Non-prophet

It's a phenomenon I've comment upon before; the mystifying fact that self-styled prophets, who claim to have a direct pipeline to god, continue to have a following even when they're repeatedly wrong.

I mean, it'd make sense if once somebody proclaims "God told me such-and-so," and the opposite of "such-and-so" ends up happening, that people would say, "Oh.  I guess he was lying about speaking with the divine word."  But no.  Charismatic preachers like Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart have repeatedly made claims that are supposed to come directly from the heavenly throne -- most of which have to do with us unbelievers being smote (smitten?  smot? smoot?  I've never been entirely sure how to conjugate that verb) -- and none of them ever come true.  Their followers are, as far as I've seen, not discouraged by this.

The latest contender for the False Prophets Lifetime Achievement Award is Lance Wallnau, author, speaker, and "spiritual guide," who started out his losing streak by claiming that god told him that the Cleveland Indians were going to win the World Series because Cleveland was the host for the Republican National Convention while Chicago is President Obama's home town, and (of course) god approves of Republicans while the Democrats are naughty in his sight.

Of course, the problem is that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.  Wallnau was undaunted, however, and posted a new spin on the situation, saying that he "was initially concerned that a Chicago vs. Cleveland contest may be symbolic of the Republican convention (Cleveland) vs Democratic Obama machine (Chicago)... but flip this situation around and see that the underdog won on a progressive field. (The Cleveland field is owned by Progressive Insurance.)"

Which leaves only one question, which is: what?

I mean, I'm not really expecting Wallnau to make sense, but as an explanation for why he fucked up, it's pretty bizarre.  And because there's no ridiculous statement that you can't make more ridiculous if you just keep talking, Wallnau went ahead and made things worse by making a series of further claims:

• The Cubs winning the World Series is actually a positive message from god, because the last time the Cubs won was 1908, which was the same year as the Azusa Street Revival that founded the Pentecostal Movement.  (Which is made somewhat less impressive by the fact that Azusa Street happened in 1906, not 1908.)
• The Cubs' victory represents the breaking of the "Curse of the Bambino," which was the work of Satan himself.  (Whether it's Satanic in origin or not, the Curse of the Bambino has to do with the Red Sox, not the Cubs.)
• If Trump wins, he'll be 70 years old when he's inaugurated, which is significant because "70 is exactly the number of years since Israel became a nation."  Which is problematic from the standpoint that 2017 minus 1948 is 69, not 70.

But other than that, his prophecies are absolutely spot-on.

Despite all of this, Wallnau is enthusiastic.  His sources say that the "curse over America is breaking and a fresh wind is blowing," and that that the church’s “long-standing losing streak is coming to an end."  He says that 2016 is "going to be the year of God reversing the curse … God pouring out his spirit."

But based on his previous predictions, I wouldn't hold my breath about any of that.

So anyhow.  I guess we'll find out whether his prediction of Trump winning the presidency is correct within a few hours, assuming that there isn't some repeat of the 2000 election nightmare wherein we had to keep our sanity somehow while enduring interminable counts, recounts, suits, and countersuits.  It's bad enough that the elections here in this country start a full two years early; the idea that it could go on for months after the polls close today makes me want to move to Costa Rica.  In either case, though, I'll make a prediction of my own; whether or not Trump wins, Wallnau will continue claiming that he has direct access to the knowledge of god -- and his followers will continue to believe him.

Cup of woe

Those of you who are, like me, of the atheist persuasion will no doubt be thrilled to hear that we are already ramping up the War on Christmas.

Hey, if the stores can start putting up Christmas decorations before Halloween, in the interest of fairness it should be okay for us godless heathens to start our diabolical machinations at around the same time, right?

So it's time for us to reveal our strategy for 2016.  Ready?

This year we are going to destroy Christmas and crush the hopes and dreams of little Christian children everywhere by: getting Starbucks to change the color of their coffee cups.

Mwa ha ha ha etc.  *rubs hands together maniacally*

Okay, so I admit that we atheists had nothing to do with the fact that Starbucks changed their coffee cup design.  In fact the first one, which was red, honestly had nothing to do with Baby Jesus, either.  It was just red, as are many things in life, including stop signs and the sweatshirt I'm currently wearing.  The Starbucks marketing arm decided that it was time for a change, and hired artist Shogo Ota to draw a very cool design -- a hundred faces drawn using a single pen stroke.  Ota's design, said a spokesperson for Starbucks, "represents the connections we have as a community. It's meant to be a symbol of unity, and to encourage us to be good to each other."

