The title of this blog post is classified

I think we've all had moments when we were taken in by a prank or a hoax.  Some of them can be pretty clever, and after all, we're only human -- we can't call things correctly all the time.  And when it happens, most of us go, "Wow, what a goober I am!" and laugh a little, and move on -- with, one would hope, a resolution not to fall quite so quickly the next time.

Which is probably why the YouTube video clip that a loyal reader sent me the link to had me torn between guffawing and crying.  Well, not the video itself; the video is a clip from The Onion, that awesome purveyor of satire, about a "Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill" (that doesn't exist) being reviewed by a Representative John Haller of Pennsylvania (who doesn't exist).

What had me twitching were the comments.

Yes, yes, I know, never read the comments section.  I broke the cardinal rule. And now that I've done so, I'm even more worried that we might re-elect Donald Trump for president, because the majority of the commenters appear to be walking, talking, computer-owning, voting Americans who have the IQ of a peach pit.

First, though, let's see what "Representative Haller" had to say:

Congress shall now vote for approval of HR 8791, the Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill, as said bill requests emergency response funding up to and including... I'm sorry, this section is classified ... dollars to prepare for a national level terrorist attack and/or attack from CLASSIFIED.  Funding for first responder personnel and vehicles would be doubled if said attack leads to more than 80% of national population being affected by CLASSIFIED.  This funding shall commence with the first attack on CLASSIFIED or the first large-scale outbreak of CLASSIFIED, dependent upon which comes first.  Civilian and military units shall be trained in containment and combat of CLASSIFIED including irradiated CLASSIFIED with possibility of CLASSIFIED airborne CLASSIFIED flesh-eating CLASSIFIED, and/or all of the above in such event as CLASSIFIED spewing CLASSIFIED escape, are released, or otherwise become uncontrollable.

Air Force units may also be directed to combat said CLASSIFIED due to their enormous size and other-worldly strengths.  Should event occur in urban areas...  [*horrified expression*] Jesus, that's... that's CLASSIFIED... far surpassing our darkest nightmares.  Should casualties exceed CLASSIFIED body disposal actions shall be halted and associated resources shall be reallocated to CLASSIFIED underground CLASSIFIED protected birthing centers.  A new Bill of Rights shall be drafted and approved by CLASSIFIED.

Having now reviewed the bill, I ask you to please cast your votes.

Okay, please reassure me; having heard that, you would immediately know that it was fake.  Right?  Right?

Apparently, "wrong."  Here's a comment that appears on the video link:

If you have any intelligence at all or if you are just "awake" you can easily enough fill in the blanks "classified"  Hmmm..  He is basically talking about radiation and disease(s) outbreak and containment, underground facilities and the general population which will evidently be gradually eradicated!  Better get your house in order, light your Lamp and have PLENTY of OIL this is going to be a long, tedious ride until Jesus comes back!  We don't know when, ONLY The Father knows so we should be ready AT ALL TIMES but these things happen FIRST, BEFORE He gets back, so you need to stay ready and "endure" with all you've got!  Remember Jesus IS The ONLY Way!  ~Heads UP!

Well, someone sensible responded to that, to wit:

This was fake video made by The Onion.  Look at the logo in the lower right corner.  Get a grip on reality.

Remember my opening paragraph, about going, "Wow, how silly of me! I got fooled!"  Well, here's the followup comment.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because you can only add [sic] so many times:

It could be a fake, or maybe the onion logo is a replacement over the real logo.  maybe somebody tampering with the video to make its seem like a fake and someone got their hands on it.  The onion logo could be a cover up scheme who knows...  But I will say this, all around us there is blood being shed, crazy earth quakes, murder, war, lies, the death toll is off the chain.  muslims cut the heads off of little children and dance around with the corpses, evil media and music, promotion of violence adultery sexual immorality and greed.  Things are so bad it just is not funny anymore.  Rape is at an all time high and everywhere I turn I see gay people !!!  yo mad people are gay its freaking crazy.  yo we got dudes popping other dudes and little boys in the butt 24/7 365. the immorality these day is off the charts.  anybody who thinks things are ok today has a nothing in between the ear.  you gotta be real stupid not to see that something huge is going to happen.

So evidently I'm one of the ones who has a nothing in between the ear, because I am certain it's a fake.  Look up the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.  There is no Representative John Haller.  That alone should be enough, wouldn't you think?

At least one guy agrees with me:

Fuck's sake, people. It's satire.  The Onion, you know?  Satire?  Meaning fake?  Hello? 

But he was immediately shouted down by the likes of the following rocket scientist:

I think it's quite funny that the majority of those saying this is fake all have blank profiles almost as if they were created just to argue the legitimacy of this video...

And the following:

Sounds like they have a plan if theirs a biological outbreak they mite of created something that can be air born and something about flesh eating hmm and if this is true some one must of got their hands on it and preparing in chase they release it on the public for some reason zombie popping in my head head there experimenting rabbits on people and that theirs a part in your brain that could make you so violent that your almost like a ghoul.

