This week in lunacy

On the whole, I'm an optimist.

It seems a happier way to be.  In general, I would rather expect people to behave well and occasionally be disappointed than to start from the assumption that everyone is an asshole and occasionally be pleasantly surprised.  I know a couple of people who are diehard pessimists, who believe that the worst of humanity is the rule and not the exception, and by and large they're chronically unhappy -- even when things turn out well.

On the other hand, the last few years have been a trial to my generally positive mindset.  I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fifteen years, and the anti-science attitudes and loony counterfactual beliefs that impelled me to start this blog seem to be as common as ever.  Take, for example, the four stories I came across on Reddit, one after the other, while I was casting about for a topic for today's post.

First we have an article courtesy of the ever-entertaining Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose main function seems to be making sure that Lauren Boebert is never proclaimed the Stupidest Member of the United States Congress.  Greene just introduced a bill to make weather modification a felony, because -- and this is a direct quote -- "we need clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!"

The irony here is that Greene has supported every one of Donald Trump's efforts to weaken environmental protection -- hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, crippling research into climate change, increasing the number of coal-fired power plants, clear-cutting forests on public land, and deregulating mining and oil production.  But sure, Marjorie, let's outlaw "weather modification," which she says was responsible for Hurricane Helene, the California wildfires, and most recently, the devastating flooding in central Texas.

Hell, if the evil liberal-controlled Deep State could modify the weather, they'd have dispatched EF-5 tornadoes to level Mar-a-Lago ages ago.  But I wouldn't expect logic like that to appeal to Greene, who responded to critics by using my least favorite phrase, "I've done my research," and based on that has come to the conclusion that people who say that hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are natural events are big fat liars.

Expect her "research" to that effect to appear in Nature any time now.

Then we had evangelical preacher Troy Brewer, who claimed that the Texas floods weren't weather modification, they were God sending a message to us.  It was significant, he said, that the flooding (well, some of the flooding) happened on July 4.  In a passage that I swear I'm not making up, Brewer said, "It was a divine signal...  Whenever this thing happened on July the 4th… this is not just about Texas.  This is a word for all the United States of America.  It's no coincidence that 1776 divided by two is 888, the numerical value of the name Jesus in Greek.  Did you know that there were 888 people rescued out of that creek?  888 is the number of Jesus...  And remember that the site of the flood, Kerrville, is the home to the 77-foot-high sculpture known as The Empty Cross."

It does strike me as odd that if this is God sending a message about how lawless and evil and wicked we all are, smiting the shit out of central Texas -- one of the most devoutly Christian places in America -- is kind of an odd move.  I mean, Kerrville isn't exactly Sodom and Gomorrah.  But "God drowned hundreds of good Christians to show you all how important it is to be a good Christian" isn't any crazier than a lot of what these people believe, so I guess it's not really all that surprising.

Next, there's Joe Rogan, who if this was a fair world would have zero credibility left, claiming that Lyme disease was a deliberately-leaked biological weapon from the secret labs on Plum Island.  It probably won't take you longer than a couple of nanoseconds to figure out where he got this amazing revelation from:

RFK Jr.

The only person out there with less scientific credibility than Joe Rogan.

"The ticks are an epidemic because of what happened at Plum Island and the other labs," RFK said in the January 2024 episode of the RFK Jr Podcast.  "We also know that they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab, and they were putting them in ticks and then infecting people."

Of course, this is the kind of thing that gives Joe Rogan multiple orgasms, so he was all in on the bioweapon claim. 

"Turns out there's a lot of real evidence that Lyme disease was weaponized," Rogan said.  "It came out of a lab called Plum Island, which was close to Lyme, Connecticut.  And RFK Jr. firmly believes that this was a weapons program...  What they were going to do is develop these fleas and ticks with a disease that spreads rapidly, wipes out the medical system of a community.  So, you could dump them from a plane, everybody gets infected, overwhelms their medical system, and then they're more vulnerable if you want to attack them...  Can you imagine if those cunts created a fucking disease and now everyone on the East Coast has it?  Because it's mostly out there."

The Rogan/RFK Jr. claim kind of falls prey to the fact that there's ample evidence that Lyme, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, has been around for a very long time.  To take just one example, Ötzi -- the "Ice Man," the five-thousand-year-old frozen human found in the Alps in Switzerland -- was found in 2012 to be Lyme-positive through DNA analysis of his tissues.

What, Joe -- did the evil Plum Island scientists use their time machines to go back and infect Ötzi in order to throw us all off their trail?  Or should we tune in next week to hear you come up with some even more insane explanation?

Finally, we have a loony claim surrounding a viral craze I hadn't even heard of.  To be fair, I'm not exactly the sort who immerses himself in pop culture, but this one is apparently huge and had escaped me entirely.  It's called a "Labubu doll," and is a "plush monster elf toy" created by Hong Kong designer Kaising Lung.  It got picked up by a couple of big names like Dua Lipa and Rihanna, and now everyone wants one.

Well, you can't have a popular toy out there without someone deciding that it's eeeeee-vil.  And especially... look at those teeth.  So now people on X and TikTok are warning that you should burn your Labubu doll because it's possessed by a demon called, I shit you not, Pazuzu.

Notwithstanding the fact that Labubu and Pazuzu sound like names that a rich old lady would give her poodles, people are taking this extremely seriously.  "I’m not superstitious, I’m a little stitious, but I’d never buy a Labubu," said one person on X.  "It comes from Pazuzu, which is a demon, and possessed the girl in The Exorcist."

So this individual is warning us not to buy a doll representing a fictional creature because it might be inhabited by a fictional demon who possessed a fictional girl in a fictional movie.

But do go on about how plausible all this is.

Then there's the person who commented, "Please before falling into the trap of Labubu or any trend nowadays, do your research.  THEY’RE MADE AFTER A DEMON DEITY (Pazuzu as they say)."

Yes, of course!  For fuck's sake!  Do your research!

Other people are blessing their Labubus or anointing them with holy water to "turn them into protector spirits." I guess this is better than burning them, at least from the standpoint of releasing toxins from burning plastic into the air, which would probably make Marjorie Taylor Greene think that the liberals were trying to modify the weather using smoldering demon flesh or something.

