Knockin' on heaven's door

Because yesterday's post -- which was about a bunch of sinkholes in the Siberian tundra being evidence of aerial dogfights between rival alien space fleets -- wasn't ridiculous enough, today I bring you:

NASA space telescopes have photographed the Celestial City of New Jerusalem, as hath been prophesied in the scriptures.

I wish I was making this up.  The claim appeared on the ultra-fundamentalist site Heaven & Hell, and the post, written by one Samuel M. Wanginjogu, reads like some kind of apocalyptic wet dream.

It opens with a bang.  "Despite new repairs to the Hubble Telescope," Wanginjogu writes, "NASA refuses to release old photos or take new ones of Heaven!"

Imagine that.

He goes on to explain further:

Just days after space shuttle astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in mid December, the giant lens focused on a star cluster at the edge of the universe – and photographed heaven! 

That’s the word from author and researcher Marcia Masson, who quoted highly placed NASA insiders as having said that the telescope beamed hundreds of photos back to the command center at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on December 26. 

The pictures clearly show a vast white city floating eerily in the blackness of space. 

And the expert quoted NASA sources as saying that the city is definitely Heaven “because life as we know it couldn’t possibly exist in icy, airless space. 

“This is it – this is the proof we’ve been waiting for,” Dr. Masson told reporters. 

“Through an enormous stroke of luck, NASA aimed the Hubble Telescope at precisely the right place at precisely the right time to capture these images on film. I’m not particularly religious, but I don’t doubt that somebody or something influenced the decision to aim the telescope at that particular area of space. 

“Was that someone or something God himself? Given the vastness of the universe, and all the places NASA could have targeted for study, that would certainly appear to be the case.”

Unsurprisingly, NASA researchers have "declined to comment."

Then we get to see the photograph in question:

After I stopped guffawing, I read further, and I was heartened to see that Wanginjogu is all about thinking critically regarding such claims:

I am not an expert in photography, but if you scrutinize the photo carefully, you find that the city is surrounded by stars if at all it was taken in space...  If the photo is really a space photo, then it could most likely be the Celestial city of God because it is clear that what is in the photograph is not a star, a planet or any other known heavenly body.

Yes!  Surrounded by stars, and not a planet!  The only other possibility, I think you will agree, is that it is the Celestial City of God.

Wanginjogu then goes through some calculations to estimate the size of New Jerusalem:

If an aero plane [sic] passes overhead at night, you are able to see the light emitted by it. If that aero plane [sic] was to go higher up from the surface of the earth, eventually you won’t be able to see any light from it and that is only after moving a few kilometers up.  This is because of its small size. Yet our eyes are able to see, without any aid, stars that are millions of light years away. This is because of their large size. 

The further away an object is from the surface of the earth, then the bigger it needs to be and the more the light it needs to emit for it to be seen from earth. 

The city of New Jerusalem is much smaller than most of the stars that you see on the sky. To be more precise, it is much smaller than our planet earth.  Remember that here we are not talking of the entire heaven where God lives but of the City of New Jerusalem. The city of New Jerusalem is currently located in heaven.  Of course, heaven is much larger that the city itself. The photo seems to be of the city itself rather than the entire heaven.

Some solid astrophysics, right there.  He then goes on to use the Book of Revelation to figure out how big the city prophesied therein must be, and from all of this he deduces that the Celestial City must be somewhere within our Solar System for Hubble to have captured the photograph.  He also uses the testimony of one Seneca Sodi, who apparently saw an angel and asked him how far away heaven was, and the angel said, "Not far."

So there you have it.

The best part, though, was when I got about halfway through, and I found out where Wanginjogu got the photograph from.  (Hint: not NASA.)  The photograph, and in fact the entire claim, originated in...

... wait for it...

... The Weekly World News.

Yes, that hallowed purveyor of stories about Elvis sightings, alien abductions, and Kim Kardashian being pregnant with Bigfoot's baby.  Even Wanginjogu seems to realize he's on shaky ground, here, and writes:

This magazine is known to exaggerate stories and to publish some really controversial articles.  However, it also publishes some true stories.  So we cannot trash this story just because it first appeared in The Weekly World News magazine. It is worthwhile to consider other aspects of the story.

