Ignorance sucks

I bet you think you know what science is for.

I bet you subscribe to such ideas as "science is a means for understanding the universe" or "science provides a method for the betterment of humankind."  And I bet that you think that, by and large, scientists are working to elucidate the actual mechanisms by which nature works, and telling us the truth about what they find.

Ha.  A lot you know.

Yesterday I found out that scientists are actually all in cahoots to pull the wool over our eyes, and are actively lying to us about what they find out.  They work to stamp out the findings of any dissenters (and, if that doesn't work, the dissenters themselves), and to buoy up a worldview that is factually incorrect.

Why would they do this, you may ask?

I... um.  Let's see.  That's a good question.

Well, because they're that evil, that's why.  And you know, that's how conspiracies work.  They just cover stuff up, sometimes for the sheer fun of doing it.  Even the scientists gotta get their jollies somehow, right?  I mean, at the end of the day, rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally only gets you so far.

I came to this rather alarming realization due to a website I ran into called, "Is Gravity a Pulling or a Pushing Force?" wherein we find out that what we learned in high school physics, to wit, that gravity is attractive, is actually backwards.  Gravity isn't pulling us toward the center of mass of the Earth, like your physics teacher told you.  It's more that... space is pushing you down.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's a little like my wife's theory that light bulbs don't illuminate a room by emitting light, they do it by sucking up dark.  She has been known to say, "Gordon, when you get a chance, can you replace the Dark Sucker in the downstairs bathroom?"  Presumably when the filaments in the bulb become saturated with dark, they become incapable of doing their job any more and need to be replaced.

But unlike my wife, the people on this website are serious.  Here is one representative section from the website:

Be sure to understand that any volumetric expansion of the Pressure of electrical-mass that surrounds the earth is what then compresses back and pushes free electrons along any given conductor. This elasticity of the quantum particles of space is the very source of "all" generated electricity around the world at this very moment. The Pressure (Density x Temperature2) of that ocean of electrical-mass that surrounds the earth is also the very origin of Gravity (your compared Density).

And so now - You - know the exact answer to what Albert Einstein spent 20 years searching for while he lived at 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, New Jersey.

The very connection between Gravity and Electricity.

Gravity is absolutely "pushing" us down onto the earth. Gravity is the Pressure of electrical-mass that permeates space and surrounds the earth. And that pressure is responsible for both the pressure of the earth's atmosphere as well as the pressure of water below any ocean.

Three layers surround the earth; The ocean, The atmosphere, and Gravity. Gravity is exactly equal to the ocean of water or the ocean of atmosphere that is surrounding the earth except Gravity is the third and outermost ocean of electrical-mass that surrounds the earth and moves through all mass.

Electrical-mass is invisible to the eye and does not possess temperature. Keep in mind that molecular Velocity = Temperature.
A = Acceleration Z = Time AZ = Velocity (Temperature) AZ2 = Distance.

The combustion of all stars (Energy) produces a pressure of electrical-mass (Gravity) that surrounds all planets and this is the exact connection between Energy and Gravity that Albert Einstein was diligently searching for.

A "Pulling Force" is absolutely impossible. And it's actually quite astounding that this needs to be stated in the year 2012. Certainly no one possesses the ability to calculate "continuous" or "exhaustively" true and pure Physics until they have come to the above realization.

It bears mention that my bachelor's degree is in physics, which means that my knowledge of the topic is, while not exhaustive, certainly better than your average layperson's.  And after reading the above (and lots more like it) on this website, I had two reactions:

1. What?
2. Do you have the IQ of a wad of used bubble gum?

I think what gets me about this is the way it's written; not only does the writer seem to have no knowledge whatsoever of elementary physics, (s)he comes across (and, in fact, states outright later on in the website) that people who do have such knowledge are the dupes.  We folks who have studied science have been fooled by the evil establishment, which is trying to keep us all in abject ignorance about how the universe actually works.

This individual isn't embarrassed by a lack of knowledge; this person is proud of it.  The author of this website takes an abysmal understanding of the rudiments of physics as evidence that (s)he has not been contaminated by the wicked Status Quo.

As another quote from the website put it, "Keep getting the word out to the Physics community who's [sic] eyes have been blinded by complexity rather than enlightened by simplicity."

It's just the cult of ignorance rearing its ugly head again, isn't it?  We here in the United States -- and it may be so elsewhere as well -- tend to distrust the educated, for some reason.  Why else would the word "elite" be used as an insult -- at least in academics?  Recall what Isaac Asimov had to say on the topic: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

And that, I think, is at the heart of this.  Why should we have to put in our dues, listening to the pointy-headed professor types pontificating, when we can just sit around and come up with our own theories?  Especially now that there's an internet, wherein anything goes, regardless of whether it has any connection to reality?  You can always find ignorant people, insane people, and disaffected academic-wannabees who will give you lots of positive feedback, no matter how far out your ideas are.

And given that Science Is Hard, it's all too easy to characterize the professors as wanting to make it harder.  They obfuscate, couching the science in complex terms not because it is complex, but because they're engaging in some kind of Freemason-like ritual to throw people off the scent.  You are in the dark not because you're too lazy to learn the actual science, but because the scientists want to keep you in the dark.

