A hand and a message

One of the most enduring mysteries, both in history and in linguistics, is the Basque people of northeastern Spain.

For many years, it was thought that because they speak Euskara -- a linguistic isolate, certainly not Indo-European and seemingly unrelated to any other known language -- that they were physically unrelated to the rest of Europeans as well.  That's proven to be untrue; their genetics are markedly similar to other western Europeans, including a high prevalence of the R1b-DF27 Y-DNA haplogroup, found throughout Spain and southern France.  While there is some evidence that the Basque people are remnants of a Paleolithic population of western Europe, there's enough similarity with the surrounding population that this question is considered far from settled.

There's no doubt they've been genetically isolated for a long time, though.  One good indicator is their abnormally high frequency of the Rh negative blood type allele.  If you, or one of your parents, is Rh negative, there is a great likelihood that you have ancestry in northern Spain or southwestern France.  (My mom, who was Rh negative, was nearly a hundred percent of French descent, mostly from western France -- I'm quite certain she has some Basque ancestry back there somewhere.)  This has a significant downside; the danger of Rh incompatibility disorder, which occurs when a negative mother conceives a positive fetus (i.e. the father is positive).  When that happens, the mother's immune system can set up a reaction against the baby's blood and destroy it.  It's what killed my sister, Mary Margaret -- when she was born, in 1945, she was premature and severely anemic, and only lived a couple of days.  Between her birth and mine, in 1960, the RhoGAM injection was developed, which suppresses that part of the mother's immune system and prevents the damage.

That injection is why I'm alive today.

In any case, there's no doubt the Basques are a unique people.  The origin of their gene pool, culture, and language are still shrouded in mystery.  But a discovery last year near Pamplona may end up shedding some light on their history.

Called the "Hand of Irulegi," it's a bronze piece thought to be about two thousand years old.  This is cool enough in and of itself, but recent analysis has shown that it has an inscription, seemingly in proto-Basque, the language of the Vascones -- the Iron Age tribe encountered in northeastern Spain by the Romans, and who are thought to be the ancestors of the modern Basques.

It had been thought previously that the Vascones had little in the way of written language -- no traces of it had been found except for occasional one-word inscriptions on coins.  So almost nothing is known about the language they spoke (except, as previously noted, that it was definitely non-Indo European).  The first word in the inscription on the Hand of Irulegi is sorioneku, almost certainly the root word of modern Euskara zorioneko, meaning "luck" or "a good omen."

It's worth being cautious, though.  Unfortunately, such claims have been made before -- and have turned out to be worse than false, actually fraudulent.  Two years ago, two archaeologists were fined and given short jail sentences for faking artifacts and claiming that they were evidence of an early Basque written language.  So following the "once burned, twice shy" rule, the archaeologists and linguists studying the Hand of Irulegi are proceeding carefully.

But if it holds up under scrutiny, it will be a pretty remarkable discovery.  The early history and linguistics of the Basque people have been huge unanswered questions before now, and any pieces we can add to the puzzle will help clarify the origins of what is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating cultures in Europe.

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Dance of life

Dancing is ubiquitous amongst human societies.

Everywhere you go, every culture you look at, there is some form of rhythmic movement, usually to music.  (Sometimes the dancing creates its own music.)  I love to dance; I'm not saying I'm great at it, but starting out the day by putting on some tunes and moving my body just feels good.  And it's much more fun to do daily chores like cooking dinner with my music on, rockin' to the beat while I'm chopping the vegetables.

It's an interesting question why this is.  A shrewd guess is that a lot of it is about social cohesion.  You get a bunch of people together, all moving in the same way to the same rhythm, and it's a strong symbol of unity and common purpose.  

There's some biochemical support for this contention.  A series of studies a few years ago found that dancing releases four of the most important feel-good and bonding hormones -- dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphin.

No wonder we feel better after we dance.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ramesh lalwani, Revanta Sarabhai Male Dancer, CC BY-SA 4.0]

For me, one of the most wonderful -- and difficult -- things about dancing is that it requires you to forget about yourself.  To dance fluidly, you need to be immersed in the music and the movement, and overcome the self-consciousness we all seem to carry around with us, to greater or lesser degrees.  I'm plagued with more than my fair share of it, and it's only been fairly recently that I've been willing to dance with other people around.  Which, of course, is missing a good part of the fun of it -- sharing the experience of moving your body in synchrony to the music.