So this pretty much amounts to something my dad used to say, to wit, "Even stopped clocks are right twice a day."  But suffices to say that we have considered other aspects of the story, and it is our firmly-held opinion that to believe this requires that you have a single scoop of butter-brickle ice cream where the rest of us have a brain.

Anyway, there you are.  NASA photographing heaven.  Me, I'm waiting for them to turn the Hubble the other direction, and photograph hell.  Since that's where I'm headed anyway, might as well take a look at the real estate ahead of time.

Death cauldrons and aerial dogfights

There are certain pieces of terrain that are just peculiar.  We tend to give them evocative names, because they are evocative; and this often leads people to attribute their formation to some seriously crazy causes.

Take the Mima Mounds, in Thurston County, Washington.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

They're a little creepy-looking, no?  The mounds average about twenty to thirty feet across, and are roughly circular -- and there are hundreds of them.  It's a seriously atmospheric place, conducive to all sorts of woo-woo explanations -- particularly since the geologists themselves aren't certain how they were formed.  And there's nothing like the lack of a scientific explanation to give people license to come up with all sorts of loony claims.  For example, that the Mima Prairie, where the mounds are located, is haunted, presumably by the ghosts of obsessive-compulsive groundhogs.

There are other features which seem too regular to be natural -- take the glacial feature called a cirque, which takes the form of an often perfectly-circular lake:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Cirques form because they are at the origins of glaciers, so experience pressure and consequent erosive forces radiating out from a central point - if the contour of the land will allow it, it results in a nearly perfectly circular depression.

Arches, pinnacles, balancing rocks, channeled scablands... natural forces can result in some amazingly cool, and sometimes bafflingly symmetrical, structures.  No need to conjure up any kind of woo-woo explanation.

Of course, this doesn't mean that humans can't be involved, too.  When I was in Iceland, I visited a place called "Viti."  Viti is a beautiful, circular blue lake, which would have been peaceful had it not been for the jet-engine roar of a steam vent nearby.  The vent was surrounded by a high fence, and had a sign on it, in various languages, which said (as near as I can recall the wording):

Get the hell away from this vent, you stupid tourist.  This vent produces superheated steam, and if for some reason the machinery controlling its release were to fail, you would be cooked by a jet of steam before you could even turn to your wife and say, "Hey, Blanche, come take a picture of me next to this sign!"

The reason for all the caution was, I discovered, because the machinery had failed, about ten years before we went there, and the resulting explosion had thrown a piece of the rigging with such force that it landed a kilometer away.  Apparently the crater left behind by the explosion of the vent machinery was a circular hole in the ground, out of which came water vapor at about 3,000 C.  At that point, Icelandic geologists decided to leave well enough alone, and simply put a diverter over the hole, so that the steam is vented high enough in the air that it won't cook the tourists.

I bring all this up because of an article I ran into recently about the Siberian "death cauldrons."  Speaking of evocative names.  It turns out that there are circular depressions in the ground in many places in Siberia, and legends about those places being "evil," and various stories about people going there and dying horrible deaths.  There is talk of metal debris and mysterious underground bunkers.

What, pray tell, is the cause of all of this mayhem?  We have the following proposals:

1)  It was an area used for nuclear testing during the Soviet era.

2)  They are sinkholes in the tundra, resulting from purely natural phenomena, and all of the associated scary stuff is made up.

3)  It is the pock-marked battlefield left behind when two hostile alien species had an aerial battle in spaceships.

Well.  I know it's hard for me to decide, given the fact that all of these theories are pretty darned persuasive.  The proponents of the alien theory have going for them that the natives of the area claim that they've seen powerful, fire-wielding beings coming from the sky for centuries, and as I was mentioning to Thor just yesterday, you know how accurate the such myths and legends tend to be.  The other thing they point out is that it has to be aliens, because it was right next door in the province of Krasnoyarsk Krai that they had the Tunguska Event, where an alien spacecraft blew up in 1908 and flattened trees radially for miles around.

