Magnets, politics, and preconceived notions

Two stories showed up just in the last couple of days that are interesting primarily in juxtaposition.

First, we had a scholarly paper published in PLOS One, entitled "Copper Bracelets and Magnetic Wrist Straps for Rheumatoid Arthritis – Analgesic and Anti-Inflammatory Effects: A Randomised Double-Blind Placebo Controlled Crossover Trial."  In it, we find out what most skeptics suspected from the get-go -- that magnetic and copper bracelets and anklets and necklaces and shoe-sole inserts and so on are a complete non-starter when it comes to treating disease.

These claims have been around for years, and usually rely on pseudoscientific bosh of the kind you find in this site, wherein we have the following "explanation:"

Life developed under the influence of the earth's geomagnetic field.  We are surrounded by a sea of magnetism.  The human body, its individual organs and each of the millions of cells making up the organs and the body bathed by this sea are magnetically charged.  Cell regulation, tissue function and life itself are controlled by internal electromagnetic currents.  In disease states, these electromagnetic potentials are altered but fortunately can be favorably influenced by the external application of magnetics...  Used correctly, Electro-Magnetic Energy Fields are a proven therapeutic modality.  Research and clinical experience has established that the very gentle, EULF, low power pulsed magnetic energy improves the repair of damaged tissue and reduction of pain, improved oxygen transport in the red blood cells, increased nutrient and oxygen uptake at the cellular level.  Greater elasticity of blood vessels, changes in acid/alkaline balance, altering of enzyme and hormone activity, all play an important role in the return to good health...  Negative magnetic fields oxygenate and alkalize by aiding the body's defense against bacteria, fungi, and parasites, all of which thrive in an acid medium.  In degenerative diseases, calcium is found deposited around inflamed joints, bruised areas on the hell, and in bones and kidney stones.  Infections occur because they function well in an acidic, oxygen deficient state.

Which, in my opinion, should win some kind of award for packing the most bullshit into a single paragraph.

So the whole copper-and-magnet thing never did make much sense.  But don't take my word for it; here's what Richardson, Gunadasa, Bland, and MacPherson said, after having run a double-blind efficacy test on magnetic bracelets:

The results of this study may be understood in a number of ways. The most obvious interpretation is that they demonstrate that magnetic wrist straps, and also copper bracelets, have little if any specific therapeutic effects (i.e. beyond those of a placebo) on pain, inflammation, or disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis...  The fact that we were unable to demonstrate... a difference for the primary outcome measure on its own, nor indeed any of the other core measures employed, strongly suggests that wearing magnetic wrists straps, or copper bracelets, in order to minimise disease progression and alleviate symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis is a practice which lacks clinical efficacy.

But as I said, this is hardly a surprise to skeptics, who doubted the whole thing pretty much from the outset.

The second story at first seems to connect to the first in only a tangential fashion at best.  Chris Mooney, a skeptical writer of well-deserved high reputation, wrote about it this week in Grist in a piece called "Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to do Math."   In Mooney's article we hear about a study by Dan Kahan and his colleagues, of Yale Law School, in which two groups of people were asked to solve the same (rather difficult) mathematical problem -- but one group was given the problem in the context of its being about "the effectiveness of a new skin cream for rashes," and the other group that it was about "the effectiveness of a new law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public."

What Kahan's study found was that when the problem involved the relatively emotionally-neutral context of a skin cream, your ability to solve the problem correctly depended upon only one thing -- your skill at math.  In other words, both Democrats and Republicans scored well on the problem if they were good at math, and both scored poorly if they were bad at math.  But when the problem involved handguns, a different pattern emerged.  Here's how Mooney explains the results:

So how did people fare on the handgun version of the problem? They performed quite differently than on the skin cream version, and strong political patterns emerged in the results — especially among people who are good at mathematical reasoning. Most strikingly, highly numerate liberal Democrats did almost perfectly when the right answer was that the concealed weapons ban does indeed work to decrease crime...  an outcome that favors their pro-gun-control predilections. But they did much worse when the correct answer was that crime increases in cities that enact the ban... 

The opposite was true for highly numerate conservative Republicans: They did just great when the right answer was that the ban didn't work... but poorly when the right answer was that it did. 

Put simply: when our emotions and preconceived notions are involved, data and logic have very little impact on our brains.

This is a profoundly unsettling conclusion, especially for people like me.  Every day I get up and write about how people should be more logical and rational and data-driven, and here Kahan et al. show me that all of the double-blind studies in the world aren't going to convince people that their magnet-studded copper bracelets aren't helping their arthritis pain if they already thought that they worked.

