Waving away the facts

I always get a kick out of the tactics-switching employed by science deniers when presented with hard data.

The young-earth creationists are an especially good example of this, because hard data supporting evolution abounds, and hard data supporting the conjecture that the Earth is 6,000 years old is basically non-existent.  So every time a new bit of evidence comes in that contradicts the Adam-and-Eve story or the Noah's Ark story, they have to engage in what a college professor of mine called "waving your arms around in the hopes that it will distract the person you're arguing with long enough that he forgets what the question was."

A good example is the recent discovery of relatively intact blood cells inside a 46-million-year-old fossilized mosquito, which the folks over at the Institute for Creation Research claim is evidence for a young Earth because we know that tissue can't last that long.  In fact, they claim (falsely), evolutionary biologists are ignoring "the protests of biochemists," implying that the biologists are stubbornly clinging to a model that the rest of science has discarded.

In no area has this hand-waving been more elaborate than in the world of the climate change denier.  First, of course, there were people who simply thought that the world wasn't warming.  Some people still don't, including noted climatologists Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck.  But as the data has poured in -- including the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which stated, and I quote, "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century," and supported that statement with hundreds of pages of data -- the naysayers have had to tone down their rhetoric some.

This change, however, is far short of "sorry, we were wrong."  We still have nutjobs like Coulter, Limbaugh, and Beck, bloviating on Fox News and in The Blaze that the climate scientists are lying.  More interesting, though, are the ones who finally admit that the Earth is warming up -- but want it to be something other than carbon dioxide emissions that's causing it.

It's not the carbon, they say.  It's the sunspots.  Or an increase in solar output.  Or solar flares.  Or shifts in the jet stream.  Or, in a statement that should be recorded forever in the Annals of Wingnuttery, it could be... god.

I'm not making this last bit up.  In an interview on Reverend Kenneth Copeland's evangelical talk show Voices of Victory, rumored Texas senate candidate David Barton admitted that okay, the Earth might be getting warmer, but it's not because of carbon dioxide emissions, it's because god is smiting us for being naughty:

Floods are under the curse, tornadoes are under the curse, murderers, pedophiles.  Abortion was a seed to it that has grown into a murderous, bloody crop of child death. And it doesn't stop with abortion.

Whether that killing is through abortion or drugs or suicide or anything else, you open the door to the killing, it's got a lot of different manifestations.  But if you choose leaders who support killing, we've opened the door to all of it.

The Founding Fathers said, when does God judge nations?  Because he doesn't resurrect nations in the future.  He judges it right now.  There is no future for any nation.  When a nation does something bad, it gets judgement or it gets blessings right now in the present.  On the spot.  Which is why policies matter.  Because if you take a bad policy, you get judged for it on the spot.  If you take a good policy, you get blessed for it on the spot.

A door has been opened and we have said, 'You know, we embraced a wicked policy.'  Okay, then I'll take my hand of protection off your nation and whap, here comes storms like we've never seen before.  And here comes floods like we've never seen before.  And here comes the climate stuff that we can't explain.  All the hot times and all the cold times.  Too much rain and not enough rain.  And we're flooding over here and we've got droughts over here.

And today, we're saying, 'Oh, no, it's global warming.' No, we opened the door that lost God's protection over our environment and that's our choice.

So. Yeah. The climatologists "can't explain" it. The scientists have no idea what is going on. Instead, it's god going "whap."

I think what gets me about all of this is that so many Americans, listening to this nonsense, just seem to nod their heads and accept that what people like Barton are saying is true.  In my class, I see more teenagers bristling when I mention "climate change" than I do when I mention "evolution;" from what I've seen, the negative press on climate change has actually outpaced that on evolution.  (I'd like to think that this may be because the anti-science crowd has given up fighting evolution because they've recognized that it's a losing proposition, but that's probably premature.)

In any case, it's maddening.  But the data just keeps pouring in, such as the study just published yesterday in Science that concludes that the current rate of oceanic warming is greater than at any time during the previous 10,000 years.

Kind of hard to argue that one, isn't it?  Unless it's just god "whapping" us again.

Lights out

I am frequently amazed by how quickly the research for this blog gets me into the deep, uncharted waters of the Great Wingnut Ocean.

