The vegan apocalypse

It struck me today how odd it is that in so many religions, it seems like it's not so much that the believers agree with god, it's that god agrees with the believers.

It's entirely possible that this impression comes from my position as an outsider.  But really: my general sense is that the people who are so vehemently against gay marriage (for example) would still be against it even if they weren't religious.  They are using their religion as justification for their bigotry, not honestly and open-mindedly trying to figure out what their religion demands.  Otherwise, you'd think they'd run into "judge not, lest ye be judged" and "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" at least as often as they read "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

All of which makes it seem to me, as you might expect, very much that man created god in his own image rather than the other way around.  Hard to explain otherwise that our deities share our pettiness, bias, jealousy, rage, and tribalism.

What brings all this to mind is a site I ran across yesterday that would be funny if it weren't so earnest.  Called God, Justice, Vegan Earth 2019, the site tells us that god isn't so much concerned about sex (which, frankly, seems to be an obsession with your typical Judaeo-Christian god) as he is with food.  We are told, in appalling detail, that we all have to become vegans right away...

... or we're gonna be slaughtered.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I thought, at first, that this might be some kind of a joke site, but I don't think it is.  They seem awfully serious about the whole thing:

Two conditions should be met then you will survive.  You will live and inherit the whole Earth to own, rule and use.  All other humans will be killed.  This is a clean restart.
1- Faith in God
2- Vegan

So given my status as an atheist, and the fact that I think that a rare t-bone steak with a glass of fine red wine is one of the truly awesome things in life, I'm pretty much screwed both ways.  We're even given a timetable, presumably so we can have a chance to mend our ways:

19 Jun 2018-All butchers globally will be killed(1)
15 Aug 2018-All hunters will be killed(2)
11 Sep 2018-Los Angels [sic] 380 Decapitation(3)
23 Sep 2018 -Speech on Mt. Sinai
11 Oct 2018-The Judgment Day

The numbers apparently stand for the "three miracles" that the adherents to this religion think are going to happen.  I was going to say something about how massive genocide hardly counts as a miracle, but then I thought about some of the stories from the Old Testament, with god directing the Israelites to hack their way across Palestine, killing everyone in their way, and I thought, "well, at least there's precedent."

At the end of the page, we're given another dire message:

This is not a business.  Our associates never advertise or sell any product and never ask for donation.
 This is an organization to UNITE and prepare all Vegans to establish the Vegan Earth.

WARNING 

God believer Vegans (only) will own the Earth in 2019.
Estimated survival number after genocide of 2018 is very low.  Learn.  Be among them.
Fill the Churches, Mosques and Temples and learn faith for God and become Vegan.
Both conditions should apply or you will be killed.

So that sounds pretty unequivocal.

We're also told that we can download a free pdf of the book The Vegan Earth: Judgment Day, which will supersede the Torah, the Qu'ran, and the Bible.   It was, the site tells us, written by god and Moses, which is a pretty powerful co-authorship.

But honestly: doesn't it sound to you like this site was put together by someone who already was a vegan, and who thought everyone else should be, too, and decided that the message would sound a lot more authoritative if it was the word of god?   We can chuckle, and shake our heads about how silly the website is -- but how is it really any different than Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, claiming that Christians need to strike back against the gay rights movement because people with "biblical views on the sin of homosexuality" are facing "totalitarianism" comparable to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the Stalinist regime in the USSR in the1950s?

Both are fact-free rancor and vitriol, from people who want to give their own ugly invective legitimacy by putting it in the mouth of god.  The only difference is that the homophobes are more common, better organized, and richer than the über-vegans. But the message is essentially the same: believe what I believe, because god says so.  And if you don't, you're hell-bound.  We may even expedite your delivery there.

