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 four truly amazing conspiracy theories there that I was unaware of, if by "amazing" you mean "ideas that you would only come up with if you have a single Milk-Dud where most of us have a brain."

First, we have astronomer Paul Cox inadvertently inducing multiple orgasms in the Planet X crowd by making a joke while analyzing a video of the 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.  Nor, apparently, in astronomers having senses of humor.  "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'll bet Paul Cox is currently banging his forehead against the wall and wishing like hell he'd never opened his mouth.

"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, Henrietta Swan Leavitt... 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 third 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 109 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 looking pretty good for a 90-year-old. Here's Mengele during World War II:

So I think can all agree that's 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.

The last entry in our Batshit Crazy Sweepstakes was one that appeared on r/conspiracy almost simultaneously with my being sent the link by my son, who is following in his old man's footsteps in having a nose for sniffing out lunacy.  This one comes our way via the Jerusalem Post, of all places, and is about retired Israeli general Haim Eshed, who for thirty years headed the Israeli Space Security Agency.  During those three decades he appears to have spent his spare time riding on a pogo stick in a room with low ceilings, because now he's claiming that there's a "Galactic Federation" that has been in contact with governments all over the Earth, and the earthlings and the aliens have a jointly-operated base on Mars.

Apparently the Federation is largely benevolent, but they'd prefer it if the inhabitants of the Earth didn't know about them, making Eshed's tell-all a little puzzling.  In fact, Donald Trump was warned off revealing the aliens' presence by the aliens themselves.  The Federation members said they preferred to wait until humans "evolve and reach a stage where we will... understand what space and spaceships are."

I must admit that wanting to wait till humans evolve is reasonable if they've been in contact with Donald Trump.  In fact, after talking to Donald Trump, I'm a little surprised that they didn't just conclude "there's no intelligent life here" and nuke the entire planet.

Eshed's decision to flout the Federation's commands becomes more understandable when you find out that he just released a book, entitled The Universe Beyond the Horizon: Conversations with Professor Haim Eshed.  So Eshed's attitude seems to be "fuck secrecy and stern warnings by the Men In Black when there's money to be made."

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 they're using on Mengele.  I'm hoping I don't have to resort to cannibalism.

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

Thus sayeth the prophecy

I have written daily on this blog for years now, and I still run into crazies that I haven't heard of before.  I guess this isn't that surprising, given that humanity seems to produce an unending supply.  But given the amount of time I spend weekly perusing the world of woo-woo, it always comes as a little bit of a shock when I find a new one.

This week it was John Hogue, who a student of mine asked about, in the context of, "Wait till you see what this loony is saying."  Hogue is a big fan of "Nostradamus," noted 16th century wingnut and erstwhile prophet, who achieved fame for writing literally thousands of quatrains of bizarre predictions.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Hogue believes that just about everything you can think of was predicted by Nostradamus. Let's start with his claim that Nostradamus predicted Saddam Hussein's rise and fall, only (because being a prophet and all, you can't just say things straight out) he called Saddam "Mabus."  How does Hogue know that Saddam is Mabus?  Let's have it in his own words:

Here, for your review are the two core quatrain prophecies about Mabus, the Third Antichrist, indexed 2 Q62 and 8 Q77 in Nostradamus’ prophetic masterpiece Les Propheties, initially published in serialized form between the years 1555 and 1560: 

2 Q62

Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vne horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete. 

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible unraveling of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

8 Q77

L’antechrist trois bien tost annichiliez,
Vingt & sept ans sang durera sa guerre:
Les heretiques morts, captifs, exilez,
Sang corps humain eau rogie gresler terre. 

The Third Antichrist very soon annihilated,
Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last.
The heretics [are] dead, captives exiled,
Blood-soaked human bodies, and a reddened, icy hail covering the earth.

Let us go through the milestones that [show] Saddam... to be candidate number one...
Being a dead candidate is the first and dubious milestone... Saddam was hanged at the 30 December 2006... 

[Saddam's name] can be found in the code name Mabus.  Saddam backwards spells maddas=mabbas=mabas.  Replace one redundant a and you get Mabus. 

Or if you don't like that solution, maybe Mabus is Osama bin Laden, whom Hogue refers to as "Usama" for reasons that become obvious pretty quickly:

Usama mixed around get [sic] us maaus.  Take the b from bin Laden. Replace the redundant a and you get Mabus.

If you take my first name, Gordon, and rearrange it, you get "drogon."  Replace the "o" with an "a," because after all there are two "o"s anyway, and you clearly don't need both of them.  You can get the "a" from the leftover one Hogue had by removing the redundant "a" in "maaus."  Then you get "dragon."  If you take my middle name (Paul) and my last name, and rearrange the letters, you get "a noble punt."

So this clearly means that a dragon is about to attack the United States, but I'm going to kick its ass.

Basically, if you take passages at random, and mess around with them, and there are no rules about how you do this, you can prove whatever you want.  Plus, all of the "prophecies" that Nostradamus wrote are vague and weird enough without any linguistic origami to help you out.  They make obscure historical and mythical allusions that, if you're a little creative, can be interpreted to mean damn near anything. Here's one I picked at random (Century X, Quatrain 71):

The earth and air will freeze a very great sea,
When they will come to venerate Thursday:
That which will be, never was it so fair,
From the four parts they will come to honor it.

