Loose genes

In the course of writing Skeptophilia for nearly fifteen years, I thought I'd run into every purveyor of woo out there.

I was wrong.

Somehow, I missed a guy named Gregg Braden, but that error on my part was rectified by a long-time follower, who sent me a link to a YouTube video with the message, "Fasten your seatbelt."

What I needed, as it turns out, was not a seatbelt, but a pillow to cushion my forehead from the repeated faceplants I did while watching it.  The video is a conversation between Braden and a woman called Theresa Bullard-Whyke of "Quantum Minds TV" that should win some kind of award for the Most Skillful Blend of Scientific Half-Truths With Complete Bullshit Ever Produced.

To take just one example, Braden and Bullard-Whyke describe a phenomenon called DNA packing, which is a well-studied feature of our genetic material.  It's been estimated that each of us has enough DNA that if it were stretched out end to end, it would measure a hundred trillion meters -- about three hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.  So to put it mildly, the stuff has to be wrapped pretty tightly.  There are a number of ways this is accomplished, but one of the main ones is that the DNA spools around a protein complex called histone, which assembles into a lattice that forms the scaffolding of our chromosomes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons OpenStax, 0321 DNA Macrostructure, CC BY 4.0]

Braden then goes into how this is one of the ways we control gene expression.  We have an estimated twenty thousand protein-encoding genes in our genome (depending on exactly how you define the term, and whether you include sequences that up-regulate or down-regulate other genes), but less than one percent of them are active in any particular tissue at a given time.  When DNA is tightly coiled up into what is called heterochromatin, it is effectively inactivated; the enzymes required for transcribing it into mRNA (the first step of protein production) simply can't get at it.  Ergo: the genes in that region are shut off.

So far, so good.

But then Braden and Bullard-Whyke take that information, and run right off the cliff with it.

Braden seems to think this gene shutoff is a bad thing, and that we'd have "superpowers" (yes, he used that word) if we could somehow get all those closed-down genes to turn back on again.  The reality, of course, is that in a healthy human, those switched-off genes are switched off for a reason; a lot of them are developmental genes that spur rapid cell division and are critical during early organ formation in embryos, but if turned back on would trigger cancer.  (Some oncogenes -- cancer-promoting genes -- do their dirty work more or less by this mechanism.)

Then Braden goes into an inadvertently hilarious claim that positive emotions cause your DNA to relax, and negative ones make it tighten up.  Experience positive emotions, he says, and your DNA will get all loosey-goosey and more of your genes will turn on.  Negative emotions makes the DNA "get knotted up," and genes turn off.  "It's influenced by your breath," he says.

Then he enthusiastically launched into describing an alleged experiment where some scientists (unnamed, of course) found that if you have photons in a vacuum, they are all random, but if you introduce DNA into the vacuum, they "all become aligned."  "This experiment conclusively proves," Bullard-Whyke said, somehow maintaining a straight face the entire time, "that DNA informs the quantum vacuum."

Well, as someone who is reasonably conversant both in biology and in physics, allow me simply to say that of all the things in the history of the universe that never happened, this experiment is the one that never happened the most.

But that didn't stop Braden and Bullard-Whyke, who went on to make the highly logical argument that if (1) your emotions can turn on your DNA, and (2) DNA informs the photons in the quantum vacuum (whatever the fuck that even means), then (3) what you experience might activate not only your own DNA, but that of people around you.

"When we live in fear," Braden says, "we're tightening our chromatin, and it influences the gene expression not only in ourselves, but in those we come into contact with."

So I hereby wish to issue an apology to anyone who has had to deal with me when I was in a bad mood, and who experienced massive gene shut-down as a result.  I will definitely try to improve how my biophotons are informing the quantum vacuum in the future.

What completely destroyed what little faith I have left in humanity's intellectual potential, though, was when I looked at the comments section for the video, and found stuff like this:

• Once again, Gregg, you have gone above and beyond expectations in your discoveries and studies with our Humanity and Universe and how it is all connected within us.  We are definitely in a beautiful shift as human beings.  Thank you for all that you do and teach.
• Outstanding content!  The evolved healers shomons [sic] high level alchemy and the new yet the ancient!  The connection between heart and brain and the conductor to everything else in the field!
• The most awaited golden age is almost here meaning the light is turning off for humanity so that we can have access to our true self in this dimension & beyond!  This is the time to care over being scare [sic]!
• Yes, I know this to be true - and all the creation stories are true, and not myth as we have believed.  I have known this for years.  And now Gregg Braden has presented the scientific proof.
• Apparently we can manifest our physical reality out of thin air, that's what I want to learn and unlock.  Highly evolved beings throughout the universe can connect with the field that makes up the universe and travel great distances in the blink of an eye and manifest creations from thought through the field into physical being in an instant.  If they can do it, the message I'm receiving is that we can too.  Can someone please figure this out and make tutorial videos?

Yes, please do make some tutorials!  I'll bring the snacks and a bottle of scotch.  First person who teleports a great distance in the blink of an eye wins.

Oh, and I should mention that while looking into this guy, I found out he was recently on The Joe Rogan Experience (because of course he was), wherein he claimed that NASA is covering up evidence of a fifty-thousand-year-old human civilization on the Moon.  He also apparently has written a book about how the name of God and the periodic table are both somehow encoded in the nucleotide sequence of our DNA.

So.  Yeah.  I don't know how I missed Gregg Braden, but he definitely is right up there with David Icke, Diane Tessman, and Richard C. Hoagland in the "I Make Up For In Confidence What I Lack In Accuracy" department.  But for those of us in the studio audience, can I once again urge you to look into what the actual scientists are saying on a topic before you fall for people like this?  I mean, if you're not up to reading technical journal articles on the topic -- which, let's face it, most of us aren't -- at least peruse the fucking Wikipedia page, okay?

Because seeing people praising this guy is making my photons go all higgledy-piggledy, and it's gonna shut all my wife's genes off.  She gets really cranky when that happens.

