The lying game

It's become almost axiomatic that politicians lie, but what I absolutely fail to understand is why we not only cast our votes for proven liars, but give them a pass when they're caught at it.

For the best example of this, we have to look no further than our President-elect.  I'm probably going to be accused of being partisan, here, but I don't care.  Donald Trump's record of telling outright lies goes back far before the election, and honestly, has nothing to do with whether he's a Republican or Democrat.  Here's a sample of the complete, egregious untruths he was guilty of before the citizenry of the United States chose him as their next president:

• He stated that "violent crime is higher than it ever has been before," when in fact violent crime peaked in 1991 and has been declining ever since.  In the U.S. you are half as likely to be a victim of violent crime as you were in 1991.
• He claimed that global warming was "a hoax created by the Chinese," and then when Hillary Clinton called him on it in a debate, said, and I quote, "I did not say that" despite the fact that the tweet was still in his Twitter feed.
• In an interview, he called pregnancy an "inconvenience," and then later lied and said he'd never said that.
• He denied using the words "pigs," "slobs," and "dogs" to describe women, and said "no one has more respect for women than I do," when in fact he did use those words, more than once.
• He claimed that the U.S. jobless rate was 42%, and didn't back down when he was challenged.  It's actually 5%.
• He was asked, under oath, if he had ever associated with people associated with organized crime, and responded, "No.  Not that I know of."  Two years before that, he was interviewed by journalist Timothy O'Brien, and was asked about his connection to Danny Sullivan, who has ties to the Philadelphia mob, and he bragged about it. "They were tough guys," Trump said. "In fact, they say that Dan Sullivan was the guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa.  I don't know if you ever heard that."  (And in fact, Trump threw a New Year's Eve party last week and invited Gambino family "business associate" Joey "No-Socks" Cinque.  Cinque runs a sham business called the "American Academy of Hospitality Sciences" -- which bestowed a five-star award on Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, and at the New Year's Eve party gave Trump a "lifetime achievement award.")

Had enough?  I haven't even considered the campaign promises he's broken already -- and we're still almost two weeks from the inauguration, for fuck's sake:

• Trump fired up his audiences before the election by pledging to jail Hillary Clinton -- "Lock her up!" was chanted at most of his rallies.  After the election, he said, and I quote: "That plays great before the election -- now we don't care, right?"
• This past summer, Trump proposed stopping illegal immigration by building a wall along the U.S./Mexico border.  "I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively," Trump said.  "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.  And I will have Mexico pay for that wall."  Just two days ago, he announced that he was going to ask Congress to fund the building of the wall, at an estimated cost of $10 billion to taxpayers.  Confronted about this apparent breaking of a campaign promise, Trump (of course) responded by tweeting about it.  "The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!"
• Another of his big campaign promises was to "drain the swamp" -- by which he meant removing the corrupting influence of lobbyists, big money, corporations, and Wall Street from the government.  His cabinet picks include billionaires who donated to the Trump campaign, the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, and a hedge fund manager from Goldman-Sachs.

And almost no one who voted for him is objecting to this bill of goods they were sold.  I don't care how much I supported someone -- if a candidate I voted for blatantly broke campaign promises before they'd even taken office, I would be pissed.

On the other hand, the one thing you hear his followers yelping about is his following through on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- something that is now appearing to be a near-certainty.  Sarah Kliff interviewed Trump voters and asked them about how the repeal was going to affect them, and uniformly they said it was going to be terrible.  When she asked them why they had supported Trump, given his unequivocal position on the subject, their responses can be summarized by what one woman told Kliff:  "I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many people's lives.  I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?"

So wait just a minute here.  He lies outright, makes campaign promises and breaks them before he's even been inaugurated, but then he actually does something he promised he's gonna do, and that's what you object to?

Okay, look, I'm not saying other politicians haven't been guilty of hypocrisy, or haven't waffled, evaded, or lied outright:

But you know what?  "He does it too!" is not a defense. It's absolutely baffling why we, as citizens, accept such behavior, and more importantly, keep voting these same clowns in.  You hear people complain all the time about how corrupt politicians are, how awful Congress is, how you can't trust any of 'em -- and yet, overwhelmingly, incumbents were voted back in.  In 2016 90% of Senate races went to the incumbent, and 97% of House races -- even though Congress's overall approval rating was 13%.

Can someone please, please explain this to me?

