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."

A trio of straw men

I had three interactions in the last 24 hours that left me wanting to bang my forehead against the wall.

I was going to call them "conversations," but "conversation" implies "exchange of ideas," which is not what this was.  This was more "one person ranting at the other, followed by the target of this rant trying unsuccessfully to find some way of responding other than shouting 'Are you a moron?  Or what?'"

The common thread in all of them was the straw-man fallacy -- mischaracterizing an argument, and then arguing against that mischaracterization.  Honestly, it's a way of saying "ha ha, I win" without doing the hard work of finding out what your opponent actually believes.

The first of these interactions was over a piece I posted here at Skeptophilia a while back on the evolution of bills designed to block the teaching of evolution.  I thought the academic paper I was writing about was absolutely brilliant, but evidently not everyone does, because I received the following comment:

I don't understand how anyone can believe in the fairy tale of evolution.  You honestly expect us to believe that one animal can just morph into another by magic?  It's so easy for you to believe that a chihuahua would become a race of large sea creatures?

 So against my better judgment, I actually responded.  The whole time, my brain was shouting at me, "You doofus.  Why are you bothering?  What do you think you're going to accomplish?"  But I wouldn't listen to me.  So I wrote:

Of course evolutionists don't think chihuahuas turned into orcas.  The very fact that you can't come up with an actual example of what evolutionists are saying indicates that you're not really all that interested in the discussion, you're just looking for an opportunity to make foolish statements and then pretend you've won the argument.

He then did something kind of sneaky; he set out bait for me.

Okay, then, tell me something evolutionists do believe.

And like an idiot, I fell for it.

I responded:

Here's just one example.  Birds are clearly descended from dinosaurs, especially the deinonychid dinosaurs (including the famous Velociraptor).  They show a lot of homologous bone structure -- and in fact, some members of this dinosaur group had feathers.  Recent protein sequencing of soft tissue preserved in dinosaur bones has also supported a close relationship to modern birds.

And he responded:

Oh, okay.  So it's not chihuahuas morphing into orcas, it's a T-rex morphing into a hummingbird.  That makes so much more sense.

So I gave up...

... only to get caught again shortly thereafter by someone who posted the following image on Twitter:

And not having learned from what had happened only two hours earlier, I responded:

So the fact that they were also both crazy homicidal dictators had nothing whatsoever to do with it?

At which point the original poster called me a "sheeple," which in my opinion is a word whose use should immediately disqualify you from rational discourse in a public forum for a year, unless in that time you can show evidence of your successful completion of a college-level logic course.

But since I never make the same mistake twice -- I make it five or six times, just to be sure -- I then got into a snarl with a Facebook friend who posted an article saying that all of the polls are wrong, that Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide.  By this time I was completely fed up with counterfactual nonsense, and I said, "How can making up reality as you go along be comforting to you?"

She immediately unfriended me, which I guess I deserved, if not for the message, for the snarky way I said it.

So apparently, I'll never learn.  Not only does engaging in arguments on the internet piss off all of the participants, it's completely futile.  And trying to reason with someone who didn't come to their conclusion using rational evidence is a losing proposition right from the get-go.  It reminds me of the quote -- attributed to several different sources -- "You can't logic yourself out of a position you didn't logic yourself into."  Or, as Thomas Paine put it, "To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

Stargates in my inbox

I get the weirdest emails sometimes.

I suppose it comes with the territory, given some of the stuff I blog about.  The problem is, not knowing anything about perhaps 80% of the people who email me with responses or comments, I often can't tell if the person was serious or not.

This leaves me in the awkward position of not being able to determine if an individual who has my email address is insane.  Take, for example, the email I got yesterday, from someone who signed it only as "A Devoted Reader:"

Dear Skeptophilia: 

Sometimes I like what you write but sometimes it just makes me mad.  Because I think you are determined not to see whats [sic] right under your nose.  I'm not calling it paranormal because that makes it sound made-up, infact [sic] it's science it's just science we humans don't know anything about.  That doesn't mean it's not real and there could be other civilizations that have that information and might be willing to share it with us if we would pull our heads out of the sand. 

