The title of this blog post is classified

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

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

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

What had me twitching were the comments.

Yes, yes, I know, never read the comments section.  I broke the cardinal rule.  And now that I've done so, I'm even more worried about what might happen in the next election.  Because to put not too fine a point on it, the majority of the commenters appear to be walking, talking, computer-owning, voting Americans who have the IQ of a peach pit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, someone sensible responded to that, to wit:

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

Remember my opening paragraph, about going, "Wow, how silly of me!  I got fooled!"  Apparently there are some folks whose motto is, "Evidence?  We don't need no stinkin' evidence."  Here's the followup comment.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because you can only add [sic] so many times:

It could be a fake, or maybe the onion logo is a replacement over the real logo.  Maybe somebody tampering with the video to make its seem like a fake and someone got their hands on it.  The onion logo could be a cover up scheme who knows...  But I will say this, all around us there is blood being shed, crazy earth quakes, murder, war, lies, the death toll is off the chain. muslims cut the heads off of little children and dance around with the corpses, evil media and music, promotion of violence adultery sexual immorality and greed.  Things are so bad it just is not funny anymore.  Rape is at an all time high and everywhere I turn I see gay people !!!  yo mad people are gay its freaking crazy.  yo we got dudes popping other dudes and little boys in the butt 24/7365.  the immorality these day is off the charts.  anybody who thinks things are ok today has a nothing in between the ear.  you gotta be real stupid not to see that something huge is going to happen.

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

At least one guy agrees with me:

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

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

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

And the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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Zombies, asteroids, and apocalypse buckets

Is it just me, or has the Religious Right completely lost the plot?

And surprisingly, I am not referring to their continuing support of Donald "Two Corinthians" Trump.

To be fair, I've never been a fan of the Evangelicals.  I was in college during the height of the Jerry Falwell/Moral Majority years, when they seemed to follow the Puritan doctrine of disapproving of anyone, anywhere, having fun.  But back then, they had a sense of decorum.  I didn't agree with their beliefs, but at least they were consistent and articulate, and were able to sustain some glancing connection to reality.

Now?  To see how the Evangelicals have completely gone off the rails, look no further than Jim Bakker, who despite setbacks up to and including spending time in federal prison for fraud, is back to raking in the dough.  His program The Jim Bakker Show has millions of viewers, and while I'd like to think some of them watch it for the "what the fuck is this guy gonna say next?" factor, I'll bet it's a small minority.

(It bears mention that Jerry Falwell himself, shortly after he forced Bakker to hand over control of his church and shortly before Bakker went to prison, called him "The greatest scab on the face of Christianity in the entire two thousand years of our history."  That assessment doesn't seem to have cost Bakker anything in the way of viewership -- or monetary profits.)

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, that appeared on the YouTube channel Telltale a couple of days ago.  And in it, Bakker is interviewing prominent Evangelical speaker Steve Quayle, and the topic is...

... zombies.

At first, generous soul that I am, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and thought, "Oh, they're using the term metaphorically, for someone who is brainwashed or mindlessly acting under the influence of someone else."  Which would be ironic coming from them, but at least not batshit insane.

But no.  They're talking about literal zombies.  Like Dawn of the Dead. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gianluca Ramalho Misiti from São Paulo, Brazil, Zombie Walk 2012 - SP (8149613310), CC BY 2.0]

Bakker says to Quayle, "Zombies that are on the Earth are a disease like any other disease that affects people, and they become like zombies.  Is that right?"

And instead of saying what any normal person would say to a question like that, which is, "Time to lay off the controlled substances, bro," Quayle responds -- completely seriously -- in such a way as to make Bakker sound almost sane:

Forgive me, but that's only part of the story.  Zombies also have the evil spiritual entity known as demon possession, ok?  Because there is no rationale with a zombie...  The best way to explain zombie bloodlust is this: the appetite of demons expressed through humans.  It should be astonishing to people that the richest people in the world, not all of them but some of them, are into occult ceremonies where they have to drink, you know, blood that's extracted from a tortured child.  Now that's sick, but that's the appetite of demons expressed through humans ...  What I'm saying, Jim, is they can induce zombieism.  At least the appetite for human flesh.

