The echoes of Carrhae

Back on the ninth of June, 53 B.C.E., seven legions of Roman heavy infantry were lured into the desert near the town of Carrhae (now Harran, Turkey) by what appeared to be a small retreating force of Parthian soldiers.  It was a trap, and the leader of the Roman forces, Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was one-third of the First Triumvirate, along with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great) fell for it.  Well-armed and highly mobile Parthian horsemen swept down and kicked some legionnaire ass.  Just about all of the Roman soldiers were either captured or killed, and Crassus himself was executed -- in some accounts, by having molten gold poured down his throat.

Not the way I would choose to make my exit.  Yeowch.

A bust thought to be of the unfortunate Marcus Licinius Crassus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sergey Sosnovskiy, Bust of a Roman, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In any case, very few soldiers from Crassus's seven legions made it back to Italy.  They didn't all die, though, so what happened to the survivors?

This is where it gets interesting -- not only because historical mysteries are intrinsically intriguing, but as another example of "please don't believe whatever you see on the internet, and more importantly don't repost it without checking it for accuracy."

The Battle of Carrhae comes up because a couple of days ago I got one of those "sponsored" posts on Facebook that are largely clickbait based on what stuff you've shared or liked in the past.  With my interest in archaeology and history, I get a lot of links of the type, "Archaeologists don't want you to find out about this ONE WEIRD HISTORICAL FACT," as if actual researchers just hate it when people hear about what they're researching and love nothing better than keeping all of their findings secret from everyone.

In any case, the claim of this particular post was that the survivors of the Battle of Carrhae were absorbed into the Parthian Empire (plausible), but never were accepted there so decided after a while to up stakes and move east (possible), where they eventually made their way to northwestern China (hmmm...) and there's a place called Liqian where their descendants settled.  These guys were recruited by the Chinese as mercenaries to fight against the Xiongnu in 36 B.C.E., and when the Xiongnu were roundly defeated the grateful Chinese Emperor allowed the Romans to stay there permanently.

This idea was championed by historian Homer Dubs, professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, who as part of his argument claimed that the "fish-scale formation" used by the Chinese army against the Xiongnu had been copied from the Roman "testudo formation" -- a move where legions go forward with their shields overlapping to prevent spears and arrows from their opponents from striking home.  The Romans had taught the Chinese a new tactic, Dubs said, and that's how they won the battle.

So far, I have no problem with any of this.  There's nothing wrong with researchers making claims, even far-fetched ones; that's largely how scientific inquiry progresses, with someone saying, essentially, "Hey, here's how I think this works," and all his/her colleagues trying their best to punch holes in the claim.  If the claim stands up to the tests of evidence and logic, then we have a working model of the phenomenon in question.

But the link I got on social media pretty much stopped with, "Hey, some Romans ended up in China, isn't that cool?"  There was no mention of the fact that (1) Dubs made his claim in 1941; (2) because there has never been a single Roman artifact -- not one -- found near Liqian, just about all archaeologists and historians think Dubs was wrong; and (3) a genetic test of a large sample of people around Liqian found not the slightest trace of European ancestry.  Everyone there, apparently, is mostly of Han Chinese descent, just as you'd expect.

And the genetic tests that conclusively put Dubs's claim to rest were conducted seventeen years ago.

Look, it's not that I don't get clickbait.  These sites like "Amazing Facts From History" exist to get people to click on them, boosting their numbers and therefore their ad revenue, irrespective of whether anything they're claiming is true.  In other words, if they can get you to click on it, they win.

But what I don't understand is the number of people who shared the link -- over five thousand, at the point I saw it -- and appended comments like, "This is so interesting!" and "History is so fascinating!", apparently uncritically accepting what the site claimed without doing what I did, a (literally) two-minute read of Wikipedia that brought me to the paper from The Journal of Human Genetics I linked above.  Not a single one of the hundreds of commenters said, "But this isn't true, and we've known it's not true for almost two decades."

I can almost hear the objections.  What's the harm of believing an odd claim about ancient history, even if the (very strong) evidence is that it's false?  To me, there is actual harm in it; it establishes a habit of credulity, of accepting what sounds cool or fun or weird or interesting without any apparent consideration of whether or not it's true.  Sure, there's no immediate problem with believing Roman soldiers settled in China.

But when you start applying that same lack of critical thinking to matters of your health, the environment, or politics, the damage accrues awfully fast.

So please do some fact-checking before you share.  Apply skepticism to what you see online -- even if (or maybe, especially if) what you're considering sharing conforms to your preconceived notions about how things work.  We can all fall prey to confirmation bias, and these days, with the prevalence of clickbait sites run by folks who don't give a rat's ass if what they post is real or not, it's an increasing problem.

Check before you share.  It's that simple.

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Hair apparent

One of the most frustrating things about being a skeptic is that you're never truly done putting nonsense to rest.

And I'm not even talking about nonsense in general.  Of course, humans will continue to come up with goofy ideas.  It's kind of our raison d'être.  I'm talking about specific pieces of nonsense that, no matter how thoroughly or how often they're debunked, refuse to die.

We saw one example of that last week -- the ridiculous "your name's deep meaning" generators -- but there are plenty of others.  And just yesterday, I ran into one of the most persistent.  I've seen various forms of it for years, but this time, it took the form of a jpg with a photograph of a young, handsome, long-haired (presumably) Native American man gazing soulfully out at us, and the following text, which I've shortened for brevity's sake:

This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Vietnam War.

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hairstyle is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue.  Back in the Vietnam War however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical Hospital.  He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Vietnam.

Sally said, ”I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government.  He was in shock from the contents.  What he read in those documents completely changed his life.  From that moment on my conservative husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again.  What is more, the VA Medical Center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.  As I read the documents, I learned why.  It seems that during the Vietnam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain.  They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities.  Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious causalities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ’sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ’sixth sense’, their ’intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ’read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas.  Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests.  They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut.  Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores.  Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores...

So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long.”

