Witch politics

Is it too much to ask that people leave their bizarre mythology out of politics?

I mean, our political situation at the moment is surreal enough.  We don't need anything to make it more embarrassing to the world at large.

Which is a message that needs delivering to televangelist Jim Bakker.  Bakker hosted an interview with Robert Maginnis, of the Family Research Council, a far-right evangelical organization that was classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010 because of their stance on LGBT issues.  In the interview, Bakker opined that President Obama was showing his preference for Muslims by appointing Abid Qureshi to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. (in Bakker's mind, "one out of hundreds of federal appointments" apparently constitutes a "preference"), when Maginnis made an even wackier pronouncement -- that our federal government is being controlled by witches:

I know that there’s demonic forces in that city.  I have personally met people that refer to themselves as witches, people that say they advise the senior leadership of the country.  We invite within the federal government people to advise us, and often some of those advisers, I think, have evil motivations, things that you and I would not approve of.

Honestly, I doubt the current trend of micromanagement in our federal government has anything to do with witches.  The whole modern Wicca religion has as its principal motto "As long as it harms none, do what you will," which is about as opposite to the government's approach as any I can think of.

But a statement being ridiculous never seems to deter these people.  Because whether it was spurred by Maginnis's remark about witches or not, last week a bunch of evangelicals at the Midwest Vision and Values Pastors Leadership Conference in Cleveland decided to protect Donald Trump from demonic attack by laying hands on him.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Darrell Scott, pastor of New Spirit Revival Center, who hosted the conference, told the audience that a "nationally known minister told Donald Trump that if you choose to run for president, there’s going to be a concentrated Satanic attack against you...  He said there’s going to be a demon, principalities and powers, that are going to war against you on a level that you’ve never seen before and I’m watching it every day."

So to ward off this nasty demonic stuff, Scott’s wife led some of the attendees in a "laying on of hands."

"God we ask you right now that Your choice is this choice," she said.  "God, I ask that you would touch this man, Donald J. Trump.  Give him the anointing to lead this nation."

I have to admit that I find it baffling that the evangelical wing of Christianity has flocked to Donald Trump the way they have.  Aren't adultery and divorce, not to mention hoarding money and refusing to pay people who work for you and admitting in a televised debate that you don't pay your federal taxes, considered sins?  Okay, I get that the right wing Christians would disapprove of Hillary Clinton's stance on gay marriage and pro-choice.  But Trump as a person seems pretty antithetical to everything Jesus preached, including "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's".

Okay, I'm an atheist, so what do I know?  But still, even from my perspective outside of the system, it strikes me as bizarre.

No more bizarre, of course, than claiming that the government is being run by witches.  So I guess whatever else you can say, you have to admire their consistency.  Even if what it means in this case is "consistently batshit."

RNA attack

It's a common strategy.  If simply spouting alarmist rhetoric doesn't cause your target audience to panic sufficiently, throw in some quasi-technical nonsense to make it sound like your position actually has scientific merit.  Unfortunately, it has a way of working, as people like Vani "The Food Babe" Hari discovered when she launched her "if you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't be eating it" campaign, which if it succeeded, would rob your diet of most of its essential nutrients, leaving behind only easy-to-say stuff like "starch."

It's the old "if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit" approach dressed up in new clothes.  It's a favorite strategy of such anti-science types as the anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOers (who in many cases are one and the same).  Witness the latter's latest sally against the scientific establishment, which revolves around the claim that if you're eating GMO food, it contains RNA (true) and this RNA can alter your own genes (false).

I learned about this bizarre statement from Sterling Ericsson's wonderful blog A Science Enthusiast, wherein we learn that the anti-GMO cadre have gone from the diffuse claim that all GMOs are bad to proposing a specific mechanism by which they do their dirty work -- they contain "engineered RNA" that then can get into your cells and interfere with your normal cellular processes.  And to the non-scientific, even the actual research can certainly sound like the stuff of science fiction; gene-modification techniques like CRISPR, switching genes on and off with RNA interference, inserting DNA from one species into another to generate organisms that express "foreign" genes as they would their own.