It does leave me with a sort of bleak feeling.  I mean, why test wacko claims, if the only people who will believe the results are the ones who already agreed with the result of the experiment beforehand?  Maybe this justifies the fact that I spend as much time making fun of woo-woos as I do arguing logically against them.  Appeal to people's emotions, and you're much more likely to get a result.

On the other hand, this feels to me way too much like sinking to their level.  I live in hope that the people who are convinced by what I write -- and maybe there have been a few -- have been swayed more by my logic than by my sarcasm.

But given human nature -- and Kahan's experiment -- maybe that's a losing proposition.

Aquatic cryptid update

It is amazing to me, after all of these years of having a (rather guilty) fascination with cryptozoology, that I still can run into cryptids that I've never heard of.  This week, for example, I discovered two that were new to me -- one veritably in my own back yard.

The first came up because it's the 25th anniversary of its alleged appearance.  Back in 1988, farmers in Rhyader, Wales, began to report that their large animals -- especially sheep -- were being killed by "a single bite to the sternum."  One farm, owned by the Pugh family, lost over three dozen of its sheep to the attacker.

The article summarizing the events of a quarter-century ago states that the townspeople initially attributed the attacks to a "black panther."  This is somewhat amusing given that the only black panthers in Wales are in zoos, and if one went missing, the zookeeper would probably have noticed.  On the other hand, reports of giant marauding felines in Britain are common enough that the phenomenon has its own Wikipedia page, so I guess if we Yanks can have our Bigfoots, then the Brits can have their panthers.

Be that as it may, the Ginormous Kitty Theory received a serious credibility blow when it was found that the evidence left behind by the Beast of Rhyader, as it came to be known, showed that the creature had not been walking on four legs -- but had, instead, slithered up from the River Wye.  So rather than modifying their guess to the Ginormous Aquatic Legless Kitty Theory, the townspeople settled on a new model, namely the Ginormous Aquatic Serpent Theory.

Not an actual photograph of the Beast of Rhyader

The author uses the term "Lovecraftian" to describe the beast, which is apt only in that it killed things.  Most of the creatures in Lovecraft's stories also sucked out their victims' souls, ate their faces, or converted them to puddles of sticky goo.  So I think we can say that the resemblance, if any, was purely coincidental.

In any case, the attacks suddenly ceased of their own accord in December of 1988, never to be repeated, and the mystery was never solved.


But if that's scary enough, little did I know that there was a similar beast only a few miles away from me.  In Cayuga Lake, a long, narrow glacial lake that's only five miles (as the crow flies) from my front door, there is a creature called "Old Greeny" that resembles the Beast of Rhyader in that (1) it's aquatic, (2) it's reptilian, and (3) it almost certainly doesn't exist.  But this last isn't going to stop the reports from coming in, one of them from an "unnamed resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania," who was visiting our fair region back in 2009, and had the following to say:

I’ve been face to face with Old Greeny; not more than 100 feet away from me as I stood on the northern shore of Lake Cayuga looking south across the lake; eight or nine years ago. It raised its triangular-tooth-filled jaws with aquatic plants hanging from it’s half-open mouth to break surface for only about three seconds before once again submerging. I will never forget that large, unblinking eye staring to the west at nothing in particular; never acknowledging my presence. Don’t let anyone tell you I saw a floating log or a beaver! I know I saw an animal that is not supposed to exist!  By what I observed I can tell you it was standing on the bottom when it raised its head for me to see; not swimming; but stationary!

Not an actual photograph of Old Greeny

The same story reports that a local resident, one Steven Griffen, was bitten on the arm so hard by Old Greeny in 1974 that it broke his arm.  This might actually discourage me from swimming in Cayuga Lake if I was actually willing to swim in it in the first place, given that our climate is not exactly conducive to running around outside clad in nothing but swim trunks (this year, summer occurred on a Thursday).

But even so, I'll keep my eyes peeled when I'm down near the lake, and report back here if I see anything that is definitely not a beaver.

I'll also make sure that I'll listen for reports of local sheep being killed by "a single bite to the sternum."  That's gotta hurt, even if the attacker doesn't turn out to be "Lovecraftian."

Life in the ozone layer

Some woo-woo ideas are at least understandable.  You can see how people might, through a combination of wishful thinking, dart-thrower's bias, confirmation bias, and the like, decide that the stars guide your future, that good luck charms (or evil curses) work, that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and El Chupacabra exist, that aliens regularly visit the Earth.

