The woo-woos go to Wales

Some of you may remember that three years ago, just as the Mayan Apocalypse nonsense was beginning to get some traction, a cadre of nutjobs associated with J. Z. Knight's "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" descended on the little village of Bugarach in the southwest of France because they had somehow become convinced that it was the only place on Earth that wasn't going to be destroyed.  The mayor of Bugarach was understandably dismayed when thousands of dubiously sane apocalyptoids showed up and started camping out all around the village.  They were, they explained, expecting that when the End Times came, the nearby mountain (the Pic de Bugarach) was going to pop open in the fashion of a jack-in-the-box, and an alien spacecraft was going to come out and bring all of the assembled woo-woos to their new home in outer space.

Except, of course, that none of this happened, and the woo-woos eventually gave up and went home.  Same as the Harmonic Convergence people and the Rajneeshees did a generation earlier.  As mystifying as it seems, repeatedly failing in every single prediction they make never discourages the loyal following.  They disperse temporarily, but always resurface later, once again holding hands and chanting while barefoot and wearing daisy chains...

... and this time Wales is the lucky winner.

Our most recent iteration of this story comes to us courtesy of the "Aetherius Society," which hales back to 1958, when London cab driver George King was instructed by an "alien intelligence" to become a religious leader.  "Prepare yourself!" the voice told him.  "You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament."  The alien intelligence said his name was "Aetherius" and that he lived on the planet Venus, despite the fact that Venus is basically a cross between an acid bath and a blast furnace, with a surface hot enough to melt lead.  Be that as it may, Aetherius did a lot of talking to and through King, delivering messages that included a cautionary note that if people didn't listen to the "Cosmic Masters," evil space guys were going to destroy the Earth.  However, with the help of Aetherius and others (including the same Krishna that the Hindus worship, except that the Aetherius people say that Krishna is from Saturn), everything would be just hunky-dory.

Oh, yeah, and Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tse were aliens, too.  Just to be clear on that.

But then, there's also this fixation on mountains, which is how Wales comes into the picture.  George King/Aetherius said that there were nineteen mountains around the world that were "holy places" that were "charged with spiritual energy," and these include Pen-y-Fan in the Brecon Beacons and Carnedd Llewelyn in Snowdonia.  And it is to the latter that the Aetherius Society members are going to be heading in August.

"Carnedd Llewelyn is one of nineteen mountains around the world that the Aetherius Society revere as holy," society member Richard Lawrence said.  "On August 23 we are arranging a pilgrimage...  The purpose of going up is to send out spiritual energy for world peace and to pray for the betterment of humanity.  The climbs are quite demanding, I find, and then at the top we raise our hands and join in prayer.  When I feel a burst of energy it could be strong heat in the palms or a tingling sensation throughout the body."

I don't know about you, but I would not consider a "tingling sensation" an adequate reward for busting my ass climbing a mountain.  But that's just me.  And at least, unlike the Pic de Bugarach, Carnedd Llewelyn isn't all that near any towns whose inhabitants the "pilgrims" will bother.  The nearest good-sized village is Bethesda, fourteen kilometers distant, which is quite a hike.  Plus, Bethesda is said by Wikipedia to be "infamous for its pubs," so maybe our pilgrims might oughta think about other accommodations in any case.

I suppose that the whole thing is harmless enough, but you have to wonder how it keeps happening.  I mean, if I were considering becoming an Aetherian, or whatever the hell they call themselves, I'd do some research first.  I'd start by looking up "alien UFO fringe groups" online, and after the first ten articles about the Heaven's Gate Cult and the Raëlians and (it must be said) the Scientologists, I'd pretty much go, "Well, fuck that."

So I won't be joining them in Wales, much as I think it's a lovely place that I'd like to visit again.  I'm not much for daisy chains and chanting.  Instead, I think I'll see what I can do in the way of achieving "tingling sensations" in the comfort and privacy of my own home.

Ebenezer's shame

Coming right on the heels of yesterday's post, wherein I mused over the question of whether the woo-woos are actually just kidding, and are seeing how outlandish their claims can become before we skeptics catch on, we have a story today that makes me ask the same question about the creationists.

