The new ninth planet

Sometimes I react differently to scientific discoveries than ordinary people do.

A few days ago, I read a press release from Caltech with some exciting news for astronomy buffs -- the discovery of good evidence of a ninth planet (a real ninth planet, sorry, Pluto) out in the Kuiper Belt, the region in the far reaches of the Solar System that was thought to be populated mostly with comets.

The planet has yet to be sighted, but the two researchers who found evidence of its existence, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, say their argument based in celestial mechanics is sound.  They got the idea when they discovered that six different distant objects with highly elliptical orbits all had their ellipses oriented the same way -- a highly unlikely arrangement to occur by chance, as the alignment of elliptical orbits precesses over time.

"It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place,"  Brown said.  "The odds of having that happen are something like 1 in 100.  But on top of that, the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way -- pointing about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of that happening is about 0.007 percent.  Basically it shouldn't happen randomly.  So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits."

So basically, they proposed that a new (and as yet, unnamed) ninth planet is locking those objects into their orbits.  Using that as their starting point, they ran a simulation -- and it matched the known objects' orbits perfectly.  "We plotted up the positions of those objects and their orbits, and they matched the simulations exactly," said Brown. "When we found that, my jaw sort of hit the floor."

Artist's conception of the new ninth planet.  The little yellow dot in the lower right is what the Sun would look like from out there.

Cool, no?  Which makes my reaction even weirder, because when I read this, instead of being excited by the new discovery, I did a facepalm and said, "Oh, dear lord, no.  This is going to bring all of the Nibiroonies howling out of their well-deserved obscurity."

If you are fortunate enough not to know about Nibiru, allow me to inform you that it is the fabled ninth planet that is the home of the Annunaki, better known as our Alien Overlords.  Nibiru supposedly only visits the inner solar system every few thousand years or so, which explains why you see so few Annunaki around these days despite the fact that our distant ancestors apparently knew all about them.

Evidently the "it's a myth" explanation never occurs to these people.

So you can see why I immediately thought, upon reading the Caltech press release, that the wingnuts who believe in Nibiru would latch onto this like a leech on a swimmer's ankle.  And sure enough, over at Area51.org, we had an article appear yesterday with the headline, "Did Caltech Researchers Just Find Planet X (Nibiru)?" 

Here's an excerpt:

A giant planet in a highly elongated orbit—that’s exactly what the fabled Planet X was supposed to be. Nibiru, as the ancient Sumerians called it, home of a race of aliens, the Anunnaki, that came here and genetically modified our ancestors. The planet described in these texts is giant, and only comes near Earth about every 3,600 years because of its, well, bizarre, highly elongated orbit... This hidden history, which is explained in detail in the books of Zecharia Sitchin, has been dismissed by skeptics in one simple stroke: where, pray tell, is this giant extra planet? 

It appears as though Caltech has just answered that question... 

Scientists have previously found evidence for a missing planet in the solar system, but this new finding is more substantial—and it’s the first time researchers have suggested that the planet is “giant”, just as foretold thousands of years ago.

Yes, well, that's all very nice, but there are just a few problems with all this.

First, Batygin and Brown's research indicates that the new planet is really far from the Sun.  It appears to have an average orbital distance of 600 AU -- one AU being the distance from the Earth to the Sun.  (By comparison, poor demoted Pluto has an average orbital distance of 39 AU.)  On closest approach, "Nibiru" might come 200 AU from the Sun -- which still puts it five time further out than Pluto is.

Second, the new planet is estimated to have an orbital period of 15,000 years, not 3,600, as the estimable Mr. Sitchin claims.  So even if it did come into the inner Solar System (which it doesn't), it would only be at 15,000 year intervals, which seems kind of inconvenient if you are acting as planetary overlords.  "You guys play nice!  If not, there'll be hell to pay!  We'll be back to check in... um... fifteen millennia."

As if that wasn't enough, we have the fact that third, the planet is estimated to be the size of Neptune, making it a gas giant with no solid surface.  Any Annunaki who were comfortable out there -- on an ice-cold planet, probably made largely of ammonia and methane, in perpetual darkness -- wouldn't do so well here on clement, solid Earth.

