Voting for values

By now, everyone with any kind of access to news has heard about the latest horrid thing to come to light about Donald Trump -- that he condones, that he actually bragged about, sexual assault.  That he was entitled to that kind of behavior "because he's a star."

What you may not be aware of is that despite this, many (not all, as you'll see later) of Trump's supporters on the Religious Right have continued in their support of Donald Trump's candidacy.  Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, said:

My personal support for Donald Trump has never been based upon shared values, it is based upon shared concerns about issues such as: justices on the Supreme Court that ignore the constitution, America’s continued vulnerability to Islamic terrorists and the systematic attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen in the last 7 1/2 years.

Ralph Reed, of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, agreed:

Voters of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, create jobs, and oppose the Iran nuclear deal. Ten-year-old tapes of private conversation with a television talk show host rank very low on their hierarchy of concerns.

Let me make this plain.  These are men who are adamant in their protection of human embryos, but who would have as their commander-in-chief a man who would without batting an eyelash participate in sexual assault against our daughters, our sisters, our mothers.  These are men who are virulent in their condemnation of loving expression between two people of the same sex in a committed long-term relationship, but think that a man "grabbing a woman by the pussy" is no big deal.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some of Trump's supporters, not to mention Trump himself, have dismissed this as "lewd locker room talk," and state that "all men talk this way."  The second half is horseshit -- I know plenty of men who speak about women in the terms of the highest respect, and always treat them the same way.  And make no mistake about it; this is not lewd.  "Lewd" is talking to your guy friends about how your girlfriend performs in bed.  It's not nice, it's very likely a breach of privacy, and it's one more example of the objectification of women in our culture.

But that is not what this is.  This is condoning, and in fact suggesting that he has participated in, rape.  This is using your social dominance to commit assault upon a person in a weaker power position simply because you can.

Then there are the people who say, "Well, Bill Clinton did the same thing!"  Perhaps he did, but that is entirely irrelevant, for two reasons.  (1)  Did you condone Bill Clinton's behavior when he was accused of sexual impropriety?  As I recall, he was impeached because of it, to the raucous applause of nearly every Republican in the country.  (2)  Bill Clinton is not currently running for president.

And if you needed a deeper layer of bullshit, just today I've seen more than once posts that said, "If what Donald Trump said was so bad, why did Fifty Shades of Grey sell millions of copies?"  Which is a level of "I don't get it" that is truly mind-boggling.  So as before, let me explain this nice and slowly:

This is not about sex.  This about consent.  Fifty Shades of Grey, from all I've heard -- I haven't read it, and have no intention to -- was a poorly-written hash of a book.  But it was about sexual exploration between two consenting adults.  If you don't see the difference between the subject of this book and what Donald Trump is saying, you are either hopelessly stupid or willfully blind.

As I said earlier, however, there are people on the right who have refused to sell their souls to see this man in the Oval Office, and I find this tremendously heartening.  Just yesterday, an evangelical friend of mine posted an article in The Washington Post by Collin Hansen, editorial director for the Gospel Coalition, who had the following to say:

Trump can maintain nearly all his evangelical support in the voting booth despite unrepentant lying and cheating.  But these same leaders still insist on a traditional, biblical ethic when it comes to views on same-sex marriage in evangelical ministries... 

To the older evangelicals planning to vote for Trump:.. You can say we’re electing a commander in chief and not a Sunday school teacher.  You can say that God often raises up pagan leaders to deliver his people from their enemies.  But no one is fooled by your arguments. 

They can see you will apparently excuse anything in a Republican nominee...  And they will conclude that they don’t really need to listen to you when it comes to "traditional, biblical ethics."

Which is exactly correct.  Hansen and I may not agree on a lot, philosophically, but he at least is clear about what values and ethics are.  And he sees Trump for what he is -- a narcissistic compulsive liar who will do anything, say anything, to achieve whatever position of power he currently wants.

A lot of people don't like Hillary Clinton.  I'm fine with that.  She was far from my first choice, too.  But it is appalling that because of that you would cast your vote for a man who talks about sexual assault upon a stranger as blithely as most of us talk about what to have for dinner.  And this makes one thing crystal clear:

If you vote for Trump, you have no right to claim that you are a "values voter."