But as far as Trump goes, I can say it no other way: he is a compulsive liar, a con man, who will say anything or do anything to get what he wants.  He is also dangerously impulsive, and already -- again, before taking office -- has endangered our role on the world stage and inflamed tensions with China, Russia, and the Middle East with his incessant loose-cannon tweeting.  We are all going to have to live through what all this will cause, and try as hard as we can to do damage control.  But I'm wondering when the Trump voters are going to realize that he has never had any intent to follow through on anything other than impulse.

To put it succinctly: you've been had.

The Phoenix devil

At present I've been sent a link five times to a claim that someone near Phoenix, Arizona took a photograph of Satan.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the photo:

A couple of the people who sent it to me appended messages along the lines of, "Hoo boy.  Look at what people are claiming now."  Two, however, had more noteworthy commentary, which I reproduce in toto below.

Photo submitter #1:

You like to scoff about the evil in the world, and claim that our souls aren't in peril.  Satan walks among us.  Unbelievers like you will be the first to be dragged to Hell.

Photo submitter #2:

People like Mr. Skeptic doubt evidence for the supernatural when its [sic] right in front of your face.  I wonder what would happen if you saw this with your own eyes.  Would you keep doubting then?  It's easy for Armchair Skeptics to sit in their living rooms and say no, but as soon as you go out in the world you learn that its [sic] not that simple.

Well, predictably, I'm not impressed.  To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson (who in the original quote was talking about UFOs) there probably is an "add demon" function on Photoshop.  My general opinion is pretty consistent with the following:

However, the bigger question is why I'm a Scoffing Armchair Skeptic about such matters more has to do with Ockham's Razor.  Ockham's Razor is rightly called a rule of thumb -- something which isn't 100% true but is still a pretty damn good guide to understanding.  The original formulation comes from William of Ockham, a 14th century monk and philosopher, who phrased it as "Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate" (Don't multiply entities without necessity), but a more modern phrasing is "All other things being equal, of competing hypotheses, choose the one that requires the least assumptions."  (It must be pointed out that Ockham himself was hardly a scientific rationalist; he's also the one who said, "Only faith gives us access to theological truths.  The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover."  So while Ockham's Razor is a great idea, I doubt I'd have agreed with him on much else.)

In any case, the Demon of Phoenix certainly is more easily explainable as a hoax than it is that Satan for some reason descended upon southern Arizona, posed for a blurry snapshot, and then disappeared without doing anything else or being seen by anyone else.  So the second submitter is, in a sense, quite right; I would be much more likely to believe that it was real if I did see it with my own eyes.  Just looking at the photograph, here in my Comfortable Armchair, I'm still saying "Nah."

Of course, being dragged to hell would do it, too.  Nothing like a little fire and brimstone to convince one of the reality of a situation.  But until that happens, you can still put me in the "Mr. Skeptic" column.

The monster in the mist

I thought that after writing this blog for six years, I'd have run into every cryptid out there.  But just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about one I'd never heard of, which is especially interesting given that the thing supposedly lives in Scotland.

I've had something of a fascination with Scotland and all things Scottish for a long time, partly because of the fact that my dad's family is half Scottish (he used to describe his kin as "French enough to like to drink and Scottish enough not to know when to stop").  My grandma, whose Hamilton and Lyell ancestry came from Fifeshire north of Edinburgh, knew lots of cheerful Scottish stories and folk songs, 95% of which were about a guy named Johnny who was smitten with a girl named Jenny, but she spurned him, so he stabbed her to death with his wee pen-knife.

Big believers in happy endings, the Scots.

Anyhow, none of my grandma's stories were about the "Am Fear Liath Mòr," which roughly translates to "Big Gray Dude," who supposedly lopes about in the Cairngorms, the massive mountain range in the eastern Highlands.  He is described as extremely tall and covered with gray hair, and his presence is said to "create uneasy feelings."  Which seems to me to be putting it mildly.  If I was hiking through some lonely, rock-strewn mountains and came upon a huge hair-covered proto-hominid, my uneasy feelings would include pissing my pants and then having a stroke.  But maybe the Scots are tougher-spirited than that, and upon seeing the Am Fear Liath Mòr simply report feeling a little unsettled about the whole thing.