What brings all this up is a fascinating study from the University of Tokyo released last week showing that humans aren't the only ones who feel like shakin' their tails when the music comes on.

Rats do it, too.

Rats were fitted out with tiny helmets containing wireless accelerometers, and then exposed to varying types and speeds of music.  Sure enough -- they began to move their heads in time to the beat.

"Rats displayed innate — that is, without any training or prior exposure to music — beat synchronization most distinctly within 120-140 bpm (beats per minute), to which humans also exhibit the clearest beat synchronization," said Hirokazu Takahashi, of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, who co-authored the paper.  "The auditory cortex, the region of our brain that processes sound, was also tuned to 120-140 bpm, which we were able to explain using our mathematical model of brain adaptation...  Music exerts a strong appeal to the brain and has profound effects on emotion and cognition.  To utilize music effectively, we need to reveal the neural mechanism underlying this empirical fact."

I find this absolutely astonishing, given that rats don't have music in their natural environments (well, except for the rats that sometimes end up cohabiting with us).  What possible purpose can this serve?  It's interesting, but it seems to me to raise as many questions as it answers.

Which, of course, is the hallmark of good science.

Whatever the reason, it's pretty cool that this impulse to move to the music has a long evolutionary history.  And there's no doubt that it does a body good.  I'll end with a quote from the wonderful writer Dave Barry: "Nobody cares if you can't dance well.  Get out there on the floor and dance anyway."

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A projectile from deep space

Sometimes the most interesting questions to ask in science are the ones about facts so commonplace that we don't usually even think about them.  For example: how did the Earth end up with the composition it has?

The crust of the Earth -- the part that (obviously) we're most familiar with -- is largely made of silicate rocks (especially feldspars), with a good bit of magnesium, aluminum, potassium, and sodium thrown in.  The mantle, the liquid-to-semisolid bit beneath the crust, is also rich in silicates, but as you go deeper the iron and magnesium content increases (minerals with those elements are generally denser than silicates, so the silicates float to the top).  The core is mainly iron and nickel.

The oceans and atmosphere are a thin layer that is insignificant in terms of contribution to the mass of the Earth as a whole.  (Pretty damn significant to life on Earth, of course.)  And the impressive mountains and valleys, not to mention things like the oceanic trenches, aren't as impressive as they seem from our vantage point.  I remember being blown away when one of my geology professors said that the highest mountain ranges and deepest trenches have less topographic relief than you find on a typical billiard ball.

The Earth formed during the early days of the Solar System from accretion of asteroids, dust, and debris that pulled together from what was probably a set of rings around the Sun similar to what still exists around the planet Saturn.  During that phase, the energy of the constant collisions and bombardment heated the nascent Earth to beyond the melting point of the rock that it was made of, rendering the whole mass molten, glowing orange-hot.  (Some of that heat is what still makes the interior of the Earth hot today; the rest comes from the breakdown of radioactive elements in the core and mantle.  It's what keeps the Earth tectonically active, and the liquid metallic outer core is very likely why our planet has a magnetic field.)

But the specific makeup of the particular rocks that came together early in Earth's history determined what we have here today.  That includes the water in our lakes, rivers, and oceans.  The vast majority of our water arrived during the coalescence of our world -- but we just found out a little more about that particular feature from a much more recent arrival.

On the 28th of February, 2021, a football-sized meteorite streaked across the skies of Winchcombe, a town in Gloucestershire, in the southwest of England.  The intense heating from friction in the atmosphere made the rock explode, and a large chunk of it landed in the driveway of Rob and Cathryn Wilcock, who donated it to the Natural History Museum of London.

Rob Wilcock's photograph of what was left of the Winchcombe meteorite after it smashed into his driveway in February of 2021

The meteorite turned out to be a carbonaceous chondrite, a rare sort of meteorite that is carbon and water-rich.  And the first cool thing was that when the scientists measured the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio of the the water in the meteorite, they found that it was identical to that in the Earth's oceans.

But you want the kicker?  Also present in the Winchcombe meteorite were various amino acids and a slew of other organic compounds -- the biochemical building blocks of life.

It's discoveries like this that that make me even more certain there's life out there in the cosmos.  Intelligent life is another matter; we still have yet to explain the Fermi paradox (Enrico Fermi's comment that if extraterrestrial life is common, then "where is everybody?" -- a topic about which I wrote in some detail a while back).  But non-technological life?  I'd bet a significant amount of money that it'll turn out to be abundant.  Think of what we could learn from a biology that was entirely separate from us, that had no ancestral connection to anything on Earth.

