Weathering the storm

Something that really grinds my gears is how quick people can be to trumpet their own ignorance, seemingly with pride.

I recall being in a school board budget meeting some years ago, and the science department line items were being discussed.  One of the proposed equipment purchases that came up was an electronic weather station for the Earth Science classroom.  And a local attending the meeting said, loud enough for all to hear, "Why the hell do they need a weather station?  If I want to know what the weather is, I stick my head out the window!  Hurr hurr hurr hurr durr!"

Several of his friends joined in the laughter, while I -- and the rest of the science faculty in attendance -- sat there quietly attempting to bring our blood pressures back down to non-lethal levels.

What astonishes me about this idiotic comment is two things: (1) my aforementioned bafflement about why he was so quick to demonstrate to everyone at the meeting that he was ignorant; and (2) what it said about his own level of curiosity.  When I don't know something, my first thought is not to ridicule but to ask questions.  If I thought an electronic weather station might be an odd or a frivolous purchase, I would have asked what exactly the thing did, and how it was better than "sticking my head out the window."  The Earth Science teacher -- who was in attendance that evening -- could then have explained it to me.

And afterward, miracle of miracles, I might have learned something.

All sciences are to some extent prone to this "I'm ignorant and I'm proud of it" attitude by laypeople, but meteorology may be the worst.  How many times have you heard people say things like, "A fifty percent chance of rain?  How many jobs can you think of where you could get as good results by flipping a coin, and still get paid?"  It took me a fifteen-second Google search to find the weather.gov page explaining that the "probability of precipitation" percentages mean something a great deal more specific than the forecasters throwing their hands in the air and saying, "Might happen, might not."  A fifty-percent chance of rain means that in the forecast area, any given point has a fifty percent chance of receiving at least 0.01" of rain; from this it's obvious that if there's a fifty percent chance over a large geographical area, the likelihood of someone receiving rain in the region is much greater than fifty percent.  (These middling percentages are far more common in the northern hemisphere's summer, when much of the rain falls in the form of sporadic local thunderstorms that are extremely hard to predict precisely.  If you live in the US Midwest or anywhere in the eastern half of North America, you can probably remember times when you got rain and your friends five miles away didn't, or vice versa.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Walter Baxter, The Milestone weather forecasting stone - geograph.org.uk - 1708774, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The problem is, meteorology is complex.  Computer models of the atmosphere rely on estimates of conditions (barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, air speed both vertically and horizontally, and particulate content, to name a few) along with mathematical equations describing how those quantities vary over time and influence each other.  The results are never completely accurate, and extending forward in time -- long-range forecasting -- is still nearly impossible except in the broadest-brush sense.  Add to that the fact there are weather phenomena that are still largely unexplained; one of the weirdest is the Catatumbo lightning, which occurs near where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.  That one small region gets significant lightning 140 to 160 days a year, nine hours per day, and with lightning flashes from sixteen to forty times per minute.  The area sees the highest density of lightning in the world, at 250 strikes per square kilometer -- and no one knows why.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fernando Flores, Catatumbo Lightning (141677107), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite the inaccuracies and the gaps in our understanding, we are far ahead of the idiotic "they're just flipping a coin" that the non-science types would have you believe.  The deadliest North American hurricane on record, the 1900 Galveston storm that took an estimated eight thousand lives, was as devastating as it was precisely because back then, forecasting was so rudimentary that almost no one knew it was coming.  Today we usually have days, sometimes weeks, of warning before major weather events -- and yet, if the prediction is off by a few hours or landfall is inaccurate by ten miles, people still complain that "the meteorologists are just making guesses."

What's grimly ironic is that we might get our chance to find out what it's like to go back to a United States where we actually don't have accurate weather forecasting, because Trump and his cronies have cut the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the bone.  The motivation was, I suspect, largely because of the Right's pro-fossil-fuels, anti-climate-change bias, but the result will be to hobble our ability to make precise forecasts and get people out of harm's way.  You think the central Texas floods in the first week of July were bad?

Keep in mind that Atlantic hurricane season has just started, as well as the western wildfire season.  The already understaffed NWS and NOAA offices are now running on skeleton crews, just at the point when skilled forecasters are needed the most.  My intuition is you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Oh, and don't ask FEMA to help you after the disaster hits.  That's been cut, too.  Following the Texas floods, thousands of calls from survivors to FEMA were never returned, because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was too busy cosplaying at Alligator Auschwitz to bother doing anything about the situation.  (She responded to criticism by stating that FEMA "responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently," following the Trump approach that all you have to do is lie egregiously and it automatically becomes true.)

Ignorance is nothing to be embarrassed about, but it's also nothing to be proud of.  And when people's ignorance impels them to elect ignorant ideologues as leaders, the whole thing becomes downright dangerous.  Learn some science yourself, sure; the whole fifteen-year run of Skeptophilia could probably be summed up in that sentence.

But more than that -- demand that our leaders base their decisions on facts, logic, science, and evidence, not ideology, bias, and who happens to have dumped the most money into the election campaign.  We're standing on a precipice right now, and we can't afford to be silent.

Otherwise I'm very much afraid we'll find out all too quickly which way the wind is blowing.

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The shadow of misrule

One of the most interesting figures from English history is King Henry II, who ruled from 1154 until his death in 1189.

Henry was the first of the Plantagenet dynasty, which was to last another three hundred years.  The Plantagenets are said to have gotten their name because Henry's father, Geoffrey of Anjou, was fond of the brilliant gold flowers of the broom plant (in medieval French, plante genesta).  His claim to the English throne came through Geoffrey's wife (and Henry II's mother) Matilda, who was the granddaughter of William the Conqueror, and who had come damn close to ruling England in her own right during the First English Civil War.

Henry was a larger-than-life figure who spent most of his reign trying unsuccessfully to keep peace in his wide landholdings (he ruled not only England, but Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Aquitaine), reining in his redoubtable wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and later, dealing with repeated rebellions from his three eldest sons Henry and Geoffrey (both of whom predeceased their father) and Richard, who eventually succeeded to the throne as Richard I "the Lionhearted."

The single incident most often remembered about Henry's reign, though, was his clash with the indomitable Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.  (His picking up of an extra syllable -- "Thomas à Becket" -- is a sixteenth-century invention.)  Becket was initially a close friend and confidante of Henry's, and Henry had been instrumental in his succeeding to the Archbishopric in the first place; but once there, Thomas proved to be stubborn and unyielding, and engaged in what amounted to an eight-year-long pissing match with the king regarding the secular authority's jurisdiction over the Church.  Henry, whose temper tantrums were legendary, ranted at a meeting of his counselors in 1170, "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!"  (The better-known line, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" is not attested by contemporary historians, although it's certainly a pithy and memorable turn of phrase.)

