Bugging out

Because the universe has an odd sense of humor sometimes, I suppose it wasn't surprising that after writing a post about how there's no evidence we've been visited by aliens and a post about how giant insects are impossible, I would run into a webpage claiming that we're being visited by giant alien insects.

The webpage calls 'em mantids, which for me really ups the creepiness factor.  Even real praying mantises are scary little beasts, with their bulgy unblinking eyes and flexible necks (allowing for rotation of the head -- something close to unique in insects) and serrated steak knives for arms.  A giant one would definitely fall into the category of "nightmare."

My reaction to this claim was also amplified by having recently rewatched the episode of The X Files called "Folie à Deux," in which a giant bug, which can also manipulate your mind to think it looks human, is biting people and turning them into zombies.  Okay, stated like that, I have to admit the plot sounds pretty fucking stupid, but let me tell you, that episode is terrifying.

Or maybe I'm just suggestible, I dunno.  Because like I said, giant bugs are impossible for several different reasons having to do with well-established laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.  The largest insect known was the Carboniferous dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan -- but this was a time when the Earth's atmosphere had much higher oxygen content (by some estimates, as high as thirty percent), allowing insects' inherently inefficient respiratory systems to be less of a hindrance to growth.  

This argument apparently doesn't have any impact on the people who believe in alien mantids, because according to the webpage, these things are kind of everywhere.  Here's a typical example from the hundreds of encounters you will find described therein:

It started when I was a teenager and went on until my early thirties.  I would wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to move.  It was terrifying and I would try to scream but nothing would come out.  Sometimes I would see a bright round light across the room and I always felt like it was trying to drain the energy/life out of me.  Sometimes I felt a heavy pressure on me and a couple of times I even thought I could feel someone next to me on the bed.  Once I saw a figure in black who I just felt was evil, standing next to my bed and it also felt like he was trying to drain the energy/life out of me...  And one time I woke up to see a large praying mantis type creature sitting in a chair looking at me and there was a small hooded/cloaked figure next to him.  I can't tell you much about the smaller figure because I didn't pay that much attention to it.  I was more terrified of the larger creature and It had my full attention.  And one thing I do have memory of is noticing a large gold medallion on its chest area.  I know also that it was very tall even though it was sitting on a chair.  I think it was wearing some kind of cape around its shoulders.  I do remember also feeling like it was studying me with indifference, if that makes any sense.  Like it didn't seem to care that I was looking back at it, or that I was terrified.  More like I was just an object in front of it that it was looking at.  I have never gone into this much detail about it before, but these are the main things that stand out in my memory.

You're probably already predicting where I'm going to go with this; this sounds like a classic example of a hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis, a well-studied phenomenon that is undoubtedly terrifying to the people who experience it, but the intensity of their fear doesn't mean what they're seeing is real.  The trouble is, sleep paralysis hallucinations are extraordinarily convincing, because (unlike ordinary nightmares) you're aware of your actual surroundings and the position of your body, so it feels like you're immersed in a partly-real, partly-surreal world, where you can't tell which is which.

Sleep paralysis accounts for maybe half the stories of mantid encounters, from the sound of it.

It's also telling that the other half of the accounts begin with, "After taking a dose of DMT/psilocybin/high-strength THC..."

So I wouldn't worry about being visited by giant mantises.  If you do experience frequent sleep paralysis, though, you might want to see a doctor.  And if you're seeing huge insects after doing drugs, the obvious solution to your problem is "stop doing drugs."

But you have to wonder what mashup of previous posts the universe will find for me next.  Maybe "Bigfoot x ghosts."  Sasquatch sightings are actually people seeing the ghosts of prehistoric proto-hominids.  That claim's gotta be out there somewhere, right?

****************************************

A matter of scale

In Douglas Adams's brilliant book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, spent millennia fighting each other mercilessly until they intercept a message from Earth that they misinterpret as being a threat.  They forthwith decide to set aside their grievances with each other, and team up for an attack on our planet in retaliation:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy...