Other claims, however, leave me wondering how the ones making them have not been taken out by natural selection decades ago.

Consider, for example, the idea that has recently been making the rounds of social media -- that the road to good health comes through breathing ozone.

I've started seeing this pop up all over the place.  I even know someone who bought an "ozone generator" for his house.  Here's the claim:

The therapeutic properties of ozone can be astounding. Organized Medicine, the FDA, and above all the Pharmaceutical giants have been actively suppressing information about ozone therapy for the better part of this century. Officially, the FDA list ozone as a toxic gas, an utter and contemptible falsehood. Many healers, including licensed MD's and chiropractors have been jailed and viciously harassed for treating (and healing) patients with ozone. Why? It works and the pharmaceutical houses, along with their puppets in the FDA and local medical boards don't want you to know that it works! That's why.

So right from the get-go we have the pro-ozoners claiming that reputable scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals (such as Mohamed Mostafa of UCLA, author of "The Biochemical Basis of Ozone Toxicity," and William A. Pryor et al. of LSU, authors of "The Cascade Mechanism to Explain Ozone Toxicity") are shills who are lying to you.

But it gets better.  Wait till you hear how they want you to get the ozone inside you, because it turns out that just breathing the stuff isn't good enough.  And let me say, at the outset, that I'm not making any of these up, and if you don't believe me, you can check the link I posted above.  So, here goes, in order of increasing weirdness.

1. You can drink water that has been infused with ozone.
2. You can smear ozonated olive oil on your skin.
3. You can have the doctor take out a pint of your blood, bubble ozone through it, and put the blood back in.
4. You can have the doctor blow ozone into your ear.
5. You can have the doctor blow ozone up your ass.
6. You can take off all your clothes, get into a plastic bag that ties at the neck, and have the doctor (or a friend) inflate the bag with ozone.
7. You can have the doctor inject ozone gas directly into a vein.

This last one seems to me to be a good way of inducing a gas embolism and dying, but the pro-ozoners say this never happens.  Why?  Because ozone GOOD, that's why.  Stop asking questions.  (In fact, the site says about the potential for gas embolism, "Do not allow this bogus fear tactic to keep you from investigating this highly effective and safe therapy!")

What, exactly, are they claiming that ozone does for you?  Well, it's not entirely clear, but here are the basics:

Ozone is an unstable, but highly beneficial molecule. It's the tri-atomic form of oxygen: Instead of the normal arrangement of 2 atoms of oxygen (O2), ozone is comprised of 3 atoms of oxygen (O3). Ozone, however, doesn't want to stay in that tri-atomic state very long and unless held in check or bound by other molecular couplings, ozone will usually break down from O3 to O2 + O1 within 20 minutes of so (at atmospheric pressure at least). O1 is called a singlet oxygen atom and it's HIGHLY REACTIVE. with just about any substance that should NOT be in the human body including all pathogens (virus, bacteria, etc.) and synthetic compounds or their metabolites such as drugs and their  metabolite residues.

So I see this as basically characterizing ozone as some kind of chemical superhero that seeks out and destroys bad guys in your body, but doesn't damage your own honest, law-abiding cells.  It flies in, wearing a cape festooned with "O3," kills pathogens and "synthetic compounds" (because we know that natural = good and synthetic = bad), and then flies away in triumph, leaving all of your organs happy, safe, and secure.

The truth, of course, is that ozone is toxic, and that using an ozone generator (or getting the stuff into your body via some more unorthodox route) is potentially dangerous.  An EPA report on the use of ozone generators to "clean household air" has this to say:

The same chemical properties that allow high concentrations of ozone to react with organic material outside the body give it the ability to react with similar organic material that makes up the body, and potentially cause harmful health consequences.  When inhaled, ozone can damage the lungs... Relatively low amounts can cause chest pain, coughing, shortness of breath, and, throat irritation.  Ozone may also worsen chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma and compromise the ability of the body to fight respiratory infections.  People vary widely in their susceptibility to ozone. Healthy people, as well as those with respiratory difficulty, can experience breathing problems when exposed to ozone.  Exercise during exposure to ozone causes a greater amount of ozone to be inhaled, and increases the risk of harmful respiratory effects.  Recovery from the harmful effects can occur following short-term exposure to low levels of ozone, but health effects may become more damaging and recovery less certain at higher levels or from longer exposure.

