The illusion of causality

Fighting bad thinking is an uphill battle, sometimes.  Not only, or even primarily, because there's so much of it out there; the real problem is that our brains are hard-wired to make poor connections, and once those connections are made, to hang on to them like grim death.

A particularly difficult one to overcome is our tendency to fall for the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this."  We assume that if two events are in close proximity in time and space, the first one must have caused the second one.  Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, likes to tell a story about his wife, who is a pediatrician, preparing to give a child a vaccination.  The child had a seizure as she was drawing the vaccine into the syringe.  If the seizure had occurred only a minute later, right after the vaccine was administered, the parents would undoubtedly have thought that the vaccination caused the seizure -- and after that, no power on earth would have likely convinced them otherwise.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Why do we do this?  The most reasonable explanation is that in our evolutionary history, forming such connections had significant survival value.  Since it's usual that causes and effects are close together in time and space, wiring in a tendency to decide that all such correspondences are causal is still going to be right more often than not.  But it does lead us onto some thin ice, logic-wise.

Which is bad enough.  But now three researchers -- Ion Yarritu (Deusto University), Helena Matute (University of Bilbao), and David Luque (University of New South Wales) -- have published research that shows that our falling for what they call the "causal illusion" is so powerful that even evidence to the contrary can't fix the error.

In a paper called "The dark side of cognitive illusions: When an illusory belief interferes with the acquisition of evidence-based knowledge," published earlier this year in the British Journal of Psychology, Yarritu et al. have demonstrated that once we've decided on an explanation for something, it becomes damn near impossible to change.

Their experimental protocol was simple and elegant.  Yarritu writes:

During the first phase of the experiment, one group of participants was induced to develop a strong illusion that a placebo medicine was effective to treat a fictitious disease, whereas another group was induced to develop a weak illusion.  Then, in Phase 2, both groups observed fictitious patients who always took the bogus treatment simultaneously with a second treatment which was effective.  Our results showed that the group who developed the strong illusion about the effectiveness of the bogus treatment during Phase 1 had more difficulties in learning during Phase 2 that the added treatment was effective.

The strength of this illusion explains why bogus "alternative medicine" therapies gain such traction.  All it takes is a handful of cases where people use "deer antler spray" and find they have more energy (and no, I'm not making this up) to get the ball rolling.  Homeopathy owes a lot to this flaw in our reasoning ability; any symptom abatement that occurs after taking a homeopathic "remedy" clearly would have happened even if the patient had taken nothing -- which is, after all, what (s)he did.

And that's not even considering the placebo effect as a further complicating factor.

Helena Matute, one of the researchers in the recent study, has written extensively about the difficulty of battling causal illusions.  In an article she wrote for the online journal Mapping Ignorance, Matute writes:

Alternative medicine is often promoted on the argument that it can do no harm.  Even though its advocates are aware that its effectiveness has not been scientifically demonstrated, they do believe that it is harmless and therefore it should be used.  "If not alone, you should at least use it in combination with evidence-based treatments," they say, "just in case." 

But this strategy is not without risk... even treatments which are physically innocuous may have serious consequences in our belief system, sometimes with fatal consequences.  When people believe that a bogus treatment works, they may not be able to learn that another treatment, which is really effective, is the cause of their recovery.  This finding is important because it shows one of the mechanisms by which people might decide to quit an efficient treatment in favor of a bogus one.

I think this same effect is contributory to errors in thinking in a great many other areas.  Consider, for instance, the fact that belief in anthropogenic climate change rises in the summer and falls in the winter.  After being told that human activity is causing the global average temperature to rise, our brains are primed to look out of the window at the snow falling, and say, "Nah.  Can't be."

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.  To quote Stephen Colbert, "Global warming isn't real, because I was cold today.  Also great news: world hunger is over because I just ate."

The study by Yarritu et al. highlights not only the difficulty of fighting incorrect causal connections, but why it is so essential that we do so.  The decision that two things are causally connected is powerful and difficult to reverse; so it's critical that we be aware of this bias in thinking, and watch our own tendency to leap to conclusions.  But even more critical is that we are given reliable evidence to correct our own errors in causality, and that we listen to it.  Like any cognitive bias, we can combat it -- but only if we're willing to admit that we might get it wrong sometimes.

Or as Michael Shermer put it, "Don't believe everything you think."

Rules, ethics, and opting out

In the last few days, I've been prepping for the start of another school year.  My 29th, which boggles my mind a little.  And although I wouldn't turn down another three months of vacation, there's a part of me that's enjoying getting my classroom cleaned and ready, going through lessons and support materials, and wondering who's going to be in my classes this year and what joys and challenges they will bring along with them.