So.  Yeah.  Some days it's hard to remain optimistic.  Just yesterday, my wife and I were discussing how the average dog is a better person than the average person, and these stories haven't done anything to diminish that assessment.  So I think I'll spend the rest of the day socializing with my dogs.

I'll try being optimistic about humanity again tomorrow.  We'll see how long it lasts.

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Pretzel logic

Many of us here in the United States have been appalled and dismayed by the response some people are having to the recent double-whammy of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the attempts afterward to clean up the mess.

First, we have the fact that the meteorologists who were instrumental in predicting the hurricanes' paths, and who almost certainly saved lives by doing so, are being inundated with threats alleging that they're covering up the fact that the hurricanes were created and/or steered by operatives in the United States government itself.  Alabama-based meteorologist James Spann describes being told to "stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else."  

"I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather," said Michigan meteorologist Katie Nickolaou.  "I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of ten thousand nuclear bombs and we can't hope to control that.  But it's taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed...  Murdering meteorologists won't stop hurricanes.  And I can't believe I just had to say that."

Proving the truth of the observation that "everything's a conspiracy when you don't understand how stuff works."

Then there's William James Parsons, the lunatic in North Carolina who threatened to kill FEMA workers who are trying to help residents who lost everything during Hurricane Helene.  News sources are saying Parsons was part of a "militia" -- why they don't call him a "domestic terrorist," which is more accurate, I have no idea.   "This is unprecedented," said Craig Fugate, who headed FEMA from 2009 to 2017.  "I know we’ve had individuals, but not an area or a group that’s threatening FEMA."

My first reaction to all of this was much like Katie Nickolaou's; utter bafflement.  How does it make sense to have a violent response to a fact I don't happen to like?  I can remember being in college classes where I became intensely frustrated by concepts I couldn't manage to understand, and not enjoying that one bit; but even then, I knew my problems would not be remedied by my punching the professor in the face.

But with regards to the current situation, I realized upon reflection that my initial reaction -- that the actions of the people making threats against meteorologists and FEMA workers were completely illogical -- is wrong.  What they are doing follows its own peculiar, twisted logic, that when you view it from a historical perspective makes total sense.

When far-right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh first really took off back in the mid-eighties, they did two things.  The first, which to a quick glance seemed the more dangerous, was to spew ultra-conservative talking points -- anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-equal rights, anti-LGBTQ, pro-corporate, pro-military, pro-unrestricted, unregistered gun ownership.  The other was far quieter, bubbling right beneath the surface, but threaded through the entire message.  And although it was subtler than all the bluster about specific issues, in the long run it was far more insidious.

"Listen to me," Limbaugh said, again and again.  "I'm the only one brave enough to tell you the truth.  Everyone else is lying to you."

Honestly, it's a genius strategy.  Once you have someone disbelieving the facts, and certain that everyone else is lying, they're in the palm of your hands.  

After that, you can convince them of anything.

What we're seeing now is the end game of that strategy.  Donald Trump and his wannabe fascist allies have taken it and stretched it to the snapping point -- and yet it seems to be showing no sign of breaking.  He can say "Haitian immigrants are eating your pets," and instead of laughing at him, his followers make threats against Haitians who are here legally -- and anyone who dares to publicly support them.  He can talk about the media as "the enemy of the people" and his followers obligingly start beating up reporters.  People like the astonishingly stupid Marjorie Taylor Greene can say "They can control the weather.  It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done," and rather than people saying, "okay, now I see you're talking complete bullshit"...

... the MAGA extremists start threatening meteorologists and the FEMA workers sent to help the innocent victims of storms.

While it's maddening and infuriating and any number of other synonyms for "what the actual fuck?", what it's not is illogical.  It's the end result of forty years of being told over and over, "The scientists and politicians and news media are lying to you."  Not, some of them may be lying or are misinformed, so use your brains and the available hard evidence to form your opinions; they're all lying, every last one, all the time and about everything, for their own nefarious reasons.

Oh, except for me.  I'm telling you the truth.  Obviously.

What is kind of hard to understand, though, is that these types call the rest of us "sheep."  That's a truly monumental scale of irony, but not one I'd expect them to acknowledge, or even recognize.

I'm honestly not sure how to combat this kind of pretzel logic.  The Trump wing of the Republican Party long ago ceded its entire identity, heart, and brain to one man's control, and now anything he says is de facto gospel truth.  At this point, he could ask them to do just about anything, and they'd acquiesce without a moment's hesitation.

Which is terrifying -- and an urgent call for anyone who is as appalled by this as I am to get yourselves to the voting booth on November 5.  This man, and his fanatical cult followers, can't be allowed ever to get within hailing distance of public office again.

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Storm of controversy

As I write this, category-3 Hurricane Idalia is currently battering parts of northern Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.  It strengthened with astonishing speed, going from a tropical depression to (briefly) a category-4 hurricane in a little over two days.  Another result of anthropogenic climate change -- warm surface water is the fuel for tropical storms, and this summer, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean is (in the words of one climatologist) "bath water."

This vindication of the facts that (1) Florida, and indeed the entire Gulf Coast, are frequent targets for storms, and (2) climate scientists have been predicting bigger storms for decades, has not had the effect you'd expect if the world was halfway sane, which is for people to say, "Oh, I guess this is what the scientists warned us about."  No, instead it's created bigger and better crackpot theories.  The storm is still howling and already I'm seeing conspiracy theorists posting that:

• Idalia is a "false flag" to get people to buy into the "climate change scam."
• Idalia is manmade, but not in the sense the climate scientists mean.  It was created by sophisticated weather modification devices run by some shadowy government agency.  No one I've seen has mentioned HAARP yet, but it's only a matter of time.
• Evil Joe Biden deliberately steered Idalia toward "Ron DeSantis's Florida" in order to distract DeSantis from campaigning for the Republican nomination.  "Where this storm hit is no coincidence," one guy posted.  "I'm surprised it didn't hit Tallahassee straight on."

Well, you're right about one thing,  you catastrophic clod; where the storm hit is "no coincidence" because it's a typical storm track at this time of year, and the Gulf of Mexico is like a giant hot tub right now.  But no one, including Evil Joe, can "steer a hurricane."

Even using HAARP.

