Neurobabble

Confirming something that people like Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz figured out years ago, researchers at Villanova University and the University of Oregon have shown that all you have to do to convince people is throw some fancy-sounding pseudoscientific jargon into your argument.

The specific area that Diego Fernandez-Duque, Jessica Evans, Colton Christian, and Sara D. Hodges researched was neurobabble, in particular the likelihood of increasing people's confidence in the correctness of an argument if some bogus brain-based explanation was included.  Fernandez-Duque et al. write:

Does the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information make explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing?  Do fMRI pictures further increase that allure?  To help answer these questions, 385 college students in four experiments read brief descriptions of psychological phenomena, each one accompanied by an explanation of varying quality (good vs. circular) and followed by superfluous information of various types.  Ancillary measures assessed participants' analytical thinking, beliefs on dualism and free will, and admiration for different sciences.  In Experiment 1, superfluous neuroscience information increased the judged quality of the argument for both good and bad explanations, whereas accompanying fMRI pictures had no impact above and beyond the neuroscience text, suggesting a bias that is conceptual rather than pictorial.  Superfluous neuroscience information was more alluring than social science information (Experiment 2) and more alluring than information from prestigious “hard sciences” (Experiments 3 and 4).  Analytical thinking did not protect against the neuroscience bias, nor did a belief in dualism or free will.  We conclude that the “allure of neuroscience” bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline.  It may stem from the lay belief that the brain is the best explanans for mental phenomena.

So this may explain why people so consistently fall for pseudoscience as long as it's couched in technical terminology.  For example, look at the following, an excerpt from an article in which Deepak Chopra is hawking his latest creation, a meditation-inducing device called "DreamWeaver":

About two years ago I got interested in the idea that you could feed light pulses through the brain with your eyes closed and sound and music at a certain frequency.  Your brain waves would dial into it and then you could dial the instrument down so that you would decrease the brain wave frequency from what it is normally in the waking state.  And then you could slowly dial down the brainwave frequency to what it would be in the dream state, which is called theta, and then you even dial further down into delta.

What the hell does "your brain waves would dial into it" mean?  And I would like to suggest to Fernandez-Duque et al. that their next experiment should have to do with people immediately believing claims if they involve the word "frequency."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then we have the following twofer -- an excerpt of an article by Deepak Chopra that appeared on Dr. Oz's website:

Try to eat one of these three foods once a day to protect against Alzheimer’s and memory issues. 

Wheat Germ - The embryo of a wheat plant, wheat germ is loaded with B-complex vitamins that can reduce levels of homocysteine, an amino acid linked to stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Sprinkle wheat germ on cereal and yogurt in the morning, or enjoy it on salads or popcorn with a little butter. 

Black Currents [sic] - These dark berries are jam-packed with antioxidants that help nourish the brain cells surrounding the hippocampus. The darker in color, the more antioxidants black currents [sic] contain. These fruits are available fresh when in season, or can be purchased dried or frozen year-round. 

Acorn Squash - This beautiful gold-colored veggie contains high amounts of folic acid, a B-vitamin that improves memory as well as the speed at which the brain processes information.

Whenever I read this sort of thing, I'm not inclined to believe it; I'm more inclined to shout, "Source?"  For example, I looked up the whole black currant claim, and the first few sources waxed rhapsodic about black currants' ability to enhance our brain function.  But then I noticed that said sources were all from the Black Currant Foundation (I didn't even know that existed, did you?) and the website blackcurrant.co.nz.  Scrolling down a bit, I found a post on WebMD that was considerably less enthusiastic, saying that it "may be useful in Alzheimer's" (with no mention of exactly how, nor any citations to support the claim) but that it also can lower blood pressure and slow down blood clotting.

So I suppose that the only way to protect yourself against this kind of nonsense is to learn some actual science, and be willing to do some research -- which includes training yourself to recognize what a credible source looks like.

But doing all this research myself leaves me feeling like I need some breakfast.  Maybe a wheat germ, black currant, and acorn squash stir-fry.  Can't have too many antioxidants, you know, when your hippocampus is having some frequency problems.

Layers of fiction

The Shroud of Turin is still an object of reverence for the devout.  Purportedly the burial cloth of Jesus, it shows the front and back of a man who has the injuries one would expect from a crucifixion.  The problem is, there was a peer-reviewed study that appeared in Nature all the way back in 1989 that used cotton fibers from the shroud to establish an age by carbon-14 dating -- and pretty conclusively showed that the cloth was made between 1260 and 1390.  In other words, a good twelve centuries too recent to be the cloth Jesus was wrapped in when he was put in the tomb.  The study was replicated, performed in several different labs, and any possible source of skew ruled out.