I find the whole thing repellant, and it's not to be wondered at that I'd just as soon be the master of my own moral code, and let others do the same.  For me, starting with the general rule "don't be an asshole" covers a lot of ground, and that includes the biblical dictum -- right from the mouth of Jesus, in fact, in Matthew 7:1-3 -- that we're better off not judging others at all, given that we've all got flaws.  For me, that includes not really giving a rat's ass what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom, as long as no one gets hurt; nor interfering with anyone's taste in food, music, books, art, or clothing, just as I'd prefer that people keep their nose out of my tastes thereof.

But that's apparently not enough of a guiding principle for some people, leading to the kind of thing you hear from bitter, humorless individuals like Tony Perkins, not to mention the various Muslim mullahs still recommending stoning, whipping, and hanging for such "sins" as sex outside of marriage, and declaring fatwas against writers, bloggers, musicians, and actors for "insulting Islam."

The whole thing makes me realize that in a lot of ways, we haven't really come that far from the Bronze Age, the days when the Lord God said unto his people such things as we find in 1 Samuel 15: "This is what the Lord Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"

And such things, apparently, still saith the lord, lo up unto this very day.

Answers, ignorance, and mitochondrial DNA

Something I fight continuously, as a teacher, is the idea that the most important thing is THE ANSWER.

It's the fault of the way education is usually conducted, of course.  Whether because teachers were themselves taught that way, or because of expediency, THE ANSWER is always considered to be the critical thing.  It doesn't matter how you got there; process isn't the concern.  As long as you have THE ANSWER in the appropriate space, you get full credit.

The problem is, by the time students get to high school, I'm expecting that they'll be moving beyond that, and it's often a battle.  I've had more than one student say, "Just tell me what to write down," as if somehow that was going to engender understanding.  My frustration on this point is what resulted in the following actual conversation:

Student:  What do I write down for question #7?
Me:  Whatever you think the correct explanation is.
Student:  But what if my explanation isn't right?
Me:  Then I'll mark it wrong.
Student:  But I don't want to write down the wrong answer!
Me:  Then don't.

In my own defense, I wasn't simply trying to be snarky; it just gets tiring to know that my refrain of "I will not think for you" often falls on deaf ears.

I find myself wondering how deep this inclination goes, and if it's because as a culture, we're taught to expect that there always is a single correct answer.  The biblical maxim of "Ask and ye shall receive" is pretty deeply ingrained.  We're uncomfortable with not knowing.

We're even more uncomfortable where there may be no way to know.

I ran squarely into this with my genealogical pursuits a couple of days ago.  There's a pair of sisters who were amongst the founding mothers of Acadia (as people of French descent call Nova Scotia).  Their names are Catherine and Edmée LeJeune, and they show up in Acadia in the early 1600s.  (I actually descend, on my mother's side of the family, from both of them.)

No one knows where they were born, or who their parents were.  The early records simply aren't complete enough.  This has led to speculation that they may have been Natives -- there are numerous records of early French settlers marrying Native women.  Could it be that the LeJeune sisters were members of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, or some other Native tribe of eastern Canada?

The whole thing was a moot point for decades; like I said, the documentation simply does not exist.  This didn't stop rampant speculation on both sides of the question.  Instead of just leaving their origin as "unknown," people seemed to need to fill in the blank with something.

Then, along came mitochondrial DNA analysis.  mtDNA is only inherited through the maternal line, so any matrilineal descendant of either sister should pinpoint their origin.  Matrilineal descendants (several of them) were traced, offered up blood samples, and the results all agreed; Catherine and Edmée were of the haplotype U6a7a, a signature that is characteristic of North African ancestry.

In my mind, this seemed to settle it.  The Moors made significant inroads into southwestern Europe in the Middle Ages, and there are huge numbers of people in Spain, Portugal, and southern France who have North African ancestry.  Catherine and Edmée most likely were born in France.  But that wasn't good enough; the people who had already decided that they were Native weren't content to let it rest.

Enter Dr. Howard Barraclough "Barry" Fell, professional zoologist and amateur archaeologist and linguist, who in 1976 published a book called America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World.  In it, using the cherry-picking lexicography favored by people who aren't actually trained in linguistic analysis, Fell came to the conclusion that the Mi'kmaq orthography, one of the only pre-Columbian North American writing systems, was descended from none other than...

... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Now I hasten to state that most linguists consider Fell to be a well-meaning but misguided amateur.  (For a particularly insightful take-down of his conclusions, check out this site, courtesy of linguist and scholar Richard Flavin.)  But this hasn't stopped sites like "Mi'kmaq/Ancient Egyptian Connection" from surfacing, wherein we find that the ancient Egyptians made it not only to Nova Scotia, but all the way to Illinois and... Australia!

Now, I know the Egyptians were pretty cool.  But if you're gonna make a claim like that, I'm gonna need something more than a few chance correspondences between words and symbols before I buy in.

But the "have an answer at all costs" crowd wouldn't let it lie, especially once the Mormons got involved, and used Fell's so-called research to support their contention that the Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Why can't we just say "we don't know?"  Why can't we focus on the reality -- the Mi'kmaq and other Native groups made their way to North America at some unspecified time in the past, and (more specifically) Catherine and Edmée LeJeune had some North African ancestry somewhere -- and consider how awesome the process of knowing is?  We can actually use blood samples from distant descendants of long-dead individuals to determine the movements of groups of people thousands, or tens of thousands, of years ago.

Cool, no?

Not cool enough, apparently.  We need THE ANSWER.

Now, let me be clear on this: there's something to be said for having a correct picture of what's going on.  But when there's uncertainty, it's critical to be comfortable with a partial answer, and even more critical to understand the whole context of knowledge within which we are working.  In the long haul, I'm happier knowing about mtDNA and the migration of human groups than I would be just to have a final answer to fill in for my distant foremothers' birthplace.

But unfortunately, I appear to be in the minority.

Chembombs and rain dances

I find the general anti-science stance of a large percentage of Americans completely baffling.

I know you can go back to the Cold War, and cite the tired old "scientists gave us the nuclear bomb" trope.  But for cryin' in the sink, people, isn't it obvious that on balance, science has been a positive thing for society?  Science has revolutionized technology, medicine, transportation, information transfer, energy systems.  How many Americans use daily something we would not have without scientific research?

And yet on topics where it would cost us economically, or force us to alter our habits, all of our trust goes right out the window.  I'm talking, of course, about climate change, especially the recent shot across the bow from Charles Krauthammer on Fox News, who should win some kind of pretzel logic award for the following, when asked about the 97% consensus amongst climate scientists regarding anthropogenic climate change:

99% of physicists were convinced that space and time are fixed, until Einstein working at a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed them they are not.  I'm not impressed by numbers.  I'm not impressed by consensus...  These are things that people negotiate… the way you would negotiate a bill, because the science is unstable [and] because in the case of climate, the models are changeable…. The idea that we who have trouble forecasting what's going to happen on Saturday in the climate could pretend to be predicting what's going to happen in 30-40 years is absurd...  What we're ultimately talking about here is human sin, through the production of carbon.  It's the oldest superstition around.  It was in the Old Testament.  It's in the rain dance of the Native Americans.  If you sin, the skies will not cooperate.  This is quite superstitious and I'm waiting for science that doesn't declare itself definitive but is otherwise convincing.

Let me just say a few things about Mr. Krauthammer's analysis:

1. Einstein was a scientist.  You, Mr. Krauthammer, are not.
2. "I'm not impressed by numbers" implies that you're also "not impressed" by data, i.e. facts.  This is called being "a dumbass."
3. Consistency amongst the climate models is why scientists are now largely in consensus about the cause, extent, and results of climate change.  It may be harsh of me, but I strongly suspect that Charles Krauthammer would not recognize a climate model if it bit him right on the buttocks.
4. For the 584th fucking time, weather ≠ climate.
5. I defy you to find one scientist who equates "production of carbon" with "Old Testament sin" or "rain dances."
6. What the hell does the last line even mean?

