The naughty naughty Nephilim

In further exploration of beliefs for which there is no evidence whatsoever, today we consider: the Nephilim.

What are the Nephilim, you might ask?  Well, amongst other things, they are the subject of Scott Alan Roberts' book, The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim: The Untold Story of Fallen Angels, Giants on the Earth, and Their Extraterrestrial Origins.  In order to save you the money of buying this book (even the Kindle edition costs $9.34), allow me to explain that the Nephilim are apparently the result of angels having sex with human women, which resulted in a race of giants.  The whole thing seems to have come out of a couple of lines in the bible, especially Genesis 6:4, "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward -- when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.  They were the heroes of old, men of renown."  They're mentioned in Numbers 13:33 as well: "We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim).  We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."

So, the Nephilim were big dudes, evidently.  Exactly how big is uncertain.  Be that as it may, Scott Alan Roberts has examined the evidence (two passages from the bible) and come to the only possible conclusion: the "angels" mentioned in Genesis 6:4 as the fathers of the Nephilim were outer space aliens, and the Great Flood happened to destroy these "demonic hybrids" and remove all traces of alien DNA from the human gene pool.

Oh, okay.  I mean, my only question would be: seriously?  You can tell all that from two bible passages? And I thought that angels didn't have sex, given that they don't have the required, um, equipment? I distinctly remember in a highly scientific documentary I saw, the movie Dogma, the angel Metatron drops his drawers and lo, it was revealed unto me that although he hath wings, he hath no wang.

But I digress.

Marcantonio Franceschini, The Guardian Angel (1716) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A complete lack of evidence, as I've stated before, never seems to discourage some people, and this hasn't stopped various folks from yammering on at length about the Nephilim, not to mention the sex lives of aliens and/or angels.  Take a look, for example, at this passage from the site Return of the Nephilim, which not only claims that the aliens had their way with human women back in the Bronze Age, but omigod it's still happening today:

Dr. John E. Mack, who needs no introduction to UFOlogists, has stated that the alien abduction scenario seems to be a program for the development of a hybrid race.  This very fact lends support to the theory that the abduction scenario is the modern resurgence of the Nephilim breeding program.  Pregnant women are abducted only to find the foetus has been removed from their womb.  In some cases they are reunited with their hybrid child in future abductions.  Men are forced to engage in sexual activity with hybrid females, or have their sperm removed from their bodies.  If there is any truth to theses alien abduction claims of literally thousands of people across the world the demonic plan of creating yet another hybrid race is already in action...  It seems pretty clear we may have entered “the Days of Noah”.

Okay, you biblical scholars correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Noah lived a while back.  So whatever we're entering now, it's not so much the "Days of Noah" as it is the "Days of a Helluva Long Time After Noah Bought the Farm."  And I don't know about you, but this is the first I've heard of guys being forced to have sex with "hybrid females;" and you'd think that if pregnant women suddenly woke up to find their babies had vanished, it would kind of make headlines, you know?  So once again, we run headlong into the speed bump of "no evidence."

Anyway, that's today's post about the naughty Nephilim, sneaking into your house to steal your sperm and/or your hybrid children, lo unto this very day.  The whole thing leaves me wondering if today's Nephilim are as big as the ones in the bible.  I'm thinking in particular of my younger son, who is 6' 7", and next to whom I verily seemeth as a grasshopper.  On the other hand, the hypothesis that he is a human/alien hybrid is confounded by the fact that he looks a lot like me, so the likelihood of his being anyone else's son is pretty slim.  And I can vouch for the fact that his mother is who she claims to be, i.e., not an alien.

At least, as far as I know.  Those aliens are pretty tricky.  Maybe my ex-wife is really from another planet.  Maybe I was abducted in 1982, and was held on board a UFO for sixteen years, and used as part of a captive breeding program.  It's as good an explanation for my first marriage as any other I can think of.

Tater treatment

One of the posts here at Skeptophilia that has garnered the most consistent attention is a piece I did back in 2013 about the catastrophically silly practice of putting onions in your socks when you're ill in order to "draw fever to your feet" (or "purify the blood" or "get rid of toxins" or a variety of other unsubstantiated magical-thinking type claims).