Skeptic's curriculum

Thanks to a forward-thinking principal about ten years ago, my high school developed an electives program based on the philosophy that there needs to be more than one path to graduation.  He said to the teachers, "If there's a topic you're passionate about and have always wanted to teach, now's your chance.  Put together a proposal for the school board.  If it flies, go for it!"

This was the genesis of the Critical Thinking class that it is my privilege to teach.  I was given the green light to develop the curriculum, and (if I can indulge in a moment of self-congratulation here) it has become one of the most popular electives in the school.

Critical thinking is a skill, and like every skill, it (1) doesn't necessarily come naturally, but (2) becomes easier the more you do it.  As humans, we come pre-programmed with a whole host of cognitive biases we have to learn to work around -- dart-thrower's bias (the tendency of people to pay more attention to outliers), a natural bent for magical thinking, the unfortunate likelihood of our memories being malleable, inaccurate, or outright false.  But with time and effort, you can learn some strategies for sifting fact from fiction, for detecting it if you're being hoodwinked or misled.

In other words, a skeptical approach can be taught.

I'm delighted to say that great strides are being taken in this area outside of my little rural school district.  Right now, a pilot program in Uganda, led by Sir Iain Chalmers of the Cochrane Foundation, has tested a new curriculum for critical thinking with respect to health and medicine with 15,000 grade-school children.  Chalmers is unequivocal about the program's intent; what he wants, he says, is for kids to be able to "detect bullshit when bullshit is being presented to them."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's an essential skill.  Here in the west we have such purveyors of health woo as Dr. Oz, Joel Wallach,  Joseph Michael Mercola, and Vani "The Food Babe" Hari persuading people that their food is contaminated by "chemicals," their prescription medications are poisoning them, and that diseases are caused by everything from not having enough "natural minerals" to disturbances in quantum vibrations.  Modern medical practitioners, they tell us, are being held hostage by "Big Pharma" to fool us all and make money hand over fist, and all the while we get sicker and sicker.

Yes, I know that in the industrialized world we have the highest human life expectancy the world has ever seen, and we've virtually eradicated dozens of infectious diseases using exactly the sort of "allopathic" medicine that Oz and his cronies rail against.  This isn't about fact; it's about being swung around by your fears and emotions.

But we're not the only place in the world that has this problem.  Central Africa, where Chalmers's trial is being run, is a hotbed of superstition, with people rejecting vaccines and antibiotics in favor of "herbal remedies" based on fear.  Quack cures are common -- for example, putting cow dung on burns.  Allen Nsangi, a researcher in Uganda who is working with Chalmers on the project, said that this practice is "almost the best-known treatment."

The Uganda project was the brainchild of Andy Oxman, research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. "Working with policymakers made it clear most adults don’t have time to learn, and they have to unlearn a lot of stuff," Oxman said.  "I’m looking to the future. I think it’s too late for my generation... My hope is that these resources get used in curricula in schools around the world, and that we end up with the children ... who become science-literate citizens and who can participate in sensible discussion about policy and our health."

All of which I find tremendously encouraging.  (Not the part about my generation being a lost cause, because I don't really think that's true, honestly.)  If we can equip children with a good skeptical toolkit, they'll be much less likely to get taken advantage of -- not only in the realm of health, but in every other way.  These skills aren't limited to one discipline.  Once you've adopted a skeptical outlook, you'll find that you apply it to everything.

At least that's my hope.  It's certainly what I've seen in my own classes.  As one of my students told me not long ago, "I thought at first that it was impossible to do what you were asking us to do -- to read and listen to evaluate, not just to memorize and regurgitate.  But now I can't help myself.  When I read something, I think, 'Okay, how do I know this is true?  What's the evidence?  Could there be another explanation?'"

Which is it exactly.  Skepticism isn't cynicism; disbelieving everything out of hand is as lazy as gullibility.  But it's essential that we learn to consider what we're hearing rather than simply trusting that we're being told the truth.  As Satoshi Kanazawa put it: "There are only two legitimate criteria by which you may evaluate scientific ideas: logic and evidence."

Storm warning

I swear, the conspiracy theorists are getting faster these days.