Oh, wait!  The Annunaki are super-powerful and magical!  Never mind.

So anyway.  These people never let little things like "facts" stand in their way, so I'm pretty sure that all of this will make exactly zero difference to the Nibiroonies.  Once you've accepted "no evidence except for a lot of self-contradictory ancient texts" as your basis of understanding, you really don't have much in the way of solid ground to stand on.

But at least you might now understand my reaction.  No insult intended to Batygin and Brown, who have done stellar work (*rimshot*), but given the woo-woos I contend with here on Skeptophilia on a daily basis, you can see why I greeted the Caltech press release with less than wild shouts of acclamation.

Fading star

Neil deGrasse Tyson, as usual, put it best: "Allow me to remind you what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for.  It stands for 'unidentified.'  That means we don't know what it is.  Now, if you don't know what it is, that's where the conversation stops.  You don't then say it must be anything."

That's a lesson that could use reinforcement, because there is a regrettable tendency on the part of a lot of folks to jump from "this is strange and we don't understand it" to "this must be evidence of (fill in the blank: aliens, ghosts, telepathy, any of a number of cryptids, any of a number of gods)."  Science, on the other hand, is perfectly comfortable with not knowing the answer.  If you don't know the answer, you continue to look.

And continuing to look, after all, is what science is.

As an excellent example of this -- and an excellent example as well of the right attitude in science -- consider Phil Plait's article over at Slate entitled, "I'm Still Not Sayin' Aliens.  But This Star is Really Weird."  In it, he gives further consideration to the star KIC 8462852, now more euphoniously referred to as "Tabby's Star" after Tabetha Boyajian, the astronomer who led the team that discovered its odd behavior.  Tabby's Star has been in Skeptophilia before, back in October of 2015 when the news of its peculiarities became public.  This star shows dramatic and irregular fluctuations in brightness, which (to date) have not been convincingly explained.  The most popular explanation, at least amongst the astronomers, was that Tabby's Star was surrounded by a huge swarm of comets that periodically blocked the light from it, causing an apparent dimming.

Now, I'm not an astronomer myself, merely a star-watching dilettante, but that never sounded all that plausible to me.  Considering that a transit of Jupiter across the Sun would only cause a 1% dimming in brightness as observed from outside the Solar System, and the brightness fluctuations for Tabby's Star reach a mind-boggling 22%, that would have to be one big-ass comet swarm.  But as the other explanations I heard included aliens building a Dyson sphere around the star, I wasn't gonna call the comet swarm hypothesis far-fetched.

But it gets weirder.  Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, has found that not only does the light from Tabby's Star get occluded by something, triggering an irregular rise and fall in brightness in the short term, it has on average dropped in brightness by 20% over the past 120 years!

Graph of the magnitude of KIC 8462852 as a function of time [Schaefer, 2016]

To quote Plait:

That’s … bizarre. Tabby’s Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun.  These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium.  If they change, it’s usually on a timescale of millions of years, not centuries. Schaefer examined two other similar stars in the survey, and they remained constant in brightness over the same time period. 

The long-term fading isn’t constant, either.  There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that’s hardly steady. 

So it appears Tabby’s Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries. 

Again. That’s bizarre. Nothing like this has ever been seen.

Plait emphasizes that he's not saying this is aliens, but adds, a tad reluctantly:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that this general fading is sort of what you’d expect if aliens were building a Dyson swarm.  As they construct more of the panels orbiting the star, they block more of its light bit by bit, so a distant observer sees the star fade over time.

He does, however, add the caveat that if this is an alien civilization building a Dyson sphere, they're working at a breakneck pace.  They'd have to generate and install panels with a total surface area of 750 billion square kilometers -- 1,500 times the surface area of the Earth -- in a little over a hundred years in order to have that effect.

So Tabby's star is a mystery.  Which means it's cool, and there are gonna be lots of astronomers and astrophysicists working to try to figure out what's going on.