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if I'd heard the contention that the government (for "government" read "evil superpowerful Illuminati overlords") was planning a days-long shutdown of the electrical grid, nationwide, in November.  I said that I hadn't -- and, of course, that I doubted that there was any such plan.

But I thought that this might be fertile ground for a blog post (which was, in fact, my friend's suggestion), so I did a Google search for "planned electrical grid shutdown."  On the plus (i.e., real) side, I did find that various electrical suppliers had run simulations of shutdowns -- essentially, drills that allowed them to develop strategies for coping with the outcome should a real grid breakdown occur.

On the minus (i.e. wacko) side, I found that yes, there are people who believe that the government is planning on turning off the electricity.  There are hundreds of such claims.  Why, you might ask?  What could such a shutdown accomplish?  Well, that's not clear; most of the claims seem to stop at the "see how evil government is?" stage.

What is most amusing about all of this is that since Google pulls out not only recent links but older ones, there were a number of sites claiming that there'd be a grid shutdown on dates that have already passed.  I found several from 2011 and 2012, as well as May 2013, August 2013, and September 2013.

Did I miss it, or was there electricity pretty much continuously through all of those?

But far be it from woo-woos to admit they were wrong just because their predictions have failed a dozen times before.  This time, they say, it's gonna happen.  November 13 and 14, folks -- this is it.  Back up your computer files, make sure you have bottled water and propane for your Coleman stove, make sure you have firewood ready to go -- because They are going to shut down the whole nation.

Still wondering (1) what possible reason people could have to make that claim, and (2) what on earth they think the government could be trying to accomplish by shutting off the power, I started to dig around on such sites, starting with a page called "Will There Be an Electrical Grid Blackout on November 13-14, 2013?", hosted on Etheric.com.  There were hints that this was gonna be some kind of "false flag" event, meant to distract the citizenry while the Bad Guys went off and did something even worse elsewhere, but no particular mention of what this even-worse-thing was going to be.  But I kept running into the name Paul LaViolette, so I figured he might be an interesting source of "information" (using the word fairly loosely) on the topic.  So I started doing some research on LaViolette himself.

Well, it turns out that Etheric.com is more or less run by Paul LaViolette, who is either a wacko crank (generally the view of the skeptics at the James Randi Educational Foundation), or an amazing genius who has made earthshattering discoveries in physics (the view of LaViolette himself).  LaViolette has a theory of "galactic superwaves" -- colossal explosions of cosmic radiation from the galactic core -- and has expounded upon this topic over at none other than Etheric.com.

Now, I'm not an astronomer, and am unqualified to weigh in on LaViolette's contention that the galactic core is sending particle blasts our way every 10,000 or so years, but alarm bells went off when I read his publications list, which included books called Decoding the Message of the Pulsars, Subquantum Kinetics, and The Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion, the latter of which got a one-star review on the Barnes & Noble website that said, "This is the worst so-called science book I have ever read."

But by this time, I was getting a bit far off the track of finding out about electrical grid shutdowns, or what (if anything) they could have to do with galactic core blasts.  So I swam back to shore, and continued my research...

... and then got instantly launched back into deep water, with a contention that the November electrical grid shutdown was to stop Americans from seeing that Comet ISON would be "interacting with the planet Mercury."

This made me say, first, "What the hell?" and second, "Wait a minute; if the power went out, wouldn't people be more likely to go outside and look up into the sky?  If the power's on, then 90% of America will be inside watching Real Housewives of New Jersey and Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo."

So maybe this is the plan, but if so, it's a really stupid one.  If this is the best they can do, I think the current Illuminati seem to have the sophistication level of Boris Badinov and Natasha Fatale, and they need to step down and let some people take over who can really run a conspiracy right. 

But I decided to give it one more try, and swam back to shore again, and this time found that the religious whackjobs were claiming that the government was shutting down the grid on November 13 & 14 because the government is in league with Satan, and this will be the start of the End Times.

At that point, I just stopped struggling, figuring that drowning wasn't looking so bad, after all.

Lord Dufferin and the man in the garden

For better or worse, being a skeptic doesn't mean that you don't find stories of the paranormal interesting -- nor that you can't react to them on an emotional level.

