This week in lunacy

On the whole, I'm an optimist.

It seems a happier way to be.  In general, I would rather expect people to behave well and occasionally be disappointed than to start from the assumption that everyone is an asshole and occasionally be pleasantly surprised.  I know a couple of people who are diehard pessimists, who believe that the worst of humanity is the rule and not the exception, and by and large they're chronically unhappy -- even when things turn out well.

On the other hand, the last few years have been a trial to my generally positive mindset.  I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fifteen years, and the anti-science attitudes and loony counterfactual beliefs that impelled me to start this blog seem to be as common as ever.  Take, for example, the four stories I came across on Reddit, one after the other, while I was casting about for a topic for today's post.

First we have an article courtesy of the ever-entertaining Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose main function seems to be making sure that Lauren Boebert is never proclaimed the Stupidest Member of the United States Congress.  Greene just introduced a bill to make weather modification a felony, because -- and this is a direct quote -- "we need clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!"

The irony here is that Greene has supported every one of Donald Trump's efforts to weaken environmental protection -- hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, crippling research into climate change, increasing the number of coal-fired power plants, clear-cutting forests on public land, and deregulating mining and oil production.  But sure, Marjorie, let's outlaw "weather modification," which she says was responsible for Hurricane Helene, the California wildfires, and most recently, the devastating flooding in central Texas.

Hell, if the evil liberal-controlled Deep State could modify the weather, they'd have dispatched EF-5 tornadoes to level Mar-a-Lago ages ago.  But I wouldn't expect logic like that to appeal to Greene, who responded to critics by using my least favorite phrase, "I've done my research," and based on that has come to the conclusion that people who say that hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are natural events are big fat liars.

Expect her "research" to that effect to appear in Nature any time now.

Then we had evangelical preacher Troy Brewer, who claimed that the Texas floods weren't weather modification, they were God sending a message to us.  It was significant, he said, that the flooding (well, some of the flooding) happened on July 4.  In a passage that I swear I'm not making up, Brewer said, "It was a divine signal...  Whenever this thing happened on July the 4th… this is not just about Texas.  This is a word for all the United States of America.  It's no coincidence that 1776 divided by two is 888, the numerical value of the name Jesus in Greek.  Did you know that there were 888 people rescued out of that creek?  888 is the number of Jesus...  And remember that the site of the flood, Kerrville, is the home to the 77-foot-high sculpture known as The Empty Cross."

It does strike me as odd that if this is God sending a message about how lawless and evil and wicked we all are, smiting the shit out of central Texas -- one of the most devoutly Christian places in America -- is kind of an odd move.  I mean, Kerrville isn't exactly Sodom and Gomorrah.  But "God drowned hundreds of good Christians to show you all how important it is to be a good Christian" isn't any crazier than a lot of what these people believe, so I guess it's not really all that surprising.

Next, there's Joe Rogan, who if this was a fair world would have zero credibility left, claiming that Lyme disease was a deliberately-leaked biological weapon from the secret labs on Plum Island.  It probably won't take you longer than a couple of nanoseconds to figure out where he got this amazing revelation from:

RFK Jr.

The only person out there with less scientific credibility than Joe Rogan.

"The ticks are an epidemic because of what happened at Plum Island and the other labs," RFK said in the January 2024 episode of the RFK Jr Podcast.  "We also know that they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab, and they were putting them in ticks and then infecting people."

Of course, this is the kind of thing that gives Joe Rogan multiple orgasms, so he was all in on the bioweapon claim. 

"Turns out there's a lot of real evidence that Lyme disease was weaponized," Rogan said.  "It came out of a lab called Plum Island, which was close to Lyme, Connecticut.  And RFK Jr. firmly believes that this was a weapons program...  What they were going to do is develop these fleas and ticks with a disease that spreads rapidly, wipes out the medical system of a community.  So, you could dump them from a plane, everybody gets infected, overwhelms their medical system, and then they're more vulnerable if you want to attack them...  Can you imagine if those cunts created a fucking disease and now everyone on the East Coast has it?  Because it's mostly out there."

