"Crisis actors:" the conspiracy theorists reach a new low

Whenever I think the conspiracy theorists of the world have reached an all-time low, and can go no lower, they surprise me by getting out the shovels.

Of course, it's hard to beat the "9/11 is an inside job" thing.  Believe me, I'm no apologist for much of what our government does, but the idea that government operatives would bomb the World Trade Center, costing over a thousand lives, in order to provide false pretenses for entering a war against Iraq, is absurd and reprehensible.  And of course, you have the ongoing chemtrails foolishness, blaming the government (acting through HAARP, or some chemical additive to jet fuel, or both) for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy -- as if nature by itself isn't good enough at cooking up disastrous storms.

But now we have a new nadir.  The contention:  the Sandy Hook massacre never happened.  No children were killed.  The grieving parents and horrified first-responders were actors.  The whole thing was set up by the government...

... to give momentum for overturning the Second Amendment.

Don't believe me?  Go here if you can stand to, where you can watch a video explaining the whole thing (I got through about five minutes of it before nausea forced me to shut it off).  Otherwise, perhaps a photograph will suffice:

The whole thing is thoroughly debunked in this link at Snopes; but that won't stop the conspiracy nuts, of course.  These are the same people who think that Theodore Roosevelt's son, Kermit Roosevelt, was an actor who played the part of Adolf Hitler during World War II (in this mythical version of world history, no Jews were killed in concentration camps), and was spirited away by American CIA agents after the war was over, and spent the rest of his life as... Walt Disney.

Again, if you don't believe me... [link]

So it's not like any amount of evidence is going to convince these people.  They have long since abandoned any respect for actual evidence, logic, and rationality for their own warped view of humanity.

You know, despite my poking fun at irrational beliefs, I really do try to be tolerant.  I do the best I can to understand people whose views differ from my own, and not just to be an arrogant asshole.  I really, honestly believe that everyone has a right to his/her own opinions, as long as those opinions don't include forcing me to believe differently than I do.

I might make an exception in the case of these folks, however.  It is my considered stance that these folks are badly in need of a punch in the jaw.  If they really think that anyone, anyone has the right to demean what the parents, friends, and community of the victims of the Sandy Hook killings went through (and are still going through), in order to promote their own ridiculous, counterfactual worldview -- well, all I can say is that they're wrong.  And somehow they should be forced to take down that website, and after that, vanish into the obscurity that they so richly deserve.

A linguistic analysis of the Antichrist

Despite the fact that I scour the internet daily for weird news, sometimes I miss good ones.   I try not to fret about these oversights, however -- because one characteristic of woo-woos is that they never, ever let a claim die.  So if I miss a crazy, outlandish story, no worries; it'll be back.

Again and again and again.

One such bizarre claim, that I missed on its first go-round but which is recently repeating its circuit of ultra-religious right wingers (I've seen it posted on Facebook twice in the last week), is a story that contends that Jesus actually revealed the name of the Antichrist in the bible.  Never mind that wackos who are way too fond of the Book of Revelation have tried before to pin that title on various world leaders; Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, the Emperor Nero, and Ronald Reagan, for example, all had their supporters as being Satan's Right-hand Man.  (As for Reagan, his candidacy came about when someone noticed that his first, middle, and last names all had six letters -- 666, get it?  But my vote goes for Pope Benedict, who looks just like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.  I mean, can't you just picture him throwing lightning from his fingertips, and vaporizing protesters who support marriage equality, all the while cackling maniacally?)

But they're not the ones that the End Times crowd are after these days.  The whole thing apparently started with a 2009 YouTube video that claimed that the biblical passage "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from the heavens" (Luke 10:18) was actually encoding the real name of the Antichrist.  Here's the excerpt that's been making the rounds recently:

When I started doing a little research, I found the Greek word for 'lightning' is 'astrape,' and the Hebrew equivalent is 'baraq.'  I thought that was fascinating...  And I wondered what the word 'heights’ is, and I looked it up in the dictionary, and it’s 'bamah...'  If spoken by a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by the poetry of Isaiah, he would say these words in Hebrew … 'I saw Satan as Baraq Ubamah.'