And as New York State teachers head toward the on-ramp, our Commissioner of Education is already beginning to polish up her own rhetoric in support of the Common Core and standardized exams, and against the opt-out movement.

This will be Commissioner MaryEllen Elia's first full school year in New York.  She comes to us from Florida, replacing Commissioner John King, who brilliantly illustrated the Peter Principle when he was promoted to the position of senior advisor to federal Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  King, a toe-the-line demagogue who wouldn't hear any criticism of the haphazard fashion in which the Common Core and its attendant exams were rolled out in New York, is now in the position of seeing to it that the entire nation goes the same way.

Elia, unfortunately, seems cut from the same mold.

Three days ago she launched a campaign to fight the opt-out movement, which last year saw over 1.1 million participants across the state.  But instead of admitting that if the parents of over a million children are objecting to a policy, it might be time to reconsider it, she doubled down on her own stance -- and implied that the parents in the opt-out movement were simply uninformed.

"As you get more people involved in the process, you have more people understanding what’s going on and why you have assessments," Elia said.  "There are a lot of people that don’t know what the Common Core is...  We’re trying to pull together a tool kit, if you will, to support superintendents in how we can communicate in a much more effective way to people across the state.  I want the superintendents to understand the reflections and law that they can use as an information piece when they talk to people in their community … It’s important for them to be able to say, ‘Listen, it’s the law.’"

The problem is, it's not the law.  There is no law that mandates that students take tests, standardized or otherwise.  Republican Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, a vocal opponent of the standardized test movement, made this abundantly clear last year.  "They [NYSED and school districts] should be providing parents with the truths and the facts and their rights," Tedisco said in an interview.  "And their rights are yes, they can opt out of something they haven’t opted into. They can refuse something for their kids they’ve never opted into."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As far as the parents who choose opt-out being uninformed, Elia may have stirred up a hornet's nest.  Jessica McNair, co-founder of the advocacy group Opt Out CNY, said, "I think she has a lot to learn about the parents in New York State.  We’re not going to back down until we see tests that are developmentally appropriate, and tests that are decoupled from the teacher evaluations."

But for the teachers who are participating in the pushback, Elia had even harsher words.  Such behavior, she said, was unethical.

"I think opt-out is something that is not reasonable," she said, at a meeting of Educators4Excellence.  "I am absolutely shocked if, and I don’t know that this happened, but if any educators supported and encouraged opt-outs, I think it’s unethical."  She has even hinted that teachers who recommend opting out to students or parents could be charged with insubordination.

It's unethical to follow the deepest core value of education -- to do what's best for children?  I have been unequivocal in my support for the opt-out movement; at this point, it's the only leverage parents and educators have against an upper administration that has a long history of being blind and deaf to the concerns of the rank-and-filers who spend nine months of every year on the front lines, and who know best the needs of their students.  They have chosen instead to take away the rights of the local districts to oversee their own assessments and teacher evaluations, and ceded that power to corporations like Pearson Education, who have over and over demonstrated that they are incapable of providing metrics that mean anything.

As Carol Corbett Burris, former principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre School District and winner of the 2010 New York State Educator of the Year Award, put it:

(T)here comes a time when rules must be broken — when adults, after exhausting all remedies, must be willing to break ranks and not comply.  That time is now.  The promise of a public school system, however imperfectly realized, is at risk of being destroyed.  The future of our children is hanging from testing’s high stakes.  The time to opt out is now.

In other words, if Ms. Elia believes that such actions are unethical, then we as educators should welcome that label as a badge of honor.

If that makes us insubordinate, so be it.

And to Ms. Elia, I can only give a warning.  If you think that by demeaning teachers and parents as unethical and uninformed you can break our resolve, you have a lot to learn.  You think 1.1 million non-compliant children is a lot?

If you don't back down with the rhetoric, and look at how the system itself is failing children, you haven't seen anything yet.

Helping the hypersensitives

One thing I've never understood is the determination of some people to believe in counterfactual nonsense despite rigorous evidence to the contrary.

Let's take, for example, the news story that a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia found yesterday, wherein we learn that a couple in Worcester, Massachusetts is suing the private school their son attends because they claim that the wifi signal in the school is making him sick.

[image courtesy of photographer Marc Lostracco and the Wikimedia Commons]

The boy, they say, has "electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome," which makes him react badly to being exposed to electromagnetic fields.  He has developed headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds, they say, and the wifi is to blame.  School officials wouldn't do anything about it, so the parents sued.