Either way, four of Henry's knights decided that this was tantamount to a direct order.  Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton quietly left the king's presence, and on December 29, 1170 made their way to Canterbury.  At first, it seemed as if they intended to bring Becket back to apologize to the king; eyewitnesses say they left their weapons outside before they went into the cathedral to confront the archbishop.  But Becket, of course, categorically refused, saying to the assassins, "I am ready to die for my Lord, that in my blood the Church may find liberty and peace."  The four knights rushed back out, grabbed their swords, and cut Becket down on the steps leading up into the choir.

The murder of Thomas Becket (ca. 1200) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What happened afterward is why this story comes up in Skeptophilia.  The four knights, understandably horrified at the repercussions of what they'd just done, took off in different directions, as fast as their horses could gallop.  They reconvened in de Morville's home in Knaresborough, Yorkshire, but the following year all four were excommunicated by Pope Alexander III.  Back then excommunication was a huge deal; it meant you couldn't receive the sacraments of the church, including absolution for sins, so it was considered a sure road to spending eternity in hell.  The four tried to make up for it by going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land -- it's thought that none of them returned, and according to one legend they came to bad ends in short order and were buried outside the walls of Jerusalem with the epitaph, "Here lie those wretches who martyred the Blessed St. Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury."

Thomas was canonized in 1173, and his death turned into a good example of "Be careful what you wish for."  In life, he'd antagonized a lot of people with his inflexibility and sharp temper; after he was murdered, all his failings were quickly forgotten and he became a holy martyr.  (In fact, so many miracles were attributed to him that 350 years later the staunchly anti-Catholic King Henry VIII had Becket's bones unearthed, burned, and scattered to the winds so they could no longer be venerated as holy relics.)  As for King Henry II, he never really recovered from his guilt, both in his own eyes and that of his people.  He undertook a remarkable penance -- he knelt at the site where Becket had died, stripped to the waist, and was flogged by the monks of Canterbury -- but it was the beginning of the end of his reign.  His wife Eleanor left him, his two oldest sons, Henry and Geoffrey, died in 1183 and 1186, and he developed health issues (probably stomach cancer) that ended his life at the young age of 56.

Becket's death made such an impression on the English people that it has given rise to a number of ghostly tales.  First, that on the evening of December 29, on the main roads out of Canterbury, you'll hear the onrushing clatter of a horse's hooves, followed by a swirl of icy wind -- the spectral presence of one of the four assassins, fleeing for their lives after murdering the archbishop.  As for Becket himself, he sometimes appears to visitors as an apparition called "Becket's Shadow" -- a vague dark figure with a "pearlescent sheen" and glowing eyes, seen near the pillar where Becket knelt while FitzUrse and the others hacked him to pieces.

It hardly bears mention that I don't give much credence to the ghost stories associated with Henry and Becket, but it does give an extra little frisson to a tale that's really rather sad.  By most estimations, Henry II wasn't a bad king; certainly there were way worse (including his indolent and cruel son King John, who succeeded to the throne after Richard the Lionhearted's early death in 1199 at the age of 41, from sepsis after a wound from a crossbow bolt).  But Becket wasn't an evil man, either.  Hard-headed and self-righteous, sure.  But the collision course the two men ended up on, and the tragedy that eventually unfolded, was as much due to circumstance as intent.  Even the rebellion of Henry's sons (with the connivance of Henry's wife Eleanor of Aquitaine) was a situation where it's hard to pin blame -- it was more what happens when you get a bunch of stubborn and strong-willed people together all of whom think they know the best way to do things.

But even unintentional misrule can cast a long shadow.  Richard I was a blustering bully who had no real interest in governance, and spent a huge chunk of his ten-year reign away on Crusade; John, his younger brother, was roundly hated for his ugly spitefulness, and no one mourned much when he died of dysentery in 1216 at the age of 49.  John's son, Henry III, had one of the longest reigns of any English monarch -- 56 years -- but he was a pious, easily swayed, and not very intelligent man whose obsession with reconquering lost territory in France turned into an utter debacle.  It wasn't until Henry III's capable son, Edward I, was crowned in 1272 -- almost exactly a hundred years after Becket's murder -- that things really began to settle.

It's worth keeping in mind -- especially considering what's happening right now in the United States -- how easy it is to tear things down, and how hard it is (and how long it can take) to rebuild a functioning government.  Any arrogant, entitled prick can run around with a chainsaw; it takes little effort and no brains whatsoever.  Crafting something that actually helps the citizens of the country live better lives requires skill and intelligence and hard work.  Look at what happened in England at the end of the twelfth century, where all it took were hard-headed ideologues refusing to give an inch to precipitate a century's worth of chaos.

How much worse could it be when the ones engineering the destruction are doing it with intent -- vicious and amoral sociopaths who are single-mindedly focused on amassing wealth and power?

Today's elected leaders, though -- and the powerful men who are moving them around like chess pieces, confident that they will never face any consequences -- might want to keep in mind the sobering epitaph carved into King Henry II's tomb at Fontevraud Abbey:

I am Henry the King. To me
Diverse realms were subject.
I was duke and count of many provinces.
Eight feet of ground is now enough for me,
Whom many kingdoms failed to satisfy.
Who reads these lines, let him reflect
Upon the narrowness of death,
And in my case behold
The image of our mortal lot.
This scanty tomb doth now suffice
For whom the whole Earth was not enough.

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Drowsing toward fascism

In John Neufeld's novel Sleep, Two, Three, Four!, the United States has become a fascist dictatorship, run by President Wagenson, who had at first been elected legitimately but then refused to step down at the end of his term.  A complicit Congress confirmed him as president-for-life, with the argument that rampant crime, lawlessness, and illegal immigration rendered it dangerous to switch administrations.  Wagenson and his cronies made sure that the justification never went away by engineering unrest, including raids on people's houses where anything, short of rape or murder, was permitted.

Keep people afraid, and you retain the support for those who claim to know how to fix it.

Along the way, fundamental rights were suspended one by one.  The press went first; news media fell under state control, so that the government had a stranglehold on what the public learned.  Any media outlets that objected (or refused to comply) were labeled as enemies of the people, and were closed down.  Other types of media had to have state approval as well; books, movies, and music that were "degenerate" were banned, their creators blacklisted or even sent to "re-education camps."  Schools were the next thing to be clamped down on -- students received approved curricula, history rewritten to sing the praises of the straight White Christian supporters of the president, and to denigrate (or ignore entirely) the contributions from other parts of society.  Immigrants, especially, were reviled, rounded up and sent back to their place of origin even if they'd immigrated legally.