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across -- which happened to be the Earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

I was reminded of the Vl'Hurg and G'gugvuntt while reading the (much more serious) book The View from the Center of the Universe, by physicist Joel Primack and author and polymath Nancy Abrams.  In it, they look at our current understanding of the basics of physics and cosmology, and how it intertwines with metaphysics and philosophy, in search of a new "foundational myth" that will help us to understand our place in the universe.

What brought up Adams's fictional tiny space warriors was one of the most interesting things in the Primack/Abrams book, which is the importance of scale.  There are about sixty orders of magnitude (powers of ten) between the smallest thing we can talk meaningfully about (the Planck length) and the largest (the size of the known universe), and we ourselves fall just about in the middle.  This is no coincidence, the authors say; much smaller life forms are unlikely to have to have the complexity to develop intelligence, and much larger ones would be limited by a variety of physical factors such as the problem that if you increase length in a linear fashion, mass increases as a cube.  (Double the length, the mass goes up by a factor of eight, for example.)  Galileo knew about this, and used it to explain why the shape of the leg bones of mice and elephants are different.  Give an animal the size of an elephant the relative leg diameter of a mouse, and it couldn't support its own weight.  (This is why you shouldn't get scared by all of the bad science fiction movies from the fifties with names like The Cockroach That Ate Newark.  The proportions of an insect wouldn't work if it were a meter long, much less twenty or thirty.)

Pic from the 1954 horror flick Them!

Put simply: scale matters.  Where it gets really interesting, though, is when you look at the fundamental forces of nature.  We don't have a quantum theory of gravity yet, but that hasn't held back technology from using the principles of quantum physics; on the scale of the very small, gravity is insignificant and can be effectively ignored in most circumstances.  Once again, we ourselves are right around the size where gravity starts to get really critical.  Drop an ant off a skyscraper, and it will be none the worse for wear.  A human, though?

And the bigger the object, the more important gravity becomes, and (relatively speaking) the less important the other forces are.  On Earth, mountains can only get so high before the forces of erosion start pulling them down, breaking the cohesive electromagnetic bonds within the rocks and halting further rise.  In environments with lower gravity, though, mountains can get a great deal bigger.  Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars, is almost 22 kilometers high -- 2.5 times taller than Mount Everest.  The larger the object, the more intense the fight against gravity becomes.  The smoothest known objects in the universe are neutron stars, which have such immense gravity their topographic relief over the entire surface is on the order of a tenth of a millimeter.

Going the other direction, the relative magnitudes of the other forces increase.  A human scaled down to the size of a dust speck would be overwhelmed by electromagnetic forces -- for example, static electricity.  Consider how dust clings to your television screen.  These forces become much less important on a larger scale... whatever Gary Larson's The Far Side would have you believe:

Smaller still, and forces like the strong and weak nuclear forces -- the one that allows the particles in atomic nuclei to stick together, and the one that causes some forms of radioactive decay, respectively -- take over.  Trying to use brains that evolved to understand things on our scale (what we term "common sense") simply doesn't work on the scale of the very small or very large.

And a particularly fascinating bit, and something I'd never really considered, is how scale affects the properties of things.  Some properties are emergent; they result from the behavior and interactions of the parts.  A simple example is that water has three common forms, right?  Solid (ice), liquid, and gaseous (water vapor).  Those distinctions become completely meaningless on the scale of individual molecules.  One or two water molecules are not solid, liquid, or gaseous; those terms only acquire meaning on a much larger scale.

This is why it's so interesting to try to imagine what things would be like if you (to use Primack's and Abrams's metaphor) turned the zoom lens one way and then the other.  I first ran into this idea in high school, when we watched the mind-blowing short video Powers of Ten, which was filmed in 1968 (then touched up in 1977) but still impresses:

Anyhow, those are my thoughts about the concept of scale.  An explanation of why the Earth doesn't have to worry about either Vl'Hurgs and G'gugvuntts, enormous bugs, or static cling making your child stick to the ceiling.  A relief, really, because there's enough else to lose sleep over.  And given how quickly our common sense fails on unfamiliar scales, it's a good thing we have science to explain what's happening -- not to mention fueling our imaginations about what those scales might be like.

