Memory boost

There's one incorrect claim I find coming up in my classes more than any other, and that's the old idea that "humans only use 10% of their brain."  Or 5%.  Or 2%.  Often bolstered by the additional claim that Einstein is the one who said it.  Or Stephen Hawking.  Or Nikola Tesla.

Or maybe all three of 'em at once, I dunno.

The problem is, there's no truth to any of it, and no evidence that the claim originated with anyone remotely famous.  That at present we understand only 10% of the brain is doing -- that I can believe.  That we're using less than 100% of our brain at any given time -- of course.

But the idea that evolution has provided us with these gigantic processing units, which (according to a 2002 study by Marcus Raichle and Debra Gusnard) consume 20% of our oxygen and caloric intake, and then we only ever access 10% of its power -- nope, not buying that.  Such a waste of resources would be a significant evolutionary disadvantage, and would have weeded out the low-brain-use individuals long ago.  (Which gives me hope that we might actually escape ending up with a human population straight out of the movie Idiocracy.)

And speaking of movies, the 2014 cinematic flop Lucy didn't help matters, as it features a woman who gets poisoned with a synthetic drug that ramps up her brain from its former 10% usage rate to... *gasp*... 100%.  Leading to her becoming able to do telekinesis and the ability to "disappear within the space/time continuum."

Whatever the fuck that means.

All urban legends and goofy movies aside, the actual memory capacity of the brain is still the subject of contention in the field of neuroscience.  And for us dilettante science geeks, it's a matter of considerable curiosity.  I know I have often wondered how I can manage to remember the scientific names of obscure plants, the names of distant ancestors, and melodies I heard fifteen years ago, but I routinely have to return to rooms two or three times because I keep forgetting what I went there for.

So I found it exciting to read about a study published last week in eLife, by Terry Sejnowski (of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies), Kristen Harris (of the University of Texas/Austin), et al., entitled "Nanoconnectomic Upper Bound on the Variability of Synaptic Plasticity."  Put more simply, what the team found was that human memory capacity is ten times greater than previously estimated.

In computer terms, our storage ability amounts to one petabyte.  And put even more simply for non-computer types, this translates roughly into "a shitload of storage."

"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," Sejnowski said. "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power.  Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."

The discovery hinges on the fact that there is a hierarchy of size in our synapses.  The brain ramps up or down the size scale as needed, resulting in a dramatic increase in our neuroplasticity -- our ability to learn.

"We had often wondered how the remarkable precision of the brain can come out of such unreliable synapses," said team member Tom Bartol.  "One answer is in the constant adjustment of synapses, averaging out their success and failure rates over time... For the smallest synapses, about 1,500 events cause a change in their size/ability and for the largest synapses, only a couple hundred signaling events cause a change.  This means that every 2 or 20 minutes, your synapses are going up or down to the next size.  The synapses are adjusting themselves according to the signals they receive."

"The implications of what we found are far-reaching," Sejnowski added. "Hidden under the apparent chaos and messiness of the brain is an underlying precision to the size and shapes of synapses that was hidden from us."

And the most mind-blowing thing of all is that all of this precision and storage capacity runs on a power of about 20 watts -- less than most light bulbs.

Consider the possibility of applying what scientists have learned about the brain to modeling neural nets in computers.  It brings us one step closer to something neuroscientists have speculated about for years -- the possibility of emulating the human mind in a machine.

"This trick of the brain absolutely points to a way to design better computers," Sejnowski said.  "Using probabilistic transmission turns out to be as accurate and require much less energy for both computers and brains."

Which is thrilling and a little scary, considering what happened when HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey basically went batshit crazy halfway through the movie.

That's a risk that I, for one, am willing to take, even if it means that I might end up getting turned into a Giant Space Baby.

But I digress.

In any case, the whole thing is pretty exciting, and it's reassuring to know that the memory capacity of my brain is way bigger than I thought it was.  Although it still leaves open the question of why, with a petabyte of storage, I still can't remember where I put my cellphone.