Yes!  That's it!  Zombie popping in your head head there experimenting rabbits on people so your almost like a ghoul!  Why didn't I think of that as an explanation?  It's brilliant!

So you see why I don't have a lot of trust in the citizenry of the United States, and their ability to vote in leaders that aren't batshit insane?

We have people here who, even when given repeated reassurances that a video that is obviously a fake is, well, a fake, they still insist that it must all be a giant conspiracy to keep them in the dark about ghouls and radiation and diseases and underground facilities and the Second Coming of Christ.

Whenever I think I've plumbed the absolute depth of idiocy, I find that there are deeper wells that I have yet to explore.  As the quote attributed to Einstein puts it: "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

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One of my favorite TED talks is by the neurophysiologist David Eagleman, who combines two things that don't always show up together; intelligence and scientific insight, and the ability to explain complex ideas in a way that a layperson can understand and appreciate.

His first book, Incognito, was a wonderful introduction to the workings of the human brain, and in my opinion is one of the best books out there on the subject.  So I was thrilled to see he had a new book out -- and this one is the Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week.

In Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, Eagleman looks at the brain in a new way; not as a static bunch of parts that work together to power your mind and your body, but as a dynamic network that is constantly shifting to maximize its efficiency.  What you probably learned in high school biology -- that your brain never regenerates lost neurons -- is misleading.  It may be true that you don't grow any new neural cells, but you're always adding new connections and new pathways.

Understanding how this happens is the key to figuring out how we learn.

In his usual fascinating fashion, Eagleman lays out the frontiers of neuroscience, giving you a glimpse of what's going on inside your skull as you read his book -- which is not only amusingly self-referential, but is kind of mind-blowing.  I can't recommend his book highly enough.

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

Alien DNA test

Online Critical Thinking course -- free for a short time!

This week, we're launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy!  It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half.  The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up!  (The free promotion is available only here.)  We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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Today we're going to take a break from subatomic physics and the Big Bang, not to mention the current state of political affairs (and I'm using that in both senses of the word) in the United States, to consider:

DNA tests that are designed to see if you have alien ancestry.

As with so many of the topics I address here at Skeptophilia, I owe this one to Reddit, that amazing clearinghouse for ideas from profound to ridiculous to completely baffling.  The post on Reddit that clued me in to the fact that alien DNA testing is a thing lands toward the "baffling" end of that continuum, although to be fair, the person who found it posted it on r/Skeptic, so they clearly didn't believe it themselves.

It was accompanied by a screencap of the offer on eBay, which I include below:

Being that the print is a little small, let me list the salient features:

• It sounds like your typical DNA analysis kit, wherein you spit into a test tube and send it in.  I did one of these (23 & Me) just out of curiosity, not that there's anything particularly in question about my own ancestry.  My heritage is French, Scottish, German, Dutch, and English, and my DNA came back: French, Scottish, German, Dutch, and English.  At least it speaks well for the accuracy of the analysis, not to mention my genealogical research and the low incidence of infidelity in my family.  (Incidentally, my DNA profile allowed me to connect with four different people whom I had not known before, and who turned out to be fairly close cousins.)
• The difference here is that instead of telling you your ethnic makeup, this test purports to tell you how much of it doesn't originate on planet Earth.  Note that it is accompanied by a highly scary-looking artist's representation of an individual who, if your test turns out to be positive, is apparently your Great-Great-Great Grandpa G'zork.
• It originates in Canada, and you can't have it shipped to the United States.  I find this a little suspicious.  I mean, it could be because it would require the transportation of bodily fluids across national boundaries, which could be a serious issue vis-à-vis disease transmission, but I prefer the hypothesis that it's because here in the United States, they'd prefer it if we don't find out we're actually aliens.  So far, apparently they're keeping Rudy Giuliani in the dark, and he looks a lot more like the aforementioned G'zork than most of the humans I've seen.
• It costs only $15.95 (Canadian).  This is a hell of a deal, especially given what it purports to do.  My 23 & Me test set me back eighty bucks, which I spent to find out what I more or less already knew.  (It did tell me that I have about three hundred "Neanderthal gene markers," which probably explains why I like my steaks on the rare side, and periodically feel like hitting people with a club, especially the ones who walk really slowly while blocking the entire aisle in the grocery store.)

So to any of my Canadian readers who don't mind sacrificing sixteen bucks for a little empirical research, I encourage you to buy a kit, and let us know here at Skeptophilia headquarters about the results.

Having a background in genetics, however, I have to wonder what they're using for their basis of comparison.  I know that in the historical documentary The X Files, the government had lots of deep-frozen alien babies in a lab somewhere, which (of course) Mulder found and (of course again) Scully didn't get to see.  So did they do a genetic analysis of the alien babies?

More importantly, why am I putting so much effort into analyzing this?