Ah, yes, the EPA.  Yet another bunch of shills for Big Pharma, right?

Of course right.

What I find mysterious about all of this is how anyone ever came up with this idea.  Ozone has long been known to be a constituent of photochemical smog, and most people have learned the general rule that "smog is bad" well enough that you'd think no one would suddenly think, "Hey, I know what would work!  Let's concentrate the stuff in smog and then breathe it!  That'll improve our health!"

But apparently that's exactly what has happened here.

So I'm kind of at a loss about this one.  There doesn't seem to be any reasonable explanation for how this started, nor why anyone believes it.

All I know is that based on what I've read, no one is getting near any of my orifices with an ozone tube.

God particle jewelry

It's simultaneously amusing and frustrating to see the woo-woos trying to incorporate the latest scientific findings into their wooism.

Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, there was a great deal of babbling about "etheric bodies" -- basically, their conception of the soul, which could project through time and space and which survived the physical body after death.  The "etheric body" was, supposedly, made of "ether," the mysterious substance suggested by scientists as the medium through which light waves propagated in the depths of space.

Because, after all, if the "etheric body" is made of "ether," then if the scientists say that the "ether" exists, the "etheric body" must, too.  Right?

Of course right.

But then the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity demonstrated conclusively that the "ether" didn't exist, and unfortunately, the woo-woos of the time didn't use the reverse logic, and conclude that souls didn't, either.  They just changed the name to "astral body" and kept right on blathering.

Bait-and-switch, that's the ticket.

The master of this technique these days is the inimitable Diane Tessman, who uses scientific words incorrectly so often that someone should design a drinking game based on her writings.  (It is not recommended that you take a shot whenever she uses the word "quantum," however.  I'd prefer not to have any of my readers end up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.)

Yesterday, though, I ran into the pinnacle, the epitome, the crowning glory of this technique.  If you know of a better one, I don't want to hear about it, because this one caused so many faceplants that I'm already going to have to go to school this morning with an icepack strapped to my forehead.

Most of you probably have heard of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle whose existence was proposed by Peter Higgs way back in 1964 as the manifestation of the Higgs field, which permeates space, interacting with matter and giving it the property of mass.  Higgs, now age 84, was fortunate enough to live to see his theory vindicated.  In March of 2013 an experiment in CERN generated traces of a high-energy particle that most physicists believe was the Higgs.

Unfortunately, twenty years earlier, physicist Leon Lederman had given the elusive particle the nickname "the God Particle" -- apparently because his publisher wouldn't let him use his first choice for a nickname, which was "the goddamned particle."

But far be it from the woo-woos to let an objection like "it's just the nickname, for cryin' in the sink!" stand in their way.  Because now we have someone is selling jewelry made from ball bearings pilfered from CERN...

... and claiming that they are infused with God Particles, and that wearing it will bring you divine guidance.

Here's the pitch:

The God Particle, which was recently discovered by our colleagues in CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, forever the Holy Grail of particle physics and nuclear research. The God particle is regarded as one of the fundamental forces of the cosmos. Many religious philosophers believe it constitutes the very ground of being, while others assert that it is the fabric of creation upon which the tapestry of the universe is woven. There are some who refer to the God particle as the clay of existence, whereas the Shaivites of India know it as Brahman and regard it quite reverently as sacred supreme Consciousness.

We still don't know if one of these theories is true, or maybe they all are. What we do know is that you are on the verge of a once in a lifetime opportunity of letting this infinite power into your life.

You deserve God's help, you deserve God's particle.

So these people apparently pilfered bits of scrap from CERN -- although frankly, they could just as well be steel ball bearings they picked up from Home Depot for $0.99 each, there's no way to tell for certain -- and made them into jewelry.

And are selling them for two hundred bucks each.

But the bullshit doesn't end there.  Oh, no.  These people are way more sophisticated than those "etheric body" yokels from the 19th century.  Read on, and be amazed:

Samples from the parts exposed to the surge of energy which showed substantial evidence of having the God Particle were sent to the leading universities and research centers in the world.

According to preliminary evidence found thus far by researches in the medical field, the energy of the God Particle has some amazing effects on migraine prevention, on treating different kinds of skin conditions, up to a surprising improvement among those who ailing from sexual dysfunction disorders. All those among a long list of other medical conditions.

The effects of the God Particle is also tested in the field of mental health and in this field the patients are also getting some surprising improvements in a wide range of medical cases, for example treating phobias and depressions of different kinds.

