Aliens visit Bulgaria

It's been a while since we've had any interesting reports of UFO or alien sightings, so I was tickled to find a post yesterday on Paranominal that claims that some hikers near Plovdiv, Bulgaria snapped a photograph of an "alien Grey" while walking through a forest.

The photograph is put into a sort of montage format on a video in the post, but I'll post the photograph itself here:

What I find interesting about this photo is that it shows the alien, who appears to be about five meters tall, clearly visible between two trees maybe ten meters further on in the woods, and yet the hikers are still walking toward it in an apparently unconcerned fashion.  I don't know about you, but if I were hiking through the woods and stumbled upon a scary-looking alien creature who was over twice my height, I would not just stroll right on up to it.  At the point this photograph was taken, I would already be running in a comical, Looney Tunes manner in the opposite direction, with my feet only visible as a circular blur.

If I had not immediately died of a brain aneurysm when I spotted the thing.  Which is probably more likely.  I may be a skeptical scientific type, and all, but I am also a great big old coward.  I believe that it is our duty as rationalists to evaluate claims of the paranormal, but I am much more comfortable evaluating them from a safe distance, which in this case would be about fifty miles.

Be that as it may, I'm a little skeptical of this claim.  For one thing, if you watched the video, you'll notice how the alien face becomes way scarier when they isolate and magnify it.  While this may seem like a "duh" statement, part of the reason that alien and ghost photographs become more convincing in close-ups is because they get grainier when you do that -- the image "pixillates."  (For a creepy example of how the brain imposes meaning on grainy data, take a look at this optical illusion.)  Now, as we've seen many times before, humans are great at imposing meaning on patternless images, and we especially like to turn those images into faces (a phenomenon called pareidolia, about which I have written many times before).  But the fact that we become more convinced as the data gets grainy is a little suspicious, and exactly the opposite of what should happen to a scientist.  We should be convinced by precision, not by imprecision.

The last nail in the coffin, for me, came at the end of the video, when I saw who had put it together.  The creator of the video -- and probably the photograph as well -- was one Stephen Hannard, of England, who is also the one who claimed that the Martian probe Curiosity found a fossilized shoe, human finger, and woodchuck on the surface of Mars, and that the International Space Station had captured footage of a giant space slug.  It's not like this guy has any kind of solid track record for veracity.  So I'm perhaps to be forgiven if I find anything coming from Hannard a little suspect from the get go.

So anyhow, I doubt this is really a photograph of an alien, which is kind of a shame.  I'd love it if there was, during my lifetime, incontrovertible evidence of intelligent alien life.  I realize that's easy for me to say sitting here safely in my office thousands of kilometers from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but I really do mean it.  If an alien spaceship landed in my back yard, I'd even try to overcome my urge to run away or die of fright in order to be the first human to shake their gray, seven-fingered hands upon their arrival on Earth.

Jesus, Santa, and Megyn Kelly

I like a fair fight.  It's actually fun for me to have a good, riproaring intellectual discussion, in which both my opponent and I know a lot about what we're saying and are willing to bat the ideas around for a while.  Even if we start out disagreeing, and end up no closer together at the end, there is something profoundly satisfying about a purely cerebral dispute.  (And it's a bit of a lost art, frankly.)

On the other hand, sometimes quarrels can be so unequally weighted that it seems unfair.  My dad used to call such arguments "shooting fish in a barrel."  While I don't shy away from those when I see them -- after all, the entire gist of this blog has to do with discussing illogical, irrational, and counterfactual ideas -- I don't get much satisfaction out of saying, basically, "Wow.  This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen."

This comes up because of a link a friend sent me to a news story on the site Crooks & Liars, entitled, "Fox News Host Megyn Kelly Assures Children: Jesus and Santa Were Both White Men."  And my response to him was:  "Oh, they are just making it way too easy for me."

Kelly came up with this bizarre bêtise in response to a column in Slate by Aisha Harris that criticized the depiction of Santa as white, because such practices marginalize non-white children.  She proposed that it might be time to represent the "spirit of Christmas" as an animal, instead:  "For one thing," Harris wrote, "making Santa Claus an animal rather than an old white male could spare millions of nonwhite kids the insecurity and shame that I remember from childhood."