On the one hand, I'm a little distressed that this assertion is still out there, when anyone who has beyond a 9th grade science education should be able to recognize it as bullshit.  But on the other hand, at least some of the people who are doing a Google search for "onions socks fever" land on my website, and hopefully don't spend the next few days with their feet smelling even worse than usual.

So I was a little shocked to find out that the onion/socks claim has been superseded.  No, the alt-med crowd are now saying, you shouldn't put onions in your socks to get rid of your cold.  That would be silly.

What you should do is put potatoes in your socks.

Here's an example of this claim:

Growing up, my parents always used potatoes in our socks for fevers. This past year, I had a fever of 102 that wouldn't drop after 2 days. I put potatoes in the fridge for 30 minutes, then sliced them, put them in my socks and started a movie. By the end of the movie my temperature had dropped to 99.9 and the potatoes were baked! After this treatment, the fever did not rise again. Cheap and healthy cure.

Okay, if you had already had the fever for two days, chances are you were probably getting well in any case. This is a fine example of the Post Hoc Fallacy -- from the Latin "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" ("After this, therefore because of this"). Just because two things happened one after the other doesn't mean that the first one caused the second one.

Oh, and you can bake a potato by keeping it at 102 degrees for an hour and a half?  Hell, I wish I'd known that years ago.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But this loopy claim isn't even the weirdest iteration of the potatoes-in-socks thing.  I found a bunch of sites that said you're supposed to put not sliced potatoes, but grated potatoes into your socks.

Here are some variants on that theme:

• Wash one or two potatoes and grate them, without peeling. Apply this paste on the soles of your feet, and then put your socks on. The potato will absorb the temperature and improve your condition.
• Potatoes contain natural anti-inflammatory properties and enzymes that can help reduce a fever. To benefit from potatoes you need to mash or grate them and mix in some cold water before applying them to the forehead for about 10 to 15 minutes.
• Potatoes are a great ally when it comes to lowering fever. You can use them grated or sliced. One solution is to grate a potato and to fill with it the inside of a pair of socks.  You are advised to use cotton socks because a synthetic textile fibre may cause heating and you don’t want this in the case of fever. After you filled the socks with the grated potato, put your child’s socks on. 

Let me just clarify something. Even if potatoes did have magical anti-inflammatory enzymes, you would not gain anything by smooshing them all over your feet, for the very good reason that that's not how humans absorb nutrients. If you doubt this, the next time you have lasagna for dinner, instead of putting forkfuls into your mouth, put the lasagna dish on the floor and stick both feet into it.

Wait for a half-hour. My guess is after that time, you will notice two things:

1. You will still be hungry. 
2. Your family will be seriously pissed at you for sticking your feet into the dinner. 

So there's nothing to this claim, and it's a little disheartening that I even have to point this out. Just to forestall further idiocy, let me just preemptively state that you also can't treat arthritis by smearing peanut butter on your ass, or any other weird food + random body part = health claim you might see.

But that's not going to stop people from asserting it, and it will probably continue to generate hits on my blog, lo until the end of time. So thanks for that, anyhow.

By the pricking of my thumbs...

I tend to have a caveat emptor attitude toward a lot of things.

If you're considering something new -- whether to trust a claim about a medication or therapy, for example -- it's not like information isn't available.  You can always track down reliable data if you work at it.  Sometimes it's hard to sift the good information from the bullshit, but it's a skill that anyone can learn.

That's what critical thinking is all about.

So when people fall for claptrap, I can be a little unsympathetic at times.  If you've been hoodwinked by the latest scam psychic, well, maybe you shoulda known better.

Some claims, however, cross the line.  And I ran into one of those yesterday, a claim so catastrophically idiotic that it's hard to see how anyone could fall for it -- but which, if they do, could easily cost a loved one their life.

The claim is that you can treat (or at least minimize the damage from) a stroke by pricking a person's fingers.