My general feeling is that even if alien intelligence exists, it's extremely unlikely that it will have a similar biology to ours, and even less likely that it will encode its genetic material the same way.  (Witness the fact that even related terrestrial species, who have fairly recent common ancestry, can't interbreed.)  So the chance of human/alien hybridization is nil, and that's even assuming they have naughty bits that are of the right size and shape to be compatible with ours.

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end for today.  And if you turn out to have alien DNA, I'm sorry if I sounded scornful.  I don't mean to insult your family.

Although I'd make an exception in the case of Rudy Giuliani.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Cock-and-bull

The skeptic community (if such a thing actually exists) is all abuzz because of the recent publication in the journal Cogent Social Studies of an article by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay called "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct."  If you read the article, you'll see immediately that it's a hoax.  It contains such passages as one in which they say the "concept of the penis" is responsible for climate change, and defend that claim thusly:

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset.  This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of [sic] the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology.  When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear.

Boghossian and Lindsay, both of whom write for Skeptic magazine, do a good bit of har-de-har-harring at the fact that their spoof article allegedly passed peer review, as does Skeptic's founder, Michael Shermer.  Shermer writes:

Every once in awhile it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed journal today.  Its ramifications are unknown but one hopes it will help rein in extremism in this and related areas.

In fact, Boghossian and Lindsay hint that their hoax shows a fundamental problem with all of gender studies:

The most potent among the human susceptibilities to corruption by fashionable nonsense is the temptation to uncritically endorse morally fashionable nonsense.  That is, we assumed we could publish outright nonsense provided it looked the part and portrayed a moralizing attitude that comported with the editors’ moral convictions.  Like any impostor, ours had to dress the part, though we made our disguise as ridiculous and caricatured as possible—not so much affixing an obviously fake mustache to mask its true identity as donning two of them as false eyebrows.

Denigrating all of gender studies based upon a sample size of One Paper seems like lousy skepticism to me.  They didn't do a thorough analysis of papers published in the dozens of journals that address the subject; they found one journal that accepted one hoax paper uncritically.  Sure, it says something about Cogent Social Studies -- which, it turns out, is a pay-to-publish journal anyhow, ranking it a long way down on the reliability ladder -- but that no more discredits gender studies as a whole than the Hwang Woo-Suk hoax discredited all stem cell research.

To me, this is more of an indication that Boghossian and Lindsay, and by extension Michael Shermer, have an ax to grind.  The hoax itself appears very much like a cheap stunt that Boghossian and Lindsay dreamed up to take a pot shot at a subject that for some reason they hold in disdain.  When the hoax succeeded, they crowed that the field of gender studies is "crippled academically."

Kind of looks like confirmation bias to me.  Sad, given that these three are often held up as the intellectual leaders of the skeptic community.

[image courtesy of artist Ju Gatsu Mikka and the Wikimedia Commons]

I do think there's one important lesson that can be drawn from this situation, however, and it's not the one Boghossian and Lindsay intended.  It's that the old adage of "if it's in an academic journal, it's reliable" simply isn't true.  I recall, in my college days, being told that the "only acceptable sources for papers are academic journals."  This wrongly gives college students the impression that all journals have identical standards -- that Nature and Science are on par with Cogent Social Studies and The American Journal of Homeopathy.

This makes a true skeptic's job harder (not to mention the job of college students simply trying to find good sources for their own research).  It is incumbent upon anyone reading an academic paper to see what the track record of the journal is -- if its papers have been cited by reputable researchers, if the research they describe is valid, if its authors have reasonable credentials.  Boghossian and Lindsay did show that we are right to be suspicious of papers that appear in pay-to-publish journals.  Beyond that, what they did strikes me as a lot of mean-spirited dicking around.

There were giants in the Earth

So our conspiracy theory of the day is: the US government is hiding living giant humanoids to create a race of hybrid super-soldiers.

This, at least, is the contention of one Steven Quayle, who in a video that (should you have fifteen minutes and are not otherwise occupied) you definitely should watch.  The opening shows Quayle, interspersed with science fiction movie clips and backed up by atmospheric music, delivering the following scary lines:

I believe that the big lie that is going to be placed, hoist [sic] upon the world, is that the aliens created mankind... Most people do not understand the evil.  Most people can't even embrace the fact that this isn't about old bones.  When I say mind-blowing, it will also be heart-freeing.  If I start talking about fallen angels having sex with Earth women, they snicker.  Well, that snicker tells me they've already made up their minds.  The super-soldier program is one of the most, well, almost unbelievable, yet so believable, programs that the US military is involved in.

Further along in the video, Quayle assures us that he doesn't believe in alien overlords.  Nope.  That would be ridiculous.  The Annunaki, he says, aren't aliens, they're fallen angels.

Which is ever so much more believable.

Worse yet, they're still around.  "They [the scientists] are starting from the premise that all of the giants are gone.  We're starting from the premise that there are modern-day giants now, and they're not suffering from acromegaly or some pituitary disorder, but they're literally going to fulfill the biblical statement of Matthew 24 where Jesus says, 'Just as in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.'"