It will probably come as no great shock that the latest bizarre salvo from the biblical literalists has come from none other than Ken Ham, whose trouncing by Bill Nye the Science Guy in a debate that brought to mind the phrase "having a battle of wits with an unarmed man" seems not to have dampened his convictions.  Now, according to a story that I first saw in (of all places) the Pakistan Daily Times, Ham is claiming that an extraordinarily well-preserved Allosaurus specimen is concrete proof of the biblical creation story.

Yes, I know that Ham et al. believe that everything is proof of the biblical creation story.  But does it seem to you that deliberately choosing a 150 million year old fossil as proof of their mythology is a little... crazy?  They're on shaky enough ground with all of the "look at the pretty butterflies and fascinating fish, god musta did it" stuff that the Creation Museum excels at; why would they deliberately pick a Jurassic-era dinosaur?

[image courtesy of photographer Andy Tang and the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's not like it came cheap, either.  According to Ham's own site, Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum shelled out $1.5 million for the privilege of displaying something that conclusively disproves their entire raison d'être.  Not that that's the way they put it, of course.  Ham was quoted in the article as saying that the allosaurus skeleton "fulfills a dream I’ve had for quite some time. For decades I’ve walked through many leading secular museums, like the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and have seen their impressive dinosaur skeletons.  But they were used for evolution.  Now we have one of that class, and it will help us defend the book of Genesis and expose the scientific problems with evolution."

I read that entire passage with the following expression on my face:

But it only got worse from there, because then Michael Peroutka weighed in.  Peroutka is the guy who sold Ham the skeleton, and he said that the allosaurus "is a testimony to the creative power of God in designing dinosaurs, and that it also lends evidence to the truth of a worldwide catastrophic flooding of the earth in Noah’s time."  Dr. Andrew Snelling, the Creation Museum's staff geologist, said that "Ebenezer" (as they're calling the allosaurus) "most likely died in Noah’s Flood, over 4,300 years ago.  In fleeing the rising waters... Ebenezer was swept away in a debris flow and buried rapidly under massive amounts of sediment, preserving many of its bones," adding that the whole story "will be published in AiG’s peer-reviewed Answers Research Journal."

I think that this was the point that I said, "... wait a minute."  "Peer-reviewed?"  By whom?  By other bible-toting, science-ignoring creationists?  I suppose, to be fair, that's what "peer" means in this context, as in telling a kindergartner that he needs to "interact with his peers" even though they are peers mainly in the sense that they aren't reliably avoiding wetting their pants on a daily basis.

Yet the AiG people do have scientists.  There is the aforementioned Andrew Snelling, who has a Ph.D. in applied geology from the University of Sydney.  Even more mystifying is Georgia Purdom, whose Ph.D. in molecular biology has not stopped her from making bafflingly wacky statements like "From the creation perspective, all bacteria were created 'good,'" presumably only becoming evil pathogens after the Fall of Adam.

And this, I have to admit, is the point when I am overtaken by incredulity.  How could people become sufficiently knowledgeable in geology and molecular biology (respectively) to receive doctorates, and simultaneously hold the belief that the entire universe is 6,000 years old?  And, furthermore, the belief that the science itself supports that view?  The whole thing is a little like my pursuing a medical degree while claiming that diagnosis and treatment should be based on the "Four Humors" model of human health. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Finkwhistle, but your stomach pains are clearly caused by an imbalance between your phlegm and black bile.  We're going to fix it by cutting your arm to let some blood out."

The sad fact, of course, is that like our crop circle "astronomologer" in yesterday's post, these people are serious.  So as much as I'd like to think that Ham and Co. are playing some kind of elaborate prank, not only on us skeptics but upon their tens of thousands of followers in the United States and elsewhere, it appears that they're sincere.  Hard though it is to fathom, they will now have a $1.5 million allosaurus skeleton with which to make their point to the gullible public.  And I can't help but think that Ebenezer the allosaurus would be ashamed if he knew his bones were being used for such a purpose.

Fooling the astronomologers

There are times that I think the woo-woos are engaging in an elaborate game of self-parody, just to see how far they can push us skeptics before we realize that it's all a huge joke.

Or at least, I live in that hope, because it's better than the alternative, which is that these people are serious whackjobs.  Take, for example, the case of the astrologer who recently commented on a crop circle that occurred in 2011 near Stonehenge.

