Doorways

There's something about doors that is magical.

They're portals from one room to another or from the inside of a house to the outside -- and sometimes stand between imprisonment and freedom.  As such, they belong to neither realm.  They're boundaries, edges, passageways.

I'm not the only one who finds the "middle ground" doors occupy to be evocative.  How many stories have the word in the title?  A Wind in the Door, The Door in the Wall, The Doors of Perception, The Door into Summer, and The Door to December -- that's without even thinking hard.  Stories that feature doors as portals from one realm to another are even more commonplace; I've done it myself (in Sephirot and The Accidental Magician).

Maybe you've even seen the following meme that was going around on social media a while back:

My immediate answer was that if I could bring along my puppy, then hell yes.  (I rather shamefacedly added that I should probably bring along my wife, too.)  I mean, chances are that rather like the Bear That Went Over The Mountain, where I'd end up after walking through is merely the other side of the doorway.  But hell, I've read books with way more interesting options.  If there was even a chance I'd find myself in Earthsea or Narnia or Prydain or the Dreamlands or Middle Earth, it'd be worth the risk of disappointment.

It's that sense of doorways as liminal spaces that probably explains the current hoopla over the discovery of what appears to be a giant oval doorway in the Dzungarian Alatau Mountains of Kazakhstan.  To be fair to the hooplites, it's pretty odd-looking:

Its dimensions (about 12 meters tall and wide) and shape immediately brought up comparisons to the Gates of Moria from The Lord of the Rings and the doorway into Jabba the Hutt's palace in Return of the Jedi.  Then the Ancient Aliens crowd got involved (because of course they did) with claims that it's the entryway to an alien base.

Maybe even one that's still occupied.  *cue scary music*

The likeliest explanation, of course, is much more prosaic; this is simply a weathering pattern in the rock face.  All you have to do is visit Arches National Park in Utah to see dozens of examples of rock formations eroded into arches (thus the name).  Geology, in fact, can do some really freakin' weird stuff.  The Giant's Causeway, a hexagonal basalt formation in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, is so peculiar-looking it seems like it couldn't be natural (until, of course, you understand the mechanism of how it formed).

That hasn't slowed down the speculation any.  It doesn't help that some early twentieth century Spiritualist writers speculated that Hyperborea, one of the mythical lands invented by the ancient Greeks, was located in the mountains of central Asia.  Gary Manners, who wrote the article linked above, concludes with the following equivocal passage:

Despite scientific explanations, the Kazakhstan doorway continues generating intense interest and debate online.  Social media users propose theories ranging from concealed alien bases to entrances to underground civilizations...  The formation's remarkable symmetry and positioning challenge even skeptical observers to consider alternative explanations beyond conventional geology.

Let's clear one thing up right away; these are not theories.  What the social media users are proposing are what we skeptics call WAGs (wild-ass guesses).  A theory is a well-tested model that explains a set of data -- i.e., a framework backed up by actual hard evidence.  All the social media users are doing is looking at a single photograph and saying, "Hey, that looks like..."  As such, these guesses are nearly worthless -- only valuable in bringing attention to an interesting site, and perhaps prompting some actual geologists to go over there and see what we've got.

So me, I'm waiting for the scientists to weigh in.  If they get to Kazakhstan, and have to say the Sindarin word for "friend" to get the doorway to open, or if they hear a gurgly voice behind it saying, "Bo shuda!  Huh huh huh huh huh," or if (best of all) they pry it open and find an underground alien base, then we can talk.

Until that time, I'm gonna Ockham's Razor the shit out of this and stick with "it's an odd-looking rock formation."

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ConCERNing Osiris

Many of you undoubtedly know about CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the world's largest particle physics laboratory, located on the border of France and Switzerland.  It's home to six particle accelerators and some of the most impressive discoveries in subatomic and high-energy physics in the world, including last year's demonstration of the existence of the elusive Higgs field, the field that confers the property of mass to every bit of matter in the universe.

Pretty impressive stuff, and most of it over my head even given my bachelor's degree in physics.

Now, switch gears for a moment.  You'll see why in a bit.