The Rogan/RFK Jr. claim kind of falls prey to the fact that there's ample evidence that Lyme, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, has been around for a very long time.  To take just one example, Ötzi -- the "Ice Man," the five-thousand-year-old frozen human found in the Alps in Switzerland -- was found in 2012 to be Lyme-positive through DNA analysis of his tissues.

What, Joe -- did the evil Plum Island scientists use their time machines to go back and infect Ötzi in order to throw us all off their trail?  Or should we tune in next week to hear you come up with some even more insane explanation?

Finally, we have a loony claim surrounding a viral craze I hadn't even heard of.  To be fair, I'm not exactly the sort who immerses himself in pop culture, but this one is apparently huge and had escaped me entirely.  It's called a "Labubu doll," and is a "plush monster elf toy" created by Hong Kong designer Kaising Lung.  It got picked up by a couple of big names like Dua Lipa and Rihanna, and now everyone wants one.

Well, you can't have a popular toy out there without someone deciding that it's eeeeee-vil.  And especially... look at those teeth.  So now people on X and TikTok are warning that you should burn your Labubu doll because it's possessed by a demon called, I shit you not, Pazuzu.

Notwithstanding the fact that Labubu and Pazuzu sound like names that a rich old lady would give her poodles, people are taking this extremely seriously.  "I’m not superstitious, I’m a little stitious, but I’d never buy a Labubu," said one person on X.  "It comes from Pazuzu, which is a demon, and possessed the girl in The Exorcist."

So this individual is warning us not to buy a doll representing a fictional creature because it might be inhabited by a fictional demon who possessed a fictional girl in a fictional movie.

But do go on about how plausible all this is.

Then there's the person who commented, "Please before falling into the trap of Labubu or any trend nowadays, do your research.  THEY’RE MADE AFTER A DEMON DEITY (Pazuzu as they say)."

Yes, of course!  For fuck's sake!  Do your research!

Other people are blessing their Labubus or anointing them with holy water to "turn them into protector spirits." I guess this is better than burning them, at least from the standpoint of releasing toxins from burning plastic into the air, which would probably make Marjorie Taylor Greene think that the liberals were trying to modify the weather using smoldering demon flesh or something.

So.  Yeah.  Some days it's hard to remain optimistic.  Just yesterday, my wife and I were discussing how the average dog is a better person than the average person, and these stories haven't done anything to diminish that assessment.  So I think I'll spend the rest of the day socializing with my dogs.

I'll try being optimistic about humanity again tomorrow.  We'll see how long it lasts.

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

Atmospheric rivers

If I asked you to name the deadliest single-event natural disaster to strike the western half of the United States in recorded history, what would you answer?

If I had to hazard a guess, most people are going to suggest the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  This was a bad one, no doubt about it; an estimated three thousand people died, and most of the city was destroyed by the quake and the fires that followed it.  Another one that might come to mind is the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980, but that one comes in a distant follower at fifty-seven casualties.

The worst natural disaster in the western United States -- by a significant margin -- is one a lot of people haven't heard of.  In the winter of 1861-1862, an atmospheric river event turned the entire Central Valley of California into an enormous lake, submerging once dry land under as much as ten meters of water.  Over a period of forty-five days, a hard-even-to-imagine three meters of rain fell in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the surrounding area, draining down into the lowlands far too fast to run off.  Rivers overflowed their banks; some simply vanished under the expanding lake.  Although the middle part of the state bore the worst of it, devastating floods were recorded that year from northern Oregon all the way down to Los Angeles.

The exact death toll will probably never be known, but it's well over four thousand.  That's about one percent of the entire population of the state at the time.

A man named John Carr, writing in his memoir thirty years later, had this to say:

From November until the latter part of March there was a succession of storms and floods... The ground was covered with snow a foot deep, and on the mountains much deeper...  The water in the river ... seemed like some mighty uncontrollable monster of destruction broken away from its bonds, rushing uncontrollably on, and everywhere carrying ruin and destruction in its course.  When rising, the river seemed highest in the middle...  From the head settlement to the mouth of the Trinity River, for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, everything was swept to destruction.  Not a bridge was left, or a mining-wheel or a sluice-box.  Parts of ranches and miners cabins met the same fate.  The labor of hundreds of men, and their savings of years, invested in bridges, mines and ranches, were all swept away.  In forty-eight hours the valley of the Trinity was left desolate.  The county never recovered from that disastrous flood.  Many of the mining-wheels and bridges were never rebuilt.