As if this wasn't bad enough, loyal readers of Skeptophilia sent me just this week two new salvos from the conspiracy-theory cadre, who apparently are our alternative here in the United States to actual scientists.   The first of them says that okay, maybe the climate is changing, but it's changing because the evil government is deliberately doing it to kill us all:

Finally the public at large is beginning to realize there is something very wrong with the weather.  Freak cold spells, heat waves, droughts, floods and tornadoed [sic] haven’t gone unnoticed by even the most conservative mainstreamer these days.  Hardly a day goes by that somebody doesn’t mention something strange, unusual, even frightening about recent weather...  Is “global warming”, aka “climate change” a diversion from weather modification by geoengineering, including HAARP, chemtrails, and microwave pulses? 

While the “scientists”, the US military, and numerous other governmental agencies, continue to deny the reality of the massive global geoengineering programs, the enormous machine that runs these ever expanding programs continues to grow in plain sight.  Those that are attempting to expose the truth regarding the planetary weather/climate modification aerosol spraying are still marginalized by the state sponsored main stream media which is all to willing to do as it is told by those in power. 

In spite of the concerted and powerful effort to hide the reality of the ongoing geoengineering programs, the masses are beginning to awaken to the fact that we are all being subjected to a horrific global experiment.  An experiment that is quite literally putting all life on Earth in the balance. An ever growing mountain of evidence already proves beyond doubt that global geoengineering is an absolute reality.  Any that do an objective evaluation of the available evidence can come to no other conclusion.

Because scientists, obviously, aren't "objective."

Then, to ramp up the fear and distrust even more, in the second source we hear from the aptly-named site Aircrap that there's a new thing out there to kill us, even worse than a chemtrail... a chembomb:

NEW CHEMBOMBS – THE LATEST HI TECH SECRET CHEMTRAIL GEOENGINEERING AND IT’S HAPPENING NOW ALL AROUND THE WORLD, OVER YOUR CITY, AND OVER YOU !

And then, we're shown photographs... of a bunch of cumulonimbus clouds:

[image courtesy of photographer Simon Eugster and the Wikimedia Commons]

Because scientists obviously don't know anything about those.

The whole anti-science thing is really starting to concern me, because I strongly suspect that if we still have time to get out of the ecological mess we're creating, the scientists will be the ones who will figure out how to do so.  As I've said so many times: science isn't perfect, and scientists aren't infallible.  But c'mon, people; they have the advantage of knowing what they're talking about, unlike yammering blowhards like Charles Krauthammer and the other bloviating windbags on Fox News, not to mention the chemtrail/chembomb wackmobiles.  We've had fifty-odd years to get over our distrust of science, and move past the Cold War ideology that spawned the whole "evil scientist" stereotype.  I have the feeling that we'd better start listening, and learning, from the people who are trained in research and analysis, and stop paying attention to the talking heads who excel at telling us what we want to hear.

In other words: it's time to grow up.

Avoiding female storms

There's a danger in being a skeptic, and that is that you stand the risk of becoming a cynic -- moving from the stance of "show me why you believe that" into "oh, c'mon, I don't believe that."  I know I have to fight that tendency, myself.  When I see a claim that appears, on its surface, to be ridiculous, some internal bullshitometer starts to ping.

When that happens, it takes some effort on my part to hold back, and to look at the claim itself with as much of an unbiased an eye as I can manage -- an absolutely essential skill, I think, for anyone who wants to keep the critical lens squarely in front of his or her eyes.

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a friend, called "Hurricanes With Female Names Are Deadlier Than Masculine Ones."  The first thing I always look for -- the source of the claim -- made me frown a little, because this isn't a story from some wild-eyed blog, it comes from none other than the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and was written up in Discover magazine.