Oh, and you'll never guess how Quayle and Bakker say the rich demon-people are turning their innocent victims into zombies.

Go ahead, guess.  You'll never get it.

They say that the contagion is being introduced into unsuspecting Americans via the nasal swabs they use to test for COVID-19.

I wish I was making this up, but listen to the clip I posted, which comes along with highly entertaining commentary from the guy who runs Telltale.  You will see that I am not exaggerating one iota.

Zombification from nasal swabs.  And yet another reason for the Religious Right not to trust the CDC and the medical establishment, and refuse vaccination.  Which makes it even more likely that the Evangelicals will contract COVID and get weeded out of the population by natural selection.

Speaking of irony.

If zombies aren't bad enough, another guest of Bakker's, one Tom Horn, says that we're going to be hit in ten years by the asteroid Apophis (we're not), that it's carrying an alien virus (it isn't), and that it's the "star Wormwood" mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

Oh, and he pronounces "contagion" as "cawn-tay-jee-on."  Which isn't relevant but is kind of hilarious.

What amazes me here is not that some wingnuts said something loony.  That, after all, is what wingnuts do.  What astonishes me is that the other three people sitting at the table with Bakker kept nodding and frowning, as if this was the most reasonable, rational philosophical discourse they'd ever heard, instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to burst into laughter, say, "You people are out of your ever-loving minds," and walk off the set.

But concerned head-nodding is, apparently, the reaction of the lion's share of Bakker's watchers, who not only now believe that we're at risk from demonic, blood-drinking, flesh-eating zombies and killer cawn-tay-jee-on-carrying asteroids, but have two more reasons to purchase his "Apocalypse Buckets" containing food to tide them over during the End Times (from which apparently he makes money hand over fist).

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end of the pool for the day.  I'd be discouraged to hear that Bakker has anyone who believes what he says; that he has millions of devoted viewers is kind of devastating.  It points up how far we have to go here in this country to counter the deeply-ingrained irrational, fearful, anti-science beliefs held by a significant number of people who live here -- and, unfortunately, who vote.

It also gives us further evidence that ignorance and fear combined with someone determined to profit off it is a very, very dangerous combination.

****************************************

Ever get frustrated by scientists making statements like "It's not possible to emulate a human mind inside a computer" or "faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible" or "time travel into the past will never be achieved?"

Take a look at physicist Chiara Marletto's The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.  In this ambitious, far-reaching new book, Marletto looks at the phrase "this isn't possible" as a challenge -- and perhaps, a way of opening up new realms of scientific endeavor.

Each chapter looks at a different open problem in physics, and considers what we currently know about it -- and, more importantly, what we don't know.  With each one, she looks into the future, speculating about how each might be resolved, and what those resolutions would imply for human knowledge.

It's a challenging, fascinating, often mind-boggling book, well worth a read for anyone interested in the edges of scientific knowledge.  Find out why eminent physicist Lee Smolin calls it "Hugely ambitious... essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of physics."

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

 

Preparing for the worst

I'm about halfway through the first draft of my current work-in-progress, a novel called In the Midst of Lions about a perfectly ordinary upper-middle-class guy who gets caught up in the fall of civilization.  By this point in the novel, order has pretty much collapsed, and he's in the ruins of downtown Seattle trying to find his way across the city and to a two-kilometer-long bridge and east into the mountains for safety (at least comparatively speaking).  He's taken some children under his wing, and in the harrowing scene I just wrote, is trying to get them away from a murderous warlord and his gang -- he himself barely escaped with his life after being captured and brutally beaten by them.

I hasten to interject at this point that In the Midst of Lions was in no way inspired by 2020.  I came up with idea decades ago -- in fact, I'd written a rough draft of the story back in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate.  (The current version bears little resemblance to the original, although the central idea is the same.)  I'd thought of returning to it many times, but always pushed it aside for other projects.  Then, late in 2019 -- pre-pandemic, and pre-Trump-breaking-the-Seventh-Seal-of-the-Apocalypse -- I decided to give it a go, and I'm quite pleased with the result, as dark as it is.