Those of you are are aficionados of punk rock may recognize this as the logo of Crass, a punk rock band formed in the 1970s that was involved in the anarchic/political end of the punk spectrum, and which produced several albums, including the memorable Penis Envy.  For reference, here's their actual logo, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Not much doubt, is there?  Some wag with a taste for punk and way too much free time decided to make a crop circle as an homage to his (or her) favorite band.  As we've seen before, crop circles can be generated in short order as long as you have some kind of device to orient yourself and a piece of plywood with which to flatten the crops.  No other explanation necessary, not that we'd be likely to look for one given that it'd be an odd alien race that would come all the light years to Earth and leave behind a punk rock logo as their only communiqué.

That point, however, apparently flew past astrologer Donna Provancher so quickly that it didn't even ruffle her hair.  Excuse me, though; Provancher isn't an astrologer, she says she's an "astronomologer."  What, exactly, is an "astronomologer," you may be asking?  In her words, "astronomology is the practice of astrology using astronomy to build the chart and supply new insights."

Which doesn't sound that different from astrology, frankly.  It's as if I decided to open a practice doing Tarot card readings and started calling it "Tarothematics" because the Tarot cards have numbers on them, and expected that people should take me more seriously than the ordinary Tarot card readers because of it.

Be that as it may, Provancher was just enthralled by the crop circle, and had a wonderful explanation of what it meant.  None of which, I hasten to say, had anything to do with punk rock.  Here's Provancher's explanation, courtesy of the wonderful site Dangerous Minds:

You know those pictures of the Gods and Goddesses with eight or eighteen or a thousand arms? That’s what we are when we work together. You can tack thousands of pairs of eyes and ears to that image while you’re at it. Nothing escapes our notice. 

Roving Astronomologer eyes and ears (thanks again Solar Ophiuchus Raya King—that makes two Gold Stars for you) directed my attention early this morning to a crop circle reported June 20, 2011 near Stonehenge.Crop Circle Connector is calling this area “Stonehenge (1)” whatever that means. I have a Facebook Wall ping out to Philip Peake (visit his blog Thoughtsoftheguru.com) my longtime Friend (with a capital F), Web Host and Webmaster who is from the U.K. Maybe he can tell me where this is in relation to the megaliths. The map wasn’t revealing of that little detail...

She then goes on to explain what the crop circle means, as follows:

—As Above, So Below (opening greeting) 

—An equal-armed or Tau-Cross (the balancing of Earth’s energies) 

—A double-headed serpent wrapped around one of the axial poles of the planet — we’ll have to assume it’s the poles of the planet since East-West doesn’t have an axial pole. The piece on top (the double-headed serpent) is bolted to the Tau-Cross, so at this point, Raya’s vision of the Staff of Asclepius is partially correct; she just didn’t finish it. 

The 2-headed King-snakes I used to see at the San Diego zoo had tails. This one isn’t like that. But then it’s not imitating a snake, it’s picturing a new concept. The new Planetary Caduceus. It needs to be finished. This is something else I haven’t discussed yet but it looks like this is one more Agenda Item on the Table I’ll put this on my To-Do list to discuss.

Well, I don't know about you, but my little heart is just going thumpety-thump in anticipation of more discussion of the "planetary caduceus."  Whatever that is.

All the while I was reading this, I kept thinking... "come on.  When is the other shoe going to drop?  Surely she doesn't think this is really some kind of mystical symbol... like, aliens?  Or Gaea communicating with us?  Or... or...  No, merciful heavens above, she really doesn't realize it's a prank."

Anyhow, I'd like to thank Dangerous Minds for the best laugh I've had in days, and Donna Provancher for inadvertently being the cause.  I guess she's really not engaging in self-parody, as comforting an answer as that would be -- she really does believe what she's saying.  And now, I need to wrap this up -- I need to go study.  Pretty soon I'll be taking my licensing exam, after which I'll be a certified homeopathophysiolomedicopsychic-ologist.

Beat that.

Crystals, children, and exploitation

In the latest from the You Don't Even Know What Those Terms Mean, Do You? department, we have a video on the site Spirit Science called "This 8 Year Old Kid Uses Crystal Grids to Transmute Negative Energy."

