Thus sayeth Lord Steven

I'm not in the habit of using Skeptophilia as a forum to give publicity to weirdos, but sometimes I find a member of the Wingnut Coalition that is so delightfully out there that I just have to tell you about it.

In this case we have a guy who calls himself "Lord Steven Christ."  As if "Christ" was Jesus's last name or something.  (Although musician and stand-up comic Stephen Lynch did riff on this idea in his song "Craig," which is about Jesus's bad-boy brother, Craig Christ.  Note: the song is hilarious, but at the same time runs pretty close to the edge of sacrilege more than once, and is highly NSFW.  You have been warned.)

Anyhow, Lord Steven's website is a sight to behold.  First off, he's very fond of having photographs of himself all over the place, usually shirtless and in mid-flex.  It also has links to three dozen or so videos, the general gist of which is that the Earth is concave and the sky is made of glass.

I'm not making this up.  So now we've gone one step past the Flat Earth lunacy; the Earth is actually shaped like a bowl.  The reason we can't see this -- why, for example, someone with a telescope can't see Japan over there on the other edge of the bowl -- is because "light bends to the center so you can't see the other side."  Whatever that means.  But anyone who doesn't believe this, Lord Steven says, is delusional.  He says that NASA and the other pesky people who investigate the universe and have come up with different answers are "lie-n-tists."

But the most interesting part of his spiel is his take on religion, because in his opinion there should be only one religion, and that is the religion of Lord Steven.  In fact, he wrote a letter to Pope Francis demanding that he turn over the keys to the Vatican forthwith, which I include in toto below because it's just that wonderful:

Dear Jorge Bergoglio: 

As your fellow Jesuit colleagues should know very well, I am the Returned Christ.  I am awaiting exaltation to world authority over all mankind.  I am ready to establish my Kingdom. 

According to the Malachy papal prophecies, you know that you, by taking on the name Francis di Pietro, have fulfilled the office of the last pope dubbed as Peter Romanus. According to the prophecy you are called to feed the people.  You are to feed them with the truth of the reality of the Kingdom of God, in which I am on the verge of establishing.  You are also commanded to tell the people that I, Christ am back, returned in a new body with a new name "Steven", the Crowned One.  You are commanded to help educate the people of my return and the hoped for liberty and righteousness to all the people that fear my name. 

You also should know that I am the "Dreadful Judge" that is mentioned in the Malachy prophecy, which also states that Rome will be destroyed.  I am here to execute judgment upon the entire Earth, and to educate the masses about taking cover prior to the hail descending from the sky, and the sun burning up the Earth. 

I am here to implement my universal mark upon humanity.  This will separate the sheep from the goats.  All who submit and wear my Seal of the Living God will be protected and blessed, those who refuse will be left to perish outside of safety. 

I command you to conceal not my identity and my message to the masses.  For the time is short and judgment is at hand.  You are to point them to me as the returned Christ. 

I expect a quick response from you confirming your obedience to me. 

The Lord Steven Christ

So that's pretty unequivocal.  I haven't heard what, if anything, Pope Francis responded, but I'm guessing that Lord Steven's demands were ignored given that I haven't heard anything about Francis resigning.  As far as the rest of his message, I have to say it's pretty nice of him to Educate the Masses before the hail descends and Earth gets burned up by the Sun, but I'm a little less enthusiastic about Perishing Outside of Safety.

I guess you can't have everything.

He also has other stuff about how he's in favor of the New World Order as long as he gets to be in charge, and that his followers need to get this complicated star-pattern design tattooed on the back of their right hands so he'll know who not to smite.  "Please also be wise and reverent in relating to me," Lord Steven writes, "because there are many proud and bashing people online that do not understand who they are relating to."

Here's Lord Steven's seal, in case you are interested in a hand tattoo.

Then there's his diatribe against Alex Jones, because apparently Lord Steven is of the opinion that like the Highlander, amongst the wingnuts There Can Only Be One.  He says that Alex Jones is a "child," and that it'd help us to see that if Alex would dress up in a bib and a frilly bonnet and hold a rattle.

Which is a mental image that will forever haunt my nightmares.

So anyhow, the whole thing is highly entertaining, in a weird, performance-art sort of way.  I strongly recommend watching some of the videos.  I watched one of them, after fortifying myself with a glass of scotch, and only twice had to pause it and put my head down on my desk to recover.  After a second glass of scotch, though, some of it actually started to make sense, so I decided I'd better either stop watching or stop drinking.

