Ancient Egyptian helicopters

I find it amusing to note how often woo-woo headlines are phrased as questions, e.g. "Did Aliens Build Stonehenge?"  "Does A Plesiosaur Live In The Hudson River?"  "Is Graceland Haunted By Elvis's Ghost?"

I live in constant hope that one day, I'll open one of these articles, and the entire article will consist of one word: "NO."  It hasn't happened yet, but it's this sort of cheery thought that keeps me going.

I thought for sure that would be the case this morning, when I took a look at an article entitled "Mysteries of Abydos: Egyptian Flying Machines?"  The article that followed (1) did not say "NO" anywhere, and (2) sadly, was serious, featuring the following photograph, a close-up of a panel from the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt:

There then follows some fairly hysterical (in every sense of the word) descriptions about how the Ancient Egyptians apparently spent a great deal of time zooming about in helicopters, because there is clearly one depicted here.  There is, according to the author, also a submarine and a Back to the Future-style hoverboard shown on the panel, as well as several other "futuristic craft."

Now, at first I was optimistically certain that this had to be an isolated phenomenon; no one, with the exception of the author of the article, could possibly take this seriously.  Sadly, I was mistaken.  I did a bit of research, and was appalled to find that this panel is one of the main pieces of "evidence" used by the von Däniken Descent Of The Gods cadre to support their conjecture that the Earth was the alien version of Grand Central Station three thousand years ago.  Amongst the ancient-aliens crowd, the Abydos helicopter is apparently hugely popular, not to mention amongst those who think that Stargate is a historical documentary.

Which may well be the same people.

The interesting thing is that the whole thing was adequately explained years ago; a French UFO aficionado named Thierry Wathelet took the time to query some Egyptologists about the panel, and put together a nice explanation.  Several of the Egyptologists, evidently fed up with all of the nonsense that has grown up around Egyptian archaeology, told Wathelet to piss off, but a few of them were kind enough to give him detailed information about how the panel had been created, and what it meant.  The simple answer: the apparent helicopter is a palimpsest -- a place where a written text was effaced or altered to make room for new writing.  The "helicopter" is a combination of (at least) two hieroglyphs, and the fact that it looks a bit like an aircraft a complete coincidence.  Wathelet quotes an email he received from Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama:

It was decided in antiquity to replace the five-fold royal titulary of Seti I with that of his son and successor, Ramesses II. In the photos, we clearly see "Who repulses the Nine Bows," which figures in some of the Two-Ladies names of Seti I, replaced by "Who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries," a Two-Ladies name of Ramesses II.  With some of the plaster that once covered Seti I's titulary now fallen away, certain of the superimposed signs do indeed look like a submarine, etc., but it's just a coincidence.   Well, hallelujah, and kudos to Wathelet for putting the whole thing together, and on a UFO site, no less.  Now, if a UFOologist can summon up this kind of skeptical facility, it shouldn't be that hard for the rest of us, right?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be "no," and I base this on the fact that my perusal of the first few pages of the 787,000 hits I got from Googling "Abydos helicopter" seemed to be mostly in favor of the theory that the ancient Egyptians spent a good bit of their time sightseeing from the air.  So I guess my search will have to continue for an article whose headline asks a question, and the article itself just says, "No" (or even better, "What are you, a moron?  Stop fucking around on the internet and go learn some critical thinking skills.").  Until then, at least one more ridiculous woo-woo theory has been laid to rest -- at least for the seeming minority of folks who take the time to evaluate the evidence skeptically and scientifically.

The voice of truth

Having been a blogger for seven years -- the fact of which I find a little astonishing -- I am well aware of the difficulty of coming across with the right emotional tone in writing.

Especially given the fraught nature of many of the topics I address, I'm sure that my words sometimes elicit strong emotions.  (Cf. the post I did a couple of days ago on hate mail.)  In some cases, the ire is probably justified; perhaps I stepped on your toes about some dearly-held belief of yours, which is bound to raise people's hackles.

On the other hand, I am often afraid that what I'm saying will be misconstrued, not because of the words themselves, but because of the inherent deficiency of the written word in representing the writer's motivations and emotional content accurately.  It's why emails so often generate misunderstandings; it's also why people often feel freer to be nasty online than face-to-face.  When we lack the visual cues of people's facial expressions and body language, we not only are more prone to misinterpreting what people's words mean, we sometimes feel less inhibited about saying things we'd never dream of saying if the person was standing right in front of us.