And it also means that there is no room for saying "it must be aliens."  The bottom line is that we still don't know.  Which is exactly where you want to be in science.  To once again quote Tyson:  "People are always saying that scientists have to 'go back to the drawing board.'  As if we're just sitting there in our offices with our feet up, everything figured out.  No, in science you are always back at the drawing board.  If you're not back at the drawing board, you're not doing science."

Propping up climate denialism

Sometimes it appears that people only want to learn enough science to (1) sound scientific, and (2) prop up whatever ideas they already believed.

A sterling example came up a couple of days ago, thanks to one Ross MacLeod, who over at the sorely-misnamed Principia Scientific International explains to us why the Stefan-Boltzmann equation proves that there's no such thing as anthropogenic climate change.

The Stefan-Boltzmann equation, named after physicists Josef Stefan and Ludwig Boltzmann, basically says that the power radiated by an object is proportional to the product of its surface area and the fourth power of its temperature in degrees Kelvin.  It's not a hard relationship to comprehend, although it has deep and far-reaching (and difficult) implications for thermodynamics.  In any case, you can see why this equation is of interest to climate scientists, being that the Earth is both absorbing and radiating heat, and the relative rates at which these two happen are responsible for its average temperature.

So anyway, MacLeod quotes a NASA publication on climate, which says the following:

When it comes to climate and climate change, the Earth’s radiation budget is what makes it all happen.  Swathed in its protective blanket of atmospheric gases against the boiling Sun and frigid space, the Earth maintains its life-friendly temperature by reflecting, absorbing, and re-emitting just the right amount of solar radiation. To maintain a certain average global temperature, the Earth must emit as much radiation as it absorbs. If, for example, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause Earth to absorb more than it re-radiates, the planet will warm up.

Not really all that controversial, you'd think.  But no, MacLeod implies that the atmosphere isn't keeping us warm, it's keeping us cool by protecting us from the boiling hot inferno of space:

The Sun has a surface temperature of 5778 Kelvin and emits of the order of 63,290,000 Wm-2 over every square metre of the photosphere.  By the inverse square law this staggering power is reduced to ~1368 Wm-2 at the distance the Earth is from the Sun...  A simple Stefan-Boltzmann calculation establishes this radiation power is capable of easily boiling water at Earth’s orbit – ~120 degrees C.  Even as far away as Mars the solar radiation is capable of inducing a temperature of ~319 Kelvin or ~46 degrees C in any object that absorbs significant quantities of it.

He then sneers, "Are the people who write gobbledygook like [the NASA publication] simply too stupid to describe or are they deliberately practicing misinformation to bolster a hypothesis?"

Which sounds like it could have come directly from the Unintentional Irony Department, because he is bolstering his own hypothesis by applying the Stefan-Boltzmann law incorrectly.

As he could have found out by taking a physics class -- or failing that, with a simple Wikipedia search -- in order to correctly calculate the energy budget of the Earth, you have to take into account that the Earth is a sphere.  He applied the law as if the Earth was a flat disk, and (unsurprisingly) got the wrong answer.  If you apply the law correctly, you come up with an average temperature of 6 °C -- so he was not only wrong, he was wrong by a factor of 20.

And yes, you read that right.  A climate change denier who calls the folks at NASA"simply too stupid to describe" apparently thinks that the Earth is flat.

The sad part is that this kind of specious reasoning (if I can even dignify it with that term) convinces people.  Almost no one has the expertise to recognize his argument as wrong on first reading; regrettably few think to check what he's saying against actual science.  All too many people see science-y words ("Ooh!  Stefan-Boltzmann equation!  That sounds complicated!  He must be right.") and swallow the rest of the claim without question.

So instead, let's look at some real science, shall we?  Because on the same day that Mr. MacLeod wrote his absurd piece on Flat Earth physics, a paper was published in Nature that shows that the amount of anthropogenic heat energy being dumped into the oceans has doubled since 1997.  Study co-author Jane Lubchenco of the Oregon State University Marine Sciences department said, "These findings have potentially serious consequences for life in the oceans as well as for patterns of ocean circulation, storm tracks and storm intensity."

James Severinghaus, of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, was even more unequivocal: "This study provides real, hard evidence that humans are dramatically heating the planet."