Many simply "disappeared."

Dissenters were jailed, student protestors at colleges arrested and sent to detention centers, children removed from the homes of "unfit parents" (i.e. those who opposed the president).  But during the lead-up to all this, surprisingly few people had objected; no one seemed to believe where it all was headed, that a dictatorship could happen here in the United States.  Here's how the character of Raph explains it:

"[B]y that time, what was left [of the country] was pretty drowsy itself.  What was left could hardly keep awake long enough to do anything." 

"Exit and entry passes," Gar supplied.  "Special Forces Units, neighborhood guards, curfews, censorship."

"Right," Raph said.  "It's just like being put to sleep...  At some point, it's too late.  You're nearly there, and there's nothing you can do to keep yourself awake.  You just stop struggling, give up, and drift off."

"Marching to sleep," Gar said wonderingly.  "Left, right, left, right, hup two three four."

"There's one thing else, boy," Raph said.  "It couldn't have happened if the people hadn't let it happen.  When the Government asked them to give up something like freedom of the press, for instance, because of an emergency or some national security problem, why, people just good-naturedly gave it up.  They figured the Government must know what it was doing.  If the Government said it was okay, why, since it didn't seem to affect them any, it was okay by them, too...  Wagenson said, 'Let's build a wall to keep the bad people out.'  And people said, 'Well, we don't want bad people here, after all.  Sure, go ahead.'  And when Wagenson said, 'Listen, folks, you don't mind if we come in and search your homes and offices, just in case we find something illegal, because there's so much illegal around' -- why, the people just nodded and smiled and said, 'Sure, if you really think it's necessary, you must know what you're doing, go ahead.  As long as it doesn't seem to bother us none, why you just go right ahead.'  And when Wagenson said he couldn't control crime and violence and the students who were protesting unless he had special powers, like putting people away just because they looked suspicious or because once before maybe they'd fallen into trouble and might get into it again, why everyone nodded and said, 'Why not, if that's what'll get the job done?'"

The story centers around six teenagers who -- for varying reasons -- join a nascent resistance movement.  They are declared enemies of the state and forced to go on the run, pursued by pro-Wagenson armed units increasingly desperate to capture them, or to silence them in any way they can.

It's a gripping story, and surely by now you must be seeing all the dozens of parallels to the current situation in the United States.  But there's one thing I haven't told you.

Sleep, Two, Three, Four! was published in 1971.

John Neufeld was frighteningly prescient.  We have a multiply-indicted wannabe dictator running for president, who already once refused to accept having lost an election and who will certainly do so again if he loses this one.  One state after another are passing laws banning books, removing them not only from schools but from public library shelves, often for no other reason than featuring racially diverse or LGBTQ+ viewpoints, or casting the history of the United States in a light critical of the straight White Christian hegemony.  College protestors are being rounded up and jailed, some evicted from their dorm rooms indefinitely for participating in their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to assemble and state their views publicly.  And we have a party whose platform hinges on keeping people afraid, painting The Other as something fearful, whether it's immigrants, people of other religions or races, queer people, trans people, the disabled, atheists, freethinkers, or dissenters.

If Neufeld wrote his book today, it would be considered a heavy-handed and obvious parody of the people currently in elected office (or running for it).  As it stands, it's a fifty-year-old warning; a terrifying vision of where we could all too easily end up.

Let us hope that enough of us are not, in Raph's words, "too drowsy to do anything."  Oscar Wilde famously said, "Life imitates art more than art imitates life;" but I pray that in this case, the great man's words prove wrong.

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Firing the watchmen

One of the most maddening things about this administration -- and there are many options to choose from -- is the insidious way they're hamstringing scientific research.

It's not just science denial.  That's bad enough.  Claiming that climate change, evolution, and the documented harmful effects of pollution are false has led to dreadful policy choices and (in the case of ecological malfeasance) put innocent lives at risk.

But they've found a sneakier way to deflect people's focus on reality; simply pull the plug on the projects that keep track of it.

This was done, to little fanfare and nearly zero coverage by the press, last week, to NASA's Carbon Monitoring System.  The project, which cost an estimated ten million dollars a year, not only kept track of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but studied sources and sinks for carbon worldwide (including methane, which is an increasing concern from thawing permafrost, and which has a higher greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide does).

So the powers that be have moved past arguing that the models are wrong, or the data flawed; they've simply stopped us from gathering the data in the first place.

[Image courtesy of NASA]

Daniel Jacob, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University, called this an "ironic" time to shut down the system.  There are two new, and more sensitive, carbon monitoring devices scheduled for launch -- one this year (to be mounted on the International Space Station), and one next (the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory), and these will now be tabled.  So Jacob finds it ironic because the funding is cut just before we added some tools to our kit that would allow far more refined measurements of the carbon levels in the atmosphere.  Me, I don't think it's ironic at all, I think it's pure cunning.  Stop the scientists from bolstering the data and their atmospheric models.  Prevent them from producing integrated theories that might make predictions leading to potential strategies for dealing with climate change.  It's like firing all the watchmen, and then acting surprised when your store gets robbed.

Or, as Paul Voosen put it, writing for Science:  "You can't manage what you don't measure."

There's no doubt about where this is all coming from; the pro-corporate, pro-fossil-fuel leanings of the current administration have never been in doubt.  Along the way, they've made sure that the voices of industry (Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Rick Perry, Doug Domenech) are appointed to influential positions, and the voices of science are ignored, defunded, shut down, silenced, and harassed.  If you doubt the last-mentioned, look into the track record of Texas Representative Lamar Smith -- who, fortunately, is retiring this year, but who has spent damn near his entire career fostering doubt about climate change and other environmental issues, and making the lives miserable of any scientist who dares to claim the opposite.  Oh, he gives lip service to caring; earlier this year, Smith said he'd be fine addressing carbon dioxide levels and climate change -- but only if we do it by replacing fossil fuels with fusion technology.

Which doesn't exist yet, and which may not even be possible on a sufficient scale to provide the nation's energy needs.  And we'd only find out if it was feasible through scientific research, which Smith and his cronies have systematically shut down.