But apparently you don't even need to see the person's face to diminish this tendency.  A recent experiment by Juliana Schroeder of the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley, and Michael Kardas and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, has shown that all you need to add is a voice.

In "The Humanizing Voice: Speech Reveals, and Text Conceals, a More Thoughtful Mind in the Midst of Disagreement," that appeared at PubMed a couple of weeks ago, the researchers showed that you're more receptive to viewpoints you disagree with, and less judgmental about the people stating them, if you hear those statements spoken rather than simply reading them in text form.

The authors write:

A person's speech communicates his or her thoughts and feelings.  We predicted that beyond conveying the contents of a person's mind, a person's speech also conveys mental capacity, such that hearing a person explain his or her beliefs makes the person seem more mentally capable-and therefore seem to possess more uniquely human mental traits-than reading the same content.  We expected this effect to emerge when people are perceived as relatively mindless, such as when they disagree with the evaluator's own beliefs.  Three experiments involving polarizing attitudinal issues and political opinions supported these hypotheses.  A fourth experiment identified paralinguistic cues in the human voice that convey basic mental capacities.  These results suggest that the medium through which people communicate may systematically influence the impressions they form of each other.  The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice.

Which is fascinating, if a little unsurprising.  After all, we are social primates, and we evolved in a context of living in groups in which communication was always face-to-face.  We're exquisitely sensitive to subtleties of expression (nicknamed microexpressions), often on a completely subconscious level.  Experiments have shown that we use minor cues such as pupil dilation size to make judgments about attractiveness, and the imperceptibly tiny back-and-forth movements of the eye called microsaccades can give you information about emotional state and what you're paying attention to (even if you're trying to hide that fact).

[image courtesy of photographer Lydia Icerko and the Wikimedia Commons]

And as far as voices go, small differences of inflection can provide huge cues as to what the speaker's intent was.  Consider the following phrase: "She gave the money to him."  Now speak the words aloud, but the first time put the emphasis on the word "she," then on "gave," then on "money," then on "him."

Each one has a different implication, doesn't it?

So if we're reading what someone's written, we're losing access to the cues that might tell us such important information as what the person's motivations and emotional state was when they wrote it.  It's no wonder this leads to frequent misjudgments.  We're trying to parse a person's words based on incomplete data.

This should make us a little more cautious about deciding that we know what people mean when we read an email -- or a blog post.  Clear communication is one thing, and (being a writer) I'm all for that.  But no matter how clear we are, we're never going to be able to communicate emotional depth via the written word as well as we can in person.

So if you think your favorite blogger is being an asshole sometimes, you might want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

ManBatPig

Reports are coming in from KwaMbonambi, a village in the KwaZulu Natal District of South Africa, of a shapeshifting monster terrorizing small children.

The monster was first spotted by a seven-year-old, who reported that he was at school and was cornered by "a short man with a long beard" in the bathroom.  Instead of looking for a creepy child molester type, the boy's mother came to the only reasonable conclusion: her son was being visited by an evil spirit called a "Tokoloshe."

So I started looking through my top-secret Cryptozoology Files to see if I could find anything out about the Tokoloshe, or if this was just a one-off.

Once I looked into it, I kind of regretted opening that particular can of worms.

Apparently this is far from the first time such a creature has been seen.  Reports of a Tokoloshe visitation from Karoo District back in 2013 gave us a clearer picture.  About those sightings, local warrant officer Zandisile Nelani said, "The community says that the monster changes shape while you are looking at it."  He went on to say that the monster had started out as a man in a suit, but had changed to a pig and then to a bat.  He hastened to add that although the creature had scared a number of residents, no people or livestock had been harmed by it.

This incident reminded me, against my will of the "ManBearPig" episode of South Park, which I had forgotten about, and honestly, I kind of wish it had stayed forgotten.

As little as two months ago, there were Tokoloshe sightings in Mozambique, where the creature was accused of running around having sex with married women, but was finally captured and paraded through the village.  Here are a couple of photographs:

Because that's not fake-looking at all.