So once again, the climate change deniers are throwing around scientific terms in order to prop up a viewpoint that is contradicted by all of the evidence, and flies in the face of the consensus of nearly 100% of the climate scientists themselves.

Further indication that when it's expedient, a confident-sounding fast-talker can induce people to believe damn near anything.

Considering the KoolAid

Nothing brings the critics howling for my immediate incarceration in a FEMA Death Camp like when I make fun of the conspiracy theorists.  It doesn't seem to matter how dumb the conspiracy theory is -- like yesterday's, wherein we heard that David Bowie and Alan Rickman are still alive, apparently because of Chaldean numerology and the fact that Matt Groening is a Freemason -- if I call these people and their claims loons, I end up getting hate mail.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I won't bore and/or offend the studio audience with excerpts from said hate mail, much of which had grammar and vocabulary indicating IQ levels barely making double digits.  But I will point out something that I've noted before -- even if you ignore the asinine "evidence" these people quote to support their ideas, we have the troubling little problem that all of the horrible things they say are on the way never seem to happen.

Let's start with "Rex 84."  Ever heard of it?  Here's a brief summary:

Rex 84... was a secretive “scenario and drill” developed by the United States federal government to suspend the United States Constitution, declare martial law, place military commanders in charge of state and local governments, and detain large numbers of American citizens who are deemed to be “national security threats,” in the event that the President declares a “State of National Emergency.”  The plan states events causing such a declaration would be widespread U.S. opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad, such as if the United States were to directly invade Central America.  To combat what the government perceived as “subversive activities,” the plan also authorized the military to direct ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels...  

 The Rex 84 Program was originally established on the reasoning that if a “mass exodus” of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA... 

These camps are to be operated by FEMA should martial law need to be implemented in the United States and all it would take is a presidential signature on a proclamation and the attorney general’s signature on a warrant to which a list of names is attached.

Sound familiar?  The problem is, "Rex 84" was an idea that cropped up during the Reagan presidency as a "contingency plan for dealing with widespread insurrection," but got spun as the president and his cronies (especially Oliver North) wanting to suspend personal liberties, revoke the constitution, declare martial law, and keep Reagan in office beyond his term limit.

Any of that stuff happen?

I thought so.

How about this one:

A 'national emergency' will provide Bush the raw power he needs to cancel the elections and hold on to even greater executive power.  Over the course of his criminal and illegitimate regime, George W. Bush has assumed powers that in cases of a 'national emergency' make of him an absolute ruler beyond the powers of the Congress or the Courts.  It has all been locked up rather neatly and planned well in advance.  A 'decider' by self-proclamation, Bush conveniently 'decides' what is and what is not a 'national emergency.  He is the sole arbiter. 

The 'mechanism' by which Bush consolidates all his power is called Executive Directive 51...  Signed into law on May 4, 2007, it specifies the 'procedures' to be taken in the wake of a 'catastrophic emergency' -- 'any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions'... 

At hearings of a congressional sub-committee in New Orleans, FEMA official Glenn Cannon acknowledged that it had been considering the use of trains to transport large numbers of people to camps and various locations around the United States.  The revelation was ominous as this use of trains is associated with Adolph Hitler's hellish Third Reich.  The camps and the mass transportation of people to them is a cornerstone in Bush's elaborate and detailed preparations for a declaration of martial law.  To every citizen of the US --whether incarcerated in a hellish concentration camp or not --the declaration of martial means but one thing: an absolute dictatorship!

The various scenarios have main points in common: Bush will, upon any pretext, declare a national emergency, cancel the elections, and impose martial law.  With martial law comes absolute power, a ruthless crack down on dissent, mass arrests and mass incarcerations.  A 'pre-text' is never an obstacle to would-be dictators.

That was a hysterical exposé from a guy who calls himself "The Existentialist Cowboy," written in May of 2008.  And at the risk of being repetitive, did any of that happen, either?

Look, it's not that I don't think evil people exist, that bad stuff can happen, that governments can turn into dictatorships.  Even the shallowest knowledge of history proves otherwise.  And I think awareness, intelligent discussion, and access to information are the surest safeguards against these sorts of things ever happening again.