Hurricane Idalia [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

Of course, it may be that everything will be okay, at least if you listen to popular evangelical wingnut "prophetess" Kat Kerr, who went on record as saying that Idalia was not going to cause any problems, because she was gonna pray at it really hard:

Attention all weather warriors, who are taking authority over the storms that are in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Gulf, which are heading toward the East Coast.  Remember to take authority in Jesus's name, because we have the right to stop the storms from coming.  Command the pressure systems (millibars) to rise within them, so they will downgrade until they diminish.  Send the Host to shred every band of the storms and tear them apart.  The sooner we do this for the storm in the Gulf, the better...  When God made the Earth, he set a boundary for the ocean so it cannot come ashore.  We are agreeing with what God says, so speak to the storms and remind them of the boundary.  In Jesus's name, these storms will become nothing!!!  Woo hoo and Zap Bam.

As usual, allow me to state up front that I didn't make any of that up, including the "Zap Bam" part.  

Lest you think this kind of lunacy is the sole provenance of some fringe-y freak element, allow me to remind you that just a week ago, a "reporter" on Fox "News" said in all apparent seriousness that Tropical Storm Hilary, which dumped huge amounts of rain on southern California and Nevada, was (like Idalia) Joe Biden's fault.  Hilary, the reporter said, "made landfall in Mexico several hours ago, but they let it right into the country because it’s Biden’s America."

Although saying Fox isn't a "fringe-y freak element" might not be that accurate, honestly.  And given the storm's name, I'm surprised they didn't bring Hillary Clinton into it somehow.  That has to be significant, right?

Of course right.

It's always been a mystery to me why people gravitate to wild magical thinking and bizarre conspiracy theories rather than applying Ockham's Razor and the principles of scientific induction.  In fact, only a few days ago a study appeared in the journal Research and Politics looking at people's motivations for believing in conspiracies, and the results were fascinating.  Disturbingly, it found that most people who promote conspiracy-based beliefs aren't "Just Asking Questions" (something the site Rational Wiki amusingly calls "JAQing off") or "trying to present both sides" or callously pushing an agenda regardless of their own beliefs (something many Republicans have been accused of, apropos of Trump's "Big Lie") -- they honestly believe the loony ideas they're disseminating.  

So that's not reassuring at all.

But even weirder to me is that they found a correlation between belief in conspiracies and what they call a "need for chaos" -- a fervent desire to disrupt things irrespective of partisanship or beliefs, and without a specific goal in mind (e.g., replacing the system with a better one).

And I truly don't understand this.  You have only to look at the effects of real, honest-to-goodness chaos -- the ongoing mess in Sudan comes to mind -- to see how quickly things can devolve into a Lord of the Flies-style horror show.  I can sympathize with the frustration a lot of us feel about wastefulness and corruption in the government, but tearing it all down and leaving nothing in its place is hardly a solution.

In any case, no, Idalia wasn't created by weaponized weather modification, it's not a false flag, and Joe Biden had nothing to do with any of it.  Praying at it won't do a damn bit of good, something you'd think would be obvious from the last 583,762 times people tried praying at something and it didn't work.  It'd be nice if people would learn some science, but these days expecting that is a losing proposition.

Especially in "Ron De Santis's Florida."

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Storm's a-risin'

You might recall that when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast in October 2012, devastating large areas and taking 147 lives, we were quick to find out what had caused the monster storm.

It wasn't warm water and low shear in the western Atlantic.  It wasn't, in a larger sense, due to climate change providing more heat energy to juice up big storms.  No, it was caused by the most powerful meteorological force known:

Gays.

This, at least, was the contention of John McTernan, who said that Sandy was divine punishment for our acceptance of LGBTQ people.  Which makes me wonder why God's aim is so bad.  Sending a huge-ass storm to target one, fairly spread-out group of people, is poor planning.  My guess is just as many holy people were harmed by Sandy as unholy ones.

Oh, well. "God works in mysterious ways."

It's nice to know, though, that our LGBTQ friends aren't the only ones who are capable of stirring up killer storms.  On right-wing commentator Chris McDonald's show The McFiles, we learned a couple of weeks ago that Hurricane Florence was created by Democrats to destroy any evidence that they're committing massive voter fraud in North Carolina.  Here's the exact quote:

I saw where North Carolina had done the voter fraud stuff for the machines, for this, that, and the other; they had caught it or something like that and they were going after it.  I said, ‘Oh boy.’  Sure enough, there is was; here comes the hurricane.  Bigger than life, there is was.  And I just found out, literally, though another source of mine, contact this morning, sure enough, they said it was in fact made by man and generated by the HAARP system, basically, and it was meant to try and flood North Carolina and flood out the evidence of what was going on with the voter fraud.

My opinion is that if Democrats could create and steer storms, there'd already have been tornadoes at Lindsay Graham's doorstep.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But as we've seen before, there's no claim that is so completely batshit crazy that it can't be bettered, and we saw this last week with a proclamation by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "firefighter prophet," who said that we've seen yet another storm that has nothing to do with plain old ordinary meteorology.  Hurricane Michael, which devastated the panhandle of Florida, was sent there by Democrats because they're angry about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Here's what Taylor said:

Does anyone else think it's strange that Justice K is sworn in and we have a major hurricane inbound?  DS scared?  They should be.  Retaliation?  Absolutely.  We will not be intimidated.  Warriors arise, time to go to work!  You know what to do...

Okay, I have just a few questions about this.

1. Isn't it kind of funny that when the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) get mad, they only send hurricanes to places that always get hurricanes anyhow?  And only during hurricane season?  If the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) sent a hurricane to Omaha, Nebraska in February, I might be impressed.
2. Even if you believe this, it's another example of abysmal aim.  The storm came nowhere near Brett Kavanaugh.
3. If Taylor's "warriors" do arise, and go to work, what the hell are they planning to do?  Maybe they're taking a page from the Persian Emperor Xerxes's book, wherein he attempted to bridge the Hellespont and his bridge got destroyed in a storm, so he sentenced the ocean to three hundred lashes.  His men duly carried out the sentence, whipping the waves.  I'd have done the same thing, since saying to Xerxes, "I'll do no such thing, because it's a really stupid idea" was a good way of finding yourself next in line.  And unlike the sea, which probably didn't care, I'm guessing when a human gets three hundred lashes it hurts like a motherfucker.
4. Does Mark Taylor always come up with this kind of stuff?  Because right now he sounds like someone whose skull is filled with cobwebs and dead insects, but who is somehow still talking.