So the fossil fuel CEOs make money hand over fist, and then they buy the votes of politicians like Smith who are more concerned with their bank accounts than with the long-term habitability of the Earth.  And the scientists -- who, of all of us, have the most reason for sounding the alarm, and evidence to back them up -- are being sidelined.

All of this leaves me feeling helpless.  I know that optimists keep talking about a "Blue Wave" that's going to come in November and sweep away all of the elected officials who have become nothing more than Trump's professional ass-kissers.  Me, I'm not quite so sanguine.  Not only do we have a powerful, deeply entrenched corporate/industrial superstructure that is tickled pink by the environmental deregulation, pro-business tax legislation, and defunding of research, there's the dictatorship-style State-Sponsored Media that Fox News has become, presenting only the cheerful party line coming from the White House and ignoring anything that could be considered a criticism of the Dear Leader's agenda.  So you've got the rich and powerful pulling the strings, and a deluded and ignorant slice of Americans never hearing what the actual effects are -- and voting the same lobby-bought politicians back into power over and over and over.

I keep hoping that people will wake up, but I'm reminded of what one of my Environmental Science students wrote, many years ago, and which seems a fitting, if depressing, way to conclude: "It'd be nice if humans based their decisions on science, but that's not what most people do.  In this case, it's going to take something really horrible to bring people to their senses -- not just one drought, one storm, one killer heat wave.  People are so sunk in short-term expediency and long-term self-delusion that it's going to take a global-scale catastrophe for them to frown, and say, 'Wait.  Maybe this was a bad idea.'  And not only does that mean that it'll come at the cost of millions of lives, it may not happen until it's too late to do anything to stop it."

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

The seven deadly words

George Orwell, in his classic book 1984, writes characters who speak a dialect of English called "Newspeak."

The "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth) controls the public perception of what is true, perceptions that are enforced by the "Thinkpol" (Thought Police).  The Thinkpol are responsible for stopping "thoughtcrime," including "facecrime" -- forbidden thoughts as revealed in your facial expression.  Toward that end, they "rectify" historical accounts (to conform to the government's agenda regarding what happened), eliminating anything that is "malquoted" or "misprinted."  You're trained to the point of accepting the government's views based on "bellyfeel" -- how they affect you emotionally, not whether they're true.

Intercourse between a man and a woman -- preferably without any pleasure -- is "goodsex."  Anything else is a "sexcrime."  The preference of the government is that babies are conceived by "artsem" -- artificial insemination.

Someone who breaks any of these rules -- or worse, contradicts what Big Brother wants you to do or say -- is not only killed, every trace of them is erased.  They become an "Unperson."

[image courtesy of photographer Todd Page and the Wikimedia Commons]

Orwell was strikingly prescient.  If you doubt that we're heading down that road, consider the story that was broken by the Washington Post yesterday, that employees at the Center for Disease Control have been given a list by the Trump administration of seven words they are not allowed to use in official correspondence or publications.

Those words are:

• vulnerable
• entitlement
• fetus
• diversity
• transgender
• science-based
• evidence-based

When I first read this, my initial reaction was, "This can't possibly be true."  The CDC being forbidden from using the word "fetus?"  But after some digging about, all I can say is that it appears at the time of this writing to be true.  The reports have not been corroborated by any official channels -- spokespeople for the CDC itself refused to comment -- but no one involved has stepped forward and said, "Bullshit."

I'm not sure what to be appalled most about this.  That we don't want any group of people identified as "vulnerable," because then we might have to do something about it.  That because of the Trump administration's ongoing war on minorities, we mustn't speak of diversity.  That LGBT individuals, whose rights to fair treatment are being threatened with every new judicial appointment, are guilty of "sexcrime;" and we have to pretend transgender people don't even exist.

And "science-based" and "evidence-based?"  What the fuck is the CDC supposed to base its policy on, then?  Magic?  The bible?  Prophecy?

Or just what its "bellyfeel" is?

I've tried not to engage in hyperbole about what this administration is doing, but every new thing I read drives me further toward the conclusion that they have really only one motive: consolidating power, and toward that end, shutting down resistance, eliminating free speech and the free press, rewriting the truth to conform to whatever Trump's cadre says it should be.  Everything contradictory is "oldspeak" that should be "rectified."

The result should be "doubleplusgood," don't you think?

My hope is the fact of this having been made public will give CDC employees the courage to defy this order.  People have to fight back, tell the 2017 version of the Thinkpol "No way in hell."  We have to spread this story far and wide, because you know the first thing the Trump administration is going to do is claim that this is all "fake news."

"Malquoted" and "misprinted."

I have some slim hope that this report will turn out to be an exaggeration, or perhaps simply untrue.  But given the Trump administration's record for supporting not only the right to dissent but science itself, I'm not holding my breath.  What it's looking more like is that Orwell got the details right -- all he missed was the year it happened.

Governmental facepalms

Because we evidently needed another reason to facepalm over a Trump appointee, today we consider: John Fleming, assistant secretary for health technology at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Fleming has some decidedly peculiar ideas.  In his book Preventing Addiction: What Parents Must Know to Immunize Their Kids Against Drug and Alcohol Addiction, Fleming states that opiates are proof of the existence of god:

Were it not for these drugs, many common and miraculous surgeries would be impossible to either undergo or perform.  In my opinion this is no coincidence at all.  Only a higher power and intellect could have created a world in which substances like opiates grow naturally.

Which brings up a couple of troubling questions:

1. Why do these miracle substances intelligently created by a deity so often lead to addiction and the potential for overdose?
2. If opiates are a blessed gift from god because they "grow naturally," why are people of Fleming's stripe virtually all against the legalization of marijuana?  Seems like an intelligent deity's creation of marijuana could be argued not only from the standpoint that it "grows naturally," but because its consumption is so beneficial to the tortilla chip industry.

 It's a bit like Dr. Pangloss said in Voltaire's masterpiece Candide:

It is clear, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end.  Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles.  Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches...  Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.

When, of course, rather than giving us noses to support spectacles, god could just have given us all perfect eyesight rather than noses built to support spectacles.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This, however, is not the only bizarre thing in Fleming's book.  He says there's a correlation between tattoos and drug addiction:

Body art comes into play in drug addiction as well, although obviously, not all who have a tattoo are addicts.  A sailor who gets a single tattoo on his arm or an adult woman who has a small butterfly tattooed on her lower abdomen are not necessarily drug addicts or even rebellious — just dumb, at least temporarily!...  When you see that your child has become interested in body art or has a fascination with the Goth or other subculture, then be on alert, because your child is likely headed into rebellion and possible drug experimentation.