 Righty-o.  Obama is the Antichrist.  Not that we have any kind of political agenda here, of course.

The only problem is, don't use a linguistic argument when there are lots of linguists around who are smarter than you are.  An expert in Hebrew and Aramaic, Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, weighed in on the contention in an article in Salon, and he said that there are several problems with it.  First, Ehrenkrantz says, the Hebrew root "bamah" doesn't mean "heights" as in "heavens," it means "heights" as in "hills."  Sticking a "u-" prefix on the word is consistent with Hebrew morphology, but doing that alters stops to continuants -- in this case, changing the /b/ to a /v/.  So, it would be "uvamah," not "ubamah."  And even so, the "u-" doesn't mean "from," it means "and."  So "baraq uvamah" means "lightning and hills."

The actual phrase "from the heavens," Ehrenkrantz says, should be "min ha-shamayim."  So the passage "lightning from the heavens" would be "baraq min ha-shamayim."  Which doesn't sound like much of anything except Hebrew.

Couple that with the fact that Obama's first name, Barack, does come from an Aramaic root, but it isn't "baraq," it's "barak," which means "blessing."  It's a cognate to the more common name Baruch.  So, if you're really trying to pull some apocalyptic linguistic analysis on the president's name, you would probably be more justified in concluding that Obama was sent to Earth by god as a blessing, and is undoubtedly going to kick some satanic ass while he's here.

Because the problem with twiddling around with language is that two can always play that game.  Linguistic coincidences and peculiarities in word root structure abound.  So let's have some fun, okay?  Let's start with the Hebrew word "rosh," which means "head, chief, or leader."  ("Rosh Hashanah" means "head of the year.")  And we all know the Latin word "limbo," the ablative form of "limbus," meaning "the edge, or outer circle, of hell."  So:  "the chieftain of the outer reaches of hell" would be "Rosh Limbo."

Hey, maybe this stuff works, after all.

Rabbits in space

A few days ago I made a statement that believing in the various end-of-the-world predictions was about as foolish as thinking that we're in danger of being attacked by Giant Space Bunnies.  So imagine my surprise when the following photograph came in from the Mars rover Curiosity:

I wasn't the only one who had that reaction; the woo-woo websites were lighting up like Christmas trees with posts speculating that extraterrestrial life had been found at last, and that we were looking at a Martian Space Bunny.  "Of course," one of the sites hinted darkly, "pretty quick the scientists will cook up a 'scientific explanation' of the whole thing and sweep it under the rug.  No way will they admit that they've discovered life on Mars."

Because, you know, scientists just loathe new, groundbreaking discoveries.  The whole purpose of the Mars rover was to confirm how boring and ordinary Mars is.  It'd really suck if they discovered anything interesting up there, something worth studying.  Scientists hate that.

But even so, I had to admit that the likelihood of it actually being a bunny was pretty small.  Whatever any possible Martian life might look like, it's unlikely to resemble our terrestrial forms.  So I figured, like our abovementioned conspiracy theorist, that the Space Bunny would be explained in short order, and wasn't going to turn out to be Bugs' distant cousin.

And sure enough.  As described in an article in the website of the National Paranormal Association (and despite their name, they're pretty careful to maintain a skeptical outlook on things), the scientists noticed some odd things about the Martian Bunny.  The first was that despite the fact that the air on Mars is extremely thin, and the wind was fairly calm that day, the Bunny was moving gradually across the ground.  In the time they observed it, it moved five or six meters, without leaving a mark on the ground.  "There's no evidence of a mark that it left in the soil as it moved," Jeff Johnson, a member of the camera team, stated.  "It was light enough and small enough to not leave any ‘footprints'."