Here's the claim, as laid out in the Discover article linked above:

According to the multi-part study, the more feminine the name assigned to a severe hurricane, the higher its death toll. Researchers believe implicit gender stereotypes — women are less violent than men, for example — skew the public’s expectation of how dangerous an approaching storm really is and whether they need to take emergency measures, such as evacuation. Basically, people would be more likely to choose to ride out Hurricane Britney than Hurricane Brutus... 

The study’s conclusions were based on a series of reviews and experiments. Researchers compiled fatalities and other statistics, such as amount of damage, from the 94 Atlantic hurricanes that made landfall in the U.S. from 1950 through 2012. To avoid skewing their results with outliers, they removed the two deadliest hurricanes — 2005′s Katrina and 1957′s Audrey, both of which happen to have female names.

On first glance, this is a fairly eye-opening result, especially given that they eliminated two extremely deadly hurricanes that had female names (and thus would have strengthened their results).  But even so, I have to admit that my initial reaction was disbelief.

 Yup.  Guilty as charged.  I'm a bisbelieving blogem.

I grew up on the Gulf Coast, and I can say with some authority that no one much cared what a hurricane's name was -- we pretty much just boarded the place up and stocked up on food and water, and, if need be, got the hell out.  The idea that anyone would alter his or her behavior based on the name of the storm seemed ludicrous.  So given my experience, I was forced to consider what else could explain this trend.

And I did find something that may explain the data's skew.  I'd like to have the opportunity to sit down with the paper's authors and crunch the numbers and see if I'm right -- but for now, I'll just run this up the flagpole and see who salutes.

According to the site Weather Underground, the number of Atlantic tropical storms per decade has increased significantly, perhaps due to the effects of anthropogenic climate change:

• 1941-1950 - 96 named storms
• 1951-1960 - 98 named storms
• 1961-1970 - 98 named storms
• 1971-1980 - 96 named storms
• 1981-1990 - 94 named storms
• 1991-2000 - 111 named storms
• 2001-2010 - 159 named storms

So you would expect that the death rate would go up from that alone.  But in fact, according to a paper by Indur Goklany (2009), the death rate from storms has actually declined significantly during the past century:

In fact, even though reporting of such events is more complete than in the past, morbidity and mortality attributed to them has declined globally by 93%–98% since the 1920s.  In the U.S., morbidity and mortality from extreme weather events peaked decades ago.  Depending on the category of extreme weather event, average annual mortality is 59%–81% lower than at its peak, while mortality rates declined 72%–94%, despite large increases in the population at risk.  Today, extreme weather events contribute only 0.06% to global and U.S. mortality...  (M)ortality from extreme weather events has declined even as all-cause mortality has increased, indicating that humanity is coping better with extreme weather events than it is with far more important health and safety problems.

So what this means is that the data is skewed -- the further back in time you go, the higher were the mortality rates from big storms, most likely due to poorer forecasting and preparation for such events.    And (more deaths) divided by (fewer storms) gives you a higher average number of deaths per storm.  This means that if you look prior to 1979 -- when all tropical storms had female names -- you'll find more deaths per decade, even though the number of storms per decade was less.

In short, I think this is a statistical artifact.  It certainly seems like it should be, given any reasonable expectation of human behavior (I see no reason why the morons who decide to ride out storms, and end up getting killed by them, would have any particular bias against throwing hurricane parties when the storm has a man's name).  But like I said: I haven't done a rigorous analysis of the numbers, and would encourage any statistically-adept readers to do so, and correct me if I'm wrong.

So my recommendation: if there is a category five hurricane bearing down on your home town, I'd get the hell out even if it's named Hurricane Princess Rainbow Sparkle-pants.

Unbearable

I remembering going to visit my parents during the Christmas season in the mid-1980s, and there was this new thing on the market for kids called "Teddy Ruxpin."  Teddy Ruxpin was a talking teddy bear that would move his eyes and mouth while "saying" pre-recorded lines, first on a cassette tape, and (in later models) on a digital device.

Teddy Ruxpin was a massive hit, largely due to an equally massive advertising campaign.  They flew off the shelves.  Toy stores couldn't keep them in stock.  Desperate parents of spoiled children paid huge amounts for black market Teddies Ruxpin.