Waiting out the whiners

So now the members of Yokel Haram currently occupying the headquarters building of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon have decided to further erode any support they may have had by rifling through 4,000 irreplaceable artifacts of the Paiute Tribe, and bulldozing a line around the refuge building's property without any consideration of archaeologically sensitive sites.

"I’ve gotten calls from ranching families who support the tribe," tribe chairperson Charlotte Roderique said.  "They’ve seen the [Paiute] campsites out there.  They’ve been in that area and they know where things are.  You can’t go and bulldoze things.  I don’t know what these people are doing, if they are doing things to just get a rise or to be martyr—all they are doing is making enemies out of the people they professed to support."

One of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, posted a video of himself pawing through the artifacts, and tried to cast it as concern over how the artifacts were being stored.  "We want to make sure these things are returned to their rightful owners and that they’re taken care of,” Finicum said.  "This is how Native Americans’ heritage is being treated.  To me, I don’t think it’s acceptable."

The Natives themselves don't seem to have that attitude.  "I got a question for the world," said Jarvis Kennedy, Burns Paiute Tribal Council member.  "What would happen if it was Natives out there taking over the building?  Or any federal land?  What would the outcome be?  Think about it.  What would happen?  Would they let us come into town to get supplies?  We as Harney County residents can stand on our own feet.  We don’t need some clown to come in here and stand up for us.  We survived without them before, we'll survive without them when they're gone.  So they just need to get the hell out.  We didn't ask for them here, we don't want them here.  They say they don't want to bother the community, but our kids are sitting at home right now when they should be at school.  They're scaring our people.  They need to go home.  We don't need them."

Ammon Bundy [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Kind of unequivocal, isn't it?  Of course, statements from Paiute leaders are likely to have no effect, given the fact that Ammon Bundy and his crew seem to have the idea that laws are more like strongly-worded suggestions, and any time someone says "You can't do that," it directly contravenes the Constitution, and probably the Word of God as well.  

The thing is, their whole stance is a sham right from the outset.  Their claims that they're doing what they do because they're concerned about the rights of citizens to their own property are shown as the lies they are by their actions.  Jacqueline Keeler, over at Indian Country Today Media Network, told us how much concern these people have for others' property:

Carla Burnside, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's archaeologist at the refuge, has told the tribe that she has seen pictures in news reports of militants sitting in her office, even at her desk with files open that contain sensitive information about archaeological sites belonging to the tribe.

And as far as their claims of respecting Native lands and artifacts, that's bullshit, too.  Keeler writes:

Bundy supporters have damaged Native American archaeological sites before, most notably, when they drove ATVs through a canyon trail in Utah in protest of protected federal lands trampling the ruins of homes belonging to the ancient Puebloans.  Also, the Southern Paiute tribes in Nevada have accused the Bundy family of defacing ancient Paiute petroglyphs in Gold Butte.

These are the kind of people who should have access to archaeological sites and a vital wildlife refuge in the name of protecting private interests?

And another thing: we need to stop calling these scofflaws a "militia."  Their favorite Constitutional Amendment, the Second, talks about a "well-regulated militia."  But regulated by whom?  Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution says the following about militias:

The Congress shall have Power To... provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;  [and]

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

Did you catch that bit about a true militia being overseen by Congress?  That's a pretty important bit.

These aren't militiamen.  These are butthurt whiners who resent any legal incursion into their being able graze their cattle wherever they want to for free.  They don't want justice; they want carte blanche to flout whatever laws they find inconvenient, and no costs or consequences.  Furthermore, they're hypocrites.  They rail against the welfare state and "government handouts" while accepting government loan money to the tune of $530,000, and still want to appear to be the wronged party.

But given that they are heavily armed butthurt whiners, the government has (understandably) not been eager to step in and create a bunch of Waco-style martyrs for the cause.  No one doubts that these people would fire if they felt threatened, and more than one of them has stated his willingness to die rather than surrender.  So the authorities are playing a waiting game, while the costs for the extra security and monitoring of the standoff are running into the tens of thousands of dollars a day -- a cost that Harney County judge Steve Grasty has stated is going to be billed to the Bundy family.

So I understand why the feds aren't storming the castle.  But man, it just pisses me off that a bunch of petulant children with big guns can simply waltz in and take over public land (public, you know?  Meaning owned in trust for all of us?), and everyone simply stands around waiting.

