Guest post: An interview with K. D. McCrite

A few years ago, I met author K. D. McCrite, whose series The Confessions of April Grace is beloved by both kids and adults for its beautifully-drawn characters and whimsical, sometimes screwball comedy storylines, all seen through the eyes of her title character, a girl growing up in rural Arkansas.  It wasn't until I'd known K. D. for some time that I found out that she had an alter ego -- Ava Norwood, the pseudonym under which she writes dark, gritty modern novels that only share with her other books a signature crystal-clear writing style.

K. D. herself is a deeply spiritual woman, despite the fact that her Norwood novels have more than once cast organized religion in a harsh and unfavorable glare.  We've become fast friends even though we don't have the same philosophical outlook -- in fact, our differences have led to some really interesting discussions, and far from distancing us, those conversations have deepened our friendship.

I thought it'd be interesting to hear her views on spirituality, writing, and how she reconciles her beliefs with her unflinching Norwood novels.  So she's my guest interviewee on Skeptophilia today.  I hope her answers get you thinking.  And I also hope you'll check out her novels, to which I've included links at the end of this post.

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GB: How does a spiritual person -- which you clearly are -- deal with the capacity for abuse inherent in organized religion?

KM: That’s not easy to do.  The life of a Christian should be simple: follow the example and teachings of the one who showed us the way.  Jesus was not an abuser, or a loser, or liar, or snob, or swindler.  He moved among all classes of people, showing no favoritism for wealth or status.  When people came to him, he did not turn them away.  He gave generously from what he had, and he served others.  Whether we believe he’s the son of God or we don’t believe in god at all, we probably agree the example of his life is the right way to live, if we want peace and contentment in our lives.  So when people claim to be Christian, but are wrapped up in ego, materialism, power, status, and legalism, I get a little hot under the collar.  No wonder Christianity now carries with it a repugnant image.  I rarely call myself a Christian any more.  I prefer Follower of Christ, and I do my best to live up to his example.

GB:  Tell me about your Ava Norwood novels, and how you reconcile your own beliefs with your writing, especially given the fact that some of the most despicable characters in them are representatives of organized religion, and yet consider themselves holy and sanctified.

KM: My books penned under the name of Ava Norwood feature people who have fallen into some kind of religious existence built on sand.  That is, their lives are set to collapse because what they are doing is foolish and weak.  I’m mixing metaphors here, but a reader should know when he opens an Ava Norwood novel, the characters are going to reap what they sow by the end of the story, good or bad.  It’s my hope that the books are thought-provoking, even enlightening.  If not, I hope I have at least offered a great read.

GB:  So you write in two different styles/personas.  One as Ava Norwood, and the other as K.D. McCrite, who writes family-friendly fiction that sometimes touches on Christian values.  Is there ever an issue with one fan base getting offended by the books in the other genre?

KM:  This is always a concern to me.  The Ava Norwood books have strong language, and graphic scenes of a violent or adult nature.  But let me be clear: the language and the scenes are not gratuitous.  They are true to the life and nature of the characters, and without them, the story would be weaker and have less impact than I intend.  I recognize that some people prefer their reading fare to be squeaky clean, and I understand.  I recommend that, rather than being offended or upset that I have chosen to use profanity, sex, or violence in a realistic way, they leave books by Ava Norwood unopened.  Otherwise, the purpose of the story is diluted or ignored because the offended reader can’t get over the portion that upset them.

Then we have the K.D. McCrite books, written for anyone from eight to 108.  Unfortunately, the audience for them restricts itself because of the lack of violence, sex, and language.  There are readers who seem to believe that there is no story without those elements.  However, I’ve been told by numerous people that “I assumed I wouldn’t like the book, but once I started, I really enjoyed it.”  The fact is, humorous, heart-warming stories can be every bit as gripping as something darker and grittier.  But how will these readers ever know that if they judge the books without reading them?

GB:  How would you answer a fan who did get offended?

KM:  "Offending someone was not my goal while writing this book, and I’m sorry you feel that way."  How else can one respond?  Not everyone is going to like everything.