****************************************

Olympic outrage

The latest epistle from the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage surrounds Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated Italy's Angela Carini after a 46-second bout at the Paris Summer Olympics this week.  Carini complained that Khelif "had an advantage" over her, which could be said by just about anyone who loses, because... well, that's why they lost, isn't it?

But the allegation was that Khelif was a man fighting as a woman, a claim that got amplified by such malicious disinformation specialists as J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk, Logan Paul, and Donald Trump, the last-mentioned of whom crowed that if he was elected he would "keep men out of women's sports."

Let's get a few things straight.

First of all, the Olympics do not allow anatomically male individuals to participate in women's sports (or vice versa).  There is a genital inspection by a doctor prior to qualification -- the athletes call it the "nude parade" -- and yes, there have been people disqualified on those grounds.  Khelif passed, meaning she's anatomically female.

Second, it's illegal to be trans (or any identity of LGBTQ+) in Algeria.  You really believe that someone representing one of the most fervently Muslim countries in the world would have been allowed to get this far if she was LGBTQ+?  And sent to France to represent the country's pride?  Get real.

Khelif at the Pan-Arab Games in 2023 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ALGÉRIE PRESSE SERVICE | وكالة الأنباء الجزائرية , Imane Khelif Jeux panarabes 2023, CC BY 3.0]

Third, yes, there are disorders that cause differences in sexual development and/or differences in levels of hormones than the average person.  Khelif (and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu Ting) were disqualified last year by the International Boxing Association for failing some undisclosed eligibility test; the rumors are it was because she has high testosterone.  But allow me to remind the people who are screaming about this -- you are the ones who want to pretend these things are simple.  You are the ones who say, "It's black-and-white -- if you have a penis, you're male; if you have a vagina, you're female."  Well, Khelif had a medical examination, and has female genitalia.  

By your own goddamn standards, the fact that she has higher-than-average testosterone should not matter.

This hasn't stopped the screeching, because apparently I'm wrong about facts, truth, and science mattering to these people.  Just this morning I saw someone post a photo of Khelif fighting Carini, and captioned it, "First ridiculing the Last Supper!  Now this!  I'm done with these WOKE OLYMPICS!"  "Woke," now, apparently being the code word for "this makes me feel squinky."  The whole Last Supper thing has been dealt with so thoroughly that I would think at this point people would be embarrassed even to bring it up, but apparently I'm wrong about that, too.  The pageant at the opening ceremony had nothing to do with Christianity at all, but was a representation of a bacchanal from Greek mythology.  

My own take on that is that if the services in the church I attended as a kid had involved half-naked feasting, drinking, and carousing, I'd still be a member.

But now that the anger over the opening ceremonies has dissipated, these people have to find something else to be outraged about, so they've settled on Khelif.  Here, though, the stakes are way higher.  These completely fabricated and fact-free rumors are not only putting her career at risk, but her life.  You think the imams back home in Algeria aren't listening to all of this?

Are you that wedded to your desperate desire to be angry that you're willing to put a young woman's life in danger?

The bottom line is that sexual development, gender, and sexual orientation are complicated.  You might want to be able to fall back on the biblical "male and female he created them" thing, but allow me to remind you that the same source also says that bats are birds (Leviticus 11), so maybe learning your science from the Bible isn't such a hot idea.  In a previous post, I already went through a lot of the ways in which gender and sexuality can confound your desire to keep things simple and binary (you can read the post here if you want), so I won't go back through it all again.

Suffice it to say that by the bigots' own stated standards, Imane Khelif is female.  Your snarling about her being male or trans or whatnot is not only false, but it's putting her in danger, and you need to shut the hell up about it now.

Time to move on to whatever you feel like being outraged about next.  This time try to pick something that won't destroy an innocent athlete's life.

****************************************

Facepalms of the gods

While snooping around looking for topics for Skeptophilia, I stumbled upon a page over on Quora that made me utter a string of really bad words and then say, "that nonsense again?"

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that the aforementioned nonsense was the contention that mythological accounts of powerful deities living in the skies are evidence of visitations by aliens with advanced technology.  The original poster on Quora called it "the Ancient Alien Theory," which made me grind my teeth even harder, because the use of the word theory to mean "this crazy idea I just now pulled out of my ass" makes me absolutely livid.