Which was a rather easy choice to make, honestly.

But I felt obliged to pass along the website to my readers, in the hopes that you'll find it as engaging as I did.  Unless, of course, you're a "proud and bashing person," in which case you'll probably just roll your eyes and stop watching.

Honest vulgarity

*Note to the more sensitive members of the studio audience: as the subject of this post is profanity, there's gonna be some profane language herein.  Be thou forewarned.*

My dad had a rather ripe vocabulary, probably largely due to the 29 years he spent in the Marine Corps.  My mother, on the other hand, was strait-laced to the point that even saying the word "sex" in her presence resulted in a raised eyebrow and the Fear-Inducing Stare of Disapproval.  My dad solved this problem by inventing new swear words (such as "crudbug") or repurposing actual words for swearing (such as "fop").  When my mom would get on my dad's case about it, he would respond, completely deadpan,"Those aren't vulgar words, Marguerite," which was true in detail if not in spirit.

It's probably obvious by this juncture that I take after my dad a lot more than my mom.  I tend to have a pretty bad mouth, a habit I have to be careful about because my job involves guiding Tender Young Minds (although I think I could make a pretty good case that most of those Tender Young Minds have a worse vocabulary than I do).  But by this point in my life, my mom's litany of "the only people who need to use vulgar language are the ones who don't have any better words in their vocabulary to say" is ringing pretty hollow.  I may have a lot of faults, but I'm damn sure that a poor vocabulary is not amongst them.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I tend to use swear words on two occasions -- for the humor value, and when I'm mad.  And to me, those are two very valid instances in which to let fly.  I still recall the great jubilation I felt when as a graduate student I first ran across John J. McCarthy's seminal paper on the linguistics of swearing, "Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation," in which we find out the rules governing inserting the word "fucking" into another word, and thus why it's okay to say "abso-fucking-lutely" but no one says "ab-fucking-solutely."

Even more cheering was the paper I just read yesterday by Gilad Feldman, Huiwen Lian, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell called "Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty" in which we find out that habitual swearers tend to be more honest, and which also should be the winner of the 2017 Clever Academic Paper Title Award.  The authors write:

There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty.  These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes and are often considered to be positively related.  On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty.  In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. We examined profanity and honesty first with profanity behavior and lying on a scale in the lab, then with a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook, and finally with profanity and integrity indexes for the aggregate level of U.S. states.  We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and with higher integrity at the society level.

Besides the general finding that profanity is positively correlated with honesty, I thought the variation in profanity use state-by-state was absolutely fascinating.  Connecticut had the highest levels of swearing, followed by Delaware, New Jersey, Nevada, and New York (not too goddamn shabby, fellow New Yorkers, and I'm proud to have done my part in our state's fifth-place finish).  Utah came in dead last, followed by Arkansas, Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee.  One has to wonder if religiosity has something to do with this, given the bible-belt status of most of the states at the bottom of the pile, but establishing any sort of causation was beyond the scope of this study.

Okay, so I'm coming across as self-congratulatory here, but I still think this research is awesome.  Given the amount of grief I got from my mom about my inappropriate vocabulary when I was a teenager, I think I'm to be allowed a moment of unalloyed pleasure at finding out that I and other habitual swearers are more likely to be honest.  So while I'll still have to watch my mouth at school, it's nice to know that my turning the air blue at home when I wallop my shin on the coffee table is just my way of honestly expressing that bone bruises hurt like a motherfucker.

Deadly pseudoscience

In 2012, a 19-month-old boy named Ezekiel Stephan spiked a fever and was obviously in distress.  His parents, a British Columbian couple named David and Collet Stephan, decided not to seek medical attention for their child, instead treating him with "natural" and "alternative" treatments such as extracts of hot pepper, garlic, onion, and horseradish.

The little boy had bacterial meningitis.  By the time they decided to get the boy to the emergency room, he had lapsed into a coma, and hours later he died.

The Stephans were arrested and tried for "failing to provide necessities of life for their child."  David Stephan was said to be "completely unremorseful" and was sentenced to four months in jail.  Collet was put under house arrest for three months.  Both were ordered to perform 240 hours of community service.