Here are links to some of K. D.'s books -- I've read many of them, and thoroughly enjoyed them, both the ones she writes under K. D. McCrite and those she writes under Ava Norwood.  Give them a try!

As K. D. McCrite:
In Front of God and Everybody (April Grace #1)
Cliques, Hicks, and Ugly Sticks (April Grace #2)
Chocolate-Covered Baloney (April Grace #3)
Pink Orchids and Cheeseheads (April Grace #4)
Eastgate Keeps On Singing (Eastgate Cozy Mysteries #1)
Coming in the future: The Case Files of April Grace -- a series about a grown-up April Grace, who has become a private investigator...
K. D. has also written extensively for Annie's Mysteries, a fiction book club.

As Ava Norwood:
If I Make My Bed in Hell
Poured Out Like Water

Leadership by the unqualified

I'm going to ask a question that will undoubtedly be uncomfortable for the 33% of Americans who are still in support of what our current administration is doing:

Why are you content to have people in jobs for which they are manifestly unqualified, and about which they display nothing short of catastrophic ignorance?

Surprisingly, I'm not talking here about Trump himself, although I'd argue that those charges could just as easily be levied against him.  The fish rots from the head on down, as the saying goes.  But here I'm referring to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who was interviewed by Lesley Stahl a few days ago on 60 Minutes, the results of which are nearly unwatchable, if you (like me) hate seeing someone completely humiliating themselves in public.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What's especially appalling about this interview is that Stahl was not trying to nail DeVos to the wall.  In fact, some of her questions strike me as softball.  And DeVos still couldn't give a coherent answer.  As an example, Stahl asked her if, under her leadership, schools in her home state of Michigan had gotten better.  After all, she allegedly got the nomination from Trump because of her work promoting charter schools there, so her influence in Michigan far predates her appointment to the Department of Education.  Here's her answer:

I don't know.  Overall, I -- I can't say overall that they have all gotten better.  There are certainly lots of pockets where the students are doing well.  Michigan schools need to do better.  There is no doubt about it...  I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them.

"I don't know?"  The Secretary of the Department of Education is asked about the current status of schools in her home state, and she says, "I don't know?"  For one thing, how can she have gone into this interview not having at least prepared an answer for this question?  I mean, if there's an expression that means the opposite of "out of left field," that's what this question was.

And she can't talk about schools in general, because they're "made up of individual students attending them?"  What the hell does this even mean?

But those were far from the only problems.  When Stahl asked her if she'd visited any underperforming schools, DeVos answered with a flat no.  Stahl, whose cool, collected persona slipped, betraying a moment of pure astonishment, said, "Maybe you should."

DeVos looked confused, and echoed, "Maybe I should."

Then DeVos tried a salvo of her own.  "The federal government has invested billions and billions and billions of dollars in the educational system," DeVos said, "and we have seen zero results."  Stahl, who unlike DeVos had actually done her homework, said that this wasn't true -- that test scores over the past 25 years had risen steadily.

DeVos gave her a walleyed stare for a few seconds, and said, "What can be done about that is empowering parents to make the choices for their kids.  Any family that has the economic means and the power to make choices is doing so for their children."

"What can be done about that?"  What can be done about what?  Rising test scores?  Heaven knows, we can't have that.  And what on earth did that non-answer have to do with the question Stahl asked?

And on and on it went.  I honestly at some point had my hands over my eyes because I couldn't bear to watch.  But after the video clip was done, and I had recovered from being that long in a state of wince, I started to get mad.  How is this woman qualified to run the Department of Education?  My sense is that she would be out of her depth in a kiddie pool, and the sole reason she is in the position is that she is a multi-millionaire plutocrat who donated to Donald Trump's election campaign.

So, to the conservatives who've read this far: how can you accept this?  This honestly has nothing to do with party.  Betsy DeVos would be drastically unqualified regardless what her political leanings were.  But there she sits, on the Cabinet of the United States, and she does a public interview in which she comes across as a blithering idiot...

... and not a single Republican leader has anything to say about it.

C'mon, people.  At some point sound leadership has to outweigh party affiliation.  It is ridiculous that our country's educational system -- our hope for the future -- is being run by a woman who, in my grandmother's words, "don't have the brains that God gave gravy."