I mean, I'm the guy who thinks that television programming went into a nosedive the day The X Files was cancelled.  I am also the guy who would love to spend a night in a haunted house, but would be likely to piss my pants and then have a stroke if anything untoward happened.  So while I'd be a good guy to have on a team of ghost hunters, from a scientific and rational perspective, I'd be a bad choice from the standpoint of practical application and laundromat charges.

I still recall many of the ghost stories of my childhood.  My uncle was a grand storyteller, and had lots of tales (usually told in French) of the scary creatures of the Louisiana bayou, including the Loup-Garou (the Cajun answer to a werewolf) and Feu Follet (the "spirit fire," or will-of-the-wisp, which would steal your soul if you saw it -- unless you could cross running water before it caught you).  Later, I voraciously read Poe and Lovecraft, and dozens of books with names like True Tales of the Supernatural.

It was in one of the latter that I ran into the story of Lord Dufferin, a 19th century British statesman who spent most of his career shuttling all over the world -- from Canada to Syria to Russia to India to Burma.  His actual name was Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin, and his life coincided almost perfectly with Queen Victoria's -- she lived from 1819 to 1901, Dufferin from 1826 to 1902.

Dufferin was, by all accounts, well known in the social circuits of high society.  His biographer calls him "imaginative, sympathetic, warm-hearted, and gloriously versatile."  He also was an excellent storyteller, and there was one story he became famous for -- mostly because to his dying day, he swore that it was true.

One night, Dufferin said, he was visiting a friend who owned an estate in Ireland.  For some reason, he was unable to sleep, and after tossing and turning for a while, he finally got up and went out through a door and onto the balcony overlooking the estate gardens.

He became aware that there was a figure moving down in the garden, and as he watched, the figure got closer.  It was a man, carrying something on his back, but he was in shadow and it was impossible to tell anything about the man or his burden.  But after a moment, the man stepped out into a patch of moonlight, and looked up at Dufferin.

Dufferin recoiled.  The man was the most hideously ugly individual Dufferin had ever seen -- and the object on the man's back could be clearly seen to be a coffin.

Terrified, Dufferin retreated to his room.  The next morning, he told his host about what he'd seen, and Dufferin's friend brushed him off -- there was no one in the garden the previous evening, the friend said.  It must have been a nightmare.

Dufferin more or less forgot about the incident.  But many years later, when he was British Ambassador to France in the early 1890s, he was in Paris for a diplomatic meeting and was about to step onto an elevator when he glanced at the elevator operator, and saw that it was the same memorably ugly face as the man he remembered from his vision in the garden.  Alarmed, he backed away, and the door closed.  He was standing there, trying to make sense of what he had just seen, when there was a tremendous crash -- the elevator cable had broken, sending the elevator compartment hurtling down the shaft.  Everyone inside, including the operator, was killed.

Dufferin sought out hotel officials to ask about the elevator operator -- but the officials said that the man had just been hired that day, and no one knew anything about him.

Dufferin lived for another ten years, and enjoyed many a glass of brandy over the telling of this tale.  And you can see why; it's got all of the elements -- a terrifying vision that turns out to be a warning of danger, a scary-looking guy carrying a coffin across a garden at night, a near brush with death.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I doubt very much if the supernatural aspects of this story are true.  Human memory is a remarkably plastic thing, and I strongly suspect that most stories of precognition rely on imperfect recollection of the original premonition, be it a dream or (as in this case) a vision.  That Dufferin saw something in the garden that night is possible; that he had a nightmare is also possible.  That it was true precognition, I seriously doubt.  It is far more likely that, years later, a shock like seeing an ugly guy in an elevator, and narrowly escaping being killed when the elevator cable broke, would have conflated in his mind the incident with the earlier nightmare (or whatever it was).

But you have to admit that despite all of that, it makes a hell of a good story -- even one that a diehard skeptic might read with a cold shudder twanging up the spine.

And with that, I'll wish you all a very spooky and fun-filled Halloween.

The great Louisiana gunboat conspiracy

There are two reasons that conspiracy theorists drive me crazy.