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Anomaly analysis

I try to be tolerant of people's foibles, but one thing that annoys the absolute hell out of me is when someone is obviously ignorant of the basic facts of a subject, and yet expects everyone to treat their opinion about it as if it had merit.

It's why "the Big Bang means nothing exploded and made everything" (cosmology) and "why are there still monkeys?" (evolutionary biology) both make me see red almost instantaneously.  Fer cryin' in the sink, if you're going to talk about something, at least take the five minutes it requires to read the fucking Wikipedia page on the topic first.  Yes, I suppose you're "entitled to your opinion" regardless, but I'm in no way required to treat such idiocy as if it were Stephen Hawking levels of brilliance.

I mean, I have a lot of faults, but one thing I try to avoid is pontificating on subjects about which I am ignorant.  I have a pretty good idea of the limits of my own knowledge, and I am unhesitating in saying, "Sorry, I don't know enough to comment about that."

It's really not that hard to say.  Try it, you'll see.

What brings this whole infuriating subject up is all the people who weighed in on something that is honestly a very cool piece of research, which came out in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last week.  A team led by geophysicist Charlotte Gaugné-Gouranton, of Paris City University, used satellite data to analyze a peculiar shift in the Earth's gravitational field that affected a huge region of the eastern Atlantic Ocean.

The team is uncertain what caused the anomaly, which lasted for about two years and then subsided back into its original state.  "By analyzing time series of GRACE [Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment]-derived gravity gradients, we have identified an anomalous large-scale gravity gradient signal in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, maximum at the beginning of 2007, which cannot be fully explained by surface water sources nor core fluid flows," the researchers wrote.  "This leads us to suggest that at least part of this signal could reflect rapid mass redistributions deep in the mantle."

The team suspects it might have been caused by a sudden phase transition in a common mantle mineral called bridgmanite (Mg,Fe(SiO3)), which could cause mass redistribution because of changes in density, similar to what happens when water freezes into ice.  But further research is needed to confirm this explanation.

Well, in a classic case of people adding 1 + 1 and getting 73.8, we immediately had dozens of self-styled experts adding "anomaly" to "gravity" and multiplying by "cannot be fully explained" and getting... well, take a look for yourself:

• "Advanced technology of alien manufacture is capable of 'shielding' from gravity and is the means of FTL propulsion that's been observed over and over.  This 'blink' means it's finally been captured by scientific equipment.  Countdown until the government denials start."
• "Disruptions like this are to be expected during the End Times.  Hell is on the move."
• "The scientists know more than they're letting on.  I wouldn't live along the East Coast of the United States if you paid me.  Connections to La Palma?"  [Nota bene: La Palma is one of the Canary Islands, home to a volcano that has been erupting intermittently since 2021, and was the subject of a rather hysterical BBC documentary in 2000 about how the island could split in half and cause a megatsunami -- something geologists have determined is extremely unlikely]
• "When those windows open and close again, it is a sign of the Celestial Ascension.  We should expect more of the same very soon."
• "I'm surprised they let this study get published.  Something that can change the Universal Law of Gravity, and they're shrugging it off as an 'anomaly'?  But now that the secret is out, why hasn't this been headline news worldwide?"
• "The LHC [Large Hadron Collider] went online in 2008.  Not a coincidence.  It's only a theory, but they said that the LHC could create mini black holes, and this may be proof."
• "Movement within the Hollow Earth.  But movement of what?  Stay tuned, folks, this is big."

*brief pause to stop banging my head against my desk while whimpering softly*

Okay, let's all just hang on a moment.  First of all, this anomaly was vast in size, but tiny in magnitude.  The fluctuation was small enough that it was undetectable on the Earth's surface (the scientists' own words) and was only caught by highly sensitive sensors on satellites that had been specifically designed to detect minute shifts in the Earth's gravitational field.  Second, it wasn't a "blink" -- it lasted for over two years.  Third, it peaked back in 2007, so whatever it was ended seventeen years ago, and in that time we have seen no Atlantic megatsunamis, aliens, Celestial Ascensions, or hellmouths opening.  Fourth, a shift in the gravitational field just means "something with mass moved," not a "change in the Universal Law of Gravitation."  Fifth, if the LHC had created a dangerous mini black hole, you'd think the physicists right there in Switzerland would have been the first to know, not some geologists working out in the Atlantic.  Sixth, you can't give an idea legitimacy simply by adding the phrase "it's only a theory;" if a claim was stupid before, it's still stupid after you say that.  In fact, it might be even stupider.

Seventh, and most importantly: for fuck's sake, people.

Captain Picard has absolutely had it with this kind of nonsense.

It's not that we laypeople -- and I very much include myself in that term -- can't get carried away by the hype sometimes.  In fact, when I first read about the La Palma thing a few years ago, I was honestly kind of freaked out by it; devastating landslide-induced megatsunamis have happened before (in fact, long-term followers of Skeptophilia might recall that I've written about two of them here -- the Storegga Slide and the Agadir Canyon Avalanche).  But then I did what everyone should do when they're confronted with a claim outside of their area of expertise; I did a little digging to find out what the scientists themselves had to say on the topic, and I found out that just about all geologists agree that while La Palma is clearly seismically active, it's unlikely to fracture and create an ocean-wide megatsunami.

At that point, I just kind of went, "whew," and resumed business as usual.  I did not then go on to claim that the scientists were wrong, the island was too going to fracture, and aliens from the Hollow Earth were going to use their anti-gravity faster-than-light propulsion to come out and usher in either the End Times or the Celestial Ascension, depending on which version you went for earlier.

Look, it's not that there's anything specifically dangerous about thinking there's an alien base under the eastern Atlantic.  It's more that such fuzzy irrationality very quickly becomes a habit.  Once you're accustomed to demanding respect for a claim that upon examination turns out to be "this crazy, fact-free idea I just now pulled out of my ass," you begin to apply the same demand for your uninformed opinions on medicine, the economy, and politics.