And these sorts of things keep happening, and over and over, not one damn thing is done about it.  All I can say is, I hope that in November, people will remember this and vote out the kiss-ass rubber stampers who are giving Trump and his rich cronies a bye on everything from appointing nitwits to canoodling with porn stars.

Woo-woo casserole recipe

Today, I ran across a truly wonderful site, if by "wonderful" you mean "bizarre."  It is called Divinorum Psychonauticus, which loosely translated from sort-of Latin means "Spirit Sailor of the Divine," even though to my ears it sounds like a spell from Harry Potter.  The site is subtitled "Where science fears to tread, art staggereth."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Its creator, Erich Kuersten, seems to be a raving wingnut, although in his defense he's up front about that.  In his "About This Author" paragraph he calls himself "legally insane ten times over," although in his posts, he seems entirely serious; I saw none of the hallmarks of Divinorum Psychonauticus being a spoof site.  In any case, I bumped into the site because of the post, "The Bigfoot-Ancient Alien Connection: Solved!", whose title seemed to promise great things.

I was not disappointed.

The first thing I noticed was how deftly the article explains why we haven't seen Bigfoot.  It is not, as many think, because Bigfoot doesn't exist.  It is also not, as others explain, that Bigfoots are intelligent, wary primates who live in trackless wilderness with plenty of places to hide.

No, it's because Bigfoots have all of their junk DNA turned on, and that allows them to time travel.  In Kuersten's words:

Our DNA is tampered [sic] down, which is to say a lot of our 'junk DNA' is disconnected. We're like parrots with clipped wings, while Bigfoot's are unclipped. If we could access all 100% of our brain, 'turn on' the dormant DNA, we could do some of the things Bigfoot does, such us 'skipping' through time, being able to wink in and out of existence (and thus avoid capture).  In fact this is why they are so evasive... they're on the run if you will, from the castrating scissors of the Greys.

Well, I have to admit that if a gray alien with castrating scissors was chasing me, I'd try to avoid capture, too.

Kuersten then adds a nice seasoning of biblical "history" to the mix:

The story of the Great Flood and all that - the Annunaki went to wipe us all out and start again because they made us in their image and likeness and with many of their powers, their ability to tap into the higher dimensions of consciousness (there are nine total), to vibrate their Kundalini energy in and out of existence and forward and backwards through time, and into alternate dimensions.  So when the sasquatch /earlier race learned how to 'wink out' they no longer wanted to mine gold for their masters.  They had the power to hide, and went on the run.  The next wave of humans (the Annunaki/Greys spliced with early ape hominid DNA) had these aspects of the brain shut off, the wings clipped.  But the flood couldn't reach the high up mountains, which is why the bigfoot and yeti are often found there. 

Is that why that is?  I'd always wondered.  The Himalayas, for example, have always seemed to me to be a singularly inhospitable place, what with all that snow and ice and thin air.  If I were a primitive hominid, I would choose somewhere rather nicer to live.  Maui, for example.  But evidently the reason you never see sasquatches on the beach, wearing swim trunks and sipping drinks with little umbrellas, is because they got stranded up in the mountains after the Great Flood and now, 4,000-odd years later, they still haven't been able to find their way down.

But why, you might ask, are Bigfoots frequently seen getting in and out of UFOs?  I know I've asked that question myself, and usually my response has been, "hallucinogenic drugs."  But Kuersten disagrees:

The reason Bigfoots are sometimes found getting into and out of UFOs is explainable as either a kind of bigfoot terminator or traitor, working to infiltrate the bigfoot colonies, or various 'friendly' alien visitors--the equivalent of, say, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. 

Okay, now I understand!  Some of the Bigfoots are in cahoots with evil aliens.  Or friendly aliens.  Or Kevin Costner.

Figure 1.  My expression while reading all of this.

And finally, how does Kuersten know all of this, as clearly there is no way you could get here via any of the more standard ways of thinking?  By this time, you will not be surprised to find out that the answer is: spirit animal guides.