(If you're curious, the title comes from Psalm 56 -- "Have pity on me, O God, have pity on me... for I lie prostrate in the midst of lions that devour men.")

The reason this comes up is because of a paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences that came out this week, and which looked at the correlation between people's ability to cope psychologically with the pandemic and governmental chaos, and their appreciation of zombie movies.  Entitled, "Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals Are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic," by Colton Scrivner of the University of Chicago, John Johnson of Pennsylvania State University, and Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University, the paper looks at how reading books or watching movies about civilization collapsing and people being killed in nasty ways might have prepared us for 2020.

The authors write;

One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds.  Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant media fictions, including horror and pandemic films, was associated with greater preparedness for and psychological resilience toward the pandemic.  Since morbid curiosity has previously been associated with horror media use during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also tested whether trait morbid curiosity was associated with pandemic preparedness and psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.  We found that fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of “prepper” genres (alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films) exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness.  We also found that trait morbid curiosity was associated with positive resilience and interest in pandemic films during the pandemic.  Taken together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that exposure to frightening fictions allow audiences to practice effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations.

You have to wonder if it works the other way, though.  Maybe living through 2020 has blunted our appreciation for horror movies.  "Okay, maybe being eaten by the living dead is horrible, but do y'all remember what happened last November?" 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons iluvrhinestones from seattle, oceania, upload by Herrick, Zombies 79201360, CC BY-SA 2.0]

"I'm not sure that watching such movies now would be helpful for our current situation," study co-author John Johnson said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "However, my understanding of pandemics and other life-challenging events is that similar future challenges are absolutely inevitable.  The past is often forgotten too easily.  Who remembered the Spanish flu epidemic until scientists brought up that piece of history during COVID-19?  This reinforces my belief that consuming stories from books, films and maybe even video games is not just an idle pastime, but a way for us to imagine simulated realities that help prepare us for future challenges."

So we writers of scary fiction are performing a public service.  Just getting people ready for how much worse it could get, or (conversely) getting them to think, "Things are bad now, but at least I'm not being vivisected by aliens."  Now, I gotta get to work on my novel.  The last thing that happened is that the main character just saw some graffiti spray-painted on a wall, left for him by the one of the warlord's evil henchmen, saying, "You'd better run, because if I see you again, you're a dead man."

I mean, getting my readers to prepare for a catastrophe is one thing, but leaving a nice guy in that situation is just cruel.

******************************************

As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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

Zombie cult feud

A Senegalese saying goes, "There are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."

I got an object lesson in this principle from a link sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia a few days ago, wherein I learned that two rival zombie apocalypse cults are currently embroiled in a feud.  The article, by Robyn Pennacchia over at Wonkette, is well worth reading in its entirety.  But my ears perked up instantly when I found out that one of the feuders is one Sherry Shriner.  I knew I'd seen her name before, but where?

A brief search was enough to determine why my memory was jogged.  Back in 2014, I did a post about how the Evil Shadow Government is outfitting us all with microchips in our dental fillings and implanted medical devices, not to mention through vaccination, with the ultimate aim of controlling our behavior in much the same fashion as a ten-year-old uses the remote control to steer his plastic car directly into a wall.

Fortunately, Shriner is one smart cookie, and found out a way to neutralize the chips, something so unexpected and technical and sophisticated there's no way the Evil Scientists would ever have thought of it: magnets. Apparently the chips kind of conk out when they're placed in a magnetic field.  So they turn out to be not such a threat after all, especially if you've ever had an MRI, which must cause the chips to short-circuit so badly that it causes Bad Guy Scientific Laboratories the world over to go up in flames.

But the failure of Shriner's microchip-implant claim apparently didn't discourage her in the least.  She is still around, and has come into the news lately through her alleged connection to a crime you might have heard about -- a woman in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania shot and killed her boyfriend, supposedly when he asked her to because he'd found out that the leader of the cult they belonged to was a "reptilian alien."