There is a long-standing tradition of the Tokoloshe (or Thokolozi) from the southern parts of Africa.   Descriptions vary.  We have the little bearded man sighted by the first grader in KwaZulu Natal, and the wild-haired demon in the photograph above; but informed sources tell me that the Tokoloshe most often appears as a brown-skinned man, hairy all over, with only one buttock.  This last feature seems a little odd, and makes me wonder if he only has a right butt cheek, only a left one, or just one huge symmetrically-placed butt cheek, the last-mentioned option bringing up other anatomical considerations that I would prefer not to think about.  

On the other hand, the photograph of the sighting in Mozambique clearly shows a guy with the standard-issue two butt cheeks.  So not sure what to make of that.

Another characteristic of the Tokoloshe is that he is said to be very well-endowed in the reproductive equipment department.  Without going into graphic detail, let's just say that he is well-endowed to the point that tighty-whities would be pretty much out of the question.  Between that and having only one buttock, getting fitted at the tailor's must be a fairly humiliating experience, and possibly accounts for his legendary ill temper.

So we have here one very odd-looking dude.  But the key feature that identifies all three of the above sightings as the Tokoloshe is his shapeshifting ability.  The Tokoloshe carries around with him a magic pebble that allows him to become invisible and look like pretty much anything he wants to; in fact, he is said to be able to take the shape of many different animals, and also to fly.  So I think we have a definite match.

Being able to look like like whoever you want would also be handy given the Tokoloshe's legendary propensity for seducing women.  If you get accused of sleeping with another man's wife, you can just say, "It wasn't me, it was just the Tokoloshe impersonating me."  Which is pretty convenient.

What should the inhabitants of the villages visited by this evil spirit do?  One possibility is to make a Tokoloshe Repellant, but the problem is that the recipe I found requires Tokoloshe fat.  Obtaining that would seem to be a bit of a stumbling block, although one site I looked at said that it might be purchased from a muti, or purveyor of traditional medicine.  You can also appease the Tokoloshe by putting out food for him, but you must remember not to put salt in it; he apparently shares with many European spirit creatures the characteristic of not liking salt.  Sometimes witches subdue a Tokoloshe, and keep him around for their own purposes, about which I will leave you to speculate.  They do this by a combination of magic and luring him with food, and keep him docile by "trimming the hair over his eyes."

As for the mom of the first grader, she was counseled by Thandonjani Hlongwane, chairman of the KwaZulu Natal Traditional Healers' Association, to pay a hundred rand to get some "strong mufti" (magic) to keep the Tokoloshe away and protect her son.  The mother has taken her son out of school, a decision supported by the chairman of the local school board, Paradise Jali, who said, “We will establish a regular prayer programme.  That is the only way we can fight this.”

Because clearly fighting one superstition with a different superstition is the best way to handle things.

So the good news for the people of South Africa and Mozambique is that Tokoloshes mostly seem fairly harmless.  Apparently even the women who have been seduced by Tokoloshes report that the experience was pretty pleasant, and in fact there are some reports that women who have had sex with a Tokoloshe will never be satisfied by sex with their husbands and boyfriends.   In either case, the bad news (other than the obvious bad news to the aforementioned husbands and boyfriends) is that there doesn't seem to be much they can do about his presence.  They only have two choices, as far as I can see: either to put out food to appease a magical spirit with enormous junk and one buttock, or to try not being so damn gullible.

I know which one I think would be more effective.

A self-portrait drawn by others

As you might imagine, I get hate mail pretty frequently.

Most of it has to do with my targeting somebody's sacred cow, be it homeopathy, fundamentalist religion, astrology, climate change denial, or actual sacred cows.  And it seems to fall into three general categories:

• Insults, some of which never get beyond the "you stupid poopyhead fuckface" level.  These usually have the worst grammar and spelling.
• Arguments that are meant to be stinging rebuttals.  They seldom are, at least not from the standpoint of adding anything of scientific merit to the conversation, although their authors inevitably think they've skewered me with the sharp rapier of their superior knowledge.  (Sometimes I get honest, thoughtful comments or criticisms on what I've written; I have always, and will always, welcome those.)
• Diatribes that tell me what I actually believe, as if I'm somehow unaware of it.

