Orbit completion

So, today is my 64th birthday, so Happy Birthday To Me, and all that sorta stuff.  I have to say it's hard for me to believe that I'm this old, but at least I make up for it by still being immature.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dogs-in-party-hats, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Even so, I have learned a few things, and I thought I'd step aside from my usual fare for a day, and present a list of 64 things I've come to understand in the last 64 years.  Despite my grandma's quip that free advice is worth what you paid for it, I hope you'll find some of them worthwhile.

1) Make a habit of being genuine.  Deception, even of yourself, can't be maintained forever.

2) If you want to find out whether someone is actually nice or not, watch how they treat dogs, cats, children, restaurant wait staff, and salespeople.

3) Live life with passion.

4) Don't take everything so damned seriously.  Most of the things that happen are, in the long run, irrelevant.

5) Don't overeat, but eat food you like.  Vegan raw-food enthusiasts who drink only wheat grass juice will still eventually die.

6) It's just as lazy -- and, in the end, just as damaging -- to distrust everyone automatically as it is to trust everyone automatically.

7) Complaining a lot pisses people off and solves essentially nothing.

8) Don't be ashamed of your tastes in art, music, books, and so on.  Anyone who ridicules you because of something that is a simple matter of opinion is an asshole.

9) There is nothing shameful about crying in public.  Yes, that includes men.

10) Relaxing and wasting time are not the same thing.

11) There are some people in this world who will be determined to see you as a different person than who you really are.  Fighting this is probably a waste of time.

12) Changing things from the top down seldom works.  The only real way to change things is from the bottom up.

13) People are always in love with their own delusions, and we all have them.

14) Spending more time outside is usually a good thing.

15) A lot of unhappiness can be averted by speaking what is truly in your heart, and then living by it.

16) Don't be afraid to get undressed in a gym locker room.  We're all naked under our clothes.

17) Take more chances.  Regrets about what we should have done and didn't are just as painful as regrets about what we did and wish we hadn't. 

18) Find some way to be creative.  Everyone is creative if they allow themselves to be.

19) You can't be unhappy for long if you have a snoring dog at your feet or a purring cat in your lap.

20) If you can, travel.  It is the most mind-expanding thing you can do.

21) Most of us could do with having fewer opinions and asking more questions.

22) If you put only half of yourself into an endeavor, it will be a waste of time for everyone involved.

23) There is very little that you will not be able to deal with better after a good night's sleep.

24) No matter how good you are at something, there will always be people who are better and worse than you are.  Be inspired by the ones who are better and be courteous and helpful to the ones who are worse.

25) Don't be afraid to say no to people.

26) Don't be afraid to say yes to people.

27) Get out on the dance floor.  You're more conspicuous just standing there than you would be if you were out dancing with the rest of us.

28) If life hands you lemons, fuck lemonade.  Make lemon meringue pie.

29) If you go to another country, eat what they eat.  You can get Big Macs at home.

30) Cultivate tolerance.

31) Be willing to laugh at your own quirks.

32) Stay hydrated.

33) Always keep in mind that much of what is on the internet is complete bullshit.

34) Cruelty is never justified.

35) Be unpredictable sometimes.

36) Don't talk once the movie has started.

37) The universe is endlessly interesting.  Cultivate curiosity about how it all works.

38) Pay attention when children talk to you.  It may not be interesting to listen to, but it's still important.

39) If you're still alive, you're not too old to pursue your dreams.  (If you're not still alive, and are nevertheless reading this, we should talk.)

40) You are not in competition with everyone.  All conversations aren't battles for superiority.

41) Sarcasm can be funny, but use it with caution.  Real ridicule can leave permanent scars.

42) Life is too short to drink bad beer.

43) Fundamentally, gullibility and cynicism come from the same place; an unwillingness to commit oneself to the hard work of thinking.

44) Every once in a while, go out at night and spend some time looking up at the stars.  It’s worthwhile being reminded how small we are.

45) Listen to your friends as much as you talk.

46) Take care of the planet we live on.  It's the only one we've got.

47) Be suspicious of any stranger who comes to your door trying to sell you a political ideology or a religious belief system.

48) Remember my friend Alex's motto: Semper alia via.  There's always another way.

49) Exercise more.

50) Understand that most people really are trying their best. 

51) Never take the last cookie unless you've been given explicit permission, and even then offer to split it.

52) Never let yourself be the one who caused another person to give up on reaching for their dreams or doing what they love.

53) A sincere apology goes a long, long way.

54) Stop at least once a day and be grateful for what you have.  There are many people in the world who would be thrilled to be where you are.

55) Find ways to give back to your community.

56) Some causes are worth fighting -- even dying -- for.

57) Make a point of learning new stuff.  Minds are like muscles -- if you don't work them, they atrophy.  And it's a healthy experience to be an absolute beginner at something every so often.

58) Be willing to lose an argument once in a while.

59) Play more.

60) Waste less.

61) Remember that most of the things we worry about won't come to pass.

62) There are times when things look hopeless, and the world seems bleak.  Hope anyway.

63) You will sometimes fail at things you desperately want to succeed at.  Try anyway.