Or maybe you just need to replace the Dark Suckers.

"Nurse Black"

Well, folks, I'm pleased to inform you that this is a milestone: my 1,000th post on Skeptophilia.

When I first started this blog, in October 2010, I had no idea what it would become.  It was a former student who suggested I create a blog (thanks, Brad!), and the first few weeks' worth of posts got little attention.  No surprise, really; it takes a while for anything like this to gain traction.

Then I passed 500, then 5,000, then 50,000, then 500,000 hits; and now, three and a half years later, I am within shouting distance of a million lifetime hits.  So I'd just like to start out with a huge thank you to all of my faithful readers for all of your suggestions, comments, reposts, and (even) criticisms.

Here's to the next thousand posts and the next million hits.

I thought I'd have a little fun with the thousandth Skeptophilia post, just 'cuz I can, right?  So sit back, friends, while I tell you my favorite ghost story.

Despite my general reluctance to believe in ghosts -- the evidence still seems to me regrettably slim -- I love a good scary story, and have been an aficionado of books with names like Twenty True Tales of Terror since childhood.  One of the scariest ones I've ever run into can be found in its entirety in John Canning's wonderful collection 50 Great Ghost Stories, which (according to the message written into the front cover that says "October 29, 1977... Mon Cher Ami... mieux vaut tard que jamais!... Amelia") I received from a family friend as a gift three days after my 17th birthday.

I read the whole thing voraciously, as I was wont to do with such books.  But none of the stories has stuck with me like the 19th century English tale of Nurse Black.

The story comes from the (real) English theater figures of Charles Kean and his wife, Ellen, but the central characters are Ellen's sister, Ann, and her publisher husband, John Kemble Chapman.  John and Ann and their eleven children lived in London in the 1850s, but London of the time was a polluted, disgusting-smelling, crime-ridden place, so they decided to find a country home that was a healthier place to raise children.

They settled on a home in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.  It was spacious and picturesque, and at the time already about 200 years old.  But it seemed ideal, and in due time the home was purchased, and the family moved in.

And for a while, nothing untoward happened.

It was only when the Chapmans were expecting guests that the first events occurred that were eventually to impel them to sell their house.  For wealthy individuals, John and Ann were unusual in their time in that they employed few servants.  Ann was a practical, strong-minded individual, and preferred to see to the household chores herself.  So one day, she was making up the bed in the "Oak Bedroom," a room that had been left unoccupied for guests, when she realized that she was not alone.

Standing near the window was a young woman in antiquated dress, wearing a white shawl over a silk petticoat.  The woman was looking out of the window with an eager expression, as if she were expecting someone, and did not seem to be paying any attention to Ann.  But Ann herself was seized with a sudden panic; she knew, she said afterwards, that it was not some stranger who had wandered into the house unnoticed.  "I felt," she told her brother-in-law Charles Kean, "as if I was seeing something I ought not to have seen."  So she put her hands over her eyes for a moment.

When she removed them, the figure was gone.

Ann chalked the apparition up to fatigue and nerves, and was able to convince herself for a time that she'd been a victim of her own imagination.

Then a few days later, a young woman who had been hired to look after the youngest of the Chapman children came running upstairs in hysterics, saying that she had been taking the trash out through a back room, and had seen a face staring at her through a window.  The face, she said, was of an old woman, "hideously ugly" and with "an expression of awful malignance," wearing a nightcap.

With some difficulty, Ann was able to calm down the nursery maid, convincing her that it had been a trick of the light -- until three days later, when Maria Chapman, one of Ann's older daughters, told her that she had been scared during the night when she had awakened to find a "very ugly lady wearing a cap" who was peering around the edge of her bedroom door at her.

During this entire time, John Chapman had been away on business in London, and it's to be imagined that Ann was looking forward to his return.  But before he got back, she did something that I have to say I find impressive -- with the help of their few servants, she went over the entire house from stem to stern.  Every closet, cabinet, cupboard, and corner was investigated, to see if there was any evidence of someone hiding in the house without the owners' knowledge.  They found nothing -- but as Ann was going down the staircase away from the Oak Bedroom, she heard footsteps following her.

She turned around.  The staircase was empty.

John came home a few days later, and by this time Ann was so thoroughly unnerved that she told her husband everything.  Knowing her to be steady, reliable, and intelligent, John believed what she said, and instituted a second (fruitless) search of the house.  And he was to get his own evidence shortly thereafter, as events accelerated.  Footsteps began to follow him everywhere he went -- "soft, steady, infinitely menacing."  He took to carrying a loaded pistol with him.  Then most of their servants quit when during their meal, a door opened and closed -- to admit no one.

One of the only remaining servants, a Mrs. Tewin, promised to sleep in the same room with Ann Chapman the next time John had to be away.  And this was to precipitate one final incident, that induced the Chapmans to leave.