[image courtesy of Christopher Bock, the Max Planck Institute, and the Wikimedia Commons]

My objection to the anti-GMO stance has always been that it lies squarely in the midst of the package-deal fallacy; just as our "natural" genes have thousands of different functions, each GMO is different from all the others.  GMOs are no more all bad than genes are, and each one has to be tested for safety individually.  (And they have been, extensively.)  But the addition of the "ingesting engineered RNA" claim adds a whole new layer of pseudoscience to the anti-GMO stance.  Rather than making it stronger, it makes it weaker, and (further) shines a harsh light on exactly how unscientific the claim itself is.

Because all of the food we eat contains nucleic acids, DNA and RNA both.  If you eat lettuce, you're eating (among other things) lettuce DNA and RNA.  If you eat a hamburger, you're ingesting the genetic material from cows (and tomatoes and whatever else you like on your burger).  If you eat "Slim Jims," you're consuming DNA from... well, whatever the hell organism "Slim Jims" are made from.  I dunno.  But presumably it was some kind of living thing at some point that had its own genetic material.

And miraculously, we don't start expression lettuce, cow, tomato, or Slim Jim genes, nor do any of those interfere with our own gene expression.  The reason is that in your small intestine you have enzymes called nucleases that break down the DNA and RNA of the organisms we eat, specifically to prevent us from accidentally incorporating foreign genetic material into our cells, which could cause us to express foreign proteins (depending on what they were and where they were produced, this could certainly be deleterious).  So the DNA and RNA in our food -- which is there even in the most organic-y of organic free-range locavore diets -- never survives the passage through our digestive system intact.

That includes any "artificially engineered" DNA and RNA, because your body can't tell the difference between the genetic material that came from a healthful, natural, non-engineered peach and that which came from BT corn purchased directly from Monsanto.  It all breaks down, natural and artifical alike.  If there's a health effect from eating GMOs, it doesn't come from the DNA and RNA -- it comes from the proteins they produced within the genetically modified organism before you ate it.

And like I said, those have been tested to a fare-thee-well.  But this is not likely to persuade the anti-GMOers, for whom the naturalistic fallacy is very nearly one of the Ten Commandments.

So anyhow, be on the lookout for this.  Call it out for the nonsense it is.  As I've said many times before, you do not make your point stronger by leaning on poorly-understood science.  All you do is make it seem like the rest of your claim has little merit as well -- which in this case, seems to be the truth.

Willful ignorance and Irish slavery

Prompted by yesterday's post regarding the tendency of some people to amplify their feelings into facts (and in the process, ignore the actual facts), a loyal reader of Skeptophilia put me on the trail of a fine, if disturbing, example of this phenomenon: the claim that there were Irish slaves, and they had it worse than the African ones did.

I had seen a version of the claim before, posted on Facebook.  This is the one I ran into:

My impression was that it was just one more in the long line of claims intended to make white people feel like they have no reason to address the sordid history of North America with respect to their treatment of minorities and indigenous peoples.  "Hey, y'all," it seems to say, "we had it bad too, you know."

What I didn't realize until today was that there's a far uglier implication here, made plain in some of the websites where you see the above posted; that not only were the Irish oppressed (a point no one with any knowledge of history would argue), but that Irish immigrants to North America were oppressed by the African Americans.  If you look at those websites -- which I would not recommend to anyone who has a weak stomach or slim tolerance for racist garbage -- you find claims that Africans and Mulattos enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed Irish slaves, especially Irish women, all through the 18th and first half of the 19th century.

The claim is thoroughly debunked by history scholar Liam Hogan, who addresses each piece of the claim, uncovering the bogus nature of the supporting evidence.  Some of the "evidence" is outright falsification; for example, one website uses gruesome photos from Andersonville Prison and the Holocaust and claims that they were pictures of Irish slaves; another shows a drawing of 18th century psychopathic murderer Elizabeth Brownrigg flogging a servant, and claims instead that it is a drawing of a poor Irish slave in the early United States being whipped.  In fact, the claim that the Irish were enslaved at all is mixing up indentured servitude with chattel slavery, a distinction that none of the slave owners back then were confused about in the least.

All of this would be another exercise in believe-what-you-want-to-believe if the whole idea hadn't been taken up by the white supremacists and neo-Nazis.  The "Irish slave" trope figures into the whole mythology you see on websites like Stormfront, revolving around the idea that the whites are in constant danger of being attacked and destroyed by people of color.  And as strategies for convincing followers go, it's pretty powerful.  If you can persuade yourself that white privilege is nonexistent, that the whites all along have had it as bad as the minorities, it is only a short step to the attitude that any demands made by minorities that the whites address institutional racism are ill-founded and unfair.