Many of you undoubtedly also know about Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, although perhaps not the same ones who knew about CERN.  Osiris was one of the most important gods in ancient Egypt, given their fixation on the afterlife.  Unlike his fellow deities, who had animals' heads, Osiris looked pretty much like an ordinary guy, except that he had green skin.

Osiris became the god of rebirth when he was killed by his brother Set, who chopped his body up and threw it into the Nile river.  Osiris's wife Isis found her husband, in chunks, and sort of stuck the chunks back together and brought him back to life, only to find out afterwards that there was a chunk missing.  Unfortunately for Osiris, that chunk turned out to be a body part that most of us males are pretty fond of, if you get my drift.  Understandably upset at his wife for not finding a fairly important bit of him, he convinced Isis to make him a new one out of gold, which strikes me as a pretty poor substitute, all things considered.  But it must have worked, because soon after Isis gave birth to the god Horus, who looked just like his parents hoped except for the possible problem of having a falcon's head.

Then Osiris died again.  Poor guy just couldn't catch a break.

Now, by this time you're probably wondering what CERN and Osiris can possibly have to do with one another.  So let me explain.  CERN, you see, isn't just a place where physicists go to conduct complex and far-reaching experiments about the subtle structure of matter; it is actually a portal whose chief purpose is to create a wormhole, which will allow Osiris to be raised from the dead.

Again.  Hopefully they'll remember to bring along his penis this time.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, called "Ta-Wer AKA Osiris AKA CERN."  Here's the main argument, if I can dignify it by that name:

According to researcher William Henry, the ancient Egyptian object named Ta-Wer aka “Osiris” device, was a stargate machine capable to open wormholes or dimensional openings used by Seth and Osiris to “travel across the underworld.”Is CERN the new “Osiris Ta-Wer”? A modern stargate machine based on ancient technology?

When work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider is completed in 2015, the collider should have twice the power and be able to help unlock more of the universe's mysteries and to explore an entirely new realm of physics.

With the LHC power doubled, they will start looking for what they think is out there and they hope that something will turn up that no one had ever thought of.

It is known that the secret societies are obsessed with the raising of Osiris and maybe they already know what they are looking for and was the placement of a Shiva Statue outside the CERN Hadron Collider a hint?

Sure.  Because a green-skinned Egyptian god and a multi-armed Hindu god are clearly the same guy.  But do go on:

According to Stephen Hawking: “ bending space-time is theoretically possible— by exploiting black holes, or wormholes if they exist, or by traveling at super speeds, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Although many people believe that time travel is science fiction, it is not, and taking into account the obsession of the illuminati to use CERN as a stargate machine, it may be possible in the near future, we will face God’s miracles as seen by the ancient Hindu people when their Gods travelling through stargate devices. 

You know, if I were Stephen Hawking, I would be really pissed at the way nutjobs use quotes from legitimate research, lectures, and interviews to support their bizarre ideas.  These guys cherry-pick almost as much as the fundamentalist Christians do.  And at least the evangelical Christians basically understand the stuff they're reading.  With articles like this one, though, you get the impression that the folks that write this sort of woo-woo horse waste have about as much actual comprehension of quantum mechanics as my dog.

They end, though, with a question:

Is there some occult ritual being carried within the LHC facility and is Shiva the one they are attempting to bring to Earth?

No and no.  Thanks for asking.  And once again, Shiva and Osiris aren't the same dude.  By no stretch of the imagination is a three-eyed, eight-armed dude wearing a necklace of skulls even remotely like a green-skinned bearded dude with a missing wang.  Are we clear on that now?

 And CERN has nothing to do with gods of any kind.  They do physics there.  End of story.

It's a regrettable tendency on the part of a lot of people to hear bits and pieces of stuff they don't understand, combine it with other stuff they only partially understand, and come to drastically wrong conclusions.  The cure, of course, is to try and find out a little about the actual facts, to learn some real science, but that, unfortunately, is a level of hard work that some people are unwilling to undertake.  So we haven't seen the end of this kind of thing.

Woo-woo wingnuttery, it seems, will be with us always, sort of like death and taxes but even more annoying.