In the middle of the night, Ann Chapman awoke to hear Mrs. Tewin moaning, "Wake me.  Wake me."  Ann ran to her bedside, and shook the servant awake.  Upon coming to full consciousness, Mrs. Tewin said she'd been dreaming, and had been aware it was a dream -- but had been unable to wake up.

In the dream, Mrs. Tewin said, she was in the Oak Bedroom.  Standing near the window was a young woman in an old-fashioned white robe, with long, disheveled dark hair.  Across the room, near the fireplace, was an ugly old woman "with an evil expression," wearing a gray nightcap over scanty, wispy hair, seated in a rocking chair.

"What have you done with the child, Emily?" the old woman asked, in a sneering, mocking voice.  "What have you done with the child?"

"Oh, I did not kill it," the girl replied.  "He was preserved, and grew up and joined a regiment and went to India."

At this point, the young woman noticed Mrs. Tewin, seemingly for the first time, and said to her, "I have never spoken to a mortal before.  But I will tell you everything.  My name is Miss Black.  This old woman is Nurse Black.  Black is not her family name, but we call her that because she has been so long in the family..."

But here, the old woman stood, and went to Mrs. Tewin and put her hand on the servant's shoulder.  The pain was excruciating, but she could not wake up.  This is when she began crying out, and called for Ann Chapman to wake her.

The next morning, Ann went into the village of Cheshunt to make inquiries, and was able to find out from an old inhabitant that many years earlier, the home had been inhabited by a Mrs. Ravenhall, who had had a niece named Emily Black.  But nothing else was recalled about them.

The Chapmans were becoming increasingly desperate to find out what was going on, and Ann (who was either incredibly courageous or else completely crazy) decided to spend a night in the Oak Bedroom, which seemed to be the epicenter of the haunting.  And late at night, she woke to see once again the figure of the young woman, this time wringing her hands and looking down at a particular spot on the floor.  The next day, she even went to the length of calling in a carpenter to pry up the floorboards at that particular spot.

Underneath was a hollowed-out space -- but it was empty.

At this point, the Chapmans had had enough, and put the house up for sale.  What happened afterwards -- who bought it, and if they had similarly uncanny experiences -- was not recorded in the story.

I think what appeals to me about this story is the open-endedness of it.  All of us have heard scary stories of the urban legend variety; the driver who picked up a beautiful hitchhiker late at night, loaned her his jacket, and afterwards finds out that she matches the description of a dead girl from the nearby village, and he finds his missing jacket folded up on her grave.  Those have always struck me as too neat, too pat, to be believable (even when I was in my much more gullible youth).  But this one has no easy tie-up, and is full of loose ends -- the Chapmans never did figure out who the ghosts were, what their story was, why they haunted the place.  Even the hollow space under the floorboards, which could have provided an easy way to give a punch line, was empty.

Now, it's not that I actually believe it, mind you.  Charles Kean, who enjoyed many a glass of brandy while scaring the absolute hell out of his friends with the tale, was a thespian, and presumably knew how to spin a good yarn, so I've no real doubt that he made it up.  But the twisty, unresolved messiness of the story has the ring of truth, I have to admit, and for me that makes it a hundred times scarier. 

Man, it should be true.

So there you have it.  One of my favorite ghost stories, in celebration of my thousandth post.  To my readers: another heartfelt thank you.  Keep reading, keep thinking, keep investigating, keep questioning.  And if tonight you hear footsteps behind you on the stairs, just say, "Emily Black, is that you?"

Maybe you'll get an answer.

Diamonds, water, the Great Flood, and car wrecks

When I was thirteen years old, I witnessed a car crash in front of my parents' house.

It was a bright red convertible, going far too fast -- and the driver was not quite able to negotiate the curve that the road made right by our driveway.  The car hit a road sign, went airborne, flipped in midair, and skidded down the hill in the neighbor's yard on its top.

My dad and I ran toward it, knowing that the likelihood was that there was a severely mashed human underneath.  But amazingly, this was the one-in-a-million situation where not wearing a seatbelt had saved the driver's life.  He'd been thrown clear, and came away with no more than cuts and bruises (and a totaled car).

But what I remember about this incident most of all is the feeling of complete helplessness -- watching the car careening down the road, seeing it launch itself into the air, being certain at the time (although I was happily proven wrong in the end) that that driver was seconds from his death.  To this day, I still have this feeling when I see something rushing toward an outcome that I am powerless to prevent.

It's an intensely uncomfortable sensation.

I experienced this feeling just yesterday, albeit in a less life-threatening situation, when I ran into a seemingly innocuous story over at the BBC News Online entitled, "Mineral Hints at Bright Blue Rocks Deep in the Earth."  In it, we hear about the discovery of inclusions of a mineral called ringwoodite in diamonds that had formed deep in the Earth (an estimated 600 kilometers underneath the Earth's surface).

[image of a ringwoodite crystal courtesy of photographer Jasperox and the Wikimedia Commons]

"Diamonds, brought to the Earth's surface in violent eruptions of deep volcanic rocks called kimberlites," the article states, "provide a tantalising window into the deep Earth.  A research team led by Prof Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta, Canada, studied a diamond from a 100-million-year-old kimberlite found in Juina, Brazil, as part of a wider project."