One of the theories being researched by the scientists is that the God Particle doesn't really cure the listed conditions but provides the human body with the energy needed to normalize and cure itself.

All those researches are performed in scientific methods demanding them to comply with a strict criteria before publication.

Therefore all the above should not be taken as a scientific fact, but should only be understood the way it is, a positive influence of material exposed to the God Particle on treating and preventing a wide range of medical problems.

The results of the researches are still censored. But there is an increasing assumption in the scientific community that in the future, when it becomes less expensive to produce the particle, it will completely change the face of modern medicine.

I especially love the penultimate paragraph, which to my ears reads like the woo-woo alternative-medicine's "Not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose human illness" that appears in microscopic print on things like herbal remedies.

And how did these folks come by chunks of one of the most famous pieces of scientific apparatus in the world, you might ask?

We are a part of a maintenance team in CERN. Among our responsibilities is to replace some of the worn out parts inside the collider.

We notices that something amazing was happening to many people during those days, and when we were summoned for tests by the research groups we realized that we were not the only ones who felt that way.

When the moment came to replace some of the parts around the center of the collision, we felt that we cannot dispose this material as waste. Instead, we started collecting the remaining bearings from the section which is under our responsibility. This material was exposed to the most powerful energy.

After the remaining bearings are collected, we remove them from the compound and later from the country, back to our countries of origin. Initially we gave small spheres which came from the collected bearings to our relatives and friends. In a short period of time the spheres started to leave their mark, and along with great responses we were flooded with requests from other acquaintances who heard about the amazing experience.

Which is either an outright lie, or else illegal, since profiting off of materials taken secretly from a scientific research facility is usually considered theft.  Of course, given that they are also making fraudulent claims about what said ball bearings can do, there are so many ethical angles from which you could attack this website that I almost wouldn't know where to begin.

So I think, instead, that I'm just going to stop here and leave it up to your consideration.  For one thing, in doing the research for this post, I did such a colossal headdesk that I think I jarred a Higgs boson loose from my skull, and my etheric body needs some time to recover before I go to work.

Sylphs to the rescue!

So, I have good news for those of you who are afraid of chemtrails.

I've posted more than once recently about the increasingly widespread claim that the government is lacing jet fuel with a variety of bad stuff, so that when the fuel goes through the engine, the bad stuff comes out in the exhaust and then settles out on us unsuspecting sheeple.  Some bad stuff that is supposedly thus dispersed:

• toxic chemicals containing barium, aluminum, and manganese
• pathogenic viruses
• hallucinogenic and/or mind-controlling drugs
• dessicated blood

If you are asking yourself how any of these things could (1) survive the combustion process in the engine, and be (2) in sufficiently high concentrations afterwards even to be detectable, much less to cause health effects, all that shows is that you have already been exposed to the mind-controlling drugs and are now a helpless pawn of the Illuminati.

However, all hope is not lost for you, my dazed, glassy-eyed friend.  Because the dirty work of the Evil Government Chemtrailers is now being counteracted and cleaned up...

... by benevolent spirits called "Sylphs."

As with many of the topics I stumble across, at first I thought this was a joke, intended to ridicule the people who believe in chemtrails, or perhaps just to calm them down and get them to go back inside and take their meds.  Sadly, it is not.  There is a whole subset of the chemtrail people who now believe that "Air Elementals" -- i.e., good fairies -- are getting up there and taking care of the evil nasty chemtrails for us.

Because clearly there is nothing like a nonexistent supernatural being for dealing with nonexistent bad guys.

As an example from the site I linked above, we have the following letter excerpt from a woman in Las Vegas, identified only as "Sarah C.:"

This morning I woke up hacking horribly and my daughter came to me and said she couldn't breath [sic] very well. So I went outside and sure enough they were spraying all over the place...  They made a huge mess of the sky.  When I first went out it was a clear day with blue skys [sic].  After 30 min of spraying the sky was covered in chemtrails.  I decided to use the power of intention and call on some Sylphs.  I don't think my intention alone was enough, but I think some of them came and did some clean up. In one of my pictures I think there is a Sylph in the shape of a bird...

I think there are some Sylphs cleaning the mess up.  It's been about an hour and a half and the sky is still blue but you can still see the remnants of the chemtrails, they look like smooshed cirrus clouds.   I also took a quick video of the spraying in progress.  I am really horrified that this is going on and no one is pitching a fit.