The mind boggles.

Studies like the one just done on the Winchcombe meteorite give us a perspective not only on how our planet formed, but what else might be out there waiting for us to find.  To quote Carl Sagan: "The universe is a pretty big place.  If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space."

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A black hole's warm glow

Once again I was sent a link by my buddy Andrew Butters, of the wonderful Potato Chip Math, who is not only a great writer but has a keen eye for a cool science article.

The link was to a story in Science Alert, and was titled, "Scientists Created a Black Hole in the Lab, and Then It Started To Glow," by Michelle Starr.  But before I tell you what the gist is, I have to bring up a peevish complaint about the headline (which may not have been Starr's fault; many times the headlines aren't written by the journalist herself, so I'm not jumping to blaming her for it).  The researchers, as you will see, did not "create a black hole;" what they did was create something that models some of the behavior of a black hole.  Which is cool enough, but doesn't have the cachet that black holes have, so Science Alert apparently thought they needed to jazz things up.  The headline is wildly misleading; no massive stars were destroyed in the course of this experiment.

Of course, this is not going to stop people from reading only the headline and then posting hysterical screeds about how those Mad Scientists Are Trying To Destroy Us All and undoubtedly tying in CERN, HAARP, the Illuminati, and Reptilian Aliens From Zeta Reticuli.

You know how it goes.

Anyhow, back to reality.  What the scientists really did was pretty amazing, and may give us some inroads into figuring out one of the biggest puzzles in physics; why theoretical physicists have been unable to reconcile the equations of quantum mechanics and those of relativity.  When they attempt to accommodate gravitational effects on the scale of the very small, the equations "blow up" -- they result in infinities -- usually a sign that something is very wrong about our understanding.

The reason black holes play into this question is that in the extraordinary gravitational field at the event horizon (the "point of no return," where the space is so strongly curved that even light can't escape), there is a quantum effect that becomes important on the macroscopic scale.  It's called Hawking radiation, after Stephen Hawking (who first proposed it), and deserves some closer attention.

 To start with, empty space isn't empty.  There is an inherent energy in space called zero-point energy or vacuum energy, and it is possible for this energy to be "borrowed" to produce particle-antiparticle pairs (such as an electron and a positron).  There's a catch, though; the pairs always recollide (in a minuscule amount of time, the upper limit of which is determined by the uncertainty principle).  So the pairs pop into existence and right out again, creating continuous tiny, extremely short-lived ripples in the fabric of space.  Not enough for anyone even to notice.

Well, unless you're near the event horizon of a black hole.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The huge gravitational field at the event horizon means that vacuum energy is much higher, and pair production happens at a much greater rate.  And because of that boundary, sometimes one member of a pair falls into the event horizon, while the other one doesn't.  At that point, the survivor radiates out into space -- taking a little of the black hole's mass/energy along with it.

That's the Hawking radiation.  What it implies is that black holes don't last forever -- eventually they evaporate, finally exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

The problem has been that the Hawking radiation is impossible to study experimentally; we're (fortunately) not near any black holes, at least so far as we know, and the faint signature of the radiation would be lost in the general white noise of the universe.  But now -- and this is where we get to the current research -- a team led by Lotte Mertens of the University of Amsterdam has developed a model that simulates this behavior, and found that just like the real thing, it emits radiation exactly the way Hawking predicted (this is the "it started to glow" in the headline).

What they did was to lock together a chain of atoms that provided a path for electrons to move, and by fine-tuning the rate at which this happened, they created a simulated event horizon that caused some of the electrons' wave-like behavior to vanish completely.  The result was an increase in thermal radiation that matched the Hawking model precisely.

Why this is significant is that it could provide a way to study the quantum effects of gravity in the lab, something that has been impossible before now.  It's not like we can hop a spacecraft and fly to a black hole (which would be inadvisable anyhow).  So this fascinating experiment might be the first step toward one of the prime goals of physicists -- finding a way to unify the quantum and gravitational models.

So even if they didn't "create a black hole in the lab," the whole thing is still pretty freakin' cool.

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Broken tools

Since 2016, one of the most persistent puzzles to me has been the unflagging support of evangelical Christians for Donald Trump, a man whose main claim to fame seems to be embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual.