Well.  Far be it from Fox to take such an affront lying down.  Kelly was outraged.  Santa is white, she says.  "For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white," Kelly said.  "But this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. But Santa is what he is.  Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change, you know?  I mean, Jesus was a white man too.  He was a historical figure, that's a verifiable fact, as is Santa -- I just want the kids watching to know that."

Let's just clear up a couple of things, okay, Megyn?

The historical basis for the Santa Claus legend is St. Nicholas of Myra, who was a fourth-century bishop in Asia Minor who was revered for giving gifts to the poor.   He was of Greek descent but lived most of his life in what is now Turkey.   It's pretty unlikely that he looked even remotely like the chubby, rosy-cheeked greeting-card Santa.  Chances are, he looked a lot more like this guy...

Patriarch Gregory IV of Antioch (1906)

... than he did this guy:

(Photograph courtesy of photographer Douglas Rahden and the Wikimedia Commons)

And then, of course, there's Jesus, who is often depicted this way:

(image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

Despite the fact that he wasn't, technically, Swedish.

The thought did cross my mind to wonder, however, if Megyn Kelly had come to her conclusions about the ethnicity of Jesus and Santa after doing some research in primary sources:

So.  Anyhow.  Like I said, all of this has me wondering how the people at Fox News still have any audience left.  And I'm not even talking about their political leanings -- as I've said before, I'm neither well-informed enough nor, frankly, interested enough to comment on politics most of the time.  But given their track record for accuracy on the facts, and their commentators' regrettable tendency to utter statements that are (not to put too fine a point on it) moronic, it's no wonder that people have started referring to the network as Faux News.

So that's our fish-shooting exercise for the morning.  But if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Kelly, or anyone else at Fox, to retract the statement.  "Death before retraction!" seems to be the motto over there.  Worse, actually; they often follow up the most boneheaded of their utterances with defenses that dig the hole even deeper.  So in the next couple of days, look for further idiocies from Kelly, including a statement that Moses was white, too, and she knows because she's seen pictures of him and he looks just like Charlton Heston.

Drowned cities and drowning mythologies

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that god was watching and would smite the crap out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, shove his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France)

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.   Here's how they launch the idea:

Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age. Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.

Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:

Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.

What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:

So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).

So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:

Plato wrote that Posidon (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).

Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:

Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea, those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood. So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.

Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing. 

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

Earth angel

Having taken on, in recent posts, topics such as how buying into conspiracies makes you doubt facts, the role of paranoia in American politics, and Monsanto and its role in creating GMOs, today I'd like to turn to an even more pressing issue, to wit:

Is the Earth being controlled by mentally retarded Nordic alien angels?

That is the contention of the author of the site Montalk.net, the link for which was sent to me by a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, and that introduces the concept thusly:

There is far more to this world than taught in our schools, shown in the media, or proclaimed by the church and state. Most of mankind lives in a hypnotic trance, taking to be reality what is instead a twisted simulacrum of reality, a collective dream in which values are inverted, lies are taken as truth, and tyranny is accepted as security. They enjoy their ignorance and cling tightly to the misery that gives them identity.

Yup, that's me, clinging to my ignorance over here.  But what should I believe, then?  We find out a bit under "Key Concepts," which starts out innocuously enough -- some stuff about the nature of god, spirit, souls, and so on, not too very different than you might find on a number of religious or quasi-religious sites.  But then we hit the concept "Evolution," and if you're like me, there's the sense of an impending train wreck:

Evolution

• physical evolution is due to natural selection, random mutation, conscious selection, and conscious mutation

• human evolution is mostly artificial; either DNA mutates to conform to alien soul frequency, or else DNA is artificially altered through advanced genetic engineering by certain alien factions

• because body must match soul, the death of a species means loss of compatible bodies for purposes of reincarnation. Thus physical life seeks physical survival and propagation of genes.

• the purpose of physical evolution is to accommodate and serve spiritual evolution

If I could evolve consciously, I'd evolve wings.  Great big feathery wings from my shoulder blades.  I know it'd make it hard to put on a shirt, but that's a downside I'd be willing to accept, in order to be able to fly.