The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years.  Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural.  Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive.  Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole.  The body has a reason for every part of itself. 

 Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ’feelers’ or ’antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment.  This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out.

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems.  It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds.  It contributes to sexual frustration.

In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error.  It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.

The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us.  When Delilah cut Sampson’s hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.

Well.  Let's take a closer look at this esoteric information hidden since the Vietnam War that is so incredibly top-secret and arcane that you'd only find it if you did a fifteen-second Google search for "the truth about long hair."

First, the alleged controlled experiments using Native trackers in the military never happened.  F. Lee Reynolds, of the United States Army Center for Military History, was asked to look into the claim and see if there was anything to it, and responded that the story was "pure mythology." 

The whole thing apparently didn't originate anywhere even remotely military.  It was dreamed up in toto in 2010 by one David "Avocado" Wolfe, an American conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, alt-med proponent, and raw food advocate, who is also noted for saying that "gravity is a toxin" and that "water would levitate right off the Earth if the oceans weren't salty" and that solar panels drain the Sun's power.

So we're not exactly talking about someone with a shit tonne of credibility, here.

There's no doubt that in a lot of cultures, men wear their hair long, and forcing them to cut it can cause some distress, but it has nothing to do with stopping them from "receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment."  If this was true, bald people would be significantly stupider than people with full heads of hair, and all you have to do is compare John Fetterman (bald) with Marjorie Taylor Greene (full head of hair) to see this can't be true, because you will find that Fetterman is a pretty smart guy while Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to have the IQ of a PopTart.  

Hair does increase your skin sensitivity some, but it is not an "extension of the nervous system," much less "exteriorized nerves."  Hair is made of strands of keratin -- i.e., not living cells.  Can you imagine how much getting a haircut would hurt if it was actually living tissue?

And if anecdotal evidence counts for anything, I can vouch first-hand for the fact that long hair does diddly-squat for your perceptivity.  I've had long hair during three periods in my life -- like, down to the middle of my back -- and I can state authoritatively that during those times, I was not receiving magical signals from the Earth Spirits or whatnot, nor was my rather abysmal sense of direction any better than usual.  Mostly what it turned out to be was a confounded nuisance, because my hair is really thick and gets curly when it's long, so in even a mild breeze I ended up looking like this guy:

Well, I have better teeth than he does.

I now have my hair really short, which is far more comfortable when it's hot, and I haven't noticed any significant impairment of my spatial awareness.

Oh, and Kirlian photography is not picking up "electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain."  It's a photograph of the static electrical discharge emitted by an object when you place it in contact with a high-voltage source.  You can take a Kirlian photograph of a dead leaf, and last time I checked, dead leaves (1) are unable to send and receive transmissions from the environment, (2) have very poor tracking skills, and (3) don't have hair.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So the whole thing is kind of a non-starter.

Anyhow, the claim is patently absurd, but that hasn't stopped it from circulating, and (like the fake name meaning generators) seems to be coming around once again.  It'd be really nice if you see it posted somewhere, you'd send them a link to this post, or at least respond "This is bullshit" (feel free to reword if that's a bit harsh for you).  I don't know if my feeble efforts to stop the flow of nonsense online will do much good, but you do what you can.

Even if you're all "numbed out" from wearing your hair short.

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Free speech vs. the truth

There are times when my uncompromising support of the right to free speech runs head-first into my uncompromising commitment to the truth.

The topic comes up because once a week, I volunteer as a book sorter for the Tompkins County (Ithaca, New York) Friends of the Library Used Book Sale.  This event, which occurs twice a year (May and October), is one of the biggest used book sales in the United States; we sort, shelve, and sell around a half a million used books yearly.

Besides my desire to help the very worthwhile cause of supporting our local library system, I also volunteer for a purely selfish reason; if I put in thirty hours, I get to go to the volunteers' presale and have first crack at the books.  The fall presale is coming up on October 1, and I still haven't gotten through all the books I bought at the spring sale.  

This fact, of course, won't slow me down a bit.

The problem with being a sorter, though, is that sometimes we have to sort (and therefore offer for sale) books that are kind of... out there.  And I don't mean weird.  Weird is fine.  This week, for example, I put in the "Physical Sciences" section a three-volume hardcover set called The Biochemistry of Collagen.  I mean, I know collagen is important, but three volumes' worth?  (Other good examples I saw recently are Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself, The Official Spam Recipe Book, and Successful Muskrat Farming.)

So bizarre isn't problematic.  What bothers me is how to handle books that are, to put not too fine a point on it, bullshit.  For example, what to do with the book I ended up with this week -- Hyemeyohsts Storm's infamous Seven Arrows.  Storm claimed to be Cheyenne, but actually is of German ancestry.  His book is supposedly about Cheyenne history and tribal beliefs, but is a mishmash of maybe five percent facts and the other ninety-five percent made-up gobbledygook.  When his book came out, naturally someone asked the Cheyenne Tribal Authority about him, and they said they'd never heard of him -- and it turned out that Storm (his actual name is Arthur Charles) had presented a falsified tribal enrollment to his publisher to convince them he actually is Native.  As far as his book, the Cheyenne consider it "blasphemous, exploitative, disrespectful, stereotypical, and racist."

So, where do I sort Seven Arrows?  Anthropology?  It isn't.  Religion?  Maybe what Storm wrote reflects his own religious beliefs; and given the popularity of the book with New Age types, evidently he's convinced quite a few folks to join in.  Fiction?  Much like Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books, he didn't publish it as fiction.  Both men (well, for Castaneda, until his death in 1998) acted as if what they'd written was nothing more than the literal truth, which makes the books the absolute worst sort of cultural appropriation -- attractive lies dressed up as a real, if esoteric, indigenous belief system.

And there are loads of people who do think it's all factual.  Apparently both Storm's book and Castaneda's multiple volumes are still used as teaching texts in college anthropology and ethnology courses, which I find absolutely appalling given how thoroughly both authors have been debunked.