What does that mean?  Beats the hell out of me.  I'm guessing that you could apply it to a variety of situations, as long as you were willing to interpret it loosely and let the images stand for whatever you want them to.  Me, I think it has to do with the upcoming apocalypse on October 21.  Oh, and that climate change is a lie, because the sea is going to freeze.  I'm sure that the Planet Nibiru and global conspiracies are somehow involved, too.

What I find amazing is that there are literally thousands of websites, books, and films out there that claim to give the correct interpretation of Nostradamus' wacky poetry.  Some of them take a religious bent, and try to tie them into scripture, especially the Book of Revelation; some try to link them to historical events, an especially popular one being World War II; others, even further off the deep end, try to use them to predict future catastrophes.  These last at least put the writers on safer ground, because you can't accuse someone being wrong if they're using arcane poetry to make guesses about things that haven't happened yet.

In any case, I'm doubtful that Nostradamus knew anything about Saddam Hussein, any more than he predicted World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of JFK, or any of the hundreds of other things he's alleged to have forecast.  All we have here is once again, people taking vague language and jamming it into the mold of their own preconceived notions of what it means.  About John Hogue himself, I'm reminded of the words of the Roman writer Cicero, who said, "I don't know how two augurs can look each other in the face while passing in the street without laughing out loud."

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 problem with Seymour

A few months ago, I made the point that the fallacy called appeal to authority is not as simple as it sounds.

On the surface, it's about not trusting authorities and public figures simply because they're well-known names.  You can convince anyone of anything, seemingly, if you append the words "Albert Einstein said so" after your claim; it's the reason I fight every year in my intro neuroscience class with the spurious claim that humans use only 10% of their brains.  You see this idea attributed to Einstein all the time -- although it's unlikely that he ever said such a thing, adding "apocryphal quotes" as another layer of fallacy to this claim, and the claim itself is demonstrably false.

The problem is, of course, there are some areas where Einstein was an expert.  Adding "Einstein said so" to a discussion of general relativity is pretty persuasive, given that relativity has passed every scientific test it's been put through.  But notice the difference; we're not accepting relativity because a respect physicist thought it was true.  Said respected physicist's ideas still had to be vetted, retested, and peer-reviewed.  It's the vindication of his theories that conferred credibility on his name, not the other way around.

The situation becomes even blurrier when you have someone whose work in a particular field starts out valid and evidence-based, and then at some point veers off into wild speculation.  This is the core of the problem with an appeal to authority; someone having one or two right ideas in the past is no insurance against his/her being wildly wrong later.

This is the situation we find ourselves in with Seymour Hersh.  Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist whose work on exposing the truth about the My Lai Massacre and the torture of prisoners of war by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib was groundbreaking.  His dogged determination to get at the facts, even at the cost of embarrassing the American government and damaging the reputation of the U.S. overseas, earned him a well-deserved name as one of the giants of journalism.

Seymour Hersh [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, Hersh seems to have gone badly off the rails lately.  His latest piece, which he's pursuing with the tenacity of a bloodhound, is about the claim that the public version of the death of Osama bin Laden is a complete fabrication -- that the United States had captured bin Laden all the way back in 2006, and with help from the Saudis was using him as leverage against al Qaeda.  When his usefulness began to wane, they had him killed and then faked a raid against his compound in Abbottabad, then made public the story of the brave soldiers who'd risked their lives to take down a wanted terrorist.

The problem is, as is described in more detail in an article in Vox, the claim is supported by little in the way of evidence.  Hersh's two sources admittedly have no direct knowledge of what happened.  The story itself is fraught with self-contradictions and inconsistencies.  And then, to make matters worse, Hersh has recently begun to claim that the United States government has been infiltrated by members of Opus Dei (a Roman Catholic spiritual organization made famous, or infamous, by The DaVinci Code), that the chemical weapons attacks in Syria were "false flags" staged by the Turkish government, and that the U.S. is training Iranian terrorists in Nevada.

None of these, apparently, have any evidential support beyond "an anonymous source told me."  Hersh, seemingly, has slipped from being a hard-hitting investigative reporter to a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.

He's not backing down, however.  He granted an interview to Slate in which he reiterated everything he's said.  He seems to spend equal time during the interview defending himself without introducing any further facts, and disparaging the interviewer, journalist Isaac Chotiner.  "What difference does it make what the fuck I think about journalism?" Hersh asked Chotiner.  "I don’t think much of the journalism that I see.  If you think I write stories where it is all right to just be good enough, are you kidding?  You think I have a cavalier attitude on throwing stuff out?  Are you kidding?  I am not cavalier about what I do for a living."

And only a moment earlier, when asked a question he didn't like, he said to Chotiner, "Oh poor you, you don’t know anything.  It is amazing you can speak the God’s English."

This is a vivid, and rather sad, example of why a person's reputation isn't sufficient to establish the veracity of their claims.  No one -- including both Albert Einstein and Seymour Hersh -- have the right to rest on their laurels, to expect people to believe something just because they've appended their name to it.

Claims stand or fall on the basis of one thing; the evidence.  And what Hersh has brought forth thus far is of such poor quality that about the only one he's convincing is Alex Jones.