Speaking of wings and flying, we really get into deep water when he starts talking about angels.  Because according to this guy, angels are real -- again, not thus far so very different, at first, from what a lot of people believe.  But wait until you hear what he thinks angels are.  (Do NOT attempt to drink anything while reading this.  I will not be responsible for ruined computer screens or keyboards.  You HAVE been warned.)

Mankind is unwittingly caught in a war between hidden superhuman factions who select, train, equip their human agents to participate in that war...  There is warring among these beings, indicating they are not all unified. At the very minimum they are polarized into opposing sides, if not split into numerous independent factions. Some factions have a strong fascist orientation.

The Nordic aliens are genetically compatible with us, and some of their females have engaged human males for sexual encounters and even long term relationships. Through interbreeding their genes can enter our gene pool and vice versa. Therefore some human individuals and bloodlines would have more of their DNA than others, and their angelic alien DNA would likely show under analysis to be basically human, albeit rare and unusual.

So, we could tell that a human had angelic alien DNA because if we analyzed his DNA, we'd find it was... human?

Alrighty then.

We then hear about what these beings are not: these misidentifications include hoaxes (don't be silly), "metaphysical entities," members of the Galactic Federation, and Super Nazis.  So thank heaven for that, at least.

We also get to read lots of stories about alien abductions, many of which include some serious bow-chicka-bow-wow with blond-haired Nordic aliens aboard their spaceships, and which presumably allowed the lucky abductee to claim membership in the Light-Year-High Club.  But then we hear the bad news, which is that the aliens who have visited us, and who have apparently engaged in a great deal of cosmic whoopee with humans, are actually mentally retarded:

The members of the Nordic alien civilization are not all homogenous in standing or understanding. Composition ranges from a two-tier system of “lower retarded ones” and “higher advanced ones” to caste-like systems with many tiers similar to the Indian caste system.

The retarded members of their kind are the ones who interact with the most advanced of humans. Why? Maybe because of their evolutionary closeness, and also because such an interaction could be mutually beneficial. Despite their seeming superhuman qualities, those aliens who interact most with select humans may, in fact, be the most flawed of their race.

The problem... is that their most flawed ones are not only the creators and users of demiurgic technology, but they are also most involved in human affairs. This means we suffer their errors, which are graver in consequence than any mistake we could commit, just as our errors are more severe than those possible by animals.  The consequences of these errors and grave transgressions have cascaded back and forth throughout the timeline. They are now converging toward a nexus point representing the potential for a cataclysmic shift. Alien factions who were responsible for initiating these consequences are likely the same ones who are now involved in the final outcome. A thread of continuity exists between the most ancient and modern of human-alien encounters. The alien disinformation campaign is an effort by one set of such factions to prepare mankind for enthusiastic acceptance of their overt control.

Well, hell.  This is even worse than the Illuminati-in-the-government thing, or the Evil-Reptilian-Alien thing, or even the Comet-ISON-is-a-spaceship thing.   We're being controlled by mentally deficient aliens, who can screw things up even worse than plain old humans could?  All because they've come to Earth looking for some hot human/Nordic alien action?

I don't know about you, but I don't like this at all.

There is more on the website, of course, including stuff about the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the North Pole, Adam and Eve, alchemy, dimensional portals, the ether, the Pyramids, zombie computers, and snakes.  I encourage you to peruse it.  I would have read more myself, but it seems a little early in the day to start drinking, and I just don't think I could have managed it without a glass of scotch.

So, anyway, there you have it.  As if we didn't have enough to worry about, now we find out that the rulers of the world are blond-haired moronic alien angels, and (worse still) that some of us are descended from them.  I'm guessing I'm not, though.  I am blond, but I've got my family tree pretty well mapped out, and I haven't run into any records that show my great-great-great grandma getting knocked up by the Archangel Derpulus.  That's okay with me, honestly.  If I don't get wings out of the bargain, to hell with it.