Which elicited an "oh, hell no" from the evangelical Christians.  Apparently to them Christianity, and Christmas in particular, has nothing to do with unity and being good to each other.  Here is just a small sampling of the outraged responses Starbucks got upon revealing the new design:

• Screw you.  My coffee should NOT (and does NOT) come with political brainwashing.  I dropped Starbucks like a hot rock.
• Frankly, the only thing that can redeem them from this whitewashing of Christmas is to print Bible verses on their cups next year.
• All Republicans boycott Starbucks.
• The giant coffee chain is calling this year’s monstrosity the “unity” cup...  Hmm, what else is unified…. ISIS!!?!  The unified caliphate of the Islamic State!
• Starbucks gets rid of Christmas colour, replaces with Islamic colour, all in the name of "unity."  Get used to this.

Yes!  Islamic green!  Same as those goddamn trees you see everywhere!  And grass!  Even the plant kingdom is trying to brainwash you to accept Shari'a law!  Buy a house plant, and the next thing you know you'll be standing on the street corner shouting "Allahu akbar" and taking pot shots at passersby!

I mean, for fuck's sake.

What strikes me about this tempest in a coffee cup is that these are, by and large, the same people who scream bloody murder about "political correctness" whenever someone objects to derogatory language being directed toward minorities, and yet they consider a change in a coffee cup design to be the moral equivalent of carpet-bombing Whoville.  So I guess their blathering about political correctness translates to "you can't take offense to anything I say, but I'm still entitled to get my panties in a twist over absolutely nothing."

So anyhow.  My feeling is that if we non-believers are going to get accused of waging a War on Christmas, we oughta at least live up to our reputations, and that as a first salvo, changing coffee cup colors kind of sucks.  Time to ramp things up.  I'm thinking of doing my part by carrying around a boombox, and every time I hear sappy Christmas music, revving up some Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails or Linkin Park.  So goodbye, "Little Drummer Boy," "Frosty the Snowman," "Sleigh Bells," and "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer."  Hello "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Closer," and "Waiting for the End to Come."

Which would be a distinct improvement, especially as regards to "Little Drummer Boy."  I freakin' hate that song.

Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many 5Ks, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology that suggests my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like  "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent. They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt... They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my run times lately, and in fact just set a personal record for a 5K two weeks ago -- 29:57 (which may not seem all that great to any competitive runners out there, but considering that I'm 56 and until this year hadn't run at all for ten years, I'm pretty damn pleased with it).

I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, however, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

Space nation

It probably is readily apparent to anyone who is a regular reader of Skeptophilia that I am frequently perplexed by the behavior of my fellow human beings.

Some of my perplexity is over things that people do which are unpleasant -- I find the motivations for such things as racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia not simply repellent, but (on some level) incomprehensible.  Why anyone would think that gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation was a valid basis for discrimination is absolutely baffling to me.

On the other hand, there's the behavior that falls into the "harmless but weird" department.  As an example of this latter tendency, we have the recent founding by Russian scientist Igor Ashurbeyli of the "independent space nation" of "Asgardia."

[image courtesy of NASA]

Ashurbeyli has called for people to sign up for citizenship, and in two weeks got a half a million names.  (Apparently further sign ups are on hold for now, but when they're reopened Ashurbeyli expects them to continue with undiminished fervor.)  As far as why he's doing it, he says, "Today, many of the problems relating to space law may never be solved in the dark woods of modern international law...  It is time now to create a new judicial reality in space."

Which may well be true -- I am certainly no expert in, um, "space jurisprudence" -- but his goals may be a little bit on the lofty side.  That's not discouraging him one bit, however.  Now that the number of applications has exceeded 100,000, Ashurbeyli says, "we can officially apply to the UN for the status of state."

Which I kind of wonder about.  Of course, the whole thing about what constitutes a nation and what does not isn't exactly clear.  It's not enough, apparently, to declare yourself an independent sovereign state; there's this thing called "recognition" wherein a more powerful nation can basically put its hands over its eyes and pretend a less powerful nation doesn't exist, and the less powerful nation has no recourse but to keep whining "Yes, I am!  I'm real, I swear!" until the more powerful nation gives up and says, "Oh, okay, I guess."