Which in one sentence explains why the United States is currently a slow-motion train wreck.

It all goes back to what Isaac Asimov said in 1980, doesn't it?  Seems like a good place to end:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

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Vinegar FTW

The frustrating thing about woo-woo ideas is that they never really go away permanently.

Take, for example, the Ancient Aliens thing.  It really came into the public eye with Erich von Däniken's 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods.  Buoyed up by his book unexpectedly catapulting him into fame, he followed it up with a number of sequels, including: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Fucking Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else For A Change.

Ha!  I made the last one up, of course, because von Däniken is currently ninety years old and still talks about The Gods all the time, raking in huge amounts of money from conferences and keynote speeches (as well as book royalties).  And that's the difficulty, isn't it?  When there's money to be made (or clicks to be clicked -- which in today's social media world, amounts to the same thing), you can never really be confident of saying goodbye to an idiotic idea.

Which, unfortunately, brings us to "chemtrails."

Chemtrails -- known to us Kool-Aid Drinkin' Sheeple as ordinary jet contrails -- got their start in 2007.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

Since then, the Evil Government has been accused of putting all sorts of things into jet fuel, with the intention of spraying it all over us and Causing Bad Stuff.  Mind-control chemicals, compounds that can alter our DNA, pathogens (anthrax seems especially popular), chemicals that induce sterility.  Notwithstanding the fact that if you want to get Something Nasty into a large fraction of the population, sneaking it into jet fuel and then hoping that the right people are going to be outside when the jet goes over, and then will inhale enough of it to work, has to be the all-time stupidest Evil Plot I've ever heard of.  I mean, this one makes Boris and Natasha's Goof Gas thing seem like unadulterated genius.

Oh, but don't worry; this time the Good Guys are way ahead.  Chemtrail your little hearts out, Evil Deep State Operatives, they're saying.  Because they have a secret weapon in their arsenal that will neutralize all chemtrails.  You ready?

Vinegar.

And not even special magical vinegar; ordinary white vinegar that you can buy from the supermarket.  You're supposed to "gently heat (not boil)" it, and the vapors rise and do battle with the poisonous chemtrails.  How this supposedly works adds a whole other level of facepalming to the discussion.  "White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]," said one YouTuber.  "It eats alkaline metals which is [sic] what they spray to create the geoengineered clouds."

The problem here -- well, amongst the myriad problems here -- is that dissolving a chemical element doesn't destroy it.  If there really were alkaline metals in jet contrails, vinegar might react chemically with them, but the metals would still be there (and presumably, still be just as toxic).  It's like the claim I've seen about pillbugs (isopods) being our friends because they "remove heavy metals from soils."  Now, isopods might well be tolerant to soils with heavy metal contamination -- I haven't verified that possibility -- but if they do consume plant material laden with heavy metals, where do you think those contaminants go after they're eaten?  They're now inside the isopod's body, and when they isopod dies, the heavy metals leach right back into the soil.  Barium, cadmium, lead, arsenic, and so on are elements, and if you are unclear on why that point is relevant, I refer you to the definition thereof.

Notwithstanding, the anti-chemtrail people claim that simmering vinegar in your back yard can "clear contaminated chemtrails in a ten-mile radius in a few hours."  Which would be a pretty good trick, if it weren't for the fact that jet contrails themselves always disappear completely on their own in fifteen minutes or so.

The whole issue hasn't been helped by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in between sessions of Congress seems to spend her time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, proposing a bill prohibiting "geoengineering and weather modification," which includes chemtrails.

But of course, the bill conveniently says nothing about the carbon dioxide released by burning jet fuel, which actually is modifying our climate.  Can't mention climate change and piss off the corporate donors, after all.

So once again, we're confronted by a conspiracy theory that keeps rising, zombie-like, from its shallow grave.  At least in this case it'll keep the woo-woos busy simmering (not boiling) vinegar in their back yards, which is fairly harmless.  And it'll give a boost to the vinegar manufacturers.  Me, though, I'm kind of pining for the Ancient Aliens to come back around again.  At least they keep people interested in stuff like history and mythology and archaeology, even if their conclusions aren't any more grounded in reality than the vinegar/chemtrail people.

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The second Sun

I know the universe can be a weird place sometimes, but... let's follow Carl Sagan's dictum of looking for a normal and natural explanation for things before jumping to a paranormal or supernatural one, mmmkay?

The reason this comes up is because of a discussion I saw online about the strange phenomenon of a "double Sun" -- when there appears to be a split view of the Sun (or, sometimes, a smaller "second Sun" near the main one).  The first clue that this is a completely natural (albeit odd-looking) occurrence is that it always happens when (1) the sky is hazy, and (2) when the Sun is near the horizon.  It turns out to be caused by the Sun's light refracting off particles of ice or smoke in the upper atmosphere, creating an ephemeral double image.

It is, in fact, simply an optical illusion.

A "double Sun" caused by wildfire smoke, seen from Jervis Bay National Park, New South Wales, Australia [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Doug McLean, Bushfire smoke induced Double Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0]

One of the commenters, evidently a science type, gave a measured and reasonable response explaining light refraction, and that resulted in everyone basically going, "Oh, that's cool!  An interesting atmospheric phenomenon!  Thank you for the scientific explanation!"

Ha!  I'm lying.  Of course that's not how people responded.  He was immediately shouted down by about a hundred other folks, who had "explanations" like the following.  Spelling and grammar are exactly as written, because you can only add [sic] so many times:

• It’s just more proof that the Earth is flat.  We’ve been viewing a computer CGI simulation since the late 1800s, and it has just been a matter of time before we start seeing glitches in the man’s software.

• Is it nibiru?  I've read planet x?  Is it a sun like star or what?  I'm so confused.