Because that makes total sense.

Anyhow, the leader of the cult, and alleged reptilian alien, is none other than Shriner herself.  Apparently Shriner tried to warn Steven Mineo, the victim of the shooting, that his girlfriend (Barbara Rogers) was a loon.  Not in so many words, of course; what Shriner said was that Rogers was a "Super Soldier."  From Shriner's Facebook page:

They're trying to spin it that I'm responsible for Steve's death?  No, Barb is.  I tried to protect Steve.  I tried to warn him about Barbara Rogers, but he wouldn't listen to me.  He thought I was insulting his 'wife'... when I was just trying to protect him from her!  I knew what she was!  He began to realize that what I said about her was true, and that's why she killed him, to protect her lies and keep her secrets.  They want to call me a cult leader?  No, I am just a humble servant and a Messenger of the Most High.  I spent my life serving HIM, and for that I get beat up by Cain's kids, libtards, Satanists, witches, and haters everywhere.  If you open your eyes it's clear to see she was involved with witchcraft and Satanism.  Steve didn't want to believe it and now he's dead from her hands.  Steve wasn't suicidal, it was her plan all along to destroy him.  So all the lies and garbage against me and others just needs to stop... 

I warned him she was a Super Soldier who would kill him and move on... but I'm the 'False Prophet'...  Perhaps he finally figured her out but it was too late for him.  It wasn't the 'online cult' that killed him, it was Barbara Rogers who they had all warned him about!  They always try to paint me as a cult... nice try libtards.

So yeah, that sounds like the pinnacle of rationality.  The picture becomes even more vivid when you add to that the fact that Pennacchia found out that Shriner also thinks she's Lucifer's sister, and that she's personally interviewed her brother (and in fact wrote a book about it, one review of which begins with the memorable line, "This woman is a delusional loon.").  Oh, and she also sells crystals called "Orgone Blasters," which supposedly will destroy chemtrails, and which are (this is a direct quote from her website) "the only thing that works against Alien-Demonic-Zombie-Vampire beings."

In case those are a problem in your neighborhood.

[image courtesy of photographer Bob Jagendorf and the Wikimedia Commons]

Interestingly, Shriner's "Orgone Blasters" are something I've also addressed here at Skeptophilia.  "Orgone," if you're curious, is a fantastically powerful kind of energy that is the force of "psychosexual release" that happens at orgasm.  How on earth you could use such an energy even if it exists is kind of a mystery, because when most folks have an orgasm they're thinking about other things than how to combat Alien-Demonic-Zombie-Vampire beings.

Or maybe that's just me.  I dunno.

You'd think that'd be enough to think about for today, but in the words of the infomercial: "Wait!  There's more!"  Shriner is currently engaged in a feud with another zombie apocalypse cult, which is called either "Amightywind" or "Almightywind" (even the cult itself seems to be unsure which is correct).  The leaders of this cult, Ezra and Elizabeth Elijah Nikomia, have come up with something even better than Shriner's use of magnets to defeat implanted microchips; they say you can defeat zombies by hitting them with a board:

I tell you this now so when you see these things come to pass you will not fear his army of ZOMBIES that will be slain by the POWER OF THE CROSS of YAHUSHUA ha MASHIACH!  Remember hit them with a board or wood that represents the CROSS.  The dead in YAHUSHUA (Christ) which shall walk and witness to MY Glory will walk as in times of old and testify of Heaven, not to take the MARK of the BEAST!  They shall prove there is life after death.  MY saints you will hear and see in Glorified Bodies that CAN NOT BE KILLED!