I remember this primarily, though, for a different reason than crass commercialism, a phenomenon so deeply entrenched in American culture that it'd be hardly worth commenting on.  What I mostly remember about Teddy Ruxpin was that during the height of the craze, a batch of the toys went out that had defective playback devices.  They played the recordings slowly, with a lower pitch, with the result that Teddy Ruxpin's voice sounded like a cross between Morgan Freeman and Satan.

I still recall the news broadcast where a reporter, trying heroically to keep a straight face, talked about the recall, and activated one of the defective bears.  "I WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU," Teddy said in a sepulchral voice, all the while smiling cheerfully.  "HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Apparently the voice was scary enough that several children had already been traumatized when they activated their bear, expecting a cheerful cartoon-character voice, and instead got something that sounded like the soundtrack from The Exorcist.

My dad and I took about 45 minutes to stop laughing.  Over dinner, one of us would say, "PASS THE KETCHUP," in a Darth Vader voice, adding, "HA HA HA HA HA."  And then we'd both crack up again, much to the chagrin of my poor, long-suffering mother, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor.

This all comes up because of a new talking teddy bear, also designed for children, but with a special twist.

This teddy bear is supposed to be appealing to dead children.

I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not.  I heard about it on the Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, and she has an excellent reputation for veracity.  Apparently the idea is that the bear, who is named (I kid you not) "Boo Buddy," says things that might be attractive or interesting to the spirits of dead children, who then will approach the bear and activate an EMF detector, making LEDs on his paws light up.

Here's the sales pitch, from Ghost Stop, the site that is selling Boo Buddy:

Not your average bear! BooBuddy is cute as a button and so much more. This ghost hunting trigger object responds to environmental changes and even asks EVP questions to initiate interaction and potential evidence. 

BooBuddy is not a toy - he's an investigator! 

Within the ghost hunting and paranormal investigations field, some theories suggest that using an object familiar and attractive to an entity may entice them to interact. This is called a 'trigger object'. BooBuddy is just that and more allowing us the ability to 'see' changes in the environment and initiate communication on it's [sic] own. 

Set BooBuddy and turn it on to detect environment changes and start asking questions. Make sure to set a recorder or camcorder near the doll to document any potential responses. That, and BooBuddy loves being on camera!

Sure he does.

I'm not at all sure what I could say about this, other than that I would buy one for the novelty value alone, if they weren't $99.95.  I guess if you believe all of this stuff about trigger objects and EMF fluctuations and so on, Boo Buddy is as sensible as anything else out there.  And if anyone does conduct any... um, empirical research using the teddy bear, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know the results.

Unless it says something like "HEY CHILDREN...  DO YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH ME?  HA HA HA HA HA HA."  And then winks at you.  Because that would be scary as hell.

Spirals and ice ages

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia was spurred by yesterday's post to send me a link that spells out why we're headed to another ice age.

Yesterday, you may recall, we learned that the sun is going to go out because solar panels actively suck energy from the sun, in the fashion of giant photonic vacuum cleaners.  Today, we're going to take a look at another problem, which is that we're headed for an ice age regardless, because the current model of the Solar System is "not only boring, but incorrect."

This startling revelation came from a post on the r/Conspiracy subreddit that could be used as an advertisement about why it's critical to take high school physics.  It starts with a video on YouTube called "The Helical Model: Our Solar System is a Vortex," wherein we find out that because the sun is traveling in a (more-or-less) circular path around the center of the galaxy, the planets aren't traveling in circles, they travel instead in a "vortex."  "The Sun is like a comet," the video tells us, "dragging planets in its wake."

Because, apparently, comets do that.  Who knew?

"Rotational motion" and "vortex motion" are, we are told, "completely different things."  Then we're shown all sorts of pretty pictures of spiral stuff like ammonite shells and fern fiddleheads.