So far, something of interest only to geologists.  But then the article went on to explain one of the odd things about these inclusions:

"While ringwoodite has previously been found in meteorites, this is the first time a terrestrial ringwoodite has been seen. But more extraordinarily, the researchers found that the mineral contains about 1% water.  While this sounds like very little, because ringwoodite makes up almost all of this immense portion of the deep Earth, it adds up to a huge amount of deep water...  They also provide the first direct evidence that there may be as much water trapped in those rocks as there is in all the oceans."

And that's when I saw the impending car crash.

"A key question posed by the observation," the article continues, "is to understand the extent to which plate tectonics on Earth leads to oceans of water being recycled deep within our planet, and to predict the likely amounts of water trapped in other rocky planets."

No, no, stop, please stop...

"Prof Joseph Smyth of the University of Colorado has spent many years studying ringwoodite and similar minerals synthesised in his laboratory.  He said: 'I think it's stunning! It implies that the interior may store several times the amount of water in the oceans. It tells us that hydrogen is an essential ingredient in the Earth and not added late from comets.'"

Too late.

You do see where this slow-motion auto accident is heading, right?  Let me make it clear by posting three of the comments that showed up when the story, in somewhat abbreviated form, made its way onto The Daily Mail:

The Christian bible has some things to say about incredibly large amounts of water deep within the earth. KJV Genesis 7:11 Noah, his family and the creatures, enter the ark 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. KJV Genesis 8:2 The waters subside 2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; KJV Proverbs 8:27-29 27 When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: 28 When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: 29 When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment.

This water was mentioned in the bible when it told of God making all the water below the earth rise and flood the world. Read about Noah. Believe what the bible teaches us. Your soul is at stake.

"....all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. And the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. " Genesis 7:11 cf John Lennox Mathematician Oxford U. It is certainly scientific to believe in God, and really now, what sort of spirit promotes hatred for people who do?

Then some poor slob, who hasn't figured out yet that arguing in the "Comments" section of popular media is completely pointless, responded that in order to believe the biblical account of the Great Flood, you'd have to accept that it rained enough in "forty days and forty nights" to cover the entire surface of the Earth, a quantity he calculated as 2000 million cubic kilometers of water.  (I haven't checked his math, but it doesn't seem to be off by much, given that the surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers.)

 

To no avail.  Of course.

[1] Direct your free water clarifications to the DM which created the headline, "Revealed:The vast reservoir hidden beneath the Earth's crust that holds as much water as ALL of the oceans." [2] You say, "2000 M cubic km of water fell as rain." Where does the bible say that? Read Genesis 7:11 again. It specifically mentions the breaking up of the fountains of the deep along with the windows of heaven being opened up. This implies that all the water did not come from rain. Besides providing the source for your claim, please show your calculations along with your assumptions. [3] You don't know and can't prove that these bible stories are myths anymore than you can definitively show what a photon is or what gravity is. Neither can you prove by testable replication where and how life originated and diversified. You are as powerless to explain these things as you are to definitively reject these verses in the bible.

So if the initial publication of the article led me to feel like I was watching the beginning of an intellectual train-wreck, the aftermath left me doing repeated headdesks.

And just because I feel obliged to say it:  no, the discovery of a great deal of chemically-bound water in the mantle transition zone does not support the biblical flood story.  For one thing, the rocks down there are at at temperature of about 1600 C, so if god "broke up the fountains of the deep," what would come out is not pure, clear water, but a huge gusher of extremely hot magma.  No, there is nothing even remotely possible about a Great Flood Covering the Earth, not to mention the whole Noah's Ark nonsense.  In order to accept any of that as literal fact, you either have to be (1) ignorant, or (2) engage in confirmation bias to an extent that is truly mind-boggling.

And to the scientists who published this research; I know you were just trying to do some cool geology.  I know you were excited by your find, and what it might tell us about the chemistry of the Earth's mantle.  But we skeptics already spend way more of our time than we should arguing against the biblical literalist lunatics, and trying to stop them from spreading their nonsense into public schools -- and now they think they have some scientific support for their Bronze-Age mythology.

Yes, I know it doesn't really support their beliefs, but they think it does, and as a result we're going to be hearing about it for the next ten years.  And for that, I don't know if I can ever forgive you.

No miracles for the Ivy League

I suppose that I'm an optimist at heart.

I always live in hope that people will see reason.  Regardless of what illogical and counterfactual thinking they've been guilty of in the past, I try to keep focused on the fact that they could, eventually, recognize that what they're saying is nonsense, and subscribe to a more reasoned approach.

It's what I'd hoped of Pat Robertson.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I know, I know.  Pat Robertson has proven, over and over, that he's a raving lunatic.  As I described in a previous post, he's the one who said that Katrina and the Haitian earthquake were the wrath of god, that martial arts were evil because they required you to "inhale demon spirits" prior to practice, and that good Christian children shouldn't participate in Halloween because the candy could have been cursed by witches.  I think I can say without fear of contradiction that these are not the pronouncements of a sane man.