There are just two problems with this claim.

Problem one is that earlier this year, possibly in an effort to forestall such nonsense, the school hired a company called Isotrope to do a complete assessment of the school with respect to the safety of its electronic equipment.  "Isotrope’s assessment was completed in January 2015 and found that the combined levels of access point emissions, broadcast radio and television signals, and other RFE emissions on campus 'were substantially less than 1/10,000th of the applicable safety limits (federal and state)," the school said in an official statement.

Problem two is more serious; that "electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome" apparently doesn't exist.

A 2006 study done by G. James Rubin et al. of King's College, London, called "Are Some People Sensitive to Mobile Phone Signals?", found that the answer is, essentially, "No."  They tested ordinary folks and "sensitives," exposing them to real and sham (i.e. non-existent) electromagnetic fields, and documented the symptoms participants had afterwards.  The results are damning:

(N)o strong evidence was found of any difference between the conditions in terms of symptom severity.  Nor did evidence of any differential effect of condition between the two groups exist.  The proportion of sensitive participants who believed a signal was present during GSM exposure (60%) was similar to the proportion who believed one was present during sham exposure (63%)... 

No evidence was found to indicate that people with self reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity.  As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition.

Another study, led by Ulrich Frick of the Psychiatric University Hospital, Regensburg, Germany, found similar results:

The major study endpoint was the ability of the subjects to differentiate between real magnetic stimulation and a sham condition. There were no significant differences between groups in the thresholds, neither of detecting the real magnetic stimulus nor in motor response... Differences between groups were mostly due to false alarm reactions in the sham condition reported by subjectively electrosensitives (SES). We found no objective correlate of the self perception of being "electrosensitive."

Even more devastating to the claim is a study done by Lena Hillert et al. of the Environmental Illness Research Centre of Huddinge, Sweden, which found that there is a good treatment scheme for electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome... cognitive behavioral therapy:

Cognitive behavioural treatment, as part of a multidisciplinary treatment package for patients with electric sensitivity, was evaluated in a controlled trial. Ten patients who received treatment were compared to 12 controls. Outcome measures included different dimensions such as symptoms, beliefs, behaviour, and biochemical measurements of stress-related variables. All outcome measures were collected prior to the study, post-treatment, and after an additional 6-month follow-up. 

The therapy group rated their electric sensitivity as significantly lower than did the control group at the 6-month follow-up, and reduction of self-rated discomforts from triggering factors was significant in the therapy group. There were no systematic changes in the biochemical variables. The symptom indices were significantly reduced over time, and ability to work continued to be good in both groups. 

The prognosis for this syndrome is good with early intervention and cognitive therapy may further reduce the perceived hypersensitivity. This may have important implications on handling of patients with electric sensitivity.

In other words, the evidence is pretty clear that electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome is purely psychosomatic in origin, and best treated by mental health therapy.

And there certainly isn't any evidence that turning off the wifi will make a damn bit of difference.

It's to be hoped that the judge in this case, Timothy S. Hillman, will do his homework, and throw the lawsuit out.  Even more beneficial would be getting the child, and possibly the parents, some psychological counseling.

Because whatever is making this kid ill is clearly not the electromagnetic fields in the school, or anywhere else.  And if he is not suffering from some kind of psychosomatic illness, possibly engendered by the worries of the parents, then there is another organic cause for his symptoms, which should be looked into for his health's sake.

What's clear is that wasting time suing the school over an imagined risk isn't helping anyone, least of all the child.

Moral sleight of hand

Magicians excel at misdirection and sleight of hand.  They can seemingly do the impossible, when in fact their shtick is simply a combination of manual dexterity and the ability to get you to look somewhere else besides the place where the actual trickery is happening.  No criticism intended; to be an excellent magician takes years of practice.  But the whole thing boils down to drawing your attention away from where you should be looking.

There are a lot of religious leaders who excel at the same thing.

We're seeing it in bucket loads at the moment, due to the Ashley Madison hack, wherein a site dedicated to finding married people partners to cheat with was broken into, and thousands of names and addresses made public.  The ones who hit the news were, of course, the public figures, but the hypocrisy factor made the religious ones stand out even more.  To no one's particular surprise, alleged pedophile and general lowlife Josh Duggar had an Ashley Madison account, and he and his family are now scrambling to do damage control despite his having a reputation by this point that is probably past salvaging.  