So it would have appeared that this was case closed.  The Shroud of Turin is a medieval fake.

But of course, nothing is ever case closed when it comes to true believers.  Joseph G. Marino and M. Sue Benford wrote a paper in 2000 claiming that the date was inaccurate because the sample used in the 1989 study had come from a more recent repaired area.  That contention, and others like it, were taken apart piece by piece in a study in 2005.  Then only a month ago, forensic scientists Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli published research that showed that the pattern of blood stains shown on the shroud was inconsistent with any reasonable pattern that would form if a man was killed by crucifixion, wrapped, and placed prone (either face up or face downward) on a solid surface.

So to repeat: it's a fake.  A remarkable fake, yes.  But a fake.

Which is what makes the latest from the people who venerate the Shroud of Turin even funnier.  Because some specialists in facial reconstruction and computer forensics in Italy have taken the image of the face on the shroud, and used digital analysis to come up with what Jesus looked like when he was alive -- then reverse-aged the image to see what Jesus looked like as a child.

So without further ado, here he is... the Christ child:

Now, have I made this adequately clear?  The Shroud of Turin isn't really the burial cloth of Jesus.  It was the work of some medieval dudes based on what they thought Jesus looked like, 1,200 years after the fact.  Even the gospels themselves weren't contemporary eyewitness accounts; most scholars believe that the earliest gospel, that of Mark, was written in about 70 C.E., or nearly forty years after Jesus died.  Add to that the fact that there is still a considerable debate in academia over whether Jesus existed at all -- or if, perhaps, he was a composite figure, put together from several historical individuals along with characteristics from mythological personages such as the Egyptian god Osiris.  New Testament scholar Robert MacNair Price writes, "There might have been a historical Jesus, but unless someone discovers his diary or his skeleton, we'll never know."

So what the Italian forensic scientists have done is take an image from a faked artifact, made by people who lived twelve centuries after the fact, of a guy who is only known from writings that were done four decades or more after he died, and who may not have existed in the first place... and reverse-aged the image to see what that person looked like as a boy.

How far removed from reality can you get?  It's as if I took a poorly-rendered drawing of Ian McKellen, reverse-aged it, and decided that was what the real Gandalf looked like in his youth in Valinor.

So anyhow.  The whole thing is harmless enough if it amuses them, I suppose, although you have to wonder what they thought they were accomplishing by all of this.  And once again, we have a group of people whose devotion to an object seems to have rendered them incapable of understanding what's meant by the term "reliable evidence."

Just as well, I suppose, because the kid's sneery expression actually reminds me not so much of the Holy Child as of Joffrey from Game of Thrones:

But heaven knows, Joffrey certainly didn't need any more ideas about his divinity.  So maybe it's better if we don't give that point any further attention.

Miraculous backfire

I walk a pretty fine line, here at Skeptophilia, between criticizing ideas and ridiculing the people who hold them.  And I'm sure that I've stepped across that line more than once, given my fondness for the word "wingnut."  But I do try to focus on people's words, actions, and ideologies rather than launching broad-brush ad hominems.  That way lies Ann Coulter, and heaven knows we wouldn't want to go there.

Wait, was that a personal ad hominem?

Dammit.

Anyhow, any time you write something and post it or publish it, you take the chance that you're going to cause some negative responses.  And the problem is that there's a range of negative responses people could have to what a blogger writes, from "disagreement" to "offense" to "so offended I'm going to sue your ass off for libel."  And this is the predicament that Stephanie Guttormson has found herself in.

Guttormson is the Operations Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, and is the kind of person who has slim tolerance for bullshit.  She has a YouTube channel called "Think Stephtically," and she has taken on all manner of psychics, faith healers, and their ilk.  And now, she has gotten herself into (in my opinion, entirely undeserved) hot water over her criticisms of Adam Miller, who claims to be a faith healer and miracle worker.

In two YouTube pieces -- "Adam Miller, Con Artist" and "Adam Miller, Charlatan Antics, Childish Tactics" -- she took Miller's claims apart piece by piece.  Devotees tried to strike back, with commentary such as the following:

I have had work done by Adam Miller for the last 2 years 12 years of nagging pain in my back, INDEED he is a healer this woman is a hacker and knows nothing about spirituality.  Adam and Eve Miller are the real deal back off and allow those their gifts to heal on.