So anyhow.  I can pretty much guarantee that none of the above-mentioned storms were generated by anything but atmospheric conditions at the time, and no one is able to summon a storm on command and then steer it.  Maybe God can, I dunno.  I'm certainly no expert in that realm.  But even he seems to be a little sketchy about the "steering" part.

I know that's kind of prosaic, and not nearly as interesting as divine retribution or evil HAARP-using Democrats or gays generating hurricanes with their giant rainbow-colored Storm-o-Matic.  But really, people.  Get a grip.  We're coming into snow season here in the Frozen North, and we have enough trouble with the ordinary kind of weather.  If every time we have a Winter Storm Warning I have to worry about whether it's an ordinary storm or some group with a vague vendetta creating bad weather to make me miserable, it's gonna be a really long winter.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing stuff up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

So I guess it's only natural that when hurricanes threaten, somebody comes up with the solution of shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who thought this would be a swell idea just thought of firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it can get flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with Hurricane Irma was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of it, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but Hurricane Irma could kick our ass.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the hierarchy of nature could remind us that we are,  honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade, these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So there you are.  The latest suggestion for controlling the weather, from people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  As for me, I've got to get going.  My classes are starting the chapter on basic chemistry today, and I need to get to school to see if I can swing a way to do a demonstration for my class called the "Barking Dog Reaction."  That's the ticket.  Things going boom.  I like it.

Apocalypse whenever

I have an update for those of you who are worried about when the world is going to end, or civilization is going to fall, which honestly would happen anyhow if the world ended.

This update comes from sources that conveniently ignore the fact that previous predictions of the world's end have had a 100% failure rate.  Every time we're told that an asteroid is going to end it all, or the Rapture is going to happen, or the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons are going to run roughshod over the populace, what happens is...

... nothing.  Civilization, or what passes for it these days, just keeps bumbling along as usual.  There are no death comets, no killer plagues, no Second Comings of Deities.  All of which I find reassuring but at the same time vaguely disappointing, because I live in the middle of rural upstate New York and we could really use some excitement around here most days.

Of course, a batting average of zero isn't enough to discourage these folks.  This time it's gonna happen, cross our hearts and hope to die in horrible agony when the Earth explodes.

First, we have the Nibiru cadre, who have been predicting the arrival of Nibiru for decades, kind of like what happened in Waiting for Guffman but not nearly as funny.  This time, though, we can say for sure that Nibiru is approaching because there's going to be a "Blood Moon" (better known to those of us who aren't insane as a lunar eclipse).  Yes, I know that lunar eclipses happen every year, but this one is different.  Don't ask me how.

According to an article in Express, the fabled tenth planet is due to arrive any time now, and has been captured in a video.  Not a NASA video, mind you.  A video taken by an anonymous YouTube subscriber, which as we all know is a highly reliable source of scientific research.

"And now," writes the author of the article, Jon Austin, "conspiracy theorists have somehow tied it in with the infamous blood moon events of a year ago that appears [sic] to be happening again."

What?  Those events of last year wherein nothing happened?  Ah, yes, I remember thinking at the time, "Heaven help us all if this happens again!  Scariest non-events I've ever seen!"

According to this bizarre view of how the world in general, and astronomy in particular, works, the "blood moons" aren't caused by the Earth's shadow.  Nope.  The Nibiroonies have "now tried to tie together the two myths and even claim it is the shadow of Nibiru causing the blood moons."

Because it's not like if there was a planet near enough, and big enough, to cast a giant shadow over the moon, NASA would notice it, or anything.

Then we have the revelation that Obama and his evil henchmen are planning a scheme to destroy America and take down other major world governments along with it.  According to the site What Does It Mean?, the president and his collaborators have a Cunning Plan to unleash upon us, despite the fact that the guy only has five months left in office, so if he really has been intending to destroy the United States, he's gotten off to an awfully slow start.

But no, the article says, he's palling up with Hillary Clinton, who apparently rivals Obama himself for being the embodiment of pure evil.  And they've teamed up with the people who run Google for a conspiracy trifecta to accomplish the following:

1.) [D]isabling of advertisements on all websites critical of the Obama-Clinton regime, including the globally popular Antiwar.com, in order to destroy them.

2.) Deleting Donald Trump from the search list of candidates running for the US presidency. 

3.) Developing and employing a filter so that the name Donald Trump won’t even show up on anyone’s computer device or smart phone.

4.) Hiding in their search results information relating to Hillary Clinton’s health and the massive numbers of suspicions deaths associated with her.

5.) Being supported in their hiding Hillary Clinton health information by the New York Times, with one of their insiders admitting what they’re doing.

Myself, I would be thrilled if something would prevent my ever having to look at a photograph of Donald Trump again.  If that's what the conspiracy's about, I'm all for it.

And as evidence for all of this, they cite...

... InfoWars.  Yes, Alex Jones, who despite having a screw loose is still considered by some to have inside information about the plots that are running rampant in our government, but which never seem to accomplish a damn thing.

It's sort of like the "Obama's coming for your guns" thing you hear all the time from the far-right.  I mean, dude had eight years to take all our guns, and as a nation we're still as heavily armed as ever.  And the contentions that Obama's a radical Muslim.  Really?  He drinks beer, eats bacon, doesn't fast during Ramadan, and supports LGBT rights.  If the guy is a Muslim, he's the worst Muslim ever.

Last, we've got the weird coincidence of three separate lightning strikes that killed hundreds of reindeer (in Norway) and cattle (in the US), and which is said to be HAARP gearing up for a major strike on the populated places of the earth.  Add this to the fact that there's a hurricane in Florida as we speak, because that's not common or anything.  HAARP has done all this as a sort of test run, and next thing we know, there'll be earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and the works, and civilization will have no other choice besides giving up and collapsing.

What's funniest about all of this is that just last week, the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, which now owns HAARP, had an open house last week wherein they invited anyone with questions or suspicions to stop by for a tour of the place so they can see what it actually does, which is to study high-altitude atmospheric phenomena.  I coulda told them this strategy wouldn't work; if you demonstrate conclusively to the conspiracy theorists that HAARP was a harmless scientific study facility, they will either (1) tell you that the real HAARP had been moved elsewhere, or (2) that you are only saying this because you are under the influence of a mind-control beam, which is one of the things HAARP is supposedly able to do.  So you can't win.  These are people who think a lack of evidence is evidence.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Three ways in which we will almost certainly not be meeting the fall of civilization as we know it.  It's kind of anticlimactic, really.  We're moving into autumn, here in the northeast.  School's starting, the days are getting shorter, and we soon will be battening down the hatches for cold weather.  Myself, I think an apocalypse would be a nice change of pace.  I'm not in favor of wholesale destruction, mind you, but a minor catastrophe or two would go a long way toward alleviating the monotony.