Curious, however, the rover team posted a "bunny watch" to keep an eye on the object; and it was Johnson who finally came up with a consistent, plausible explanation.  He examined the spectrum of light reflected from the object's surface, and found that it matched exactly the spectrum of light reflected from the material that composed the rover's airbag, that was deployed as it descended toward the surface.  So it seems like what we have here is of decidedly terrestrial origin -- a vaguely bunny-shaped scrap of airbag material.

So, there you are.  The search continues.  But I'm very impressed at how this was solved -- using science, logic, and skepticism.  The caution that the Curiosity team showed, in not leaping to the conclusion that this object was what it looked like, is what separates science from woo-woo.  And it's why, given the choice, I trust the scientists.  They're generally pretty good at telling fact from fiction, and airbag cloth from a Martian Space Bunny.

Sense and nonsense about GMOs

Please allow me to start today's post with a brief genetics lesson.

There is a feature of the genetic code called universality.  Put simply, universality means that all organisms on Earth read DNA the same way.  DNA is made up of strings of nucleotides, and there are four kinds, represented by the letters A, C, G, and T.  The order of those four nucleotides spells out the genetic message, and allows DNA to act as a set of instructions for building proteins and guiding development.  And the language -- how the order is translated -- is identical, for every living thing.

Besides being a fairly powerful argument for common ancestry -- why would we all speak the same genetic language if we weren't all related? -- this has opened the door for genetic engineering.  Take a gene (a set of instructions from one organism) and insert it into another organism's DNA, and the recipient will read that gene the same way the donor did, and produce the same gene product.  It's how we now have human insulin produced from genetically modified bacteria; it's how scientists have created "golden rice," that stores vitamin A in its seeds; it's how goats were generated that express spider silk proteins in their milk.  It's also how, by transferring a gene for a fluorescent protein from jellyfish into the embryo of a cat, scientists created Glow Kitties:

The application to agriculture was obvious.  Once the technique was perfected, within short order we had bt corn and tomatoes (the crops produce a substance in the leaves that is toxic to caterpillars, reducing the amount of pesticides that need to be used); "RoundUp-Ready" soybeans, wheat, and barley (the crop plants are resistant to the herbicide RoundUp, allowing the use of that chemical on fields, reducing the labor from weeding and increasing crop yields); disease-resistant papayas, plums, cucumbers, potatoes, and squash; tomatoes with a significantly increased shelf life; and freeze-resistant strawberries.

Then the alarmists began to chime in.  GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) were dangerous, they said; GMO crops generated food that was unsafe for human consumption.  A (hoax) story began to circulate that a "scientific experiment" had been done, feeding chickens exclusively GMO corn, and "26 out of 33 of them died, and the survivors were stunted and unhealthy."  Critics claimed that companies like Monsanto, that had spearheaded GMO research, were lying to consumers about product safety.  This led to a widespread banning of GMOs in the EU, most of Africa, and elsewhere, and a powerful grassroots movement is demanding that world governments outlaw GMOs and genetic transfer research entirely.

Now, despite the fact that there is no possible way that all GMOs could have the same (negative) health effect -- by what possible mechanism could rice that makes vitamin A and a virus-resistant cucumber generate similar side effects? -- people lumped together all GMOs in their minds.  The whole thing isn't "natural."  And since natural, of course, equals good, GMOs equal bad.

No one was more virulent in fostering this viewpoint than Mark Lynas, who was one of the first people to rail against GMOs as toxic and dangerous.  But now -- miracle of miracles -- Mark Lynas has issued a public retraction of his original stance at the Oxford Farming Conference.  Why?

Science, that's why.

Here's a brief excerpt from his 5,000-word statement (but you should definitely read the whole thing):

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

He then goes on to describe how putting all GMOs in the same category is illogical; as each transferred gene does something different, it's impossible for them all to have the same effects, and therefore the safety of each new crop has to be weighed independently, just as we do with everything else.  Furthermore, the vast majority of them, as evaluated by careful, peer-reviewed science, are safe and beneficial, but that hasn't stopped alarmists from swaying governmental policy:

Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural...