But I shouldn't be surprised that they use it this way, because (1) they also misinterpret just about every piece of archaeological or anthropological evidence in existence, and (2) calling it a "theory" gives an undeserved sheen of seriousness to their claim.  What gets me, though, is that this stuff has been around for decades, has been debunked every which way from Sunday, and it's still got traction.

The whole goofy story starts with the book Chariots of the Gods, written by Erich von Däniken in 1968, but more's the pity, it doesn't end there.  Chariots of the Gods is the Creature That Won't Die.  Like the Hydra, it just keeps regrowing heads and coming back at you again.  In fact, Chariots of the Gods was only the first of a series of books by von Däniken, each ringing the changes on the Ancient Astronauts theme.  When Chariots of the Gods hit the bestseller list, he followed it up with: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else.

Obviously, I made the last one up, because von Däniken at age 89 is still blathering on about The Gods.  His books have sold 62 million copies, have been translated into 32 languages, and his ideas formed the basis of a theme park in Switzerland, thus further reinforcing my belief that skepticism will never be the lucrative profession that woo-wooism is.

A statue from the late Jomon period of Japan (1000-400 B.C.E.), which Erich von Däniken thinks can only be explained as a space-suited alien, since humans obviously never include weird imaginary creatures in their mythological art. [Image is in the Public Domain]

You might ask what von Däniken's evidence is, other than the argument from incredulity ("wow! The pyramids are really big!  I can't imagine making a pyramid, myself.  Therefore they must have been designed and constructed by aliens!").  Here are a few pieces of evidence that von Däniken claims support the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis:

• The Antikythera mechanism.  This complex "mechanical computer," found in a shipwreck dated to about 150 BCE, contains a series of nested gears and was used to calculate astronomical positions.  Von Däniken says it's of alien manufacture, despite the fact that similar devices are mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, including Cicero's De Re Publica, in which its invention is credited to Archimedes.  (To be fair to von Däniken, I used Antikythera myself as the central MacGuffin in my novel Gears.  However, unlike von Däniken's work, Gears is clearly labeled "fiction.")
• The Piri Reis map.  This map, dating to 1513, "could only have been drawn using an aerial perspective," von Däniken claims.  In other words, it was drawn looking down from a spacecraft.  Unfortunately for von Däniken, the truth is that human sailors have been quite good at drawing maps for a very long time, because those who weren't quickly became fish bait.  The antecedents of the Piri Reis map have been identified, and include ten maps of Arab origin, four of Portuguese origin, and one map drawn by Christopher Columbus himself.
• The sarcophagus of Mayan ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal, which allegedly shows him riding in a spacecraft.  The claim has been denounced loudly by every known expert in Mayan culture, language, and history.  The sarcophagus depicts the Mayan religious concept of the "world tree," not a rocket ship with a plume of exhaust, says archaeologist Sarah Kurnick -- von Däniken's claims to the contrary show that he can't be bothered to learn the first thing about Mayan culture before making pronouncements about what their art and inscriptions mean.  An objection which, of course, could be made about every other cultural artifact he mentions.
• The Moai, or Easter Island statues.  These are pretty cool, but in my mind only demonstrate what a lot of single-minded people working together can accomplish.
• A "non-rusting" iron pillar in India, that supposedly didn't rust because it was some kind of alien alloy.  When von Däniken's books became popular, naturally skeptics wanted to go to India to check out this story.  They found the pillar, and you'll never guess what it had on it?  Rust.  If you can imagine.  Being that this was kind of conclusive, von Däniken backed off from this claim, and said in an interview with Playboy, "We can forget about this iron thing."

The truth is, piece after piece of von Däniken's "evidence" falls apart if you analyze it, and try not to be swayed by his hyperdramatic statements that always seem to include phrases like "can only be explained by," "scientists are baffled by," and "a mystery beyond human ken."  Von Däniken's books were written because they make money, and are, simply put, pseudoscientific tripe.  The best debunking of his claims was Ronald Story's 1976 book The Space Gods Revealed, which is a page-by-page refutation of all of von Däniken's claims, and remains to this day one of the best skeptical analyses of pseudoscience ever written.