Well, I might point out first that there's a difference between a "hack" and a "hacker," but the more trenchant response is the one that appeared immediately after the above post:

I brushed my teeth yesterday then crossed the street.  Today I forgot to brush my teeth, and was hit by a car crossing the street - IF only I had brushed my teeth, I wouldnt have been hit by a car.  Right?

(Y)our example demonstrates (amongst others) the logical fallacies of cherry picking, and correlation is not causality.  THAT is why we have scientific methodologies - to weed out those claims by people such as Adam when not supported by the evidence.

Spot on, of course.  But the problem with people like Miller is that they never just retreat in disarray when they're shown up -- they lash out.  And that's what Miller has done.  He has sued Guttormson for copyright infringement (she used some clips of Miller's schtick in her own videos) and for "actual harm caused to Mr. Miller as a result of Guttormson’s infringement and statutory damages."

The lawsuit probably doesn't stand a chance of being found in Miller's favor; but the problem is, Miller is wealthy (another indication of how many gullible people there are in the world) and can afford the cost far better than Guttormson can.  So Guttormson has started a GoFundMe drive to pay for her legal costs from this frivolous lawsuit -- to which I hope you will be able to donate.

But what Miller may not have realized, given his apparent unfamiliarity with critical thinking, is that there is a phenomenon called the Streisand effect.  It involves someone objecting to negative publicity, and their objection bringing far more attention to that publicity than it otherwise would have had.  It got its name, of course, from singer Barbra Streisand, who became furious over an aerial photograph of her house that had been taken by an obscure California photographer, and sued him to have it destroyed -- resulting in the photograph being circulated worldwide, appearing in countless articles and blog posts, including on the Wikipedia page about the Streisand effect.

Gives new meaning to the phrase "pick your battles."

Barbra Streisand's house, posted here just because I can.  [image copyright © 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org, and courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So let's see if we can invoke the Streisand effect here.  Miller wants his day in court?  Fine.  How about we skeptics pull together, and not only support Guttormson's GoFundMe drive, but circulate and repost her two videos in which she criticized Miller?  When I looked at them this morning so I could link them to this post, they had only 11,000 and 2,400 views each.

That is far too few.

So take a look at Guttormson's YouTube videos (links posted above).  Post them on Twitter and Facebook and wherever else you can think of. They're well worth watching on their own merits, of course; she's hilarious, and her biting commentary on Miller's content and delivery style got some belly laughs from me.  Besides the pleasure of watching Miller's lawsuit completely backfire, it'd be nice to see more people exposed to this kind of skeptical approach of woo-woo claims.

Funny to think, then, that the efforts of a guy who claims to "work miracles" might be to bring much wider attention to a woman who works to demolish such claims.  Now wouldn't that be a miracle?

Corporate-run small government

Some days, being an optimist is a losing proposition.

In previous posts, I have outlined the evidence supporting the claim that hydrofracking is (1) extremely wasteful of water, (2) dangerous, (3) likely to result in contaminated groundwater, and (4) contributing to climate change.  Any one of these reasons should be sufficient to prohibit it, but pushed by corporate interests, fracking is going great guns despite multiple mishaps (some of them resulting in loss of life) and most recently, the discovery of fracking chemicals in drinking water in Pennsylvania.  (For a summary of the dangers of fracking, with specific examples, see my post from last December.)

So it's not to be wondered at that some communities have taken matters into their own hands, and outlawed fracking.  And for people who claim that this is just the NIMBY principle at work ("Not In My Back Yard") -- I would argue that this technology shouldn't be in anyone's back yard.

Hydrofracking well [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's what the citizens of Denton, Texas did last year -- they voted in November to join a growing list of towns that have banned fracking within their boundaries.  But this week the state of Texas overrode that vote, by passing a resolution 24-7 that prevents communities from banning anything done by oil and gas companies.  The resolution is going to Governor Greg Abbott this week, who is expected to sign it into law.

"Oil and gas companies donated $5.5 million to the campaigns of legislators in the last elections," said Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas.  "And clearly they got their money’s worth."

Supporters of the bill were, of course, elated, as were the oil and gas corporations.  Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay) said that the bill found "the common ground" between the energy industry and municipalities, which is true in the sense of a rabbit finding "common ground" with a wolf when it gets pinned to the ground and eaten.