But no sidestepping was quite as comical as the dance done by British Islamist leader Hamza Tzortzis, whose name was also released in the leak.  Confronted by his having a paid subscription to the infidelity site despite his constantly preaching about the evils of sexual immorality, Tzortzis had what may be the weakest defense I've ever seen.

Tzortzis was lambasted by a follower on his Facebook page who wrote, "So Hamza, you are claiming that some guy knew all of your private information and wanted to screw with you so he created a fake account on Ashley Madison.  This guy then paid hundreds of dollars to maintain the account for 9 months.  This account was then used to make transactions at locations where you were also present at the time.  Then the ultimate plan was to hack the Ashley Madison database and release 40 million users so you could be exposed.  Am I getting this right?"

And Tzortzis replied, in toto, "You’re an idiot. Read the post before you write.  The amount was 15 pounds a month, not hundreds."

So okay, maybe not all of 'em are skilled at misdirection.

But not all of the sleight of hand has to do with infidelity.  Recently Mehmet Görmez, the head of the Diyanet (the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs), called on Islamic religious authorities throughout the Middle East to unite to fight ISIS.

Such a move, of course, would be deeply controversial in a region where sect loyalty and arguments about the interpretation of religious texts routinely lead to violence.  So in response to Görmez's statement, Bilal Yorulmaz, professor of religion at Marmara University, said that what the Islamic world really needs to be worried about is...

... the Jedi.

"Jediism … is spreading today in Christian societies," Yorulmaz said.  "Around 70,000 people in Australia and 390,000 people in England currently define themselves as Jedis."

He then went on to describe how Hollywood is the real problem, presumably because the movie industry so frequently blows up priceless archeological sites and beheads researchers who are trying to protect them.

Okay, I know confronting your personal failings isn't easy, and it must be even more devastating to own up to the evils committed in the name of your deeply-held ideology.  But setting up straw men as a way of deflecting blame only makes your own culpability in things that much clearer.

You have to wonder, however, how long people will go on defending a position that is, at its basis, indefensible.  Are they hoping that sooner or later, the short attention span of their followers will kick in, and all will be forgiven and/or forgotten?  Hell, it worked for Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard --  both of whom were caught in ongoing infidelity despite their continual harping on sexual purity.  Haggard, in fact, was not only caught cheating, but caught cheating with a male prostitute.  And both are now back to preaching the gospel to standing-room-only crowds, and making money hand over fist doing it.

Funny what time and pious misdirection can do.

I've always felt that honesty and integrity were about the most important character traits out there, so the whole thing is pretty repulsive.  To be able to stand up in front of a crowd and make utterances that are deliberately designed to steer people away from your own failings, indiscretions, and immorality is as dishonest as simply lying about it.

The sad thing is that for some reason, it works.  Just like with stage magic, people get fooled, again and again.  But far from entertaining, this sleight of hand just leaves me feeling a little sick.

A matter of truth

I'm willing to believe that I take stuff too seriously sometimes.  "Lighten up" is a comment I've heard since I was about six years old, as is "You're a bit tightly wound."

So let's just take it as a given that my annoyance at the latest Facebook spam fad might be an overreaction, okay?

Anyone who participates in social media has probably already figured out that I'm talking about the "What Does My Name Mean?" site.  I enter my name, and I'm told that "Gordon" comes from the Greek words "Gor" meaning "invincible" and "Don" meaning "god."

The problem is, every single one of them is wrong.  Made up, fabricated, untrue, and whatever words you can think of to that effect up to and including "liar, liar, pants on fire."  I know this because I'm a linguistics geek, remember?  Gordon is from Gaelic, not Greek, and it doesn't mean "invincible god," it means "hill dweller."

Which is not nearly as glamorous as "invincible god," but considerably more accurate, given that the Scottish side of my family were peasants.

And it's not just my name that is incorrect.  All of them are this way.  You keep being told that your name means "glorious prince" even if you enter your name as "Bullshit" or "Buttface" or "Fuckoff."

The whole thing is clickbait, an attempt (and apparently a successful one) to get millions of people to click on a link.

So what's the harm?  As a friend of mine said, "It's just a party game.  Ignore it."  Which I could, except for two things.

One is that such clickbait sites are sometimes linked to malware and viruses.  Some computer-savvy folks have determined that this one probably isn't, but a good many of them are, including the ubiquitous "99% of people can't come up with a man's name beginning with E.  Can you?" links.  At best, these sites are equipped to do data harvesting; at worst, you could come away with a computer virus.  So showing a little caution about what you click and share is a good idea.