And now, the Stephans have gone to Prince George, British Columbia to promote "natural remedies" for Truehope Nutritional Support, Inc., a company founded by his father.  Truehope's EMPowerPlus is one of the "remedies" that "assists with brain function" that they gave to their child shortly before he died.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Dave Fuller, owner of Ave Maria Specialties, a "holistic health" store that carries Truehope products, seems to give nothing but a shoulder shrug with respect to the Stephans' actions.  "Who am I to say that just because something happened that was an accident the guy regrets — his son died — that he shouldn't have a job?" Fuller said.

Let's be clear here.  This was not an accident.  Bacterial meningitis is a horrible disease, but caught early enough, is treatable.  This couple deliberately ignored their little boy's increasingly severe symptoms in favor of quack "remedies," rejecting modern medicine for alt-med bullshit.  And as a result, their child died.

Unfortunately, this abandonment of science in favor of pseudoscience is becoming increasingly common.  The medical researchers are labeled as shills for "Big Pharma," and their data is rejected as inaccurate or outright fabrication, designed to "keep us buying drugs" or "keep us sick," and any information about low efficacy or side effects is allegedly covered up.

In fact, we're one of the healthiest societies the world has ever seen.  Most of the diseases that killed our great-grandparents' generation are now unheard of (how many people do you know have had diphtheria?).  And yet there are people who want to reject everything that modern medical research has given us in favor of the same kinds of remedies our ancestors used -- that didn't work very well back then, and still don't work now.

It's this same idea that is driving Donald Trump's links to the anti-vaxx movement, most recently his request of a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an anti-vaxxer who hides behind the "we just want safe vaccines" half-truth -- and Kennedy is now apparently going to head up a "vaccine safety board" to further investigate such nonsense as the link between vaccines and autism, which has been studied every which way from Sunday and always results in no correlation whatsoever.

All of this gives the impression that we need oversight because at the moment vaccines and other medications are simply thrown out willy-nilly by the medical researchers with no vetting at all, and that now we'll finally have someone making sure we're protected from the evils of Big Pharma.  Of course, nothing could be further from the truth; there is already the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (which has been around for fifty years) which oversees the testing and evaluation of vaccines and provides data to the CDC regarding efficacy and potential side effects.  The same is true for other medications; there is a rigorous set of tests each drug has to undergo, first on animal models and then (if they look promising) on human volunteers, before they are approved by the FDA.

That doesn't mean the process is foolproof.  Humans are fallible, data can be misinterpreted, experiments can fall prey to unintended sample bias.  There's no doubt that the profit motive in the pharmaceuticals and health insurance industries has led to price inflation for medications.  But the drugs themselves are, by and large, safe and effective, and sure as hell are better than horseradish extract for treating meningitis.

But the step from "the system has some flaws and could use reform" to "reject all modern medicine in favor of roots and berries" is all too easy a step for some people, and in the case of the Stephans, it resulted in their son's death.  And, more appallingly, they're still hawking the same stuff despite a very real test case establishing that it's worthless.

The bottom line: science isn't perfect, but as a means of determining the truth, it's the best thing on the market.  And also, the trenchant comment from Tim Minchin's performance piece "Storm:"  "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

Sifting fact from fiction

President-elect Donald Trump's latest ploy, any time he is criticized in the press, is to claim that what they're saying is "fake news."  (That, and to threaten to revoke their right to cover his speeches.)

Five days ago, he tweeted (of course, because that's how adults respond to criticism) that the Russian dossier alleged to have compromising information on him was "fake news and crap."  The, um, interaction he is alleged to have had with some Russian prostitutes was likewise "fake news, phony stuff, it did not happen."  About CNN, he said the "organization’s terrible...  You are fake news."  He's banned reporters from The Washington Post from attending his events, calling it "incredibly inaccurate... phony and dishonest."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There are two things that are troubling about this.

One is that Trump himself has been responsible for more than one demonstrably false claim intended to do nothing but damage his opponents.  Kali Holloway of AlterNet found fourteen, in fact.  Trump either created himself, or was responsible for publicizing, claims such as the following:

• Barack Obama was a Kenyan Muslim and never attended Columbia University
• Hillary Clinton was covering up a chronic debilitating illness and was too sick to serve
• Ted Cruz's father was involved in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy
• Thousands of Muslims in and around New York City had a public demonstration to cheer the events of 9/11
• Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered
• 97% of the murders in the United States are blacks killing other blacks (when confronted on this blatantly false claim, he said, "It was just a retweet... am I going to check every statistic?")
• Millions of votes in the presidential election were cast illegally
• Climate change is a Chinese hoax
• Vaccines cause autism -- and that the doctors opposing this fiction deliberately lied to cover it up

And so on and so forth.