In the past, it seemed like they'd at least wait until the dust settled from the latest catastrophe before claiming that it was (1) a hoax, (2) set up by the government as a "false flag," (3) engineered by the Illuminati, or (4) all of the above.  But now, thanks to the internet, we can conclusively state that light is the fastest thing in nature, but bullshit comes in at a close second.

This all comes up because we're already beginning to hear loony theories about Hurricane Matthew, which pummeled Haiti and Cuba, slammed the Bahamas, and is currently ripping its way up the Florida coast (with a potential afterwards for making a weird loop out in the Atlantic and hitting Florida for a second time).  Certainly its track has been odd -- I can't remember ever seeing a hurricane in the southern Caribbean make a ninety-degree right-hand turn the way this one did.

But there's a lot we don't know about steering currents, the prevailing winds that move storms around.  We're getting far better at predicting them -- which is why our ability to forecast storm tracks has improved dramatically in the past thirty years -- but it's still far from an exact science.

Hurricane Matthew on October 4, 2016 [image courtesy of NASA]

All of which leaves open a gap for the nutjobs to crawl through.

First, we have online media commentator Matt Drudge, who never misses an opportunity to use human suffering to hammer home his ultra-right-wing views, claiming that the people at NOAA are overplaying the severity of the hurricane to "make an exaggerated point on climate."  The ironic thing about this is that given the fact that we just had our umpteenth-in-a-row month of record-setting heat, I'd say the climate is making the point for itself.  But silly things like facts don't discourage Drudge, who is already saying Matthew is "a fizzle" and is not going to live up to the forecasters' dire predictions.

Then Rush Limbaugh jumped into the fray, claiming that not only is Matthew not going to live up to the expectations, but that hurricanes in general are a liberal conspiracy.  "It’s in the interest of the left to have destructive hurricanes because then they can blame it on climate change, which they can desperately continue trying to sell," he said on his radio show this week.

So apparently all the left has to do is to make up stuff, and it becomes real.  I bet the Democrats are going to be tickled that they have this much magical power.  All they have to do is wave a wand and say "Hurricanus manifestum!" and lo and behold, we have a storm.

Maybe they should try "Anncoulteria shutthefuckuppibus" and see what happens.  I know I'm willing to try it.

But I digress.

Anyhow, just because Drudge is an asshole and Limbaugh is a moron is not to say that Matthew hasn't been an odd storm.  Not only has it taken a weird path, as I mentioned earlier, but it strengthened really quickly, blowing up to category 4 only a day after it took its northward turn.  So it will come as no surprise that we're already hearing about how the odd features of Matthew are because it's...

*cue scary music*

... not an ordinary hurricane.

This alarming news comes from one Dr. Ethan Trowbridge, who is called a "leading climatologist" over at the website Someone's Bones despite his pronouncements making me wonder if he's been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Trowbridge, who appears to be unclear on the process of hurricane formation, attributes Matthew's ferocity to the close approach of the planet Nibiru (I bet you thought we were done with the Nibiru horseshit.  Ha, fooled you, didn't I?).  According to Trowbridge, some bizarre and hitherto-unknown physics is allowing the mysterious tenth planet to stir up hurricanes:

Nibiru is producing latent heat on our planet.  And this has a positive correlation on weather patterns currently being experienced on Earth.  There are a lot of things the public is not being told, that can influence this storm’s trajectory. Many things factor into this... 

Nibiru is annihilating Arctic sea ice, and its proximity to our inner solar system is pulverizing and altering atmospheric conditions across the globe.  Greenland, for example, has lost much of its polar ice, causing the region to darken; the consequences allow solar radiation—from both the sun and Nibiru—to permeate the atmosphere, warm the Earth’s oceans, and destabilize the planet’s crust. 

These are dangerous times.  What happens in the Arctic impacts the world.  This is known as the ‘carbolic effect,’ a concept the USGS and its affiliates keep hidden from the public.  Greenland has reached its carbolic point, and now Nibiru’s presence is influencing weather all over the planet. Hurricane Matthew is the latest example, and Nibiru is the cause.

The author of the article tells us that Dr. Trowbridge is "now in exile," which I suppose is nicer than saying "was laughed out of the scientific establishment."