The stars against Monsanto

In the last week my Environmental Science class has been discussing the production, use, and safety of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).  It's a balancing act for me; addressing the legitimate concerns about their effects on human health and the environment, without buying into all of the alarmist hype, is never easy.  Additionally, the subject always brings up the questionably ethical practice of patenting genes and crop strains, so it is a topic that stirs up good discussion -- and strong feelings.

And, of course, inevitably the name "Monsanto" comes up.  Monsanto has become such a stand-in for "Evil Corporation" that a new fallacy, the argumentum ad Monsantum, was coined a while back -- the logical error that allows you to smear anyone or anything as long as you can tie it to Monsanto.

It's an increasingly hot topic.  So no wonder the woo-woos have gotten involved, this time to see if they can get some information about GMO safety, and the corporate practices of Monsanto...

... from astrological readings.

I swear I'm not making this up.  I'm not nearly creative enough to invent something this completely idiotic.  If you don't believe me, you'll have to check out the article on Activist Post entitled, "GMOs: What Do the Stars Say Astrologically?", by Catherine J. Frompovich.  In it, we learn that not only are the anti-GMO folks worried, the stars are, too.  Frompovich tells us that an astrologer, Eric Coppolino, has done a complete astrological work-up for Monsanto and its founder, John Francis Queeny, and what he found should alarm the hell out of you, as long as you have a single kernel of KettleCorn where most of us have a brain.

The first thing that Coppolino tells us is that when President Gerald Ford signed TOSCA (the Toxic Substances Control Act) into law, in October of 1976, "Mars and Chiron were in opposition."  Chiron, which is a comet-like body that has an orbit between Saturn and Uranus, is one I hadn't heard of before in connection to astrology, but Cafe Astrology tells us that it "is symbolized by the 'wounded healer.'  It represents our deepest wound, and our efforts to heal the wound."  So there you are, then.

Why that's important, Coppolino tells us, is that this reflects "a cosmic pattern that occasionally sets into Monsanto’s horoscope negative aspects that affect Monsanto’s genetically modified foods ‘mission’."  Whatever that means.

But things may not be all that rosy for Monsanto in the future, Coppolino says.  "Monsanto’s 11th house provides a description why the company seems so intractable, including its stranglehold on the public.  Monsanto survived the onslaughts against genetically modified food by its usual tactics – the use of government influence.  However, Monsanto’s Jupiter-Saturn conjunction will experience a simultaneous conjunction from Pluto and square from Uranus, which happens in 2015."

Oooh.  Scary.  "While there is no way to predict exactly what the Uranus-Pluto square will bring," Coppolino says,  "there are few astrologers who would dare to underestimate its potential power.  Those who are working for a sane response to genetic modification or to stop Monsanto outright, should know that the company is approaching a vulnerable moment, which is an invitation for activists to persist in their efforts."

Yeah.  So take that, Monsanto.

As I've said before, astrology falls into the category of "mostly harmless" -- the only damage done being the suckering of gullible people.  Still, it always bothers me when two kinds of woo-woos join forces.  The anti-GMO crowd rely largely on discredited and dubious information in their claims for harm to human health from genetically-modified crops -- most notably, the now-retracted "study" by Gilles-Eric Seralini that allegedly showed that rats fed GMO corn developed tumors.  The data, after months of peer review, were deemed "inconclusive" -- and the conclusions of the study were therefore ruled suspect.  Even so, it's still considered gospel by people who think that any genetic tampering with anything is scary and immoral (despite the fact that we've been tampering with genetics for centuries, via selective breeding of domestic animals and plants).

So teaming up with astrologers, who have about the same level of scientific veracity on their side, is not good news for those of us who want to approach the whole thing in a more fact-based, logical, scientific fashion.  One has to hope that the number of people who would appeal to an astrologer on these matters are few in number, and that the astrological prognostications of Eric Coppolino will mostly be ignored, in favor of an actual consideration of the evidence -- i.e., the real information, not just some blathering on about Pluto and Chiron and Mars.

But as we've seen many times before, optimism is sometimes a losing proposition.  I predict that the next thing we'll see is either covens of witches casting spells to stop Monsanto, or else the homeopaths coming up with anti-GMO "remedies," made from shaking up RoundUpReady tomatoes in water, and then diluting it 5,000 times.