So Trump calling out others for fake news should definitely be an odds-on contender for the "Unintentional Irony of the Year" award for 2017.

The more upsetting aspect of this, however, is that Trump is implying that you can't trust anything on the media -- except, of course, what comes out of his mouth.  The implication is that nothing you see on the news or read in the newspaper is true, that the default stance is to say it's all fake.

This is a profoundly disturbing claim.  For one thing, as I've said many times before, cynicism is no more noble (or correct) than gullibility; disbelieving everything is exactly as lazy and foolish as believing everything.  For another, the media are really our only way of finding out what is happening in the world.  Without media, we would not only have no idea what was going on in other countries, our own government would be operating behind a smokescreen, their machinations invisible to everyone but those in on the game.

Which is a fine way to turn a democracy into a dictatorship.

There is some small kernel of truth to the accusation, however; it is true that all media are biased.  That CNN and MSNBC slant to the left and Fox and The Wall Street Journal slant to the right is so obvious that it hardly bears mention.  To jump from there to "everything they say is a lie," however, is to embrace a convenient falsehood that allows you to reject everything you hear and read except for what fits with your preconceived notions -- effectively setting up your own personal confirmation bias as the sine qua non of understanding.

The truth, of course, is more nuanced than that, and also far more powerful.  We are all capable of sifting fact from fiction, neither believing everything nor rejecting everything.  It's called critical thinking, and in these rather fractious times it's absolutely... well, critical.  As biologist Terry McGlynn put it, "When we teach our students to distinguish science from pseudoscience, we are giving them the skills to identify real and fake journalism."

I won't lie to you.  Sorting fact from fiction in the media (or anywhere else) is hard work, far harder than simply accepting what we'd like to believe and rejecting what we'd like to be false.  But it's possible, and more than that, it's essential.  Check sources -- even if (especially if) they're from your favorite media source.  Check them using sources that have a different slant.  Go to the original documents instead of merely reading what someone else has written about them.  Apply good rules of thumb like Ockham's Razor and the ECREE (Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence) principle.  Pay special attention to claims from people who have proven track records of lying, or people who are making claims outside of their area of expertise.

Donald Trump's snarling of "fake news, phony journalism" every time he's criticized should immediately put you on notice that what he's saying is questionable -- not (again) that it should be disbelieved out of hand, but that it should be scrutinized.  Over the next four years, people on both sides of the aisle are going to have to be on guard -- never in my memory has the country been so polarized, so ready to begin that precipitous slide into sectarian violence that once begun is damn near impossible to halt.  Our leaders are showing no inclination to address the problems we face honestly and openly -- so it falls to us as responsible citizens to start sifting through their claims more carefully instead of simply accepting whatever half-truths or outright lies fit our preconceived notions.

Pajama game

So the latest alt-med health craze is: high-tech pajamas.

I'm not making this up.  Under Armour has just released a Tom Brady-endorsed line of "Athlete Recovery Sleepwear," which according to the advertisement works as follows:

Far Infrared is a type of energy on the infrared spectrum that has several benefits for the human body.  TB12 technology was developed to harness it even when you’re resting. The soft bioceramic print on the inside of the garment absorbs the body’s natural heat and reflects Far Infrared back to the skin.  This helps your body recover faster, promotes better sleep, reduces inflammation, and regulates cell metabolism.

The main problem with this is that reflecting heat back to your body is what a good blanket will do.  It's entirely possible that ceramic-impregnated cloth does it more efficiently, but I'm not convinced that you're going to get any health benefit out of fancy pjs any more than you would out of a nice down comforter.

NOT Tom Brady pajamas.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

To be fair, there has been some research on the effects of far infrared on health.  Some of the results were suggestive -- especially those linking far-infrared sauna use with lowered inflammation -- but the main study I've seen cited has a good many woo-ish bits, such as the following:

For FIR used as a therapeutic modality the alternative terms “biogenetic radiation” and “biogenetic rays” have been coined and widely used in the popular literature. FIR wavelength is too long to be perceived by the eyes, however, the body experiences its energy as a gentle radiant heat which can penetrate up to 1.5 inches (almost 4 cm) beneath the skin.  FIR energy is sufficient to exert rotational and vibrational modes of motion in bonds forming the molecules (including the water molecules) as well as resonate with cellular frequencies.

What, exactly, does "resonating with cellular frequencies" mean?