One is that they consistently accept weird, convoluted explanations for events just because those explanations favor their twisted notions about the way the world works, simultaneously ignoring a simple, rational explanation that fits all of the available evidence.  This anti-Ockham's-razor approach runs counter to any reasonable logic, but they embrace it with a vehemence that is often scary.

The second is that they're damn near impossible to argue with.  Present a counterargument to their favored theory, and you're deluded.  Laugh at them, and you're a "sheeple."  (Wait, isn't "sheeple" plural?  What's the singular, then?  "Sheeplum?")

Come up with a really good counterargument, and you must be one of... Them.

Take, for example, the article that hit the conspiracy site Liberty Federation this week about some military boats that were seen in a river near Slidell, Louisiana.  There's a video, with the tagline, "Is this part of some kind of drill or is it just normal now in the new Amerika to see armed troops patrolling public canals?"

Right.  "Amerika."  *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*  Of course it's the military wing of the New World Order, practicing their takeover maneuvers.  Merely requiring that you ignore the fact that the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School, which has been operating there for decades, is only five miles away.

So yeah, this really was just a drill, and the guys really were just ordinary military guys, which one of the commenters on the post pointed out:

We have a unit down there, been training in that area for close to 20 years. Not sure how that guy has never seen them before, we run all over the rivers and marshes (and Lake Pontchartrain) constantly. Completely normal training, guys are preparing for overseas deployment, has nothing to do with the conspiracy BS being spouted below. Not sure why they are transiting through such a populated area, we normally stay farther away from areas like that for various reasons. 

Well, one reason is probably that when they don't, the conspiracy theorists start honking like mad.  To wit, the following response:

so what is next
-shoot shoot You Americans , b.o."s agenda – to a " T " , e. holder is doing flips inside of the west/wing knowing that he is get’’n closer to controlling the whole kitten-ka-bouttle then any A.G. ever – even though it is so Un-American that it is sickening to the stomach – this is this administrations agenda , People wake the " F " UP ^ , this is Your Nation dying at a tic-toc and a tic-toc , Yes , What can We do – Do You not see that every time this administration wins in court or by a legislative mark of the pen , It is always very controversial and they will win it by – chicago bullitics – each and every time – what is it that they (this administration) could/and/would hold against You or Your’s , People it is get"n to be to that close of lose for Us Americans that Yes it could come down to You and what You had said and/or done and You may or/may not feel it was wrong , they (this administration) will find the wrongs and put the blame on You or one of Your loved One’s , People We have the devil in Our House and they know what You have forgotten , As little or as simple it was or is to You , They will see to it that it can make the difference of being a representative of the People ’ or NOT being a representative of the People , This administration is so damn evil that the devil HimSelf has to step-back and try to figure out where the evilness comes from – Since this devil himself knows what is in the winners package – There is Not enough wrapping paper and/or ribbon to put this in a package and say (F^ck You say’s Da devil) wel-come to da jungle where obama loves to be , he feels so much at home that he sends the tranny away – why would you need another pointer when ya have the likes of me – and this is coming from the one that has the wife of an tranny – oh baby it is the stiffy that gets me (says b.o.) fur — sure

I feel like this should come with some sort of Rosetta-Stone-like translation, don't you?  We need someone like the little old lady from the movie Airplane:

So, I feel duty-bound to do my best, here, although my Dumbassian is kind of rusty.  But here's my best shot at a translation of the above:

I dislike President Obama because I think that his agenda is to target American citizens, and perhaps kill them.  Attorney General Eric Holder is certainly part of this, and is so excited by the prospect that he is engaging in gymnastics.  Gosh, this sure makes me nauseated!  I wish that more Americans would be aware of their surroundings.  Every time this administration wins a court case, it angers me.  It is like what happens in Chicago.  President Obama knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake!  He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good or his thugs will murder you and your entire family!  Even Satan is appalled by how evil this administration is.  Satan would like to wrap this administration up with wrapping paper and give it as a gift.  Also, I believe that because President Obama is an African American, he would prefer to live in a tropical rain forest biome.  And his wife is a hermaphrodite.  Oh, my, yes.

So okay, maybe it doesn't make any more sense when you put it in standard English.