I get why people with far-right ideology support him; that, at least, is consistent.  Trump has the same pro-corporate capitalist, xenophobic, anti-immigration, authoritarian views they do.  But the very religious have continued to idolize the man despite his openly admitting affairs while married, multiple credible allegations of fraud, and so many outright lies that it's impossible even to keep up with them.  They even go so far as to consider him anointed by God -- I heard one person, with no apparent sense of irony, call Trump "Jesus's Right-Hand Man."

When I've inquired (cautiously) into how "Jesus's Right-Hand Man" can be so dramatically and thoroughly flawed, I've heard comments like "God can work with a broken tool."  Which seems to me to be a puzzling stance for a group of people who ostensibly believe that the Bible should be followed to the letter, and anyone who doesn't do so is destined for the fires of hell.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gerbilo, Christianity symbols, CC BY 3.0]

A fascinating study that appeared last week in Politics and Religion may have figured out the answer.  It's not that they think Trump is religious himself; they don't.  In fact, only 37% of the white evangelical Christians in the study said they thought Trump was religious.  (Surprisingly, Biden scored slightly higher.)  Despite this, they overwhelmingly voted for Trump -- because, the study found, Trump repeatedly emphasized that evangelical Christians were a threatened minority, and promised to protect them.

The perception, apparently, was that it didn't matter if Trump was religious, or even moral, himself; his election was "part of God's plan" to bolster up the evangelical community against perceived external threats.  Trump's strategy was to play into that fear -- and it worked.

"This finding suggests that Trump is a unique case when it comes to white evangelical evaluations of the religiosity of elites," said Jack Thompson of the University of Exeter, who authored the study, in an interview with PsyPost.  "Instead of projecting their beliefs onto Trump, and thereby supporting him because of his perceived religiosity, white evangelicals support him despite his lack of religiosity...  The findings concerning the salience of identity threats on conditioning white evangelical beliefs also provide an additional explanation for why evaluations on Trump’s religiosity might not have mattered when it came to their vote choice in 2016.  Namely, because Trump’s invocation of the decline of white Christian America proved effective in activating religious identity threat in a way that led to white evangelicals to coalesce around his candidacy.  In this way, Trump’s ability to articulate white evangelicals’ fears about the declining influence of Christianity likely overrode any lingering concerns about his religiosity."

So "God can work with a broken tool" turns out to be pretty spot on, as does the observation by a friend of mine that "the Religious Right loves Trump because he hates the same people they do."  

The whole thing makes some twisted kind of sense.  If you're convinced that "God has a plan" -- and that, importantly, you know what that plan is -- then it doesn't make a difference who contributes to the working out of that plan.  It could be the most evil human being alive, committing atrocities, and as long as that moves God's plan forward -- well, that's what needs to happen.

Mighty convenient, that.

One has to wonder how this will continue to play out, because there's no doubt that evangelical Christianity is declining.  A study in 2021 found that between 2006 and 2020, the number of self-identified evangelicals in the United States dropped by 37%.  (In the same period, the number of Roman Catholics also dropped by 27%.)  What that suggests is that the fears of decreasing influence are well-founded.  At some point, the mobilization of the remaining evangelicals because of fear will inevitably be overcome by the fact that they're simply too few in numbers to make a difference in national elections.

At least, I hope so.  I'm not religious myself but have no problem with people who are, as long as they stay in their lane and don't attempt to force belief down my throat.  On the other hand, any group who could support a moral degenerate like Donald Trump can't be allowed to swing the direction of our entire nation.

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Roots of the problem

It's natural enough to think that humans are the only organisms that damage their own habitat.  We certainly seem to be doing a damn good job of it.  But there have been other times living things have sown the seeds of their own destruction.

One good example is the Great Oxidation Event -- sometimes, justifiably, nicknamed the "Oxygen Holocaust."  It occurred just over two billion years ago, and hinges on one rather surprising fact; oxygen is a highly reactive, toxic gas.

There's good evidence that aerobic respiration -- the set of biochemical reactions that allows us to burn the glucose in our food, and which provides us with the vast majority of the energy we use -- evolved first as a mechanism for detoxifying oxygen, and only afterward got co-opted into being an energy pathway.  The problem was that prior to the Great Oxidation Event, all of the organisms had been anaerobes, which are capable of releasing energy without oxygen.  To the vast majority of anaerobes, oxygen is a deadly poison.  That's why when there was a sudden, massive injection of oxygen into the Earth's atmosphere a couple of billions of years ago, the result was that just about every living thing on Earth died.