As proof, Sarah C. includes the following photograph:

 See the Sylph right there in the middle?  See it?

No, neither do I, but it's probably because of all of the mind-altering drugs I've inhaled from jet fuel.  You know how that goes.

Another person, "Bram," wrote in to say that he's helping things along because he built a machine that makes Sylphs:

I built a cloud-buster a couple years, ago....and have been enjoying Sylphs big-time, on a regular basis.  I was on the beach (a few blocks away) yesterday, and just happened to looked up. The sky was filled with these Friends.  It was very heartening.

Oh, I'm sure it was.  And I hope you and your "Friends" are very happy together.

A writer from Edinburgh, Scotland named "Ruth" also said that she'd photographed a Sylph.  Here's the original picture:

This looks to me less like a "Sylph" than it does like a "cloud."  But once she started editing, cropping, and otherwise monkeying around with the photograph, Ruth found out that what looks like a cloud to the rest of us is actually a Sylph who has shown up to clean up air pollution.  Ready for the edited version that proves her point?

To me, this doesn't look like a benevolent Air Elemental, this looks like Lord Voldemort.  But what do I know?

Not much, apparently, according to Ruth.  Here's what she has to say about it:

Today, for a brief spell, the clouds above us cleared away and I spotted a fingerlike sylph pushing back the clouds, quite literally.  This was after I'd asked them to come and clear away a heavy black cloud over my garden!!

Shortly after this I was indooors [sic] and spotted a face in one of the remaing [sic] clouds, but it was a bit like some of your ghostlike faces, which I find quite alarming (my camera battery was low and so I also didn't get a picture).  Because of this, I asked it to smile and I sent it a smile and as I did so, the mouth space immediately turned upwards and the eye holes narrowed as they would when you smile!!  However, the face faded away almost immediatley [sic] after, as though I had hurt its feelings!!  How bizarre.... all very intriguing!!

Ha ha!  Yes, very intriguing!  Now please excuse me, while I back away slowly, keeping my eyes on you the whole time!

So, this once again indicates the truth of something I've commented on before, namely, that there is no claim so ridiculous that someone can't modify it so as to make it way more ridiculous.  Now, excuse me, but I have to go focus my attention on calling up some Fire Elementals, because it's cold in here.

The power of "only"

Today, I ran into a story that got me thinking about how powerful a single word can be in changing the gist of a claim.

An article in Online Medical Daily entitled "'Seeds Of Life' Collected During Perseid Meteor Shower: Scientists Say Algae 'Can Only Have Come From Space'," writer John Ericson describes an unusual find on the (formerly) sterile sides of a British research balloon.

In a study described at the Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology conference in San Diego, British biologist Chandra Wickramasinghe told attendees about a discovery, that (if true) revolutionizes what we know about the origins of life on Earth.  Wickramasinghe and his colleagues launched a balloon into the stratosphere during the annual Perseid meteor shower, and upon retrieval, found that the surface had a microscopic blob of microorganisms stuck to it.  "The entities varied from a presumptive colony of ultra-small bacteria to two unusual individual organisms - part of a diatom frustule and a 200 micron-sized particle mass interlaced with biofilm and biological filaments," Wickramasinghe said, in an interview with The Daily Mail.

Diatom frustules (skeletons)

"By our current understanding of the means by which such particles can be transferred from Earth to the stratosphere they could not - in the absence of a violent volcanic eruption occurring within a day of the sampling event - make such a journey," Wickramasinghe explained.  "If there is no mechanism by which these biological entities could be elevated from Earth to the stratosphere then it must have arrived from above the stratosphere and have been incoming to Earth...  They can only have come from space."

What Wickramasinghe is claiming is not a new idea.  Called panspermia, the speculation is that the ancestors of all terrestrial species was a microorganism (probably an extremeophile) that rode in on a meteorite or on cometary debris.  Chemist Svante Arrhenius was fond of the claim, as was astronomer Fred Hoyle; but it's not much in vogue these days, largely due to slim evidence supporting the contention.  Wickramasinghe himself is kind of a fringe figure in the minds of much of the scientific community -- not only has he championed panspermia with a single-mindedness that approaches obsession, but he also testified for the defense in a 1981 McLean vs. the Arkansas State Board of Education trial, one of many cases that considered the constitutionality of teaching creationism in public schools.  During the trial, he referred to the famous fossil of Archaeopteryx as a "hoax."

None of this wins him any points in my book.