Well, okay, technically it's only "right next door" if by that phrase you mean "1,500 km away," and almost everyone who's studied the Tunguska Event thinks that it was a small fragment of a comet that hit the Earth.  But still!  Alien spacecraft!  Aerial dogfights!  Crash landings, leaving circular depressions in the ground, and scattered radioactive debris that poisons the landscape and anyone foolish enough to visit!  C'mon, don't you think so?  Don't you?

Okay, maybe not.  But you have to admit that as an explanation, it does have more panache than either "the Soviets blew up some nuclear bombs there, and never cleaned up their mess or even admitted that they'd done it" or "sinkholes sometimes form, and people make shit up."

Secrecy failure equation

Every once in a while a piece of scientific research comes along that is so clever and elegant that I read the entire paper with a smile on my face.

This is what happened today when I bumped into the study by David Robert Grimes (of the University of Oxford) just published two days ago in PLoS ONE entitled, "On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs."  What Grimes did, in essence, was to come up with an equation that models the likelihood of a conspiracy staying secret.  And what he found was that most conspiracies tend to reveal themselves in short order from sheer bungling and ineptitude.  In Grimes's words:

The model is also used to estimate the likelihood of claims from some commonly-held conspiratorial beliefs; these are namely that the moon-landings were faked, climate-change is a hoax, vaccination is dangerous and that a cure for cancer is being suppressed by vested interests.  Simulations of these claims predict that intrinsic failure would be imminent even with the most generous estimates for the secret-keeping ability of active participants—the results of this model suggest that large conspiracies (≥1000 agents) quickly become untenable and prone to failure.

Grimes wasn't just engaging in idle speculation.  He took various examples of conspiracies that did last for a while (for example, the NSA Prism Project that was exposed by Edward Snowden) and others that imploded almost immediately (for example, the Watergate coverup) and derived a formula that expressed the likelihood of failure as a function of the number of participants and the time the conspiracy has been in action.  When considering claims of large-scale coverups -- e.g., chemtrails, the faking of the Moon landing, the idea that climatologists are participating in a climate change hoax -- he found the following:

The analysis here predicts that even with parameter estimates favourable to conspiratorial leanings that the conspiracies analysed tend rapidly towards collapse.  Even if there was a concerted effort, the sheer number of people required for the sheer scale of hypothetical scientific deceptions would inextricably undermine these nascent conspiracies.  For a conspiracy of even only a few thousand actors, intrinsic failure would arise within decades.  For hundreds of thousands, such failure would be assured within less than half a decade.  It’s also important to note that this analysis deals solely with intrinsic failure, or the odds of a conspiracy being exposed intentionally or accidentally by actors involved—extrinsic analysis by non-participants would also increase the odds of detection, rendering such Byzantine cover-ups far more likely to fail.

Which is something I've suspected for years.  Whenever someone comes up with a loopy claim of a major conspiracy -- such as the bizarre one I wrote about a few days ago, that the Freemasons collaborated in faking the deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman -- my first thought (after "Are you fucking kidding me?") is, "How on earth could you keep something like that hushed up?"  People are, sad to say, born gossips, and there is no way that the number of people that would be required to remain silent about such a thing -- not to mention the number required for faking the Moon landing or creating a climate change hoax -- would make it nearly certain that the whole thing would blow up in short order.

[image courtesy of photographer Michael Coghlan and the Wikimedia Commmons]

It's nice, though, that I now have some mathematical support, instead of doing what I'd done before, which was flailing my hands around and shouting "It's obvious."  Grimes's elegant paper gives some serious ammunition against the proponents of conspiracy theories, and that's all to the good.  Anything we can do in that direction is helpful.

The problem is, Grimes's study isn't likely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.  The conspiracy theorists will probably just think that Grimes is one of the Illumanti, trying to confound everyone with his evil mathe-magic.  Grimes alluded to this, in his rather somber closing paragraphs:

While challenging anti-science is important, it is important to note the limitations of this approach.  Explaining misconceptions and analysis such as this one might be useful to a reasonable core, but this might not be the case if a person is sufficiently convinced of a narrative.  Recent work has illustrated that conspiracy theories can spread rapidly online in polarized echo-chambers, which may be deeply invested in a particular narrative and closed off to other sources of information.  In a recent Californian study on parents, it was found that countering anti-vaccination misconceptions related to autism was possible with clear explanation, but that for parents resolutely opposed to vaccination attempts to use rational approach further entrenched them in their ill-founded views.  The grim reality is that there appears to be a cohort so ideologically invested in a belief that for whom no reasoning will shift, their convictions impervious to the intrusions of reality.  In these cases, it is highly unlikely that a simple mathematical demonstration of the untenability of their belief will change their view-point.