I've gotten several of the latter in the last few weeks, and it's these that I want to address in this post, because they're the ones I find the most curious.  I've got a bit of a temper myself, so I can certainly understand the desire to strike back with an insult at someone who's angered you; and it's unsurprising that a person who is convinced of something will want to rebut anyone who says different.  But the idea that I'd tell someone I was arguing with what they believed, as if I knew it better than they did, is just plain weird.

Here are a handful of examples, from recent fan mail, to illustrate what I'm talking about:

• In response to a post I did on the vitriolic nonsense spouted by televangelist Jim Bakker: "Atheists make me want to puke.  You have the nerve to attack a holy man like Jim Bakker.  You want to tear down the foundation of this country, which is it's [sic] churches and pastors, and tell Christian Americans they have no right to be here."
• In response to my post on a group of alt-med wingnuts who are proposing drinking turpentine to cure damn near everything: "You like to make fun of people who believe nature knows best for curing us and promoting good health.  You pro-Monsanto, pro-chemical types think that the more processed something is, the better it is for you.  I bet you put weed killer on your cereal in the morning."
• In response to the post in which I described a push by EPA chief Scott Pruitt to remove scientists from the EPA advisory board and replace them with corporate representatives: "Keep reading us your fairy tales about 'climate change' and 'rising sea levels.'  Your motives are clear, to destroy America's economy and hand over the reigns [sic] to the wacko vegetarian enviro nuts.  Now that we've got people in government who are actually looking out for AMERICAN interests, people like you are crapping your pants because you know your [sic] not in control any more."
• And finally, in response to a post I did on the fact that the concept of race has little biological meaning: "You really don't get it, do you?  From your picture you're as white as I am, and you're gonna stand there and tell me that you have no problem being overrun by people who have different customs and don't speak English?  Let's see how you feel when your kid's teacher requires them to learn Arabic."

So, let's see.  That makes me a white English-only wacko vegetarian enviro nut (with crap in my pants) who eats weed killer for breakfast while writing checks to Monsanto and plotting how to tear down churches so I can destroy the United States.

Man, I've got a lot on my to-do list today.

I know it's a common tendency to want to attribute some set of horrible characteristics to the people we disagree with.  It engages all that tribal mentality stuff that's pretty deeply ingrained in our brains -- us = good, them = bad.  The problem is, reality is a hell of a lot more complex that that, and it's only seldom that you can find someone who is so bad that they have no admixture whatsoever of good, no justification for what they're doing, no explanation at all for how they got to be the way they are.  We're all mixed-up cauldrons of conflicting emotions.  It's hard to understand ourselves half the time; harder still to parse the motives of others.

So let me disabuse my detractors of a few notions.

While I'm not religious myself, I really have a live-and-let-live attitude toward religious folks, as long as they're not trying to impose their religion on others or using it as an excuse to deny others their rights as humans.  I have religious friends and non-religious friends and friends who don't care much about the topic one way or the other, and mostly we get along pretty well.

I have to admit, though, that being a card-carrying atheist, I do have to indulge every so often in the dietary requirements as set forth in the official Atheist Code of Conduct.

Speaking of diet, I'm pretty far from a vegetarian, even when I'm not dining on babies. In fact, I think that a medium-rare t-bone steak with a glass of good red wine is one of the most delicious things ever conceived by the human species.  But neither am I a chemical-lovin' pro-Monsanto corporate shill who drinks a nice steaming mug of RoundUp in the morning.  I'll stick with coffee, thanks.

Yes, I do accept climate change, because I am capable of reading and understanding a scientific paper and also do not think that because something is inconvenient to American economic expediency, it must not be true.  I'd rather that the US economy doesn't collapse, mainly because I live here, but I'd also like my grandchildren to be born on a planet that is habitable in the long term.

And finally: yes, I am white. You got me there.  If I had any thought of denying it, it was put to rest when I did a 23 & Me test and found out that I'm... white.  My ancestry is nearly all from western Europe, unsurprising given that three of my grandparents were of French descent and one of Scottish descent.  But my being white doesn't mean that I always have to place the concerns of other white people first, or fear people who aren't white, or pass laws making sure that America stays white.  For one thing, it'd be a little hypocritical if I demanded that everyone in the US speak English, given that my mother and three of my grandparents spoke French as their first language; and trust me when I say that I would have loved my kids to learn Arabic in school.  The more other cultures you learn about in school, the better, largely because it's hard to hate people when you realize that they're human, just like you are.