The claim appeared at the site Health Freedoms Alliance, and if you don't believe me, you can check out the link provided.  On the other hand, if you are reluctant to add another count to the site's hit tracker, here's a direct quote about the seven steps you should follow if someone near you has a stroke:

1. Keep the needle — over the fire, a lighter or candle to sterilize it and then use it to prick the tips of all 10 fingers.
2. There is no specific acupuncture, it should only be a few millimeters from the nail.
3. Prick in a way that the blood can flow.
4. If blood does not start to drip, tighten and start squeezing in order to make the blood flow.
5. When all 10 fingers begin to bleed, wait a few minutes — you will see that the victim will come back to life!
6. If the victim’s mouth is distorted, massage his ears until they become red – which means blood has reached there.
7. Then prick the needle in the soft part of each ear, to fall two drops of blood from each ear. A few minutes later, the mouth would no longer be distorted.

Wait until the victim comes to normal, without any unusual symptoms, and then send him/ her to the hospital. 

This method of bloodshed to save the life is part of the traditional Chinese medicine, and the practical application of this method has proven it to be 100% efficient, since it helps people survive strokes.

Okay, yeah, you'd think people would know better.  Any one of my tenth grade intro biology students should know better.  Pricking a person's fingers has absolutely zero effect on a blood clot or aneurysm in the brain, which are the two most common causes of stroke.  It has been shown over and over that any delay in getting a stroke victim competent medical help increases the likelihood of irreversible brain damage.

And that delay would include messing around pricking a person's fingers and earlobes with a needle.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I'm stepping away from my usual caveat emptor stance, and will state for the record: any public media that makes claims like this is acting in a fashion that the word "irresponsible" doesn't even begin to cover.  You're free to dose yourself up with the latest homeopathic sugar pills, have your practitioner balance your chakras, and slather essential oils all over your body.  Have at it, you know?

But when you state a claim that might well cause some poor gullible soul to make a decision that could lead to a loved one's death, you've lost the right to a public forum.  I know it's probably impossible to do, but Health Freedoms Alliance, and any other sites that publish this foolishness, should be shut down permanently.

The final word on Zika

One of the posts that earned me the most hate mail was one I did a while back on the Zika virus, wherein I suggested that what the scientists were telling us -- namely, that the Zika virus was the cause of the recent upsurge in microcephaly in infants -- was the truth.

The alternate hypotheses -- that the birth defect was due to exposure to the insecticide pyriproxyfen, widely used to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito (which is the vector not only for Zika, but for chikungunya, yellow fever, and dengue fever), or even more outlandish, that the condition was caused by being bitten by genetically-modified Aedes mosquitoes -- I suggested were scientifically unsound and extremely unlikely borderline conspiracy theories.  The genetically-modified Aedes, in fact, were released as a method for reducing mosquito populations and therefore the spread of the diseases they carry, but that carried little weight with the people for whom "GMO" means "tool of the evil scientific establishment and Big Pharma for killing people and/or turning them into mindless automata."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well.  You'd have thought I was suggesting carpet bombing Fern Gully or something.  I was called credulous and brainwashed, and those were the generous responses.  Others suggested I was a stooge of the scientific establishment or a shill for Big Pharma, and was deliberately spreading misinformation to fool the general public into thinking that the scientists actually care about humanity.  As such, I was complicit in any damage they did, which according to some people who wrote to me, might include the extinction of the human race.

I didn't bother trying to disabuse my detractors of these opinions.  For one thing, I've found that people who believe something that fervently are seldom convinced by rational discourse.  All my objections would have done is convince them that they were onto something, despite the fact that recent trips to my mailbox have turned up zero Shill Payments to me from Big Pharma.

But time passed and the furor died down, and the more rabid of my readers went on to find other things about me to criticize.  But I just stumbled a couple of days ago across an article in the online science magazine Stat to the effect that, lo and behold...

... a recent exhaustive study has shown that microcephaly is due not to insecticides or GMO mosquitoes, but to the Zika virus itself.

