Zealotry, belief, and the desecration of Serpent Mound

Zealot (n.) - A person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.

There's something frightening about zealots, isn't there?  They are quite content to flout laws, ignore social conventions, and run right over anyone who opposes them (sometimes literally) in order to achieve their goals.  In my experience -- and I've known a number of people I would describe with this term -- they are also damn near impossible to talk to.  Once you start out from the position, "I am right, and nothing anyone could say will convince me," your conviction becomes an unassailable, and rather dangerous, fortress.

People usually think of zealotry as being the bailiwick of the more extreme factions of the majority religions.  You hear a lot about zealots amongst the evangelical Christians and the fundamentalist Muslims, for example.  But zealotry is no respecter of belief system; any faith-based framework can lead you there, as long as you end up espousing it with sufficient fervor.  One of the most decided zealots I've ever met chose to express that tendency via PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).  Don't think this could possibly represent zealotry?  This woman once said, in my presence, "All life is equivalent.  If I was faced with the choice of killing one human life to save the lives of ten non-human animals, I would do it without hesitation."  And yes, that includes mice.  Or worms.  Or bugs.

Zealotry, therefore, entails a kind of blindness.  Whatever you do, you do with a set of self-justifying rationalizations, that it's what god, or the gods, or the angels, or a Higher Purpose, demands that you do.  Any argument to the contrary is simply ignored into non-existence.

Which brings us to the damage done by vandals to the Serpent Mound, an ancient Native American site in Ohio.

Serpent Mound is a low, undulating rise 420 meters long, that archaeologists believe was created by a people called the "Fort Ancient" culture about a thousand years ago.  It is thought to have served some sort of dual devotional and astronomical purpose, although its significance to the culture which created it is still uncertain.  The land on which it stands was donated to the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society in 1900, and it was designated a National Historical Landmark in 1964.

Serpent Mound (photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

And now, a bunch of people calling themselves "Light Warriors" spent an evening running around on Serpent Mound, digging holes in it to plant "orgonites" in it so that they can "realign its energy" and "lift the vibration of the Earth so that we can all rise together."  [Source]

What is an "orgonite," you might ask?  It's a bunch of quartz crystals, feathers, and metal filings, embedded in a blob of resin (usually made by baking it all in a muffin tin).  Orgonites, believers claim, rid a place of "negative energy" and "create positive energy frequencies."

The ones who are responsible for this act -- a bunch of wingnuts called "Unite the Collective" -- are proud of what they did.  They are, they claim, "Galactic Light Beings" who are only doing what is necessary to make the Earth experience "ascendancy."  (If you have the time, look around on their website.  It is that strange mixture of woo-woo wackiness and absolute conviction that I find simultaneously funny and very, very scary.)

Fortunately, officials in Ohio are not impressed by Unite the Collective's claims that what they did is not only right, but necessary.  Volunteers are helping Ohio Historical Society members to locate and remove the Energy Muffins from Serpent Mound, and charges are expected to be filed this week which (if successful) would result in 90 days in jail for the perpetrators and a $5,000 fine.

What freaks me out about this is not that a beautiful, historically significant place was vandalized; this is (sadly) not the first time such a thing has happened, nor will it be the last.  What gives me the shudders is the complete certainty these people have that their bizarre worldview is correct, and their willingness to act on it.  It was just this attitude that led fundamentalist Muslims to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and historical sites in Mali; it is what led to the burning of the texts in the Great Library of Alexandria; it is what led Christian missionaries to destroy the quipus, the ancient "talking knots" of the Incas, of which few remain intact.

I have high hopes that law enforcement will catch up with the self-styled "Light Warriors" who desecrated Serpent Mound, but I am less sanguine about the possibility of eradicating the self-righteous zealotry they represent.  Whether it is expressed through politics, mainstream religion, or a fringe group like "Unite the Collective," the tendency toward zealotry is scarily common amongst humans -- and amazingly difficult to predict, control, or correct.