As if this wasn't bad enough, we then find out from an entirely different wackmobile that Hurricane Matthew is a "weaponized storm" meant to blast America for "rejecting globalist, totalitarian rule." The proponent of this theory (if I can dignify it with that term) is one Steven Quayle, who goes on to tell us that HAARP is involved (of course), the whole idea was dreamed up by the Illuminati (of course), and the fact of its being named "Matthew" is significant because of the "Biblical associations... and obvious prophetic implications."

Which makes perfect sense, given the well-known biblical books the "Gospel of Katrina" and the "Letter of St. Wilma to the Louisianians."

And this isn't even taking into account the fact that HAARP closed two years ago, and even if it was still operational and could do what Quayle claims it can do, it only seems to be able to generate hurricanes in areas that always get hit by hurricanes anyway.

Now if HAARP could generate a category-5 hurricane in, say, North Dakota, I'd be impressed.  But south Florida?  Not so much.

So the damn thing is still out there churning, and already the loonies are trying to tie it into their warped worldview.  Which, I suppose, shouldn't be surprising.  In any case, enough about the lunatic fringe; I'll just end with a wish for all of those in harm's way from this storm to remain safe -- whatever its ultimate cause was.

Gaming the brain

I think all of us can relate to the desire to have our brains work better.

We forget things.  We get distracted.  We let worry keep us from enjoying our days and from sleeping at night.  And that's not even counting the more serious problems that some of us have to deal with -- depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dementia... the list goes on and on.

So it's only to be expected that we're attracted to anything that promises to help us out in the Mental Faculties Department.  This has given rise to companies like Lumosity, which use a variety of brain-stimulating games to activate your neural circuitry -- and, the claim goes, trigger an overall improvement in your mental acuity.

The problem is, they don't work as advertised.  Playing a brain game improves one thing and one thing only -- your ability to play that game.  This was the finding of a study that was published last week in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, and describes work by seven researchers headed by Daniel J. Simons, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Disturbingly, not only did Simons's team find little in the way of positive results, they found poor experimental design in previous studies that had found such results.  Simons et al. write:

Based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.  We also find that many of the published intervention studies had major shortcomings in design or analysis that preclude definitive conclusions about the efficacy of training, and that none of the cited studies conformed to all of the best practices we identify as essential to drawing clear conclusions about the benefits of brain training for everyday activities.

Simons agrees that it's a discouraging result.  "It’s disappointing that the evidence isn’t stronger," Simons said in an interview in Science Around Michigan.  "It would be really nice if you could play some games and have it radically change your cognitive abilities, but the studies don’t show that on objectively measured real-world outcomes."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If that weren't bad enough, a couple of weeks ago there was an announcement from a researcher that another brain-improvement strategy -- "power poses" -- also shows little effect.  This one achieved wide acclaim when one of its chief proponents, social psychologist Amy Cuddy, spoke about it on one of the most watched TED talks -- at present, it's been viewed over 36 million times.  The idea is that adopting a body pose of strength and courage affects your hormone levels (especially testosterone and cortisol), which then feeds back and positively affects your mood and anxiety levels; likewise, adopting a submissive or weak pose generates the opposite effects. 

The problem is, attempts in January to replicate Cuddy's experiments failed to generate results, and (most damning of all) one of the co-authors of the original study, Dana Carney, has stated outright that "I do not believe that 'power pose' effects are real."  She said the original study made use of the statistical fudging technique called "p-hacking," which (to oversimplify, but give you the general gist) amounts to running a variety of tests and only reporting on the ones that generated positive results.

All of which is not intended to stop you from playing brain games or doing power poses.  I still think there's something to be said for thinking positively, and if you approach life playfully and optimistically you're much more likely to enjoy it and (therefore) be successful at what you do.  (As my dad used to say, I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right.)

But as far as actual measurable results in cognition, memory, or hormone levels?  Apparently not.  Which is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising.  Our brains are tremendously complex organs, and it's always struck me as a little unlikely that powerful neural firing patterns could be so readily malleable.  As usual, the simplistic approach seems to be appealing... but wrong.

High school baptism

I am sick unto death of public school employees proselytizing their students.