The other thing, though, is more philosophical.  Dammit, truth matters.  We're encouraged all the time by this culture to fool ourselves, to (on the one hand) take personality tests that show that we're Special and Gifted and Misunderstood, and (on the other) that we've got personal and physical defects that can be remedied if you'll just buy this product that is On Sale For A Limited Time Only.  We're constantly bombarded by exaggerations, fibs, and outright lies, often motivated by someone's desire for your attention, loyalty, or money.

Or all three.

You should care if you're being lied to, even if it's about something insignificant.  Why is it fun to be told that your name means "Beautiful Queen" if it doesn't?

It's all too easy to get lulled into a place where comfort matters more than truth.  What else keeps the multi-million-dollar industry of astrologers and psychics in business?  The desire for warm and fuzzy messages from the Other Realms, in the face of the hard truth that such practices are pseudoscience and their practitioners charlatans, is what keeps their victims coming back for more.

So okay.  I know this one is apparently harmless.  I can accept that because I'm a linguist, and a little too tightly wound, the whole thing is grinding my gears way more than it reasonably should.

But it still seems to me that we need to put more value on the truth, even in small matters.  As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it: “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.  One word of truth outweighs the world.”

The voices of the dead

This week I ran into a couple of claims of a type I'd never heard of before -- and considering how long I've been in the game of analyzing the world of woo-woo, that came as kind of a surprise, especially when I found out that this sort of thing has apparently been going on for a while.

Turns out that there are people out there who say not only that they can contact the spirits of the dead,  but that they are acting as the ghost's locum.  In other words, they are guided by the not-quite-departed spirit to perform acts that the spirit itself would have done, if only it still had a body with which to do so.

Which becomes even more extraordinary when you find out that the ghosts are those of people like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Victor Hugo.

If you're thinking, "Wait... so that means...  No, they can't really be saying that" -- yes, that's exactly what they're saying.  These "mediums" write novels, create art, write music, and then claim that the works came from the minds of the Great Masters, who were just hanging around looking for someone through which to channel talents frustrated by the inconvenience of being dead.

First we have Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who in the 1970s catapulted to fame by going public with the story that she had written music -- or more accurately, written down music -- that had been dictated to her by Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some people have been impressed with her work to the extent that it was actually performed and recorded in a collection called A Musical Séance.  Pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was less effusive. "If the newfound compositions are genuine," he said, "they would best have been left on the shelf."

Brown died in 2001, still claiming that the pieces she wrote were actually compositions of long-dead composers.  She even described them; Debussy was a "hippie type" who "wore very bizarre clothes," Beethoven no longer had "that crabby look" because he'd regained his hearing, and Schubert tried to sing compositions to her but "he doesn't have a very good voice."

Skeptics, of course, point out that none of Brown's music goes much beyond the simpler and less technical compositions the composers created when they were alive, which is odd, especially since some of them had had hundreds of years to come up with new pieces.  But she's still considered by true believers to be one of the best pieces of spirit survival out there.

Then we've got Brazilian artist Valdelice Da Silva Dias Salum, who makes a similar claim, but about painting -- that when her hand holds the brush, she's being guided by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Monet, and Van Gogh.  She actually signs her paintings not with her own name, but with the name of the artist who (she says) was doing the actual work.

"I grew up poor and illiterate," Salum told Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, the reporter for NPR who wrote the story.  "I didn't even know who these painters were.  I had no artistic talent.  But the spirits selected me."

Garcia-Navarro included in her story a drawing of a girl that Salum signed "Renoir."  To my admittedly untrained eye, it looks a bit like the attempts high school art students make to copy the style of the grand masters; there's nothing about it that has that luminous beauty that distinguishes a genuine Renoir.

But what do I know?  Apparently when Garcia-Navarro was researching for her story, she also found a writer named Divaldo Franco who is apparently producing new works by Victor Hugo, and another named Sandra Guedes Marques Carneiro, who has sold over 250,000 copies of romances she says are dictated to her from the spirit world by love-starved dead people.

No wonder they need to get their frustrations out.  When Rosemary Brown was on Johnny Carson, she apparently revealed that according to her sources, there was no sex in heaven, which is pretty damned disappointing.

Not that I'd probably be heading there even in the best-case scenario.

My general feeling about all of this is that as evidence for life after death goes, it's pretty thin.  Once again, we have the spirits of the dead communicating to the living things that don't really reveal to us much we didn't already know.  I find Rosemary Brown the most interesting of the lot -- I have to admit that some of her compositions aren't bad.  But there's nothing about them that jumps out at me and says, "Oh, this is definitely J. S. Bach at work."