But fer cryin' in the sink, nothing is accomplished by evidence-free fear talk of conspiracies (Masonic or otherwise), FEMA death camps (complete with guillotines), and top-secret communiqués from super-evil brilliant Illuminati overlords who are so top-secret-super-evil-brilliant that a raving wingnut like Alex Jones can see right through them.

And if that makes me a KoolAid-drinkin'-sheeple, then so be it.

Coincidence theories

The deaths last week of entertainment giants David Bowie and Alan Rickman brought forth a torrent of tributes, thank yous, and reminiscences of their many memorable star turns.  I will never, for example, forget Bowie's wonderfully creepy performance as the Goblin King Jareth in Labyrinth, a movie I have loved since first seeing it as a teenager:

As far as Alan Rickman goes, the choices are a little overwhelming -- Sense and Sensibility, Harry Potter, Love Actually, Die Hard, Sweeney Todd, Dogma, and Blow Dry barely begin to scratch the surface -- but for me, the performance that always comes to mind is his fall-out-of-your-chair-hilarious role as the sour-tempered Alexander Dane/Dr. Lazarus in Galaxy Quest:

It may be a sign that I've written Skeptophilia for far too long that while everyone else was mourning the passing of two beloved entertainers, I was sitting here thinking, "How long will it be before people start claiming that their deaths were (1) faked, (2) predicted by psychics, or (3) part of a conspiracy?" And it brings me no great joy to find that my grim suspicions were correct.  Two days ago, the YouTube channel "Russianvids" posted a fourteen-minute video entitled, "David Bowie & Alan Rickman Death Hoax 100% Staged."

How do we know this, you might ask?  Well, let's start with the fact that a year to the day before David Bowie's death, there was an episode of The Simpsons wherein we hear about a cat with two different-colored eyes named "Bowie."  Add to that the Freemasons, sinister hand signs, the 911 emergency call number, the fact that the Twin Towers were destroyed thirty-three years after they were built, the fact that Jesus was crucified at age 33, and John Carpenter's movie They Live, and you have what lawyers call "an airtight case."

What about Alan Rickman?  Well, both he and Bowie "allegedly" died of cancer at age 69, and the symbol for the astrological sign of Cancer looks a little like 69:

We also hear that both Rickman and Bowie made their last appearance on December 7, which is somehow significant because of the number 7 and Chaldean numerology.  Don't ask me why.

Then there was a long bit about how pretty much everyone is a Mason, presumably with the exception of the guy who owns "Russianvids."  The Masons, he says, all speak in code; "It's a big club," he says, "and you're not in it."  So I'm beginning to wonder if his obvious pissoff against the Masons might come from sour grapes.  Maybe he applied for membership to the Masons, and was turned down, or something.  He certainly sounds like he has an axe to grind.

Anyhow, at this point, my eyes were starting to glaze over.  He says several times that he's "Just Asking Questions," a ploy for sowing doubt that a friend of mine calls "JAQing off," a phrase that I sorely wish I had come up with.  He also says that people like me, who think that conspiracy theorists in general have a screw loose, are "coincidence theorists."  We think everything is a coincidence, apparently.  And honestly, he's not far wrong; I do think there are dark dealings and evil plots, but much of what happens in the world is chaos -- stuff happening for no particular reason, and some of it occurring at the same time, i.e., coincidence.  Which is, after all, what you call it when two random events coincide.

Then once again I did what I should never do, which is to look at the comments section.  I think I keep doing this because I desperately want to believe that most of my fellow humans are not raving wackmobiles, a desire that gets dashed more often than not.  For your amusement, here are a few of the comments on the video.  As always, grammar and spelling are left as-written, because you can only write [sic] so many times:

• yo bro keep doin this shyt you killin em with tht knowledge dem fools cant deny all these facts
• yep, the game is rigged from top to bottom... i'd be willing to bet that most lotto winners are paid actors... hired to pretend the lottery is real. It's a SCAM.
• wow. EVERYTHING is a lie! Funny how we can over look so easily, but then again, i dont pay attention to msm. Great vid!
• 18 months with cancer, 6+6+6
• in an underground city somewhere, where we aren't invited; doesn't matter how devoted a fan you are! If more of them start disappearing like that then we should know that something's up...
• a big false flag is planned for the USA very soon, maybe in march to counterbalance rising frequencies in the period around the first solstice this year. but could be earlier though.