Magical thinking and falling crucifixes

Today we have a story from Newburgh, New York about the power of prayer, and the untoward results thereof.  [Source]

David Jimenez, a devout Catholic, prayed every day in front of a giant, 600-pound marble crucifix in the Church of St. Patrick, asking god to heal his wife Delia, who was suffering from ovarian cancer.  Doctors told the couple that Delia's cancer was in remission in 2010.  Elated, David offered to spend hours meticulously cleaning the crucifix, as a sign of his thankfulness that his prayers were answered.  Unfortunately, what neither he nor (apparently) anyone else in the church knew was that the crucifix was held to the wall by only a single screw, and when he started scrubbing it, the screw popped loose, and the crucifix fell over on top of Jimenez, crushing his leg.  He was rushed to the hospital, but doctors were unable to save his injured leg, and it was ultimately amputated.

Last week, Jimenez's lawyers announced that they have initiated a lawsuit seeking $3 million in damages from the church.

This story has elicited a lot of sardonic laughter on atheist websites.  I understand why people responded that way -- irony always seems to generate laughter, even when it involves injury or death (look at "The Darwin Awards").  Me, I feel sorry for the guy.  After all, he was throughout the incident only acting from the best of motives; care for his ill wife, thankfulness for her recovery, gratefulness to the church for their support.  Whether the church owes him $3 million is not for me to say; but clearly if what he claims is true, that the 600-pound statue was only secured by a single screw, he might well have a case.

What I don't get here, and (honestly) probably never will get, is how anyone gets caught up in that kind of magical thinking in the first place.  It is undeniable that Jimenez and millions of others seem to take "the power of prayer" as a matter of course; "pray every day" is commanded from pulpits all over the world every Sunday.  And there are thousands of accounts of times that the "power of prayer" resulted in cures (or as they call them, "miracles").  My question is: do these people really not get cause-and-effect?  Delia Jimenez was cured by doctors, presumably through chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, or some combination; David's kneeling in front of a crucifix had nothing whatsoever to do with it.  Before you can make the claim that the "power of prayer" really works, you have to explain all the times it didn't work with something more than "god has a plan" or "god works in mysterious ways."  If you pray for Uncle Frank and he recovers, and I pray for Aunt Betty and she doesn't, you can't just say that Uncle Frank's recovery proves that prayer works and wave away what happened to poor Aunt Betty.

Of course, the toppling over of the crucifix adds another surreal element to the whole thing.  If you believe that god really was behind Delia Jimenez's recovery, don't you find it odd that god walloped her husband with the very object of devotion her husband had been praying in front of?  One of the commenters on the story stated, "God healed Delia Jimenez and then punished David Jimenez for idolatry.  Catholics always have had trouble obeying the Second Commandment."  This kind of made my head spin.  Do you really think that a deity, especially one of the kind Christians worship, would work that way?  "Through my power, and because of thy prayer, I have healed thy wife, but now I'm going to smush thy leg because thou didst pray the wrong way."  Really?  That's what you believe, that's the god you worship?  A god who would do such a thing would beat the Greek deities in simple capriciousness.  In fact, I think that given a choice, I'd rather worship Hermes.  At least he knew how to tell a good joke.

I guess the bottom line is, I will never understand magical thinking.  I honestly do try to be tolerant of others' beliefs, however I sometimes come across as an arrogant know-it-all.  But stories like this make me realize that there is a wide, probably unbridgeable, gap between the way I think and the way most of the religious think.

... and the test results are in!

Regular readers may remember that a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an experiment being performed by psychologist Chris French and science writer Simon Singh to test, under controlled conditions, the alleged telepathic powers of some self-proclaimed psychics.  (You can read the original post here.)  French and Singh conducted the test at the University of London, and in a deliberately ironic gesture, released the results two days ago -- on Halloween.

And the results were... (drum roll please):

Zilch.