And there's also the problem that the conspiracy theorists think that they are the ones who are blowing the whistle on the Bad Guys.  My guess is that most of the adherents to conspiracy theories would read Grimes's paper, and assume that the equation is correct, and they're the heroes who are exposing the conspiracy and causing it to fail.  You really can't win with these people.

Be that as it may, it's heartening to know that we now have some theoretical support for the idea that most conspiracy theories are bullshit.  Even if it doesn't change anyone's mind, it cheered me up considerably, and I'm thankful for that much.

Defining marriage for everyone else

My mom was a devoutly Christian woman, a staunch Roman Catholic whose go-to strategy for difficult times was "Ask the Holy Spirit for help."  She rarely missed church, read the bible avidly, and taught Wednesday afternoon sixth grade catechism classes for years.

Despite her deeply-held religious beliefs, she had one other strong belief that stands out in my memory.  She used to phrase it as, "My rights end where your nose begins."  When someone she knew did something that was against the moral code by which she lived, she would shrug and say, "That's between them and the lord."  And for her, that ended it, unless it was to add, "None of my business."

Which is an attitude I would love to see in more religious folks these days.  Live according to your own morals; don't expect anyone else to conform to them.  What others do is none of your business.

And that especially extends to what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

The desperation of highly religious people to control who has sex, how, and with whom reached some kind of apogee a couple of days ago when David Fowler of the Family Action Council of Tennessee filed a lawsuit that would stop the state from issuing all marriage licenses until the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage in the United States, is overturned.

Yes, you read that right.  Fowler would prefer to have every couple who would like to get married in the state of Tennessee denied a marriage license than to see a single LGBT couple granted one.

Astonishingly, state lawmakers are already lining up behind Fowler's suit.  Representative Susan Lynn has sponsored a resolution in support of what Fowler and FACT are trying to do.  "I have dozens of sponsors, and the message of my resolution is clear,” she claimed.  "We as a state have been violated, and we expect the doctrine of separation of powers and the principles of federalism reflected in our Constitution to be upheld."

Can we be clear on something, here?  This is not about federalism and the Constitution.  This is about sledgehammering religious views on what is an acceptable marriage into law, effectively abrogating the separation of church and state in the process.

And at its base, it's all about the fact that these people think that gay sex is icky.  What other possible justification can there be?  How does the fact of two gay men getting a marriage license have any effect at all on my (heterosexual) marriage?  It doesn't change the definition of my marriage.  It merely allows them to decide on the definition of theirs.

And it's not like the biblical definition of marriage is all that clear in any case.

The stance of "I believe this, so you have to act in accordance to those beliefs whether you accept them or not" is the hallmark of extremism.  Interesting, isn't it, that the same Religious Right who would love nothing more than to halt same-sex marriage and mandate that creationism is taught in public schools are the same ones who rail against the extremist Muslims for basically doing the same sort of thing.  In Saudi Arabia, you can be flogged and imprisoned for drinking alcohol -- whether you're Muslim or not.

Explain to me how this is different from what David Fowler and his cronies in Tennessee are doing.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Fowler et al. are perfectly within their rights to disapprove of homosexuality.  They can believe that the bible is 100% literally true, internal contradictions and all.  They can cherry-pick the prohibitions from Leviticus they like, and ignore the ones they don't (such as all of the dietary restrictions).  No one, honestly, cares what they believe.  It's a free country, and you're allowed to practice whatever religion you choose, or (fortunately for me) none at all.

But when you start demanding that the terms of that religion become the law of the land, you are automatically in the wrong.

Sorry, Mr. Fowler.  Your rights end where my nose begins.

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."