Anyhow, when the actual book was in my hands, I was really troubled about what to do with it.  I'm not allowed to do what I wanted, which was to drop it in the trash where it belongs.  I eventually decided to put it in "Religion" because it seemed the closest, but honestly, I felt guilty even doing that.  I don't want anyone reading this book and having even the slightest inclination to believe it.

What about Laurel Rose Willson's book Satan's Underground, supposedly a true account about her being subjected to ritual abuse as a child in a Satanic cult, but later proven to be a complete fabrication?  (Willson herself later switched gears and wrote a different book, under an assumed name, claiming -- also falsely -- that she was a Holocaust survivor.)  Or The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa (actual name: Cyril Henry Hoskin) which purported to be the real experiences of someone growing up in a Tibetan monastery -- when the real Rampa/Hoskin was actually an unemployed plumber from Plympton, England who had never been to Tibet in his life?

What about books on homeopathy, claiming you can treat your illnesses using "remedies" that have been diluted past Avogadro's Limit?  Or ones claiming you can fix your health if you consume lots of vinegar -- or only foods that are alkaline?  (Presumably not at the same time.)  Or pretty much anything by Joseph Mercola, Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, or Dr. Oz?

And that's not even getting into the political stuff.

I know that the principle of caveat emptor applies here; if people are ignorant or self-deluded enough to believe this nonsense, especially given how much information there is online debunking it, then they deserve to be bamboozled.  As P. T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute," and the unspoken corollary was that suckers deserve everything they get.  And the principle of free speech should also apply, right?

But.

I don't want to be part of it, you know?  I don't want people reading Seven Arrows and the Don Juan books and Satan's Underground, at least not without knowing what the real story is.  (I actually own the first four Don Juan books -- but next to them on the bookshelf are Richard de Mille's The Don Juan Papers and Castaneda's Journey, the most comprehensive takedown of Castaneda's fraud I've seen.)

But at the same time, how is surreptitiously throwing them in the trash when they cross my path at the book sale any different from the book bans and book burnings I've so often railed against?

Gah.  Ethical questions like this are beyond me.  Where's Chidi Anagonye when you need him?

So far, I've been a Good Guy and haven't thrown away a book because I think it's bullshit.  I won't say I haven't been tempted, but as of right now I've sided with free speech and P. T. Barnum, as well as the Friends of the Library rules for volunteers.  I won't say it hasn't been without some pangs to my moral sensibilities, though.

Anyhow, those are the ethical conundrums faced by a book sorter.  Fortunately, most of the books I handle are unproblematic.  Even if The Official Spam Recipe Book makes me gag a little, I have a clear conscience about putting it in "Cookbooks."

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Tall tales of Don Juan

I was chatting with a friend about mystical claims a few days ago, and the subject of Carlos Castaneda came up.  He'd heard of Castaneda -- unsurprisingly given the man's fame -- but didn't know about the controversy surrounding Castaneda's writing.  It was a bit of a slow news day, so I thought it might be time to repost this piece I wrote in 2017 about the topic, especially given that Castaneda's works are still selling like crazy and are presented as factual, not just in fringe groups but in many serious college classes.

And as another brief aside: if you haven't already done so, check out (and subscribe to!) the Skeptophilia YouTube channel!  New content uploaded every week!

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When I was in eleventh grade, I took a semester-long class called Introduction to Psychology.  The teacher was Dr. Loren Farmer -- I never found out if he actually had a Ph.D., or if people simple called him "Dr." Farmer because of the air of erudition he had.

The class was taught in an unorthodox fashion, to say the least.  Dr. Farmer was pretty counterculture, especially considering that this was Louisiana in the 1970s.  He stood on no ceremony at all; we were allowed to sit wherever we liked (my favorite perch was on a wide bookcase by the window), and class was more of a free-roaming discussion than it was the usual chalk/talk typical of high school back then.  Even his tests were odd; we had a choice on his final exam of ten or so short-answer/essay questions from which we were to answer seven, and I recall that one of them was "Draw and interpret three mandalas."  (I elected not to do this one.  My talent for slinging the arcane-sounding bullshit was and is highly developed, but my artistic ability pretty much stalled out in third grade, and I didn't think I could pull that one off.)

Some time around the middle of the semester, he instructed us to go buy a copy of a book that would be assigned reading over the following few weeks.  The book was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda.  I had never heard of it, but I dutifully purchased the book.

I was nothing short of astonished when it turned out to be about the use of hallucinogenic drugs.  Castaneda tells the story of his apprenticeship to Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui native from Mexico, wherein he was given peyote, Psilocybe mushrooms, and Datura (Jimson weed), inducing wild visions that Don Juan said weren't hallucinations; they were glimpses of an "alternate reality" that sorcerers could use to gain power and knowledge.  Castaneda starts out doubtful, but eventually goes all-in -- and in fact, wrote one sequel after another describing his journey deeper and deeper into the world of the brujo.

I was captivated by Castaneda's story.  I read the sequel to Teachings, A Separate Reality.  The third one, Journey to Ixtlan, was even better.  Then I got to the fourth one, Tales of Power, and I began to go, "Hmmm."  Something about the story seemed off to me, as if he'd gone from recounting his real experiences to simply making shit up.  I made it through book five, The Second Ring of Power, and the feeling intensified.  About two chapters into book six, The Eagle's Gift, I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

But something about the stories continued to fascinate me.  The best parts -- especially his terrifying vision of a bridge to another world in the fog at night in A Separate Reality, and his witnessing a battle of power in Journey to Ixtlan -- have a mythic quality that is compelling.  But the sense that even apart from any supernatural aspects, which I predictably don't buy, the books were the product of a guy trying to pull a fast one on his readers left me simultaneously angry and disgusted.

I discovered that I'm not alone in that reaction. Richard de Mille (son of Cecil), an anthropologist and writer, wrote a pair of analyses of Castaneda's books, Castaneda's Journey and The Don Juan Papers, that I just finished reading a few days ago, explaining my resurgence of interest in the subject.  De Mille pounced on something that had been in the back of my mind ever since reading Journey to Ixtlan -- that it would be instructive to compare the timeline of the first three books, as Ixtlan overlaps the years covered by the first two, Teachings and A Separate Reality.