So this makes me wonder how my two rather large tattoos haven't resulted in my being addicted to cocaine or something.  Despite the size and elaborate nature of my own body art, maybe I'm still in the category of "temporarily dumb."

Last, it turns out that Fleming himself might not have much right to point fingers about temporary stupidity, because he is one of the people who fell for the story in The Onion that Planned Parenthood was building an "$8 billion abortionplex."  Then, not having learned the lesson "if you're not smart enough to recognize satire and fake news, at least be smart enough to check your sources," he delivered a speech on the floor of Congress in 2013 to communicate the alarming news that the Department of Defense was starting to round up and court martial Christians so as to "create an atheist military."

Where, you might ask, did Fleming get this "information" from?

From Breitbart, of course.

So come on, folks.  Is it too much to ask to have a few government appointees who are competent, intelligent, and sane?  Because the ones we have now, in my dad's trenchant phrase, couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.

Myself, I'm beginning to wonder if this is an elaborate experiment being run by alien scientists to see how long it takes us to figure out that the whole American government is some kind of huge put-on.  The question they're trying to answer is whether we'll just go along with it unquestioningly.  At some point, maybe they're expecting us to say, "Okay, ha-ha, very funny.  Game's up.  Come out of hiding, alien overlords, and give us back some semblance of normalcy."  I don't know how else you'd explain people like Fleming, not to mention Steve Bannon, who looks like he's spent the last ten years pouring Jack Daniels on his breakfast cereal.

Rigged thinking

Skepticism often requires maneuvering your way through equal and opposite pitfalls.  As I frequently say to my classes, gullibility and cynicism are both signs of mental laziness -- it is as much of a cognitive error to disbelieve everything you hear as it is to believe everything.

The same is true of reliance on authority.  It certainly is inadvisable to believe without question anything an authority says (or believe it simply because (s)he is an authority); but dismissing everything is also pretty ridiculous.  Stephen Hawking, for example, is a world-renowned authority on physics.  If I refused to believe what he has to say on (for example) black holes I would be foolish -- and very likely wrong.

So categorical thinking tends to get us into trouble.  It's an excuse to avoid the hard work of research and analysis.  It is also, unfortunately, extremely common.

Which brings us to "everything the government tells you is a lie."

Distrust of the government is in vogue these days.  "The government says..." is a fine way to start a sentence that you're expecting everyone to scoff at, especially if the piece of the government in question belongs to a different political party than you do.  That spokespeople for the government have lied on occasion -- that they have, sometimes, engaged in disinformation campaigns -- is hardly at issue.  But to decide that everything a government agency does or says is deliberately dishonest is sloppy thinking, not to mention simply untrue.

It also has another nasty side effect, though, which is to convince people that they are powerless.  If the Big Evil Government is going to do whatever they damn well please regardless of what voters want, it leads people to believe that they're being bamboozled every time they vote.  And powerless, angry, frustrated people tend to do stupid, violent things.

Which is why the whole "the election is rigged" bullshit that Donald Trump is trumpeting every chance he gets is so dangerous.  For fuck's sake, the election hasn't even happened yet; one very much gets the impression that this reaction is much like a toddler's temper tantrum when he doesn't get the piece of candy he wants.  Trump can't conceive of the fact that he could compete for something he wants and lose fair and square; so if he loses (and it very much looks like he's going to), the election must be rife with fraud.

Scariest of all was his suggestion in last night's presidential debate that he might not concede the election if Clinton wins.  As CNN senior political analyst David Gergen put it:

More importantly, many in the press, as well as others (I am among them) were horrified that Trump refused to say he would accept the verdict of voters on November 8.  No other candidate has ever taken the outrageous position that "if I win, that's legitimate but if I lose, the system must be rigged."  It is bad enough that Trump puts himself before party; now he is putting self before country.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In fact, actual voter fraud in the United States is so rare as to be insignificant with respect to the outcome of elections.  A comprehensive study by Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and professor of law at Loyola University, found 31 cases of credible voter fraud out of one billion ballots cast in the past sixteen years.  A separate study by Lorraine Minnite, professor of political science at Rutgers, came to the same conclusion.  Further, she found that irregularities in elections were almost always due to innocent human error rather than a deliberate attempt to throw the election.  Here are four examples Minnite cites:

• In the contested 2004 Washington state gubernatorial election, a Superior Court judge ruled invalid just 25 ballots, constituting 0.0009 percent of the 2,812,675 cast. Many were absentee ballots mailed as double votes or in the names of deceased people, but the judge did not find all were fraudulently cast. When King County prosecutors charged seven defendants, the lawyer for one 83-year old woman said his client “simply did not know what to do with the absentee ballot after her husband of 63 years, Earl, passed away” just before the election, so she signed his name and mailed the ballot. 
• A leaked report from the Milwaukee Police Department found that data entry errors, typographical errors, procedural missteps, misapplication of the rules, and the like accounted for almost all reported problems during the 2004 presidential election. 
• When the South Carolina State Election Commission investigated a list of 207 allegedly fraudulent votes in the 2010 election, it found simple human errors in 95 percent of the cases the state’s highest law enforcement official had reported as fraud. 
• A study by the Northeast Ohio Media Group of 625 reported voting irregularities in Ohio during the 2012 election found that nearly all cases forwarded to county prosecutors were caused by voter confusion or errors by poll workers.

It's easy to say "the system is designed to screw voters!" or "the election is rigged!"  It's not so easy to answer the questions, "What evidence do you have that this happens?" and "How would you actually go about rigging a national election if you wanted to?"  (If you want an excellent summary of the argument that the risk of hackers or other miscreants affecting the outcome of an election in the United States is extremely small, check out the CNN article on the subject that just came out yesterday.)

So what we have here is one more example of baseless partisan rhetoric, which has as the unsettling side effect making people on the losing side feel like they've been cheated.  Which, I think, is why we're seeing a serious uptick in threats of violence by people who don't like the way the election seems to be going -- from the woman at a Trump rally who cited "rampant voter fraud" and said, "For me personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I myself am ready for a revolution" to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke who tweeted, "our institutions of gov, WH, Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch. Pitchforks and torches time."

To reiterate what I said at the beginning; it's not that I condone, agree with, or like everything government has done.  Nor do I think that government officials (or whole agencies) are above doing some pretty screwed up stuff.  But to say "government sucks" and forthwith stop thinking -- or, worse still, threaten violence because of that simplistic view of the world -- is not just wrong, it's dangerous.

Flying saucer data dump

The alien conspiracy theorists and cover-up-o-philes must have experienced a serious "WTF?" moment after the release a week ago of official reports of UFOs...