Look, it's not like I wouldn't admit it if I was wrong.  It's been known to happen, and as much as it isn't exactly pleasant, I'll be up front about it and eat crow if necessary.  But here, the new study, conducted by a team of fourteen Brazilian doctors and scientists and published in the highly respected British medical journal The Lancet, is unequivocal.  The authors write:

We screened neonates born between Jan 15 and Nov 30, 2016, and prospectively recruited 91 cases and 173 controls.  In 32 (35%) cases, congenital Zika virus infection was confirmed by laboratory tests and no controls had confirmed Zika virus infections.  69 (83%) of 83 cases with known birthweight were small for gestational age, compared with eight (5%) of 173 controls.  The overall matched odds ratio was 73·1 (95% CI 13·0–∞) for microcephaly and Zika virus infection after adjustments.  Neither vaccination during pregnancy or use of the larvicide pyriproxyfen was associated with microcephaly.  Results of laboratory tests for Zika virus and brain imaging results were available for 79 (87%) cases; within these cases, ten were positive for Zika virus and had cerebral abnormalities, 13 were positive for Zika infection but had no cerebral abnormalities, and 11 were negative for Zika virus but had cerebral abnormalities...  We provide evidence of the absence of an effect of other potential factors, such as exposure to pyriproxyfen or vaccines (tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis, measles and rubella, or measles, mumps, and rubella) during pregnancy, confirming the findings of an ecological study of pyriproxyfen in Pernambuco and previous studies on the safety of Tdap vaccine administration during pregnancy.

"Importantly, this article provides the first evidence that exposure to the insecticide pyriproxyfen and vaccines administered during pregnancy were not associated with an increased risk of microcephaly," wrote Federico Costa and Albert Ko (of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute and Yale University School of Public Health, respectively) about the recent study.  "The biological plausibility of these two rumored causes was always weak in any case."

So that should be that, but of course you know it won't be.  Studies like this one don't convince the naysayers and conspiracy theorists; all they do is move the scientists who conducted it into the "evil and untrustworthy" column.  You have to wonder what would convince these people.  My guess is nothing.  As I've so often commented, you can't logic your way out of a position you didn't logic your way into.

I'm already bracing myself for another tsunami of hate mail, but hell, that's why I do what I do, right?  As punk rocker John Lydon put it, "If you're pissing people off, you know you're doing something right."

The return of "Dear David"

Regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall that a few months ago I did a piece on "Dear David," a highly creepy child ghost that was allegedly haunting a cartoonist and Twitterverse frequent flyer Adam Ellis.  "Dear David" was, Ellis discovered, the ghost of a child who had died when a shelf tipped over and crushed his skull, which evidently pissed him off but good.

Why this made Dear David determined to harass Ellis is unclear, but that's what happened.  Not only did the creepy kid with the malformed head show up in Ellis's dreams, he called Ellis's cellphone hundreds of times (caller ID couldn't figure out where he was calling from; which makes sense, given that hell has an unlisted number).  He scared the absolute shit out of Ellis's cat on more than one occasion.  Ultimately, Ellis moved to a different apartment, and for a time, things calmed down.

But unfortunately for Ellis, "Dear David" is back.

Ellis, understandably, is freaking out.  Here's his own commentary -- this is strung together from separate tweets, but makes a coherent narrative:

(L)ast week something started to happen.  Late on Wednesday, I woke up with a start and felt something strange, like something had just been watching me.  I turned on the light but I was alone.  Still, there was this a tangible feeling of... badness?  Everything felt wrong, sort of like when you have the flu and you wake up at night and can't really tell where you are for a minute.  It was a feeling I'm used to—it always accompanies David.  People tweet at me a lot saying he might just need help, but I'm certain that's not the case.  Every time he shows up, I feel a palpable sense of malice.  There's what I felt that night.  Malice.  Dread.  But still, I was alone.  And I was so tired, I wound up just going back to sleep.  I've been so exhausted recently I can barely function.

So he slept for a while, but was once again awakened when the feeling came back.  And he had another surprise waiting for him:

Just like before, I jolted awake hours later, feeling the same unease.  I turned on the light and hurried out of bed to get my phone from the bookcase.  There were probably 350 photos to scroll through.

350 photos, I might add, that Ellis claims not to have taken himself.  And he got a serious shock when he found that all of them were photos of Ellis, asleep in his bed.