And what de Mille found is that the books are full of subtle internal contradictions that one would never discover without doing what he did, which is to lay out all of the carefully-dated supposed journal entries Castaneda gives us in the first three books.  Among the more glaring errors is that Castaneda is introduced for the first time to a major character, the brujo Don Genaro, twice -- over five years apart.  Also separated by years are events in which Castaneda saw (the word in italics is used by Castaneda to describe a mystical sort of vision in which everything looks different -- humans, for instance, look like bundles of fibers made of light) and in which Don Juan tells his apprentice "you still have never seen."

Worse still is the fact that Ixtlan recounts a dozen or so mind-blowing experiences that allegedly occurred during the same time period as Teachings -- and yet which Castaneda didn't think were important enough to include in his first account.  Add to that the point de Mille makes in The Don Juan Papers that not only do the Yaqui not make use of hallucinogens in their rituals, Don Juan himself never tells Castaneda a single Yaqui name -- not one -- for any plant, animal, place, or thing they see.  Then there's the difficulty pointed out by anthropologist Hans Sebald, of Arizona State University, that Castaneda claims he and Don Juan went blithely wandering around in the Sonoran desert in midsummer, often with little in the way of food or water, never once making mention any discomfort from temperatures that would have hovered around 110 F at midday.

The conclusion of de Mille and others is that Castaneda made the whole thing up from start to finish, and the books are the combination of scraps of esoteric lore he'd picked up in the library at UCLA and his own imagination.  There was no Don Juan, no Don Genaro, no glow-in-the-dark coyote that spoke to the author at the end of Ixtlan.  Distressing, then, that de Mille's rebuttals -- which were published in 1976 and 1980, respectively -- didn't stop Castaneda from amassing a huge, and devoted, following. He founded a cult called "Tensegrity" which alleged to teach the acolyte the secrets of how to see Don Juan's alternate reality. He surrounded himself with a group of women called "the nagual women" (unkinder observers called them the "five witches") who did his bidding -- Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Patricia Partin, Amalia Marquez, and Kylie Lundahl -- all of whom vanished shortly after Castaneda died of liver cancer in 1998.  There's been no trace discovered of any of them except for Partin, whose skeleton was discovered in Death Valley in 2006, but it's thought that all five committed suicide after their leader died.

So what began as a hoax ended up as a dangerous cult. Castaneda seems to have started the story as a way of pulling the wool over the eyes of his advisers in the anthropology department at UCLA (it worked, given that Journey to Ixtlan is essentially identical to his doctoral dissertation), but as so often happens, fame went to his head and he moved from telling tall tales about an alleged Yaqui shaman to using the people who bought into his philosophy as a way to get money, sex, and power.

And it can be imagined how pissed off this makes actual Native Americans.  Castaneda hijacked and mangled their beliefs into something unrecognizable -- placing his books in with Seven Arrows as yet another way that non-Natives have appropriated and misrepresented Native culture.  (If you've not heard about Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts Storm, it's a mystical mishmash containing about 10% actual facts about the Cheyenne, and 90% made-up gobbledygook.  Storm himself -- his actual first name is Arthur -- claims to be half Cheyenne and to have grown up on the reservation, but the Cheyenne tribal authorities say they've never heard of him.)

What's saddest about all of this is that Castaneda could have simply written "fiction" after the title of his books, and they'd have lost nothing in impact.  It's not that fiction has nothing to teach us, gives us no inspiration, doesn't consider the profound.  In fact, I would argue that some of the most poignant lessons we learn come from the subtexts of the fiction we read.  (I have tried to weave that into my own writing, especially my novel Sephirot, which is about one man's Hero's Journey placed in the context of Jewish mystical lore.)

But instead Castaneda lied to his readers.  There's no kinder way to put it.  He told us that it was all real.  Not content with writing an excellent work of inspirational fiction, he instead is relegated to the ignominious ranks of clever hoaxers.  (Or at least should be; de Mille says there are still lots of college classes in which Castaneda's books are required reading, and not as an example of an anthropological hoax, but as real field work in ethnology and belief.)

So however entertaining, and even inspiring, his books are, the whole thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.  In short, truth matters.  And the fact is, Carlos Castaneda was nothing more than a sly and charismatic liar.

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Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

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

Tweets and backfires

Let me ask you a hypothetical question.

You're over on Twitter, and you post a link making a political claim of some sort.  Shortly thereafter, you get responses demonstrating that the claim your link made is completely false.  Would you...

1. ... delete the tweet, apologize, and be more careful about what you post in the future?
2. ... shrug, say "Meh, whatever," and continue posting at the same frequency/with the same degree of care?
3. ... flip off the computer and afterward be more likely to post inflammatory and/or false claims?

I know this sounds like a setup, and it is, but seriously; why wouldn't everyone select answer #1?  As I discussed in a post just a few days ago, we all make mistakes, and we all hate the feeling of finding out we're in error.  So given that most animal species learn to avoid choices that lead to experiencing pain, why is the answer actually more commonly #3?

I'm not just making a wild claim up myself in order to have a topic to blog about.  The fact that most people increase their rate of promulgating disinformation after they've been caught at it is the subject of a paper that was presented last week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems called, "Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment."  The title could pretty much function as the abstract; in an analysis of two thousand Twitter users who post political tweets, the researchers looked at likelihood of posting false information after having errors pointed out online, and found, amazingly enough, a positive correlation.

"We find causal evidence that being corrected decreases the quality, and increases the partisan slant and language toxicity, of the users’ subsequent retweets," the authors write.  "This suggests that being publicly corrected by another user shifts one's attention away from accuracy -- presenting an important challenge for social correction approaches."