• It has been photographed before, from Seattle to Wisconsin.  NASA has known about the approach of Nibiru, the Destroyer, Planet X or the countless other names it is known by, including Wormwoof, which it is known by in the bible.  It is an entire star system travelling on an elliptical orbit towards our earth.  It has its own Sun (which you are seeing) and several planets that travel with it.  All the people want to know why can’t you see it.  The answer is because it’s a dead brown star that can only be seen in the infra red spectrum.  The only 2 places that have a black light telescope is in Antarctica and the Vatican.  Go figure.

• If you don’t mind, I will actually give you a serious reply, depending on what you believe in depending on what you think is possible and aside from that, depending on what frequency you operate at you’re able to see in those things, I’ve heard a lot from people who are a lot smarter than me that by 2027 the two suns will be completely visible as well as open contact.  I don’t care if I’m labeled crazy I don’t channel.

• Idk what any of this can or will mean for us here, but boys and girls I don't think the comet in our orbit, that they say should remain visible to the naked eye, but only while facing due West, and get this....only during, or immediately after the sunset will it appear near the Sun, I don't think that's what they are telling us it is.  Is this the reason all these billionaires have been building massive underground bunkers suddenly this past year?

• Trump the Antichrist is here and two suns is the beginning of the end.  In many apocalyptic and religious interpretations, the imagery of “two suns crossing in the sky” is often associated with the arrival of the Antichrist, signifying a significant and ominous event that marks the beginning of the end times, often interpreted as a sign of a false messiah or a powerful evil force emerging into the world, e.g. Trump and Musk.

• There is a second sun behind our sun but we can never see it because it stays behind the sun.  It’s gravitational balanced by the tiny black hole on the other side of our moon that we can’t see either.  Every 276 years in June the moon’s black hole and the second son have a tilting wobble and the second sun becomes visible for a few minutes in a small viewing zone across the northern hemisphere.  Behind the second sun there are a few more things that we can’t see, like second Jupiter.

A few thoughts about all that.

• What the actual fuck?

• Okay, I can see Trump as the Antichrist, given that he embodies all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual.  But somehow I don't think even his level of evil can make two Suns appear in the sky.

• If it's only visible for a few minutes every 276 years, it was pretty lucky the dude got a snapshot of it, wasn't it?

• So, Nibiru is en vogue again, eh?  Last I heard of Nibiru was about ten years ago, and I figured it had become passé, replaced by far more believable claims like targeted weather modification and 5G mind control and Jewish space lasers.

• If I've never seen a "second Sun," it's because I'm "operating on the wrong frequency?"  I didn't know humans were like radios, and came equipped with a frequency dial.  That's pretty awesome.  Maybe if mine is set right I can tune into the BBC.

• Only Antarctica and the Vatican have "black light telescopes"?  I'm trying to come up with some kind of clever response to this, but... nope, I got nothin'.

• If I ever get another pit bull, I'm gonna name him "Wormwoof."

• At the risk of repeating myself, what the actual fuck?

What astounds me about all of this is how many people seem to gravitate toward this sort of nonsense instead of looking first for a rational explanation.  It's not like the science in this case is hard to understand, or even hard to find; the website of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory posted a perfectly good explanation that shows up on the first page of a Google search for "double Sun."

But loony claims like Nibiru and dead brown stars and second Jupiters and simulation glitches are, apparently, more attractive.  Is it because it makes the universe seem weirder and cooler?  Or is it the appeal of "seeing through a coverup" by scientists or the government or whatnot?

It's always seemed to me that the scientific explanations of what we observe are plenty cool enough, and some of them -- like quantum physics -- plenty weird enough.  Why do so many people need to add extra layers of wackiness onto things?

I'll end with another quote from Carl Sagan, which I think sums things up nicely: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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The ideologue

I told myself that I wasn't going to do another political post so soon after Tuesday's, but dammit, my good intentions got blasted to smithereens by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (53427511876) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Let me open by stating my bias up front.  My considered opinion, as a 32-year veteran science teacher with fifteen years of experience writing on science-related topics, is that RFK is a certifiable lunatic.  He combines the worst of the alt-med nonsense -- the kinds of things promoted by Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and Vani "Food Babe" Hari -- with outlandish and debunked conspiracy theories, then dishes it all up as if it was peer-reviewed science.  Here are the three stories that destroyed my resolve to stay away from politics for at least a few days:

• In a town hall moderated by "Dr. Phil," he was asked by an audience member what he was planning on doing about "chemtrails."  You probably know that "chemtrails" are a completely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that The Bad Guys are putting stuff into jet fuel -- the "stuff" varies from heavy metals to radioactive isotopes to pathogens like anthrax -- so that when the exhaust is released into the upper atmosphere, it settles down on all of us and poisons us.  Notwithstanding that this has to be the absolute stupidest idea for a poison-delivery method I've ever heard of, it's been studied (I can only imagine the eye-rolling done by the scientists assigned to the research), and... nothing.  Contrails are almost entirely water vapor, with small amounts of soot from incomplete burning of jet fuel.  That's it.  But did RFK say that?  Of course not.  He's all in on chemtrails.  "It’s done, we think, by DARPA [the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency]," he said.  "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel -- so those materials are put in jet fuel.  I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.  We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable."

• An article in Ars Technica provides evidence -- in the form of RFK's own words -- that he doubts the basis of the medical science of infectious disease, the "Germ Theory of Disease."  Which claims that many diseases are (1) caused by pathogenic viruses, bacteria, fungi, or protists, and are therefore (2) communicable.  You'd think this'd be beyond question by this point, right?  Wrong.  RFK believes that any disease involving a pathogen is caused by having a weakened immune system -- i.e., all pathogens are opportunistic.  Get enough clean water, food, air, and sunlight, and you'll never get sick.  This is the basis of his anti-vaxx stance; if you live right, you shouldn't need 'em.  If this was a rational stance -- which it is not -- I'd ask him why, then, did childhood death rates go down so dramatically during the 1950s and 1960s, when mandatory vaccination programs against diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio were instituted?  Did all the kids suddenly start eating right, or something?