Many of the smaller towns never were, either.

Lithograph of K Street, Sacramento, California, in January of 1862 [Image is in the Public Domain]

What seems to have happened is that in rapid succession, a series of narrow plumes of moist tropical air were carried in off the Pacific.  These "atmospheric rivers" can carry an astonishing amount of water -- some of them have a greater flow rate than the Amazon River.  When they cross over land, sometimes they dissipate, raining out over a wide geographical area.  But the West Coast's odd geography -- two mountain ranges, the Coast Range/Cascades and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, running parallel to each other with a broad valley in between -- meant that as those plumes of moisture moved inland, they were forced upward in altitude (twice).  The drop in pressure and temperature as the air rose caused the water to condense, triggering a month-and-a-half-long rain event that drowned nearly the entire middle of the state.

The reason I bring this up is because the geological record indicates the Great Flood of 1861-62 was not a one-off.  These kinds of floods hit the region on the order of once every century or so.

Only now, the Central Valley is home to 6.5 million people.  And one of the predictions of our best models of climate change is that the warm-up will make atmospheric river events more common.

When people think of deadly disasters, they usually come up with obvious and violent ones like earthquakes and volcanoes.  Certainly, those can be horrific; the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, China killed an estimated three hundred thousand people.  But the two most dangerous kinds of natural disasters, both in terms of human lives lost and property damage, are flooding and droughts -- two opposite sides of the climatic coin, and both of which are predicted to get dramatically worse if we don't somehow get a handle on the scale of fossil fuel burning.

I saw a quip making its way around social media a while back, that every disaster movie and horror flick starts with someone in charge ignoring a scientist.  There's some truth to that.  Unfortunately, we've not been very good at taking that message to heart.  We need to start listening -- and fast -- and learning from the lessons of the past.  Disasters like the Great California Flood will happen again, and now that we've stomped on the climatic accelerator, it will likely be sooner rather than later.

Let's hope we don't close our eyes to the potential for a catastrophe that will dwarf the one of 170 years ago by several orders of magnitude.

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

Altered flow

John McPhee's wonderful book The Control of Nature describes three attempts to alter naturally-occurring geological processes: the shift of the course of the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya River (which would leave New Orleans without a port); the lava flow from the 1973 eruption of Eldfell Volcano on the Icelandic island of Heimaey, which threatened to seal off the main town's only harbor; and the ongoing problem with landslides in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, which have been exacerbated by people's insistence on building multi-million-dollar homes in steep-sided canyons.

Of the three, only the Icelanders had a success story.  They halted the lava flow by pumping cold seawater onto it, and stopped it before it closed off the harbor completely; the tongue of solidified rock actually created a useful seawall.  The other two were, and still are, drastic failures.  The levee/spillway system in Louisiana, intended to keep the Mississippi in its channel and prevent it from switching over to the Atchafalaya's shorter and more direct path to the Gulf of Mexico, has caused more silting of the channel and subsidence of the land, both of which were direct contributors to the severity of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005.  California still deals with landslides, despite their best efforts to contain them with various slope stabilization devices -- and rich people are still building their mansions right in harm's way.

33% is not a great success rate, but it's pretty reflective of our attempts to control natural processes.  It's not that I'm saying what we do has no effect; the unfortunate part is most of what we've tried hasn't worked, or has actually made the situation more dire.  The obvious example (anthropogenic climate change) is only one of many examples of times we've messed around with things and come off very much the worse.

Although we're unique in the animal world in being able to control our environments to some extent, we're still very much at the mercy of the natural world.  Big, sudden cataclysms -- events like major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods -- are the most obvious examples, but sometimes slow, gradual processes can alter the course of history just as profoundly.  The fall of the Roman Empire, about which I've written a couple of times recently, may well have been triggered by a climatic shift causing freezing drought in the central Asian steppes, inducing the Huns to migrate west and starting a domino effect of invasions.  Certainly the rising and lowering of sea level as ice ages came and went altered migration patterns; both Australia and the Americas were colonized during periods when the areas now at the bottom of (respectively) the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Bering Sea were dry land.