It's also unclear how Asgardia can be a nation given that it doesn't have any actual territory to speak of.  The concept of "nation" is tangled up in the control of land, and unless Ashurbeyli and the other Asgardians are laying actual physical claim to space, it's hard to see how this can be a state in the conventional definition of the word.  "A state in the classical sense has a territory and has a significant portion of its population living on that territory," said Frans von der Dunk, professor of law at the University of Nebraska.  "As long as nobody's going into space, you can have as many signatures as you want, but you are not a state."

Which is probably true -- far be it from me, non-lawyer that I am, to argue with an expert in legal matters -- but kind of overlooks the fact that the whole idea of national borders is itself pretty bizarre.  The idea that there's an arbitrary invisible line drawn on the ground, and on the west side of that line it's legal to drink alcohol and on the east side it isn't, is really peculiar.  If aliens ever land on Earth, you have to wonder what they'll think of the fact that we have sliced up the planet into competing pieces, and they all have mutually contradictory sets of laws.

The aliens will probably up stakes and return home with the conclusion that there's no intelligent life on this planet, is what I'm thinking.

Of course, I can't argue with Ashurbeyli's motivations.  On the "concept" page of the Asgardia website, he writes:

The essence of Asgardia is Peace in Space, and the prevention of Earth’s conflicts being transferred into space. 

Asgardia is also unique from a philosophical aspect – to serve entire humanity and each and everyone, regardless of his or her personal welfare and the prosperity of the country where they happened to be born. 

Asgardia's philosophical envelope is to ‘digitalise’ the Noosphere, creating a mirror of humanity in space but without Earthly division into states, religions and nations.  In Asgardia we are all just Earthlings!

Which I can't honestly argue with.  And I suppose it's good that we have idealists like Ashurbeyli who are willing to throw themselves into a high-flown project like this, even if it's not immediately apparent how it will all work.

In any case, I may sign up, once they re-open registration.  Not entirely sure why except to say that I did it.

So I guess my initial statement that "humans are weird" is only accurate if I include myself in that assessment.

Acting on absurdities

In C. S. Lewis's wonderful fantasy story The Magician's Nephew, he says, "The trouble about making yourself stupider than you really are is you very often succeed."  In the story, Uncle Andrew (the magician of the title) has convinced himself so completely that what he is seeing isn't real that in the end, he actually becomes unable to see it.

It's not so far off from what happens with conspiracy theorists.  When you have accustomed yourself to accepting an idea even if it has no evidence to support it -- or, in some cases, because it has no evidence to support it -- you're likely to fall for any damn fool claim that comes along.  And, if you'll allow me another quote, this one from Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

We got an object lesson in these two principles last week when two men from Georgia, Michael Mancil and James Dryden, were arrested for plotting to go to Alaska with piles of weapons, with the intent of blowing up HAARP.  You probably know that HAARP -- the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project -- has been blamed for everything from creating hurricanes to triggering earthquakes, when in reality all it does is study the ionosphere for the purposes of improving communication and navigation systems.  To be sure, it looks kind of creepy; a field of antennae sprouting up from the Alaskan tundra.

So the conspiracy theorists just love HAARP, and their fears were not assuaged a bit when the U. S. Air Force, which ran HAARP, basically turned it over last year to the University of Alaska - Fairbanks.  You'd think that people would say, "Okay, if HAARP really could be used as an ultra-powerful weather modification device, capable of spawning tornadoes on the other side of the planet, the Air Force would definitely not release their interest in it."

But that is not how the minds of conspiracy theorists work.  Of course HAARP is still being run by the government, and is still causing lightning strikes in Dakar, Senegal.  We couldn't be that far wrong, could we?

Of course not.

But as I pointed out before, people who (1) don't care about evidence and (2) are convinced that the government is in a huge conspiracy to wipe out the entire human race are very likely to do stupid stuff.  Witness Mancil and Dryden, who according to the Coffee County Sheriff's Department had amassed "[a] massive amount of arsenal seized [that] looked like something out of a movie, one where a small army was headed to war."