The tipping point came with the evolution of yet another energetic pathway: photosynthesis.  Photosynthesis was a tremendous innovation, as it allowed organisms to harness light energy instead of chemical energy, but it had one significant downside.  The first part of the reaction chain of photosynthesis breaks up water molecules and releases oxygen.  So when the first photosynthesizers evolved -- probably something like modern cyanobacteria -- oxygen gas began to pour into the oceans and atmosphere.

Something like 99% of life on Earth died.

The survivors fell into three groups: (1) the handful of organisms that had some early form of aerobic respiration as a detoxification pathway; (2) anaerobes that had a way of hiding from the oxygen, like today's methanogens that live in anaerobic mud; and (3) the photosynthesizers themselves.

From the organisms that survived that catastrophic bottleneck came every living thing we currently see around us.

So we're far from being the only organisms that cause ecological problems.  The reason the topic comes up, in fact, is because of another example I'd never heard of until I bumped into a paper in the Geological Society of North America Bulletin last week; the Devonian mass extinctions, which are one of the "Big Five" extinction events that have struck the Earth.  This particular series of cataclysms wiped out an estimated seventy percent of marine species, but it may have been triggered by the evolution of something that seems innocuous, even benevolent.

Tree roots.

Plants had only colonized the land during the previous period, the Silurian, enabled to do so by yet another innovation; the evolution of vascular tissue.  The internal plumbing vascular plants have (the xylem and phloem you probably remember from your biology classes) allow plants to move water farther and faster, so they were no longer so tied to living in ponds and lakes.  Plus, vascular tissue in many plants doubles as support tissue, so this facilitated growing taller (a significant advantage when you're competing with your near neighbors for light).

But if you're taller, you're also more likely to topple when it's windy.  So then there's selection for who's got the best support system.  The winners: plants with roots.

Devonian Forest by Eduard Riou (ca. 1872) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Like vascular tissue, roots are multi-purpose.  They not only provide support and anchoring, they're good at creating lots of absorptive surface area for water and nutrients.  (Some roots are also evolved to store starch -- carrots come to mind -- but that's an innovation that seems to have come much later.)  So now we have a competition between plants for who's got the best supports, and who can access nutrients from the soils the fastest.

Roots very quickly became good at twisting their way into rocks.  You've undoubtedly seen it; tree roots clinging to, and breaking up, rocks, asphalt, cement, pretty much any barrier they can get a foothold into.  When that happened, suddenly there's an erosive force breaking up bedrock and transporting nutrients (especially phosphorus) into plant tissue.  Phosphorus began to leach out of the rock into the soil, and when the plants died all the phosphorus in the tissue was released into rivers, streams, and lakes.

The result was a massive influx of nutrients into bodies of water.

Have you ever seen what happens when chemical fertilizers get into a pond?  It fosters algal blooms, and when the algae dies and decomposes, the oxygen levels plummet and the entire pond dies.

That's what happened during the late Devonian Period -- but planet-wide.

The huge reef-building rugose and tabulate corals and stromatoporid sponges were wiped out en masse.  Other groups, such as trilobites and brachiopods, which depended on the reefs for habitat and food, got knocked back hard as well.

All, the authors claim, because of a nifty innovation in the structure of land plants.

It's tempting to think that the environment is stable; we look around us and think things have always been this way, and will always be this way.  What more of us need to understand is that while the global ecosystem is resilient up to a point, there is always a tipping point.  The scary part is we can pass that point suddenly, without even realizing it.  Then before we're even aware of what's happened, the last chance to turn things around is gone.

The difference between what happened during the Great Oxidation Event and the Devonian Mass Extinctions, and what's happening now, is that back then there was no conscious awareness on the part of the organisms who created the problem and those that were affected.  Now, we have (or should have) the awareness to see what is happening, and enough knowledge to make some smart decisions and halt the self-destructive path we're on.

Let's hope that it's not too late.

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Waves, demons, and sunk costs

I find it utterly baffling how hard it is for people to look at something that didn't work out like they expected and say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

I mean, on one level, I get it.  I'm no fonder of being wrong than the next guy.  Finding out you're mistaken, especially about something important, can be devastating.  And admitting you're wrong can be nothing short of humiliating.  But even so -- when the facts demand it, we don't really have a choice, do we?

To judge by a great many people, apparently we do, and that choice is "hang on like grim death to what we already believed, and summarily dismiss any evidence to the contrary."