I know that taking anything from Spirit Science is kind of a cheap way to get a Skeptophilia post at this point.  This site first gained attention from a video that was narrated by an animated character whose voice sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk on quaaludes, and that basically told us that Everything Is Connected and Energy Flows Through Us and other vapid New Age platitudes, every once in a while throwing in a nice science-y word to keep us thinking that what they were saying actually meant something.

But so far, all we have is a flashy woo-woo take on Science, The Universe, and Everything, very much in the tradition of What the Bleep Do We Know? (the latter produced by none other than the infamous J. Z. Knight, of Ramtha fame).  Spirit Science, therefore, is kind of low-hanging fruit, and I've never felt all that inclined to address their claims.  If you can even call them "claims."  (For a funny response to the video link I posted, take a look at this one.)

Of course, the fact that Spirit Science is 100% USDA Grade A Bullshit hasn't dissuaded people from watching the Spirit Science channel on YouTube in huge numbers, and as a result, there are now 26 (or more) videos narrated by Alvin.  All of which seemed more depressing than interesting, until the article about the eight-year-old started showing up all over Facebook and other social media sites.

What bothers me about this one is not, strictly speaking, the woo-woo aspect of it.  The idea of "crystal energies" has been around for a long time.  I remember a woman coming over to my house in response to For-Sale ad I'd placed in the newspaper, and her picking up one of the quartz crystals that had been collected years earlier by my dad on one of his rockhounding trips.  "Ooh," the woman said, caressing the crystal.  "This one is lovely!  I can feel it focusing my energy in such a positive way!"

It was an effort not to guffaw directly into her face.

So what bothers me about this story isn't the bullshit aspect of it, but the exploitation aspect -- given that it must be the kid's parents who (1) taught him all of this nonsense, and (2) set up this "interview."  At the end, too, the kid says that he'll be happy to set up a "crystal grid appointment" for anyone interested, hinting at a monetary side of the whole thing that I'm sure will come as no great shock to anyone reading this.

And yet the people interviewing him never mention anything about exploitation.  They treat his fancies as if they were entirely real, starting with the guy who introduces the segment saying, "What you're about to see is a perfect example of the consciousness of today's children."  Then we're shown the kid and his crystal arrangement, and the interviewer treats him with great seriousness, asking him how it works.

"It captures the dark energy in these three webs," the kid tells her, "and then disposes of it using this (crystal) turning it into my energy... it goes all the way around the world.  And the universe."

Mmm-hmm.  Sounds completely plausible.  We hear a lot more about crystals focusing energy (never, of course, defining the terms "focus" or "energy"), and light and dark energies shooting around, and so on.  Eventually, the interviewer gets to what really was the only germane question she asked:  "How did you know how to make this web design?"

The kid's response:  "I knew... because the rocks know exactly how to dispose of dark energy...  they told me.  I go up to one rock, and find the key, put my finger on it, and then I put it up to my ear and hear what it's saying...  a key is a part of the rock, every rock has it, that is the energy key point of it."

Now, I raised two boys, who were both imaginative and creative youngsters, always making up games and let's-pretend worlds.  My older son, especially, always has had a wildly creative mind, and we still have stories he wrote and board games he dreamed up, the latter of which had rules so abstruse that they make Magic: The Gathering look like a tic-tac-toe game.

Here, though, we have parents (never seen on the interview, but you know they're there) who are feeding this young person with the impression that his fantasy world is real -- as if I had told Lucas when he was little that the plastic dinosaurs he loved to play with actually were alive and aware, because he had somehow made them so.  This is, put simply, exploiting a child's imagination for fame and (probably) money, all the while leading him to believe that his naturally blurred boundary between reality and fantasy isn't just hard to delineate, it doesn't exist.

And they're doing so with the complicity of the people who interviewed him, and with the encouragement of thousands of people who commented and have now passed this story all over the place.  While it's heartening that the first comment was appropriately snide...  "a kid arranges his parent's mineral collection and repeats a bunch of nonsense and now he is a guru.  namaste" -- note that this commenter was immediately shot down with responses like "Get a brain."  And most of the other comments were wildly positive:

We are in the Age of Aquarius now....for those of you that don't get this...why are you even watching it if it isn't your "thing"? ...this kid is truly gifted...and if you don't understand it....you might wanna wake up to the New Age....Just saying! 