In more than one of them, there is a small, ghostly figure standing next to his huddled form, or leaning over toward him.  I'll direct you to the website if you want to take a look at them, because I don't want to step on Ellis's right to the images he posted, but I will say that they are, to put it bluntly, really fucking creepy.  Ellis writes:

The vast majority of them were me sleeping in an empty room.  It's sort of dark but you can see me sleeping.  I'd left a couple night lights on just in case anything showed up, but for the first hundred or so photos it was just me in an empty room.  Then, suddenly, he was there.  Standing on the chair at the foot of the bed staring at me.  In the next photo, from a minute later, he seems to be staring straight up at the ceiling?  Just staring.   

Then he appears to collapse on the chair.  The next dozen photos are all the same.  He's completely lifeless.  At first I'd thought he was dead, which obviously doesn't make any sense.  I looked over at the chair half expecting him to still be there but it was empty.  But then, in the next photo, he's gone.  The room it totally empty again.  He's gone in the next several photos, too. 

I figured maybe that was it, but I kept swiping through the photos.  About 15 photos later, he was back, standing next to the bed.  It was just like the last time I saw him.  That's when my heart started to race.  I didn't want to look at the rest of the photos, but I knew I had to.  I swiped to the next photo and my heart sank into my stomach. 

He was on the bed.  Inches from me, staring down at me sleeping.

But that wasn't the worst.  Ellis continued to scroll through the photographs, and then got to the last one...

... which once again shows his sleeping form, but in the lower left hand corner is an extreme close-up of the side of someone's head, showing stringy, tousled hair and a malformed ear.

So yeah.  That falls clearly into the "oh, hell no" department for me.  I realize it's probably a hoax -- as I've pointed out many times, it doesn't take much skill to make some exceedingly creepy pics with Photoshop -- but it's a really well-done hoax.  It's simple, direct, and the images (however they were made) are completely shudder-inducing.

Especially the last one, which I seriously regret looking at.

James McBryde, illustration for the M. R. James short story "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come for You, My Lad" (1905) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So once again, we have evidence that being a skeptic does not render you immune from having the piss scared out of you by a good ghost story.  I have to say that whether it's fiction or not -- and acknowledging that it probably is -- Ellis is doing a really good job as a storyteller, getting his readers creeped out, waiting a while, then delivering a sucker punch when no one expects it.  And now, y'all will have to excuse me, because I've got to go get my cellphone...

... and make sure that no wandering evil ghosts with dented skulls have been using it during the night.

Requiem for a heart-stealer

Eight years ago, my younger son and I were sitting on the couch in the living room, laptop between us, looking through photographs on PetFinder.

About a year earlier, we'd lost our venerable old hound Arlo, and our other dog, an eccentric and wound-too-tight hound/border collie cross named Doolin, was clearly lonely.  So we decided to start looking around for dogs at local SPCAs.

Pretty soon, Nathan and I saw one that we both thought was cute, up at the Seneca County SPCA, only about fifteen miles north of us.

We showed the photograph to Carol, who was at first less than sanguine.

"I don't know," she said.  "He's kind of... funny looking."

Nathan and I insisted that he was cute, and that we go up and meet him.  Although, upon consideration, we had to admit that she was right.  He was kind of a funny-looking dog.  Square, stubby muzzle, curly tail, coat like a German shepherd, ears that cocked at a goofy angle when he was interested in something.

Even so, we thought he was worth a visit.  So about a half-hour later, we were in our car driving north, with Doolin riding shotgun.  She, of course, had to get along with whatever dog we got, so she had to have first right of refusal, as it were.

The lady who was staffing the SPCA that day told us this dog's rather horrid backstory.  He'd been badly abused, she said, ending with his owners moving away, leaving him tied to a tree, in an upstate New York November.  Leaving him, in other words, either to starve or freeze, whichever came first.  The neighbors heard him crying and rescued him, but they couldn't have a dog, so they brought him to the SPCA, where he lived for nine long months.

It's kind of understandable that no one took him home.  He was really fearful of anything new, naturally distrustful, and had a serious issue with anyone getting between him and food.  (A leftover, of course, from his being starved as a puppy.)  But the lady brought him out, he went nose to nose with Doolin...

... and both of them started wagging.  In fact, Doolin went into the doggy "play bow" -- something she almost never did.