... by the CIA.

Thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I was able to peruse the CIA.gov link entitled "Take a Peek into our 'X-Files'," which begins thusly:

The CIA declassified hundreds of documents in 1978 detailing the Agency’s investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The documents date primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s. 

To help navigate the vast amount of data contained in our FOIA UFO collection, we’ve decided to highlight a few documents both skeptics and believers will find interesting. 

Below you will find five documents we think X-Files character Agent Fox Mulder would love to use to try and persuade others of the existence of extraterrestrial activity. We also pulled five documents we think his skeptical partner, Agent Dana Scully, could use to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings. 

The truth is out there; click on the links to find it.

We are then not just invited, but positively encouraged to peruse the files on such cases as the sighting of flying saucers in East Germany in 1952 and the report from the same year describing UFOs over a uranium mine in the Belgian Congo, not to mention the report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects filed with the CIA in 1953.

Then, if that wasn't wonderful enough for you, we are directed to a page called "How to Investigate a Flying Saucer" wherein we are told all about Project Blue Book.  It's as if the CIA had a sudden attack of conscience and decided to come clean on everything that the UFO world holds dear:

Before December 1947, there was no specific organization tasked with the responsibility for investigating and evaluating UFO sightings. There were no standards on how to evaluate reports coming in, nor were there any measurable data points or results from controlled experiment for comparison against reported sightings. 

To end the confusion, head of the Air Force Technical Service Command, General Nathan Twining, established Project SIGN (initially named Project SAUCER) in 1948 to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to such sightings, on the premise that UFOs might be real (although not necessarily extraterrestrial) and of national security concern. Project SIGN eventually gave way to Project GRUDGE, which finally turned into Project BLUE BOOK in 1952.

We then are led through a systematic way to study such sightings, including methodologies for eliminating "false positives," how to identify (terrestrial) aircraft and other natural phenomena, how to gather data (and what data is critical), and how to file an eyewitness report.

I cannot begin to imagine how a diehard UFO conspiracy theorist would react to reading this.  My guess is that the reaction would largely be a scoffing dismissal of the entire site -- the stance being that of course the CIA is still covering up its knowledge of aliens (Roswell!  Groom Lake!  Dulce Base!  Area 51!).  This release of a few reports is only meant to persuade the weak-minded that the CIA has nothing to hide.  The real stuff on alien autopsies and grotesque alien/human hybridization experiments is still being covered up.

It's especially amusing that the release of these documents has coincided with the reboot of The X Files.  I do not think this is an accident, and it indicates something that I had not known before, namely that there are government intelligence agents who have a sense of humor.  If you've seen either of the two new episodes that have been aired so far, you will know that Chris Carter et al. have basically pulled out all the stops, and threw every conspiracy trope in the world into two fifty-minute shows.  And, no spoilers intended, the CIA and Department of Defense do not come out looking like heroes.

So anyway.  Anything that can induce some cognitive dissonance into the minds of conspiracy theorists is okay by me.  I don't think that the CIA is telling us everything they know -- being that "top secret" designation happens for a reason -- but it's nice to have access to at least some of the original documents.  Now, you'll have to excuse me, because I have some UFO reports to read.

The road to hell

The transition of a culture into fascism is seldom sudden.  It's a slow slide, urged forward by fear and xenophobia, and often catalyzed by the appearance of a charismatic figure who spouts jingoistic talking points, pounding the table and telling everyone that he has the answers, that all will be well if they just vote for him.

And one of the first things that often happens is that his followers, buoyed up by the heady air of finally having a leader who is saying all of the things they've felt for years, begin to shout down the opposition.  Inevitably violence occurs, and a protestor at a rally is beaten up for having the wrong views.  The charismatic leader doesn't chide his followers for their actions; oh, no.   He urges his followers on, suggests that the victim deserved the beating -- which of course fosters further violence and more fear on the part of anyone courageous enough to dissent.

James Luther Adams was one of those victims, and was lucky to get away as more-or-less unscathed as he did:

I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.  Was he going to beat me up because of what I had been saying?...  He shouted at me... "You damn fool, don’t you know that here today you keep your mouth shut or you’ll get your head bashed in... You know what I have done.  I’ve saved you from getting beaten up.  They were not going to continue arguing with you.  You were going to be lying flat on the pavement."

And throughout it all, the moderate rationalists look at each other in amazement, saying, "How can this happen?"  Some deride the leader as a fool, a buffoon with no experience in government and even less credibility.  As if that has any effect on people who are reacting through fear and the sudden thrilling awareness that the leader has just given you carte blanche to beat the shit out of anyone who says the wrong thing.

The fear is fed by a knowledge of there being terrible societal inequities, and the sense that the problems can only be righted by a complete overturning of government.  In the words of an ordinary citizen, "Of course all the little people who had small savings were wiped out.  But the big factories and banking houses and multimillionaires didn’t seem to be affected at all.  They went right on piling up their millions.  Those big holdings were protected somehow from loss.  But the mass of the people were completely broke.  And we asked ourselves, 'How can that happen?'...  But after that, even those people who used to save didn’t trust money anymore, or the government.  We decided to have a high time whenever we had any spare money, which wasn’t often. "

Small wonder that such conditions foster distrust, suspicion, and anger.  And then, along comes someone who says he can fix all that:

We deceive ourselves if we believe that the people want to be governed by majorities.  No, you don't know the people.  This people doesn't want to lose itself in “majorities.”  It doesn't want to be involved in great plans.  It wants a leadership in which it can believe, nothing more.

And still the moderates stand around, shaking their heads in dismay, and doing little else.

Anyone who disagrees is ridiculed or denounced.  Critics are publicly humiliated and made to apologize for their audacity, and sued for defamation if they refuse.

Then the propaganda machine goes into overdrive convincing people that the entire country is going to hell if the election goes the other way:

This man who, because of his extraordinary knowledge and ability in all areas, was able to rise from nothing to his present position as the leader... despite tremendous resistance, is perhaps the only one who has the ability to master the enormous tasks, rescuing the nation at the eleventh hour from its almost hopeless situation.  Led by fate, he followed his path. It would not be the first time in history that [we were] rescued by the right man in our greatest need.

And of course, the final step is turning that anger and fear against a common enemy, someone who can act as a scapegoat.  After all, there has to be a means for directing the rage; the revolution can't be too complete, or it will destroy the very structure to which the leaders are trying to ascend.  So who's to blame?

The poor and powerless, of course.