I asked my 'channeled' guru panther animal spirit guide.  Believe it or not, that's what he 'told' me, in the weird non-linguistic way that spirit guides will.  Now, he's quite a trickster as I've learned on more than one occasion.  But this all makes a lot more sense than some of the daffy theories (I've heard), so I'm posting it here.  Make of it what you will, and remember, the truth is so strange no language can encompass it, so never be afraid to leave language at the door when entering the higher planes! 

Oh, I will, Erich.  I left language with baggage check, and am ready to be x-rayed by the TSA (Transcendental Safety Authority) before boarding my astral plane! 

If you're not satisfied with this selection from Divinorum Psychonauticus, there's also "Remembering my 2012 Galactic Alignment Euphoria, Non-Duality, Quetzlcoatl Visions, Cult Leadership, and Inevitable Fever," "The New Line of Alien-Human Hybrids - Wilkommen auf der Future!", and "Uma Thurman is From Venus."  And yes, in that last one, he is talking about the planet Venus, i.e., the place with an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, where the surface temperature averages 462 C.  (I've heard people say that Uma Thurman is hot, but I don't think that's what they meant.)

Figure 2: Uma Thurman's home world

So anyway.  That's our brief foray into the deep end of the pool for today.  It's kind of like a recipe for a woo-woo casserole, isn't it?

In a large mixing bowl, place 2 lbs. finely ground Bigfoot. Add:

• a chopped Annunaki
• biblical references to taste
• 3 tbsp. references to poorly-understood science
• 1 cup higher dimensions of consciousness
• 1 cracked UFO
• 1 pint time travel
• 1 spirit guide (preferably "panther," but "weasel" will do)  Mix well. Place in a greased baking dish, and bake at 350 F until well-done  Serve immediately.

Pairs excellently with most wines.  In fact, the more your guests drink, the more palatable the casserole will seem.

Natural smackdown

For today's piping hot serving of schadenfreude, we have: YouTube has terminated Mike Adams's account.

Adams, you probably know, is the wingnut who founded Natural News, which is the world's biggest clearinghouse for loony alt-med claims and unfounded conspiracy theories about things like "toxins."  Amongst other completely wacko ideas, Adams claims that:

• AIDS is not caused by HIV.
• Infectious diseases in general are not caused by germs.
• We're all being poisoned by "chemtrails."
• Evidence-based medical research is a huge shell game being played by doctors, scientists, and "Big Pharma," with the aim of keeping us sick so they can keep making money.
• GMOs are all hazardous to human health.
• Homeopathy works.

So this termination is actually a big deal.  The account's entire library of videos was deleted, meaning that if someone linked or embedded one of them on a secondary site or blog, they will now show as "This Video Is No Longer Available."

Before you start yelling at me about the First Amendment and free speech, allow me to state for the record that "Free Speech" doesn't mean you have the right to say anything, anywhere, with no consequences.  I can claim the First Amendment protects my right to tell my boss to fuck off, and no court in the land will side with me if I'm fired.  YouTube quite rightly has rules to play by, and if someone's account violates those rules, it is entirely within their purview to delete their videos.

Adams, predictably, had a complete meltdown, just like he did when Google took steps to stop him from gaming their search engine optimization software to propel his links to the top of search pages.  He, of course, claimed that the action taken was not because he violated one of Google's policies; this was a targeted attack against his message.  And now YouTube has joined the ranks of the persecutors.  Adams said:

In the latest gross violation of free speech committed by radical left-wing tech giants, YouTube has now deleted the entire Health Ranger video channel, wiping out over 1,700 videos covering everything from nutrition, natural medicine, history, science and current events. 

Over the last two weeks, YouTube has been on a censorship rampage that’s apparently run by the SPLC, a radical left-wing hate group that despises Christianity, the Second Amendment and patriots in particular.  Hundreds of prominent conservative video channels have been targeted for termination by YouTube, leading many independent media leaders like myself to call for government regulation of YouTube to protect free speech and end the tyranny.

The SPLC, allow me to point out, is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, hate crimes, and extremists in the United States, and only gets involved with YouTube if there's a video that promotes ethnic, racial, or religious hatred.  So targeting the SPLC is nothing short of bizarre.