"House Bill 40 enjoys widespread support because the legislation provides cities with authority to reasonably regulate surface level oil and gas activities, while affirming that regulation of oil and gas operations like fracking and production is under the exclusive jurisdiction of the state," said Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association.  Which is mighty convenient, given that most of what the petroleum industry does is underground.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/barnett-shale/article20199849.html#storylink=cpy

Among the many things that appall me about this is the hypocrisy of the legislators who voted for the bill.  The yes votes come from a Senate that is 2/3 Republican, and the vote went largely along party lines. But isn't the Republican ideal that small government is the best?  Don't we always hear the quote from conservatives, sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson, that "the government that governs best is the one that governs least?"

Apparently this maxim only applies if you're talking about taxes and gun control, and not about communities exercising self-determination with regard to greedy corporations pushing their way in and ruining aquifers used for agriculture and drinking water.

Oh, and preventing public school biology teachers from teaching evolution, and limiting the rights of LGBT people to enjoy the same privileges we straight people take for granted.  Perfectly okay for the government to be huge and intrusive with regards to those issues.

But if a community decides -- by a popular vote, no less -- that it doesn't want fracking wells on its land, then the state of Texas steps in and says, "Sorry.  You can't do that."

Small government, my ass.  Apparently in Texas, the Republican rule has been changed to "Small government unless it's doing something that gets me votes or lines my wallet."

The whole thing reeks of corruption.  Metzger called it right; money talked, the hypocrites voted, and the corporations won.  And the citizens of towns like Denton lost, big time.  One can only hope that they'll challenge this ruling, and take that challenge as far as it can go.

And I also hope that whatever legal obstacles they set up are put in place quickly -- before the frackers come in and trash the place.

Free speech and dog bites

It looks like some people need a refresher course in the concept that going around deliberately offending people you disagree with doesn't make you a hero, it makes you an asshole.

This is my general conclusion about Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative, whose "Draw a Cartoon of Muhammad" event in Garland, Texas was crashed by two armed Muslims.  The event had high security -- no one was in any doubt of the risk they were taking -- so when the two men came in, brandishing assault rifles, they were immediately shot and killed by the armed guards hired to protect attendees.

The comparisons to the Charlie Hebdo massacre started to fly.  Geller, who organized the event, was vocal in her claim that the whole thing had to do with free speech.  "There is a problem in Islam, as illustrated last night, and anyone that addresses it gets attacked in this same way," Geller said.  "The Islamic jihadis are determined to suppress our freedom of speech violently."

Which is certainly true, on some level.  I don't want anyone to misunderstand me; I still think that Islam is factually wrong, and has a lot to answer for in terms of human rights offenses, suppression of women, and encouraging extremism and fanaticism.  But Geller's case began to look a little different when it was revealed that she isn't just a free speech advocate, she's a conspiracy theorist who thinks there's some kind of huge plot to institute Shari'a law in the United States, and that there are Muslims everywhere, influencing every level of government.

Hell, she even thinks that conservative activist Grover Norquist is a "dangerous Islamic infiltrator."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole Draw Muhammad event starts to look like a deliberate set-up, and that Geller was hoping like crazy that something violent would happen.  What she did amounts to taking a stick and repeatedly hitting a dog with it, and when the dog turns around and bites you, saying, "See?  I told you it was vicious."

And, of course, she got her wish.  So this isn't some sort of victory for free speech; it's a fanatic on one side pissing off two fanatics on the other side, which hardly constitutes a win for either ideology.

As far as the parallels to Charlie Hebdo, there are some similarities.  In both cases, we had people who knew full well what the reaction by devout Muslims would be.  The difference, though, seems to be that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo lampooned other religions as well -- the Catholics and Jews got equal time in their magazine -- whereas Geller's event was specifically targeted at Islam.  The fact that the intent in Garland was to provoke a response is evident from the armed guards, who turned the attack into something more like suicide by cop.

So let me make this clear.  We do have the right to free speech in the United States.  Geller, and the cartoonists who participated, had the right to do what they did.  But having a right to do something doesn't mean that you have the right to expect that there be no consequences no matter what you say.  I might have the right to say that a guy I know is an illiterate, ugly ignoramus, but I don't have the right to act all surprised if he responds in kind.

And more importantly, having the right to do something doesn't make it the right thing to do.

As far as Geller's claim that she was just trying to point out how crazy the Islamic extremists are, I only have one question: didn't we already know that?  No one who has picked up a newspaper in the past ten years had any doubt on that point.