The two "psychics" who had agreed to participate were asked to write down something about each of five volunteers who were concealed behind a screen.  Afterwards, the five volunteers were asked to pick the descriptions that fit them best.  The psychics achieved a hit rate of one in five -- exactly consistent with chance alone.  [Source]

Now, so far, I find nothing particularly surprising about this.  I've read a great deal of the literature regarding controlled tests of psychics, mediums, and so on, and also about human cognitive biases -- confirmation and dart-thrower's bias, the "Clever Hans" effect, and so on.  When researchers are not exceptionally careful to screen out and control for these sorts of things, the results are immediately suspect -- which is why I don't think most anecdotal evidence in this realm, of the "I Went To A Psychic And She Was So Amazing" kind, is logically admissible.

What is more interesting is the reaction of one of the psychics who participated in the test, the rather unfortunately-named Patricia Putt.  "This experiment doesn't prove a thing," Ms. Putt said.  She went on to explain that she needs to be face-to-face with a client to establish a connection of "psychic energy."  When she is allowed to see her clients, her "success rate is very high."

She ended with a snarky comment that the scientists had designed the test simply to prove what they already believed -- accusing them, with no apparent sense of irony, of confirmation bias.

"Scientists are very closed-minded," she said.

My response is that of course she prefers to work face-to-face, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with "establishing a connection of psychic energy."  The psychics I've seen working first hand do what they do by paying close attention to body language -- they have trained themselves to watch their clients' every twitch, because that cues them in to how well they're doing, and where to go next with the "reading."  I still recall seeing a psychic doing a reading for students in a high school psychology class that I was asked to attend (and of course I was thrilled to have the opportunity to do so!).  The psychic, a woman named Laura, never took her eyes off the student she was doing a "reading" for, and as soon as the student gave the slightest sign that she was saying something that was off-base, she'd shift direction.  And later in the class, I gave a quick glance at the clock on the wall -- I had a class to teach the following period -- and Laura immediately said, "Am I out of time?"  And she hadn't even been doing a "reading" for me at the time -- I was sitting in the back of the classroom, and she simply noticed my eyes moving!

So despite Pat Putt's objections, I'm not buying that French and Singh deliberately set up the experiment to make her fail, or that they're closed-minded, or that the screens they used were made of special psychic-energy-blocking materials.  The most reasonable explanation for the results is simply that the alleged telepaths were unable to perform, and that they accomplish their "very high success rate" with face-to-face clients a different, and probably quite natural, way.  Admittedly, these were only two psychics, and a single experiment, and this hardly rules out the existence of psychic abilities in the global sense; but it very much places the ball in the court of folks like Derek Acorah, Sylvia Browne, and Sally Morgan.  If what you are doing is not simply a combination of prior research, information provided by assistants, and sensitivity to human body language -- if you really are, improbably and amazingly, picking up on human thoughts through some sort of hitherto undetected "psychic energy field," I would very much like you all to man-up and do what any critical thinker would demand:

Prove, under controlled conditions, that you are able to do what you claim.  And if you cannot do that, kindly have the decency to stop ripping people off.

Brains, mysticism, and melting faces

"Well, I saw it.  I saw it with my own eyes."

You hear that a lot, in claims of the paranormal.  I was just sitting there, in my room, and the ghost floated in through the wall.  I was outside at night, and I saw the UFO zoom across the sky.  I was at the lake, and I saw ripples in the water, and a dinosaur's head poked out and looked at me.

In a court of law, "eyewitness testimony" is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence, and yet time and again experimental science has shown that your sensory apparatus and your memory are flawed and unreliable.  It doesn't take much to confuse your perception -- witness how persuasive many optical illusions are -- and if you couple that with how easily things get muddled in your memory, it's no wonder that when eyewitness claims of the paranormal are presented to scientists, most scientists say, "Sorry.  We need more than that."