But the frustrating bottom line is that all of that hasn't made a dent in the popularity of von Däniken and his ideas.  Much of the blame lies with shows like Ancient Aliens, of course; the This Is No Longer Even Remotely Related To History Channel keeps pushing it because it's lucrative (it's now on its twentieth season and showing no signs of flagging).  So despite the rationalists and skeptics giving themselves facepalm-induced concussions, it looks like The Gods are still going to be around for a good long while yet.

****************************************

Looking out of the window

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, about how the best way to defang would-be fascists is to laugh directly into their faces, today we consider a second issue of political importance, to wit: why have the media completely dropped the ball with regards to fact-checking?

As British investigative journalist Nick Davies put it, "Journalists interview a woman in one room who says it's sunny.  Then they interview a man in another room who says it’s raining.  Your job, as a journalist, is not to simply write up what you have been told.  Your job is to look out of the damned window."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roger H. Goun from Brentwood, NH, USA, Reporter's notebook (2330323726), CC BY 2.0]

Instead, the trend has been for journalists to nod sagely as the person makes whatever lunatic pronouncement they're going on about at the moment, giving the impression to observers that it makes perfect sense -- and empowering said lunatic to repeat the claim again later, only louder.

Take, for example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is odious for many reasons but not least because of his staunch resistance to taking measures toward containing COVID-19.  At a rally, DeSantis came out not only against vaccine mandates, but against the vaccine itself.  "Almost every study now has said with these new boosters, you're more likely to get infected with the bivalent booster."  Of course, the truth is that zero studies have said that, but because virtually no one called him on it, he said it again at a recent rally -- "Every booster you take, you’re more likely to get COVID as a result of it."

Not a single reporter raised a hand to question the veracity of that remark, or to ask him to name one single study that has supported the contention.  The scary thing is that this is a lie that could, and probably has, cost lives.

Then we have the time-honored approach of candidates and elected officials realizing they've overstepped, and then saying, basically, "You didn't hear me say what you just now heard me say," and the media letting them get away with it both times.  Take, for example, Tulsa mayoral candidate Brent VanNorman, who stated explicitly that we need to require elected leaders to be Christian:

I think that if you go back and study the history of our nation and our founding, the pulpit was the primary tool [during] the Revolutionary War [for] communicating to people.  But [also], public officials had to be Christians in many areas and we’ve gone so far away from that and we need to get back.

A couple of days later, at least he was asked to clarify his comments by the Tulsa World, and if he really did mean that only Christians should hold office (despite the fact that this is exactly what he said).  VanNorman's response was:

No, no, no, no.  My point would be that I think people that are informed by Christian values make good public servants and they have a servant’s heart.  And so I would hope that, as a result of my value system, in which I care for humanity and … I try to treat people with equality, I try to treat people with love, and there’s a moral foundation that gives me that I hope people would appreciate, and that I hope that my motives are pure in what I’m doing and I’m not doing them for the wrong reason.

I'd like to tell you that he was drowned out by people shouting, "But that isn't what you said!"  But that'd be a lie.

Last, we have the statement by Donald Trump to a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, that should scare the absolute shit out of everyone, left and right and center alike -- in which he says that if he's elected president, it'll be the last time you'll ever get to vote:

I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote.  And again Christians, get out and vote, just this time.  You won’t have to do it anymore.  Four more years you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine.  You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.  I love you, Christians...  I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote.  In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.

Trump's campaign and right-wing members of Congress seemed to realize immediately how this came across -- and what bad timing it was to say the silent part out loud.  Sure, this might be their intent, but stating it to a room full of people was... impolitic, to put it mildly.  The campaign issued a statement to "clarify" it (when to damn near everyone it was plenty clear enough already), saying he was referring to  the "importance of faith," "uniting the country," and "bringing prosperity."

No, what he was referring to was becoming dictator-for-life.  Is there another meaning of "you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians" that I'm unaware of?

Tom Cotton, Republican senator from Arkansas and de facto leader of the Trump Toady Coalition, went even further, saying that of course Trump had been joking.  "I think he’s obviously making a joke about how bad things had been under Joe Biden, and how good they’ll be if we send President Trump back to the White House so we can turn the country around," Cotton said in an interview on CNN's State of the Nation.  "And that’s what the American people know.  For four years, things were good with President Trump.  We had stable prices, a growing economy, peace and stability around the world."