There's a difference between criticism and deliberate provocation.  By all means criticize; pointing out the flaws in an ideology is crucial in getting people unstuck from erroneous ways of thinking.  (And as I said before, there is a lot about Islam to criticize.)  But you can do that and remain respectful of people.  It doesn't mean there won't be times people will lash out at you; it doesn't mean you won't sometimes offend.

But it does leave you on a moral high ground that Geller and Charlie Hebdo have abandoned.  They want to have it both ways -- to set out to be offensive, and then to be offended themselves when their targets retaliate.

And in the end, all they proved was that being an asshole sometimes results in getting people killed.

Eppur si muove

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Inquisition in Rome for his claim that the Earth went around the Sun, not the other way around.

He had a nice body of evidence in his favor.  He had observed the phases of the planet Venus, had advanced a theory of oceanic tides that supported the movement of the Earth rather than the Sun, and had actually seen the four largest moons of Jupiter (now called the "Galilean moons" in his honor) circling their host planet.  He was able to show that all of the motions of the planets, as well as the apparent motions of the stars, were far more easily and simply explained by a heliocentric model than a geocentric one.

None of that mattered.  The powers-that-be had spoken, and religious dogma and orthodoxy won the day.  Galileo was found guilty of being "gravely suspect of heresy," and was put under house arrest for the remaining nine years of his life.  He was fortunate; only thirty years earlier, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for such heretical views.

Part of what saved Galileo, of course, was that he was bullied into recanting.  He was made to swear his adherence to the scriptural account, and to "abjure, curse, and detest" his criticism of the claim that the Earth was the motionless center of the universe.  His caving to their demands probably saved his life.  But legend has it that as he left the courtroom to begin serving his sentence, he muttered, "Eppur si muove"  -- "and yet, it moves."

Cristiano Banti, Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition (1857) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And that brings me to our modern-day version of the Inquisition, by which I mean the climate change deniers currently in charge of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, chaired by Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, and containing such shining lights of scientific knowledge as Dana Rohrbacher (who called climate change "liberal claptrap").  The general tenor of the committee can best be judged by a statement from Representative Bill Posey of Florida, who claimed we shouldn't be worried, because during the "Age of the Dinosaurs" the temperature was 30° warmer than it is now, and it didn't seem to bother them any.  But cut the guy some slack; even if he apparently doesn't know that the dinosaurs were around for 200 million years, and that there's good geological evidence of temperature swings during that time that included at least one Ice Age, he's correct that there was a temperature high -- called the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum -- that occurred when there were dinosaurs.  Okay, the average temperature during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum was only 5° higher than it is today, so he was off by a factor of six, but that's good enough for the Science Committee, right?

Of course right.

So my point is, we've allowed science research to be put into the hands of a committee largely made up of clowns who couldn't pass a 9th grade Earth Science class.  So what did we expect would happen?

What happened was precisely what the Inquisition did to the free-thinking gadflies of its time; they squashed dissent.  Just a couple of days ago came the announcement that the committee had slashed NASA's Earth Science Research budget by $323 million -- about 20% of its total budget.  The cuts weren't even announced until six days before the vote, giving the minority of members who actually get that scientific understanding comes from data and hard evidence little time for action.  The budget passed on a party-line vote.

Chairman Smith, when asked about the budget, responded only that "The Obama administration has consistently cut funding for... human space exploration programs, while increasing funding for the Earth Science Division by more than 63 percent."

But you see, Mr. Chairman, there's a good reason for that.  The scientific consensus is that we're approaching a tipping point with respect to the climate, despite what you and your cadre, and its counterpart in the Senate -- the Committee on the Environment, chaired by none other than Senator James "Snowball" Inhofe -- would have us believe.  Some people, including biologist and environmental scientist Tim Flannery, think we might already have passed that point.  (His book The Weather Makers is one of the best, most readable summaries of the mountain of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change; everyone should read it, but plan to be a little depressed afterwards.)

So we've put the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and we shouldn't be surprised that they are making chicken dinners.  NASA was given the message "toe the line, or else."  They basically said, "Up yours, Lamar," and continued to push for action on climate change, giving unequivocal support to the scientists who conduct the research and actually know what's going on.  The result?  NASA's budget for climate research gets cut to the bone -- and the House passed a bill that prohibits scientists from giving advice on their own research to the Environmental Protection Agency, while allowing corporate interests unfettered access to the EPA's advisory board.