The more economic difficulties increase, the more immigration will be seen as a burden... In this struggle... there’s only a clear either/or.  Any half measure leads to one’s own destruction.  The world [of these people] must be destroyed if humanity wants to live; there is no other choice than to fight a pitiless battle against [them] in every form.

Amazingly, people fall for it.  Fact-checking, pointing out the lies and half-truths, doesn't alter the trajectory by one millimeter.  In a direct quote that you would think would be enough by itself to wake people up: "Credibility doesn't matter.  The winner will not be asked whether he told the truth."

But still his poll numbers climb, until what looked like a ridiculous bid for attention by a narcissistic troll has become a threat to the founding principles of the entire country.

And at some point, we look around us in horror, and say, "How did we get here?"  There was no single turning point, no sudden overthrow -- just a gentle, smooth slide into being governed by the worst people in the world.

[image courtesy of photograph Robert F. W. Whitlock and the Wikimedia Commons]

Oh, but wait.  All of the quotes and references above were taken directly from primary documents regarding the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in pre-World War II Germany.

Who did you think I was talking about?

Plausible deniability

One of the things I've never understood is the certainty a lot of people have that the universe is designed in such a way as to line up perfectly with their personal opinions.

It crops up fairly regularly in religion.  You think gays are icky?  Well, what a coincidence.  God doesn't like them, either!  You would rather that the power structure keep men in control of everything?  How about that, Allah would like that, too!

It'd be kind of an odd coincidence, don't you think?  Conservatives think god is conservative, liberals think god is liberal.  Never once do you go to a conservative church and hear the preacher say, "Sorry, brethren and sistren.  God told me that we need to welcome in illegal immigrants."  Nor do you go to a liberal church and hear, "God has a new directive.  Balancing the federal budget is more important than funding social programs."

Doesn't it seem like people are designing their religious beliefs so that they support their political biases, and not the other way around?

To be fair, there are exceptions, such as Reverend Danny Cortez of the New Harmony Community Baptist Church of Los Angeles, who recently broke with the party line of the Southern Baptist Convention and came out in support of LGBT individuals.  But it's rare.  Most of us are convinced we live in a comfortable little universe that in the Big Picture, works exactly the way we would like it to.

This tendency isn't confined to religion, though.  A study done at Duke University and published just this month supports the troubling notion that we even approach scientific findings this way.  Troy Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate in Duke's School of Business, and his team found that when test subjects were presented with scientific evidence of a problem, followed by a policy solution that would run counter to their political beliefs, they were more likely to believe that the problem itself didn't exist.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Conservatives, for example, were given a statement to read that showed evidence that the global average temperature would rise by 3.2 degrees in the 21st century.  Half of them then read a proposed solution requiring increased government regulation -- carbon emissions taxes, restrictions on fossil fuel use, and so on.  The other half were given a solution that involved support of the free market, such as reducing taxes on companies that use green technology.

When asked whether they believed that the Earth's temperature would rise by the predicted amount, only 22% of the first group said they did -- compared to 55% of the second group!

Liberals are no less prone to what Campbell calls "solution aversion."  Liberals showed a much lower belief in statistics about violent home break-ins if they were then presented with a solution that doesn't line up with liberal ideology, such as looser restrictions on handgun ownership.

"Logically, the proposed solution to a problem, such as an increase in government regulation or an extension of the free market, should not influence one’s belief in the problem.  However, we find it does,” Campbell said about the study.  "The cure can be more immediately threatening than the problem...  We argue that the political divide over many issues is just that, it’s political.  These divides are not explained by just one party being more anti-science, but the fact that in general people deny facts that threaten their ideologies, left, right or center."

All of this strikes me as kind of bizarre.  Whatever my other biases, I've never thought it was reasonable to deny that the disease exists because the cure sounds unpleasant.  But apparently, that's the way a lot of people think.

But it does give some hope of a solution.   Says study co-author Aaron Kay:  "We should not just view some people or group as anti-science, anti-fact or hyper-scared of any problems.  Instead, we should understand that certain problems have particular solutions that threaten some people and groups more than others.  When we realize this, we understand those who deny the problem more and we improve our ability to better communicate with them."

To which I can only say: amen.

Let us pray...

In the latest from the Quick Comeuppance department, we have news that only three days after the Supreme Court sided 5-4 with the town of Greece, New York in supporting their right to open town meetings with a prayer, a man in Deerfield Beach, Florida has put in his official request to open a city commission meeting with a prayer...

... to Satan.

My first reaction upon reading this was, and I quote, "BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Surely the Supreme Court justices must have realized what a can of worms they were opening.  Whatever your opinion about whether the United States was a Christian nation at its founding, it's pretty certain that it's not any more -- or at least, Christianity isn't the unified front it once was.  Unbelievers now account for one out of every five Americans, and then there are all of the minority religions, not to mention the fact that Christianity itself has shattered into hundreds of little sects that barely agree with each other on anything but the basics, and sometimes not even that.  So it comes down to the fact that separation of church and state protects everyone; it protects me from being forced to sit through a prayer I don't believe in, and it protects Christians from having to sit through a prayer praising Lucifer.

Which, of course, is the point that Chaz Stevens is trying to make with his letter to the City of Deerfield Beach, which reads as follows:

Dear City of Deerfield Beach: 

With the recent US Supreme Court ruling allowing “prayer before Commission meetings” and seeking the rights granted to others, I hereby am requesting I be allowed to open a Commission meeting praying for my God, my divine spirit, my Dude in Charge. 

Be advised, I am a Satanist. 

Let me know when this is good for you. 

Besties 

Chaz Stevens, Calling in from Ring 6 of Dante’s Inferno

Stevens is the same guy who responded to Florida Governor Rick Scott's support of a city-sponsored nativity scene with a demand to place next to it an eight-foot-tall Festivus pole made of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans.

And won.

Then, there is the group who is constructing a ten-foot-tall statue of Baphomet to be placed at the Oklahoma Statehouse -- after State Representative Mike Ritze pushed through a request by a conservative Christian group to erect a monument of the Ten Commandments.  The legislators aren't going to take that lying down, to judge by Representative Earl Sears's response upon hearing of the plans for the statue: "This is a faith-based nation and a faith-based state.   I think it is very offensive they would contemplate or even have this kind of conversation."

So breaking down the wall between church and state is apparently just fine, as long as it's the right church.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase, "Be Careful What You Wish For," doesn't it?