"Challenge" isn't the right word; it's more like "tendency that's so frustrating it makes anyone sensible want to punch a wall."  The researchers, Mohsen Mosleh (of the University of Exeter) and Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David Rand (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), have identified the twenty-first century iteration of the backfire effect -- a well-studied phenomenon showing that being proven wrong makes you double down on whatever your claim was.  But here, it apparently makes you not only double down on that claim, but on every other unfounded opinion you have.

In what universe does being proven wrong make you more confident?

I swear, sometimes I don't understand human psychology at all.  Yeah, I guess you could explain it by saying that someone who has a dearly-held belief questioned is more motivated in subsequent behavior by the insecurity they're experiencing than by any commitment to the truth, but it still makes no sense to me.  The times I've been caught out in an error, either here at Skeptophilia or elsewhere, were profoundly humbling and (on occasion) outright humiliating, and the result was (1) I apologized for my error, and (2) I was a hell of a lot more careful what I posted thereafter.

What I didn't do was to say "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

This does pose a quandary.  Faced with a false claim on social media, do we contradict it?  I don't have the energy to go after every piece of fake news I see; I usually limit myself to posts that are explicitly racist, sexist, or homophobic, because I can't in good conscience let that kind of bullshit go unchallenged.  But what if the outcome is said racist, sexist, or homophobe being more likely to post such claims in the future?

Not exactly the result I'm looking for, right there.

So that's our discouraging piece of research for today.  I honestly don't know what to do about a tendency that is so fundamentally irrational.  Despite all of our science and technology, a lot of our behavior still seems to be caveman-level.  "Ogg say bad thing about me.  Me bash Ogg with big rock."

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

Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

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

No admission

Let's establish something right from the outset.

Vaccines do NOT cause autism.

Clear enough?  If you are in any doubt, here's a site that provides links to exhaustive studies and meta-analyses that not only show no causative relationship between vaccines and autism, but that there is not even a correlation.

I.e., Andrew Wakefield was lying, and the anti-vaxxers are willfully putting their own children at risk of potentially deadly diseases that are entirely preventable.  As I've said now about 582 times.

The reason this comes up yet again is a webpage that I've now seen posted three times, with the title, "NOW IT'S OFFICIAL: FDA Announced That Vaccines Are Causing Autism!"

The article goes on to say the following:

You may be wondering: Why some of the doctors don’t say anything about the risk of DTaP Vaccine? 

That is a question that many of us, still wondering! Maybe they just is just not convenient for them that we know about the risk of these vaccine. 

To take the vaccine debacle further, most of the mandated vaccines for infants and children, contain many of the above ingredients, which must be stopped from being injected into infants, toddlers, teens and even adults! 

It’s time for Congress to rescind the “Get out of Jail Free” card for vaccine makers and stop the aggressive onslaught of the Autism Spectrum Disorder that is depriving children of a fulfilling life and ruining families emotionally, financially, and physically to the point of parents divorcing because of the stresses of ASD in a family.

The reason that "some of the doctors" (exclusive of frauds like Andrew Wakefield) aren't saying anything about the risk of autism from DTaP and other vaccines is that there is none.  There may well be kids who were diagnosed as autistic following their vaccinations; after all, most vaccines and most autism diagnoses both occur during early childhood.  But to associate the two is the Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this."

Let me say it again: multiple studies with huge sample sizes have found that the incidence of autism is no higher in vaccinated children than it is in unvaccinated children.  And vaccinating your children will keep them getting diseases like diphtheria, which back in the days before immunization, killed children by the thousands by making them, literally, slowly suffocate to death.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So needless to say (or it should be), the FDA didn't announce any such thing.  If you bother to read the article, or (better yet) take a look at the FDA post that generated it, what you find is that the information the government published on the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) vaccine listed autism along with a dozen or so "reported adverse effects" -- but then said, and I quote, "Because these events are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequencies or to establish a causal relationship to components of Tripedia vaccine."

The important part is "reported voluntarily."  In other words, all you'd have to do is have a single parent call the FDA and lodge an official complaint that their child became autistic due to the DTaP vaccine, and it would be justifiably included on this list.  Nowhere does it says that the claim -- any of them on the list, in fact -- had been evaluated by a physician, or even confirmed to be the truth.  This isn't even at the level of anecdote.

This is at the level of "my aunt's best friend's gardener's second cousin's third-grade teacher said it was so."

If you think that I'm just a blogger with an axe to grind on this topic -- not entirely untrue, I must admit -- here's the piece that Snopes did on the subject.

It's unfortunate the FDA did that -- not that I'm in favor of suppressing information, bear you, but the last thing we (or they) really need is the anti-vaxxers to come howling out of the woodwork.  Not that they ever gave up, really, and it's amazing how much their campaign has worked, even among people who are otherwise pretty sensible.  I've seen more than one person claim they'd never get a flu shot because the year before, the vaccine gave them the flu (impossible, as the flu vaccine contains dead virus particles) and that there's no way they'd have their child receive the HPV vaccine because it can potentially cause brain damage (total bullshit, and especially horrifying given that the eradication of HPV would virtually eliminate the risk of six different particularly deadly cancers).

The message should be loud and clear.  Claiming that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits, or that the risk is even significant, is quite simply wrong.  Refusing to vaccinate your own children constitutes child endangerment, not to mention putting at risk children who can't receive vaccines for legitimate medical reasons (e.g. having a damaged immune system).

This debate is over.  It's time for the anti-vaxxers to stop screeching about coverups and shills and conspiracies by Big Pharma, and admit that they were wrong from the outset.

And along the way, admit that this has never been about evidence; it's about irrational fear and a never-say-die adherence to personal bias.

Foundations on sand

I try to be polite, but there are times that there really is no reasonable response to a person other than, "I hate to have to point this out, but you're lying."

Surprisingly, I am not talking about either Donald Trump or Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Even more surprisingly, I'm not referring here to any politician.  I'm referring to a story that I ran into yesterday where people are taking seriously the claim by a Lithuanian woman named Stanislava Monstvilene that she not only has lived on, but has cured her own stage-4 brain tumor with, a diet composed solely of wet sand.