Here are two websites that will hopefully make you think.  Keep an open mind when you read them and stop thinking that skeptic means a person who disbelieves everything and makes fun of what they don't understand. 

A Devoted Reader

The two websites turned out to be called "Saddam or Stargate?  What is Task Force 20's Main Objective?" and "2014 War for Men's Souls."   And I was going to say that these two websites read like a script for a movie on the Syfy channel, but that isn't entirely correct, because movies on the Syfy channel at least have to have some kind of plot.

Whereas these two websites make the random ravings of Alex Jones sound like a pinnacle of rationality.  Here are a couple of selections from "Saddam or Stargate?":

Imagine this scenario.  The U.S. government obtains intelligence that hidden somewhere in central Iraq is an actual stargate, placed there by the Anunnaki 'gods' of ancient Sumeria...  In this scenario, when Nibiru is closest to Earth, the Anunnaki will "take the opportunity to travel to Earth through that same stargate and will set up their encampment in Iraq." 

With time running out, President Bush invades Iraq.  American scientists raid the (Iraqi national) museum and close the stargate, thus frustrating the grandiose ambitions of the self-styled reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, Saddam Hussein, and making the world safe for the New World Order. 

Is this the sequel to the movie Stargate?  Is it a new episode of the TV series?  Is it a new Star Trek movie?  No, it is none of these.  According to Dr. Michael Salla, it is probably exactly what happened!

Probably exactly!  Spoken like a true scientist, Dr. Salla.  "We're probably almost kind of exactly sort of sure.  Maybe."

How do we know all of this for kind of definitely certain?  Our evidence includes seeing a soldier with wacky sunglasses in Baghdad:

As a U.S. soldier peered out of a passing tank, a young engineering student and a retired accountant contemplated one of the more common questions on the streets of Baghdad: Did the soldier's wraparound sunglasses give him X-ray vision? 

"With those sunglasses, he can definitely see through women's clothes," said the engineering student, Samer Hamid.  "It makes me angry. We are afraid to take our families out on the street."

So soldier with funny sunglasses = x-ray vision = being able to see what we look like naked = Saddam Hussein was in contact with aliens who gave him a magic stargate.

I can't see any flaw in the argument there, can you?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that website reads like a treatise on formal logic when compared to the other one.  A brief passage will suffice:

Some orbs appear to be the manifestation of the human soul after we die; only visible to ultraviolet and infrared non-filtered cameras.  To days [sic] cameras pick them up because it is much cheaper to manufacture them without such filters.  This is why both UFOs (who the ancients said were “spirit” gods who could take human form-cloaked in the UV and IR) and ghosts can be captured by today’s technology, when not visible to the human eye.  The ancient Mesopotamia bible spoke of both spirits and the soul.  Nearly every ancient civilization makes reference to the soul; Egypt built a technological civilization around them.  They were quite obviously doing something with high voltage; Tesla coils and particle accelerators, to harness and launch the soul.  From the Zoroastrians, to Mesopotamia, even the Maya and pre-Columbians, all had this knowledge.

So there you are, then.  And I don't know about you, but having my soul launched by a particle accelerator seems like a cool idea.  I'd go for that as a sendoff when I die, except that I'd pretty much already decided that I want a Viking funeral.  Lay my body out on my canoe, set it on fire, and shove it out into my pond, and then all of my friends and family throw a huge party with lots of alcohol and music and debauchery.  More fun than your typical church funeral, don't you think?

But I digress.

I live in hope that the people who send me these emails aren't serious, but I fear that this one was.  It seemed awfully... sincere.  And to A Devoted Reader, a personal message:  I tried to keep my mind open, I honestly did.  But I still don't believe in stargates and Annunaki and spirit orbs and so on.  I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool if this stuff existed; hell, I'd love it if Bigfoot and aliens and so on were real.  But I'm just not seeing it.

So thanks for the emails, and do keep them coming, even though some of them make me a little worried that you people might know where I live.  Toward that end, allow me to mention, offhand and in-passing-like, that I recently moved to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mauritania.  The view is lovely, and it even has wifi.  Drop by to visit any time.