But sooner or later, the Congress will find out what the Inquisition found out: you can't legislate away reality.  If they wanted to, they could pass a bill stating that the Moon was made of Wensleydale cheese, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to its actual composition.  So while our leaders put their hands over their eyes and say "la-la-la-la-la, not listening," outside the world continues to warm, the climate continues to oscillate wildly, storms continue to strengthen, and the seas continue to rise.

Chairman Smith and his herd of science-deniers can vote away our ability to study climate change, but they can't make the warming itself go away.  All they can do is assure that we have less information, and will be less able to cope with the effects of climate change when they happen.

Eppur si muove.

Wagging the dog

On Saturday, we looked at the wild conspiracy theories that have arisen around the military exercises called "Jade Helm 15" that are scheduled to take place in the southwestern United States this summer.  The conclusion I came to was that you had to be a major nutjob to believe what Alex Jones and his ilk were claiming -- a statement that comes pretty close to a tautology.

Unfortunately, further developments have shown that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is, by this definition, a major nutjob.

Abbott has informed Major General Gerald Betty that he is deploying the Texas State Guard to make sure that the planned military takeover of Texas doesn't happen.  Abbott wrote:

To address concerns of Texas citizens and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe, secure, and informed about military procedures occurring in their vicinity, I am directing the Texas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15.  During the Operation's eight-week training period from July 2015 to September 2015, I expect to receive regular updates on the progress and safety of the Operation. 

During the training operation, it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.  By monitoring the Operation on a continual basis, the State Guard will facilitate communication between my office and commanders of the Operation to ensure that adequate measures are in place to protect Texans.

To make matters worse, we find out that a man who is running for president of the United States also considers Jade Helm a serious threat.  It will probably come as no surprise, however, that the contender I'm referring to is Ted Cruz:

My office has reached out to the Pentagon to inquire about this exercise.  We are assured it is a military training exercise.  I have no reason to doubt those assurances, but I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.

 Of course, this is not the first wacko idea that Cruz has fallen for.  When he found out about Agenda 21, a non-binding environmental action plan for sustainable development that was drafted in 1992 by the United Nations, Cruz wrote:

Agenda 21 attempts to abolish “unsustainable” environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. . . . Agenda 21 subverts liberty, our property rights, and our sovereignty.

Right.  Because non-binding resolutions that no one has acted on for 24 years are all about destroying American sovereignty.

Oh, and don't you think that Ted Cruz looks exactly like a blobfish?

But I digress.

The whole Jade Helm thing, though, seems to be spiraling out of control.  Over at the dubiously-connected-with-reality website Personal Liberty, we find out that we need to panic even more because an anonymous guy found out from a friend of a friend that there are trains with shackles on them:

Let me drop a bombshell that I have not seen you address.  There are trains moving throughout Texas that have shackles inside some of the cars.  I have not personally seen them, but I know personnel that have seen this.  This indicates that these trains will be used to transport prisoners of some sort.  I know from reading your articles that your default belief will be that these are for American political prisoners and will be transported to FEMA detention camps of some sort.

What is a little scary about all of this is that when you get heavily-armed people scared over nothing, they react, and pretty soon that nothing turns into a great big something.

In other words, you have the insane tail wagging the slightly-less-insane dog.

So I'm glad that there are at least a few voices of reason, such as Republican Senator Todd Smith, who wrote a letter to Governor Abbott that began thusly:

Let me apologize in advance that your letter pandering to idiots who believe that US Navy Seals and other US military personnel are somehow a threat to be watched has left me livid.  As a 16 year member of the Texas House and a proud patriotic AMERICAN, I am terrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my Governor actually believes this stuff and the possibility that my Governor doesn’t have the backbone to standup to those who do.  I’m not sure which is worse.  As one of the remaining Republicans who believes in making decisions based on facts and evidence -- you used to be a judge?  I am appalled that you would give credence to the nonsense mouthed by those who intend to make decisions based on internet or radio shock jock driven hysteria.    Is there ANYBODY who is going to stand up to this radical nonsense that is a cancer on our State and our Party?  It is alarming that State Republican leadership is such that we must choose between DEGREES of demagoguery.

 To which I can only say: Amen.

Of course, "listening to the voice of Reason" is not something we've seen people do much lately, especially when the loonies have whipped up a frenzy.  So I can only hope that wiser minds prevail, and the nutjobs quiet down, and whatever military exercises they have planned for this summer go off peacefully and without a hitch.  It would be a terrible thing if the conspiracy theorists turned out to be right, not because they were right from the beginning, but because the fear they'd incited created the very situation they were yelping about.