Frighteningly, that's exactly what's happening.  Donald Trump's running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, has gone on record that institutional racism only exists if we talk about it:

Donald Trump and I both believe that there’s been far too much of this talk of institutional bias or racism in law enforcement. We ought to set aside this talk, this talk about institutional racism and institutional bias, the rhetoric of division.

The Trump campaign chair in Ohio, Kathy Miller (who has since resigned), went even further, blaming President Obama for racism, and claiming that it didn't exist before he became president:

If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last fifty years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it.  It’s not our fault, certainly... Growing up as a kid, there was no racism, believe me.  We were just all kids going to school. 

I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected.  We never had problems like this...  Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.

Well, of course you didn't experience racism, you nitwit.  You're not a minority.  As for the rest of it, this surpasses willful ignorance.  I'm not even sure what you'd call it.  Especially since the interviewer said to Miller that some people would take exception to what she'd said, and she responded, "I don't care.  It's the truth."

So here's a particularly awful example of what I was talking about yesterday; people elevating their own feelings, biases, and prejudices to the level of facts.  Taking the fact that for a white person, talking about racism can be uncomfortable, and using that discomfort as an excuse for believing that racism itself doesn't exist.

Well, I'm sorry, but the world doesn't work that way.  The truth doesn't change because thinking about it makes you feel wonky.  And neither can you substitute your mythology for actual history as a way of whitewashing the role your ancestors (and mine) had in oppressing other cultures.  All that does is perpetuate the very attitudes that created the problem in the first place -- and makes it less likely that our children and our children's children will live in a world where everyone is treated fairly and equitably.

Turning feelings into facts

A couple of days ago, I saw the following screed posted:

Do you think that Obama is intentionally trying to destroy America?  Anyone who doesn't see it or believe it is either blind, or prejudiced because of a like nationality...it's such a shame that our first African American president has done so much destruction to our nation!...  Pray very hard that Trump wins because for all his faults he truly loves his country and we WILL NOT survive Hillary Clinton.

I try like hell to avoid politics here on Skeptophilia, partly because I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on most political topics, partly because I see most issues of governance as so hopelessly complicated that it's unclear that there even is a solution, and partly because most folks enter any political discussion so completely opinionated that it's hard to see how anything I could say would change anyone's mind on anything.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But this statement was so extreme that it was tempting to post a response, a temptation I successfully resisted.  The comment rankled, though, and ultimately I felt like I had to respond in some way, so here we are with today's topic.

What I find most bizarre about the statement itself is that if you look around you, America is pretty much loping along as it always has, miraculously undestroyed after eight years of Obama's leadership.  And if you dig a little deeper -- by which I mean not simply shrieking an opinion but examining the facts -- you find something even odder.

The Balance, a non-partisan economic and financial media source, just posted an article yesterday that the U.S. economy is pretty healthy -- in fact, the article's author, Kimberly Amadeo, said it's "very nearly a Goldilocks economy."  In the past few years the GDP has grown at an ideal annual rate of between 1.8 and 2.5 percent.  U.S. manufacturing has grown even faster -- up 2.6% this year, and forecast to remain around that rate for the next four years.

What about the deficit?  Since President Obama took office, the deficit has dropped by 2/3, from $1.4 trillion to $489 billion.  (Now, I agree that $489 billion is still a pretty huge number, but at least it's moving the right direction.)

Likewise, the unemployment rate has shown a steady drop, from a high of 10% in October 2009 to 4.8% today.  Even the crime rate -- one of Trump's major issues -- has dropped steadily, and in fact has been on the decline since a peak way back in 1994.  (The same holds true even if you just look at the rate of violent crimes involving guns; so despite the hype in the media, you're actually less likely to be killed by a gun now than you were twenty years ago.)

What about those illegal immigrants "pouring across our borders?"  According to a study by the non-partisan Pew Research Group, the rate of illegal immigration has been stable for years, and in fact was considerably higher in 2007 than it is now.  (You might argue that it's still too high -- but the fact is, it's actually lower today than it was during George W. Bush's presidency.)

Even the common claim that "Obama is comin' for your guns" has turned out to be horseshit.  Look around you.  We're still as heavily armed as ever.