• He stated outright that it was reasonable that religious people would shun the MMR vaccine, because it contains "aborted fetus debris."  Needless to say, this is untrue.  Vaccines against viral diseases are cultured in cell lines grown in labs, not in aborted fetuses.  If this were true, it'd be kind of funny that some of the most anti-abortion people around -- the leaders of the Catholic Church -- have no problem with vaccines, and in fact, strongly recommend that children get all of the critical childhood vaccines on the schedule recommended by most doctors.

Look, it's not that I'm against the idea that we need good food and clean air and water.  I'm also well aware that Big Pharma has a lot to answer for in how it produces, vets, and prices drugs.  But going from there to something I saw posted on social media a couple of days ago -- a 32-point-font banner saying, "BIG PHARMA HAS NEVER CURED A SINGLE ILLNESS!" is blatant idiocy.  To give just one example, a friend of mine, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age eighteen and is now a happy and healthy young woman in her late twenties, would not be alive today without the chemotherapy developed and produced by "Big Pharma."  

But under RFK, cancer research -- and also research into Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Parkinson's, and most recently, Ebola fever -- has been defunded in favor of spurious projects to "stop chemtrails" and "look into the connection between vaccines and autism."  (tl;dr: There isn't one.)

In short, RFK is a dangerous ideologue who shouldn't be allowed within hailing distance of our national health policy.  His continued occupation of the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services is going to result in irreparable damage to the American health care system.

But a man like him is never going to step down, because he can't conceive of the possibility that he could be wrong.  An attitude which, of course, is endemic in our government right now.

I wonder how many people will have to die before anyone will step in and fire him?

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Celestial revelations

Once or twice a week I volunteer to sort book donations for our local Friends of the Library biannual book sale.  This particular event, held in May and October and sponsored by the Tompkins County Friends of the Library, is one of the biggest used book sales in the United States -- we process a half a million books a year.  It's an amazing event, raises much-needed money for our library system, and is a must-attend for any bibliophiles.

It hardly needs saying that the sale is one of the high points of the year for me.  I always come back with a huge box of books, because I clearly don't have enough books already.  As the volunteers' presale is on April 27, I've already been snooping around up and down the aisles in the warehouse, scouting out what books I want to pounce on before anyone else has an opportunity to get their grubby mitts on 'em.

Sorting incoming books is a lot of fun, not only because the people I work with are lovely, but because it's highly entertaining to see what people choose to donate.  I've noticed that there seem to be themes -- one day we'll be inundated with books on anthropology, the next gardening, the one after that murder mysteries or religion or science fiction.  There's nothing odd about this, when you stop to think about it.  We all have our obsessions, reading-material-wise, so when people clear out their shelves it's understandable that we'd end up with piles of donations from the same genres.

When I was there last Wednesday, the Theme of the Day was the occult.  We had psychic stuff and reincarnation and crystals and astrology and Tarot card interpretation, as well as about twenty books by the famously loony Graham Hancock.  None of this was all that remarkable.  But then I ran into three copies of a book I kinda-sorta remembered hearing about -- The Urantia Book -- and by the third time, I asked one of the other sorters if she knew what it was.

She didn't.  She, like myself, had heard the name, knew it was connected with the occult somehow, but that was about it.

So when I got home, I looked it up, and it's quite a story.

Cover of the first edition (1955) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing seems to have been the brainchild of one William S. Sadler, although Sadler said he acted only as a channel and that the pages of the original manuscript "materialized" between 1924 and 1935.  Sadler is a curious figure; he was a doctor and an early "health food" promoter, whose wife Lena (Kellogg) Sadler was the niece of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes.  Sadler started out being a debunker of psychic claims, and in fact wrote a book called The Mind at Mischief in which he exposed fraudulent mediums and their methods of hoodwinking the gullible.

But then... something happened.  It's unclear if Sadler had a change of heart, or if (like the cynical, bored book publishers who decided to out-conspiracy the conspiracy theorists in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) he figured he could come up with his own loony idea that would fool people way better than the two-bit mediums he'd debunked.  Whichever it was, in 1924 he launched into a claim that he had become the focus of a "strange communication from a group called the Celestials." 

So he and some friends got together to write it all down.

These writings, which run to two thousand pages, are what were eventually compiled into The Urantia Book.  It wasn't published until 1955 -- because, Sadler said, there'd been questions he and his team had that needed to be "clarified by the Celestials."

But when it finally did hit the presses... wow.

The "Urantia Foundation" -- formed to coordinate printing and sales of the book -- reports that it's still a hot seller.  Between 1990 and 2000, annual sales went up by over a factor of five (from 7,000 to 38,000).  It became downloadable in 2010, and since then averages around 60,000 downloads a year.  Brad Gooch, in his book Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, says that the number of Urantia study groups and online discussion groups has been going up steadily in the last ten years and is showing no sign of leveling off.

I'll be honest; I haven't read the book itself and have no real intention to, but the excerpts I've found online strike me as fairly innocuous.  There's a lot of talk about all of us having the "Divine Spark" or an "Indwelling Presence" that guides us toward good behavior, and a "Thought Adjuster" that steers us away from sinfulness.  It seems to have no particular quarrel with other religions and philosophies; the attitude is that they all got some things right and some things wrong, so y'know, we're all on this journey together, live and let live, I'm okay you're okay everyone's okay.  And aliens, but they're okay, too.

Honestly, it's all pretty tolerant and friendly-sounding.  Me, I'd take this over evangelical Christianity in a heartbeat, even if Sadler did make the whole thing up.