Cosmic doorways

A question that frequently arises when I am perusing writings from the Wide World of Woo-Woo is, "Do these people recognize it when they're just making shit up?"

You'd think they would, wouldn't you?  I mean, I get how suggestible we humans are, how subject to bias, how susceptible to misinterpreting sensory input.  Not only that, we are perhaps more emotional beings than we are cerebral ones, a fact that was brought home to me rather vividly one evening last week when my wife heard a noise downstairs, meaning the choice was "go down and investigate" or "surrender your Man-Card immediately."  So I went downstairs.  And there was no one down there, but by the time I had figured that out, and that we were not in danger of being knifed to death by a psychopath, I had broken out in a serious cold sweat, despite (1) being armed with a pair of fireplace tongs, and (2) the fact that my wife felt sorry for how obviously terrified I was and went with me.

So like I said: I get that we can let our minds get carried away, in a variety of fashions.  But what I don't get is how it can happen without your being aware of it.  So many woo-woos are doing what clearly appears to me to be crafting highly complex works of fiction, and yet the entire time, they seem to be entirely convinced that what they're saying is true.

This comes up because of a site I stumbled upon called Cosmic Doorways, wherein I found the following image:

We have a few problems here right from the get-go, not least being their representation of Nelson Mandela as a skinny half-naked white guy with blond hair.  And wings.  But the crazy doesn't even end there, more's the pity; they connect Mandela with the Chinese moon lander, and throw in Paul Walker for good measure.  Some time today, they say, Walker and Mandela are going to go through a "cosmic doorway" that will transport them from South Africa to the galactic core.

If I've been wrong all along, and there are immortal souls, I hope like hell this isn't true, because in the middle of the galactic core is a big-ass black hole.  How unfair would that be?  Walker just died in a fiery car crash, and Mandela passed away at age 95 after a long life filled with strife and struggle against oppression.  So they die, and their souls are floating around the place, looking forward to heaven, or at least something better than car crashes and solitary confinement, and WHOOAAAA they both get sucked, feet-first, down a black hole.

I'd like to be able to tell you that there is evidence that the Cosmic Doorways people are joking, but they appear to be entirely serious, despite the fact that damn near everything on the site seems to have been made up.  They show stills from the movie Stargate as if it were some kind of historical documentary.  They have photographs of every last object on the Earth that is shaped like a ring, along with captions indicating that these are secret high-energy portals.  There are lots of images of the Virgin Mary, because "she is a vessel that allows beings to come and go between dimensions."  They say that the "Four Corners" region of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona is magical because the "Four Corners" make a cross shape, even though I can't think of another shape that the junction of four more-or-less rectangular states could possibly make.  They have lots of quotes from the songs of The Doors, because, hey, doors, right?  They claim that the way to use these cosmic portals is by sharpening up your pineal gland, and/or taking hallucinogenic drugs, the latter of which may explain a good bit of the content of the site.

But still.  Even considering that the author may well have taken more DMT and ayahuasca than his neurotransmitters could handle, it still strikes me that he must, on some level, be aware that what he's writing can't possibly be true.  For example, he identifies the following as a "stargate:"

[photograph courtesy of photographer Mike Russell and the Wikimedia Commons]

Despite the fact that it is actually not an intergalactic portal at all, but the Michigan Labor Legacy Landmark in Detroit's Hart Plaza, and hundreds of tourists walk through it every day without being transported anywhere much but the other side of the monument.

So.  Yeah.  Anyhow.  I read things like this, and I keep saying to myself, "Is this guy joking?  Or what?"  But in this case the answer, sadly, appears to be "No."  He really does think that Nelson Mandela and Paul Walker are going to be transported to the galactic core today.  And furthermore, he apparently views this as a good thing, as is Mandela's miraculous ethnic transformation.

As for me, I think I'll stick with reality.  It's not nearly as psychedelic, but at least I'm reasonably sure that the doorway of my office won't suddenly send me to the core of a distant star, or anything.  You can see how that'd be unpleasant.

Quantum downloadable medicines!

Okay, now I've seen it all.