My solution would be to block the (government-maintained) roads so they can't get out, stop the (government-provided) mail service, and cut the (government-managed) electricity and water to the refuge headquarters.  See how long they last in an eastern Oregon January with no help from the people they claim are the pinnacles of evil in our society.

Disc world

A couple of days ago I did a post on a climate change denier who attempted to science and failed rather catastrophically by neglecting to consider in his calculations the fact that the Earth is a sphere.  "Flat Earther" has become a synonym for "nut," with good reason, and the climate change denier -- one Ross MacLeod -- let himself in for a good deal of well-deserved ridicule for the error.

The problem is, there are people who seriously believe that the Earth is flat, and they're every bit as fervent about it as Mr. MacLeod is about his denialism.  In fact, as I found out from a piece that appeared two days ago in The Guardian, the Flat Earthers' devotion to their particular brand of wingnuttery has in common with religion not only its zeal, but its fractiousness.  Because I learned from the article, "Flat-Earthers Are Back: 'It’s almost like the beginning of a new religion'" by Beau Dure, that there are almost as many sects of Flat Eartherism as there are of Christianity.

The schismatic nature of Flat Eartherism becomes apparent when you consider the heretical views of YouTuber TigerDan925, who shocked the absolute hell out his followers when he admitted that Antarctica was a continent, and not an ice wall surrounding the Earth's disk.  The backlash was immediate and vitriolic, as if he'd nailed a tract to the cathedral door saying that the Pope wasn't the true leader of the church or something:

You've jumped to an awful lot of conclusions based on very little evidence here, Dan. And now ALL flat earthers are liars?  Really.  You showed us nothing but people on/in ice and snow.  You showed us a red dot where a military base supposedly is. The clip with the people playing instruments is REALLY convincing that All Flat Earthers are liars, for sure!  What the hell are you doing?  I mean, other than cause useless dissension...  Shame on you, dude.  Seriously.

From there, it was only a short walk to his being accused of selling out:

They got to you didn't they bro?  I saw you uncovering truth, interviewing missionaries and I thought you were legit.  It seems like overnight, you changed your position, despite all of the evidence YOU gathered.  Now you're saying there's only one scripture and it's vague so you will leave it out?  If you know it or not, you just lost yourself so much credibility, and you have more thumbs down than up.  I understand changing your position when you find new CREDIBLE evidence, but that's not what you did.  You went from believing the bible to not believing the bible, seems like overnight.  Leads me to believe "SOMEBODY" made you change your stance.

But never mind him, one commenter said, because the Eternal Truth will win out even if one guy is spouting heresy:

Next he says the Antarctica is not governed and protected by the Illuminati, that somehow any group deciding to buy and invest in equipment is free to roam anywhere by plane or on land.  This is absolute rubbish...  2016 is the year it becomes common knowledge the earth is flat, just like 9/11 became common knowledge, no stopping the truth now.

Someone claiming that Antarctica isn't governed by the Illuminati!  If you can imagine.  Next thing you know, he'll be claiming that salvation is through faith and not through actions, or something.

I didn't realize, however, how deep the dissension goes.  According to Dure's article, this is serious stuff, with Flat Earthers like Eric Dubay of the International Flat Earth Research Society keeping "a lengthy Nixon-style enemies list, labeling... many other flat-Earthers 'shills' who deliberately poison the movement with flawed arguments."

You'd think there'd be enough flawed arguments to go around, wouldn't you?  No need to fight over them, really.

The whole thing reminds me of all of the sects and sub-sects and splinter sects in Rosicrucianism, which has led me to suspect that the number of Rosicrucian groups might exceed the number of actual Rosicrucians.  And the Rosicrucians and the Flat Earthers, honestly, have approximately the same grasp on reality, so the analogy is pretty apt.

Anyhow, I had no idea that a woo-woo belief system could have so many internal divisions.  Shouldn't be surprising, I suppose.  It reminds me of a bit of wisdom that a friend of mine picked up while working for the Peace Corps in Senegal: "There are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."

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.