I know I say this a lot, but I wish I was making this up.  Sadly, this is true, and what's worse, there are some natural-diet alternative-medicine types who think this is really (1) possible, and (2) a good idea.  But let Monstvilene speak for herself:

I had a late stage brain tumor.  They said I wouldn’t last long.  My hemoglobin level was 60 [some five times over the normal range].  I was passing by and once an idea came to my mind – take the sand and eat it.  For the first time I choked but then I got used to it.  You should not mix it with food or water.  You should not eat anything else, otherwise you will feel sick.  And the water should not be drunk.  I used to eat wet sand so after it I do not want to drink.

Just reading this makes me want to drink, and I'm not talking about water.  But six AM is a little early for a double scotch, so I'll just soldier on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There is a condition where people feel compelled to eat non-food materials, especially dirt, chalk, stones, hair, and paper.  It's called pica, and is associated with mineral deficiencies, anemia, and mental instability.

And although some of those substances -- particularly dirt and chalk -- are mineral-rich, your body is generally incapable of handling minerals in that form.  Most minerals (such as calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium, cobalt, and so on) that are necessary for health are only absorbed easily if they're chelated -- bonded to an organic compound.  (This is why, for example, zinc supplements are usually in the form of zinc gluconate, and you will not achieve the same effect by chewing on a galvanized nail.)

So pica might result in a compulsion to eat weird stuff, but there's no indication that eating the weird stuff does anything for the underlying condition that caused the pica.

But back to the Sand Lady.  Because she's not just saying she's supplementing her diet with wet sand; she's saying that wet sand is all she eats.  Ever.  (Or drinks.)

To which I respond: bullshit.

Sand, and it pains me even to have to state this, has zero calories.  Most sand is finely ground silica and various types of feldspars (the exactly composition, naturally, depends on the kind of rock the sand was eroded from).  But in no case does sand contain enough nutrients to survive on.

So at the risk of appearing as a scoffer, I'm 100% sure that Ms. Monstvilene is chowing down on sand when the reporters are around, and when no one's looking, she's sneaking out for a cheeseburger with extra mayo.

It's a bit like the couple who claimed to be "Breatharians" (living on nothing but air and the "energy of the universe") and the Seattle woman who said she was going to spend a hundred days "living on light" (this didn't work out so well, as her health deteriorated from the combination of starvation and vitamin deficiency so much that she had to discontinue the stunt on day 47, at which time she had lost 20% of her body weight).

You can't subsist on light and/or dirt for the very good reason that you are not a plant.  Now, I know that loony people make loony claims, kind of by definition.  But that doesn't mean you need to believe them, or necessarily even consider them seriously.  There is enough out there that deserves investigation and is actually scientifically verifiable; last thing we need is to spend our time trying to figure out how some woman in Lithuania is living on a sand diet, when in fact, she is not.

(The irony that in writing this point, I am spending my time addressing this situation, is not lost on me.)

So there you are.  There are times when it is perfectly justifiable to respond "You are talking complete horse waste" to a claim.  Now, you'll have to excuse me, because all of this talk of eating is making me hungry.  Not for dirt, fortunately.  I'm thinking more of bacon and eggs.

The sticker price

Once again, famed medical professional Gwyneth Paltrow is promoting the latest be-all-and-end-all for your health, to wit: "Body Vibes stickers."

These are silver-dollar-sized stickers that you stick on your body to "rebalance the energy frequency in your body."  Whatever the fuck that means.  But the pseudoscience technobabble doesn't end there:

The concept: Human bodies operate at an ideal energetic frequency, but everyday stresses and anxiety can throw off our internal balance, depleting our energy reserves and weakening our immune systems.  Body Vibes stickers come pre-programmed to an ideal frequency, allowing them to target imbalances.  While you’re wearing them—close to your heart, on your left shoulder or arm—they’ll fill in the deficiencies in your reserves, creating a calming effect, smoothing out both physical tension and anxiety.  The founders, both aestheticians, also say they help clear skin by reducing inflammation and boosting cell turnover.

The stickers, Paltrow tells us, are made of "the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut’s vitals."  But herein lies the problem.  Because once you make an easily-verified statement -- i.e., veer away from vague, hand-waving bullshit about imbalanced energy frequencies -- you've kind of sealed your own fate.

And it didn't take long for NASA to respond.

Mark Shelhamer, former chief scientist in NASA's human research division, was unequivocal.  "Wow," Shelhamer said.  "What a load of BS this is...  Astronauts do not have any conductive carbon material lining the spacesuits.  Not only is the whole premise snake oil, the logic doesn’t even hold up.  If they promote healing, why do they leave marks on the skin when they are removed?"

This, of course, has exactly zero impact on the alt-med crowd, who absolutely hate it when people bring up pesky stuff like "facts" and "science" and "peer review."  Richard Eaton, founder of AlphaBioCentrix, which developed the stickers, was undeterred by NASA's skepticism.  "Without going into a long explanation about the research and development of this technology, it comes down to this," Eaton said.  "I found a way to tap into the human body’s bio-frequency, which the body is receptive to outside energy signatures.  Most of the research that has been collected is confidential and is held as company private information."

Oh, no, please, Mr. Eaton.  Do give me your long explanation of the research and development.  Define such terms as "bio-frequency" and "energy signatures" using scientifically valid language.  Show me how you can "pre-program" a fucking sticker to "target imbalances."  Give me some well-controlled research showing that the things actually work through something more than the placebo effect.

Until then, don't pretend that what you're hawking is anything more than a convenient way to make money from the gullible and ignorant.

Speaking of which, did I mention that "Body Vibes" stickers cost $120 per pack of 24?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Just as a contrast, let's look at some actual science having to do with stuff you stick on your body, which coincidentally just appeared over at New Scientist yesterday.  Joseph Wang, of the University of California-San Diego, has just published research on a new technology -- a small, flexible square that you can stick on your skin, and which will generate enough power to run a mobile device, using chemicals from your sweat.