The idea that climate has been a major driver for history has gone out of vogue, and is sneeringly referred to as "climate determinism" despite the fact that (1) there's no denying the vagaries of climate have had obvious and dramatic effects, and (2) no one has ever claimed that climate was the only thing affecting the course of events.  Consider, for example, some new research out of the University of Southampton that came out in Nature Geoscience this week.

Life in Egypt has always been dicey -- the valley of the Nile is thickly-inhabited, but go more than a few miles east or west from it and you're in marginally-inhabitable desert.  We all learned in elementary school how the ancient Egyptians survived by learning how to manage what are always called the Nile's "life-giving floods" through irrigation channels and catchment basins, but the truth is, all it took was a dry year or two and the entire civilization was in deep trouble.

The situation changed -- for once, for the better -- about four thousand years ago, when the Nile shifted course and created the floodplain around Luxor.

The reason was the same as what John McPhee explains about the Mississippi, but with a happier outcome.  As rivers flow, they pick up sediment, and when they reach the sea and the water velocity slows down, that sediment is deposited on the river bottom.  This raises it, creating an impediment to water flow, slowing down the water further and making it drop more sediment, and so on and so forth.  Eventually the delta becomes impassible, and the water is forced into another channel (unless people step in and try to stop it, like what is happening with dubious success in Louisiana).

In southern Egypt, though, the switch in paths brought the flow of the Nile out over a broad, flat plain that prior to that had been high and dry.  The outflow into the Mediterranean moved east as well, and the outgoing river broke up into dozens of outflow channels.  This proved extraordinarily beneficial to the people living all along the river's northern half.  "The expansion of the floodplain greatly enlarged the area of arable land in the Nile Valley near Luxor (ancient Thebes) and improved the fertility of the soil by regularly depositing fertile silts," said Benjamin Pennington, who co-authored the paper.  "The Egyptian Nile we see today looks very different from how it would have been throughout much of the last 11,500 years.  For most of this time, the Nile was made up of a network of interwoven channels that frequently changed their course.  Around four thousand years ago, the Nile abruptly shifted and there was rapid floodplain aggradation, where the river began depositing large amounts of sediment, building up the valley floor.  This created a more expansive and stable floodplain."

The result was that the New Kingdom -- which included the reigns of famous pharaohs such as Ahmose I, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun -- had the resources to become one of the significant political powers of the region.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mohammed Moussa, Ramses II in Luxor Temple, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Like McPhee's one-out-of-three success rate for humans trying to control nature, however, it bears keeping in mind that for every example of a natural event benefitting humans, there's one that didn't turn out so well for us.  The collapse of classical Mayan civilization in the eighth century C.E. was largely triggered by a prolonged drought; the onset of the Little Ice Age in the fourteenth created a perfect storm of conditions that fed into the Black Death killing one-third of the population of Europe.

However confident we are in our comfortable high-tech world keeping us safe, it's always good to remember how tenuous it is -- and the fact that in the long haul, Mother Nature is still very much in charge.

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

Lost beneath the waves

Ever heard of the Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod?

If not, I hadn't either. Those of you with a linguistic bent might surmise from the name that the kingdom had something to do with Wales, and you'd be right.  The sad tale of the lost Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod is one of the dozens of inundation myths (although using that last word may be inappropriate, as you'll see in a moment), including the Breton city of Ys and the Arthurian legend of the Kingdom of Lyonesse.  Both were allegedly destroyed for their wickedness by drowning in the ocean.  If this puts you in mind of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional land of Númenor, that's no coincidence; Ys and Lyonesse were part of the inspiration for Tolkien's doomed kingdom of the Second Age of Middle Earth.

The less-famous Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod has some striking parallels.  Originally made up of a broad, fertile valley west of Wales, the land was swallowed up by the sea and now lies beneath Cardigan Bay.  Instead of the sinfulness that did in Ys, Lyonesse, and Númenor, Cantre'r Gwaelod was supposedly destroyed by negligence; in the Black Book of Carmarthen, a thirteenth-century document that is the earliest surviving manuscript written entirely in Welsh, the unfortunate kingdom met its doom because a maiden named Mererid who had been tasked with tending a well fell asleep, and the well overflowed and flooded the entire land.