The problem is, there are a lot of people who think this way.  If you go over to the Conspiracy subreddit -- which I wouldn't suggest if you want to maintain your sense that humans represent intelligent life -- you will find posts even stupider than this one.  You will find posts that will make this one seem like a doctoral dissertation.  You will find posts that will make you wonder how the people who wrote them have enough brain cells to operate a computer successfully.

I live in hope, however, that the sensible people outnumber the conspiracy theorists, a hope that is bolstered by sites such as the Conspiratard subreddit, which exists solely to ridicule the ideas of people like our above marginally-coherent friend.  I also hope that the majority of the 191,000 who have subscribed to Conspiracy are only amused bystanders, much the way I listen to Alex Jones or read the columns written by Ann Coulter.

So, yeah, I'm an optimist.  It's a dicey proposition, sometimes, but still better than the alternative.

Even here in "Amerika."

Captain Odin of the spaceship Valhalla

Last night, I was working out at the gym, and one of the televisions was showing a program about a subject I know and love: Vikings.

My MA is in Scandinavian historical linguistics (yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story).  As part of my thesis research I read a good many of the sagas, some in the original Old Norse, the culmination of a passion for the subject I've had since I first found D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths when I was in elementary school.

"Odhin," by Johannes Gehrts (1901) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I was tickled when I saw the program being aired, even though I had a chill run up my spine when I noticed that it was on the History channel.  Given the name, you'd think that the History channel would show programs related to history.  You'd be wrong, although I guess the more accurate name of The Woo-Woo Bullshit channel wouldn't attract sponsors very well.

So I watched the program for a while.  And it turned out to be an episode of...

... Ancient Aliens.

I'm not making this up.  My first thought was that the contention of the show was that the Vikings were aliens, but it turns out that no, they're not saying that.  That would be ridiculous.

They're saying that the Vikings were helped by aliens.

The show featured a couple of legitimate scholars, Kirsten Wolf of the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Department of Scandinavian Studies (which, coincidentally, is where I took my courses in the Old Norse language) and Timothy Tangherlini of UCLA.  Both made coherent and academically relevant statements regarding the history and culture of the ancient Norse, which were (of course) immediately misinterpreted by the wackos who wrote the narrator's script.

"The Vikings were enormously sophisticated in terms of technology: ship-building, bridge-building, fortress-building," Wolf said, which is true, but then the narrator jumped in with, "But many researchers remain baffled at how the Vikings became so socially, politically and technologically advanced, especially while living in the cold, harsh environment of the North...  Just how were the Norse Vikings able to manage such technological and geographical feats?  Are their fortresses and journeys to unknown continents evidence that the Vikings had access to extraterrestrial knowledge?  Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and believe the proof can be found by examining the religious beliefs of this mysterious people."

Yup.  Those poor ol' scholars, always "baffled" at how "mysterious" everything is.  Good thing we have raving wingnuts like Phillip Coppens and David Hatcher Childress to weigh in on the situation and rescue us from our ignorance with conclusions such as Thor's hammer being a "kinetic weapon," Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn being "spy drones," and Odin's seat up on Hlidskjalf being "the captain's seat on a spacecraft."

I wonder if it's aerobic exercise to pound your head repeatedly into the wall, because that's what I ended up doing, watching this show.

At least that's better than what Drs. Wolf and Tangherlini most likely felt like doing.  After realizing what idiocy their names had been associated with, publicly, I'm guessing they probably both wanted to commit seppuku.

I kept watching, though, in the fashion of a person witnessing a slow-motion train wreck.  A couple of times, I actually laughed out loud, so it's probably a good thing that the gym was otherwise empty.  One of the best points came when Phillip Coppens explained that the dwarves, mentioned many times in myth collections like the Eddas, were actually...

... the "Grays."  Yup, the same alien creatures we see in such historical documentaries as The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Here's what he said, verbatim, or near as I can recall:

Are they real dwarfs, or somehow more mythical, or whether the label “dwarf” actually stuck to them because they were somehow smaller?  And of course today, we often describe the gray alien archetype as dwarfish as well, simply because they are smaller.