Of course, to be fair, you have to consider a claim separate from the person making it; even complete wingnuts can land on correct ideas sometimes.  And here, we have at least some sort of hard evidence -- traces of microorganisms on a sterile balloon that had taken a trip into the stratosphere during a meteor shower.  Has Wickramasinghe been vindicated?

There's the problem here, and it revolves around the use of the word "only."  Wickramasinghe said that his algae blob "can only have come from space."  Take out the word "only," and I'm with him 100%.  The blob could have come from space.  Its presence on the balloon is certainly suggestive.  But to say that it only can have come from space requires a great deal more than that.

Stratospheric dust collection is a notoriously difficult task.  Contamination is a constant hazard, especially if you are trying to obtain a pure sample of interplanetary dust -- i.e., material that did not originate on Earth.  Terrestrial dust, made up of windblown sediments, volcanic ash, and more prosaic materials such as pollen, can reach amazing heights in the atmosphere, and travel extraordinary distances.  A recent study found that dust from the Sahara can reach stratospheric heights -- and affect weather in western North America.

So even if Wickramasinghe's group was careful -- and I am not trying to imply that they weren't -- the possibility of contamination has to be weighed into any argument about the origin of the microorganisms on the balloon.  As NASA's page on "Cosmic Dust" puts it, "Once in the stratosphere this ‘cosmic dust’ and spacecraft debris joins terrestrial particles such as volcanic ash, windborne desert dust and pollen grains."

But of course, Wickramasinghe has a dog in this race, and once you take out the word "only," you don't have much of a story left.  Debris, some containing organic compounds or even microorganisms, has been found before and been alleged to have an extraterrestrial origin.  Thus far, none of these claims has been conclusively supported, so (to be fair) we have to consider the jury to be still out on the idea of panspermia.

Now, don't get me wrong.  No one would be more delighted than me if extraterrestrial life was discovered, even if it turned out just to be single-celled organisms.  I've long suspected that we're not alone in the universe -- what I know about evolutionary biology suggests to me that life is probably plentiful out there in space.  But if you make a claim to have discovered aliens, even microscopic ones, you have to be held to a higher standard of evidence than suspicions and suggestions.  And your case isn't made more watertight simply because of a judicious use of the word "only."

There's this thing called "reality." You might want to check it out.

As a blogger who focuses continually on the crazy ideas people have, you'd think that after a while, I'd either (1) become cynical, (2) give up, or (3) devolve into what Robert Chazz Chute, the interviewer who chatted with me on the Cool People Podcasts, called "being a dick to dumb people."

I'd like to think that I avoid that trilemma most of the time.  But every once in a while, I run into something that makes me want to jump up and down and scream, "How in the hell can you believe this?  Are you a moron?  Or what?"  But I refrain from doing this, because usually I write in the early morning, and I don't want to wake up my wife.  Also, I own a nervous, neurotic border collie, who reacts to any stressful situations by peeing on the floor, so I'd like to avoid that if at all possible.

Just today, though, I ran into not one, but two stories that had that effect on me.

Now, note in each case, it's not the originator of the story that I want to yell at.  There are many loony people in the world, and it's well within their rights to publish their loony ideas online.  However, it is (in my opinion) beholden upon the rest of us to say, in as gentle a fashion as possible, "There, there, now.  Don't get yourself all worked up.  Just have a nice cup of cocoa and take a nap, and you'll feel better."

That is, of course, not what happened.  In each of these cases, the "comments" section filled up immediately with people who not only didn't argue with the person in question, they agreed.  They considered the wingnut's ideas logical.  They praised the courage of the originators for taking such a controversial stance.

Not one comment -- not one -- said, "Hey.  Reality.  It's over here.  You might want to give it a look."

Let's start with Starre Vartan, a writer for the Mother Nature Network, who wrote an opinion piece decrying public schools' abandonment of teaching children cursive.  Now, I myself am very much in favor of getting rid of cursive, largely because I never really managed well with cursive myself.  My cursive writing looks a little like the Elvish script from The Lord of the Rings, as written by an Elf with a severe disorder of the central nervous system.  I can't read my own cursive writing.  I don't know how anyone else would manage.

But Ms. Vartan is all up in arms over losing cursive.  Why, you might ask?  Is it because it's a valuable skill having to do with improving hand/eye coordination?  Is it because it's a fine old tradition that deserves to be continued?  Is it because, done properly, it is beautiful and artistic?

Nope.  None of the above.  Ms. Vartan believes that cursive is being abandoned...