Yes!  Yes!  I see it all now!  Fake lotteries and 666 and underground cities and rising frequencies in the period of the solstice = David Bowie and Alan Rickman are still alive!  How can I not have seen that?

So yeah.  After I finished facepalming repeatedly over all this, I closed the link and sat for a while, whimpering softly and rocking back and forth.  I mean, no one would be happier than me if Bowie and Rickman were still alive; they were brilliant.  But it's gonna take more than an episode of The Simpsons and some random FrootLoop babbling about Freemasons and numerology to convince me of it.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  I really wouldn't advise watching the YouTube video; that's why I'm here, to kill off millions of brain cells so you won't have to.  Instead, watch Galaxy Quest and Labyrinth some time soon.  It'd be a much better tribute to the memories of two great men.  I know that's what I'm gonna do.

Possessed poodles

The one thing you should never say is "Now I've heard it all."

Especially if, like me, you are an aficionado of woo-woo. If you are a regular reader of Skeptophilia, you have followed me through investigations of Florida Skunk Apes, the discovery of the Millennium Falcon on the floor of the Baltic Sea, plastic cards that will impart "Scalar Energy Fields" to the water you drink, medicines that you download directly into your body, and countless examples of Jesus, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary, and (in one case) Bob Marley showing up on a variety of food items.  And each time, it's been tempting to say, 'Now I've heard it all."

If you did, in fact, say that, you're gonna regret it.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Because following hard on the heels of yesterday's discovery that your computer can be healed by witchcraft, we now we have a  book, written by New York City artist Olga Horvat, called Paranormal Pooch.  Paranormal Pooch is about her dog, Princess, who was...

... possessed by demons.

I kid you not.  Horvat apparently had a run of devastatingly bad luck a while back, including the following incidents:

• Her apartment was infested by bedbugs, and it cost $7,000 to get rid of them.
• Her husband was in an automobile accident, and afterwards came down with a rare autoimmune disease.
• Her daughter was suspended from second grade for putting on a rubber glove and grabbing a classmate, and then blamed the odd behavior on "hearing voices in her head."

And instead of doing what most of us would do, in such unfortunate situations -- including saying to our kid, "Why the hell did you bring a rubber glove to school?" -- Horvat evaluated the evidence, and came to the inescapable conclusion that the whole thing was due to her poodle being possessed.

Don't be fooled by the goofy haircut and innocent-looking eyes.  This is a demonic entity for sure.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Amongst the claims she makes in Paranormal Pooch -- and believe me, there's enough fodder for skepticism in there that I could go on all day -- my favorite is that dogs with pointy ears are more susceptible to possession than dogs with floppy ears, because "The spirit can get in there easier."

Myself, I would think that if a spirit is capable of causing your spouse to get in an automobile accident, it would be capable of lifting a dog's floppy ear to get inside.  But what do I know?

In any case, Horvat solved the whole thing by inventing, and selling (c'mon, you knew she was selling something) "electromagnetic shield pendants" to protect humans and pets from demonic possession.  They only cost $197, which is a comparative steal considering the cost for exterminating bedbugs.  It's received rave reviews, mostly from other wingnuts, including Joshua Warren, renowned psychic investigator: "A CHILL ran down my spine while reading Olga Horvat’s Paranormal Pooch.   Why?  Because her story is so real and her emotions so palpable."

Well, all I can say is that my definition of "real" and Mr. Warren's seem to differ somewhat.

The sad postscript to the whole thing is that four months after she was successfully cleansed of evil spirits, Princess herself fell down the stairs and died.  Maybe she was grief-stricken after losing her satanic companion, I dunno.