Just last week, a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience put another nail in the coffin of our perceptual integrative systems, showing how easy it is to trigger someone to see something that isn't there in a completely convincing way.  [Source]  Ron Blackwell, an epileptic, was in the hospital having tests done to see if a bit of his brain that was causing his seizures could be safely removed.  As part of the pre-surgical tests at Stanford University Hospital, his doctor, Dr. Josef Parvizi, had placed a strip of electrodes across his fusiform gyrus, a structure in the temporal lobe of the cerebrum.  And when the electrodes were activated, Blackwell saw Dr. Parvizi's face melt.

"You just turned into somebody else," Blackwell said. "Your face metamorphosed.  Your nose got saggy, went to the left.  You almost looked like somebody I'd seen before, but somebody different."  He added, rather unnecessarily, "That was a trip."

This study has three interesting outcomes, as far as I'm concerned.

First, it shows that the fusiform gyrus has something to do with facial recognition.  I'm personally interested in this, because as I've described before in Skeptophilia, I have a peculiar inability to recognize faces.  I don't have the complete prosopagnosia that people like the eminent science writer Oliver Sacks has -- where he doesn't even recognize his own face in a mirror -- but the fact remains that I can see a person I've met many times before in an unfamiliar place or circumstance, and literally have no idea if I've ever seen them before.  However -- and this is relevant to Parvizi's study -- other human features, such as stance, gait, and voice, I find easily and instantly recognizable.  And indeed, Blackwell's experience of seeing his doctor's face morph left other body parts intact, and even while the electrodes were activated, Blackwell knew that Dr. Parvizi's body and hands were "his."  So it seems that what psychologists have claimed -- that we have a dedicated module devoted solely to facial recognition -- is correct, and this study has apparently pinpointed its location.

Second, this further supports a point I've made many times, which is that if you fool your brain, that's what you perceive.  Suppose Blackwell's experience had occurred a different way; suppose his fusiform gyrus had been stimulated by one of his seizures, away from a hospital, away from anyone who could immediately reassure him that what he was seeing wasn't real, with no one there who could simply turn the electrodes off and make the illusion vanish.  Is it any wonder that some people report absolutely convincing, and bizarre, visions of the paranormal?  If your brain firing pattern goes awry -- for whatever reason -- you will perceive reality abnormally.  And if you are already primed to accept the testimony of your eyes, you very likely will interpret what you saw as some sidestep into the spirit world.  Most importantly, your vehement claims that what you saw was real cannot be accepted into evidence by science.  Ockham's Razor demands that we accept the simpler explanation, that requires fewer ad hoc assumptions, which is (sorry) that you simply had an aberrant firing pattern occur in your brain.

Third, this study has significant bearing on the stories of people who claim to have had "spiritual visions" while under the influence of psychoactive drugs.  One in particular, DMT (dimethyltryptamine), present in such ritual concoctions as ayahuasca, is supposed to create a "window into the divine."  A number of writers, particularly Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman (the latter wrote a book called DMT: The Spirit Molecule), claim that DMT is allowing you to see and communicate with real entities that are always there, but which only the drug allows you to experience.  Consider McKenna's account of his first experience with the chemical:

So I did it and...there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place.  And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves.  Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me.  And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces.  And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment.

A generation earlier, Carlos Castañeda recounted similar sorts of experiences after ingesting datura root and psilocybe mushrooms, and like McKenna and Strassman, Castañeda was convinced that what he was seeing was absolutely real, more real in fact than the ordinary world around us.

My response, predictably, is: of course you saw weird stuff, and thought it was real.  What did you expect?  You monkey around with your brain chemistry, and you will obviously foul up your perceptual apparatus, and your ability to integrate what's being observed.  It's no more surprising that this happens than it would be if you spilled a cup of coffee on your computer, and it proceeded to behave abnormally.  If you short out your neural circuitry, either electrically (as Parvizi did) or chemically (as McKenna and others did), it should come as no shock that things don't work right.  And those altered perceptions are hardly evidence of the existence of a mystical world.