What, exactly, Mererid was supposed to do about a well that was flowing so fast that it could inundate a whole country while someone was taking an afternoon nap is uncertain.  But in the legend, the poor girl got the blame, and so the matter has stood.

But what separates Cantre'r Gwaelod from other lost-lands myths, including the most famous one -- Atlantis -- is that the Welsh version may actually have some basis in fact.

The Gough Map [Image is in the Public Domain]

Two researchers, Simon Haslett, Professor of Physical Geography at Swansea University, and David Willis, Professor of Celtic History at the University of Oxford, found evidence on one of the earliest maps of Great Britain of two low-lying islands in what is now Cardigan Bay.  The document, called the Gough Map after its last owner prior to its donation to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, dates back to the fourteenth century, although many historians believe it to be a copy of an earlier map.  And it indicates that parts of Cardigan Bay were once dry land, and further, that the contours and terrain of these islands are reminiscent of the descriptions of Cantre'r Gwaelod from the Black Book of Carmarthen:

This study investigates historical sources, alongside geological and bathymetric evidence, and proposes a model of post-glacial coastal evolution that provides an explanation for the ‘lost’ islands and a hypothetical framework for future research: (1) during the Pleistocene, Irish Sea ice occupied the area from the north and west, and Welsh ice from the east, (2) a landscape of unconsolidated Pleistocene deposits developed seaward of a relict pre-Quaternary cliffline with a land surface up to ca. 30 m above present sea-level, (3) erosion proceeded along the lines of a template provided by a retreating shoreline affected by Holocene sea-level rise, shore-normal rivers, and surface run-off from the relict cliffline and interfluves, (4) dissection established islands occupying cores of the depositional landscape, and (5) continued down-wearing, marginal erosion and marine inundation(s) removed the two remaining islands by the 16th century.  Literary evidence and folklore traditions provide support in that Cardigan Bay is associated with the ‘lost’ lowland of Cantre’r Gwaelod.

So it looks like we may have here another example of a legend with some basis in fact.  A good many of the inundation myths -- including, very possibly, the Great Flood in the Bible -- might have come from the fact that at the end of the last Ice Age, the seas were rising, and previously dry land such as Beringia (between Russia and Alaska) and Doggerland (between England and continental Europe) were drowned.  Cantre'r Gwaelod, perhaps, was a victim of the same sea level rise -- but unlike the others, we appear to have a map showing exactly where it lay.

And maybe once and for all we can absolve poor Mererid of any responsibility for its demise.

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

Listening to Cassandra

I like to think of myself as basically an optimistic person, and someone who looks for the best in my fellow humans.  But there are times that I think that a gigantic meteor strike might, all things considered, be the best option at this point.

Those times usually occur when people persist in a behavior that is known, for absolute certain, to be self-destructive.  And surprisingly enough, I'm not talking about climate change here, and our determination to keep burning fossil fuels despite the near-universal consensus amongst climatologists that this practice is drastically altering the Earth's climate.  What I'm referring to is two stories that both broke day before yesterday, and that leave me shaking my head and feeling like whatever happens to our species, we kind of deserve it.

The first, and more local, example of this phenomenon was described in an article in NPR Online, the title of which sums up the problem succinctly: "Levees Make Mississippi River Floods Worse, But We Keep Building Them."  The article, written by Rebecca Hersher, describes the ongoing catastrophe along the Mississippi River, wherein every single year there are destructive, often deadly, floods.

Here's a capsule summary of the problem.

Before the 20th century, the Mississippi had a habit shared by many large rivers; overflowing its banks during the rainy season.  This phenomenon had a couple of effects.  First, it brought the silt picked up along the way out of the river basin, depositing it on land.  Second, it meant that regular, minor floods -- the sort of thing one can prepare for and cope with -- were kind of a way of life.  (Why, for example, my uncle's fishing cabin in Henderson, Louisiana was built on stilts.)