So anyway.  Nice try telling me who I am, but you got a good many of the details wrong.  Inevitable, I suppose, when it's a self-portrait drawn by someone else.  Next time, maybe you should try engaging the people you disagree with in dialogue, rather than ridiculing, demeaning, dismissing, or condescending to them.  It's in general a nicer way to live, and who knows?  Maybe you'll learn something.

And if you want to know anything about me, just ask rather than making assumptions.  It's not like I'm shy about telling people what I think.  Kind of hiding in plain sight, here.

Elegy for a dying language

In the village of Ayapa in southern Mexico there are two old men who don't much like each other, and despite the fact that they only live 500 meters away from each other, they haven't spoken in years.  One, Manuel Segovia, is described as being "a little prickly;" the other, Isidro Velazquez, is said to be stoic and a bit of a recluse.

All of which would be nothing more than a comical vignette into small-town life, except for the fact that they are the last two fluent speakers of the Ayapaneco language.  And, in fact, they have recently decided to put their feud behind them so they can work together to preserve it.

Ayapaneco is one of 68 indigenous languages in Mexico.  It is from the Mixe-Zoque family of languages, which are spoken by people of Olmec descent.  It survived the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish, but was finally done in by the institution of compulsory Spanish education in the 20th century and has been dwindling ever since.

My question of the day is: should we care?

Current estimates are that there are over 6,000 languages in daily use by native speakers (which excludes languages such as Latin, that are in daily use in schools but of which no one is a native speaker).  A great many of these are in danger of extinction -- they are spoken only by a handful of people, mostly the elderly, and the children aren't being raised fluent.  It's an eye-opening fact that 96% of the world's languages are spoken by 4% of the world's people, and the other 96% of the world's people speak the other 4% of the world's languages.

Run that one around in your head for a while.

On the top of the list is Mandarin, the most widely-spoken language in the world.  English, predictably, follows.  Of the people who speak neither Mandarin nor English, a substantial fraction speak Hindi, Spanish, Russian, or some dialect of Arabic.  Most of the rest of the world's languages?  Inconsequential -- at least in numbers.

15th century manuscript in medieval Gaelic [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Linguists, obviously, care deeply about this.  Michael Krauss, professor emeritus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has stated, "... it is catastrophic for the future of mankind.  It should be as scary as losing 90% of the biological species."

Is he right?  The argument for preserving languages is mostly derived from a cultural knowledge perspective; language is a way of encoding knowledge, and each different sort of code represents a unique body of that knowledge.  It's sort of an expanded version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that states that the language you speak alters how you think (and vice versa).  That argument has its points, but it is also specious in the sense that most languages can encode the same knowledge somehow, and therefore when the last native speaker of Ayapaneco dies, we won't have necessarily lost that culture's knowledge.  We may have lost the ability to figure out how that knowledge was encoded -- as we have with the Linear A writing of Crete -- but that's not the same as losing the knowledge itself.

The analogy to biodiversity is also a bit specious.  Languages don't form some kind of synergistic whole, as the species in an ecosystem do, where the loss of any one thread can cause the whole thing to come unraveled.  In fact, you might argue the opposite -- that having lots of unique languages in an area (such as the hundreds of mutually incomprehensible native languages in Australia) can actually impede cultural communication and understanding.  Species loss can destroy an ecosystem -- witness what's happening in Haiti and Madagascar.  It's a little hard to imagine language loss as having those same kinds of effects on the cultural landscape of the world.

Still, I can't help wishing for the extinction to stop.  It's just sad -- the fact that the number of native speakers of the beautiful Irish Gaelic and Breton languages are steadily decreasing, that there are languages (primarily in Australia and amongst the native languages of North and South America) for whom the last native speakers will die in the next five to ten years without ever having a linguist study, or even record, what it sounded like.  I don't have a cogent argument from a utilitarian standpoint abut why this is a bad thing.  It's aesthetics, pure and simple -- languages are cool.  The idea that English and Mandarin can swamp Twi and Yanomami is probably unavoidable, and it even follows the purely Dawkinsian concept of the competition between memes.  But I don't have to like it, any more than I like the fact that my bird feeders are more often visited by starlings than by indigo buntings.