About the only statistics I could track down where Obama's track record kind of sucks is the male/female wage gap (which has barely moved in the past twenty years), the racial wage gap (just a couple of days ago a study by the Economic Policy Institute announced that it's the highest it's been in forty years), and the wealth gap between the richest and poorest (which is going the wrong way -- up -- and has been for thirty years).

So okay, you think that Obama is destroying the nation.  Maybe even deliberately.  Can you show me one metric -- just one -- that shows that that's true?

I mean, I get it if you don't like his policies on pro-choice/pro-life, LGBT issues, and so on.  Those tend to be divisive and engender high emotion.  But if you're trying to tell me that the United States has gone to wrack and ruin in the past eight years, can you show me why?

The whole thing is reminiscent of the interview with Newt Gingrich in which he said that people feel increasingly unsafe from violent crime.  The interviewer said, "Violent crime across the country is down."  Gingrich responded, "The average American... does not think crime is down, does not think they are safer."  The interviewer -- who at this point seemed to be trying to stop herself from laughing in his face -- said, "But we are safer, and it is down."  Gingrich said, "That's your view."

The interviewer said, "No, it's not my view, it's a fact..."

Gingrich interrupted with a patronizing smile and said, "What I said is also a fact."

And this seems to me to be the heart of the problem.  We are at the point that your "feeling" that we're spiraling into chaos trumps my facts that we're not.  Or -- scarily -- that if you're feeling something strongly enough, it becomes a fact.  The world, then, is constrained to fitting into whatever your particular narrative says it is.

Which is all very well until people start voting on the basis of ignoring facts and relying on feelings -- because that is a strategy that can lead to disaster.

Chemical round-up

Yesterday's post about people who are fact-resistant is an easy segue into today's topic, which is: a viral post I've now seen at least a half-dozen times on social media that claims that there's RoundUp in vaccines.

The article, written by one Catherine J. Frompovich, starts with the following:

An absolute BOMBSHELL has just hit Big Pharma's vaccine industry!

Which, in my opinion, is a phrase that means, "Nothing important has happened."  Every time we hear that there's an ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL that's going to (1) destroy Hillary Clinton, (2) destroy Donald Trump, (3) expose the lies of Big Pharma, or (4) cause a devastating scandal in Congress, we wait breathlessly...

... and nothing happens.

Of course, the people making the claim have an explanation for that; the "MSM" (Mainstream Media), who in this worldview is second only to "Big Pharma" as a stand-in for Satan himself, has covered the whole thing up.

In this case, we find out that a research scientist named Anthony Samsel has discovered traces of glyphosate (better known under its trade name as the herbicide RoundUp) in vaccines.  Then we're given the following alarming information:

In high school chemistry aren’t students taught the importance of chemical interactions, especially when mixing several chemicals in a laboratory beaker?  What can happen?  An explosion!  A similar chemical reaction occurs within the human body — the largest living, working test tube on earth, however it causes adverse health effects, not an explosion.

So, what you're saying is: if you put "chemicals" together, they explode, except that we're talking about putting chemicals together here, and they don't explode?

But even so they're really really bad.  Because they're chemicals.  So q.e.d., apparently.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then, of course (since it's RoundUp), we immediately launch into the argumentum ad Monsantum fallacy, which is to claim that anything even tangentially connected to Monsanto must be evil.   The implication is that Monsanto is deliberately tainting vaccines with their nasty chemicals for some diabolical reason, most likely to get rid of anyone who is stupid enough to fall for their cunning plans.

The whole argument falls apart, however, when you start looking at the details.  Going to the blog that brought Samsel's research to the public eye, we find out that there have been traces of RoundUp found in vaccines, most likely due to the inclusion of animal-derived products such as glycerine, but the amounts are almost all less than one part per billion.  Still, that doesn't tell us much about toxicity -- Frompovich is correct that some substances are toxic in vanishingly small quantities.  But then you look at the end of Samsel's data table, and you find out that "gummi bears" have quantities of RoundUp that are on the order of eighty times higher than any of the vaccines studied.

Interesting that there's all of this hoopla about Big Pharma and toxins in vaccines, but there's no mention of the role of Big Gummi in poisoning our children's candy.