Too bad for all of those brothers and sisters who speak ill of what they do not know. It is understandable though. Not every being on this earth is connected to the great planet. 

Children like this that can see through the illusions of what we believe to be true give me hope that we just might not end up destroying the Earth.

This kid is, on the surface, doing what kids do; playing with stuff and making up stories.  But the adults who are currently turning him into a mini-celebrity amongst the woo-woo crowd are doing him no favors.  It's to be hoped that he'll eventually figure out that what he's saying is nonsense.  I just hope that by that time, he hasn't been so suckered in by the lucrative side of woo-woo that he becomes the next J. Z. Knight, channeling 20,000-year-old guru spirits from Atlantis in front of adoring crowds, and becoming filthy rich in the process.

Dark shadows

I find myself wondering, sometimes, how the fans of television shows like Monster Quest don't get frustrated and stop watching after a while.

I mean, you have these guys running around, week after week, shouting about footprints and eyewitness accounts and blurry photographs, and in the end they always catch exactly zero monsters.  But somehow, this lack of success never discourages the monster hunters, nor their fans, nor (apparently) the sponsors, because cryptozoological television series are multiplying like bunnies.

Which, unlike the cryptids, are actually real.

Take, for example, the latest trailer from Mountain Monsters, which you can watch over at Cryptomundo.  The trailer tells us about a "Shadow Creature," a "massive beast" who is actively hunting humans, which sounds terrifying.  But then, when you watch the video, it turns out to be a bunch of bearded guys wearing plaid running around at night, and making noises that sounded to me like "HURR A DURR HERPLE!  HURK A DURK DURK SNURFLE DURR!" as some unidentified snarling noises sound in the background.  I don't know about you, but I couldn't understand a single thing these people were saying.  I'm assuming it was English, since it was filmed in West Virginia, but it could equally well have been in Lithuanian or Swahili.  And I'm from the Deep South, so I'd think I'd be able to decipher an accent from that part of the world, however much of a twang it had.

But no such luck.

And of course, we never get to see the monster.  As far as hard evidence -- if I can call it that -- all you get is a single footprint in the snow, and some broken ice that the creature allegedly stepped in.  Other than that, all we see is a lot of growling, intermingled with excited cries of "DERP DERP FNURR" as they run about carrying flashlights.

But naturally, I had to find out more about what they were chasing, so I did a Google search for "shadow monster Braxton West Virginia," and found out that what they're after is most likely the "Flatwoods Monster."  The Flatwoods Monster has antecedents that go back at least fifty years, back to a sighting in Braxton County in 1952.

According to an article in The Skeptical Inquirer, here's what happened:

About 7:15 p.m. on that day, at Flatwoods, a little village in the hills of West Virginia, some youngsters were playing football on the school playground. Suddenly they saw a fiery UFO streak across the sky and, apparently, land on a hilltop of the nearby Bailey Fisher farm. The youths ran to the home of Mrs. Kathleen May, who provided a flashlight and accompanied them up the hill. In addition to Mrs. May, a local beautician, the group included her two sons, Eddie 13, and Freddie 14, Neil Nunley 14, Gene Lemon 17, and Tommy Hyer and Ronnie Shaver, both 10, along with Lemon’s dog. 

There are myriad, often contradictory versions of what happened next, but UFO writer Gray Barker was soon on the scene and wrote an account for Fate magazine based on tape-recorded interviews. He found that the least emotional account was provided by Neil Nunley, one of two youths who were in the lead as the group hastened to the crest of the hill. Some distance ahead was a pulsing red light. Then, suddenly, Gene Lemon saw a pair of shining, animal-like eyes, and aimed the flashlight in their direction. 

The light revealed a towering "man-like" figure with a round, red "face" surrounded by a "pointed, hood-like shape." The body was dark and seemingly colorless, but some would later say it was green, and Mrs. May reported drape-like folds. The monster was observed only momentarily, as suddenly it emitted a hissing sound and glided toward the group. Lemon responded by screaming and dropping his flashlight, whereupon everyone fled.