The whole thing, Quayle says, is a "multi-thousand-year cover up."

Then, of course, the Smithsonian comes up, because no discussion of archaeological conspiracies would be complete without the Smithsonian being involved.

"It's interesting, Tim," Quayle said to the interviewer.  "There's evidence of the bias of the Smithsonian, and their contempt for out-of-place artifacts -- every time giant bones were found, it didn't matter if it was on the West Coast, the Arctic, the Antarctic believe it or not, the East Coast, the Ohio River Mounds, they always have a fabulous cutoff point, being once the Smithsonian is notified, and those bones are sent to the Smithsonian, they're never heard from again."

A giant skeleton in Brazil, or a clever example of Photoshop, depending on which version you go for

"The point has been to keep this biblically-relevant topic out of the minds of the people," Quayle adds.

Why, you might be asking, would the Smithsonian -- and other scientific research agencies -- go to all of this trouble?  After all, careers are made from spectacular discoveries like these.  If the bones were real, not to mention the Annunaki, you'd think that archeologists would be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first to publish these findings in a reputable journal.

The reason, of course, is that the government is intimidating the scientists into silence so that they can keep secret the fact that these giant dudes are still around, and are being used in sinister genetics experiments to create a race of human/giant super-soldiers.

Shoulda known.

Quayle also tells us that he won't appear on camera unless he gets the final say on video and audio edits, and that "No one has been willing to agree to that."  Which makes it kind of odd that he's on camera telling us that.  And that he now has his own video production company and has videos on YouTube.

Of course, he might have been right to avoid the spotlight.  He says he's afraid for his life, that he's being followed by the Men in Black.

"I'll be lucky not to be killed one day.  People have disappeared, Tim.  People who know about this, who have evidence."

And once again, we could convince ourselves that all we have is a lone wacko with access to recording equipment -- until you start reading the comments, of which I will give you a mercifully short sampling:

• People say that it takes place in the future. But I think it takes place in the past. The year is 800 after all. And it seems to have the message that you can't beat the titans without mixing with them. Rendering man almost extinct. No wonder Noah and his sons were the only real men left.
• Do you guys feel the Neanderthals are a creation of fallen angels?
• They are from the Nephilim thats why Neanderthal DNA has only entered the human gene pool through men and why Neanderthal DNA is the source of being white. Enoch 105 says the children born to fallen angels were white. Anakim were white blonde giants, Amorites were white Red heads and some were giants, then the Horites were normal sized white hairy cave men with brow ridges. Thats why Hitler thought if he just got enough blondes to have children, sooner or later they would get a superman. 
• there's stones thousands of years old talking about the ANANANAKI

So there you have it.  Giant Anananaki (if I've counted the "Na's" correctly) being hidden by the government so they can have lots of sex with Earth women, who will give birth to a race of immortal super-soldiers, as hath been prophesied in the scripture.

You'd think, though, that if the US has had this super-soldier program for decades (as Quayle alleges), they'd have brought 'em out by now.  Just think what a race of super-soldiers could do about, for example, ISIS.   So my scoffing doesn't mean that I don't think that ferocious giant half-human, half-fallen-angel dudes wouldn't be useful.

It's more that I think Quayle and his followers have a screw loose.

But that's just me.  And if I end up being taken prisoner by a troop of white hairy cave men with brow ridges and used in sinister scientific experiments, I suppose it'll serve me right.

Over the moon

There are some woo-woo ideas that will never die.

I don't care how far-fetched they are, how many times skeptics debunk them, they will still show up over and over again.  These things are like the woo-woo version of a deerfly in summer, buzzing around your head no matter how often you slap it away.

Such is the "faked Moon landing" thing.  It's the tiredest, oldest trope from the conspiracy theory mindset, and I thought that the people who buy into such things had moved on to bigger and better conjectures, such as claiming that every time something bad happens, it's a "false flag" to distract us from... um, even worse things that the government is allegedly hiding from us.

So it was with a weary sort of surprise that I saw the claim resurface not once, but twice, lately.  In the first rehashing, we hear that there has been a video of Stanley Kubrick released in which he admits that he filmed the Moon landing shots -- i.e., they were sound-stage fakes filmed in Hollywood.

In the video, Kubrick is allegedly being interviewed by filmmaker T. Patrick Murray, and says the following:

Kubrick: I perpetrated a huge fraud on the American public, which I am now about to detail, involving the United States government and NASA, that the Moon landings were faked, that the Moon landings ALL were faked , and that I was the person who filmed it. 

Murray: Ok. (laughs) What are you talking ... You're serious. Ok. 

Kubrick: I'm serious. Dead serious. Yes, it was fake. 

Murray: Why are you telling the world? Why does the world need to know that the Moon landings aren't real and you faked them? 

Kubrick: I consider them to be my masterpiece.

Then, supposedly Kubrick told Murray to hide the film for fifteen years -- and shortly afterwards, Kubrick died.