A couple of Scottish hikers being made to feel uneasy

The Big Gray Dude has been seen by a number of people, most notably the famous mountain climber J. Norman Collie, who in 1925 had reported the following encounter on the summit of Ben MacDhui, the highest peak in the Cairngorms:

I was returning from the cairn on the summit in the mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.  For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.  I said to myself, this is all nonsense. I listened and heard it again, but could see nothing in the mist.  As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.  Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and I will not go back there myself I know.

Collie's not the only one who's had an encounter.  Mountain climber Alexander Tewnion says he was on the Coire Etchachan path on Ben MacDhui, and the thing actually "loomed up out of the mist and then charged."  Tewnion fired his revolver at it, but whether he hit it or not he couldn't say.  In any case, it didn't harm him, although it did give him a serious scare.

Periodic sightings still occur today, mostly hikers who catch a glimpse of it or find large footprints that don't seem human.  Many report feelings of "morbidity, menace, and depression" when the Am Fear Liath Mòr is nearby -- one reports suddenly being "overwhelmed by either a feeling of utter panic or a downward turning of my thoughts which made me incredibly depressed."  Scariest of all, one person driving through the Cairngorms toward Aberdeen said that the creature chased their car, keeping up with it on the twisty roads until finally they hit a straight bit and were able to speed up sufficiently to lose it.  After it gave up the chase, they said, "it stood there in the middle of the road watching us as we drove away."

So that's our cryptozoological inquiry for today.  I've been to Scotland once, but never made it out of Edinburgh -- I hope to go back and visit the ancestral turf some day.  When I do, I'll be sure to get up into the Cairngorms and see if I can catch a glimpse of the Big Gray Dude.  I'll report back on how uneasy I feel afterwards.

Dinosaurs, the Flood, and attempted murder

I have some friends who are currently trying to kill me.

At least, that's the only interpretation I can put on the fact that their Christmas gift to me was a copy of Dinosaurs for Kids by Ken Ham.  According to the back, amongst other things, we can learn from this book "the truth behind museum exhibits and flawed evolutionary timelines."

So my conclusion is that these friends were hoping that I would read this book and have an aneurysm, or possibly burst into flames.  Or both simultaneously.

But I'm pleased to say that their nefarious little plot did not succeed, which is why I'm here today to tell you about it, and to quote for you a paragraph from the final page of the book, to wit:

Follow the Truth!  While the Bible helps us to understand how and when dinosaurs lived, and even why they died, the Bible doesn't give us highly descriptive details about each and every one.  It gives us the big picture of history so we can develop a general understanding of these creatures.  Then we can use observational science to help us fill in some of the details and increase our understanding -- all the while knowing that nothing in real science can or will contradict God's Holy Word.

In other words, we can accept everything that science says about anything unless it tells us something different than what we want to hear.

But I decided to write about this today in Skeptophilia not only to celebrate my escaping a near brush with death, but because Ken Ham and dinosaurs are in the news for a different reason. Apparently Ham is pissed off at The Washington Post because they claimed that he thinks that dinosaurs were wiped out by the Great Flood.  So he dealt with this the way any reasonable, intelligent adult would; he posted a snarky comment about it on Twitter.

"Hey @washingtonpost," Ken tweeted, "we at @ArkEncounter have NEVER said Dinosaurs were wiped out during Flood-get your facts right!"

In fact he went on to elaborate that the dinosaurs didn't die in the Great Flood; they actually made it onto the Ark along with two (or seven, depending on which biblical account you believe) of each of the six billion-odd species on Earth, where they lived in cages until the waters magically went somewhere and Noah let them all go on the side of Mount Ararat, and became extinct afterwards because of other stuff, possibly because humans liked the taste of T. rex steaks too much.

Because that's ever so much more believable.

Just remember, children: Velociraptors used those nasty claws to peel oranges.

Note some other interesting features about the above illustration.  First, the Deinonychus appears to be levitating.  Maybe the Law of Gravity was also optional in the Garden of Eden.  Second, isn't it funny how Adam and Eve are always shown as naked, but there with strategically placed bushes to hide their naughty bits?

Like in the following photograph of foreplay with a voyeur dinosaur:

And the following, in which the lamb is clearly thinking, "Dude.  Find a different animal to block the view of your penis next time."

Implying all of the naked fun we could be having if the whole Apple Incident hadn't intervened.  But, after all, this is the kind of lunacy we've come to expect from Ken Ham et al., who think that a miscopied and mistranslated bunch of archaic manuscripts written by some Bronze-Age sheep herders are the best tool we have for understanding biology and interpreting human behavior.