The flammable chemtrail snow vortex of doom

Those of us in the northern slice of the United States have had to contend with unusually cold weather over the past few weeks, coupled with snow and ice that have reached even the usually mild southeast.  My original hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana actually got snow two days ago, and Lafayette is the place that my dad described as being so Deep South that if it were any deeper, we'd have been floating.

And almost everyone has heard about the snow storm that paralyzed the city of Atlanta, leaving highways gridlocked, thousands of car accidents from minor to horrifying, and hundreds of students who were stranded at their schools overnight.

What many of you may not know, though, is that the white flakes you saw falling from the sky over the last few days...

... may not have been snow.

*cue scary music*

At least, that's the contention of a variety of conspiracy theorist types who evidently have three scoops of rocky road with extra nuts where the rest of us have brains.  Take a look, for instance, over at The Resistance Journals, where a post hit yesterday called "What is With the Snow From the Recent Storm -- Solar Vortex?"  Notwithstanding that I think he means "polar" vortex, in that post we find out that (1) there is no doubt that the government is now controlling the weather, (2) the snow that has fallen doesn't seem to be melting, and (3) people have reported that this snow is flammable.

Now, I'm not buying the "flammable" part.  Snow is made of frozen water, which is notoriously non-flammable, explaining why water is commonly used to put out fires.  And as far as the snow not melting, that may have something to do with the fact that it's cold.  Snow does that when it's below 32 F, you know.

Then we have this lunatic, over at YouTube, who believes that chemtrails are being used to generate snow to combat global warming, and this has created special snow.  He then does an experiment, which you must watch for the humor value alone, wherein he tries to set some snow on fire first with a butane lighter, and then with what appears to be a propane torch.  When faced with the blue-hot flame of the propane torch, the snow basically evaporates instantaneously, and the guy is mystified by its disappearance.  "Where is the water?" he asks, evidently having forgotten that in third grade we all learned that there is a third state of water besides liquid and solid.

"What is this?" he asks.  "This ain't snow.  This is crazy."

Yes, sir, it is that.

So the wingnuts are really having a field day with the recent weather.  But of course, being a skeptic, I had to run an experiment of my own.  You can't just discount something because you're biased to think it is ridiculous; that wouldn't be proper skepticism, right?  Fortunately, here in upstate New York we are liberally endowed with snow at the moment, so I got a beaker and went out into my front yard and collected some, and brought it inside and put it on my kitchen counter.

Fig. 1.  Some snow in a beaker.  Yes, I have beakers at home.  Don't judge.

I attempted to light it with a match, with no success.  The match made a sizzling noise and went out, which I believe is the expected behavior.

So then, I let the beaker of snow sit on my counter for about an hour.  After an hour, this is what it looked like:

Fig. 2.  The same snow after one hour had passed.

Note how much less volume the water takes up than the snow did.  This, of course, is part of the explanation for why the aforementioned lunatic didn't notice much in the way of water coming from his chunk of snow after it was hit with a blowtorch; snow has lots of air space.  (And it's relevant that the snow from my front yard was old snow that had had several days to pack down.  Even so, it lost about 80% of its volume when it melted, give or take.)

The whole time I was running this experiment, my dog was staring at me in hope, because when I'm rummaging around in the kitchen it usually means food is being prepared, and if food is being prepared, it means he might get some.  He did not really understand why I was messing about with beakers and snow and cameras in the kitchen, and no ribeye steaks were being cooked.  His general philosophy is, "Why be in the kitchen if no ribeye steaks are involved?"

Fig. 3.  Grendel looking perplexed.  This is a common look for him.

So, after running my highly scientific experiment, I have come to the conclusion that (1) the recently fallen snow is not flammable, (2) when it melts, you get plain old water, and (3) none of this has anything to do with "chemtrails." 

Oh, and (4); if I don't cook ribeye steaks soon, my dog is going to be really disappointed in me.

And I'm not even going to address something I saw on Reddit a couple of days ago, which is that the recent snowstorm is all part of a big experiment being run at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  How on earth an underground particle accelerator could be used to influence the weather on the other side of the freakin' world, I have no idea.  So I'll end here, with a wish that wherever you are, you are experiencing clement weather.  I don't know about you, but I've had about enough of this polar vortex crapola, even if it isn't being artificially created by the government.

Chemtrails on Venus

Yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and frequent contributors of topics thereto, sent me a link with the note, "Nothing like explaining one crazy idea using another crazy idea, is there?"

The link brought me to a page on Above Top Secret entitled "A Possible Reason for Chemtrails: A Form of Galactic Protection?" in which we learn that the government might have a positive reason for chemtrailing the absolute hell out of all of us.

They are trying to create a screen to shield us from the sensors of alien spaceships that intend to destroy all life on Earth.

At this point, you're probably already facepalming.  But in the words of the 1980s infomercials -- "Wait, there's MORE!"

How does the author know that this is possible?  Because that's what happened to Venus:

'Under all those sulfuric clouds [on Venus] there is a whole ecosystem'...  [W]hat if it's possible that there IS and ecosystem under those clouds, but not just an ecosystem; a whole civilization!

What I am getting at is what if the reason that the TPTB (or whatever you'd like to call them) are spraying chemtrails is to create a layer of atmosphere that will constantly reflect sunlight (When viewed from the outside of our atmosphere) hence making us look as bright as Venus at the moment. This in turn will hide us from any alien predators IF there are any lurking out there looking for a place to conquer and devour. 

Of course, there's just one teensy problem with this idea, besides making me wonder if the author's skull is filled with PopRocks.  And that is that the temperature on Venus is so high that the first probes to land there got fried.  To quote Universe Today:

There are many geophysical similarities between Venus and the Earth. Average temperature is not one of them. Where the Earth has an average surface temperature of 14 degrees Celsius, the average temperature of Venus is 460 degrees Celsius. That is 410 degrees hotter than the hottest deserts on our planet...  The atmosphere has made visual observation impossible. It contains sulfuric acid clouds in addition to the carbon dioxide. These clouds are highly reflective of visible light, preventing optical observation. Probes have been sent to the surface, but can only survive a few hours in the intense heat and sulfuric acid.