Most skeptics think that what the group saw was a Barn Owl, which has reflective eyes and makes weird hissing noises when disturbed, but of course, the True Believers doubt that.  Here's a depiction of the Monster, drawn by a professional artist from descriptions by the people who allegedly saw it:

Which is certainly pretty creepy.  But people's imaginations being what they are -- especially when those imaginations are being fueled by generous doses of adrenaline -- I'm a little doubtful.  And I'm still doubtful even after reading about the aftermath of the incident, in which several of the witnesses, especially Gene Lemon (pictured on the left above), had physical symptoms after the sighting, including throat soreness, nausea, and vomiting.

To me, Lemon's symptoms could easily be explained by a bout of stomach flu, and/or simple hysteria over a bad fright.  No monster necessary.

But that didn't stop the Mountain Monsters people from running about, shouting incomprehensibly, and pointing off into the darkness.  Whatever floats their boat, I suppose.

You know, I wonder what will happen if ever they do catch a monster?  What will they do?  Will they be so surprised that they finally succeeded that they'll end up getting eaten?  Will the show be over, in the fashion of a miniseries that reaches its conclusion and resolution?  "Yup!  We finally got the monster!  Now we can all go home to our families and regular jobs!"

Or I wonder if it'll be like the old television series The Incredible Hulk, you know?  The Bad Guys always got really close to capturing David Banner, or at least proving that he was the Hulk, but they never quite did.  He always got away at the last possible minute.  I think that's what they'd do here.  They'd stage it so that they nearly catch the monster, but then... improbably... it gets away.  "Dammit!" the Intrepid Monster Hunters will say.  "Maybe next week!"

And people will keep tuning in, week after week, in hope.  Me, I'll just watch Gilligan's Island.  At least there, you knew they'd never succeed.

Heavy weather

I find it puzzling how few people actually understand weather.

Partly, this puzzlement is because I've always found it completely fascinating.  I spend a lot of time on Weather Underground and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) sites, with the result that I frequently update my wife on the status of weather systems in Nebraska.  (Her stock response: "That's nice, dear.")

I cannot, for example, fathom how people wouldn't be intensely curious about videos like the recent time-lapse series taken of a supercell system in Wyoming, which all of you should watch right now:

What surprises me is how few people get beyond the "Oh, wow," stage with all of this.  I know that the first time I saw a photograph of a supercell -- which ranks right up there with a dry microburst as the most bizarre weather phenomenon I've ever heard of -- I immediately thought, "What could cause something like that?"  And asking this question led me to all sorts of cool places, like atmospheric convection and adiabatic cooling and evaporative cooling and wind shear.

Now I realize that this stuff gets complex fast.  To quote Garrison Keillor, "Intelligence is like four-wheel drive.  It enables you to get stuck in even more remote places."

But it's still awesome.  And weather is, after all, ubiquitous.  How you could be immersed in something all the time, and not want to know how it works, is mystifying to me.

All of this comes up because of two stories this week, both of which never would have been more than meteorological curiosities if it weren't for the fact that people tend not to know much about the weather phenomena that surround them all day, every day.  The first, which involves an admittedly odd cloud pattern called a "hole-punch cloud," or "fallstreak hole," had people speculating that the seeming "hole in the sky" (check the link for photographs) was one of the following:

1. A wormhole.
2. A flaw in the Matrix.
3. A sign that we're all living inside some kind of self-contained dome, à la The Truman Show, and the hole was sort of like the can light that fell out of the sky at the beginning of the movie.
4. A gap through which an angel was about to arrive.  Why an angel couldn't just come through the clouds without there being a hole, given that clouds are basically big blobs of fog, I don't know.
5. A portal to a different dimension.

Of course, all of the furor was founded on the fact that hole-punch clouds have a perfectly natural explanation, usually that an airplane (or, much less commonly, a meteor) disrupted what was uniform cloud cover, leaving a temporary hole through the clouds.

No Matrix, wormhole, or angels required.

Second, we had a story from the wonderful site Doubtful News that blamed the unusual (and destructive) rains that have hit Serbia in the past week on none other than...

... HAARP.