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Me, I'm going to go have a second cup of coffee, and plot revenge against the friends who gave me the dinosaur book.  I think I'm going to have to work pretty hard to come up with anything near as clever, and that's assuming that reading Ham's book doesn't have some kind of delayed reaction side effects.  If you see a headline in tomorrow's news that says, "Upstate NY Man Bursts Into Flame, Dies," you'll know what happened.

New world hack

You've probably heard of the Bilderberg Group, which is an annual conference of a couple of hundred  "political elite, experts from industry, finance, academia, and the media" named after the first place they met (back in 1954), the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.

They're also thought by some to be synonymous with, or at least a subcategory of, the Illuminati, and as such, the Bilderbergs are the evil, ultra-intelligent ruling elite of the New World Order who are controlling everything that goes on in all of the world's major governments, and who are so super-top-secret that they have a Wikipedia page saying where and when their next meeting is going to be held.  

Which is why I choked on my coffee yesterday morning when I read that the Bilderberg Group's site had been hacked, and a cryptic message left behind that has the conspiracy theorists experiencing multiple orgasms.  The message is the usual "we know who you are, you won't get away with this" kind of stuff, except for the fact that it has odd capitalization scattered throughout the message, leading the aforementioned so-and-sos hopping about making excited little squeaking noises about how it contains a secret encoded message.

The Hotel de Bilderberg, Oosterbeek, Netherlands [image courtesy of photographer Michiel M. Minderhoud and the Wikimedia Commons]

You can read the entire thing at the link posted in the preceding paragraph, but here's an excerpt so you can get the flavor:

Dear Bilderberg mEmBers, From NoW(), each OnE of you have 1 year (365 days) to truly work in faVor of HumaNs and not youR private interests
Each TopIc you disCuss or work you achieve thRough YoUr uber privAte meetinGs should from now benefit WORlD population and not X or Y groUp of people
OtHerWIse, we will FinD you and we Will hAck you
MiNd the cuRrent situation: We conTrol your expensive connected cars, we control your connecteD house security devices, we control your daughter laptop, we control your wife’s mobile,
we tape YoUR seCret meetings, we reAD your emaiLs, we control your faVoriTe eScort girl smartWatch, we ARe inside your beLoved banks and we Are reading YoUr assets
You wont be safe anywhere near electricty anyMore
We WiLL watch yOu, from NoW on you got to WoRk for Us, Humanity, the People

So that's pretty threatening, especially the part about controlling their favorite girl escorts.  You have to wonder how they'll do that.  Are the girl escorts remote-controlled robots?  Or do they have neural implants, so that when the Bilderberg members are in (as it were) mid-escort, the girls will suddenly start cackling in a maniacal fashion and demand passwords to their beLoved banks or they won't finish escorting them, leaving them in escortus interruptus?

But it's the potential for an encoded message that really has the conspiracy world humming.  One possible decoding of the message is included at the above website, which apparently involves conversion of the capitalized letters to hexadecimal and dividing by 3,600,000 and looking at it with your eyes squinched up, and gives you a latitude and longitude that's pretty close to the North Pole.

Which is incredibly significant, because before this, the location of the North Pole has been a highly-classified secret.  Just think of what would happen if WikiLeaks got a hold of this information, and put together the location of the North Pole with Pizzagate.  There would be massive uprisings.  Major world governments would fall.  Donald Trump would write several self-congratulatory tweets about it.

It would be, in a word, chaos.

So anyhow.  The whole thing is impressive mainly because of the fact that the Bilderberg website is probably pretty heavily protected, and the fact that hackers got into it is a little scary.  I mean, just think about it.  If they could do that, they could probably hack the sites of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.  And think of what effect that could have.

But as far as the message, I'm not convinced it contains anything of interest.  It will, however, give the conspiracy theorists something to worry at, which with luck will keep them out of trouble for a while.  And who knows?  Maybe it will induce the Bilderbergs to turn their attention to humanity's needs rather than personal gain.  Not a Bad oUtcome, You GOtta admit, RegarDless Of your opiNionS aBOut the ethics Of hacKS.

Time marches on

Happy New Year 2017 to all of my readers, and I hope this one brings you everything you hope for.  Me, I'm keeping my New Year's wishes fairly modest this year.  I'm currently working on two novels and I'd like to finish them both; I'd like to get my 5 K race time down below 27 minutes; and I'd like it if Donald Trump doesn't open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.