But the long and short of it is, YouTube is a privately owned, for-profit company, and there is no reason in the world that it should have to host Mike Adams's nutcake screeds if the Board of Directors says it doesn't want to, any more than I should have to allow Adams to do a guest post on Skeptophilia because he claims it's his right under the First Amendment.  So in fact, what he's doing right now is whining because he flouted the rules and got caught at it, and is trying to deflect the blame on the liberals and tech giants and (for fuck's sake) the SPLC.

Myself, I have to admit my reaction to this was: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  Much as I advocate for the right of free expression and the principle of caveat emptor, it really would be a better world if we had fewer people making crazy and potentially dangerous claims.  So I'm afraid I can't work up much sympathy for Adams.  In fact, what I really wish is that he would take Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Gwyneth Paltrow along with him.  That would really be some schadenfreude I could get behind.

Safety shift

It's simultaneously amusing and a little frightening how sure we all are of our own opinions.

When challenged, we tend to react either with incredulity or with anger.  How on earth could anyone believe differently than we do?  Our own beliefs arise, of course, from a careful consideration of the facts, of the world as it is.  If you think differently, well, you're just not putting things together right.

And not only do we use our certainty in our own rightness to make judgments about others, we also use it to cement our own conclusions over time.  I recall with some discomfort the time I was being interviewed on a radio program, and the host asked me a perfectly legitimate question for someone who is a self-styled skeptic, namely: has there been a time that I have been challenged in one of my beliefs, and after analysis, turned out to be wrong?

Well, it was a fair knock-out.  I could only recall one time that, in the (then) five years I'd written Skeptophilia, that a reader had posted an objection that changed my mind.  (If you're curious, it was about the efficacy of low-level laser therapy on wound healing; she came at me with facts and data and sources, and even if I'd been inclined to argue, I had no choice but to admit defeat and retreat in disarray.)

But other that that?  When I get objections, I tend to do what most of us do.  Say, "Oh, how sad for you that you don't agree with me," and forthwith stop thinking about it.

What's so appalling about this is how easily those seemingly set-in-stone root beliefs can be changed by circumstances outside of our control, and often, without our even knowing it's happening.  Which brings me to a simple but elegant experiment done at Yale University by John Bargh, Jaime Napier, Julie Huang, and Andy Vonasch that appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology late last year.  The experiment springboarded off a longitudinal study done at the University of California that showed that the more fear a child expressed over novel situations in a laboratory at age four, the more conservative (s)he was likely to be twenty years later.  Conservatives, it has been found, are more likely to regard the unfamiliar with suspicion, and in fact, have higher activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with anxiety.  Liberals, on the other hand, have a greater degree of trust in the unknown (whether justified or not), and tend to be less fearful of new people and new experiences.

So what Bargh et al. decided to do was to see if the opposite might hold true -- if changing people's sense of being safe would alter their political stances.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And they did.  Bargh's team guided participants through an intense visualization exercise, which for some participants was about having the ability to fly, and for others being invulnerable and safe from harm in all situations.

The results were dramatic.  In Bargh's words:

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general. 

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents.  And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats.  Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

This study has a couple of interesting -- and cautionary -- outcomes.

First, the researchers did not look at how long-lasting these changes were, so even for those who think the changes were a good thing (probably my left-leaning readers), there's no guarantee that the leftward shift was permanent.  Second, consider the fact that the shift occurred by having people visualize an imaginary scenario -- i.e., something that isn't true.  Even if the shift was long-lasting, I have some serious qualms about changing people's beliefs based on having them imagine a falsehood.  That, to me, is no better than having them persist in erroneous beliefs because of a lack of self-analysis.

But to me the scariest result of the experiment by Bargh et al. is to consider how this tendency is exacerbated -- or, more accurately, manipulated -- by the media.  Conservative news sources thrive on inducing fear.  (As one example, think about the yearly idiocy over at Fox News about we atheists' alleged "War on Christmas.")  By the same token, liberal media tends to focus on stories that make you feel better, at least about the usual left-wing talking points -- stories, for example, of immigrants who have succeeded and become model citizens.  In both cases, it's powered by our tendency to shift rightward when we feel threatened and leftward when we feel safe -- and, in both cases, to keep listening to the news sources that reinforce those feelings.