Then there's this site, which is so loony that it falls into the "not even wrong" category.  Here's an excerpt long enough to give you the general gist, but not so long that you'll kill valuable brain cells by reading it:

FIR has vast penetrating and healing powers.  You know that if the Astronauts are taking advantage of the power of Far Infrared by using it in their Space Suits, there has got to be some value to it.  FIR emitting Bio Ceramic mineral compounds are even used to line the inside of their space shuttle to replicate the energy of sunlight.

We're also told that far infrared rays are "unique in that they travel in straight lines" (like all electromagnetic radiation, actually); that they "vibrate at the same frequency as the human body;" that they are "drug-free;" that they "reduce the acidity of the body" and that "a more alkaline body is healthier;" and that they "help heal burns and reduce scaring [sic]."

Well, I don't know about you, but that all sounds pretty convincing to me.

The difficulty of all of this is that the First Law of Thermodynamics, which is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, indicates that any heat reflection you get from ceramic pajamas is not going to introduce any more energy into your person than the amount you lost to radiation in the first place.  Like I said, if you're cold at night, get a blanket.

I haven't mentioned the fact that the Under Armour Athlete Recovery Sleepwear will set you back $144.98, an expense that could be obviated entirely by doing what I do, which is ditching the pajamas entirely.  That may have been too much information, but it's probably still worth it if I've saved you 145 bucks.

So in summary: there may be some small benefit to wearing Tom Brady's pajamas, but even if the results are not the placebo effect they're unlikely to be anything you couldn't achieve other ways.  The benefits of far-infrared are still pretty dubious, and most of the positive results have been with far-infrared emitters -- like heat lamps and saunas.  If you're looking for a way to sleep better, put your money into a more comfortable mattress instead.  And for cryin' in the sink, don't fall for the whole "resonating with your body's cellular frequency" bullshit.

Although it could be worse.  They could have mentioned "quantum."

Schadenfreude

There's a natural human tendency to want the people who hurt us to suffer.  It's not nice, it's not productive, but it's pretty universal.

And now some psychologists have demonstrated that there is a neurological underpinning to our love of schadenfreude.

David S. Chester and C. Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky Department of Psychology set up a group of 156 test subjects to have the opportunity to gain (harmless) revenge for perceived hurts.  Each of the subjects was instructed to write an essay on a personal subject, and the essays were traded among the group for feedback. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, some of the feedback wasn't from other test subjects -- instead, the researchers had substituted their own, and harsh, feedback.  ("One of the WORST essays I've ever read," for example.)

The participants took a survey to rate their mood before and after the feedback.  After receiving an awful response, test subjects said (understandably) that their mood suffered.  But then the researchers allowed the recipients of bad feedback to use a computer simulation to stick pins in a voodoo doll symbolizing the person who had trashed their essay, and found that when they did that, their mood recovered -- almost to pre-feedback levels.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A second experiment refined the response even further.  A group of 154 people were given a pill -- a placebo, of course -- but told that the pill would have two effects: enhancing their cognitive abilities, and stabilizing their mood.  They were then allowed to play a simple computer game, a three-person ball-passing game.

What they didn't know -- in addition to the fact that they'd been given a placebo -- was that they weren't playing against other humans, they were playing against a computer that had either been programmed to ignore them most of the time (the ball gets passed mostly between the other two "participants") or to play fair (the ball gets passed equally among all three).

After playing that game, and either getting frustrated and ignored or not, they were told to play a second game, involving being the fastest to press a button.  This time, however, the slowest player received an annoying burst of noise through headphones.  And the fastest player got a perk -- (s)he was able to adjust the volume to determine how badly the slowest player got penalized.

Both the players that had been treated fairly in the first game, and those who had been treated unfairly but given a "mood stabilizer," felt no need to adjust the volume.  But the ones who had been treated unfairly and not given the "mood stabilizer" indulged their schadenfreude to the hilt, cranking the sound up to 100 decibels.

"Together, these findings suggest that the rejection–aggression link is driven, in part, by the desire to return to affective homeostasis," Chester and DeWall write.  "Additionally, these findings implicate aggression’s rewarding nature as an incentive for rejected individuals’ violent tendencies."

The researchers emphasized that they were not recommending revenge as a way of improving your mood, and suggested that other options (such as meditation or reconciliation) might actually work better.  But they found that the old adage "revenge is sweet" is uncannily accurate.