Notwithstanding the obvious lie about Trump's statement being "a joke," Cotton's assessment of the four-year chaos of the Trump presidency comes directly from CloudCuckooLand.  But no one called him on it.

If that wasn't clear enough, Fox News's Laura Ingraham interviewed Trump on Monday -- surely a sympathetic audience if ever there was one -- and gave him multiple opportunities to walk back his statement, or at least moderate it to assuage some of the horrified criticisms.  Trump -- whose motto is "death before admitting an error" -- refused, and merely doubled down on his original statement.  When Ingraham saw that he wasn't going to back off, she did -- irresponsible, but considering Ingraham's track record, unsurprising.

I've recently seen posts on social media lauding people like Walter Cronkite, who was one of the newscasters I remember well from when I was a kid.  He reported the news, and -- astonishingly -- you could not tell what his own political views were.  (To this day, I don't know if he was a conservative or a liberal, or somewhere in between.)  The watershed moment in the change we see from then to today was the repeal of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which opened the doors for the partisan, news-media-as-entertainment circus we have today.  I don't see any hope of its reinstitution, but we could go a long way toward repairing the damage if the people in news media reaffirmed their commitment to truth above politics.

Put more succinctly: it'd be nice if journalists started doing their fucking job.

****************************************

The laughter weapon

In the episode of the original Star Trek "The Day of the Dove," a malevolent alien entity traps 38 members of the Enterprise crew on board the ship -- along with 38 Klingons.

It sets them up with weapons, convenient grievances (some of which were manufactured by the entity, who can manipulate memories), and a preternatural ability to heal from wounds.  As it turns out, the entity feeds on rage.  It's set up the ship as a feeding station, fueling the anger of the Federation and Klingon crew, getting them to fight with each other so it can gain strength.

The end of the episode is interesting -- especially in light of recent events.  Kirk and Spock realize that the creature is promoting their fury for its own malign purposes, and the only way to defeat it is to refuse to play the game.  In the end, what works best is laughing at it.  Faced with derisive laughter, it is defeated by being starved of what it needed most, which is fear and anger.

I was immediately reminded of "The Day of the Dove" by the discombobulation we're seeing amongst the GOP over being labeled "weird."  The parallels are obvious.  The GOP message has been nothing if not consistent; keep voters angry and scared.  Keep your eye on those depraved atheists and LGBTQ+ people, they warn.  Watch out for the influence of Jews and Muslims.  Look out for the caravans of illegal immigrants, which, strangely enough, never seem to arrive.  (The rhetoric that illegal immigration has increased is false; illegal immigration has been level since 2007.  I'm not saying it's not a problem, but the idea that the Democrats have opened the borders simply isn't true.)  

What the recent "call 'em weird" approach has highlighted is that fascism is, at its heart, humorless, arrogant, and deadly serious.  I remember thinking back in 2016 that what needed to happen was that during one of Trump's speeches, when he uttered one of his countless lunatic pronouncements, the entire room should have burst out in a deafening uproar of laughter.  Trump doesn't mind an argument; he positively thrives on being combative.

But being laughed at?

No wannabe dictator can survive that.

It's already flooding social media.  Over at Bluesky, it's taken the form of "The Republicans have been the party of normalcy my entire life, especially when..."

• "... MTG and Lauren Boebert got into a vicious argument over Jewish space lasers."
• "... Donald Trump apparently believed that he could change the path of a hurricane by drawing on the forecast map with a Sharpie marker."
• "... Trump created trading cards depicting himself as various superheroes."
• "... Louie Gohmert claimed that the Democrats want to jail all Christians for belonging to a hate group."  (Despite the fact that about seventy percent of Americans self-identify as Christian.)
• "... Trump confuses 'asylum seeker' with 'insane asylum' and keeps bringing up Hannibal Lecter and acting as if he's a real person."
• "... DJT Jr. championed the views of Dr. Stella Immanuel, who believes that gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons."  (Yes, this is actually what she believes, and Trump Jr. did support her enthusiastically -- I wrote about it here a couple of years ago.)