Apparently, besides HAARP's role in modifying the weather, Mancil and Dryden also thought that it was being used to "trap people's souls."  What the U. S. government would do with a bunch of souls, I have no idea.  Maybe they figured that there were some members of congress who could use a replacement, I dunno.  Be that as it may, Mancil and Dryden were apparently "told by god" that they were to go to Alaska, kidnap a scientist and steal his ID badge, and use that to gain access to the facility, after which they would blow it up and "release the trapped souls."

So here we have yet another example of why it's important for people to start paying more attention to facts, and less attention to crazy claims made by random wingnuts.  (Following this dictum would put Alex Jones out of business, which would be a step in the right direction.)  In any case, I'm glad the whole thing ended happily.  The would-be terrorists never made it out of their home county and are cooling their heels in jail, and the scientific facility is safe, at least for the time being.  So now we can turn our attention to worrying about other things, such as the outcome of next week's presidential election, which may well leave me wishing that HAARP could wipe out humanity.

Return to sender

Despite my daily perusal of the news and science sites for interesting topics, sometimes I miss stuff.  It's inevitable, of course, but sometimes a story is so absolutely tailor-made for this blog that I can't believe that (1) I didn't see it, and (2) a reader didn't send me a link.

That was my reaction when I ran into, quite by accident, an article from Scientific American nine years ago about a researcher in the Netherlands who did a psychological study of people who believe in reincarnation.  I've always found the whole reincarnation thing a bit mystifying, especially given that most of the people you talk to who claim past lives say they were Spartan warriors or Babylonian princesses when, just by the numbers, the vast majority of people should recall being Chinese peasants.  Or, if you allow reincarnation from other life forms, being a bug.

But no.  "Boy, life sure was boring, when I was a bug" is something you rarely ever hear reincarnated people say.

The Wheel of Life [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, there are some people who believe fervently that they were once someone else, somewhere else.  So Maarten Peters, a psychological researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, decided to see if he could figure out what was going on.

He asked for people who believed they could recall past lives to volunteer, and an equal number of people who did not believe in reincarnation, and gave them a test called the false fame paradigm.  This test gives subjects a list of unfamiliar names to memorize, and then the next day those names are mixed in with new names and the names of famous people.  The question was: which of the names presented belong to famous people?

When he compared the results, an interesting pattern emerged.  The people who believed in reincarnation were, across the board, more likely to commit a source-monitoring error -- an error in judgment about the source of a memory.  They were far more likely than the control group to think that the unfamiliar names they had memorized the previous day belonged to famous people.  Evidently, they had a marked tendency to conflate their own (recent) memory of a name with (more distant) memories of hearing about celebrities in the news.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters said about his results.  "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

The implication, of course, is that the "memories" these people have about past lives are very likely to be an amalgam of memories of other things -- stories they've read, documentaries they've watched, perhaps even scenarios they'd created.  Whatever's going on, it's extremely unlikely that the memories these people claim to have come from a prior life.

Of course, there's a ton of anecdotal evidence for reincarnation, which in my mind doesn't carry a great deal of weight.  The whole thing has been the subject of more than one scholarly paper, including one in 2013 by David Cockburn, of St. David's University College (Wales), called "The Evidence for Reincarnation."  In it, he cites claims like the following:

On March 15th, 1910, Alexandrina Samona, five-year-old daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Carmelo Samona, of Palermo, Sicily, died of meningitis to the great grief of her parents.  Within a year Mrs. Samona [gave] birth to twin girls.  One of these proved to bear an extraordinary physical resemblance to the first Alexandrina and was given the same name.  Alexandrina II resembled Alexandrina I not only in appearance but also in disposition and likes and dislikes.  Stevenson then lists a number of close physical similarities and of shared characteristic traits of behaviour.  For example: Both liked to put on adult stockings much too large for them and walk around the room in them.  Both enjoyed playfully altering people's names, such as changing Angelina into Angellanna or Angelona, or Caterina into Caterana.   Most striking of all, however, were the child's memory claims: 'When Alexandrina II was eight, her parents told her they planned to take her to visit Monreale and see the sights there. At this Alexandrina II interjected: "But, Mother, I know Monreale, I have seen it already." Mrs. Samona told the child she had never been to Monreale, but the child replied : "Oh, yes, I went there. Do you not recollect that there was a great church with a very large statue of a man with his arms held open, on the roof? And don't you remember that we went there with a lady who had horns and that we met some little red priests in the town?" At this Mrs. Samona recollected that the last time she went to Monreale she had gone there with Alexandrina I some months before her death.  They had taken with them a lady friend who had come to Palermo for a medical consultation as she suffered from disfiguring excrescences on her forehead.  As they were going into the church, the Samonas' party had met a group of young Greek priests with blue robes decorated with red ornamentation.' 

