hard on the ECREE principle -- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  But what, then, constitutes "extraordinary" evidence?  Suppose something really, truly paranormal was going on -- would I even recognize it as such?

Take, for example, the claim that's been all over the news -- that NASA released a photo of the planet Mercury that contained the faint image of a giant cloaked spaceship.  (You can read an article about this, and see images, here.)  The individual who found the image, a YouTube poster with the handle "siniXster," states that NASA's STEREO imaging satellite took a photograph of a coronal mass ejection, and that the particles emitted by the CME washed over Mercury -- catching in its wake an object of equal size that was hovering, invisible, nearby.  This disrupted the CME and rendered the object temporarily visible.

"It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," siniXster said in his YouTube video about the image.

Okay.  All Star Trek references aside, my first reaction was, "An invisible spaceship as big as a planet?  Really?"  But then I thought, "Well, I've always said that it was entirely possible that there was life out there in the universe... what if there was a superpowerful alien species, with a giant ship, out near Mercury watching us, and they'd rendered their ship invisible to us using some advanced technology.  Might I just be overdoing the rationalist skeptic thing, and missing something amazing?"

Well, that possibility does exist, and I'd be a pretty poor skeptic if I didn't realize that my perceptual apparatus and brain are just as flawed as the next guy's, and my capacity for such inherent problems with inference as dart-thrower's bias is just as great.  How, then, do I decide for sure if they've stumbled upon something earthshattering?

Besides ECREE, a rule of thumb I tend to trust more often than not is Ockham's Razor; that all other things being equal, the explanation that requires you to make the least ad hoc assumptions is probably the correct one.  In this case, is there a simpler explanation that addresses all of the evidence?

Unfortunately for siniXster and others who think that we're being monitored by the Romulans, the answer is yes.  Russ Howard, head researcher in solar physics at the Naval Research Laboratory provided a nice little explanation of the photograph.  The Mercury-sized object hovering in Mercury's orbit isn't a cloaked spacecraft, Howard says.  Actually... it's Mercury:

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible.  They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day.  Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME.  The remaining light is then enhanced.  When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image.

But... how do I know that this is right?  Am I just trying to be superskeptic here, and leaping at the Official Explanation because it means I don't have to revise my worldview?

Answering that question as honestly as I know how, I think I still have to say "no."  Being a skeptic doesn't mean that you reject paranormal explanations out of hand just because they're paranormal; but it does mean that you have to evaluate the evidence as best you can, and accept the best explanation that's out there on the market.  My frequent critics notwithstanding, I do think I'm open-minded enough that I wouldn't be blind to evidence of something weird should it eventually happen along.  I just don't think that this is it.  Ockham's Razor is a statement about how the universe behaves, and how we can come to understand it; and in my experience, it works pretty damn well, even if it does preclude a huge cloaked Romulan spaceship, which honestly would be kind of cool if it were true.

Ockham's Razor is not a law, however; convoluted and wildly improbable events do occur, and it may well be that there are phenomena out there that lie outside the purview of our conventional scientific explanations.  If this is true, I would love to experience some of them first hand, and I hope that I would be accepting of their veracity despite my preconceived conviction that they don't exist.  Perhaps Mark Twain was right when he said, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."