And so on and so forth.  

Lest you think I'm exaggerating by calling them would-be fascist dictators, though, you might want to familiarize yourself with Project 2025, which sets the agenda for a second Trump presidency -- and which, despite Trump's recent efforts to backpedal, remains closely aligned with the MAGA leadership's goals.  In fact, Trump's running mate, J. D. Vance, has multiple connections to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who is one of Project 2025's main architects.  Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts's upcoming book, Dawn's Early Light, and includes in it a thinly-veiled call to violence: "It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine.  But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets."

So I'm serious when I say they're scrapping for a fight.  But what they do not seem to have been prepared for is the simple response of ridicule.

I'm not saying that ridicule is enough; but pointing out to undecided voters that these people are not just dangerous, they're downright crazy, seems to be helping.  It pulls the teeth of their main weapon, which is convincing everyone that (1) we're in danger, and (2) the GOP are the ones who know how to fix what they just now made us all scared of.  It's no wonder that the Nazis suppressed comics and satirists; Hitler preferred to be worshiped, but failing that, was fine being feared.

But the one thing he couldn't tolerate was not being taken seriously.

Trump is cut from much the same cloth.  Perhaps fortunately, he lacks the brains of a Hitler, Mao, Stalin, or Mussolini, and that's not even taking into account the signs in the last year that he's experiencing some profound cognitive decline.  And to be clear, laughing at him and his cronies doesn't mean we shouldn't treat the threat they represent as if it weren't real.  Like in the science fiction setting of "The Day of the Dove," the fact that the solution was to laugh at the entity didn't obviate the need to address the danger it represented.  MAGA, just like the nameless creature in Star Trek, is perfectly happy to incite their followers to bloodshed in order to fulfill their goals.

It's just that the best option at this point is to keep the focus on the fact that at their core, they're total nutjobs.  These people are so extreme that if I were to hop a time machine and go back ten years, and write a novel detailing what's happened in those ten years, my publisher would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

I'll end with another fictional reference -- this from C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.  Toward the end, the main character, Mark Studdock, has been accused of murder and imprisoned in the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, where he is being worked upon (with the desired end of brainwashing him completely) by the sinister Dr. Frost.  Frost, like the MAGA leaders, is a humorless, desperately arrogant man, who demands that others treat him with the seriousness and deference he feels he merits, despite his actions being nothing short of fatuous.  Mark realizes the solution, but too late, given that he's a captive, and at the mercy of Frost and his cronies.  Lewis writes, "Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing; but laughter was unhappily out of the question."

Luckily for rational voters in the United States it's not out of the question for us.  So keep laughing... and for heaven's sake, vote this November.

****************************************

Crying wolf

There's a bias that's a bit like an inverted appeal to authority: anyone who repeatedly and stridently makes claims that prove to be unsubstantiated, far-fetched, or outright false eventually finds that people simply stop listening.  At that point, even if they did come up with something reasonable and insightful, it's doubtful that anyone would pay attention.

We've seen a number of people who've exhausted their credibility in that fashion here at Skeptophilia.  Some notable examples:

• Geneticist Melba Ketchum, who has claimed several times to have hard evidence of the existence of Bigfoot (including its DNA).  She wrote a paper about her findings that she finally was able to get published -- but only in a "scientific journal" she herself started for the purpose.  Worse still, it turned out that most of the citations in the paper were bogus, including one that says in the cited paper itself that it was written as an April Fool's joke.
• Author Richard C. Hoagland, who despite having (direct quote from the Wikipedia article about him) "no education beyond high school level... no advanced training, schooling, or degrees in any scientific field" has become famous for a variety of loony pseudoscientific ideas, my favorite one being that the hexagonal cloud patterns on Saturn are "produced by the same phenomenon that causes crop circles."
• Journalist Jaime Maussan, who says he has conclusive proof that some mummies found in Mexico aren't human -- i.e., are aliens.  Surprising absolutely no one -- well, no one rational, at least -- the mummies that have been DNA tested are one hundred percent Homo sapiens, and the ones Maussan is the most convinced are aliens show signs of recent tampering to make them look less human.
• Mark Taylor, a prominent evangelical inspirational speaker, who claims that having orchestral instruments tuned to A = 440 Hertz is a secret plot by the Freemasons to alter your DNA so that you will hate Donald Trump.  I'd like to be able to say that this is the most insane thing that Taylor has said, but that unfortunately would be a lie.