Stopping the rumor machine

Twenty-six people are dead in yet another mass shooting, this one in a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, a small community 21 miles from San Antonio, Texas.

The killer, Devin Patrick Kelley, died near the scene of the crime.  He had been fired upon by a local resident as he fled the church, and was later found in his car, dead of a gunshot wound.  It is at present undetermined if the bullet that killed him came from the resident's gun, or if it was a self-inflicted wound.

Devin Patrick Kelley

Wiser heads than mine have already taken up the issue of stricter gun control, especially in cases like Kelley's.  Kelley was court martialled in 2012 for an assault on his wife and child, spent a year in prison, and was dishonorably discharged.  All I will say is that I find it a little hard to defend an assault rifle being in the hands of a man who had been convicted of... assault.

I also have to throw out there that the whole "thoughts and prayers" thing is getting a little old.  If thoughts and prayers worked, you'd think the attack wouldn't have happened in the first place, given that the victims were in a freakin' church when it occurred.

But that's not why I'm writing about Kelley and the Sutherland Springs attack.  What I'd like to address here is how, within twelve hours of the attack, there was an immediate attempt by damn near everybody to link Kelley to a variety of groups, in each case to conform to the claimant's personal bias about how the world works.

Here are just a few of the ones I've run into:

• Someone made a fake Facebook page for Kelley in which there was a photograph of his weapon, a Ruger AR-556, with the caption, "She's a bad bitch."
• Far-right-wing activists Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones immediately started broadcasting the claim that Kelley was a member of Antifa.  This was then picked up by various questionable "news" sources, including YourNewsWire.com, which trumpeted the headline, "Texas Church Shooter Was Antifa Member Who Vowed to Start Civil War."
• Often using the Alex Jones article as evidence, Twitter erupted Sunday night with a flurry of claims that Kelley was a Democrat frustrated by Donald Trump's presidential win, and was determined to visit revenge on a bunch of god-fearing Republicans.
• An entirely different bunch of folks on Twitter started the story that Kelley was actually a Muslim convert named Samir al-Hajeeda.  Coincidentally, Samir al-Hajeeda was blamed by many of these same people for the Las Vegas shootings a month ago.  It's a little hard to fathom how anyone could believe that, given the fact that both gunmen died at the scene of the crime.
• Not to be outdone, the website Freedum Junkshun claimed that Kelley was an "avid atheist" named Raymond Peter Littlebury, who was "on the payroll of the DNC."

And so on and so forth.

Look, I've made the point before.  You can't stop this kind of thing from zinging at light speed around the interwebz.  Fake news agencies gonna fake news, crazies gonna craze, you know?  Some of these sources were obviously pseudo-satirical clickbait right from the get-go.  I mean, did anyone even look at the name of the site Freedum Junkshun and wonder why they spelled it that way?

And for heaven's sake, Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones?  At this point, if Cernovich and Jones said the grass was green, I'd want an independent source to corroborate the claim.

So it's not the existence of these ridiculous claims I want to address.  It's the people who hear them and unquestioningly believe them.

I know it's easy to fall into the confirmation bias trap -- accepting a claim because it's in line with what you already believed, be it that all conservatives are violent gun nuts, all liberals scheming slimeballs, all Muslims potential suicide bombers, all religious people starry-eyed fanatics, all atheists amoral agents of Satan himself.  It takes work to counter our tendency to swallow whole any evidence of what we already believed.

But you know what?  You have to do it.  Because otherwise you become prey to the aforementioned crazies and promoters of fake news clickbait.  If you don't corroborate what you post, you're not supporting your beliefs; you're playing right into the hands of people who are trying to use your singleminded adherence to your sense of correctness to achieve their own ends.

At the time of this writing, we know next to nothing about Devin Patrick Kelley other than his military record and jail time.  We don't know which, if any, political affiliation he had, whether or not he was religious, whether he was an activist or simply someone who wanted to kill people.  So all of this speculation, all of these specious claims, are entirely vacuous.