So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.

All in all, it's a remarkable turnaround.  Finally, we have someone talking what is just plain common sense -- not trumpeting childish scare-tactics like labeling GMOs "Frankenfoods."  And his position is backed up by mountains of evidence-based science, not just urban legends and the naturalistic fallacy.

Of course, Lynas is pretty likely to be labeled as a shill.  I'll bet that before the words were even out of his mouth, someone had shouted, "How much did Monsanto pay you to say all that?"  As we've seen over and over in Skeptophilia, you just can't convince some people, not with volumes of carefully-researched data and the most flawless argument.  But the fact that someone like Lynas changed his mind -- and was willing to issue a public apology and a statement to that effect -- gives me hope.  Because, as he says, if we don't get smart about how we do it, and use the technology and resources we have, feeding all seven billion humans is going to be an increasingly impossible task to accomplish.

Reason vs. extremism

Let me say explicitly that I have no quarrel whatsoever with the majority of Christians.

Despite being an out, and rather outspoken, atheist, I am firmly of the opinion that everyone arrives at the truth in his/her own way and time.  My personal lack of belief should never be taken as some kind of tacit statement that I hold your philosophical or religious beliefs -- whatever they are -- in contempt.  Now, I may disagree with you, or think you are mistaken.  But whether we agree or not, you have every right to find your own path -- just as I do.

That said, I must ask a question of any Christian readers of this blog.  Why is it that so many of you refuse to stand up to the minority within your ranks who trumpet hate, intolerance, and fear-mongering?

It's a question I've asked before, and one that could equally well be applied in other realms.  In politics, individuals who break ranks with the party line (as Chris Christie did yesterday) are often briefly lauded as mavericks -- but the backlash they face from the establishment frequently makes their gains amongst free-thinkers a Pyrrhic victory.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if that weren't true?  Wouldn't it be nice if rank-and-file Christians resoundingly repudiated Donald Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association, for sending out emails like the one that went out to members yesterday, titled "What will religion look like in 2060?", and which contained the following passages:

What will religion look like in the year 2060?

Conservative Christians will be treated as second class citizens, much like African Americans were prior to civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Family as we know it will be drastically changed with the state taking charge of the children beginning at birth...

Churchbuildings [sic] will be little used, with many sold to secular buyers and the money received going to the government...

Christian broadcasting will be declared illegal based on the separation of church and state. The airwaves belong to the government, therefore they cannot be used for any religious purpose.

We will have, or have had, a Muslim president.

Cities with a name from the Bible such as St. Petersburg, Bethlehem, etc. will be forced to change their name due to separation of church and state.

Or, how about the statement that Mathew Staver, dean of Liberty University's School of Law, made to Moody Radio's Janet Parshall about what would happen if gay marriage was legalized across the United States:

Basically marriage will be completely destroyed, families will be destroyed, children will be hurt by this and freedom of speech and freedom of religion, including in the pulpit itself, will absolutely be bulldozed over.  This would open a floodgate of unimaginable proportions…

This is the thing that revolutions literally are made of.  This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing.  This would be the thing that revolutions are made of.  This could split the country right in two.  This could cause another civil war.  I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.

Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, here, but there's part of me that just can't accept that ordinary, regular Christians, the men and women who are the majority of Americans, actually believe that these men are speaking the truth.  Please reassure me; you don't really think that atheists like myself secretly want to tear churches down, that we would love to see the state taking charge of raising children, that we won't be satisfied until St. Paul, Minnesota is renamed "Nogodsville?"  That our disbelief implies that we will discriminate against you for your belief?  That if gays marry, it will have any other effect than... more gays being able to marry?