A further, and more serious, problem comes to light when you start digging into the background of Anthony Samsel himself, and his alleged studies linking glyphosate to every human malady except the common cold via scary-sounding biochemical pathways.  An exposé by Tamar Haspel three years ago found that the supposed peer-reviewed research Samsel and a woman named Stephanie Seneff conducted into the presence of glyphosate and its effects on human tissue almost certainly never occurred.  Haspel writes:

Samsel and Seneff didn’t conduct any studies.  They don’t seem interested in the levels at which humans are actually exposed to glyphosate.  They simply speculated that, if anyone, anywhere, found that glyphosate could do anything in any organism, that thing must also be happening in humans everywhere.  I’d like to meet the “peers” who “reviewed” this.

Worse still, neither Samsel nor Seneff is a biochemist, or even a cellular biologist. Seneff is a computer scientist at MIT; Samsel is a "consultant" who does "charitable community investigations of industrial polluters."  As Haspel put it, "I think it's fair to say that they probably went into this with a point of view."

And if you needed one further death-blow to the whole argument, the woman who wrote the ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL article, Catherine J. Frompovich, is a staff writer for...

... The Daily Sheeple.

So to those folks who keep circulating this article and ones like it, I'm respectfully asking you to stop.  There's enough misinformation out there on health in general and vaccines in particular.  To say it for probably the 13,537th time: vaccines are safe, effective, protect you and your children from diseases that can kill you, and have a very very low likelihood of side effects.  Myself, I'll take the chance of the health effects of minuscule amounts of glyphosate rather than those from getting the measles, hepatitis A, or even the flu.

On the other hand, I am having second thoughts about gummi bears.

The index case for fact-resistance

I think a standard question for anyone who holds an anti-science stance -- so climate change deniers, antivaxxers, people who are pro-homeopathy -- should be: "What would it take to convince you that you are wrong?"

I'll be up front that this idea is not original to me.  It was the single question that still stands out in my mind as the most important in the infamous Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate.  Nye responded, in essence, that one piece of information that could not be explained except by the young-Earth model is all it would take.  Ham, on the other hand, said that nothing could convince him.  No evidence, no logical argument, nada.

And therein, folks, lies the difference between the scientific and anti-scientific view of the world.

It is a question I wish had come up during a hearing this week in the House Committee on Science (controlled, as I have mentioned before, almost entirely by anti-science types).  The topic was the subpoenas being sent out to climate scientists in an attempt to intimidate them into backing down on their (at this point incontrovertible) claim that the world is warming up.  One of the people who spoke in favor of the subpoenas was Ronald Rotunda, professor of law at Chapman University.

This in itself is an odd choice.  Rotunda is a lawyer, not a scientist.  Wouldn't you want the scientists -- i.e., the people who know what the hell they're talking about -- to weigh in?  Of course, it doesn't take a genius to see that wasn't the point here.  The point was getting some talking heads to reinforce the view of the committee that climate change is a hoax.  But what happened afterwards is pretty interesting -- and heartening.

Rotunda was trying to make the case that the scientists disagree on the idea of climate change and (specifically) sea level rise, and cited research by Harvard geoscientist Jerry Mitrovica, claiming that it showed that the melting of the Greenland ice cap would actually cause the sea level to fall.  Of course, Rotunda was completely misrepresenting Mitrovica's work; Mitrovica had shown that due to a combination of gravitational effects and isostatic rebound (the lifting of land masses when a weight such as an ice cap is taken from them), the sea level around Greenland as measured from the coast of Greenland might fall.  What Rotunda conveniently forgot to mention was that the melted ice combined with the aforementioned factors would cause the sea level to rise more elsewhere.

That's not what the representatives on the committee wanted to hear, of course, so it never came up.

Coastal Greenland [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What's encouraging in all of this depressing business is the response of one person on the committee -- Bill Foster of Illinois, the committee's only trained scientist (he started his career as a physicist).  Foster listened politely to what Rotunda was saying.

But he wasn't buying it.

What Foster did was brilliant -- he merely asked Rotunda to explain how his claim worked.  "I was fascinated by what seemed to be apparent support of an argument that the Greenland ice sheet would melt, and thereby lower the sea level," Foster said, "and I was wondering if you can expound on how exactly the physics of this works."

Rotunda, who apparently has less understanding of physics than your typical 12th grade physics student, immediately began to babble.  "When the ice sheet melts, all the gravity that was then part of the island of New Greenland [sic] disappears into the ocean, it just goes away.  And that ice has been pushing Greenland down, and now Greenland will be moving up, because the water is all over the place."

All I can say is that if I gave explanations like that in my high school classes, I would quite rightly be tarred and feathered.