*cue scary music*

There are several problems with all of this, besides the obvious consideration that anyone who believes that the Moon landings were faked must have a single Hostess Ho-Ho where most of us have a brain:

• Both T. Patrick Murray and Kubrick's widow have come out with statements saying that the film is a fraud.
• The man in the interview really doesn't look (or sound) like the real Stanley Kubrick.
• At one point, the interviewer slips up and calls the guy playing Kubrick "Tom."
• The film is dated "May 1999," which is two months after Kubrick died.

But do go on about how convincing it all is.

The second story was probably triggered by the first bringing Kubrick's name back into the spotlight apropos of the Moon landings.  And what it claims is that Kubrick hid a bunch of hints regarding the fake Moon landings in his movie The Shining.

The website is a rambling, incoherent mess of "evidence" that includes such nonsense as the "explanation" about why Kubrick changed the number of the haunted room from 217 (what it was in the Stephen King novel the movie is based upon) to 237.

It's because it's 237,000 miles from the Earth to the Moon, of course.

Unfortunately, the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, where the movie was filmed, blows that silliness away -- right on their website, they explain that they did that because they didn't want people avoiding room 217, so they asked Kubrick to change it to a room number that doesn't exist in the hotel.

We are also given incontrovertible evidence like the fact that Stuart Ullman, the manager of the Overlook Hotel who gives Jack Torrance the job as caretaker, is wearing red, white, and blue (well, maroon, white, and blue, to be accurate), so the Overlook represents America.  And that Jack Torrance is the stand-in for Kubrick himself -- because neither one combs his hair much.  And that there is a "Native American motif" on the wall in one scene that "looks like rocket ships."  And that the snowstorm that strands the family in the hotel is "a symbol of the Cold War."

It couldn't be because the movie is set in the Colorado Rockies in winter, or anything.

Oh, and at one point, the character of Danny is wearing an Apollo 11 sweater, so when he stands up, we're witnessing the "symbolic launch of Apollo 11."

Someone asked Kubrick's directorial assistant, Leon Vitali, about that.  "That was knitted by a friend of [costume designer] Milena Canner," Vitali said.  "Stanley wanted something that looked handmade, and Milena arrived on the set one day and said, ‘How about this?’ It was just the sort of thing that a kid that age would have liked."

Vitali also said that he'd seen a documentary that connected Kubrick and the film to the Moon landings, and spent the entire time he was watching it "falling about laughing," adding that the contention is "absolute balderdash."

Not that this will convince the conspiracy theorists.  A higher-up denying things just makes them conspiracy harder.

So anyhow, this one will bounce around for a while on the interwebz, and then sooner or later fade back into well-deserved obscurity.  But there's no reason to believe it will be gone.  The oldies-but-goodies never stay gone.  They keep coming up like clockwork...

... like the rising of the Moon.  Wonder if that's a coincidence?

Nah, probably not.

The title of this blog post is classified

I think we've all had moments when we were taken in by a prank or a hoax.  Some of them can be pretty clever, and after all, we're only human -- we can't call things correctly all the time.

And when it happens, most of us go, "Wow, what a goober I am!" and laugh a little, and move on -- with, one would hope, a resolution not to fall quite so quickly the next time.

Which is probably why the YouTube video clip that a loyal reader sent me the link to had me torn between guffawing and crying.  Well, not the video itself; the video is a clip from The Onion, that awesome purveyor of satire, about a "Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill" (that doesn't exist) being reviewed by a Representative John Haller of Pennsylvania (who doesn't exist).

What had me twitching were the comments.

Yes, yes, I know, never read the comments section.  I broke the cardinal rule.  And now that I've done so, I'm even more worried that we might elect Donald Trump for president, because the majority of the commenters appear to be walking, talking, computer-owning, voting Americans who have the IQ of a peach pit.

First, though, let's see what "Representative Haller" had to say:

Congress shall now vote for approval of HR 8791, the Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill, as said bill requests emergency response funding up to and including...  I'm sorry, this section is classified ... dollars to prepare for a national level terrorist attack and/or attack from CLASSIFIED.  Funding for first responder personnel and vehicles would be doubled if said attack leads to more than 80% of national population being affected by CLASSIFIED.  This funding shall commence with the first attack on CLASSIFIED or the first large-scale outbreak of CLASSIFIED, dependent upon which comes first.  Civilian and military units shall be trained in containment and combat of CLASSIFIED including irradiated CLASSIFIED with possibility of CLASSIFIED airborne CLASSIFIED flesh-eating CLASSIFIED, and/or all of the above in such event as CLASSIFIED spewing CLASSIFIED escape, are released, or otherwise become uncontrollable.

Air Force units may also be directed to combat said CLASSIFIED due to their enormous size and other-worldly strengths.  Should event occur in urban areas...  Jesus, that's... that's CLASSIFIED... far surpassing our darkest nightmares.  Should casualties exceed CLASSIFIED body disposal actions shall be halted and associated resources shall be reallocated to CLASSIFIED underground CLASSIFIED protected birthing centers.  A new Bill of Rights shall be drafted and approved by CLASSIFIED.