What's curious about the people who believe this really is a more-or-less divine revelation from all-knowing Celestial Beings, though, is when it gets to the parts about science -- because in a lot of places, it got the science wrong.  And the really interesting part is that the things they got wrong were, oddly enough, wrong in exactly the way that you'd expect from an entirely non-Celestial human who was writing in the 1920s.  It describes the formation of the Solar System via something that sounds an awful lot like the 1905 Chamberlin-Moulton Planetesimal Hypothesis, which was widely accepted in the 1920s but ruled out on the basis of inconsistencies with known physical principles by Lyman Spitzer and Henry Norris Russell in 1940.  It states that the Andromeda Galaxy is "almost one million light years away" -- once again, the accepted value in the 1920s, before better measurements showed that it's well over double that distance.  Back then, too, the whole "fundamental particle" thing was really taking off, and there was no certainty of how deep the well went -- whether particles would prove to be divisible into ever tinier and tinier pieces with no end, or if there really were fundamental, indivisible particles.  Well, Urantia says that all the known particles are composed of a fundamental smaller piece called an "ultimaton;" electrons, for example, are made of a hundred of them.

Unfortunately for Urantia and the Celestials, however, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, one of the most extensively-tested models in all of science, finds no evidence of "ultimatons," and electrons really do appear to be fundamental and indivisible.

So my problem is that if you're expecting me to accept that this really is some kind of revealed truth -- either from a deity, or at the very least, from some super-smart aliens -- then why'd they get the science demonstrably wrong?  And if they got the facts wrong, on what basis should I believe anything else they say?

As generally "nice" as their philosophy seems to be, I have my doubts.

Anyhow, now I know way more about The Urantia Book than I did.  If you're intrigued, and going to be in Ithaca during the first week of May, you can pick up a copy or three at the book sale.  Today I'll be heading down in an hour or so to do my shift sorting more books.  I wonder what the Theme of the Day will be?  Sports?  True Crime?  Graphic Novels?  Self-Help?

Amish Romances?  I kid you not, there's a whole shelf full of Amish Romances.

When you deal with a half a million books a year, there's bound to be something for everyone.

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The zombie claim

One of the fundamental principles of woo-woo-ism is never to let a popular idea die.

You can refute them, you can debunk them, you can show them hard cold facts that what they're saying can't be true, and they will never give up.  It's a little like Donald "It's Only Rigged When I Lose" Trump, isn't it?  The world has to be how they see it, so any evidence to the contrary has to be suppressed, rationalized away, or simply ignored.

This is undoubtedly why I am once again running across references to a claim that I first saw way back in the 1970s -- that the Dogon tribe of Africa had prior knowledge, through contact with "ancient astronauts" from another planet, that the star Sirius has a companion star that is too small to see with the naked eye.  According to this story, they even got the orbital period of this star correct (fifty years, give or take).  Aficionados of UFOs and aliens and so on just love this story, because if true, it would seem to be evidence that a relatively primitive tribe had information that they could only have gotten from an advanced society.

Of course, that last statement is literally true; the advanced society they got it from is France.  The anthropologist who first made the claim of the Dogon's knowledge, Marcel Griaule, is thought to be the one who "contaminated" the Dogon with outside information in the first place.  The discovery that Sirius's companion star ("Sirius B") is a bizarre condensed stellar core called a white dwarf was all over the news in the 1920s, when Griaule was working with the Dogon, and the Dogon themselves are peculiarly fascinated with the stars.  It doesn't take much of a reach to guess that Griaule was the source of the information, especially given that subsequent researchers into the Dogon culture found that the only ones who had actually heard of "po tolo," as they called Sirius B, were the people in the village Griaule had visited.

Sirius A and Sirius B [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Griaule's claim probably would never have gotten much notice if it hadn't been for a 1977 book by Robert Temple called The Sirius Mystery, which rode on the then-recent hype surrounding Erich von Däniken's 1968 smash bestseller Chariots of the Gods, followed by his equally popular books Gold of the Gods, Odyssey of the Gods, Signs of the Gods, Return of the Gods, Retirement Planning Advice of the Gods, and Favorite Easy Recipes of the Gods.  Temple's book covers much of the same sort of ground, and garnered highly dubious responses by Carl Sagan, Jason Colavito, James Oberg, and Ian Ridpath, the latter of whom wrote a thorough takedown of the claim in The Skeptical Inquirer in 1978.  Ridpath shows that to accept that the Dogon somehow knew about Sirius B requires taking their vague, ambiguous, and mythologized accounts (as related by Griaule) and forcing them to conform to the data.  It's more likely -- vastly more likely -- that the Dogon heard bits and pieces about the discovery of the double star from Griaule or one of his staff and incorporated them into their own legends in a piecemeal fashion, than that they somehow got the information from space travelers who'd actually been there.

Ridpath writes:

The point is that there are any number of channels by which the Dogon could have received Western knowledge long before they were visited by Griaule and [Germaine] Dieterlen [an anthropologist who worked with Griaule].  We may never be able to reconstruct the exact route by which the Dogon received their current knowledge, but out of the confusion at least one thing is clear: they were not told by beings from the star Sirius.

Nonetheless, almost fifty years after Ridpath's authoritative takedown, this story is still circulating.  A search for the keywords "Sirius" and "Dogon" garners thousands of hits, and a quick perusal of the first three pages is enough to demonstrate that almost all of them buy Griaule's idea wholesale.  And this points to another, and more depressing conclusion; skeptical thought seems to travel slower than bullshit does.  Ridiculous ideas, like Griaule's claim that ancient astronauts had visited the Dogon, have more of a cachet than do prosaic statements such as "Griaule told 'em himself, and then claimed he'd discovered something amazing."  Who would be motivated to tell a friend something like the latter?  While the former... well, you can see how that story might have a little more tendency to get passed along.