It's a biofuel cell -- a power-generating device that runs on organic chemicals broken down by enzymes in the material.  Mirella DiLorenzo, of the University of Bath, was impressed by Wang's creation.  "The most exciting application is wearable sensors that can monitor health conditions, then sweat could generate enough power for a Bluetooth connection so that the results could be read straight from a smartphone," DiLorenzo said.  "This is an amazing proof-of-concept work.  The applications will come quickly in the near future."

Those applications could include monitoring an athlete's performance by tracking lactate levels in the sweat -- which is an indication of how hard the muscles are working.

See the difference, here?  We have, on the one hand, Paltrow and Eaton babbling about quantum bio-energetic frequency vibrations as if anything they said made sense; and on the other, Wang and DiLorenzo talking about actual experimental science, producing a measurable and replicable effect, and based on a solid understanding of biochemistry.

The problem is that actual research just isn't as sexy as alt-med, which can claim any damn thing it wants without the need for verification.  You want to claim that smearing peanut butter on your face will cure your anxiety by resynchronizing your chakras and changing the color of your aura?  No problem!  No one can challenge you, because what you're claiming is that a useless remedy will fix something that almost certainly doesn't exist, which even if it does, is apparently invisible for some reason to every piece of scientific equipment available.  I.e., you're making an inherently unverifiable statement.

But I wish more people would turn to the actual science when they have questions, rather than unscientific charlatans like Gwyneth Paltrow.  Because not only are the victims of these scams wasting their money, they're not seeking effective care for actual medical conditions.

And that crosses the line from just being a bunch of harmless bullshit to being truly dangerous.

Sifting fact from fiction

President-elect Donald Trump's latest ploy, any time he is criticized in the press, is to claim that what they're saying is "fake news."  (That, and to threaten to revoke their right to cover his speeches.)

Five days ago, he tweeted (of course, because that's how adults respond to criticism) that the Russian dossier alleged to have compromising information on him was "fake news and crap."  The, um, interaction he is alleged to have had with some Russian prostitutes was likewise "fake news, phony stuff, it did not happen."  About CNN, he said the "organization’s terrible...  You are fake news."  He's banned reporters from The Washington Post from attending his events, calling it "incredibly inaccurate... phony and dishonest."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There are two things that are troubling about this.

One is that Trump himself has been responsible for more than one demonstrably false claim intended to do nothing but damage his opponents.  Kali Holloway of AlterNet found fourteen, in fact.  Trump either created himself, or was responsible for publicizing, claims such as the following:

• Barack Obama was a Kenyan Muslim and never attended Columbia University
• Hillary Clinton was covering up a chronic debilitating illness and was too sick to serve
• Ted Cruz's father was involved in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy
• Thousands of Muslims in and around New York City had a public demonstration to cheer the events of 9/11
• Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered
• 97% of the murders in the United States are blacks killing other blacks (when confronted on this blatantly false claim, he said, "It was just a retweet... am I going to check every statistic?")
• Millions of votes in the presidential election were cast illegally
• Climate change is a Chinese hoax
• Vaccines cause autism -- and that the doctors opposing this fiction deliberately lied to cover it up

And so on and so forth.

So Trump calling out others for fake news should definitely be an odds-on contender for the "Unintentional Irony of the Year" award for 2017.

The more upsetting aspect of this, however, is that Trump is implying that you can't trust anything on the media -- except, of course, what comes out of his mouth.  The implication is that nothing you see on the news or read in the newspaper is true, that the default stance is to say it's all fake.

This is a profoundly disturbing claim.  For one thing, as I've said many times before, cynicism is no more noble (or correct) than gullibility; disbelieving everything is exactly as lazy and foolish as believing everything.  For another, the media are really our only way of finding out what is happening in the world.  Without media, we would not only have no idea what was going on in other countries, our own government would be operating behind a smokescreen, their machinations invisible to everyone but those in on the game.

Which is a fine way to turn a democracy into a dictatorship.

There is some small kernel of truth to the accusation, however; it is true that all media are biased.  That CNN and MSNBC slant to the left and Fox and The Wall Street Journal slant to the right is so obvious that it hardly bears mention.  To jump from there to "everything they say is a lie," however, is to embrace a convenient falsehood that allows you to reject everything you hear and read except for what fits with your preconceived notions -- effectively setting up your own personal confirmation bias as the sine qua non of understanding.

The truth, of course, is more nuanced than that, and also far more powerful.  We are all capable of sifting fact from fiction, neither believing everything nor rejecting everything.  It's called critical thinking, and in these rather fractious times it's absolutely... well, critical.  As biologist Terry McGlynn put it, "When we teach our students to distinguish science from pseudoscience, we are giving them the skills to identify real and fake journalism."

I won't lie to you.  Sorting fact from fiction in the media (or anywhere else) is hard work, far harder than simply accepting what we'd like to believe and rejecting what we'd like to be false.  But it's possible, and more than that, it's essential.  Check sources -- even if (especially if) they're from your favorite media source.  Check them using sources that have a different slant.  Go to the original documents instead of merely reading what someone else has written about them.  Apply good rules of thumb like Ockham's Razor and the ECREE (Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence) principle.  Pay special attention to claims from people who have proven track records of lying, or people who are making claims outside of their area of expertise.

Donald Trump's snarling of "fake news, phony journalism" every time he's criticized should immediately put you on notice that what he's saying is questionable -- not (again) that it should be disbelieved out of hand, but that it should be scrutinized.  Over the next four years, people on both sides of the aisle are going to have to be on guard -- never in my memory has the country been so polarized, so ready to begin that precipitous slide into sectarian violence that once begun is damn near impossible to halt.  Our leaders are showing no inclination to address the problems we face honestly and openly -- so it falls to us as responsible citizens to start sifting through their claims more carefully instead of simply accepting whatever half-truths or outright lies fit our preconceived notions.

Meme wars

It's time we all make a commitment to the truth.