If I'm right -- that the majority of Christians recognize that what these men are saying is blatant foolishness -- why do so few stand up and say so?  Why does it take behavior as egregious as that of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church to make people willing to break ranks?  You are not betraying the cause by stopping the extremists, the hate-filled, the fear-mongers, from being your spokespeople.  By doing so you are opening a space for dialogue, fostering reconciliation, and recognizing what is nothing more than simple fact -- that despite our philosophical differences, we all have the same basic human needs and desires, and that given a chance, we can coexist happily.

So I will ask once again: have the courage to speak up against these men.  Say, simply, "You don't speak for me."  Be willing to be a voice of reason.  Heaven knows, we need them, on both sides.

The attractiveness of cults

One of my failings is my inability to comprehend how people can find themselves still being suckered in by ideologies that are obviously, demonstrably false.  Now, mind you, I get why people stick with what they were taught as children; if you grew up being told, for example, that the world is 6,000-odd years old, and that people are bad because the first woman on Earth got tricked into eating a piece of fruit by a talking snake, and that (furthermore) the talking snake is still around trying to trick you, too, it's unsurprising that you wouldn't listen to the likes of me.

What is completely incomprehensible to me, though, is how anyone from outside the system, who had seen other ways of thinking, would look at something like that and say, "Wow!  Now that makes intrinsic sense!"  Yet I know two former students, both extremely bright young men, who did exactly that, rejecting science and logic and rationality for biblical literalism.

My incomprehension, though, turns to incredulity when I see people voluntarily espousing ideologies that are not just flat-out wrong, but destructive, abusive, and (frankly) scary.  Cults, in other words.  And here I am, of course, referring to the Church of Scientology.

I've long avoided mentioning Scientology in this blog, largely because I'd rather not have Tom Cruise show up at my house and start jumping on my sofa.  For another thing, the hopeful part of me keeps assuming that this cult has to be on the way out, what with all of the bad press it's gotten the last few years -- more than one exposé by investigative reporters, not to mention the whole kerfuffle over the anti-Scientology episode of South Park.  (You might remember that the episode "Trapped in a Closet" resulted in Isaac Hayes, who voiced the character Chef, leaving South Park in protest, and Tom Cruise threatening Viacom that if they didn't pull the episode, he would withdraw from the cast of Mission Impossible III.  Viacom caved, and cancelled a rebroadcast of the episode; and Cruise, satisfied, went ahead with the movie, which went on to net a total of $2.56 in the box office.)

All of this makes Scientology seem ridiculous -- and certainly a good many of their beliefs fall into the "no, really?" category -- but there is a darker side to the organization.  People who have investigated church leaders have been harassed, sued, and threatened.  Wikipedia finally had to resort to closing off the main pages about the church and its leaders in 2009, because true believers wouldn't stop altering the pages to remove critical or negative passages.  The church continues to pour money into converting people in other countries, a move that some governments have resisted.  Just four days ago, a story in the Atlantic Wire describes charges being filed in Belgium against the church, including "extortion, fraud, privacy breaches, and the illegal practice of medicine."

People, however, continue to join, which baffles me.  Church leaders boast that Scientology is "the fastest-growing religion on Earth."  Given their secrecy, it's hard to get accurate numbers, but Janet Reitman, who did an investigative report for Rolling Stone in 2011, estimates their membership at between 100,000 and 200,000 worldwide.

So I must ask: what about this ideology do people find appealing?  It's a pretty bizarre amalgam of claims -- involving alien spirits ("Thetans"), an intergalactic overlord named "Xenu," a cult of personality about the founder that borders on hero-worship, and something very much like brainwashing.  Consider all of the negative press in recent years -- including an allegation that L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology after making a bet with science fiction writer Robert Heinlein that he (Hubbard) could become filthy rich by making up his own religion.  (Hubbard won, obviously, but probably didn't need to collect, given how rich he did become.)