I'm not at all sure what to do about this, or honestly, if there's anything that can be done.  We all have our biases in one direction or the other to start with, and we're pretty likely to seek out news sources that corroborate what we already thought.  A combination of confirmation bias and the echo-chamber effect.  But what the Bargh et al. study should show us is that we can't become complacent and stop considering our own beliefs in the sharpest light available -- and always keep in mind the possibility that our own opinions might not be as carved in stone as we'd like to think.

A hole in your argument

There are some legends that stick around despite the fact that they are demonstrably false.

At least for some of tall stories, you can see how they'd persist.  Tales like Slender Man, the Black-eyed Children, and crazed murderers with hooks for hands have been around ever since the tradition of telling scary stories around campfires began.  So while they're not true -- at least, there's no evidence for any of them of the kind that would convince a skeptic -- you can at least understand why someone might fall for 'em.

In some cases, though, there are claims that are made that are easily verifiable.  And when someone does bother to verify them, and finds that they're false, and yet people still believe -- that I can't comprehend.

As an example of this, take the tale of "Mel's Hole," a supposedly bottomless pit near Ellensburg, Washington.  Ranker ran a story on the legend a few days ago, based on a radio piece that ran a while back on the paranormal show Coast to Coast, and tells us about the meat and bones of the story.

A guy named Mel Waters called in to Coast to Coast to tell the hosts about a hole on his property in central Washington State.  It was, Waters said, nine feet in diameter and lined with bricks.  It predated Waters, he said; locals, and before that the indigenous inhabitants of the area, knew about it -- and avoided it.  It was cursed, they said.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Waters, though, got interested in it, and decided to see how deep it was.  He put a weight on the end of some fishing line, and lowered it down the hole.  After he'd released 80,000 feet of line, it still hadn't gone slack -- i.e., the hole itself was over fifteen miles deep.

Already I was getting a little suspicious.  It's hard to imagine anyone having the patience to release fifteen miles of fishing line into a hole in the ground.  But be that as it may, it was far from the weirdest thing Waters claimed.  Here are a few of the things he told the Coast to Coast folks:

1. Animals, especially dogs, were terrified of the hole, and had to be dragged to get them close to it.
2. If you yelled down it, there was no echo.
3. If you brought a radio near it, it would play music from decades ago.
4. A bucket of ice lowered into it came back up magically transformed into a "warm liquid" that was flammable.
5. A tranquilized sheep lowered into it was pulled back to the surface dead, seemingly "cooked from the inside," and had inside it an animal "resembling a fetal seal with human eyes staring back at him" that Waters immediately chucked back in.  Neighbors said they'd seen something like that around the mouth of the hole on several occasions.

But far and away the weirdest claim about the hole is that it could bring animals back to life.  A neighbor, Waters said, had a dog who died, and the neighbor did what any bereaved pet owner would do, namely, look for a random hole in the ground on someone else's property to throw the body into.  But the dog not only didn't stay in the hole, it didn't stay dead.  Waters said he'd seen it running around in the woods afterwards -- wearing the same collar it was wearing when the neighbor threw it in.

So far, pretty spooky stuff.  But there are a variety of problems here, the most serious of which is, if you claim there's a giant magical hole in the ground, your story kind of falls apart if it doesn't exist.

Which it doesn't.  Not only that, geologists say that a fifteen-mile-deep hole would be impossible, especially near the seismically-active Cascade Range.  But even accepting that magic might in this case trump modern geological science, no one has been able to find the hole -- even a guy who claimed to know where it was and believe in its powers, one Gerald Osborne, led a thirty-person expedition in 2002 that found zero holes.

Last, and most damning of all, local reporters have dug into property records in Kittitas County, and have found no record that a man named Mel Waters ever owned property there -- or even lived in or near Ellensburg.

So the whole thing is clearly a hoax, and Waters himself non-existent.  And that, you would think, would be that.