Sarah Palin vs. Joe McScrooge

Sarah Palin, who is determined for some reason Not To Go Gentle Into That Good Night, is once again winning accolades from the Religious Right.  This time, it's for a book about the alleged "War on Christmas," called Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

The book alleges that "joyless atheists," presumably including myself, are trying to "abort Christ from Christmas."  She collectively refers to people like this as "Joe McScrooge."  "Joe McScrooge," Palin opines, "armed with an attorney, is really dangerous."

"We were founded as written in our charters of liberty, in the documents that created America," Palin said, in an interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network.  "We're founded on a Judeo-Christian faith that would allow forever the right to express or respect for faith in America...  The road that we are on today is too many of those angry atheists armed with attorneys would try to take away that freedom to express faith. It's going to end in ruin unless we do something about it.  I want this book to be a call to action, to take steps for school districts, for communities, for business owners, for families to understand they don't have to hide their faith.  They don't have to be embarrassed by it.  This war on Christmas is really the tip of the spear when it comes to a greater battle that's brewing.  And that battle that's brewing is those who would want to take God out of our society, out of our culture, which will lead to ruin as history has proven."

Well, wiser heads than my own have addressed her contention that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation;" but I will point out that one of the most staunchly Christian governments this continent has ever seen was the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which a man was placed in the stocks for an hour for "indecency," because he kissed his wife in public after having been away for three months.   This was the home of floggings for heresy, and hangings not only for witchcraft, but for being the wrong kind of Christian.

Whatever your belief system, I don't think that leaving that sort of thing behind could be construed as "leading to ruin as history has proven."

My central problem with Palin's contention, though, is that the "War on Christmas" that she and her pals at Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network like to whinge about really doesn't exist.  No, we Joes McScrooge don't want taxpayer money paying for Christian displays; we don't want Christian messages in our public schools, courthouses, and government offices.  To do so would be exclusionary to the one in four Americans who are not Christian.

But as far as what people do on private property?  No atheist I know gives a damn.  You can erect a crucifix so high it obstructs light plane traffic, as far as I care.  You can put up signs, as a member of my community has, saying, "Who does not accept Jesus Christ will be cast into the fiery furnace" and "The wages of sin are death!"  You can have a Christmas tree in every window and a statue of Santa Claus on your roof.

Because that's what private property means.  As opposed to public property, which implies paid for, and therefore endorsed by, the government.  A distinction that Ms. Palin apparently doesn't understand.

Oh, and for the most part, the atheists I know don't really care whether someone says "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays" to them, because besides operating under the assumption that there is no god, we also have a general rule for behavior, namely, "Don't be a dick."  And like anyone who is not being a dick, we generally respond to the intent of the person we're speaking to, not just the words, and will repay kind intent with kind response.  Of all of the atheists I know -- and I know plenty -- I can only think of one who might get pissy if someone said "Merry Christmas" to him, and launch into a diatribe about how that was making an assumption about his beliefs.  And even he probably would only do that if he was already having a bad day.

So, Ms. Palin, sorry to take the wind out of your sails, not to mention your sales; whatever you and your book may claim, the "War on Christmas" really doesn't exist.  We atheists have bigger things to worry about, like the fact that a good many of your buddies are still trying to get Young-Earth Creationism taught in public school science classrooms, are still trying to make sure that religious-based homophobia is cast into law, are still trying to use the bible to argue that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening.  Given all of the bigger issues we face, the last thing most of us care about is whether you put up a "Jesus Is The Reason For The Season" banner in the local laundromat.

And I'd like to think that's that, but of course, that is never that with these people.  The alleged "War on Christmas" has been going on for years, with the Call to Arms being issued on Fox News before the Thanksgiving turkey carcass is even cold.  And each year, pretty much nothing happens, which you would think would eventually convince them that the "War on Christmas" is a figment of their imagination.