So our alleged "ecosystem and civilization" down there would be a little on the toasty side.

The whole thing reminds me of one of the funniest moments on the wonderful 1970s science series Cosmos, written and hosted by Carl Sagan, in which he describes an earlier set of "inferences" (if I can dignify them by that term) about what might be on Venus:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds. Well, what are clouds made of? Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore, the surface must be wet. Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp. If there's a swamp, there's ferns. If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs.

Observation: we can't see a thing on Venus.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who think this way, and with a small amount of digging, I found that there are still apparently folks who believe that there are aliens down there under the clouds on Venus.  Here's an excerpt of a "top secret file" I found, which I know is top secret because it says so at the top of the page, and which is so incredibly secret that you can find it with a thirty-second Google search using the keywords "Venus civilization:"

UFOlogia Top Secret File
TOP SECRET FILE

FORM INFRA D.I.P. PROJECT MARXEN UF088

EVIDENCE OF CIVILIZATION ON VENUS


It is scientifically possible for material plane beings to live in an atmosphere on another planet, that is too hot or chemically fatal to Earth humans, by constructing underground air-conditioned bases or cities protected from the elements on the surface. It is also feasible to create air---conditioned domes on the surface of other planets that have artificial atmospheres exactly like on Earth, and American scientists admit they already have the technology and plans to create these bases on Mars and our Moon. Therefore extraterrestrials with the superior technology to create disc--shaped U.F.O.s, that are detailed in dozens of photos and documents in the U.S. Air Force released Project Bluebook files, could logically possess the advanced science to create such bases on the surface of the planet Venus.

The physicists William Plummer and John Strong stated that Venus may have large areas of bearable temperatures. The regions near the Venusian north and south poles would be much cooler than the areas reportedly monitored by space probes. Furthermore, according to Professor Alexander Lebedinsky, in the Soviet Union, in data suppressed by the United States Pentagon complex, the usual surface temperature of much of Venus must be about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even though "radio---electric" measurements indicated 700 or more degrees. Similar observations can be made on the relatively COOL surfaces of gas tubes used in neon signs, because the radio--electric equivalent of those tubes is also several thousand degrees! 

Yuppers.  There you have it.  The Venera, Mariner, and Magellan probes, which sent back photographs from Venus's surface, just accidentally landed over and over on Venusian neon signs, and it confused the sensors.   Never mind that every single photograph they took looked like this:

So whatever "civilization" the Venusian chemtrail-cloud-anti-alien-shields are there to protect must not mind being red hot and swimming around in liquified rock.

On a more somber note, I hope that there's not a grain of truth to all of this nonsense -- that what we are currently doing to the atmosphere, in the form of excessive fossil fuel use, might not generate a runaway greenhouse effect.  In the same episode of Cosmos that Sagan quipped about dinosaurs, he threw in his own cautionary note -- that the reason Venus is so hot is only partially its greater proximity to the Sun.  It is largely due to the huge amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.  So while the author of our original webpage perhaps didn't intend it, there's a way in which there is a connection -- enough injection of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, via the burning of hydrocarbons like jet fuel, and we might well raise the surface temperatures out of the narrow range in which carbon-based life is possible, altering our Earth into a planet like Venus -- a place that, to once again quote Sagan, "is very much like hell."

Sorry, you get an "F"

Tomorrow is the start of a new school year for me, and that probably explains why I had the reaction I did to a flyer that some friends of mine picked up.

They were in their car in downtown Ithaca, and a very earnest-looking woman came up and shoved a piece of glossy paper through their open window.  Nearby were several people with picket signs.  Resisting the impulse to roll the window up, my friend's daughter took the piece of paper, which was apparently a joint effort of two groups called GeoEngineering Watch and Global Skywatch.

A brief glance at the flyer was enough to elicit some hearty guffaws from my friends, and the daughter, riding in the passenger seat, read the contents to her dad as he drove.  Several times, he reported afterwards, he almost had to pull over because he was laughing so hard.  And the consensus was, "Oh, we have to keep this and give it to Gordon," with the probable reasoning being that my blood pressure is far too low.

So anyhow, over dinner a few days later, I was presented with the flyer.  I won't quote the whole thing, because the back is covered with fine print and it would be as tedious for me to type it out as it would be for you to read it, so I will simply present you with the high points, along with some parenthetical comments that I would have scribbled in, in red pen, if this had been a paper that one of my Environmental Science students had submitted to me.

Illegal government-controlled chemical weather modification programs are taking place over our heads right now day after day!  [Source?  This is clearly an overgeneralization.]

It's called, [misplaced comma] GeoEngineering [but you need a comma here] AKA Chemtrails, Stratospheric Aerosols or Solar Radiation Management.  [Geoengineering and stratospheric aerosols aren't the same thing, and chemtrails and "solar radiation management" appear to be made up.]  We are being sprayed with tiny particles of Aluminum, Barium, Strontium, and other highly toxic chemicals that go right into our red blood cells.  [No, we aren't, and no, they don't.]

These chemicals spread across the sky and block out the sun.  [Yesterday was nice and sunny, but thanks for asking.]  The lack of sunlight and the nano size particles are poisoning everything and making us sick.  [Strangely enough, I feel fine.]  Respiratory and brain disorders have risen off the charts.  [Source?]  The aluminum is poisoning our farms so only Monsanto's aluminum resistant GMO seeds will grow.  [Odd that my vegetable garden is doing so well this year, isn't it?]

See through the lies!  Do your own research!  [Oh, I do.]

Save the planet!  [Doing my best.  The first thing I'd choose to save it from is "stupidity," but at the moment I'm thinking this is a losing battle.]

Governments and corporations are deliberately manipulating and altering Earth's climate, endangering the lives of people all over the world.  [Source?]  Two of the most extreme cases of geo-engineering are chemtrails -- the release of toxic chemicals into the air that are poisoning people and the planet [please review the definition of "geoengineering"] -- and HAARP -- an electromagnetic antenna array in Alaska that can send radio frequency radiation over large geographical areas [so do television station transmitters] and manipulate weather patterns causing earthquakes, tsunamis, and more.  [Earthquakes and tsunamis are not "weather patterns"]  These projects represent some of the worst crimes in history, yet most people are unaware of them.  [Perhaps because you're making this up as you go along?]