But when the population started both to grow and urbanize, these floods were "mitigated" -- by installing a system of levees and spillways to "tame the river."  Mostly constructed in the 1930s and 1940s by the Army Corps of Engineers, the (well-meant) attempt to stop people from being flooded out every year had two unexpected effects.

One is that the silt that would have been deposited to either side of the river now was kept in the river itself.  This left only two places it could go -- deposited onto the river bottom, or flushed out into the Gulf at the delta.  The first raised the riverbed, and the second raised the mouth of the river; both of these had the effect of pushing the level of the river upwards.  Simultaneously, the silt that was in the river didn't end up on land, and the land itself started to subside.

Rising river + sinking land = a need for bigger levees.  So the levees were raised, making the problem worse -- and so on and so forth.  I still vividly remember being in New Orleans and walking along a footpath at the base of a levee along the Mississippi -- and looking up to see the top of a shrimp boat going past, about thirty feet above my head.

The 17th Street Canal in Metairie, Louisiana [Image licensed under the Creative Commons No machine-readable author provided. Infrogmation assumed (based on copyright claims)., MetOutletCanalDogwalkerBreechBkgrd, CC BY 2.5]

The second unexpected effect follows directly from the first.  If you build higher levees, the water level rises, so when the levees break, you don't have a minor flood, you have a catastrophic one.  This, of course, is what happened in New Orleans in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, but it's inevitable that it'll happen again in the near future.

The kicker?  We've known about this problem for ages.  In 1989 John McPhee wrote an incredible book on the topic, called The Control of Nature, in which he laid out the problem clearly.  And what have we done differently since then?

Nada.  Build more levees.  Pretend we know what we're doing, and that nature won't ultimately have the last word.

The other example of humans doing idiotic self-destructive stuff revolves around something I always mention in my biology classes as the time our species did something right; the 1989 Montreal Protocol that banned the production or use of chlorofluorocarbons, a class of chemicals used as coolants and propellants that were thought to be harmless but turned out to destroy the atmosphere's protective ozone layer.  Almost all the nations on Earth signed on -- surely one of the only times in humanity's history where damn near everyone has agreed on something.

Or so we thought.  Since 2012, there's been a sudden and mysterious uptick in the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere -- up, at one estimate, by 25%.  As of the time of this writing, no one's quite sure where it's coming from.  Up until now, the CFC levels have been gradually falling (and ozone hole gradually diminishing) as the CFCs from before 1989 have broken down -- but it appears that we're not done with this problem yet.

"It is not clear why any country would want to start to produce, and inadvertently release, CFC-11, when cost-effective substitutes have been available for a long while," said NASA scientist Robert Watson, who led the studies thirty years ago that led to CFCs being banned.  "It is therefore imperative that this finding be discussed at the next Ministerial meeting of Governments given recovery of the ozone layer is dependent on all countries complying with the Montreal Protocol (and its adjustments and amendments) with emissions globally dropping to zero."

Durwood Zaelke, founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development and an expert on the Montreal Protocol, was more unequivocal still.  "Somebody's cheating.  There’s some slight possibility there’s an unintentional release, but… they make it clear there’s strong evidence this is actually being produced...  This treaty cannot afford not to follow its tradition and keep its compliance record...  They’re going to find the culprits.  This insults everybody who’s worked on this for the last 30 years.  That’s a tough group of people."

So at least we have some folks who are on the case.  What kind of power to compel they will turn out to have, once the culprits are identified, remains to be seen.  And here in the United States, we've seen in the past year a weakening of damn near every environmental regulation we have, in favor of corporate profit and short-term expediency.  So how much help our government will be is questionable.

I'm holding out some hope that at least by publicizing these issues, people are beginning to wise up.  However, our inaction on climate change -- a phenomenon we've known about since the 1890s -- doesn't bode well.  Mostly what has happened is that the people who are brave enough to sound the warning have turned into Cassandras -- prophets who are cursed to be correct, but no one believes them.

As for me, I'm trying to maintain my optimism, but after reading these two articles, right now mostly what I'm doing is scanning the skies looking for the incoming meteor.

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

This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.