Bloomin' onions for Satan

As I mentioned earlier this week in my post about the "Majestic 12" conspiracy, once you've fallen down the rabbit hole of seeing conspiracies everywhere, there's no getting out.  Anyone who doesn't see the pattern is a dupe; anyone who tries to argue you out of believing it is a shill, or worse yet...

... one of the conspirators.

And the power of a conspiracy theory seems completely unrelated to its plausibility.  After all, we still have people believing that HAARP is creating hurricanes and tornadoes and blizzards and earthquakes, despite the fact that (1) it was shut down completely two years ago, (2) it never could do that stuff in the first place, and (3) if it could have done that stuff, there's no way in hell the government would have shut it down.

But logic doesn't stop people from yammering on as if what they were saying made sense.  Which is why a tweet a week ago about Outback Steak House having ties to the Illuminati has gone viral.

It all started with Twitter user @eatmyaesthetics, who noticed that if you mapped out the positions of five Outback Steak House in various cities, you could connect them with lines to form a pentagram -- a five-pointed star.  Of course, the emphasis here was on the sinister connotations of this symbol, especially when it's upside-down, which it was if you turned the map the right way.

Then the retweet machine got started, and within short order the tweet had been reposted tens of thousands of times.  Undoubtedly some of the people who retweeted it did so because of the humor value, but some of them evidently believed that @eatmyaesthetics was on to something, because people started mapping out the positions Outback in their own cities, and lo and behold, found the same scary pattern.

Then Lauren Evans over at Jezebel threw her two cents' worth into the mix, saying, "Now that I know the truth, it's impossible to see it any other way.  And you don't get a ten-ounce steak for twelve dollars without at least a little help from the devil."

Which was tongue-in-cheek.  I think.

Then Outback itself got involved, first stating that that their official position was that they "neither would confirm nor deny" Illuminati involvement in their restaurants, following it up with a tweet that "If the Bloomin' Onion is evil, then we don't want to be good."  They added a winky-face emoji after the tweet, which could alternately be interpreted as "we're kidding, of course" or "we are an evil agency allied with the Forces of Darkness to engage in mind control via drugs sprinkled on your medium-rare ribeye steak."

All of which induced multiple orgasms in the conspiracy theory world.

But here's the thing, of course; what shape did they expect you'd get by connecting five dots with lines?  Here's an experiment I want you to run: get a sheet of paper, and draw five dots on it.  The only requirement is that no three of the dots can be in a straight line.  See if you can find a configuration of dots that you can't inscribe with a pentagram.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

So this isn't so much a conspiracy theory as it is a test to detect who failed 10th-grade geometry.  In fact, any business that has more than five locations in a city can be connected with at least a reasonably recognizable pentagram.  So if Outback is an arm of the Illuminati, then so are McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Taco Bell.

Although now that I come to think of it, I've been suspicious about Taco Bell myself for a while.

So as usual, we've got a case of what Michael Shermer calls "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there."  The upshot is that if you like Outback, you don't have to worry that part of the money you spend for dinner is going to support the New World Order.  Your biggest concern is that there have been people whose arteries have clogged up just looking at "Bloomin' Onions," but I doubt seriously whether that has anything to do with the Illuminati.

Seeing stars

I am endlessly amused (or endlessly frustrated, depending on my mood) by the way the same piece of information can be interpreted by different woo-woos to support each of their varying, and in many cases mutually contradictory, views of the world.  All of them take the same bit of data, and put their own spin on it, so that it becomes some kind of purportedly incontrovertible support for whatever they already believed in.

In short order, you have a multilayered rainbow-colored cake of craziness, with nuts.

Take, for example, the curious photograph that is currently zinging its way around the Internet, an image from Google Maps taken by satellite of a spot near Lisakovsk, Kazakhstan:

The thing is real, not a photoshopped image; type the coordinates 52°28’46.86″N 62°11’7.68″E into Google Earth to see it for yourself.  But of course, once you know it's real, what is it?

You can bet that the fundamentalist Christians have an answer to that.

The upside-down pentagram is well known as a sign of Satan, and this cadre has accompanied the photograph with a dire-sounding message that the Time Of The Antichrist Is At Hand.  This version of the story is also accompanied by a claim that the pentagram appeared near a pair of towns called "Adam" and "Lucifer," a statement that is supposed to be significant somehow but for which I could find no corroboration.  And frankly, that part sounds a little spurious to me.  Most of the towns in Kazakhstan that I could find on a map have names like "Zhezkagan" and "Stepnogorsk."  "Adam" and "Lucifer" sound a little... anglo to me to be place names in that part of the world.

And, after all, New York has an Adams County and a Lucifer Falls, and I haven't seen any giant pentagrams appearing around here, so there's that.

Another thing, though, is that whether this looks like an upside-down pentagram depends on the angle from which you view it.  Turn the photograph around, or (in fact) rotate it by 36° in either direction,  and all of a sudden it becomes a right-side-up pentagram.  So just color me unconvinced that this is a sign of the End Times.

But of course, the evangelical Christians aren't the only ones who have weighed in on the curious photograph.  You also have the ones who think it's a sign from Mother Earth that we are "abusing nature" and that we need to be more considerate of our environment.  This version of the story has a piece about the pentagram being one of the "signs that we cannot continue to harm our planet without the planet letting us know about it."

These are presumably the same people who think that crop circles are a way for the Spirit of Nature to inform us to give up coal mining and take up organic farming and wear clothes woven from hemp.  And these folks think the upside-down pentagram isn't an evil symbol at all, but a positive, vital neopagan symbol that has suddenly appeared to bring us all to some kind of environmental enlightenment.

Then, you have the people who think that the pentagram is "an unfinished summer camp for the children of the Illuminati."  Because the Illuminati are just that sneaky and secretive, that they would create a structure that you couldn't ever find out about unless you happened to check out Google Maps.  According to this guy, "Kazakistan" (which is how he pronounces it throughout the entire video) is part of the "bloodline of the Illuminati."  Whatever that means.  But that's where the whole world is being controlled from, so... so... just don't let your guard down for a minute.

You know how that goes.

The speculation doesn't end there, however.  There's another group who weighed in on the topic, and they don't think the star is a symbol of Satan, the Illuminati, or Gaea, but a communiqué from... you'll never guess who.

Righty-o.  Because intelligent extraterrestrials who have expended a great amount of effort, time, and energy to get to Earth from a planet light years away would have nothing better to do than to draw a giant star on the ground and then leave.

Of course, the actual explanation turned out to be much simpler.  No Antichrist, Nature Spirits, New World Order, or extraterrestrials needed.

"It is the outline of a park made in the form of a star," archaeologist Emma Usmanova said in an interview with LiveScience about the geographical oddity.  "The star was a popular symbol during the Soviet era.  Stars were often used throughout the Soviet Union to decorate building facades, flags and monuments...  We believe that the star shape was the abandoned site of a Soviet-era lakeside campground."

And Usmanova apparently has years of experience working in the Lisakovsk area, so she should know.

Not that I expect that this will shut up the It's Aliens crew, much less the neopagans or the fundamentalists.  But that's how confirmation bias works, isn't it?  You latch on to an explanation for something because it fits what you already believed, and hang on like grim death even if there's a plausible explanation to the contrary.  Because, let's face it; when it comes to choosing an explanation, "an abandoned campground site" just doesn't have the gravitas that Satan, Mother Earth, the Illuminati, and aliens do.