And I don't care what exactly you're proselytizing -- a political stance, a religious worldview, an opinion on gay rights or abortion or the legalization of marijuana.  Now, understand what I'm saying here; it is all right to discuss any of those things, as long as it makes sense in the context of the curriculum.

It is not all right to push one specific viewpoint on students.

Public school students are (1) young, and (2) a captive audience.  Furthermore, it is not a venue in which kids are generally taught to stand up to the adults and say, "I disagree with you, and here's why."  So at best the students who hold opposing viewpoints are generally going to be cowed into silence; at worst, they are held up to ridicule or punishment for going against both the authority figure and the majority.

Which is why what happened at a Georgia high school a couple of weeks ago is inexcusable.  Earlier in September Katie Beth Carter, a student at Heritage High School in Ringgold, Georgia, had been killed in an automobile accident.  The varsity football coach, E. K. Slaughter, decided to honor Katie's memory...

... by holding a ceremony and baptizing the entire football team.

Lest you think this was just a non-religious dunk in a water tank -- akin to the "Ice Bucket Challenge" that went around a couple of years ago to raise money for ALS research -- Slaughter's own words to the team should clarify:

Thanks for having the courage to take this step.  We talked the other day — for those who weren’t in our team meeting — I was just sharing with them, you don’t realize characteristics that certain people have until you don’t have them anymore.  And just reflecting over the last week with KB [Katie Beth] and just how loving she was and how servient [sic] she was… This is about you and this is about your relationship with Christ and nothing else, ‘K? It’s a big step for you.

And Katie's brother Jacob, a practicing minister, took the players one at a time and dunked them after saying, "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit..."

Baptism by Klavdiy Vasilievich Lebedev (ca. 1890) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some religious folks are lauding the coach for taking this step.  If you're one of them, then stop and ask yourself: would you be feeling the same way if the coach had used his position of authority to read to the kids from the Qu'ran or The God Delusion?  Or to lecture them about how important it was to stump for Hillary Clinton?  Or how they needed to write to their congresspersons in support of LGBT marriage rights?

If any of those made you cringe, then don't stand there and claim that you don't understand why proselytizing of any kind needs to be kept out of schools.

And it's not that I want school employees to encourage atheism.  That, too, is proselytizing.  What I'm saying is that none of it has any place in public schools.  There are plenty of venues where kids can be instructed in what to believe about religion, politics, and social issues.  Why are home and church not sufficient?  Why do we need to turn schools into indoctrination camps, and (inevitably) leave some kids feeling as if they're being excluded or demeaned because of their own beliefs?

Put simply: separation of church and state isn't there to protect nonbelievers; it's there to protect everyone.

Fortunately, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has gotten involved, and almost certainly there will be a lawsuit. "Losing a beloved recent graduate is a terrible tragedy and we understand the district community must cope and grieve together," said Liz Cavell, staff attorney for the FFRF.  "But this can and should be done in a way that does not give the clear impression that the school district endorses religion or a particular religion."

Which is it exactly.  Opponents have characterized the FFRF as promoting a secular viewpoint in schools, but that's inaccurate; it is opposed to promoting any viewpoint, secular or religious, to public school students.  Christians would rightly object to their children being told what they should believe, or that their own beliefs are wrong; adherents of other religions, and young people with no religious beliefs at all, should be accorded the same right.

In fact, isn't there something in the bible about "do unto others as you would have them do unto you?"  I seem to remember that part was pretty important.  Maybe Coach Slaughter and his supporters should re-read that part.

A tsunami of misinformation

One of the most frustrating things I encounter while doing research for Skeptophilia is sensationalized nonsense masquerading as fact -- especially when it is gussied up in such a way as to make it seem reasonable to the layperson.

This is the problem with the article "Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean (And It's Going To Get Worse)" that appeared over at Zero Hedge yesterday.  In it, we have a rehash of the Fukushima disaster of 2011, which generated a horrific tsunami and breached a nuclear power plant.  The combined effects of the earthquake and its aftermath cost almost 16,000 lives, and left 230,000 people homeless -- some of whom are still living in temporary housing.