Having now reviewed the bill, I ask you to please cast your votes.

Okay, please reassure me; having heard that, you would immediately know that it was fake.  Right?  Right?

Apparently, "wrong."  Here's a comment that appears on the video link:

If you have any intelligence at all or if you are just "awake" you can easily enough fill in the blanks "classified" Hmmm..  He is basically talking about radiation and disease(s) outbreak and containment, underground facilities and the general population which will evidently be gradually eradicated!  Better get your house in order, light your Lamp and have PLENTY of OIL this is going to be a long, tedious ride until Jesus comes back!  We don't know when, ONLY The Father knows so we should be ready AT ALL TIMES but these things happen FIRST, BEFORE He gets back, so you need to stay ready and "endure" with all you've got!  Remember Jesus IS The ONLY Way! ~Heads UP!

Well, someone sensible responded to that, to wit:

This was fake video made by The Onion. Look at the logo in the lower right corner. Get a grip on reality.

Remember my opening paragraph, about going, "Wow, how silly of me!  I got fooled!"  Well, here's the followup comment.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because you can only add [sic] so many times:

It could be a fake, or maybe the onion logo is a replacement over the real logo. maybe somebody tampering with the video to make its seem like a fake and someone got their hands on it.  The onion logo could be a cover up scheme who knows...  But I will say this, all around us there is blood being shed, crazy earth quakes, murder, war, lies, the death toll is off the chain.  muslims cut the heads off of little children and dance around with the corpses, evil media and music, promotion of violence adultery sexual immorality and greed.  Things are so bad it just is not funny anymore.  Rape is at an all time high and everywhere I turn I see gay people !!!  yo mad people are gay its freaking crazy.  yo we got dudes popping other dudes and little boys in the butt 24/7 365.  the immorality these day is off the charts.  anybody who thinks things are ok today has a nothing in between the ear. you gotta be real stupid not to see that something huge is going to happen.

So evidently I'm one of the ones who has a nothing in between the ear, because I am certain it's a fake.  Look up the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.  There is no Representative John Haller.  That alone should be enough, wouldn't you think?

At least one guy agrees with me:

Fuck's sake, people.  It's satire.  The Onion, you know?  Satire?  Meaning fake?  Hello?

 But he was immediately shouted down by the likes of the following rocket scientist:

I think it's quite funny that the majority of those saying this is fake all have blank profiles almost as if they were created just to argue the legitimacy of this video...

And the following:

Sounds like they have a plan if there's a biological outbreak they mite of created something that can be air born and something about flesh eating hmm and if this is true some one must of got their hands on it and preparing in chase they release it on the public for some reason zombie popping in my head head there experimenting rabbits on people and that there's a part in your brain that could make you so violent that your almost like a ghoul.

Yes!  That's it!  Zombie popping in your head head there experimenting rabbits on people!  Why didn't I think of that as an explanation?  It's brilliant!

So you see why I don't have a lot of trust in the citizenry of the United States, and their ability to vote in leaders that aren't batshit insane?

We have people here who, even when given repeated reassurances that a video that is obviously a fake is, well, a fake, they still insist that it must all be a giant conspiracy to keep them in the dark about ghouls and radiation and diseases and underground facilities and the Second Coming of Christ.

Whenever I think I've plumbed the absolute depth of idiocy, I find that there are deeper wells that I have yet to explore.  As the quote attributed to Einstein puts it:  "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

Jesus wept

A report is in from Bolivia that there is a statue of Jesus in a church that is "weeping real tears."

Of course, the devout are now flocking to the church, and church officials are declaring that it's a miracle.  Parishioners have spent hours kneeling and praying before the statue.  People are collecting the "tears" in vials, and claiming that they have magical powers of healing.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Such stories are not uncommon.  There have been enough claims of this type that "Weeping Statues" has its own Wikipedia page.  Weeping statues, usually of Jesus or Mary, have been reported in hundreds of locations.  Sometimes these statues are weeping what appear to be tears; others weep scented oil, or (in a number of cases) blood.  

The problem is, of course, that when the church has allowed skeptics to investigate the phenomenon, all of them have turned out to be frauds.

One of the easiest ways to fake a crying statue was explained, and later demonstrated, by Italian skeptic Luigi Garlaschelli.  If the statue is glazed hollow ceramic or plaster (which many of them are), all you have to do is to fill the internal cavity of the statue with water or oil, usually through a small hole drilled through the back of the head.  Then, you take a sharp knife and you nick the glaze at the corner of each eye.  The porous ceramic or plaster will absorb the liquid, which will then leak out at the only point it can -- the unglazed bit near the eyes.  When Garlaschelli demonstrated this, it created absolutely convincing tears.