Of course, Philip.  Whatever that means.  And along the same lines, I'm guessing that the trolls were the Vikings' way of describing the "Rancor" from Star Wars, and the elves were invented because J. R. R. Tolkien was a time traveling ultra-intelligent extraterrestrial being who went back to the 9th century and told the ancient Norse about Legolas et al.

But watching this show wouldn't have been the complete experience it was without a commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, he of the amazing hair, so I was positively tickled when he showed up.  Tsoukalos had this to say about Valhalla:

Valhalla was not a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations, but it might have been some type of an orbiting space station.  The reason why I’m saying this is because we have a description of Valhalla: it is an incredible description of a place that has weird attributes.

Which is such an amazing feat of logical deduction that I can hardly think of a response, other than to say that my classroom has some "weird attributes" and it is not, so far as I can tell, an "orbiting space station."

At that point, I kind of gave up, stopped staring at the television with my mouth hanging open, and went over to use the weight machines, figuring that even if my brain had been turned to cream-of-wheat, at least I could work on my biceps.

So this, my dear readers, is why I don't watch television, except for when I'm at the gym.  I should have changed the channel, really.  Next time I will -- I'll try to find something more sensible and intellectually stimulating than what the History channel has to offer.

Reruns of Gilligan's Island should fit the bill.

Next rest stop, 5.9 parsecs

New from the Hope Springs Eternal department, we have a guy from Georgia who wants to build an cultural information welcome center for aliens.

Called the Extraterrestrial Culture Center, Ed Komarek's brainchild is ambitious to say the least.  Here's what he has to say about it:

The purpose of Extraterrestrial  Cultural Centers International (ECCI) is to facilitate the integration of earth humanity into the greater extraterrestrial domain of universal stellar civilizations.  Our mission is to create an organization and facilities to accomplish this purpose.  We intend to fulfill that mission through the creation of a network of extraterrestrial cultural centers and facilities around the globe.   The emphasis will be on peaceful, mutually beneficial interrelationships sharing knowledge, understanding and love amongst all.

Which, honestly, I can't argue with, even the "stellar civilizations" part, given that I'm pretty certain that there must be alien life out there elsewhere in the cosmos.  (Whether it's intelligent life remains to be seen; and given the way humans act, sometimes, I've occasionally wondered if we might be flattering ourselves by calling our own behavior intelligent.)

Be that as it may, Komarek's grandiose plans are nothing if not well thought out.  In a piece in UFO Digest, Komarek describes his two-pronged approach to building the Culture Center:

With the publication of the Center Webpage, The First Conceptualization Phase of the Extraterrestrial Cultural Center is now almost complete and we begin to move forward on to the Second Phase; that of actualizing the Concept.   Most of us doing the conceptual work have little experience with organization and management.  We hope, now that the Conceptual Phase is ending, that a much more experienced and capable management team will join with us, to bring this Concept to reality in Phase Two. 

 

Phase Two will require high caliber business people coming on board who are capable of running a large organization and who also have the fundraising capabilities necessary to raise millions of dollars to build the Centers.   The initial task for the advanced management team is to make the Extraterrestrial Cultural Centers International a legal non-profit entity and to begin fundraising for a modest operating budget the first year.

So "Phase Two" seems like it has some inherent stumbling blocks, namely: (1) millions of dollars to build the Center; (2) millions more dollars to run and staff it; and (3) smart business people to run the whole thing.  I'm not sure that (3) isn't the biggest problem, honestly.  As we've seen many times, there is no short supply of people willing to donate large amounts of money to oddball causes, but getting your average MBA to turn down a lucrative job in Los Angeles to run a UFO welcome center seems like a losing proposition.

Komarek is making use of all of the resources at his disposal, however, including social media.  He has a Facebook page, but when I looked at it I was a little put off by the fact that it seems to be heavily populated by people who probably should not be allowed outside unsupervised.  Here's a sampling from the first few posts on his page:

Alien Invasion Now Taken Very Seriously: Our Government Prepared For the Worst! “They May Not Come In Peace!” (Videos Include Mainstream News Footage)

Reminder * Lightship System White Ibis: What are disclosure and ET contact about? To really understand you have to go beyond the phenomenon of space and time. Higher your frequency, and meet us half way!