I am sick unto death of people trying to score political points by spreading around falsehoods on the internet.  With the access to technology most of us have, it usually takes less than five minutes to check on the veracity of what you're about to post before you post it.  Instead, people seem content to spread around bullshit that conforms to their preconceived notions, whether or not it's true.

This is inexcusable.  And it needs to stop.

And yes, it's both sides of the political aisle that are guilty of this.  Let's start with this one, that was making the rounds a few months ago:

Ted Cruz never said that.  Snopes has a link to a transcript of the entire speech he made at Liberty University on the 23rd of March, 2015.  That line appears nowhere.

The worst part?  When I told the person who posted this that it was fake, his response was, "Yes, but I'm sure he believes it.  He could have said it."

You know what?  I don't give a flying fuck what Ted Cruz, or anyone else, could have said.  The fact, is, he didn't say it.  Claiming that he did is a lie.  Don't try to tell me that the truth doesn't matter.

Next up, Elizabeth Warren:

That's another big nope.  Snopes says it's "unproven," but adds, "We were unable to locate any interviews, footage, clips, tweets, or other instances in which Elizabeth Warren said anything remotely resembling the phrase quoted above."

I.e., she didn't say it.  Moving on.

There's this one, attributed to Mitt Romney:

Not only did Romney not say that, Laura Ingraham didn't air a show on that date, and Romney was not her guest at any time in early 2014.

The false attributions don't stop at political figures:

This one started making the rounds right after Prince died, so he conveniently couldn't say "I never said that."  Fortunately, Snopes did.

How about this one, trying to discredit Donald Trump:

The people at FactCheck.org researched this one exhaustively.  Trump never said any such thing, not in 1998 or any other year.

Most appallingly, there's this one:

No, sorry for those of you who'd like to believe this; Hillary Clinton is not an "advocate for rapists."  In 1975 she was a defense attorney.  Do you know what a defense attorney's job is?  Go ahead, I'll wait while you look it up.

The truth is that Clinton was appointed to defend the accused rapist, Tom Taylor, and according to the chief prosecutor, Mahlon Gibson, "Hillary told me she didn’t want to take that case, she made that very clear."  Snopes goes on to say:

As for the claim that Hillary Clinton "knew the defendant was guilty," she couldn't possibly have known that unless she were present when the incident in question occurred.  Even if she surmised that the defendant was likely guilty based upon the evidence and/or his statements, she was obliged to operate under the rules of the U.S. legal system, which assume the accused to be innocent until proved guilty.

And so on and so forth.

You know what?  I don't honestly care what political party you belong to, whether you're liberal or conservative or something else entirely.  I don't care who you're planning to vote for next November, or if you're sick of the whole shebang and decide to stay home.

But I do care about the truth.  So for all of you people with the fast-forward-finger out there; take five damn minutes and check to see if what you're posting is true before you post it.  If posting stupid stuff politicians do and say gets you off, then there's certainly enough to choose from without spreading around outright falsehoods.   You are helping nothing, and proving nothing, by circulating bullshit because it lines up with what you'd like to be true.

What you're doing is making yourself complicit in a lie.

A win for the good guys

I find it discouraging, sometimes, how often the hucksters win.  We still have homeopathic "remedies" on pharmacy shelves.  Selling supplements of dubious benefit and largely unknown side effects is still a multi-million dollar business.  Throw in all of the purveyors of woo who every year bilk thousands of people out of their hard-earned cash, and it all adds up to a pretty dismal picture.

But still, every once in a while, the good guys come out on top.

This  happened just this week with the announcement that the creators and marketers of the "Lumosity" brain-training games are being ordered to pay $2 million in reparations to customers who fell for their "unfounded claims that Lumosity games can help users perform better at work and in school, and reduce or delay cognitive impairment associated with age and other serious health conditions."

The selling points were attractive, with the aging population becoming increasingly (and justifiably) spooked by the specter of Alzheimer's and other age-related dementias.  I can understand the fear; I watched my aunt, my mother's older sister, outlive both of her siblings, finally dying at the age of 90 after spending the last ten years of her life essentially unresponsive and needing 24-hour care due to the ravages of Alzheimer's.  It's my worst nightmare, really.  The idea of having my body go on long after my mind is gone is absolutely terrifying.

So the claim that you could stave off dementia by playing some computer games was appealing.  So, too, were there other claims -- that you would improve your performance at work, at school, and on the sports field, feel more alert, perform cognitive tasks more quickly and accurately.  A direct quote from their advertisements said that playing their games three or four times a week would help users to reach "their full potential in every aspect of life."  With that kind of claim, it's understandable why people fell for their sales pitch.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem was, it had no basis in fact, and the Federal Trade Commission is requiring Lumos Labs, the company which created and marketed Lumosity, to refund money to their customers because they were participating in "misleading health advertising."

"Lumosity preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease," said Jessica Rich, Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.  "But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads."

In fact, it wasn't simply a lack of evidence; there is significant evidence against their claims.  A 2014 joint statement from Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute said that "The strong consensus of this group is that the scientific literature does not support claims that the use of software-based 'brain games' alters neural functioning in ways that improve general cognitive performance in everyday life, or prevent cognitive slowing and brain disease."

But flying in the face of scientific evidence wasn't the only problem.  The FTC found that "...the defendants [failed] to disclose that some consumer testimonials featured on the website had been solicited through contests that promised significant prizes, including a free iPad, a lifetime Lumosity subscription, and a round-trip to San Francisco."

So promoting falsehoods for profit + paying people to give you good reviews = a $2 million penalty.  Which is exactly as it should be.

It's high time that the FTC crack down on these spurious claims.  You have to wonder how long it'll take before they can get the supplement-and-remedies cadre to stop hiding behind "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any human illness" as a catch-all disclaimer and general Get Out of Jail Free card.

In any case, I find the whole thing heartening.  I do believe in the principle of caveat emptor, but we sure as hell wouldn't have to invoke it quite so often if the powers-that-be would pull back the reins on the false advertisers.