In any case, Parvizi's accidental discovery is a fascinating one, and will have wide-reaching effects on the study of perceptual neuroscience.  All of which supports what a friend of mine, a retired Cornell University professor of human genetics, once told me: the 21st century will be the century of the brain.  We are, she said, at a point of our understanding of how the brain works that corresponds to where geneticists were in 1912 -- we can see some of the pieces, but have no idea how the whole system fits together.  Soon, she predicts, we will begin to put together the underlying mechanism -- and at that point, we will be starting to develop a complete picture of how our most complex organ actually works.

Boo.

It is not, perhaps, particularly insightful to state that Halloween is a weird holiday.  However, in this case I don't mean "weird" in the sense of "spooky," but in the sense of "why the hell do people actually enjoy this?"

That said, it's not that I don't enjoy participating myself.  Last year, for example, I spent the entire school day wearing a vampire costume, complete with fake blood, a cape, and white stage makeup.  The only downside was that I couldn't wear the plastic teeth during class because they had a regrettable tendency to make me drool, something that I bet never happens to real vampires.

So far today at my school, I've seen a variety of witches, several clowns, a few butterflies, a pink inflatable pig, a Viking, and Barack Obama.  I found Obama the scariest, and I don't mean that as some kind of sly political statement.  It's odd, but I've always found rubber masks of all kinds - even the ones intended to be funny - to be seriously creepy.  I think it's the fact that they look human (the best ones look really human) but even while the person inside the mask talks, the expression never changes.  I, and I suspect a lot of people, react viscerally to facial expressions, or lack thereof; we're wired to pick up cues from people's faces, and when there are none there to pick up, it's disconcerting, even if you know that the mask is just rubber and that there's a real (and friendly) person underneath. It's no coincidence that we describe the affect-less faces of the insane "mask-like."  The whole thing is reminiscent of the concept of the "uncanny valley," about which I wrote last year (you can read the post here if you're interested).

Even so, I should perhaps mention that I collect masks.  I have brought home masks from most of our many overseas travel adventures, and they are hung all over our walls (usually in places that take you by surprise and so elicit a bigger reaction when you come around the corner or close the door).  I also really enjoy costumes, especially well-done or clever ones.  (At a Halloween party years ago, a biology teacher friend of mine and his wife, who was a physician's assistant, came dressed in an odd fashion.  He was wearing the pants from a set of military camouflage, and nothing else.  She was wearing the top half (with very short shorts).  When I asked what they were, he replied, "Guess. We're a human body part."  After some questioning, I discovered that they were the upper and lower G.I.)

But I do love being scared, and also being scary.  My mask collection is one of my most prized possessions, even though -- or perhaps because -- it's kind of creepy.  I thoroughly enjoy a good horror movie, and in my fiction writing I frequently make a valiant attempt to scare the absolute bejeezus out of you.  This tendency, which if not universal, is at least very common, begs an explanation.  Why do we like to be scared?

It probably varies from person to person, but I can say that for myself, it's kind of a reassurance that I'm safe and sound.  I don't gravitate toward slasher films -- to me, those are too close to the kind of thing that actually happens, and I have no real desire to watch people, even if they are actors, getting gruesomely massacred.  But a really atmospheric, spooky film about the supernatural is a wonderful experience, largely because after it's over (whew) I can look around at my comfortable house, and think, "thank god this house isn't haunted by ghouls."  And if, later that night, there are some bumps and creaks, and I get scared again, I still know that when I wake up the next morning the sun will be shining (well, okay, this is upstate New York; at least the sun will be rising) and I will still be safe.  I'm alive and unhaunted, and I can get a cup of coffee and revel in the fact that my disbelief in evil spirits has been once again supported by events.