What about the blood?  Well, in the cases where the statues have wept blood, some of them have been kept from the prying eyes of skeptics.  The church, however, is becoming a little more careful, ever since the case in 2008 in which a statue of Mary in Italy seemed to weep blood, and a bit of the blood was taken and DNA tested, and was found to match the blood of the church's custodian.  Public prosecutor Alessandro Mancini said the man was going to be tried for "high sacrilege" -- an interesting charge, and one which the custodian heatedly denies.  (I was unable to find out what the outcome of the trial was, if there was one.)

Besides the likelihood of fakery, there remains the simple question of why a deity (or saint) who is presumably capable of doing anything (s)he wants to do, would choose this method to communicate with us.  It's the same objection I have to the people who claim that crop circles are Mother Earth attempting to talk to us; it's a mighty obscure communiqué.  Even if you buy that it's a message from heaven, what does the message mean?   If a statue of Jesus cries, is he crying because we're sinful?   Because attendance at church is down?  Because we're destroying the environment?  (Pope Francis might actually subscribe to this view.)  Because the Saints didn't make it to the Superbowl this year?  Oh, for the days when god spoke to you, out loud, directly, and unequivocally, from a burning bush...

In any case, I'm skeptical, which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone.  I suppose as religious experiences go, it's pretty harmless, and if it makes you happy to believe that Christ's tears will bring you good luck, then that's okay with me.  If you go to Bolivia, however, take a close look and see if there's a tiny hole drilled in the back of the statue's head -- which still seems to me to be the likeliest explanation.

Shooting down the false flag

I'm frequently asked how I can write daily on this blog without losing my marbles.  Deliberately immersing myself in the silly things some people believe, you'd think, would be a recipe for cynicism and/or despair.

The truth is, I'm still generally an optimist.  When you think about it, it'd be kind of silly to have a blog like this if I thought gullibility was incurable.  I'm confident that people can adopt a skeptical outlook, and can choose to look at the world through the lens of evidence and logic.

But it doesn't mean I don't sometimes get angry.

The thing that pushes the rage button the hardest is the combination of stubborn ignorance and lack of compassion.  When someone makes a claim that not only flies in the face of rationality, but dehumanizes and demeans, that makes me see red.

Like the claim that is popping up all over conspiracy websites, that the whole Ebola epidemic is being faked by "crisis actors."

Scientists working at the site of an Ebola outbreak [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I've dealt with this topic before, but from the standpoint of actors staging school shootings -- a heinous enough claim.  But now, we have people saying that there's no such thing as Ebola.  The whole thing, they say, was invented so as to give world leaders (especially President Obama) the leverage to declare martial law and turn the United States into a dictatorship.

There's been buzz about this on the r/conspiracy subreddit, which is hardly surprising given that this is where the whole "crisis actors" nonsense gained traction after the Sandy Hook massacre.  Here's how it's being framed:

You have them in Africa, in New York, San Francisco, Haiti, and other places. Yes, they are sick and they are dying. But that doesn’t make an epidemic, because the tiny virus that was supposed to be at the bottom of all this is missing from the equation. 

This tells you how to invent a fake epidemic. You take many sick and dying people, and you claim there is one germ that is causing all the trouble. You promote a few diagnostic tests that ‘will confirm the presence of the germ’ and you tell people they must be tested. 

But the tests don’t really confirm the presence of the germ. They’re deceptive and useless. Of course, the test will register positive in many cases. These positive people are said to be victims of the one germ that is at the root of the epidemic. 

You tie together and link together people who are sick and dying for various reasons, and you claim they’re all dying because of the One Germ. That gives you a powerful psychological ploy, because people are always looking for the one unified thing that explains a whole host of disturbing facts. You give them what they want.

This is from a blog post from Jon Rappoport, who (by the way) also claims that there's no such thing as SARS, and that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

Mad yet?  Wait till you see the piece that showed up over at UFO Blogger yesterday -- that hospitals are hiring actors to feign symptoms of Ebola, for some undisclosed purpose.  The author of the post includes the following quote from New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation's chief medical officer, Dr. Ross Wilson: "If those patients have symptoms and a travel history we would expect them to be isolated within a few minutes in that emergency room.  Then we would call the Department of Health and complete a further work-up with the patient being isolated."

My guess is that the reason (assuming the story isn't an out-and-out lie) is to train hospital staff in proper protocol for dealing with a dangerous virus, but that isn't the implication.  The implication is that the whole thing is fake, that what the CDC is saying is nothing more than a smokescreen.

A "false flag."  Oh, how I hate that phrase.  And no, I'm not going to present the evidence to the contrary, because a simple online search for scientific papers about this disease will turn up so much information that I wouldn't have room to fit it in this post.

The degree to which this kind of claim is irresponsible is staggering, but so is the lack of simple compassion.  There have been 4,000 deaths from this hideous disease to date, with every indication that we haven't even neared the peak.  There are five suspected and one confirmed cases in Spain, and another couple of suspected cases here in the United States besides the one man who died two days ago -- pointing to the possibility that we may have a bigger problem than anyone thought at first.  To demean the suffering of the victims, and the efforts of the medical establishment to combat this virus, is disrespectful at best and ugly, belittling propaganda at worst.