So there you are.  Another rather humbling feature of human psychology.  What I find most fascinating about all of this is not that we like to see those who have hurt us suffer -- that's not all that surprising, frankly -- but that when told we're being given something that will stabilize our mood, our desire for revenge evaporates.  Illustrating once again the rather terrifying fact of how easily manipulable we are.  We have undeserved confidence in our impulses, motives, and justifications -- when in fact, a more reasonable stance considering the research is to doubt pretty much everything we feel.

Speaking truth to power

My mother's grandfather, Joseph Meyer, was one of a small community of French Jews near Donaldsonville, Louisiana.  His family, like many Jewish families, had their names changed in the 19th century -- Joseph's paternal grandparents were born Schillen Lévy and Mindel Bloch in Dauendorf, Bas-Rhin département, Alsace, France.  But the French authorities decided their names were too Jewish-sounding, and altered them by decree to Joseph and Minette Meyer.

Some of my Bloch and Lévy relatives chose to stay in Alsace, and a couple of generations further along one of my Bloch cousins, Céline Bollack, was born in the little town of Wintzenheim in 1893.  When the Nazis rose to power, Céline and her husband, Armand Simon, became involved in the French Resistance.  They passed out anti-Nazi literature, worked to organize people to fight the German infiltration into France, and even as circumstances looked darker and darker, would not be silenced.

In spring of 1944 they were in the town of Brive-le-Gaillarde, in the département of Corrèze in south-central France.  Brive-le-Gaillarde was a hub of the Resistance, and in fact had been the home of Resistance fighter Edmond Michelet (who was imprisoned at Dachau, contracted typhus, but survived both).

Armand and Céline were not so lucky.  They were arrested along with their fifteen-year-old daughter Irène in Brive-le-Gaillarde on April 4, 1944 for sedition and agitation (and not least because they were Jewish themselves).  They were transferred to a holding camp in Drancy, northeast of Paris, and on April 29 were part of Convoy 72 from Drancy to Auschwitz.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers.  There were 1,004 men, women, and children on Convoy 72.  Only 100 of them were chosen to work in the camp; the other 904 were gassed.

Armand, Céline, and Irène Simon were among the 904 executed shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz.

It bears mention, however, that even of the 100 who were allowed to live after arriving in the camp, only 38 survived to the liberation of the death camp on January 27, 1945.

What always strikes me about the Nazi atrocities is the complicity of ordinary folks.  It is easy enough to imagine horrific things being done by people who are truly evil; what is hard to wrap my brain around is how thousands of regular people, with families and friends and hobbies and jobs and pets, not only sat idly by while the Nazis arrested their neighbors, but actively helped.  These are the people who became informants, prison guards, collaborators.

These are the people without whom the Holocaust would never have happened.

I would like to say that such atrocities could never happen again.  But I see the same things going on today -- ordinary folks excusing elected officials for saying and doing terrible things; ridiculing, denigrating, or threatening people who speak up; agitating anger against those who look different or think differently.  If you believe that such behavior couldn't escalate into violence and oppression, if you think we've learned our lesson from the horrors of World War II, you're fooling yourself.  Those same tendencies are still with us, waiting to be whipped into a frenzy by leaders who gain power from inciting hate, making us afraid, and teaching us to distrust the truth.

The only way to stop this is to speak up and continue speaking up.  Such acts of courage are risky; my cousin Céline and her husband and daughter paid for their resistance with their lives.  But the risks -- whether they are minor ones such as ridicule and condemnation, or major ones such as imprisonment or execution -- do not abrogate our responsibility to stand up for what is right.

When I have attended Passover celebrations and the time comes for remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust, I have spoken the names of Céline, Armand, and Irène Simon along with the words "May they never be forgotten."  But I'll go a step further.  May we never lose our courage to do what they did, to speak truth to power.  We must not simply remember the ones who gave their lives for a noble cause, but be like them --  be unafraid to put ourselves in harm's way to stop those who would see our country and our world once again descend into a maelstrom of hatred, violence, and despair.

I owe most of what I know about my cousin and her family to the research of my dear friend Dr. Diana Wagner, Holocaust Educator at Salisbury University (Maryland).  She has been working with the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center to hand-transcribe hundreds of documents related to the Holocaust, and to make those documents available through the World Memory Project.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Diana for not only my personal knowledge about my own family, but for all of the hours she has put in to make sure that these stories truly will never be forgotten -- and to help us to vow that we will never let such things happen again.