In my opinion, the best exploration of this need to be absolutely terrified was The X Files.  I'm not referring to the movies, both of which (to me) were disappointing, but the television series.  Like any series, they had a few dogs, but the best of them rank right up there with the scariest things I've ever seen.  If you're an aficionado, you might remember the episode "Patience" -- about the batlike creature who waits for twenty years to avenge its murdered mate, and goes around killing all the people who had anything to do with its death.  At the end - when the only remaining survivor is in his cabin in the woods, and hears a noise in the fireplace, and goes to investigate - there's nothing's there, but then he turns around, and OH MY GOD THE BAT THING IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM.  Quite possibly the single scariest moment in the history of television.  Even if you knew it was going to happen, it was the quintessence of all of those childhood fears of the monster under the bed, or what might be looking in the window if you pulled the curtains apart just a crack in the middle of the night.  I don't know about you, but I had a hard time opening the back door to let my dogs in after watching that.  I love my dogs dearly, but it was a sore temptation to let them fend for themselves outside that night.

Then again, we have the added benefit that watching horror films burns calories.  A study just released by some researchers at the University of Westminster found that you can burn a good 200 calories just sitting there shivering.  The best burn, they found, came from watching The Shining (which I would agree is a damn scary film), followed by Jaws and The Exorcist.  Of course, this is probably offset by the tendency of most movie watchers to nosh on pizza, popcorn, and beer while watching, but still, it bears mention as one benefit of indulging in a scary movie every so often.  And there's also, of course, the fact that if you're watching the movie with your significant other, the inevitable huddling together on the couch that these movies usually cause could result in some further, um, calorie-burning activity after the movie ends.

So you can see that there are a multitude of benefits that come from being frightened.  It's only human -- the evidence is that we've been telling scary stories for a very, very long time, and in virtually every culture studied.  Still, it may be that some of you don't share this need to periodically be scared to the point of pants-wetting.  If so, you may find this post nothing more than mildly mystifying.  To the rest of you, I will only wish you a happy Halloween, and sweet dreams tonight.

Breaking news: Hurricane Sandy caused by the "homosexual agenda"

Well, up here in lovely upstate New York we're about three-quarters of the way through the remnants of Hurricane Sandy, and we only lost power for a short time yesterday afternoon.  Thus far, we've been mighty fortunate -- when I look at the photographs coming in of the devastation along the coast, I'm reminded of hurricanes I lived through as a child in southern Louisiana, of flooded streets, ripped-off roofs, and electricity out for days or weeks.  So all in all, we've been pretty lucky.

Sandy has been a weird storm in a lot of ways.  It's amazingly powerful, for a late-season hurricane; it followed a highly uncharacteristic track; and it merged with an on-land winter storm as it made landfall, causing it to strengthen as it moved over land, not weaken (as most tropical storms do).  All of this, I'm sure, is making you wonder what could be the cause of such a peculiar set of circumstances.  And I'm certain that it will come as no surprise for you to find out that the answer is:

Gays.

Yes, folks, the homosexual contingent are at it again, according to ultra-religious wingnut Reverend John McTernan.  [Source]  "God is systematically destroying America," McTernan said.  "Just look at what has happened this year.  ...Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda.  America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!"  He then goes on to explain that god is creating storms to smite the US because of our increasing acceptance of gays.

All of this makes me pretty angry.  I mean, really: give us atheists a little credit, too!  Every time God Smites The Wicked With His Mighty Hand, all you hear about is how he was aiming for the gays.  Don't you think he'd be even more eager to smite us godless nonbelievers?  After all, a good many of the gays and lesbians I know are Christians, and barely any of the atheists are.  It kind of pisses me off that here I sit, as obvious a target as any I can think of, and all god smote me with was a stiff breeze.  It seems kind of anticlimactic.

There's also the problem with this theory that if god is trying to Smite The Gays using Hurricane Sandy, his aim could use some improvement.  One of the areas that Sandy clobbered was rural West Virginia, which saw blizzard conditions including two to three feet of wet snow, knocking out the power and shutting down roads.  And it's not like Appalachia is exactly a hotbed of homosexuality.  Yeah, okay, New York City got hit pretty hard, as did Atlantic City, and I'd expect the Gay Sex Quotient of both of those places is fairly high.  But you'd think that given the tools god has to work with -- tornadoes and lightning, not to mention your tried-and-true method of just having something heavy drop out of a window -- he could take out the gays with pinpoint precision if that was what he was really trying to do.  A hurricane seems awfully broad-brush.