Yes, we have not seen the last of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, that favorite bête noire of conspiracy theorists -- despite the fact that HAARP closed last year and is currently being dismantled.  It's been blamed for everything from tsunamis to earthquakes to tornadoes to hurricanes, and now... floods:

Many of my contacts in Serbia have spoken of whispered accusations that the unprecedented flooding and unusual weather patterns in the last few years have something to do with the US’s HAARP system. According to one website: “A Serbian journalist was advised not to write about a HAARP installation near Belgrade. After series of texts regarding HAARP antenna system near Barajevo (Belgrade municipality) and application of this ELF system in Serbia the journalist of newspaper Pravda has received a phone call on Monday evening around 10PM from unlisted phone number. The voice on other side of the line gave the journalist a “friendly advice” to stop writing on HAARP...” 

Would it be surprising if the US, after unleashing neo-Nazis in Ukraine, unleashed flooding in Serbia? Those in the know would probably say no.

 And there's a reason for that, you know?  Like the fact that HAARP couldn't even cause floods when it was running, much less now, when it isn't?

Of course, every time there's a catastrophe, people want an Explanation, not just an explanation.  It's not enough just to talk about weather systems and frontal boundaries and atmospheric moisture; there's got to be more.

But dammit, it'd be nice if people would start with the weather systems and frontal boundaries, rather than starting from ignorance and going downhill from there.  If you want to comment intelligently on anything, it helps to know some of the science behind it first.

Okay, I'll calm down, now.  Back to my happy place.  NOAA.  I see that there's a low-pressure center over Manitoba at the moment.  Isn't that cool?  Isn't it?

That's nice, dear.

The Common Core Gay Agenda Standards

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no apologist for the Common Core.  I've seen its implementation in my own school district, and heard all too much about how it is affecting other ones.  While the heart of the "new standards" is well-meant, its reliance on numerical metrics and high-stakes standardized tests has been nothing short of devastating.

But little did I know that there is another reason to despise the Common Core, one that I would never have thought of in my entire life, despite the fact that I spend my days steeped in wacko woo-woo bullshit.  If you had told me, "Dream up the most ridiculous argument against the Common Core you can think of.  C'mon, pull out all the stops.  It should make 'Ancient Aliens Built Stonehenge' look like rocket science," I don't think I'd have thought of this.

Ready?

A Florida state representative is claiming that we shouldn't implement the Common Core, because it will turn your kids gay.

I'm not making this up, although I wish like hell that I was.  Representative Charles Van Zant, speaking at something called "Operation Education Conference" in Orlando, had this to say, and if you don't believe me, you can watch the video on the link I provided:

Our new Secretary of Education recently appointed AIR [American Institutes for Research] to receive a 220 million dollar contract for end-of-course exam testing, to prepare those tests.  Please, go on their website.  Click the link to what they're doing with youth, and you will see what their agenda really is.  They are promoting, as hard as they can, any youth that is interested in the LGBT agenda, and even name it two-hyphen-S, which they define as 'having two spirits.'  The bible says a lot about being double-minded.  These people, that will now receive 220 million dollars from the state of Florida unless this is stopped, will promote double-mindedness in state education, and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.   

I'm sorry to report that to you...  I really hate to bring you that news, but you need to know.

*brief pause to clean up coffee splatters from computer monitor*

I think my favorite part of this was when Representative Van Zant said that the test developers want children "to become as homosexual as they possibly can."  What does this even mean?  Is there some kind of gradation of homosexuality, from, say, Neil Patrick Harris all the way up through Dr. Frank N. Furter?

And how, exactly, are standardized tests supposed to accomplish this?  Will there be some kind of subliminal message in reading passages, such that, if you take the first letter of each word, it spells out, "I EMBRACE THE GAY AGENDA?"  Will there be a cryptic code on the bubble sheets, that if you decode it, reads, "I solemnly swear to abandon heterosexuality from here on, so help me Freddie Mercury?"

Or is it just that somewhere on the exam, there will be some kind of portrayal of a gay person in other than a negative light?

Can't have that, after all.

I keep thinking that sooner or later, our elected officials will run out of completely boneheaded statements to make.  I keep hoping that they will exhaust their reserves of idiocy on topics such as climate change and evolution, and stay away from other subjects.  Most fervently, I keep espousing the optimistic position that we will eventually start electing people who have IQs higher than their pants size.

To judge by Representative Van Zant, however, it appears that my hopes may be ill-founded.