All four of these people have found that restoring your credibility once it's shot is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  Although in the case of Taylor, I suspect he doesn't care -- part of his shtick is that he's a Lone Voice Crying In The Wilderness, so he probably falls back on the impeccable logic of "Many brilliant truth-tellers have been considered crazy -- people consider me crazy, so I must be a brilliant truth-teller!"

In any case, the latest in this Parade of Shame is Luis "Lue" Elizondo, who was a U. S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and worked for the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and now is a prominent member of the UFO/UAP Truthers community.  Lately we've seen lots of claims that the U. S. government has concrete proof of extraterrestrial intelligence; a year ago there was a big hearing in Congress where people like alleged whistleblower David Grusch said they'd not only seen, but participated in the recovery and testing of, "non-human biologicals" and the spacecraft that allowed them to get here.  My point then, as now, was: fine, you want us to believe you?  Let's see the goods.  Turn at least some of it over to independent unbiased scientists for study, under peer review, and then we can talk.  But of course instead we have additional claims of an X Files-style coverup because of issues of national security, and so far what we've seen is bupkis.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MjolnirPants, Grey Aliens Drawing, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Now, Elizondo is publishing his memoirs, and you can bet they'll be replete with claims of UFO shenanigans.  The problem is, skeptic Jason Colavito got a hold of some advance excerpts, and besides the usual Cigarette Smoking Man antics you'd expect, Elizondo is making a whole bunch of other clams that make his UFO stuff look like Nobel Prize material.

One of the weirdest is that Elizondo says he's been haunted for decades by "glowing ghost bubbles."  There are green ones, clear ones, and blue ones -- the green and clear ones are harmless, he says, but the blue ones are "malevolent."  Then he launches into a bizarre passage about the veracity of the Book of Enoch -- one of the biblical Apocrypha, about which I wrote last year, and which (to put not too fine a point on it) is really fucking bizarre -- and in these excerpts he has a lot to say about our old friends the Nephilim:

Enoch's journey is filled with heavenly accounts, including descriptions of angelic and demonic hierarchy, God's throne, God's inner circle of guards, and even the language of the supernatural.  On paper, Enoch's travels don't sound that dissimilar to reported nonhuman encounters.  We also looked at the sixth chapter of Genesis.  That's the chapter that contains the story of Noah's ark.  Before we get to Noah, verses 1 through 4 of that chapter quickly share that otherworldly beings came to earth and mated with human women. Some translations call these offspring giants, while others refer to the visitors by the original Hebrew word, Nephilim, which some scholars say means something like fallen angels, or beings that cause others to fall.

At this point he seems to be aware that he's doing a synchronized skating routine with Erich von Däniken on very thin ice, because he goes on to say, "To be clear, I'm not advocating the ancient astronaut hypothesis that many today believe.  I'm simply drawing some interesting parallels."  Which is the woo-woo equivalent of making some loony claim and then excusing it by saying you're "just asking questions" (which a friend of mine calls "JAQing off").

The problem, of course, is that if Elizondo wanted anyone to take him seriously other than people who think Ancient Aliens is a scientific documentary, this kind of nonsense is not doing him any favors.  Admittedly, I haven't read the memoirs -- they're not available yet -- only the excerpts Colavito provided.  But honestly, given their respective track records, I'm much more likely to trust Colavito's perspective than Elizondo's.

And that's coming from someone who would dearly love to see hard evidence of extraterrestrial life.

So there you have it.  One more example of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Like any other bias, it can lead you astray; the whole point of the fable is that eventually there was a wolf, no one believed the boy, and the boy got turned into a lupine hors-d'oeuvre.  But even if it's a bias, it's an understandable bias.  If Elizondo really does have good evidence of aliens but has blown his own credibility to the point that no one is listening any more, he has only himself to blame.

****************************************