Unfortunately, that's about where the Zero Hedge article stops being factual and starts relying on sensationalist exaggerations and outright fabrication.  Here's a brief list of the inaccurate claims that appear on the article:

• "[The Fukushima earthquake was] believed to be an aftershock of the 2010 earthquake in Chile."

Well, it might be true that someone believes that.  Presumably the writer of the article does.  But there aren't any geologists who do.  The earthquakes occurred a year apart and over 17,000 kilometers from each other.  There is no seismic process that could possibly connect the two.

If that weren’t bad enough:

• "Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean every day."

This isn't incorrect so much as it is misleading.  Note that nowhere in this statement (in fact, nowhere in the article) does it state how radioactive those 300 tons of water are -- i.e., how much radioactive cesium (the most common radioisotope in the leaked water) was present.  In fact, marine radiochemist Ken Buesseler has stated that ocean radiation levels near the disabled power plant are one thousandth of what they were immediately following the accident, and at any distance at all from the site the contamination is "barely discernible."

• "It should come as no surprise, then, that Fukushima has contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean in just five years."

Cf. my previous comments about quantities and measurability.

• "Not long after Fukushima, fish in Canada began bleeding from their gills, mouths, and eyeballs.  This “disease” has been ignored by the government and has decimated native fish populations, including the North Pacific herring."

This is referring to viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a deadly disease of fish that is caused by (note the name) a virus.  It has nothing to do with radiation or the Fukushima disaster, and was recorded in fish populations long before the earthquake.

Also, correlation does not imply causation.  Even if viral hemorrhagic septicemia had only been seen after debris from Fukushima washed ashore, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the contaminants in the debris had caused the disease.

• "Elsewhere in Western Canada, independent scientists have measured a 300% increase in the level of radiation."

300% of a minuscule amount is still a minuscule amount.

• "Further south in Oregon, USA, starfish began losing legs and then disintegrating entirely when Fukushima radiation arrived there in 2013.  Now, they are dying in record amounts, putting the entire oceanic ecosystem in that area at risk.

This is another viral disease called starfish wasting disease, and like the fish disease mentioned earlier, has bugger-all to do with Fukushima as there have been outbreaks of it since 1972.  However, there is some evidence that increasing water temperatures have made starfish more susceptible, so there's a connection to climate change, which is something we should be concerned about.

And no alarmist article would be complete without some scary pictures.  First, we have this one, from NOAA:

This has nothing to do with radiation leakage.  It's a map tracking wave heights of the tsunami as it crossed the Pacific, as you'd know if you had looked at the scale on the right hand side.

Then there's this one:

Which shows a bunch of dead starfish.  But as I established a couple of paragraphs ago, this has nothing to do with radiation poisoning.

And so on and so forth.  The alarmist foolishness in articles like this is dangerous from a couple of standpoints. First, it makes it sound like the scientists themselves are ignorant of what's going on, or (worse) are actively covering it up for their own malign purposes.  Second, it misrepresents what the science actually says.  Third, it distracts us from problems that actually are global catastrophes in the making by focusing our attention elsewhere.

At a less-than-careful reading, though, such an article sounds well researched and factually accurate.  It has links, sources cited, uses technical vocabulary.  It's only if you take the time to do some research yourself that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

So caveat lector.  As usual.  And to the people who keep forwarding this article around, I'm respectfully asking you to stop.  It's hard enough to get people to trust legitimate science these days; this kind of thing only makes it worse.

Cunning disguise

A couple of days ago, we had the conspiracy theory on the part of the pro-Trump side of things that moderator Lester Holt had thrown the debate in favor of Clinton because she was giving him threatening coded hand gestures.  So because the watchword around here is fairness, today we're going to look at another conspiracy theory, this one dreamed up by members of the pro-Clinton faction:

Donald Trump isn't really Donald Trump, he's Andy Kaufman in disguise.

Andy Kaufman, as most people my age know, was the disturbingly odd comedian who played the vaguely Eastern European Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi, and then went on to have a bizarre career doing standup comedy.  His comedy shtick frequently involved wrestling women, Elvis Presley impressions, and (occasionally, if the audience wasn't sufficiently appreciative) reading to them from The Great Gatsby until they gave up and left.