Other than that, I'm pretty content with the status quo.

But speaking of calendars, milestones, and benchmarks, apparently there's been a proposal to revamp our calendar.  According to a video by the Munich-based filmmakers that call themselves "Kurzgesagt" (German for "in brief"), we shouldn't be in the year 2017, we should be in 12,017.

The reason for this proposal is that marking our calendar based upon the beginning of Christianity is a fairly arbitrary zero year, given how many people in the world aren't Christian.  Plus, having a great swatch of history marked by the calendar-running-backwards "B.C." scale is confusing and unnecessary.  So Philipp Dettmer and his friends at Kurzgesagt have suggested a new scale, and one that conveniently would only require the addition of a "1" at the beginning of our current year.

So what happened 12,017 years ago that's so special?  Dettmer says this is when the first known permanent stone building was built in the hills of southern Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, marking the point at which we began to "build a new world on top of the old one."  At that point, we set in motion the massive terraforming operation that has characterized humanity ever since.

This would mean that we would do away with the old "B.C." and "A.D." designations; all years on the calendar after that point (and thus all of recorded history) would run forward and would be "H.E." (Human Era).

Roman calendar from the 1st century B.C.E., or the 99th century H.E., whichever you prefer (image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First of all, the temple that Dettmer et al. are referencing -- Göbekli Tepe, near the town of Şanlıurfa -- was not built 12,017 years ago, it was founded around 11,150 years ago, which is a 900-odd year discrepancy.  This is according to the oldest radiocarbon dates we have from the site, so it seems like a good estimate.  So if you really do want to measure the years based on the founding of this temple, you'd have to do more than simply adding a "1" to the beginning of the current calendar year, you'd have to add 9,133, which is not nearly as convenient.

Second, I wonder if they've considered the level of conniption that would be thrown by the Religious Right if this was seriously proposed.  These, after all, are the same people who founded the War on Christmas trope, which claims (among other things) that Starbucks changing its winter cup design was the moral equivalent of strafing the Three Wise Men while they were on their way to Bethlehem.  These are also the same people who regularly send me hate mail when I use "B.C.E." and "C.E." ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era") instead of B.C. and A.D.  (One memorable one said, "You're so much in love with your lord and master Satan you can't even bear to write Christ's name in an abbreviation.  You're despicable."  Which became a lot funnier when the final sentence made me think of reading the whole thing in a Daffy Duck voice, so I did.  You should try it.)

Hell, we're the culture that couldn't even agree to switching over to using metric units.  Nope, gotta stick with feet, inches, pounds, ounces, hundredweights, and furlongs per fortnight.  'Murika!  Fuck yeah!

Then there's a third issue, which is that it's not like we don't have commemoration of other deities in other parts of our timekeeping system, such as the days (Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Freyja) and months (Januarius, Februarius, Mars, Maia, Juno).  The difference is that pretty much no one worships any of these gods any more, which in Thor's case is kind of a shame because he was a serious badass.

Of course, it's not like calendar-keeping ever was a particularly exact science.  Our current zero year (well, 1 A.D., as there's no Year Zero in the contemporary calendar) is supposed to be based on the birth of Jesus, but the problem is, the most recent scholarship on the topic -- calculated from known dates of Roman emperors' reigns and the lives of biblical figures such as Herod -- has concluded that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.  He also wasn't born on December 25, but probably some time in the spring, given that "the shepherds were tending their lambs in the fields."  The settlement on December 25 as the date for the celebration of Jesus's birth probably started some time mid-4th century, and a lot of folks think that the date was chosen because it coincided with the part of the year when the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a solstice festival associated with meals, get-togethers, and gift-giving (sound familiar?).  The idea was that if you sanctified the date by putting a Christian spin on the celebration, you could let the former pagans still have their party but pretend it was something holier.  The church fathers figured with luck, the recent converts would eventually forget about the pagan part and focus only on the holy part, which 1,700 years later still hasn't happened, given Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and Black Friday specials at Walmart.

Now, my point is not that any of the above stuff is exact, either; the spring 4 B.C. date for Jesus's birth still rests on a lot of guesswork.  It's more that our calendar-keeping isn't based on anything real as it is.  It's hard enough to keep up with the inevitable vagaries that are engendered by the fact that the Earth's rotation and revolution cycles don't line up especially well, which is why we have leap days every four years (and had a "leap second" this year -- hope you used your extra second for something productive).  Trying to make a major-scale change to calendar-keeping would be too much for us, I think.