But so far, what we've been shown is hardly startling, if you know any physics at all.  Of course the motion of the planets looks different if you're viewing it from a different perspective.  Physicists call this a reference frame, and they know all about them -- the idea of reference frames is what gave Einstein the idea for the Theories of Relativity.  So it's not some kind of earthshattering idea to point out that if you're traveling with the sun, the planets move in ellipses, and if you're not -- if you're at a fixed point above the center of the Milky Way, watching the stars zoom around in circles -- the planets will travel in a spiral-ish fashion.  The motion isn't different; what has changed is your reference frame.

But that's only the beginning.  We're then shown two drawings of "energy fields," one around a human and one around... um, something.  I'm not sure what.  The first one is marked "copyrighted," so out of respect for intellectual property rights (although this may be stretching the definition of the word "intellectual"), I'll just post a link to it.  The second, though, I'll reproduce here:

The original poster on r/Conspiracy called these "Taurus fields."  And I sat there for some time, wondering, "Why Taurus?  Why not Scorpio or Aquarius, or, for that matter, Camelopardalis?"  And then it came to me:  he means "torus."  As in, a donut-shaped thing.  Although I do think that "Taurus" is correct in one sense, in that this seems to me to be a lot of bull.

In any case, this sets us up for the punch line, which I present here in toto:

...we are just on the outside of the Iron Age (the shaded in cone), and entering the Bronze Age. Being we are still in the cone, this is causing us to travel in a spiral, but the spiral is widening. This is causing us to gain speed, like a sling. 

This gain in speed is causing our sun to produce longer solar flares. This will cause our planet to rise in temperature, causing our polar caps to melt. This, of course, will cause major flooding. We've yet to see the worst, and the worst will last about a month to a month and a half. This will flood most of the world. 

And the sun progresses to increase, the planets will pull away (think of gravity like a bungee cord), and this will then cause global cooling, which will introduce us into a new ice age. 

The ice age will take about 300 years to fully manifest, but it will last between 12,000 - 16,000 years. 

This explains all the black projects costing trillions of dollars. This explains all the underground bunkers being built. This explains all the camps, all the militarization of police, all the crack down on rights. This explains why people that seem to have all the money they need seem to need more money.

Wowza.  This may be one of the most concentrated samples of bullshit I've ever seen.  We have: a total lack of understanding of basic physics, apocalyptic stuff, "global cooling," government conspiracy theories, and underground bunkers, all in the space of just five short paragraphs.

We are then directed to two websites for further information.  The first is Half Past Human, which seems to be some kind of conspiracy site (although I did see references to "swirlies in the sky" and "spacegoat farts" on the top couple of entries, both of which I would prefer not to investigate).  The second is DJSadhu.com, which is a blog with lots of videos and articles about how everything we know about physics is wrong.  Oh, and chemtrails and Cliven Bundy and pyramids.

It's a general rule of thumb that whenever some n00b comes down the pike, without any scientific training whatsoever, and claims to have discovered a Grand Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, (s)he is (1) probably insane, and (2) definitely wrong.  Scientists do make mistakes; as British science historian James Burke put it, in the episode "Worlds Without End" from his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, "The so-called voyage of discovery has, as often as not, made landfall for reasons little to do with the search for knowledge."  Science sometimes backtracks, makes missteps, pursues what ultimately turn out to be dead ends.

But scientists do understand the method by which you achieve understanding, and because of that, the overall body of science becomes better refined, and closer to grasping the actual truth, as time goes on.  The bottom line: we may not understand everything, but we have a pretty good idea of how to explain a lot of what we see.  The likelihood of anyone finding anything that completely overturns our understanding of any branch of science is slim indeed.

The solar vacuum cleaner

Poe's Law has claimed another victim.

Well, more than one.  Lots more than one, to judge by Facebook and Twitter over the last couple of days.  This particular iteration of the rule that any sufficiently well-done satire is indistinguishable from the real thing comes at the hands of The National Report, which shares the stage with The Onion as a hysterically funny source for completely fake news.