So that's the next best thing to "What would it take to change your mind?" -- "Can you explain to me how that would work?"  Both of these, in my opinion, should be the immediate go-to questions in any debate on climate change -- or any other discussion that has become contaminated with anti-science.

Of course, the downside of all of this is that the climate change deniers on the Science Committee, with the exception of Bill Foster, all just nodded sagely while Rotunda spewed his bullshit.  If you already have assumed your conclusion, no amount of logic or evidence would ever sway you.

It reminds me of a brilliant satirical piece written by Andy Borowitz for New Yorker earlier this year entitled, "Scientists: Earth Endangered By New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans."  A quote from Borowitz seems an appropriate way to end this post, especially given that the House Committee on Science -- of all groups -- seems to be the index case for fact-resistance:

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them. 

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said.  “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.” 

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.” 

While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorize that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en route from the auditory nerve to the brain.  “The normal functions of human consciousness have been completely nullified,” Logsdon said.

There goes the Sun

Yesterday I received a friendly email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia of the "You think that is stupid, wait till you see this" variety.  As well-intentioned as these generally are, I always hesitate to read further, because my general impression of human foolishness and gullibility really doesn't need any further reinforcement.

This one was in response to last week's post about the Flat Earthers, so already we've set the bar for comparative idiocy pretty high.  But as I continued to read the email (yes, I succumbed to my 'satiable curiosity), I found that said bar was cleared in a single leap by this particular claim.

So without further ado: the idea that makes the Flat Earthers look sane and sensible.  Ready?

The Sun doesn't exist.

According to a group of loons calling themselves "asunists," what we're calling the Sun is just an illusion generated by light collected and beamed at the Earth by an array of curved mirrors.  You might be asking, "Light coming from where, exactly?", but that is only the first of the many problems we encounter upon delving into the situation.  Apparently the idea came about when someone googled "solar simulator" and found that there is a device that approximates the radiation spectrum and illuminance of the Sun, and is used for testing solar cells, sunscreen, plastics, and so forth.  So in a classic case of adding two and two and getting 147, they then interpreted this to mean that the Sun itself was a simulation.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Who is responsible for this?  Well, nasty old NASA, of course.  Same ones who keep the Moon hologram going and are suppressing information about the Earth being flat and/or hollow, not to mention the impending catastrophic visit by the fabled planet Nibiru.

What evidence do we have?  The producer of the above-linked YouTube video explains how he knows that the Sun isn't real, and a lot of it seems to be the fact that in some photographs, the outline of the Sun is "fuzzy."  It used to be clear and sharp, but now because of "chemicals in the air" the Sun has gotten all blurred.  So apparently we used to have a real Sun, but now it's been replaced by a simulator which just isn't as good as the real thing.

My question is -- well, among my many questions is -- don't you think someone would have noticed when the real Sun was taken down, and the simulator put in place?  Oh, and what did they do with the old Sun?  Was it sent to the stellar retirement home?  Was it just turned out into the cold vacuum of space, to wander, lost and forlorn forever?

Of course, the question that applies to all of these wacko conspiracy theories is why anyone would bother to do all of this.  Don't you think that if the Sun really was a big bunch of mirrors, the Earth was flat, or whatnot, the scientists at NASA would tell us?  What could they possibly gain by pretending that the Sun exists and the Earth is an oblate spheroid?

The oddly hilarious postscript to all of this is that the whole the-Sun-doesn't-exist conspiracy theory received a boost from none other than Ray "Mr. Banana" Comfort, the outspoken young-earth creationist who a couple of years ago got his ass handed to him when he showed up to distribute creationist literature at a talk by Richard Dawkins hosted by the Skeptic Society.  Well, Comfort has picked up on the "asunist" thing and used it as an argument against atheism (in Comfort's mind, everything is an argument against atheism).  He tells us about his perception of the "asunists" -- mischaracterizing their claim as stating that they believe we're actually in the dark -- and compares that to atheists' conclusion that god doesn't exist.

Which just shows you that there is no idea so completely stupid that you can't alter it so as to make it way stupider.

So to the loyal reader who sent me the email, all I can say is "thanks."  I now am even more convinced that Idiocracy was a non-fiction documentary.  It's time to get myself a cup of coffee and try to reboot my brain so that I make some degree of sense in class today.  Also time to start watching for the sunrise.

Or the solarsimulatorrise.  Or whatever.