But as we've seen over and over, with woo-woos, that is never that.  You can have the most sterling argument, demonstrate the lack of evidence until the middle of next week, and they'll still say, "Yeah, but."  And thus, the legend of Mel's Hole persists, lo unto this very day.

As for me, I'm sticking with science.  Call me unimaginative, but there you are.  As the inimitable Carl Sagan put it, "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."  I don't think he was talking about fictitious holes in the ground, but it applies equally well to them.

Liars and truthers

Words matter.

People with a commitment to the truth should demand that media and politicians make their statements using unambiguous language, and not hesitate to call them out when they don't.  Obfuscation is the next best thing to telling outright untruths; it misleads and confuses just as much.  Which, no doubt, is what was intended.

It's why my blood pressure spikes every time I hear how the media usually deals with the blatant falsehoods spoken by Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  They're not "alternate facts," not "opinions," not "differing interpretations."  They're lies.  And we should not waver in identifying them as such.

But the word I want to address today is "truther."  It's been appended to the loony claims of most of the current conspiracy theories.  We have 9/11 "truthers," Sandy Hook "truthers," flat Earth "truthers."  And it's a word the media, and everyone else, needs to stop using.  These people are not only not speaking the truth, they have no interest in the truth whatsoever.  All they want is to bend the facts to fit their warped view of how the world should work.  Any evidence that doesn't fit their claims is ignored, argued away, or labeled as a fabrication.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This comes up because of a pair of self-identified "truthers" who were arrested a couple of days ago for harassing the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, Frank Pomeroy.  This is doubly horrific; not only did Pomeroy have to deal with the massacre last November of his parishioners by shooter Devin Kelley, Pomeroy's fourteen-year-old daughter was killed in the tragedy.

But to people like Jodi Mann and Robert Ussery, this is just more fuel for the fire.  The "Deep State" engineered the event, they said, during which no one was actually killed.  Grieving friends and family members were played by "crisis actors."  The whole thing was staged to turn people against supporting the Second Amendment, which is the first step toward confiscating all guns and the government imposing martial law.

And the Sutherland Springs massacre isn't the only thing Mann and Ussery claim didn't happen.  According to Ussery and Mann's website, Side Thorn, neither did the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Boston Marathon, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and the Jason Aldean concert in Las Vegas.  All of them were complete fabrications.

This belief has led them to do things that any sane person would consider completely incomprehensible.  In the case of Pastor Pomeroy, the pair spray-painted "The Truth Will Set You Free" on a poster put up for friends of the pastor's slain daughter to sign.  Ussery and Mann demanded proof from her father that the girl even existed, demanding to see her birth certificate or other evidence that she wasn't -- as they claimed -- an invention of the media.  Ussery, Pomeroy said, repeatedly followed him around screaming threats, including one that he was going to "hang Pomeroy from a tree and pee on him while he's hanging."

So finally, the pair have been arrested for harassment.  Fortunately.  They've also sent threatening notes to the students-turned-activists who survived the Stoneman Douglas shooting.  They are, they said, actors, and the shooting was "100% a staged drill."

One of the students, Cameron Kasky, has responded to this allegation with his characteristic humor and grace, tweeting, "Anyone who saw me in last year's production of Fiddler on the Roof should know that no one would pay me for my acting."

The problem is, that's not going to stop Ussery and Mann and others like them.  These people are on a crusade, and welcome being arrested as a chance to give their lunacy a public forum.  But what prompted me to write this was not the craziness of an obviously false claim.

It's that the media has been consistently calling Ussery and Mann "truthers."

No, they are not truthers.  They are either delusional or else are outright and blatant liars.  They are promoting a dangerous conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact, and besides that, are attacking grieving family and friends of people who were victims of mass murderers.  There is no "truth" about this at all.

It's a deranged false claim, and the people promoting it are guilty of threats and harassment.  Pure and simple.

We need to stop soft-pedaling things.  It gains nothing, and in this case, subtly lends credence to people who do not deserve it.  The media -- and by extension, we who consume it -- need to be unhesitating in labeling a lie as such.

That is how you become a "truther."