Jesus led the resistence [sic] to Enlil - Yahweh, the genocidal Commander of the goldmining expedition from the planet Nibiru to Earth. Jesus, from his home in France and in North America, defied Yahweh and taught 'Help the poor. Sustain the feeble. Do evil to no one. Do not covet what you do not possess. Reverence Woman, the foundation of all that is good and beautiful.'".

So. Yeah. However well-meaning Komarek is, some of his followers seem to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Or maybe that's just my narrow understanding because I haven't "highered my frequency" yet.

Anyhow, I'm not sure how I feel about all of this.  I mean, Komarek's certainly to be encouraged to do whatever floats his boat, and the whole thing seems harmless enough.  As hobbies go, spending your time drawing up plans for building roadside stops for aliens isn't really any crazier than having a fantasy football team.

It's just that the whole thing seems a little premature.  I mean, we don't even have incontrovertible evidence that extraterrestrial life exists, much less that they've ever come here; so having a massive complex designed to make them feel welcome seems kind of like an exercise in futility.

There is, of course, the possibility that it could become a tourist attraction for plain old humans, similar to the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico.  If Komarek succeeds in his alien version of "If you build it, they will come," I know I, for one, would plan a visit there.

Of course, he still has his millions of dollars to raise, and his MBAs to find, and when I checked, his Facebook page only had 592 followers, including the three people quoted above, who hardly count.  So I'm not sure how likely it is to be realized, at least in my lifetime.

It's sad, honestly, because other humorously ironic projects have actually succeeded.

I mean, they succeeded in building the George W. Bush Presidential Library, after all.

Cures for vaccination

It's with a strange twinge of conscience that I'm writing today about an alt-med woo-woo claim that I don't think we should challenge.

It popped up on the website BabyCenter Community a couple of weeks ago, but apparently has been gaining ground since then, showing up on Facebook, Twitter, and websites devoted to anti-vaxx and holistic medicine.

The claim: putting a clay plaster on a vaccination after you get back from the doctor's office will "draw out the vaccine."

The first place I saw this -- the website linked above -- posed it as a question, where it received the following answers:

It helps to pull some of the toxins back out.  Not all though.

 

apparently it is possible to remove all vaccines, infiremiere [sic] should be a day in their vaccines in order to work in a hospital, she made all her vaccination and immediately after the injection, she had everything prepare in advance, she it [sic] absorb the vaccine in his car

with a homeopath here in France It can remove inject vaccine long ago, as soon as I have more information I will send you

One person did say that it wouldn't work, that vaccines are irreversible; but another, much more authoritative respondent came back with the following:

Hello,

For mandatory vaccines that nobody escapes, there is indeed the clay poultice can reabsorb the "poison" from his injection. The method is as follows:

You buy a clay tube (health food stores) and you present to vaccination equipped with this tube, gauze and tape. Once the vaccine was injected, you go to the toilet and you put a thick layer of clay on the vaccine + gauze + tape. Keep this poultice for 2 hours and the vaccine will be almost completely absorbed by the clay.

Upon returning home, you take the natural vitamin C (Acerola C, for example) or magnesium chloride (pharmacy: A bag of 20 grams dissolved in one liter of water and take 1 glass morning, afternoon and evening up. 'to exhaustion of a liter).

So I was reading this, and I was thinking... maybe it's better we let them think this is true.

After all, then the kids will be vaccinated and protected from disease, decreasing the likelihood of outbreaks of preventable diseases; and the adults will conclude that they've won, that they fooled us silly ol' skeptics and scientists, and in consequence, they'll shut up about it and stop trying to fight mandatory vaccination laws.

So, maybe there is a time that it's better to let the woo-woos continue in their beliefs, especially when one particular woo-woo belief cancels out the ill effects of another one.

But I do say this with some degree of guilty feelings.  Because, after all, the whole approach of a skeptic should be to follow wherever the evidence leads, to try to promote clear thinking and the scientific approach for one and all, and in any situation where the scientific approach applies.

Here, though... maybe we should let them have their clay poultices and acerola detox cleanses and homeopathic anti-vaccine remedies.  Let 'em think they've beaten the system.

And hope like hell that their children grow up to understand science better than the parents did.