For over ten years, observers have been noticing white aerosol trails being dispersed in the skies that don't behave like usual condensing jet exhaust.  When seeking explanation, investigators are told by the government that these are just the normal "contrails" that we see coming from commercial jets and that they are perfectly safe.  [Seems right to me.]  However, they don't dissipate the way regular condensation trails do.  [Yes, they do.  The evaporation time of a contrail is dependent on the weather conditions in the upper atmosphere -- temperature, windspeed, and humidity -- but they all eventually evaporate.  Water does that, you know.]  They linger for hours, spreading across the sky, and are often laid out in cross hatch patterns.  [Check out maps of common air traffic flight paths in your area for an explanation of this.]  The government has refused to test samples collected underneath the trails.  [Better things to do, I would imagine.]  Now a TV news report from Germany has confirmed that their military is in fact doing aerial spraying of chemtrails.  [Oh!  A TV news report from Germany!  Well, then!  All the proof I need!]

An article from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, confirms that not only are chemtrails real, [Bull.  Shit.]  but they are suspected to be responsible for a variety of neurotoxic conditions including MS, Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, and Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS).  [All of these conditions are caused by different things.  Have you ever passed a biology class in your life?]

Intense spraying of dangerous chemicals from planes has been reported in, at least, the US, Canada, Germany, England, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and Croatia.  [Source?]  A nasty mixture of parasites, pathogens, toxic heavy metals, and nano-engineered particles have been found falling to earth from the trails of certain planes.  [Living parasites and pathogens somehow survive the combustion process in the jet engine?  Really?  Do you have even the vaguest understanding of how jet engines work?]  Aluminum, barium, bacillus spores, radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, dessicated blood, mold spores, yellow mycototoxins, ethylene dibromide and synthetic nano-fibers are among the ingredients found in collected samples.  [Wasn't this the recipe for a magic spell by the witches in Macbeth?  Oh, and I think you mean "mycotoxin."  Are the yellow ones really bad?]  As these fill the atmosphere and lodge in our lungs and blood streams through the air we breathe and the food we eat, it represents the most unavoidable toxic pollution in history!  [Odd, then, that you aren't wearing a filter mask right now.  Why is that, I wonder?]

And so forth and so on.

So, yes, the chemtrail people have come to very close to my home town, and they are pissed.  Which they should be, because I would definitely give them an "F" for this report.  I might even call home and talk to their parents, perhaps recommending that they drop my class and sign up for some remedial-level science courses. 

Because it sure as hell sounds like they need them.

Funeral march for HAARP and orchestra

In fiction, when an evil villain against whom you have fought long and hard is finally vanquished, you are generally depicted as being pretty happy about it.  When the Ring was destroyed and Sauron defeated, there was, as I remember, a great big ol' party afterwards.  The slaying of the Emperor, and the Death Star being blown to smithereens, was followed by a feast, complete with dancing Ewoks.  Even Jean-Luc Picard, not known for his effusive outbursts of emotion, stopped for celebratory cup of Earl Grey tea after the Borg cube self-destructed.

I find that in real life people don't react that way.

Last week it was announced that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP for short, was closing due to lack of funding.  HAARP, which journalist Sharon Weinberger calls "the Moby Dick of conspiracy theories," has been accused of almost everything evil you can imagine -- creating hurricanes, generating earthquakes, spawning tornadoes, triggering droughts (and floods), and even exerting direct-into-your-skull mind control over the innocent citizens of the U. S. of A.  So when Deborah Byrd, of EarthSky Science News, announced that HAARP was shutting down, you'd think there would be Great Rejoicing, right?

Here's a direct quote from Byrd's article:

The 35-acre ionospheric research facility in remote Gakona, Alaska – 200 miles north of Anchorage – shut down in early May 2013. HAARP has an antenna array used by scientists to study the outer atmosphere by zapping it with radio waves generated by 3,600 kilowatts of electricity. Not sure how, but HAARP became infamous among conspiracy theorists and some environmental activists, who believed it was responsible for intentional weather modification. Dire events – such as Hurricane Sandy in late 2012 – have been blamed on HAARP by people called “uninformed” by scientists and other commentators. But no more. HAARP’s program manager, Dr James Keeney, said in a July 15, 2013 press release: "Currently the site is abandoned. It comes down to money. We don’t have any...  If I actually could affect the weather, I'd keep it open."

"Ha!" you would think the conspiracy theorists would shout.  "The American people have finally triumphed!  HAARP is no more!"

Nope.  You should read the comments on Byrd's article.  The conspiracy theorists are pissed.  They also don't believe she's telling the truth, so they're really pissed.  Here's a sampler, in case you don't want to risk valuable cells in your prefrontal cortex reading through them all.  You'll just have to believe me that spelling and grammar have been left as-written, because I didn't want to write "sic" 548 times.

This is the facility for the public to see. The real HAARP culprit is in Gakona, Alaska. Does anybody know if that facility is shut down. I don't think so. It's like we have two space program. NASA and the military. The military is functioning real well unlike NASA which is a shell of its former self.

READ: According to Keeney’s press release, the only bright spot on HAARP’s  horizon right now is that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is expected on site as a client to finish up some research in fall 2013 and winter 2014. DARPA has nearly $8.8 million in its FY 14 budget plan to research:

there are MULTIPLE facilities, not just Alaska!! Stationed GLOBALLY.

most scientists deny obvious Facts all the time.
most scientists are afraid to "loose credibility" if they dont repeat the nonsense they had to learn to graduate...
most scientists forget to try to disprove their own Thesis.