I do know one thing, though; I hope like hell that Horvat is never allowed to own another dog.  Because it sounds, all joking aside, like she is not someone who should be trusted to give appropriate care to a pet.  But I have strong feelings about how animals are treated, and maybe I'm being unfair, here.

Oh, and one other thing: now I've heard it all.

Digital witchcraft

My lack of technological expertise is fairly legendary in the school where I work.  When I moved  this year into a classroom with a "Smart Board," there was general merriment amongst students and staff, along with bets being made on how long it would take me to kill the device out of sheer ineptitude.

It's January, and I'm happy to say that the "Smart Board" and I have reached some level of détente.  Its only major problem is that it periodically decides that it only wants me to write in black, and I solve that problem the way I solve pretty much any computer problem: I turn it off and then I turn it back on.  It's a remarkably streamlined way to fix things, although I have to admit that when it doesn't work I have pretty much exhausted my options for remedying the problem.

Now, however, I've discovered that there's another way I could approach issues with technology: I could hire a witch to clear my device of "dark energy."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I found this out because of an article in Vice wherein they interviewed California witch and ordained minister Joey Talley, who says that she accomplishes debugging computers by "[placing] stones on top of the computer, [clearing] the dark energy by setting an intention with her mind, or [cleansing] the area around the computer by burning sage."

Which is certainly a hell of a lot easier than actually learning how computers work so you can fix them.

"I just go in and work the energy," Talley said.  "And there are different stones that work really well on computers, chloride [sic] is one of them.  Also, some people really like amethyst for computers.  It doesn’t really work for me, but I’m psychic.  So when I go into the room where somebody’s computer is, I go in fresh, I step in like a fresh sheet, and I’m open to feel what’s going on with the computer.  Everything’s unique, which is why my spell work changes, because each project I do is unique...  Sometimes I do a magic spell or tape a magic charm onto the computer somewhere.  Sometimes I have a potion for the worker to spray on the chair before they sit down to work. Jet is a stone I use a lot to protect computers."

So that sounds pretty nifty.  It even works if your computer has a virus:

I got contacted by a small business owner in Marin  County.  She had a couple of different viruses and she called me in.  First, I cast a circle and called in earth, air, fire and water, and then I called in Mercury, the messenger and communicator.  Then I went into a trance state, and all I was doing was feeling.  I literally feel [the virus] in my body. I can feel the smoothness where the energy’s running, and then I feel a snag. That’s where the virus got in...  Then I performed a vanishing ceremony.  I used a black bowl with a magnet and water to draw [the virus] out.  Then I saged the whole computer to chase the negativity back into the bowl, and then I flushed that down the toilet.  After this I did a purification ceremony.  Then I made a protection spell out of chloride [sic], amethyst, and jet.  I left these on the computer at the base where she works.

The virus, apparently, then had no option other than to leave the premises immediately.

We also find out in the article that Talley can cast out demons, who can attach to your computer because it is a "vast store of electromagnetic energy" on which they like to feed, "just like a roach in a kitchen."

The most interesting bit was at the end, where she was asked if she ever got mocked for her practice.  Talley said yes, sure she does, and when it happens, she usually finds that the mockers are "ornery and stupid."  She then tells them to go read The Spiral Dance and come back when they have logical questions.  Which sounds awfully convenient, doesn't it?  I've actually read The Spiral Dance, which its fans call "a brilliant, comprehensive overview of the growth, suppression, and modern-day re-emergence of Wicca," and mostly what struck me is that if you didn't already believe in all of this stuff, the book presented nothing in the way of evidence to convince you that any of it was true.  Put another way, The Spiral Dance seems to be a long-winded tribute to confirmation bias.  So Talley's desire for "logical questions" -- such as "what evidence do you have of any of this?" -- doesn't really generate much in the way of answers that a skeptic from outside the Wiccan worldview could accept.

But hell, given the fact that my other options for dealing with computer problems are severely constrained, maybe the next time my "Smart Board" malfunctions, I'll wave some amethyst crystals around.  Maybe I'll even do a little dance.  (Only when there's no one else in the room; my students and colleagues already think I'm odd enough.)

Then, most likely, I'll turn it off and turn it back on.  Even demons won't be able to stand up to that.