Me, I think if we're really going to have a meaningful calendar, we should start with the real milestone, which is the Big Bang.  Now that's a real Zero Year.  And with that thought, I'll end here, and pause only to reiterate my wish that your 13,800,002,017 A.B.B. is a special one.

Crash course

As if we needed one, there's another clickbait sort-of-sciencey-or-something site that I should warn you about.

It's called the Mother Nature Network, and it bills itself as follows:

MNN is designed for people who want to make the world a better place.  Its content is engaging, non-political, and easy-to-understand and goes well beyond traditional "green" issues — encompassing topics that include family, health, home, travel, food, and community involvement. It has been labeled “The Green CNN” by Time, “The USA Today of Sustainability” by Fast Company, “Green Machine” by Associated Press, and “one of the hottest web properties out there” by NBC News; highlighted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; selected “Best Idea” at Fortune Magazine’s Green Summit; and chosen as a “Top Pick” by Newsweek.

Well, that may be, but it makes me wonder about how Time et al. are deciding who to laud.  MNN is even a cut below I Fucking Love Science as regards to sensationalized headlines, shallow analysis of actual science stories, and the usual smattering of "the world of the bizarre" kind of articles (as an example, on of their "trending stories" is "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016").

My objection, though, is not that there's another clickbaity website that exists solely to grab ad revenue -- heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, and include sites that claim to be legitimate media, such as The Daily Mail Fail.  My main beef with these places is the misrepresentation of science.  Because, heaven also knows that given the general low comprehension of actual science by the voting public, we do not need media making it worse.

As an example, check out their story from this past Wednesday called "A Whole Other Star Is On a Crash Course With Our Solar System" by Bryan Nelson.  Well, don't actually check it out unless you want them to get another click's worth of advertising money.  But let me tell you the gist, and save you the moral dilemma.

First, what the hell is with the headline?  Is Bryan Nelson in third grade?  "A Whole Other Star?"  So, it's not Part of Another Star?  Or the Whole Same Star As Before?

But we'll let that pass.  The topic does sound alarming, doesn't it?  But when you read the text, you find that we've got a while to prepare:

[I]n around 1.35 million years, that's close to what might happen.  Scientists have been plotting the course of a rogue star, Gliese 710, which currently sits in the constellation of Serpens some 64 light years from Earth.  Turns out, it's headed straight for us.

And "close to what might happen?"  What the fuck does that even mean?  Turns out Bryan Nelson isn't really sure either:

The star isn't scheduled to collide directly with Earth, but it will be passing through our solar system's Oort Cloud, a shell of countless comets and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Sun's gravitational influence.  You might think that's a safe distance, but the star is likely to slingshot comets all over the solar system, and one of those could very well have our name on it.

So a star is going to be in our general vicinity over a million years from now, and it might disturb some comets, which are likely to get flung in toward the inner Solar System, and one of them might hit the Earth.  Or not.

But that's not all:

Scientists calculated that Gliese 710 is the star that's expected to come closest to us within the next 10 million years (which is as far ahead as scientists could project), but it's not the only close encounter.  As many as 14 other stars could come within 3 light-years distance in the next few million years, and there are numerous fainter, red dwarf stars with unknown trajectories that could be headed our way too.

So we shouldn't just worry about Gliese 710, we should also worry about other stars which might or might not come close to the Solar System in the next few million years, not to mention other stars which might or might not exist and could do indescribably bad things if they do.

"Hoag's Object" -- the remnants of a collision between two galaxies [image courtesy of NASA]

I decided to do a little research, and find out where all this stuff had come from.  I found a paper in Astronomy Letters from 2010 (i.e., actual research and not hyped silliness) called "Searching for Stars Closely Encountering the Solar System" by Vladimir V. Bobylev, and it included the following:

Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from −2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45 ± 0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 1 × 10−4, of falling into the region d < 1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.

Did you catch that?  The "nonzero probability" of Gliese 710 influencing the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud comets is 1 × 10−4.

For you non-math-types, that's one in ten thousand.

If you needed any more indication that the Mother Nature Network article was sensationalized clickbait, there you have it.

So add that one to our list of suspect media sources, along with the usuals -- Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, Breitbart, Before It's News, and so on.  My general advice is not to go there at all.  But if you disregard this, whatever you do, don't click on "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016."  You have been warned.