There is no right or wrong, just people who want to believe it's all A OK and those who suspect that it's not.

the moon is waxing to waning in a single night,doubt it,look at 3 hour intervals top lit at rise bottom lit at set,this isnt caused by cow farts .stop being stupid for a minute and think about it,,why is the moon flipping a 180 each night,it is the earth tilting on axis nightly,,face N mark spot u stand.then find earth bound 2nd optic reference and then the big dipper,,dipper N. of Polaris"N star as earth rotates always to the left big dipper north of N star should be moving W-E,,as the stars S of Polaris move E-W,,the big dipper and Polaris and the rest of the star field clearly dip ofer 70 degrees west moving against the normal ball like star pattern,our axis is being pulled 70 degrees a night or more,this is easily seen with your own eyes,,why dont you wake up and see the signs in the sun the moon and the stars

I speculate that the reason for all of this angst over HAARP's imminent demise is partly because in order to believe that HAARP is being shut down from lack of funding, you have to accept that it must not have been that important to the government in the first place.  If they really had developed the ability to create earthquakes, hurricanes, et al., do you think that the powers-that-be would have just... given up?  To accept this press release as true, the conspiracy theorists would have to do something unimaginable:

Admit that they have been wrong all along.

No way can they do that.  It's too big a revision of their worldview.  So the press release is an outright lie.  Or the facility is being relocated elsewhere, because too many non-sheeple figured out what they were up to.  Or the government has moved on to even more evil things, like making the moon flip over once a night.  (Can anyone tell me what the hell that guy was actually trying to say?)

So, they'd much rather believe that the Enemy is still out there, and still ultra-powerful, rather than settle in and enjoy their victory.  It reminds me of the line from C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength, in which Lord Feverstone implies that the college bureaucrat Curry actually likes having obstructionists to complain about: "'Damn it all,' continued Feverstone, 'no man likes to have his stock-in-trade taken away. What would poor Curry do if the Die-hards one day all refused to do any die-harding?'"

In any case, I don't think there is going to be any celebrating tonight.  No party, no Ewoks, not even a nice cup of Earl Grey tea.  Because, you know... you can never let down your guard.  Not even for a moment.

It will be interesting, though, to see what they turn their attention to next.  It's probably too much to hope for that it will be something that actually has a basis in fact.

The twisted world of the Tornado Truthers

If I can sum up the rationalist view of the world in one sentence, it would be: your belief in something does not make it the truth.

If you would like me to agree with you, I need more than hearing that you believe it's so.  I need evidence -- or failing that, at least a good, solid, logical argument in favor.

The problem is, there is a slice of humanity for whom a lack of evidence for a claim becomes some kind of twisted argument for its correctness.  These are the people who become conspiracy theorists -- people whose belief in their warped view of reality is so strong that a complete absence of any support for their views is turned inside out, is used to show that the coverup is real.  They are absolutely convinced, and are damn near impossible to argue with.

And now, of course, they have weighed in on the tornadoes that hit Oklahoma in the last three days.

They call themselves the "Tornado Truthers."  Don't believe me?  Here is a collection of direct quotes, taken from Twitter and Facebook.  [Note to readers who are offended by such things; there's a good bit of bad language in these quotes, but to edit that out would diminish the intensity of these people's feelings on this subject.  In any case, be forewarned.]

255 tornadoes issued today.  43 caused by HAARP.

TORNADO WARNING.  YEAH FUCK YOU TO HELL #HAARP

Government-made tornadoes - HAARP - check out HAARP maybe with one A - can't remember offhand Tesla's work

That tornado pic is insanity, hey government, I know you [sic] watching, TURN THAT FUCKING HAARP MACHINE OFF!!!!

Tornadoes is wild man it's not tornado season... #haarp

Dutchsince on YouTube.com issued a warning for the east coast.  The HAARP induced tornadoes that leveled cities in the midwest is now on its way to the east coast.  East coast get prepared.  Facebook just like Obama refuses to post information to warn America.  Why?

Notice to all these tornados this week are the result of haarp to set the stage for martial law and FEMA camps

30 + People Dead & Thousands of Homes/Towns DESTROYED cuz of The Illuminati & Their Weather Modification Machine (HAARP) ITS A FACT!  LOOK IT UP AND START SPEAKING OUT TO CREATE SOME WEATHER RELATED DISASTER TO FORCE US OUT OF OUR HOMES INTO THEIR NEW HOMES (FEMA CAMPS)

Thank you h.a.a.r.p. for this crazy fucked up weather

HAARP, of course, stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a government-run ionospheric research station in Alaska.  It has nothing to do with weather modification.  It cannot generate tornadoes (or earthquakes, or volcanoes, or hurricanes, or sinkholes, or any of the other hundreds of things it's been claimed to do).

Oh, yeah, and it is tornado season, actually.  The peak of it.  But by all means, "Tornado Truthers," don't let any facts get in the way of your beliefs.

And then Alex Jones, of course, had to weigh in.  Could the recent tornadoes be generated by the US government, a caller asked?  Don't be a ninny, of course they could.  After all, we now know that the insurance companies have been using weather modification to avoid having to pay out to ski resorts during winters when it doesn't snow.  "Of course there's weather weapon stuff going on," Jones said, one eyelid twitching spasmodically.  "We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night.  Turned out it was the Air Force."  Of this week's tornadoes, he admitted that he wasn't sure that it was the government, but that if you saw small aircraft "in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things, if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did.  You know, that's the thing, we don't know."

Heh.  We don't know.  *wink wink nudge nudge*  It's the government.

To Jones and his intrepid band of loony followers, anything constitutes evidence.  In fact, nothing constitutes evidence.  "I haven't seen any aircraft spraying stuff and immediately triggering a tornado" simply becomes, "They've got cloaking technology.  Of course you didn't see anything."  And all you have to do is append the word "Truther" to your particular warped view of the universe, and it becomes de facto Truth, capital T, no evidence necessary.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.

Better, though, to focus on what we should be doing; assisting with the cleanup and rebuilding, donating money if you can't go there to help directly.   (Here's a site that has a list of places to donate.)  Beyond that, focusing on the positive stories that have come out of this tragedy -- of the selfless teachers who tried to save their students' lives, some of them who lost their lives in the process; of the first responders who risked their safety to dig survivors out of the rubble of their homes; of the neighbors, friends, and families who pitched in to help as soon as the funnel clouds lifted.  And of the little miracles, like Oklahoma resident Barbara Garcia, who lost her home but was reunited with her little dog who she thought had been killed when her house collapsed.  (Have kleenex handy if you watch the video on this link.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

 

Focus on what's important, here.  With any luck, the deafening silence that greets the screeching pretzel logic of the "Tornado Truthers" will convince them to crawl back under their rocks where they belong -- at least until the next natural disaster occurs.