... because there is some sort of a conspiracy to render children incapable of reading the Constitution.

She states, "It's near-impossible to read cursive if you can't write it," which certainly isn't true in my case, and honestly, is almost certainly untrue in general.  Generating script (productive language) and deciphering script (receptive language) aren't even done in the same parts of the brain, for cryin' in the sink; there's no reason to believe that even a person who has never written cursive in his life wouldn't be perfectly capable of being taught to read it.  As far as the governmental connection, she quotes Michael Sull: "There are so many children today who can't even read cursive writing, let alone write it.  They'll never be able to read anything that was written in the 19th century.  They won't be able to read the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or anything written during the Civil War.  They're missing an entire portion of our country's history."

Because, of course, those documents don't exist in any other forms besides the cursive original.  Like, online, or in high school history texts, or anything.

Now, as I said, Ms. Vartan is perfectly within her rights to post her opinion, just as I do here in my blog.  But what I found appalling was that no one in the comments section even points out what were, to me, completely obvious broken links in the logical chain.  The comments virtually all began with phrases like, "What a good point!"  (There were two, in fact, that stated that the commenters had gone to school in Italy and Romania, respectively, and that they had learned cursive in grade school, and how much better the schools were there because of that.)

The second example came from none other than Alex Jones, who is so far gone on the wingnut spectrum that I am frankly stunned when he can say anything more coherent than "woogie woogie woogie pfththtptptptptptppt."  Jones has had a lot to say about Syria lately, most of which has contained the words "false flag" and has made no sense whatsoever, not that anyone should really find that surprising.  But he really outdid himself yesterday.  Here's what he said:

But it’s the globalists here running my life, that’s why they’re my front-and-center problem.  Because they are the biggest, most organized, eugenics-based, scientific dictatorship, trans-humanists at the top that plan the extinction of almost everybody and a new species to rise up or humans merged with machines.

That’s their religion, and no one’s discussing that.  Everyone is going to be deindustrialized, everyone is going to be put back into the Stone Age and controlled.  And Obama and the globalists and the robber barons, they’re going to fly around in their jetcopters and their Air Forces Ones and their red carpets, like gods above us.  And they’re going to get the life-extension technologies.

So the contention is that President Obama is in cahoots with various corporate leaders to kill most of us and return the rest of us to "the Stone Age," while they become immortal cyborgs who ride around on red carpets.

You know, it's an amazing day when someone can make the writings of L. Ron Hubbard appear sane.

And once again, how did people respond, on Jones' site InfoWars?  Here is a sampling (spelling and grammar are as written):

I've said it before and I'll say it again; How can we blame our government for supporting terrorists when WE are still supporting terrorists IN OUR GOVERNMENT??

I know people are afraid to believe, REFUSE to believe we've already been overthrown, but its true. There is no risk of it happening, it already has. We are wading through the changes one decade at a time. Changes happen slowly for a reason. Hitler did what he did overnight, and almost didnt fail.. Youre going to tell me people with the same ideas dont exist today? That your going to wake up and be in a completely different country one morning? They are going as slow as they have to to make it work, and I assure you all of their players are in place. There are thousands of people who do nothing with their lives but figure out how to implement a unified luciferian control over the globe. And MILLIONS who are indirectly doing work for said goal and dont even realize it.

These fckrs are planning more evil, something big too. Ya'll think they are just going to roll over and admit their defeat and wrongdoings? When most wake up, their pants will be around their ankles wondering WTF happened.

Alex Jones the Illuminati owned and run shill designed to discredit the Patriot Movement and keep it in the dark as to the real and obvious cause of their oppression.

Okay.  Give me a moment, here, to get my blood pressure back down.

There.  Somewhat better now.  In my calmer moments, I am willing to consider that the people who respond to stories like these do not represent a good sampling of the American public.  For one thing, most clear-thinking people probably wouldn't bother to take the time to register on a site so they can comment on a story that is obviously ridiculous; said clear-thinkers probably have better things to do, such as actually having jobs and families and lives.  Also, there's the possibility -- certain, I think, in Jones' case -- that dissenters, especially those like myself who would be likely to refer to Jones as a "raving whackjob," would be blocked from posting on the site in short order.

So I live in hope that what we're seeing in these comments is not a representative sampling of the opinions, and intelligence level, of the American citizenry.  And that hope will keep me posting here.  Cynicism is, after all, not a happy spot.  As my dad used to say: "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right."