Even though Cockburn is willing to admit reincarnation as a possible explanation of such claims, he sounds a little dubious himself; toward the end of his paper, he writes, "[E]ven if we did think in terms of some underlying common element which explains the similarities between these individuals we would still need to show that the presence of the common element justifies the claim that we are dealing with a single person: to show, that is, what significance is to be attached to the presence of that element."  I would add that we also need to eliminate the possibility of outright lying on the part of the parents -- there has been more than one case where a parent has attempted to hoodwink the public with regards to some purportedly supernatural ability their child allegedly has.

So anyhow.  My sense is that the evidence for reincarnation is pretty slim, and that any claims of past lives are best explained by fallible memory, if not outright lying.  But I'm guessing no one will be surprised that I'm saying that.  In any case, I better wrap this up.  Lots to do today.  Considerably more, I would imagine, than I'd have to do if I was a bug, although that's pure speculation because I don't have much of a basis for comparison.

Give me a break...

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the Mandela Effect, which is the idea that when you remember some major event differently than other people, it's not because your memory is wrong, it's because you have side-slipped here from an alternate universe where the version you remember actually happened.  The phenomenon gets its name from the fact that a lot of people "remember" that Nelson Mandela died in jail decades ago, which of course didn't happen.  These same folks are the ones who make an enormous deal over "remembering" that the Berenstain Bears -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as "Your parents and teachers are always right about everything" -- were originally the Berenstein Bears.

Why their name would be different in an alternate universe, I don't know.  From watching Star Trek and Lost in Space, I always assumed that the major differences you'd find in an alternate universe is that all of the good guys would be bad guys, and because of that, many of them would be wearing beards.

But the Mandela Effect isn't going away, despite the fact that if you believe it you're basically saying that your memory is 100% accurate, all of the time, and that you have never misremembered anything in your life.  The whole thing has become immensely popular to "study" -- although what there is there to study, I don't know.  Witness the fact that there is now a subreddit (/r/MandelaEffect) with almost thirty thousand subscribers.

The most recent thing to be brought to light by this cadre of timeline-jumpers has to do with the "Kit Kat" candy bar.  Apparently many people recall the name from their childhood as being "Kit Kats" (with an "s"), even though that doesn't really work with the candy's irritating ear-worm of a jingle, "Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar."  So once again, it's more likely that you're in an alternate universe than you just aren't recalling the name of a candy bar correctly.  And now we have someone who has proposed an explanation as to why all of this is happening.

You ready?

The Mandela Effect is caused by...

... CERN.

Yes, CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator, home of the Large Hadron Collider, which became famous for not creating a black hole and destroying the Earth when it was fired up last year.  CERN has been the target of woo-woo silliness before now; back in 2009, projects had to be sidelined for months while the mechanism was repaired after a seagull dropped a piece of a baguette onto some electrical wires and caused a short, and the woo-woos decided that the seagull had been sent back in time to destroy the LHC before it destroyed the entire universe.

So I guess there's no end to what CERN can do, up to and including vaporizing specific letters off of candy bar wrappers.  But you know, if CERN can alter our timeline, don't you think there's more important stuff that it could accomplish besides changing the spellings of candy bars and cartoon bears?  First thing I'd do is go back in time and hand Donald Trump's father a condom.

But I might be a little biased in that regard.

What baffles me about all of this is that not only is there abundant evidence that human memory is plastic and fallible, but just from our own experience you'd think there would be hundreds of examples where we'd clearly recalled things incorrectly.  The fact that these people have to invent an "effect" that involves alternate universes to support why they're always right takes hubris to the level of an art form.

So anyway.  I'm not too worried about the possibility of my having side-slipped from another timeline where I was a world-famous author whose novels regularly rocket to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.  I'm more concerned at the moment over how the hell I'm going to get the "Kit Kat" jingle out of my head, because that thing is really fucking annoying.