But then, last month,  he said something... reasonable.  Like, really reasonable.  It was shortly after the Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate, and Pat said on his show, The 700 Club, that Ham had better give up trying to defend the young-Earth creationist stance:

Let’s face it.  There was a Bishop [Ussher] who added up the dates listed in Genesis and he came up with the world had been around for 6,000 years.  There ain’t no way that’s possible.  To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.

Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves.

We’ve got to be realistic, and admit that the dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn’t comport with anything that is found in science, and you can’t just totally deny the geological formations that are out there.

Well... um... yeah.  Exactly.

The creationists, of course, were not going to take that lying down, especially given that Pat is one of their own and is still widely listened-to in the evangelical world.  Paul Taylor, who along with Eric Hovind is the host of Creation Today, took serious umbrage with Pat's pronouncements.  "Pat Robertson is claiming, then, that 6,000 years comes from Ussher’s book and not the Bible," Taylor said.  "The point is, where did Ussher get his figure of 6,000 years?...  Now, then, Pat Robertson, are you claiming the Bible is not [divinely] inspired when the Bible clearly tells us that the world is 6,000 years old?"

Which, I guess, was a fair enough criticism, given Taylor's assumptions about both the inerrancy of the bible and Pat Robertson's opinion thereof.  But as for me, I was heartened.  Maybe there's hope after all, I thought.  If someone like Pat Robertson could be convinced of the antiquity of the Earth, then there's hope for converting others to a more scientific view of the universe.

Optimism, sometimes, is a losing proposition.

I say this because of a story that popped up yesterday that described another proclamation Pat made on The 700 Club, this one just this past Monday.  A listener called in and asked Pat why the incidence of miracles was so much higher in "places like Africa" (the listener's words, not mine, allow me to point out) than it is here in the U.S.  Why don't we see miracles happening every day, like in biblical times, when it seemed like every other day there was a talking snake or a burning bush or a dude getting the crap smitten out of him for blasphemy or a dead guy coming back to life?  Why, the listener asked, don't we see stuff in the U.S. like prayer restoring sight in the blind and the ability to walk in the lame?

Ah, yes, that, Pat said.  It's because...

... god doesn't like us because we're too smart:

People overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools.  We’re so sophisticated, we think we’ve got everything figured out.  We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real.

We have been inundated with skepticism and secularism.  And overseas, they’re simple, humble.  You tell ‘em God loves ‘em and they say, ‘Okay, he loves me.’  You say God will do miracles and they say, ‘Okay, we believe him.’

And that’s what God’s looking for.  That’s why they have miracles.

Well, even overlooking the blatant white-privilege attitude that would cause someone to label an entire freakin' continent with the word "simple," this strikes me as a completely baffling attitude.  Let's put you in god's shoes (size 12 loafers).  Now say you've got two people that you're considering doing a miracle for.  And you're not just considering doing your garden-variety miracle like hitting all of the stoplights green or finding two perfectly ripe avocados at the grocery store or hearing something that's true on the History Channel.  No, this is going to be something big, like regrowing a lost limb or having your dog start talking to you to tell you that you need to repent your evil ways and return Unto The Lord.

Now, both of the people you're thinking about granting a miracle to are unbelievers.  But one is a dirt-poor, uneducated farmer from Senegal.  The other is a highly influential, wealthy, Ivy League academic from Boston.

Logically, which one should you choose?

Well, if god is trying to reach the maximum number of people -- which, presumably, he is -- the obvious choice is the Bostonian academic.  No offense to our Senegalese farmer, but if he was suddenly converted via a divine message spoken by his dog, he might tell three or four people, maybe a couple of dozen, at most, and that would be it.  The Bostonian?  Especially if he could prove that something miraculous had happened, like hard evidence that he had regrown a lost finger, or something?

You're talking a reach of millions.

So either (1) god doesn't see things that way, and doesn't understand the concept of "biggest bang for the buck," or (2) I was wrong about Pat Robertson, and he actually is crazy as a bedbug.

Sadly, I'm putting my money on the latter.

Bring out your dead!

I have, at times, been accused of selecting only the most grotesquely absurd examples of woo-woo belief to examine in this blog.  Thus, say my detractors, avoiding the necessity of answering difficult questions about more plausible, rational, and scientific claims.

To which I say: maybe.  I don't think I really shy away from odd (but plausible) ideas; there are a good many claims to which I give my stock response of, "The jury's still out on that one," and which I am eager to consider.  (An obvious example is the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.)  But if I sometimes fall prey to the temptation of going for the low-hanging fruit, I can excuse myself on two bases:

1. They are so freakin' common; and
2. There are so many people who fall for them.

As an example, take the article that popped up on The Freethinker yesterday, which I had to read twice to convince myself that I wasn't falling victim to Poe's Law.  The title?  "Evangelical Christians Want Access to More Corpses... To Hone Their 'Raising the Dead' Skills."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'd like to be able to tell you that this isn't exactly what it sounds like... but it is.  Tyler Johnson, of Bethel Church, Redding, California, runs something called "One Glance Ministries" -- and an integral part of this is the "Dead Raising Team," about which Johnson himself has the following to say:

The DRT offers a service of support to any family that is grieving the loss of a loved one.  In addition to giving the bereaved spiritual and emotional support, our team of trained ministers will offer prayers of resurrection on the behalf of the deceased.  Handling each situation with the utmost sensitivity, our team travels to the funeral home, morgue, or family's home where the deceased is being kept.  Upon arrival, we spend time in prayer with the family, as well as the deceased.  We will stay as long as we are needed.  Since it was started, the DRT has comforted families in the midst of grief, as well as having eleven resurrections to date as a result of their prayers.  If this is a service you would like to make use of in the midst of your pain, please contact us as soon as possible.  Nothing is impossible with God.

Call me a Doubting Thomas, but after reading the mention of the "eleven resurrections" I wanted to type in [Source Citation Needed!].  But unfortunately, Johnson isn't forthcoming with details.  As the Freethinker article put it:

Johnson is unwilling to provide successful case studies. And in general, the proof that believers cite is a bit unconvincing ­– for example, there is an American heart surgeon who allegedly brought a heart attack patient back from the dead with prayer … oh, and a defibrillator.

Other doctors find the story entirely unremarkable. One wonders why.

On the DRT website, you can check out the details of "training," which include sessions on "The Theology of Dead Raising" and "The Practicals of Dead Raising."  I would expect the latter to be especially... informative.

I'd like to say that this kind of thing is limited to the US, but apparently there are also lunatics of this stripe in the UK.  Again, from the article in Freethinker:

Alun and Donna Leppit... [are] a British couple who are convinced that the dead can be raised through the power of prayer.  

During the course of the [BBC 4] broadcast, Donna lamented that there aren’t too many corpses in the UK that they can practice on.

The one that they did try to resurrect to was Donna’s brother,  who died of a heart attack.

By the time they got to the mortuary, he had been dead for eight hours. They prayed over him for nearly an hour, and although at one stage they thought they saw him move, that was as good as it got.

Are they discouraged?  "Not at all," says Alun.  "Practice makes perfect," adds Donna. "But in this country, we don’t often get access to dead bodies."

No, Donna, and there's a reason for that.

Funny that there's no Amputee-Restoration Team, isn't there?  Seems like amputees eager to have god (with whom Nothing Is Impossible) restore their lost limbs would be easier to come by than corpses.  Wonder why they don't give that a shot?

Maybe because they know it wouldn't work -- and the amputee would still be around, sans limb, to give lie to the whole proceeding.

Okay, I know all Christians aren't like this, and I won't fall into the trap of judging all of them on the basis of a loony few.  But in my experience, the loony ones are often the loudest.  Look at Michele Bachmann.  (Not directly!  Wear protective eyewear!)  Her shrill neo-Puritanism draws huge crowds -- despite the fact that she has stated outright that America should be run on the basis of "a biblical view of law."  (And has also said, "If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it. When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it.")

A "biblical view of law" would include, presumably, doing things like stoning disobedient children and burning down towns where there are unbelievers, since those are both clearly mandated in the Old Testament, along with the prohibition against homosexuality she is so fond of quoting.

So I'm perhaps to be excused for being a little wary when someone says, "Oh, Christians aren't like that!"  Maybe many Christians aren't.  Maybe even most aren't.  But if enough of them are potential clients of the Dead Raising Team that people like Michele Bachmann (and Jim DeMint, and Sam Brownback, and Ted Cruz) can get elected, then there's something seriously wrong.  (Read this article in Patheos if you are still in doubt.)

So it's easy for rationalists to laugh at the Dead Raising Team and the rest of the wacko fringe, but there is a significant percentage of Americans who believe in such things whole-heartedly.

So maybe the "low-hanging fruit" isn't quite so facile a target as it may have seemed at first.

The disappearance of Flight 370

Well, I'm happy to say that The Weekly World News has been supplanted as the world's first and foremost disseminator of bullshit.  The crown has now officially been passed to Natural News. 

It's not that the competition wasn't stiff.  The Weekly World News has had some doozies.  (My all-time favorite TWWN headline: "Santa's Elves Actually Slaves From The Planet Mars.")  But Natural News has edged them out, on two bases: (1) they have better writers, so their stories actually sound plausible and therefore sucker more people, and (2) they have mastered the art of distributing bonkers "news" stories via social media.

At first, it was just health stuff (and their site is still sub-headed, "Natural Health News and Scientific Discoveries").  And as such, they confined themselves for some time to articles telling you about how Big Pharma is trying to kill us all, how you can cure cancer with lemon juice, how putting onions in your socks draws out toxins, and how you won't get heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or old age if you eat Indian gooseberries.  (You thought I was going to say I made those up, didn't you?  Well, ha.  Those are real article topics from Natural News.  Teach you to make assumptions.)

But now, they've branched out.  And because of this, we have a monumentally screwy piece of journalism, to wit: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared because it... disappeared.