As far as why these things go in cycles, and why there's been a recent resurgence of interest in Sirius and the Dogon -- I have no idea.  The claim this time seems to have been picked up by the Harmonic Convergence people, who think that our current turbulent political situation is an indication that we're about to "ascend" and meet up with Cosmic Masters from another star system.  "Pain and anguish always precede profound change for the better," I saw on one of their websites.  To which I say: cool beans.  All I can add is that y'all Cosmic Masters need to get your ascended celestial asses here pronto, because our current so-called leaders seem to be fucking things up royally.  At this point, I'd look upon an invasion by aliens as an improvement.  I mean, I'm not asking for the Daleks or the Vashta Nerada to show up -- I do have some standards -- but there are a lot of other options.  Even the Borg have their positive aspects, you know?

But since the Borg are a collective interconnected hive-mind, this brings up the question of what would happen if some of these MAGA types got assimilated.  Suppose they Borg-ified Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Would the Collective all of a sudden become way stupider?  After assimilating Mike Johnson they'd probably stop trying to take over new planets and focus on taking away the rights of the ones they'd already assimilated, and then they'd hold a prayer meeting.  Or how about J. D. Vance?  Would they all suddenly develop a strange affinity for sofas?

But I digress.

Anyhow, if you do see the whole Dogon/Sirius B thing popping up, like some undead zombie claim we all thought was long buried, you might want to mention that it was thoroughly debunked all the way back in 1978.  There aren't any Ancient Astronauts, so claiming that they visited a tribe in Africa is even further removed from the truth.

It's time to let this one go, at least for now.  I'm not enough of an optimist to believe it'll ever go away completely, but for now, let's give it a rest, okay?

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Resonant nonsense

One of the problems with targeted-advertisement algorithms is that they're awfully good at picking up on words like "homeopathy" and "crystal healing" and "chemtrails" and not so good a picking up on words like "bollocks" and "lunacy" and "absolute horseshit."

The result is that my work here at Skeptophilia leaves me foundering in a sea of wingnuttery.  The "Recommended For You" pages I get on Facebook are particularly bad, especially given that these days, the way Facebook works is you get twenty "Sponsored" and "Recommended" posts for every one that's from an actual friend, so trying to find out what's going on with your pals requires wading through all the stuff Mark Zuckerberg thinks you desperately need to see but almost certainly would prefer not to.

This is the only possible explanation for how Facebook ended up recommending a page to me called "Schumann Resonance Today."  Those of you who are aficionados of obscure atmospheric phenomena probably know that the Schumann resonances are the resonant radio frequencies of the atmosphere -- similar to how a plucked guitar string has a natural frequency it "wants" to oscillate at (corresponding to the pitch you hear when you pluck it).  Just like the guitar string needs something to set it in motion, the Schumann resonances do, too; in this case, lightning.  Lightning releases not only light and heat and compression waves (sound), but radio waves, and it turns out that those at 7.83 Hertz have the right wavelength to resonate and form a standing wave in the upper atmosphere.  (Once again similar to a guitar string, the atmosphere also has "overtones" -- progressively weaker harmonics at 14.3, 20.8, 27.3, and 33.8 Hertz.)

And that's all they are.  Nothing mystical, nothing that has any effect on humans.  In fact, they weren't even discovered until 1952.

But then you look at the "Schumann Resonance Today" page on Facebook, and... well, let me give you a taste of it.

Each post starts with a graph that looks like this:

And a headline like "WARNING: THE SCHUMANN RESONANCE HAS EXPLODED!!!" followed by "Rolling blackouts expected!  We warned you this was coming!"

If you look at the comments section (Not directly!  Always wear eye protection!) you find out that literally hundreds of people have noticed the explosion of the Schumman resonance, because they report:

• having insomnia
• sleeping way more than usual
• having tons of nervous energy
• having no energy at all
• more "glitches in the matrix" than usual
• fewer "glitches in the matrix" than usual
• pets acting weird

As far as the last-mentioned, I don't know about your pets, but my pets kind of act weird 24/7/365.  In fact, I'd notice it if they stopped acting weird.  Just yesterday morning, I heard "BANG (whimper) BANG (whimper) BANG" so I got up to go see what was going on.  Turns out it had started to rain and Jethro wanted to come inside, and he wanted to bring along his favorite stick, but when it was in his mouth he didn't fit through the doggy door.  So his solution after three or four unsuccessful tries was to sit on the patio in the rain and feel sorry for himself until I came downstairs and rescued him.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the Schumann resonance people are deadly serious that a standing radio wave in the upper atmosphere is somehow impacting their lives.  Here are a few selected comments, which I swear I am not making up:

This full moon and static air has me AWAKE.  I have been manic for a week now.

I’m sleeping deep; inward struggles (46+ years worth due to severe trauma) have been lifted; I’m more focused, hopeful, and optimistic; I feel a spine chilling shift in my spirituality and empathic abilities (ascending) … plus so much more! I’m eternally grateful

Grounding & aligning your central axis with the earth’s supports the integration of the energy

I woke up too early yesterday and then slept great last night. Ringing in my ears in different tones at different times and in different ears. Some days it's more prevalent than others. I guess it's a roller coaster for all of us

These vibrational frequencies affect some people more than others.  Sometimes the answer is increasing your own vibration out of the range of the resonance.  If that doesn't work, sleeping on a grounding sheet can help. 

Has ANYONE noticed there [sic] certain gifts they have, they have gotten stronger?  I play a game with cards, I put a few down and try n guess what’s there.  I’ve been playing around with it bcuz I feel myself smarter?  Every time I pick one I have been spot on.  Anyone else notice lil differences that are big ?

I got a beautiful flash premonition of my next step to my higher life, I received a download that shows me my path.  It was a beautiful experience.

Can someone explain to me what this means?  And if it means it’s time to buy an another gun?

Oh dear lord no please don't buy another gun.  And as far as the rest of you people -- well, I'm happy for your ascending empathic abilities and flash premonitions of higher lives and whatnot, but whatever it is you're experiencing has nothing to with standing radio waves.

And for what it's worth, you're not going to get anywhere by listening to a sound at a frequency of 7.83 Hertz, which I also saw recommended, because sound waves and radio waves aren't the same thing.  And incidentally, "raising the frequencies" is not necessarily a good thing.  If you think "high frequencies = good, low frequencies = bad," how 'bout you listen to a piccolo for three hours and I listen to a cello for three hours, and we'll see which one of us comes away with a splitting headache.