This morning I stumbled across the single most idiotic thing I've ever run into.  Don't even try to tell me that there are stupider beliefs out there, because I flatly refuse to believe it.  Any human being on this planet who believed anything more ridiculous than this has got to have been taken care of by Darwinian natural selection centuries ago.

The name of the website should put you on notice immediately; it's "QuantumMAN: The World's First Downloadable Medicine."  Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like; you enter your credit card information, pay a fee (most of them seemed to be between US$25 and $100), and click "download."  The "medicine" downloads through your computer -- directly into you.  Voilà!  You're cured!

How could this possibly work, you might ask?  Well, of course, it doesn't, but how do they say it works?  I watched some of their informational videos, and here's a transcript of the explanation:

ZAG, a private humanitarian medical research group, develops biodata programs using its quantum computer.  The programs are accessible via a "Portal," a means of quantum teleportation.  This Portal can then be unlocked by a user through the use of a Portal Access Key (PAK), a number string developed to open the Portal for a desired product.  PAKs can be accessed via a personal computer, mobile device, or tablet.  Once opened, the biodata programs can be transferred to your brain's neural network (also a quantum computer).  These programs then rapidly and repeatedly deliver physiological directives to the user's body to impart their health benefits.

Yes, you got that right: for a hundred bucks, you can access completely useless quack cures right in the comfort of your own home.

Of course, you may not see improvement right away, because sometimes the placebo effect doesn't work, so you might need repeated doses of "biodata" to fix whatever ails you.  You are cautioned that "each PAK is good for one dose only" and that you might need to "upload 5-8 doses every ten days as needed."  You can also "upload multiple doses simultaneously."  So, we're talking potentially thousands of dollars here to effect a "cure."

My vote for the funniest part of the whole site is at the very bottom of the "Catalog" page, where we are told, "Beware of imposters!  Only Portal Access Keys (PAKs) uploaded directly from this site... are genuine and effective."  Because heaven knows you wouldn't want to upload nothing from a bunch of quacks who were trying to rip you off, right?

So, what are they claiming to be able to cure?  Well, the easiest answer is, "everything."  There are "cures" for autoimmune diseases, insomnia, chronic pain, constipation, and obesity; there are "vaccines" for malaria, the common cold, and the flu; there is one that "reverses meth addiction," giving "lifetime immunity in just nine months;" there are sex drive boosters; there is even a "quantum massage."  In this last one, we upload the "Portal" prior to getting a conventional massage, and then the following happens, which you have to read verbatim to get the full effect:

ZAG, the private humanitarian medical research group that employs QuantumMAN™, has now elevated massage into the quantum realm. It has developed QMassage™ (Quantum Massage) that transfers data that provides the incredible health and healing benefits described above. You simply purchase QMassage™ and receive a number of its "Portal Access Keys™ (PAKs™). Accessing these PAKs™ via your personal computer, smartphone or tablet allows your body to quantumly receive (upload) QMassage™'s master programs. Derived from quantum physics, QMassage™ literally turbo boosts a therapist's massage into the quantum realm providing results not achievable by conventional massage alone. Or used as a standalone product, QMassage™ literally massages your entire body inside and out within its multiple realms.

Yes!  That's what I want!  Quantum massages that I can quantumly upload into the quantum realm of my quantum neural network!  All my subatomic particles are just quivering with anticipation!  Quantum quantum quantum!

There's no way to tell from the site if anyone has actually fallen for this; I didn't even see anything like a hit tracker.  And websites, of course, are much cheaper and easier to maintain than actual real-world businesses, especially given that (other than the cost of registering the domain name) this company has zero overhead.  No product, either, of course, which also lowers operating expenses.  Now, there's a business model for you: set up a website that does absolutely nothing, let it run, and let the placebo effect and human gullibility start the cash flow.

This whole thing left me simultaneously laughing out of sheer astonishment, and crying for the future of humanity that there could be anyone so catastrophically dumb that they think this could possibly work.  And as I said at the beginning: if ever find anything you think is a more ridiculous idea than this, please don't tell me about it.  For one thing, I'm not sure I'd believe you.  And second, if it turned out that you were right, I would thereby revoke my membership in the human race, and look for a ride on the next UFO off the planet.