So anyhow, Shriner absolutely hates A(l)mightywind, almost as much as she hates "libtards."  Alleged boyfriend-killer Barbara Rogers, Shriner says, was an evil witch affiliated with the Nikomias' group, and there's been a years-long war between their rival cults of an intensity reminiscent of the Hatfields and McCoys:

So all the witches online seem to be rallying their covens and fake Christian ministries to protect fellow witch Barbara Rogers and come against me and paint the lie Steve wanted to die.  Almightywind Witch Cult is run by a woman who was a witch in the Great White Brotherhood of Indiana, broke off from them to begin her own “ministry’ online.  She’s been making hate videos about me for years.  Steve was well aware of them.

And apparently the idea is that the Nikomias talked Barbara into shooting Steve because Steve had allied himself with Sherry Shriner.  From here on it gets kind of confusing, however, so I'll simply direct you to Pennacchia's excellent article if you want more information.

Myself, I'm just glad that Shriner and the Nikomias all live in different states than I do.  I'm sure that New York has its share of wackos, but these three seem like they're in a class by themselves.  And the fact that they're feuding is honestly kind of scary, because when you have people whose grasp on sanity is so tenuous, you never know what they might do.

Or maybe I'm one of the Secret Reptilian Alien Zombie Vampire Libtards.  You can see how that would be just as likely.

Zombie awareness training

There's a saying that has been repeated often enough that it is nearly a cliché, and that is: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

The Center for Disease Control just found that out.

Last year, you may recall, the CDC posted a page on their website called "Zombie Preparedness."  The creators of this page said that the whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek way of calling attention to the wisdom of knowing what to do during an emergency, and recommended such measures as having an up-to-date first-aid kit, knowing escape routes from the house (and also which roads to take if you need to escape in a bigger way), and teaching younger members of the family what to do when bad things happen.  All of it, they said, could equally well apply to other, more mundane disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.

Well, I'm sure that all of you have heard about the recent bizarre spate of human mutilations.  First, there was the drugged-out guy in Florida who ate a homeless man's face, putting him in the hospital with life-threatening injuries; the face-eater himself was ordered to stop by the police, but just looked up at them... and growled.  The police shot and killed him.  Then, a guy in Hackensack, New Jersey was holed up in his apartment with a knife, threatening to kill himself, and police ordered him to surrender -- so the guy stabbed himself, and proceeded to hurl pieces of his own intestines at the stunned cops.  Then a Canadian nutjob killed a former lover, ate part of him, and mailed other assorted parts to the Canadian governmental headquarters.  And then, just two days ago, two guys got in a fight in a Staten Island diner, and bit off and swallowed part of the guy's ear.

Not to mention the recent outbreak of "flesh-eating bacteria" in the American Southeast.

All of this has resulted in a flood of emails and calls into the CDC, from people terrified about the ongoing "zombie outbreak."  Sites have popped up all over the internet that we are seeing the beginning of the "zombie apocalypse" -- and that the CDC knew about it ahead of time, and that's what gave rise to the link on the CDC site about "zombie preparedness."  More insidiously, some conspiracy-minded types are suggesting that the CDC engineered the whole thing, and what we're seeing is a zombie-virus outbreak, à la 28 Days Later.

Predictably, I'm not buying any of it.

The truth of the matter is that the whole thing boils down to a standard principle of media; once you've found a catchy idea that causes people to read what you write, continue to riff indefinitely on the same theme.  The Florida face-eater was certainly a wild story, and its release in national media was probably justified.  But once that happened, and people mentioned the z-word, the other stories were cast in the same light, to get the same kind of attention -- the suicidal self-stabber in Hackensack probably wouldn't have reached national media if it hadn't been for the first story, and neither would the ear-biter in Staten Island.  The Canadian killer was certainly big news... but the news agencies that released that story all mentioned the Florida case, cinching up the connection in people's minds between the two unrelated incidents.

And now, the CDC is catching major amounts of flak for their "Zombie Preparedness" site, from people who (1) believe that Shaun of the Dead was a scientific documentary, and (2) wouldn't recognize a joke if it walked up and, um, bit them.  The CDC Zombie Preparedness page itself has had so much traffic that several of the subsidiary links on the site have crashed or have been taken down.