What gets me about all of this stuff, though, is the one question you so seldom hear anyone ask: why do people want to have a mandated prayer before a government meeting?  Or, for that matter, a government-funded nativity scene?  No one is saying you can't pray privately all you want, whenever and wherever you want, or have a nativity scene in your own personal yard so garish that the lights blind the drivers of nearby cars.  But what earthly purpose can there be to have such religious gestures carry the government's imprimatur?

Except, of course, to rub it in the faces of people who don't believe.  That, I think, is the tacit goal here -- to say to us atheists (and, probably, to adherents to other religions as well), "Ha ha.  The United States is too a Christian nation.  See?  We showed you, didn't we?"

The teensy problem with this, though, is that by so doing, the Christians who are making such an issue of this aren't even following the precepts of their own holy book.  I turn your attention to Matthew 6:5-6, wherein we read, "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.  Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

Mmm-hmm.  Wonder what Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision, would say in response to that?  Not much, is my guess.  Because take a look what he actually did write: "To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact."

Righty-o.  Well done.  I will be looking forward to hearing how the City Commission of Deerfield Beach likes starting their meetings with a prayer to Satan.  And to anyone who feels so inclined, I would be happy to help you write a nice invocation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to use at whatever public meeting you'd like.

A side of chips

One of the most chilling tropes in my all-time favorite television series, The X Files, was the idea that the individuals involved in the conspiracy between the government and the evil aliens had simultaneously taken DNA samples and implanted microchips into our bodies when we were given vaccinations against smallpox.  The DNA was kept in a huge deep-freeze vault (the same place, I recall, that Mulder saw his first frozen alien baby), for a variety of nefarious purposes -- alien/human hybridization experiments amongst them.  Scully, at first a non-believer, finds out that Mulder was right when her doctor locates, and removes, the microchip in her own body -- with the unexpected result of her developing terminal cancer.

It's a terrifying idea, isn't it?  We're marked, tagged like animals in some kind of wildlife study, for reasons beyond our ken.  The whole thing is what we in the field technically refer to as "Some Seriously Scary Shit."

But, of course, being fiction, The X Files isn't real.  A distinction that apparently has sailed right past one Sherry Shriner, who claims that microchip implants are everywhere, and in everyone, and she knows they are because god told her so, a conclusion she tells us all about in her web page entitled "How To Detect and Nullify Chip Implants."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Shriner thinks the government has us all microchipped, and that microchips are present in all of the following:

• vaccines
• dental fillings
• any kind of implanted medical device (e.g. pacemakers)
• surgical pins, rods, or plates
• transplanted tissue

Not only that, we have probably been microchipped even if we never go to the doctor or dentist, Shriner tells us:

If you are ever in a crowded store and you feel a sudden sting, like you got bit by a insect... [c]hances are you got zapped by a chip gun.  Yes, there are actually morons with chip guns who purposely go around implanting people.

Apparently the lord told Shriner all about this, and that not only are the chips for tracking people, They (the big "They") use the chips to control our behavior:

Our government has been knee deep in one particular area over the past 60 years and that has been to learn how to manipulate and control people.  Biblical theology would refer to as witchcraft but it is seen as advancement and technological breakthroughs by a government that on the backside serves Lucifer and is preparing the way for his rise and manipulation of the entire earth. 

Are serial killers and assassins today under government influence as lab rats to see how effective mind manipulation and control is?  I would say so.  Most of these involved with hideous crimes have recounted stories of chip implantations, missing time, or hearing voices which is typical of being a MILAB or military lab rat. 

What I have found in the Bible Codes about implantable chips in these last days is that they are 2-way transistor radio type chips.  Over the years they have perfected them from being tracking devices to being able to influence people by speaking to them directly through these chips and influencing their actions.  Through these chips they can read your thoughts, hear what you are saying, even see what you are seeing (depending on the chip, like a video chip they have and can implant you with).

We have some recourse against all of this nasty stuff, though, and fortunately, it's simple enough.  These ultrasophisticated high-tech super-secret microchips are only vulnerable to one thing, and we're lucky that it's the one thing the brilliant evil scientists that the government hired would never have thought of...

... magnets.

I have found that rare earth magnets called Neodymium magnets will nullify chips.  I bought some Neodymium magnets online from a retailer, the kind that can lift 10lbs of steel and run about .70 cents a piece and I used band aides to hold them in place.  I put magnets on the back of each ear lobe, on the side of each arm where I have received shots, on both sides of my jaws where I had wisdom teeth removed, and under each heel where I had been purposely implanted by my mother's doctor shortly after I was born.  Also on my stomach where I had a cesarean. I am finding that most people are implanted by their navels as well.  If you have had any type of surgery put a magnet near the scar for about 24 hours. 

When you use the magnets be sure to have the north side of the magnet facing your skin.  A compass will tell you which side of the magnet is north.  For newer chips or chips closer to the surface like your ears or jaws leave them on for about 12 hours.  For older chips such as vaccinations leave them on for about two days.  The Lord will lead you as to how long to keep them on or when it is deactivated and you can take the magnet off.  Just listen for His guidance in your Spirit if you are one of His. 

Seek the Lord on where you have them and He will guide your thoughts and lead you where to put the magnets.

Well, alrighty, then.

Just for the record, though, I'm not letting any neodymium magnets anywhere near my skin, because those things are freakin' powerful, and I'd rather not get a sensitive body part pinched between two of 'em.  Given the choice, I'll stick with the microchips.

Because that's just it, isn't it?  If Shriner is right, and we all have these microchips in us, the government is monitoring and controlling something like 314 million people, minus the half-dozen or so who take Shriner and her ilk seriously and have stuck magnets all over their bodies.  Can you imagine the amount of data we're talking about, here?  The government can't even seem to manage to have an error-free list of voters, and that's just managing a list of names and addresses.  Can you imagine the chaos if government officials were not only monitoring us constantly -- our conversations, what we were looking at, what we were hearing -- but were actually controlling our actions?  Like, with radio transmitters to move us around, or something?

It would be like a 314-million-player game of blind man's bluff.  We'd all be walking into walls, in front of trains, off cliffs, and so on, not to mention the fact that the drivers in Boston would be worse than they already are.

So I doubt that Sherry Shriner is right, honestly.  I haven't heard a thing about this from the lord (or any other reasonably credible source), so I'll just go on ahead living my life and assuming that the Men In Black don't give two shits what I had for dinner this Monday.  (A nice t-bone steak, steamed asparagus, and a glass of red wine, if anyone's curious, not that it matters.)  And if you do find a microchip in your smallpox vaccination scar at some point, my advice is to leave it there.  Scully took hers out, and damn near died.