Lest you think this stuff is just the province of a few scattered woo-woos, the "Schumann Resonance Today" page has fifteen thousand followers, and their posts average between six hundred and a thousand likes each.  It'd be comforting to think that some of these are people who follow the page simply for the humor value, but after looking at the comments, I'm forced to the conclusion that the vast majority of these folks are True Believers.

I find this colossally frustrating.  To learn what the Schumann resonances are -- and how (frankly) prosaic the phenomenon is -- all you have to do is read the post on Skeptoid I linked above, which was the first non-woo hit I found after a fifteen-second Google search; failing that, just read the damn Wikipedia article.  Both are clear about how the resonances work, that they have nothing to do with human health, and that all of the "Resonances EXPLODED" stuff is utter nonsense.

So I'm forced to the conclusion that this isn't only an example of superstition, pseudoscience, and confirmation bias, it's an example of laziness.  The answers, the real answers, are out there; and -- unlike, for example, quantum physics -- in this case the actual science isn't even that hard to understand.  There is no excuse for falling for this kind of foolishness, not with the access we now have to real, factual knowledge.

I'll end with an exhortation to all of us to get out there and learn some damn science before we start posting stuff on social media.  And as far as the Facebook algorithms -- get your fucking act together.  Seems like after thirteen years of writing Skeptophilia, y'all'd have figured out that recommending pages like this to me is seriously barking up the wrong tree.

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Werewolf box

Because apparently some ill-advised person uttered the dreaded words, "Well, things can't possibly get any weirder than they already are," I've been seeing a resurgence of interest in an "invention" from 1990 called the "Feraliminal Lycanthropizer."

I put "invention" in quotation marks because mostly what it seems to do is "nothing," which is hardly remarkable.  Hell, I've got three dogs who do that all day long, unless their dreaded enemy the UPS Guy shows up, at which point they sound Full Red Alert until the Guy retreats to his truck in disarray, which always happens.  This leaves them with a nice cheerful feeling of having Accomplished Something Important, at which point they resume doing nothing until the next non-crisis arises.

Anyhow, the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer, such as it is, is the brainchild of one David Woodard, who sounds like one seriously strange dude.  He is an accomplished musician who specializes in writing requiems (he once wrote one for a dead pelican he found on the beach) and "prequiems" for people who aren't technically deceased but who, in the words of Monty Python, will be stone dead in a moment.  Woodard wrote about his mystery machine in a pamphlet in 1990, describing it as a "psychotechnographic" device he'd found out about somewhere and then recreated:

The first part of the contraption's odd moniker comes from the Latin ferus (wild animal) and limen (threshold); if you think the second part sounds like it must mean "... that turns you into a werewolf," you're exactly right.  (However, it must be mentioned that after Gary Larson's immortal coinage of thagomizer for the spiky end of a stegosaurus's tail -- named, you'll probably recall, after "the late Thag Simmons" -- it's hard for me to take anything ending in -izer seriously.)

In any case, the thing supposedly creates three simultaneous infrasonic sine waves, at 0.56, 3.0, and 9.0 Hertz, respectively, which combine to create "thanato-auric waves."  After that, someone inside the box is... well, let me quote the pamphlet Woodard wrote about it:

This combination of drastically contrasting emotional trigger mechanisms results in an often profound behavioral enhancement which occurs strikingly soon (within moments) after the user enters and remains in the auricular field of the machine...   [This acts] to trigger states of urgency and fearlessness and to disarmor the intimate charms of the violent child within.  The Trithemean incantations richly pervading the machine’s aural output produce feelings of aboveness and unbridled openness.

Right!  Sure!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"

I was disappointed to find out that even Woodard doesn't believe the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer actually turns you into a werewolf, which is a shame, because that'd be kind of cool.  I've always thought that of the horror movie bad guys, werewolves are objectively the best.  I mean, consider the advantages: (1) you only have to work one day a month; (2) there's hardly any danger because no one much carries guns with silver bullets, including in places like Texas where even the dairy cattle are packing heat; (3) you get to romp around howling at the Moon; (4) werewolves always have super ripped muscles, despite seldom being seen at the gym; and (5) no one thinks it's weird if you show up to work naked, a principle exemplified by the character Jacob Black in the movie Twilight, wherein audience members lost track of the number of times Taylor Lautner took all his clothes off.

Not that I'm complaining about that, mind you.

But all the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer allegedly does is to increase your violence and sexual desire, which seems like a bad idea to do at the same time.  Fortunately, in reality it doesn't even do that much; no less a source than  the Fortean Times said "There is no evidence the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer exists or could have such effects."  Somewhat more crudely, paranormal researcher Michael Esposito commented that the sexual effects of the Lycanthropizer could be duplicated by "leaning up against the spin cycle of a Maytag."

So an oddball made a strange claim a 35 years ago, which isn't anything out of the ordinary, because that's what oddballs do.  What's remarkable, though, is that this thing has now resurfaced, and is making the rounds of conspiracy websites (wherein it's suggested that it's somehow going to be used covertly to, I dunno, convert people into extremely horny super-soldiers or something) and even sketchier sites owned by people who are trying to figure out how to make one, because for some reason they want to feel more violent.

Since the Lycanthropizer doesn't actually do anything (Cf. paragraph 2), I suppose there are worse things the fringe element could spend their time on.  After all, the more time they waste trying to generate an "auricular field of thanato-auric waves" the less time they'll have to amass actual weapons.

So the upshot is: knock yourself out.

Anyhow, that's our News From The Outer Limits for today.  And I guess that, in fact, the world has not yet gotten as weird as it could possibly get.  But y'all'll have to excuse me, because my washing machine just went on spin, and I've got to... um... go attend to it.

 

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