[image courtesy of photographer Aero Icarus and the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup.  Disappeared.  "Poof."  Or "zap," or whatever noise you prefer your teleportation device to make.  And admit it: it's not really that surprising.  Given that we're talking about the loss of a huge passenger jet, it was only a matter of time until the conspiracy theories started flying around.

Author Mike Adams does it right, I have to give him that.  First, it's hammered into our brains how MYSTERIOUS and BAFFLING it is that the plane vanished (words to that effect appear dozens of times), and then we're offered a possible explanation:

This is what is currently giving rise to all sorts of bizarre-sounding theories across the 'net, including discussions of possible secret military weapons tests, Bermuda Triangle-like ripples in the fabric of spacetime, and even conjecture that non-terrestrial (alien) technology may have teleported the plane away.

But no, Adams says, that would be ridiculous.  We couldn't believe that without evidence.  Instead, he asks us to believe the following:

The frightening part about all this is not that we will find the debris of Flight 370; but rather that we won't. If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence.

If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever control it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power. That thought is a lot more scary than the idea of an aircraft suffering a fatal mechanical failure.

Righty-o.  Because planes have never disappeared before, or anything.  It's not as if there's a list of 122 airplane disappearances that have never been resolved, right there on Wikipedia -- 36 of them since 1966, when black boxes were required on commercial aircraft.  It's not as if there is precedent for it taking a long while to locate wreckage -- such as the remains of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, which took three years to recover.  (The black box was finally found under 13,000 feet of water in the South Atlantic.)

Marginally more plausible theories have been trotted out, mostly centering on some kind of Chinese-led terrorist attack designed to get rid of one or more people who were on the plane.  To that, I can only respond: why the hell would the Chinese blow up an entire airplane to get rid of a few people?  The plane was headed to Beijing, fer cryin' in the sink.  Couldn't they have just arrested them when they got there?  It's not like the Chinese are shy about doing that sort of thing, after all.

So, then, you might ask: what do I think happened to the plane?

Are you ready? 

I don't know.  There's no evidence at the moment, and in the absence of evidence, that's what we say.  It's not that hard, really -- say it after me:  I don't know.  It might have been an equipment malfunction; it might have been a terrorist bomb; it might have been shot down by someone on the ground.  It might have been any number of other things.  We don't have any information yet, so any speculating is kind of pointless, and it sure is a little premature to start talking about alien teleportation.  But that didn't stop the commenters on the Natural News article from writing stuff that was, if you can believe it, even loonier than the original article:

Why Does Mike Adams not offer any speculation about The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing charging Israel with genocide? Also the Former Malaysian Prime Minister until 2003 who once stated 9/11 was a false flag and it's Jews that run the world. The plane being fitted with the Boeing uninterruptable autopilot system?

The possibility exists that this plane instead of moving towards the ground has moved away from the ground. In other words it has moved into outer space. It is beyond Earth orbit because it would have been detected in orbit by some instrument. This would explain why the black box signal is not detected.

Have you seen LOST!!! What if this is just like LOST! The radiation from Fukishima [sic] is probably changing the sky now too.

Mike is blessed with a unique ability to analyze, rationalize and discern evil. For those who want Mike to ignore politics, remember that millions more innocent people have been murdered by governments than from toxins in their food.

So, the reason that they haven't found the wreckage yet couldn't be the fact that the Gulf of Thailand, where the plane disappeared, is fucking huge?

Nope.  Has to be a "new, mysterious force that plucks airplanes out of the sky."

Look.  I'll grant you this:  I don't know what happened, either.  (Cf. what I wrote several paragraphs ago, and then asked you to say along with me.)  The difference is, I don't pretend that I do, and I don't have any interest in getting people all freaked out over idle speculation that will almost certainly turn out to be false.  But I'll go this far -- if it does turn out to be a "new, mysterious force," or aliens, or time warps, or the fact that the Bermuda Triangle decided to go on vacation in Southeast Asia, I'll happily publish a retraction.

It'd be nice to receive the same from Mike Adams if, on the other hand, I turn out to be right -- but I'm not expecting it.

Race, ethnicity, Einstein, and King Tut

Today we have two stories that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, we have an article by Jo Marchant over at Medium entitled, "Tutankhamun's Blood," wherein we hear about the work done by Yehia Gad to sequence the young pharaoh's DNA -- and how it set off a war over what race/ethnic group gets to claim him.  First, there was concern that the test would show a connection between the Egyptian king and... *cue dramatic music* the Jews:

The editor of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, reported in 2002 that [proposed DNA testing] was cancelled “due to concern that the results might strengthen an association between the family of Tutankhamun and the Biblical Moses.” An Egyptologist with close links to the antiquities service, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, agreed: “There was a fear it would be said that the pharaohs were Jewish.”

Specifically, if the results showed that Tutankhamun shared DNA with Jewish groups, there was concern that this could be used by Israel to argue that Egypt was part of the Promised Land.

This might seem an outlandish notion, but given the context of the Middle Eastern history, it is understandable...  For many Egyptians, the idea that their most famous kings could share some common heritage with their enemies is a hard one to cope with.