And yet people still join.  And donate.  Just yesterday, an article appeared in the online Australian news source The West entitled "Scientologists Build Underground 'Space Alien Cathedral,'" about a recently-discovered subterranean bunker near Roswell, New Mexico, which allegedly houses (in a thermonuclear-weapon-proof vault) an electronic copy of all of the writings of L. Ron Hubbard and his disciples.  Further, the shape of the bunker as seen from space is supposed to be a symbol recognizable to "Xenu," so if humanity tanks, the galactic overlord will still be able to find Hubbard's sacred texts.

Which, of course, means that they still somehow have the kind of cash and manpower at their disposal that would allow them to build something this complex.

This is absolutely beyond me, and in fact I'm finding it hard to think of any insightful commentary I might be able to add.  I'll just finish up by saying that as an aside, my dogs are trained to bite anyone who jumps on our sofa, so you might want to take that under advisement.  In fact, it might be best if you just stay in your bunker where it's safe.  Thank you.

Keep it on the QT

Dear Woo-Woos of the World,

Ten days?  Ten days is all you could wait?

You just couldn't bear to have a little more time go by before you started blathering on once again about cycles and calendars and End Times?  What, it wasn't enough to have four (count 'em, four -- May 21, October 21, December 12, and December 21) failed predictions of the end of the world in the last eight months, you now have to come up with a new one?

If for some reason, you want to take a closer look at the latest in idiotic prophecies, here's a page from the bizarre site Unexplained Mysteries entitled, "Quetzalcoatl: When Will He Return?"  In case you were optimistic about the webpage's contents, it is far too much to hope for that the entire article consists of one sentence: "HE DOESN'T EXIST, YOU MORON."  No, the writer, one L. M. Leteane, takes Central American Native mythology, and throws it in a blender with Babylonian mythology and Egyptian mythology (because of course, the more ridiculous incorrect beliefs you put together, the more logical things get), and comes up with the following:

The Egyptian god Thoth and the Central American god Quetzalcoatl are actually the same person, because obviously a dude with the head of an ibis and a winged, feathered snake are so similar that they must be one and the same.  QT (as I will hereafter refer to this combined god) has a real fondness for numbers, and his magic number is either 52 or 144,000, the latter being because that's the number of blocks in the Great Pyramid of Giza.  If you take 13 bunches of 144,000 days, you get about 5,125 years; that amount of years, if you start in 3,113 B.C. E. (why start there?  Because the Sumerians, that's why.  Stop asking questions) brings you to the year 2012.  But we just finished 2012, and the world didn't end, amazingly enough.  According to L. M. Leteane, that's because the year 2012 as an end date is "valid but not correct."

And no, I didn't make that quote up.

So, because QT also likes 52, add that number to 2012, and you get 2087.  Add 720 years to that, and you get the year 2807, which contains "13 (almost 14) lots of 52, just as Thoth said!"

No, I didn't make that quote up, either.

Now, add 562 years to that, because of something about Pisces and astrology and who the hell knows, and you get the year 3369, which is when the "comet Marduk" is supposed to return.  Marduk is a Babylonian god.  Apparently, it's also a comet.  Who knew?  Not the astronomers, I'm guessing, because Leteane says it is "not a comet mapped in recent times."

Oh, yeah, and there was something in there about the Great Flood of Noah happening in 10,983 B.C.E. because that was when the Earth's axial tilt was "at its most precarious."  What exactly this means, I'm not sure.  Maybe Leteane thinks that if the Earth tilts too much, it falls over and dumps ocean all over the place.  I dunno.

Anyhow, I'm gonna stop here, because the whole thing is making my head hurt.  If you're curious, you can take a look at the link, or buy Leteane's book, They Came From the Sky.  Me, I'm done with all this.  All I can say is that I'm glad that the predicted End Date is 1,357 years from now, because even in a best-case scenario, I'll be long dead by that time and won't have to worry about nimrods further "analyzing" the situation and trying to decide why, despite all of this faultless logic, the world once again didn't end.