It does bring up, too, the question of why these preachers are so concerned about who is having sex, and how they're doing it.  Is it just me, or do these guys seem a little bit sex-obsessed?  After all, the bible goes on and on about all sorts of other things that are Naughty In God's Eyes, but you barely hear any preachers saying that god created a hurricane because you collected firewood on the sabbath, or because you ate pork, or because you wore clothing made of two different kinds of thread woven together.  All of these are expressly prohibited in Leviticus -- in fact, a guy got stoned to death for the first one -- but these days, god has apparently forgotten about all of the other rules.  Maybe it's because god finds what goes on in people's bedrooms more interesting to watch, I dunno.

In any case, if you live in the northeastern US, I hope you escaped the worst of the damage from the storm.  And whether it was caused by the gays, or by what anyone with an IQ that exceeds his shoe size thinks -- that it was caused by a confluence of weather phenomena -- let's concentrate on helping the folks who weren't so lucky pick up the pieces and put their lives back together.  Because, after all, that's one of the things that the atheists agree with the Christians on; charity is a virtue.

Storms, earthquakes, and coincidences

Here I sit, having battened down the hatches in preparation for Hurricane Sandy (due to arrive in the wee hours tonight), and two things are on my mind.

First, why don't you ever hear the verb "to batten" used for anything other than "hatches?"  No one battens down windows, doors, throw rugs, or anything else.  You never hear of anyone leashing their dog to a post, for example, and then saying, "I have battened down Rex."  It seems like a useful word, and it's a pity it has such a restricted usage.  So I think all of you should make a point, during the next few days, of using the verb "to batten" in unorthodox ways.

Second, I've already begun facepalming over the eruption of woo-woo conspiracy theories claiming that Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Son-Tinh (which just slammed into the Philippines and Vietnam this weekend), and the 7.7 magnitude Canadian earthquake that caused tsunami warnings to be issued in Hawaii (there were high waves, but no serious damage) are all due to President Obama using HAARP to monkey around with things.  Or possibly chemtrails.  Or both.  They don't seem to have any clear idea of how any of this actually could be manmade, but that still hasn't stopped them from claiming that it is, that President Obama is sitting in his underground bunker, an insane smile on his face, and pressing buttons and pulling levers, and saying, "Now they'll be sorry!  I've caused a massive hurricane that will hit Washington, DC, causing widespread flooding and destruction!  Despite the fact that I live there!  That's how evil I am!  Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

You think I'm joking.  Already websites like the rather ironically-named "Aircrap" are buzzing with statements such as, "You can't be expecting me to believe that all three of those events, occurring so close together, is just a coincidence?"

Actually, yes, that is exactly what I'm expecting you to believe.  When events coincide, this is called "a coincidence."  Given that the Earth experiences storms and earthquakes virtually on a daily basis, there will be times when several of these events happen in close succession because of no other factor than random chance.  We don't have to posit such absurdities as President Obama activating tractor beams from space via HAARP, or jets out of Newark spraying aerosols via their contrails to lay down a pathway for the storm, to account for this.  Both of which were, in all apparent seriousness, claimed by people on these sites.  And all of which shows that people who don't understand (1) the laws of statistics, (2) atmospheric science, and (3) geology, and who also (4) have spent too much time watching bad disaster movies on the Syfy channel, should really just keep their mouths shut.

So, anyway, that's our dip in the deep end of the pool for today.  Me, I'm not worried about HAARP or chemtrails, but I am a little worried that we'll lose power for a while, because we're supposed to get some serious wind here.  So if I am incommunicado for a few days, that's why, and I offer my apologies in advance, and a promise to write again as soon as I can.  I'll sign off here with my hopes that if you are in the path of the storm, you and your loved ones are safe and sound, and your homes undamaged.  As for me, I'm off to school to batten down the students.