Yet the possibility that Tutankhamun could share some DNA with ancient Jewish tribes is not far-fetched, says Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist and mummy specialist at the American University in Cairo. After all, the royal family might well have shared genes with others who originated in the same part of the world. “It is quite possible that you might find Semitic strains of DNA in the pharaohs,” she says. “Christians, Jews, Muslims—they all came from a similar gene pool originally.”

Yehia Gad finally was allowed to do the DNA testing, under the direction of an Egyptian antiquities expert, the archaeologist Zahi Hawass, and the results turned out to be controversial, but for a different reason:

A Swiss genealogy company named IGENEA issued a press release based on a blurry screen-grab from the Discovery documentary. It claimed that the colored peaks on the computer screen proved that Tutankhamun belonged to an ancestral line, or haplogroup, called R1b1a2, that is rare in modern Egypt but common in western Europeans...  This immediately led to assertions by neo-Nazi groups that King Tutankhamun had been “white,” including YouTube videos with titles such as King Tutankhamun’s Aryan DNA Results, while others angrily condemned the entire claim as a racist hoax. It played, once again, into the long-running battle over the king’s racial origins. While some worried about a Jewish connection, the argument over whether the king was black or white has inflamed fanatics worldwide. Far-right groups have used blood group data to claim that the ancient Egyptians were in fact Nordic, while others have been desperate to define the pharaohs as black African. A 1970s show of Tutankhamun’s treasures triggered demonstrations arguing that his African heritage was being denied, while the blockbusting 2005 tour was hit by protests in Los Angeles, when demonstrators argued that the reconstruction of the king’s face built from CT scan data was not sufficiently “black.”

If that's not ridiculous enough, just yesterday we had a story from Haaretz about an apparently insane Iranian cleric who claims that Albert Einstein was actually a Shi'a Muslim:

The report cites a video by Ayatolla Mahadavi Kani, described as the head of the Assembly of Experts in the Islamic Republic of Iran, who says that there are documents proving the Jewish scientist embraced Shiite Islam and was an avid follower of Ja'far Al-Sadiq, an eighth-century Shi'i imam.

In the video, Kani quotes Einstein as saying that when he heard about the ascension of the prophet Mohammed, "a process which was faster than the speed of light," he realized "this is the very same relativity movement that Einstein had understood."

The ayatollah adds: "Einstein said, 'when I heard about the narratives of the prophet Mohamad and that of the Ahle-Beit [prophet's household] I realized they had understood these things way before us.'"

What I find wryly amusing about all of this he's-mine-no-he's-mine tug-of-war over famous historical figures is how it ignores the reality of what race and ethnic identification actually are.  There is some biological basis for race, which is how we can generate cladograms for ethnic groups like the one pictured below:

Note what is, for some people, the most surprising thing about this tree; two very dark-skinned individuals, one a Native Australian and the other a Bantu from Zimbabwe, are far more distantly related to each other than an Englishman is related to a guy from Japan -- even though both the Bantu and the Australian are routinely lumped together as "Black," and the Englishman and the Japanese consider themselves different races.

Professor Emeritus Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the acclaimed and much-cited population geneticist at Stanford, writes, "Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear…  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones.  From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus…the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection."

That's not to say that there's nothing to race at all.  Self-perception, privilege, culture, religion, and language are all strongly connected to, and influenced by, race and ethnicity.  But the genetic connection is tenuous at best, which is why I always find it funny when someone tells me that (s)he is "1/32 Native American," and then decides to adopt a Native name, wear Native-style jewelry and clothing, and so on.  By the time your ancestry has that small a proportion from any ethnic group, you are hardly Native American in any cultural sense, so doing all that sort of stuff -- and yes, I know more than one person who does -- is little more than an affectation.

But it's also not to say that I'm not proud of my roots.  My family is predominantly French and Scottish, with some Dutch, German, English, Irish, and Native American thrown in for good measure (and the latter, I'm afraid, isn't much more than 1/32 of my heritage).  Ethnically, I'm a southern Louisianian, and if you don't think that's an ethnic and cultural group, you should spend some time in Lafayette, Louisiana.  But I am, at the same time, fully aware of how fluid a concept ethnic identification is.  I've lost most of my Cajun accent in the three decades I've lived in YankeeLand, and my children -- who share about the same proportion of Cajun blood I do, since their mother was also half south-Louisiana-French by ancestry -- were raised in upstate New York and therefore aren't ethnically Cajun at all.

And all of this is why the wrangling over whether King Tut was "actually" European (or Black, or Semitic, or whatever) and whether Albert Einstein was "actually" a Muslim, is ridiculous.  We are all mixtures of genetics and culture; and each of those brings along with it physical and cultural baggage.  It's wonderful when someone embraces his or her ethnicity for the positive features (the perspective on the world, the music, the language, the food) and jettisons the negative aspects (the divisive us-vs.-them mentality, the notions of superiority and inferiority, the assumption of privilege).  An understanding of what ethnicity and race are, and are not, is a critical step in growing into a world where we value each other's shared humanity more than we worry about what labels we choose to place on ourselves.