But no.  In that way, they're a little like my dog, who enjoys protecting our house from Evil Farm Machinery.  The difficulty is, we live across the road from a farm, so he barks pretty much constantly.  And each time a tractor goes by, and he barks -- the tractor goes away.  So he thinks that he has accomplished something, something vital, and that without his barking, the tractor would have come straight through the wall, and the farmer would have stolen his rawhide bone.

So he keeps barking.  Because you never know.  You have to keep vigilant.  Never let your guard down for a moment.  Because that farmer, he's a wily guy.

Just like we "Joes McScrooge."

Everything is false. Including this post.

I suppose it had to happen.  Eventually, if you buy into conspiracy theories -- where you consider the people in charge, and the media outlets, to be lying to you in order to push forward some sort of secret agenda -- you'll come to the logical end point of that belief system.

That everyone is lying to you.

That, at least, is the contention of a guy who posted on the website Above Top Secret a couple of days ago, heading his post, "Could Every Story on the News be Fake?"  Wondering how anyone could think that, of course I clicked on the link.  After all, this would mean that stories in my local paper this morning reporting on last night's Winter Festival Parade in my home town were false, and that the police closed Route 96 for two hours as some kind of diabolical False Flag, perhaps using coded Illuminati messages cleverly backmasked in Christmas carols.

So the post directed me to a video by Ed Chairini (published under his handle "Dallas GoldBug") called The Truth Exposed!  Basically, we seem to have arrived at Conspiracy Theory Nirvana, here.  I only made it through part of it, though, I'll be honest -- the video is an hour long, and that's just Part One of Three.  But on this video, which is like some sort of insane version of James Burke's Connections, we discover that some of the survivors of the the Virginia Tech massacre are "Seal Team Six," which supposedly was the group who participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, except that it never happened.  Another Virginia Tech survivor is actually kidnapped California teenager Jaycee Dugard, who is actually Casey Anthony, who is actually one of the actors on The Bachelorette, who is actually dress designer Rachel Zoe, who is connected to vanished airplane hijacker D. B. Cooper.

Oh, but that's not all.  South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone engineered the Columbine shootings, which, incidentally, also never happened.  And Miley Cyrus is actually murdered child fashion show model Jonbenet Ramsey.

And at that point, I gave up.

The problem with people like Chairini isn't just that they exhibit confirmation bias on a scale never before seen in the history of humankind; the problem is that they have moved out past doubt, past cynicism, into some kind of rarefied atmosphere where you can't trust anything.  Everything you see is suspect.  Everyone you know is lying.  Everything you hear is a manufactured falsehood, there to mislead and misinform.

The difficulty with even addressing people like this is that after they've arrived at this place, they're stuck there forever.  The most convincing evidence against their stance, the most logical argument you can craft, only means that you're either deluded (in conspiracy theorist parlance, you've "drunk the KoolAid") or you're actually one of the disinformation agents yourself.  In either case, they have no reason to listen to you, and it cements their feet even more firmly in place.

Why someone would go to such lengths to do all of this -- to engineer a fake child murder and subsequent investigation, and shelter the child for years, and then bring her back out so she can "twerk" at the Video Music Awards -- he never tells us.

Or maybe that's just in Part Two, which I am not going to watch.

Cynicism, and its bizarre younger brother conspiracism, are sometimes passed off as sophisticated, worldly stances.  I see students sometimes who act as if statements like "the government always lies," "all of science could be wrong," and "the world is going to hell" are some kind of brilliant intellectual declarations, and that the speaker is therefore a smart and perceptive individual who has seen past the smokescreen.

In reality, of course, cynicism is just as lazy as gullibility -- and it is perhaps worse, because the confidence with which cynics proclaim their "worldview" gives them the veneer of deep thought.  The truth is that disbelieving everything is as bad as believing everything, with the added filigree of making you a generally miserable person to be around.

At least gullible people are usually happy.

Better to do the hard work of thinking; better to trust others unless there's evidence to the contrary.  Most people, I maintain, are just ordinary folks who want what we all want -- love, shelter, security, and a good laugh every once in a while.  Peopling your fantasy world with evil manipulators doesn't make you brilliant; it just makes you a bitter, joyless pain in the ass.