Kaufman's routines were so weird, and he was so secretive about his own personal life, that many people began to wonder if the line between his acting and his actual personality was becoming blurred -- that maybe it wasn't an act, that the man was mentally ill.  He did nothing whatsoever to discourage this perception, and in fact it was the subject of the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon (starring Jim Carrey as Kaufman).  But because of his penchant for dubiously tasteful pranks, when he died in 1984 at the age of 35 of a rare form of lung cancer, not a few of his fans wondered if he'd faked his own death -- and in fact, there are still people who believe that Kaufman is alive and in hiding under an assumed identity.

Which is strange enough.  But just last week Zach Schonfeld did a piece over at Newsweek that apparently there are people who take this idea one step further -- that not only did Andy Kaufman survive, but he survived as Donald Trump.

Andy Kaufman shortly before his death.  Yes, I know he looks absolutely nothing like Donald Trump.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Never mind that Trump himself is older than Kaufman; Trump was born in 1946, Kaufman in 1949.  So Trump was out there doing stuff while Kaufman was still alive and performing.  Easy, say the conspiracy theorists; either the real Trump died shortly before Kaufman's faked death, or... maybe... Kaufman killed him and took his place.

The sole evidence, if I can dignify it by that name, that is trotted out to support this nutty idea is that people point out the similarity between Trump's bombastic, blustering style and the persona of one of Kaufman's characters, lounge singer Tony Clifton, who would shout abuse at audience members in a New York-accented voice that Schonfeld says "resembled a coked-up Bugs Bunny's."  One of the proponents of this theory -- a science writer named Erik Vance -- says that the similarity is so striking they must be the same person.

"All you gotta do is watch one Tony Clifton video and you realize, this is Trump!" Vance told Schonfeld.  "He’s saying these audacious horrible things that he’s not serious about, but he doesn’t care!  It’s just one big joke for him.  And it’s brilliant.  You watch Donald Trump and you can’t help but think, ‘No one can think this stuff!’  I imagine Trump going home at night and putting on a beret and listening to Rachmaninoff and discussing postmodern theory."

I kept thinking that Vance would, somewhere in the story, say, "Ha ha!  Not really!  Of course I don't think Kaufman and Trump are the same person!  They don't even look alike!"  But Vance seems... really serious.  When he created a blog to give his theory more visibility, he was swamped with positive feedback, despite the fact that he said stuff like this:

I believe that Kaufman created his Donald Trump character sometime around 1972, as a precursor to his equally jarring Vegas lounge singer, Tony Clifton.  As the comedian gained fame and money, he worked doggedly to build a backstory for Trump, making him the son of a New York real estate agent, a graduate of the Wharton School, and giving him a stint in military school. 

As both Kaufman and his Trump character became more successful, the comedian had to increasingly rely on his brother Michael and collaborator Bob Zmuda to take turns playing Trump.  In 1983, exhausted and frustrated that he couldn’t dedicate more time to the Trump project, he made a decision.  He would fake his death, undergo reconstructive surgery, bleach his hair into an elaborate comb-over, and become Trump full time.

What this illustrates -- besides the fact that people believe some seriously wacky shit, a point that hardly needed emphasis, especially for regular readers of Skeptophilia -- is that engaging in nutty conspiracy theories is not confined to people of one political stripe.  It's easy to conclude that of course we are seeing everything clearly, it's the other side that subscribes to goofy notions about how the world works.  They believe in conspiracy theories; we are perceiving reality.

What's becoming apparent is that the lunatic fringe on both sides is prone to bizarre counterfactual thinking.  So once again, if behooves us to recall Kathryn Schulz's dictum of being able to look at our own beliefs and say, "I don't know, maybe I'm wrong."

Of course, the likely truth is that Hillary Clinton was not engaging in threatening nose-scratching to intimidate Lester Holt, Donald Trump is (for better or for worse) Donald Trump, and Andy Kaufman died at the young age of 35 way back in 1984.  I know that Ockham's Razor is just a rule of thumb, and sometimes the world does turn out to be weird and convoluted; but in this case, I strongly suspect that the simplest explanation is actually the truth -- regardless of what people on either side of the aisle would like to believe.