So yeah, sometimes I do get angry.  Like this morning.  I will admit to having yelled, "Are you fucking kidding me?" at my computer when I discovered this story.  But I remain confident that the good guys -- the compassionate, rational, kind, honorable people -- still far outnumber the bad.

And as for the bottom-feeders who are currently claiming that the Ebola epidemic is fake; I'd like to suggest that you crawl back in your holes, and get out of the way of the people who are actually doing something to help the people who are suffering from this very real, and very dangerous, virus.

Holes in the truth

I know I have a lot of faults.  I can be prickly and snarky sometimes, I'm easily frustrated, and I have a broad streak of impatience.  Sometimes I swear too much.  (Okay, I often swear too much.)  I'm too hard on people when I feel like they're making excuses or are devolving responsibility that should rightfully be theirs onto someone else's shoulders.  Sometimes I'm not a team player when it would be easier (and kinder) just to cooperate and be pleasant.

But one fault I can say I do not fall prey to, and in fact cannot really understand; and that is being sneaky and dishonest.

If I tell you something, you can pretty much rely on its being the truth.  I've said it to my students, I've said it to my own children: you'll make mistakes, but when you do, own up.  Don't compound your mistakes by lying to me about them.  You get into a habit of lying, and you'll find it comes more and more easily -- and you become more and more facile at justifying your lies to yourself and others.  One lie, I've found, so often leads to another.

And another.

It's why I had a reaction of complete revulsion to the news yesterday that Rickey Wagoner, the driver for the Dayton (Ohio) Regional Transportation Authority who claimed that he'd been shot and stabbed by three black teenagers, seems to have made the whole thing up, including the claim that gunshots aimed at his chest had been stopped by a bible that he carried in his shirt pocket.  As Exhibit A, he had a small paper-bound bible with not one, but two bullets lodged in it.

A miracle, he claimed.

[image courtesy of Open Clip Art Library]

And so did a lot of his fellow Christians.  God had his hand over Wagoner, had shielded him from harm through an attack that could well have killed him.  A lot of non-theists were less impressed -- I was reminded of the wonderful quote from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Jingo:

"This belonged to my great-granddad," [the sergeant] said.  "He was in the scrap we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayer for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look, you can see the hole." 

"Pretty miraculous," Carrot agreed. 

"Yeah, it was, I s’pose," said the sergeant.  He looked ruefully at the battered volume.  "Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really."

But even so, even the atheists did admit that Wagoner had been (if nothing more) damned lucky.

It turns out instead that what he seems to be is a damned liar.

Not only did Wagoner apparently fabricate the whole attack -- the allegation is that he shot himself in the leg and inflicted several shallow cuts on his own body -- he seems to have shot the bible himself.  Forensics tests with an identical book, placed on a gel dummy, showed that at the distance the gunshots were discharged toward Wagoner, the bible couldn't have stopped the bullets -- they'd have gone right through, and traveled another fifteen centimeters into his body.  All of the injuries, investigators say, were consistent with self-inflicted wounds, and the entire story is not just implausible, but impossible.

What, exactly, was he hoping to accomplish by his fabrication?  To create the appearance of a miracle to edify the religious?  To convince the non-religious of the error of their ways?  Or, even worse, to cast aspersions on black teenagers, further ramping up the fear and suspicion of minorities and youth?  Or some combination of the above?

Whatever his motivation was, he's not saying.  He hasn't spoken to police or reporters regarding the allegations, and has refused to make a statement.  DRTA has apparently fired him, though, so the case against his story seems pretty solid.  "After conducting a comprehensive investigation that has spanned nearly four months, the police department has concluded Mr. Wagoner fabricated his statements," DRTA executive director Mark Donaghy said.  "All of us at RTA are angry at the thought that an employee would allegedly mislead the police, the public and us and use ugly racial stereotypes in doing so."

Yup.  And make all of the well-wishers, not to mention his fellow Christians who were duped into thinking they'd been touched by a genuine miracle, look like fools.  The whole thing is just repulsive.

And, for me, kind of incomprehensible.  What could possibly motivate someone to go to these lengths -- cutting himself, and shooting himself in the leg?  Wagoner had been employed by DRTA for ten years and had an "excellent work record" -- an indication, at least, that he wasn't showing any obvious signs of mental illness.  It seems to be a hoax, a fabrication, a lie outright, crafted for his own reasons, with deliberate intent to deceive.

That I cannot understand.  Although I disagreed from the start with the religious folks who praised Wagoner's apparent narrow escape from death as a miracle, I find myself feeling pretty sympathetic toward them at the moment.  It's always hard to have your trust betrayed, which is why dishonesty cuts so deep.

Other than charges of lying to the police, I'm not sure what legal action can be taken against Wagoner, but it certainly seems unjust that he should get off scot free after duping so many people.  I hope that at least, he is made to face the media and the public, and give a statement admitting that he lied.  Because to come back to where I started: dishonesty sucks.  There is no gentler way to put it.