Presumably at some point we'll know more about Kelley.  At the moment, we don't.

So please please please stop auto-posting these stories.  At the very least, cross-check what you post against other sources, and check out a few sources from different viewpoints.  (Of course if you cross-check Breitbart against Fox News, or Raw Story against ThinkProgress, you're gonna get the same answer.  That's not cross-checking, that's slamming the door on the echo chamber.)

Otherwise you are not only falling for nonsense, you are directly contributing to the divisiveness that is currently ripping our nation apart.

As the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman put it: "You must be careful not to believe something simply because you want it to be true.  Nobody can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself."

Tut tut

Most of you are probably familiar with the famous "King Tut's Curse."

The story goes that when British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the hitherto undisturbed tomb of King Tutankhamen, the "Boy King" of Egypt during the 18th dynasty, it unleashed a curse on the men who had desecrated it -- resulting in the deaths of (by some claims) twenty of the expedition members.

Tutankhamen was the son of the famous "Heretic King" Akhenaten, and died at the age of eighteen in 1341 BCE.  Some archaeologists speculate that he was murdered, but current forensic anthropology seems to indicate that he died of a combination of malaria and complications from a badly broken leg.

King Tutankhamen's death mask [image courtesy of photographer Carsten Frenzl and the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, shortly after Tut's tomb was opened, people associated with the expedition began to die.  The first was Lord Carnarvon, who had funded Carter's expedition, who cut himself badly while shaving and died shortly thereafter of sepsis from an infection.  While it's easy enough to explain a death from infection in Egypt prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, the deaths continued after the members of the expedition returned to London:

• Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, was found smothered in a Mayfair club.
• Bethell's father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from his seventh-floor flat -- where he had kept artifacts from the tomb his son had given him.
• Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the first victim Lord Carnarvon, died in a London hospital "of mysterious symptoms."
• Ernest Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, was found dead in his home shortly after arranging for the first public show of King Tut's sarcophagus. 

And so on.  All in all, twenty people associated with the expedition died within the first few years after returning to England.  (It must be said that Howard Carter, who led the expedition, lived for another sixteen years; and you'd think that if King Tut would have wanted to smite anyone, it would have been Carter.  And actually, a statistical study done of Egyptologists who had entered pharaohs' tombs found that their average age at death was no lower than that of the background population.)

Still, that leaves some decidedly odd deaths to explain.  And historian Mark Benyon thinks he's figured out how to explain them.

In his book London's Curse: Murder Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End, Benyon lays the deaths of Carter's associates in London -- especially Bethell, Westbury, Herbert, and Budge, all of which were deaths by foul play -- at the feet of none other than Aleister Crowley.

Crowley, the self-proclaimed "Wickedest Man on Earth," was a sex-obsessed heroin addict who had founded a society called "Thelema."  Thelema's motto was "Do what thou wilt," which narrowly edged out Crowley's second favorite, which was "Fuck anything or anyone that will hold still long enough."  His rituals were notorious all over London for drunken debauchery, and few doubted then (and fewer doubt now) that there was any activity so depraved that Crowley wouldn't happily indulge in it.

Aleister Crowley, ca. 1912 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of Crowley's obsessions was Jack the Ripper.  He believed that the Ripper murders had been accomplished through occult means, and frequently was heard to speak of Jack the Ripper with reverence.  Benyon believes that when Crowley heard about Howard Carter's discoveries, he was outraged -- many of Thelema's rituals and beliefs were derived from Egyptian mythology -- and he came up with the idea of a series of copycat murders to get even with the men who had (in his mind) desecrated Tutankhamen's tomb.

It's an interesting hypothesis.  Surely all of the expedition members knew of Crowley; after all, almost everyone in London at the time did.  At least one (Budge) was an occultist who ran in the same circles as Crowley.  That Crowley was capable of such a thing is hardly to be questioned.  Whether Benyon has proved the case or not is debatable, but even at first glance it certainly makes better sense than the Pharaoh's Curse malarkey.  Whether Benyon's explanation is right in all the details or not  is probably impossible at this point to prove, rather like the dozens of explanations put forward to explain the Ripper murders themselves.  But this certainly makes me inclined to file the "Mummy's Curse" under "Another woo-woo claim plausibly explained by logic and rationality."