So anyway, let's keep our eye on the ball, people.  There are no such things as zombies.  There have been a lot of movies about zombies, but they're fiction.  (If you're curious, here's the Wikipedia canonic list of zombie movies -- including such obvious winners as Zombie Attack from Outer Space and Violent Shit III: The Infantry of Doom.)  The CDC was just trying to be funny, but also call attention to emergency preparedness, with their site, and are neither covering up a zombie apocalypse, nor are they responsible for one.

Okay, have we got that straight, now?  Because I have to go make sure my shotgun is loaded.

Modeling the zombie apocalypse

I usually tell you a little about my topic before I give you my solemn promise that I didn't make any of it up.

This one is so weird that I'm going to put the disclaimer first:

I swear I'm not making any of this up.

A team of medical researchers from two universities in Ottawa have released a paper (published in the Journal of Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress) containing a mathematical model of what would happen to a population during a zombie attack.

The team was comprised of Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad, and Robert J. Smith?.  And no, I'm not being tentative, there, with that last name.  The question mark is part of Dr. Smith?'s name.  I wonder how it's pronounced, don't you?   Do you have to say it like a question?  At parties, do people go up to him and say, "Hello there, Dr... Smith?"

Myself, I wouldn't have thought it was legal to have a punctuation mark as part of your name.  But now that I find that apparently it is, I think I'll follow suit.  From now on, my name will be Gordon Bonnet!  That way, people will always seem excited to see me.

In any case, the aforementioned medical research team seems to take the whole zombie-study thing awfully seriously.  Here's the actual abstract of the paper:

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

I also have to quote the first line of the paper itself, just because it's so memorable: "A zombie is a reanimated human corpse that feeds on living human flesh [1]."  The coolest thing about this is that they sourced this information.  The source, if you're curious, is The Zombie Survival Guide - Complete Protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks (2003, Three Rivers Press, pp. 2-23).

The article then goes on through some amazingly abstruse mathematics to show that a zombie outbreak would be "catastrophic" and could be "disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead."

Have I mentioned that I am not making any of this up?

In the conclusion of the article, Munz, Hudea, Imad, and Smith? state:

In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.

What I find most amazing about all of this is that there was no attempt to tie this to any real, actual epidemic; the whole article was about zombies.  Doesn't that strike you as a little weird?  Now personally, I  love it when scientists take something whimsical and use it as a model for a real phenomenon; one of my all-time favorite studies was when a team of evolutionary biologists used "mutations" (i.e. typos and changes in wording) in chain letters as an analogy to random alterations in DNA, and used it to model how cladistic taxonomy works.  It was sheer brilliance.

This, though... well, I'm not sure I see the relevance.  I can't think of any disease that works anything like, um, zombification, so all of the mathematical twiddling about doesn't really have any apparent application.  Not, of course, that I object to scientists having a little fun once in a while -- but this made it into a peer-reviewed journal, and presumably was the result of a grant from a funding agency of some sort.  Dr. Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK's top governmental medical advisers, seemed a little uncomfortable when asked about the study.  "My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie, then it's dead forever," he said, in an interview, and went on to state that other than that characteristic, "zombification" didn't really seem to parallel any known disease particularly well.  "[No infectious illness known] actually causes large-scale death or disease, but certainly there are some fungal infections which are difficult to eradicate."

Smith?, however, was undaunted, and told a BBC reporter, "When you try to model an unfamiliar disease, you try to find out what's happening, try to approximate it.  You then refine it, go back and try again."  Even, apparently, when said unfamiliar disease doesn't, technically, exist.

So, there you have it, then.  A mathematical model for the zombie apocalypse.

Oh, and by the way, if you still don't believe me, here's a link to a BBC article about the study.  In the lower right hand part of the page there's a link that says "Zombies Study (University of Ottawa)" that will allow you to download a free pdf of the entire paper.

Reading all of this stuff leaves me feeling kind of dazed, incapable of doing anything but stumbling around the house with a blank expression, making moaning noises.  Of course, that may be because I'm still waiting for the coffee to finish brewing.  No need to show up at my door with axes.  Honestly.