Take, for example, last week's election here in the United States.  Many of us, on both sides of the aisle, were expecting a "red wave" -- that the Republicans would score resounding wins, and end up with decisive majorities in the House, Senate, and gubernatorial races.  Didn't quite work out that way.  The Democratic majority in the Senate looks like it'll be up by at least one, possibly two; at the time of this writing, the control of the House of Representatives has yet to be decided, but any majority (either way) is going to be razor-thin.

My reason for bringing this up in the context of "being wrong" is not the pollsters, nor mere voting citizens like myself.  I have nowhere near the expertise in political science to expect my prognostications about elections would carry any weight at all, and polls have been wrong as often as they're right.  No, what I'm looking at here are the people who predicted the "red wave" would happen -- because God had told them so personally.

Let's start with pastor George Pearsons, who told an interviewer on The Victory Channel that he knew the election wouldn't be "stolen" because he'd gotten the information directly from the Big Guy himself:

This afternoon I'm in the kitchen, and I'm fixing something to eat, and Terry and I are talking about the election, and the different things that are happening.  And for a moment I got quiet, and I heard the voice of the Lord.  And you know what he said?  He said, 'I got this.'...  Father, we thank you.  We have worked together between heaven and Earth.  Two years, praying, standing, believing,  We are, as believers, emboldened, empowered, and standing on our authority in the word of God.  This election will not be stolen.  Corruption, you bow your knee, your name to the name of Jesus [??? sic], and Father we thank you that we've seen in two years, Jesus himself has rolled up his sleeves, and he has worked, and his people have worked with him, in every shape, form, and manner.  So Lord, we thank you that this deal is over.  It's up.  And now we hear your voice: 'I got this.'  And we praise you and honor you for the victory this night for the United States of America.

As the results started coming in, though, the tune changed.  My Pillow guy Mike Lindell, also speaking on The Victory Channel, said he saw it coming, despite what God himself had said to Reverend Pearsons, and that had been announced on the same channel, only hours earlier:

Well, it's kind of what I expected.  They're stealing everything.  Just in Herschel Walker's race alone, over two hundred thousand votes have been injected into his opponent to get to this runoff stage.  They stole the governor's race with Mastriano in Pennsylvania, we've seen an early injection of ninety thousand votes in the computers, and Kari Lake, they're trying to steal her race, too.

Needless to say, there was no "injection" of votes, and the races weren't "stolen."  Walker's in a runoff but is trailing Raphael Warnock, and Mastriano lost fair and square.  But saying that is a bridge too far for people like Lindell.

A couple of days afterward, when it became clear that there had been no "red wave," the christofascists were scrambling around trying to figure out why the divine guidance had turned out to be flat wrong.  No way could they just say, "Maybe God didn't speak to us after all," or "Perhaps hitching our boat to Donald Trump wasn't such a great idea," or (worst of all) "It's time to do some reflection and rethink whether our message of exclusion, ugliness, and hate is in line with Jesus's actual words."  Instead, they cast around for what could possibly have made the election go sideways, and landed on the obvious answer:

It was the demons.

Pastor Shane Vaughn said that of course what God told him wasn't wrong, and of course he wasn't delusional when he claimed to hear God speaking in the first place.  It was just those damn demons:

That's why there was no red wave.  Abortion.  Abortion changed everything.  And even though all the polls showed the economy was the main issue, abortion is a religious issue.  And religion creates more passion than anything in the world...  And there's a religion of demons that loves abortion.  That religion of pro-abortion showed up.  It was bigger than anybody understood because of the passion those demonic powers create in their church of heathens that love to kill babies.  Now that's why there was no red wave.  Abortion.  Had it not been for the abortion issue, I promise you, the whole country would be red today.  What happened in Pennsylvania -- anybody who could vote for that monster, Uncle Fester, proves to me the power of demonic activity in the world today.  That's the only way you could vote for that man.  That's it.  Those demons did show up, and those demons do have power over this Earth.

So if the supernatural voice you supposedly heard telling you something turns out to be wrong, you have to invent a supernatural enemy to explain what happened?

I understand the sunk-cost fallacy; that once you've put a tremendous amount of personal and emotional energy into supporting something or someone, it's a huge effort to reverse course.  But seriously; isn't it time for some reassessment, here?

It puts me in mind of a couple of quotes, the first from Susan B. Anthony: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."  And even more to the point, from theologian and writer Timothy Keller: "If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself."

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