So we were sold.  Shortly thereafter, he was in our car heading home with us.

I decided to name him Grendel.  I've always loved the tale of Beowulf, and feel a bit sorry for Grendel -- not quite human, not quite animal, sort of an unfortunate combination who doesn't fit in anywhere.  Grendel the dog was a little like a dozen or so breeds put in a blender, so it seemed appropriate.

Grendel on his first day in his forever home

He was kind of skittish at first, but it was amazing how quickly he responded to love and a warm, comfortable home.  He'd obviously never seen stairs before -- the door into our fenced back yard opens off the basement, so he had to go downstairs to go outside.  The first time, he looked terrified, and simply stared down the staircase, frozen to the spot, and barked.  I clipped on his leash, and dragged him down the stairs -- once.  He got to the bottom, and sort of went, "Oh.  That was easier than I thought."  And never had a problem with the stairs again.

It wasn't long before he had stolen our hearts.  Carol's comment: "I swear, this dog keeps getting cuter every day."  His favorite thing was playing with his rope toy:

Tugging on the end of that toy, he made noises that were terrifyingly fierce.  The closest approximation I can come to is that they sounded like the snarling of the Tasmanian Devil on Looney Tunes.  One time we had some friends over, and they were in the kitchen talking to Carol, and I picked up Gren's rope toy.  Seconds later, our friends came running into the room, because it sounded like Gren was tearing my face off.

It was all show, of course.  His personality gave him the nickname "Mr. Cupcake," one of dozens of names he ended up with.  He was totally attached to Carol and me, and when we were home, all he wanted was to be near us.

Not spoiled a bit.  Nope.  Nuh-uh.

One thing that surprised us was his ability to climb chain-link fences.  You'd never guess he was that agile, to look at him; he was -- and I say this with all affection -- the same basic shape and size as a fireplug.  But he got quite adept at scaling the fence and getting out, one time doing so an hour before the one and only tornado warning I've ever experienced in my 25 years in upstate New York.  The storm came roaring through -- no tornadoes near us, fortunately -- but Grendel evidently spooked and took off.  He'd escaped before, and always came back, usually covered with mud and very pleased with himself, but night came -- and no Grendel.

We searched the neighborhood.  Nothing.  We put up signs, went from door to door down our road.  (One kid looked at the photograph we had of him and said, "Oh, what a pretty dog!"  Carol and I looked at each other and said, "Um... not really.")

Three days went by, and we got a call from the SPCA in Watkins Glen, twenty miles down the road.  Grendel had been found in Burdett, a little village about ten miles away...

... after he climbed in someone's open car window at a mini-mart, and when the car's owner came out, he barked at them and wouldn't let them into their car.  They called Animal Control, who came down and lassoed him, and then looked through reports of missing dogs.  The guy who called us said, "Well, we have this dog, and we're pretty sure there couldn't be two dogs of this description, so we think he's yours."

So we went down and bailed him out.  I've never seen a dog so excited to be back home.

The years went by, and he slowed down some -- stopped climbing fences, spent more time snoozing on the couch, started getting a little gray around the muzzle.  Still kept being the huge presence in our lives, a funny-looking dog with an outsize personality (and who, I swear, did continue to get cuter and cuter).  Our routine revolved around him -- get up in the morning, let him out, put the coffee on, let him back in, let him into the bedroom so he could climb on the bed for snuggles, and so on.  But he always gave us far more than he took from us.  He still wanted little more than a warm bed, a bowl of dog chow, and cuddles.

Then, about two weeks ago, he stopped eating.  He'd always had a bit of a sensitive stomach, so we thought maybe it was the food.  We tried tempting him with canned food, then with cooked chicken and hot dogs.  At first he ate a little, then he pretty much gave up completely.  We brought him to the vet -- always a last resort with us, as the final remnant of the abuse he'd experienced as a puppy was a fear of being restrained.

An ultrasound, blood work, and urinalysis confirmed that he was in the middle of complete kidney failure.

The decision was clear, but it is still one of the hardest things I've ever done, to make that final call to the vet.  They were wonderful, kind, and understanding of the heartbreak we were experiencing.  I held him as he drifted off to sleep one last time, and we both wept as we said goodbye to the best dog I've ever had.