This time, The National Report has taken aim at the solar power industry with a stunning exposé called "Solar Panels Drain the Sun's Energy, Experts Say."  In the article, we find out about a study done at the Wyoming Institute of Technology that showed that solar panels suck energy from the sun in the fashion of giant leeches:

Scientists at the Wyoming Institute of Technology, a privately-owned think tank located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, discovered that energy radiated from the sun isn’t merely captured in solar panels, but that energy is directly physically drawn from the sun by those panels, in a process they refer to as "forced photovoltaic drainage." 

"Put into laymen’s terms, the solar panels capture the sun’s energy, but pull on the sun over time, forcing more energy to be released than the sun is actually producing," WIT claims in a scientific white paper published on Wednesday.  "Imagine a waterfall, dumping water.  But you aren’t catching the water in buckets, but rather sucking it in with a vacuum cleaner.  Eventually, you’re going to suck in so much water that you drain the river above that waterfall completely."

WIT is adamant that there’s no immediate danger, however.  "Currently, solar panels are an energy niche, and do not pose a serious risk to the sun.  But if we converted our grids to solar energy in a big way, with panels on domestic homes and commercial businesses, and paving our parking lots with panels, we’d start seeing very serious problems over time.  If every home in the world had solar panels on their roofs, global temperatures would drop by as much as thirty degrees over twenty years, and the sun could die out within three hundred to four hundred years."

And to make the article even funnier, the study was supposedly commissioned by none other than Halliburton:

"Solar panels destroying the sun could potentially be the worst man-made climate disaster in the history of the world, and Halliburton will not be taking part in that," the company stated in a press release issued Friday morning.  "It’s obvious, based on the findings of this neutral scientific research group, that humans needs to become more dependent on fossil fuels like oil and coal, not less."

My mirth over this story dwindled, however, when I noticed that almost every person who posted this story had done so because... they thought it was true.

[image courtesy of photographer M. O. Stevens and the Wikimedia Commons]

I wish I were making this up.  Here's a selection of the comments that I saw appended to the link.  You may want to put a pillow on your desk for the inevitable faceplant:

Green technology my ass.  The liberal pseudo-environmentalists are selling us out as usual. 

Pass this link along!  Don't let this get swept under the rug! 

Just another way they're going to make money off the fake climate change agenda. 

Alot [sic] more believable than what you hear about the "greenhouse effect" bullshit. 

I wonder how long it will take for the warmists to suppress this.

*sits, hands over face, sobbing softly*

I don't know, folks.  I think that this one may have pushed me over the edge.  "Warmists?"  "Liberal pseudo-environmentalists?"

What, because we have the brainpower to recognize that you can't suck up sunlight with a fucking vacuum cleaner?

And even if light did work this way, we'd have a slightly larger problem than solar panels, you know?  Namely: plants.  As light-suckers go, the plants are a hell of a lot more efficient than solar panels, and there are a great many more of them.  So, what should our slogan be?  "Down with photosynthesis?"  "Pave the forest, save the planet?"

I know all too well, first hand, the state of science education in the United States.  And this is despite teaching in a pretty good school system, where there are a great many opportunities for in-depth study in science.  I know that between school budgets cutting staffing to the bone, and the purely ideological hacking of science education standards to remove controversial topics like climate change and evolution, it's a wonder kids don't graduate thinking that all matter is composed of the four elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.  (And interesting, too, that according to the article I linked, the first state to reject public school science standards explicitly because of the issue of climate change was the state of Wyoming -- a point that no doubt the writers of the satire in The National Report were trying to make by siting the fake "study" in Cheyenne.)

But really, people.  How ignorant about the world around you can you get?  This goes way past "dopeslap" territory, right into "please don't breed."

And to the people over at The National Report:  I'm uncertain whether to applaud, or ask you to publish a retraction.  Poe's Law notwithstanding, we really don't need more people voting against clean energy.