The upshot is, as a writer, I'm going to continue to work on getting everything I can written while I'm alive.  It'd be nice if after I'm dead I could continue to dream up stories and upload them to the literal Cloud.  But I'm not counting on that opportunity.

So if you'd like to read something I've written (other than Skeptophilia, obviously), there's a selection at the right to choose from, and my next novel, Lock & Key, is scheduled to be on bookshelves in November.  Because once I've gone to my eternal reward (or just deserts, as the case may be), my general impression is that will be that.

Paranoia bombshell

The Question of the Day is:  At what point does a prominent figure go so completely off the rails that people stop believing him?  Or is there no lower threshold for credibility?

Interestingly enough, I'm not talking about Alex Jones, or even Rush Limbaugh, here.  Today's contribution to the Annals of What-the-Fuck comes from Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger," owner of Natural News.

Adams has made his name touting dubious nutrition tips and scaring the absolute shit out of people over the dangers of vaccines, but now has ventured into conspiracy paranoia of every type.  And yes, I know that some of the stuff on Natural News exists purely as clickbait, to push up the site's rankings in search engines, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that Adams himself thinks what he's saying is true.

Consider, for example, his take on the horrific explosions that happened last week in Tianjin, China.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Most people believe that the blasts were caused by poorly-stored volatile chemicals, an explanation that gains credence when you realize that Tianjin is a major industrial seaport, and Chinese safety standards are lax at best.  This is not to downplay the magnitude of the disaster; over a hundred people are known dead, and the chain reaction of explosions devastated a huge area in the city.  According to a BBC article on the explosions,

Before the explosions, several firefighters were already at the scene trying to control a blaze.  There have been suggestions that water sprayed on some of the chemicals could have led to the blasts.   Calcium carbide, known to be at the site, reacts with water to create the highly explosive acetylene. 

Chemical experts suggest an acetylene blast could then have detonated the other chemicals for a much larger blast. 

The China Earthquake Networks Centre said the initial explosion, in a city with a population of around 15 million, had a power equivalent to three tonnes of TNT detonating, while the second was the equivalent of 21 tonnes. 

The second was so big that satellites orbiting Earth picked it up as well.

But such measured, thoughtful reporting isn't good enough for people like Adams.

Nope.  He has to claim that the Tianjin explosions were carried out by American "space weapons," and that China and the United States are "already at war," because of China's devaluation of the yuan:

Chinese dissidents have told Natural News they have reason to believe the attack on Tianjin is a warning shot from the United States, which is terrified that China is on the verge of announcing its own gold-backed currency while declaring a fire sale on U.S. debt holdings. 

The actions would collapse the U.S. dollar and destroy the U.S. economy, sending the United States into economic freefall. The "Rod of God" weapon deployment by the U.S. Pentagon, we're told, was America's "shot across the bow" to send a powerful warning message to China while disguising the attack as a domestic chemical explosion.

What evidence does he have?  Apparently people saw helicopters in the air immediately before the blast occurred.  Also, the Chinese government is controlling the movement of tourists, requiring them to register their passport numbers and hotel accommodations with officials.  (Didn't they already?)

'nuff said.  The only possible explanation is that the United States is blowing up Chinese seaports using space weapons.  Because that's credible.

What's next?  Claiming that there's a ground war being fought entirely between groups of crisis actors?  After all, why wage an actual war when you can just trick all the sheeple with footage of fake battles and false flags?

Okay, maybe Adams really is pulling our legs, here.  Maybe he's entirely in it for the ad revenue, and is making shit up, Weekly World News-style, just to keep us coming back.  But if you read what he writes, he sounds as if he's entirely serious.

Which brings up the troubling question of how many of his readers believe all of this stuff.  Are there really that many folks out there who think that everything in the mainstream news is false?  Because the way Natural News links get passed around on social media can't just be explained by the "Hey, you'll never guess what Mike Adams is claiming today!" phenomenon.

I dunno.  I find the whole thing troubling.  Not that it's impossible that Adams himself is paranoid; paranoia is, unfortunately, an all too real manifestation of some psychiatric disorders.  But the fact that enough readers exist to keep Natural News in business scares the hell out of me.

Because if that many people actually believe that the United States is blowing up Chinese cities with ray guns from space, I'm ready to concede defeat on the skepticism and move on to writing fiction full time.  After all, if it works for Mike Adams, it can work for me.