The house sure seems empty without him.  It's amazing how big a spot they hold in our lives.  Our redbone/bluetick coonhound mix, Lena, has been at a loss, wondering where her friend went.  We feel the same way.  I keep expecting to look over at the couch and see his earnest and rather silly face looking at me in perplexity, wondering why I'm not petting him.

That's the thing about pet ownership; the great likelihood is that you'll eventually have to face losing your friend.  It's still worth it, all of it.  I'll never regret rescuing him from the SPCA and helping him work through the fear and trauma he'd experienced, and watching him grow into the sweet, affectionate little guy that was always inside him, and just needed a kind voice and a welcoming home to let out into the open.

But it still hurts like hell.  It's inevitable that it would.  I'll be grieving the loss of my little buddy for a long time.  Right now, I need to wind this up, because I can't see the computer screen any more.

The seven deadly words

George Orwell, in his classic book 1984, writes characters who speak a dialect of English called "Newspeak."

The "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth) controls the public perception of what is true, perceptions that are enforced by the "Thinkpol" (Thought Police).  The Thinkpol are responsible for stopping "thoughtcrime," including "facecrime" -- forbidden thoughts as revealed in your facial expression.  Toward that end, they "rectify" historical accounts (to conform to the government's agenda regarding what happened), eliminating anything that is "malquoted" or "misprinted."  You're trained to the point of accepting the government's views based on "bellyfeel" -- how they affect you emotionally, not whether they're true.

Intercourse between a man and a woman -- preferably without any pleasure -- is "goodsex."  Anything else is a "sexcrime."  The preference of the government is that babies are conceived by "artsem" -- artificial insemination.

Someone who breaks any of these rules -- or worse, contradicts what Big Brother wants you to do or say -- is not only killed, every trace of them is erased.  They become an "Unperson."

[image courtesy of photographer Todd Page and the Wikimedia Commons]

Orwell was strikingly prescient.  If you doubt that we're heading down that road, consider the story that was broken by the Washington Post yesterday, that employees at the Center for Disease Control have been given a list by the Trump administration of seven words they are not allowed to use in official correspondence or publications.

Those words are:

• vulnerable
• entitlement
• fetus
• diversity
• transgender
• science-based
• evidence-based

When I first read this, my initial reaction was, "This can't possibly be true."  The CDC being forbidden from using the word "fetus?"  But after some digging about, all I can say is that it appears at the time of this writing to be true.  The reports have not been corroborated by any official channels -- spokespeople for the CDC itself refused to comment -- but no one involved has stepped forward and said, "Bullshit."

I'm not sure what to be appalled most about this.  That we don't want any group of people identified as "vulnerable," because then we might have to do something about it.  That because of the Trump administration's ongoing war on minorities, we mustn't speak of diversity.  That LGBT individuals, whose rights to fair treatment are being threatened with every new judicial appointment, are guilty of "sexcrime;" and we have to pretend transgender people don't even exist.

And "science-based" and "evidence-based?"  What the fuck is the CDC supposed to base its policy on, then?  Magic?  The bible?  Prophecy?

Or just what its "bellyfeel" is?

I've tried not to engage in hyperbole about what this administration is doing, but every new thing I read drives me further toward the conclusion that they have really only one motive: consolidating power, and toward that end, shutting down resistance, eliminating free speech and the free press, rewriting the truth to conform to whatever Trump's cadre says it should be.  Everything contradictory is "oldspeak" that should be "rectified."

The result should be "doubleplusgood," don't you think?

My hope is the fact of this having been made public will give CDC employees the courage to defy this order.  People have to fight back, tell the 2017 version of the Thinkpol "No way in hell."  We have to spread this story far and wide, because you know the first thing the Trump administration is going to do is claim that this is all "fake news."

"Malquoted" and "misprinted."

I have some slim hope that this report will turn out to be an exaggeration, or perhaps simply untrue.  But given the Trump administration's record for supporting not only the right to dissent but science itself, I'm not holding my breath.  What it's looking more like is that Orwell got the details right -- all he missed was the year it happened.