64) You will sometimes get your heart broken.  Love anyway.

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The former Appalachia

In my post a few days ago about scary predators, I mentioned a curious feature of the prehistory of North America -- the Western Interior Seaway, which for a bit over thirty million years in the mid- to late-Cretaceous Period split the continent in half, connecting the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, Alan L. Titus, Map of North America with the Western Interior Seaway during the Campanian (Upper Cretaceous), CC BY 4.0]

This meant that a broad strip of land from current-day Alberta to east Texas was underwater.  In fact, Kansas -- which seldom comes to mind when you think of the ocean -- is one of the best places in the world to find late-Cretaceous-age marine fossils like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and scary-ass enormous carnivorous fish like Xiphactinus.

These mofos were around five meters in length.  Going for a nice skinnydip in the Western Interior Seaway would not have been recommended. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jonathan Chen, Xiphactinus AMNH, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Seaway is thought to have formed because the Laramide Orogeny -- the combination of uplift and volcanism that created the Rocky Mountains -- caused downwarping of the continental crust to the east, allowing the ocean to flood inward.  The Laramide uplift eventually would be the Seaway's undoing, however; the upward push gradually shifted eastward, lifting what is now the American Midwest and leaving it high and dry.  (Of course, this final stage happened right around the same time as the Chicxulub Impact occurred, so living things at that point had other worries; but fossil beds in North Dakota that preserve evidence of the actual impact show that most of what had been the Seaway had already broken up into swamps, rivers, and shallow lakes.)

As you can see from the map, the Western Interior Seaway split North America into two continents, a western one (Laramidia) and an eastern one (Appalachia).  What's curious is that we know a great deal more about the paleontology of Laramidia than we do of Appalachia.  Most of what come to mind as the big, charismatic dinosaur species of the late Cretaceous, such as T. rex and Triceratops and Parasaurolophus, lived in Laramidia; and just this week, a paper appeared in PLOS One about one of the Laramidian mammals, a muskrat-sized marsupial called Heleocola.

So what was happening in Appalachia?

The answer is "we're not really sure," because the evidence is so slim.  A rapidly-rising mountain range, such as what Laramidia was experiencing at the time, results in a lot of eroded sediments and volcanic ash with which to bury recently-deceased organisms, making the western parts of North America prime places for hunting fossils.  The part of the continent east of today's Mississippi River is, on the whole, made up of rocks of far greater age.  (For example, where I live -- a bit down and to the right of the letter "C" in "Appalachia" on the map -- has rocks of Devonian age, which were already about three hundred million years old when the late Cretaceous dinosaurs were lumbering around.)

So old, stable crust with gentle topography = much less eroded sediment, and little to no formation of the sedimentary rock where you find fossils.

There have been a few finds here and there, even if nowhere near the fossil riches in the western half of the continent.  We know there were species from some of the familiar groups -- tyrannosaurids, hadrosaurs, coelurosaurs, ornithomimids, and lambeosaurs -- but on the whole, they were more like their ancestors (i.e. they had changed less over time, and still resembled the "basal" or "stem" lineages).  Why this happened is unknown.  There's a general rule that slow environmental change and low selection leads to very slow rates of evolutionary change (thus the oft-quoted statement that sharks have barely changed in overall form in two hundred million years, which is only true if you pick and choose which species to look at).  So were the inhabitants of Appalachia simply in a more congenial environment, as compared to the ones in the tectonically-active, rapidly-rising mountains of Laramidia?

It's certainly a possibility, but it's hard to make any real determinations based on a lack of evidence.  As I've pointed out before, even with the most favorable of conditions, only an extremely small fraction of organisms ever become fossils; what we don't know about the past vastly outweighs what we do know.  Still, it's mind-boggling to think about a time when things were so very different.  My home territory of the Finger Lakes Region of New York, now cool hardwood forests where the scariest denizens are foxes and black bears, were then warm, humid subtropical jungles, with a climate more like Central America, and populated by a huge assemblage of dinosaurs we're only beginning to understand.

Just as well things have changed, really.  I have a hard enough time keeping bunnies out of my vegetable garden, I can't imagine how I'd deal with my lettuce plants being munched by hadrosaurs.

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Impact

New from the "Well, I Guess That's A Silver Lining?" department, we have: a massive meteorite collision 3.26 billion years ago that may have jump-started the evolution of life on Earth.

And I do mean massive.  This particular meteorite, given the unprepossessing name "S2," is estimated to have been a hundred times heavier than the Chicxulub Impactor that wrote finis on the Age of the Dinosaurs around 66 million years ago.  The S2 impact in effect took a chunk of rock four times the size of Mount Everest and slung it toward Earth at the muzzle velocity of a bullet fired from a gun.

The evidence for this impact was found in one of the oldest exposed rock formations on Earth -- the Barberton Greenstone, on the eastern edge of the Kaapvaal Craton in northeastern South Africa.  Geologists found tiny spherules -- microscopic glassy beads that result from molten rock being flung upward and aerosolized.  The impact not only blasted and melted millions of tons of rock, it generated so much heat that it boiled off the upper layer of the ocean, and the liquid water left behind was turned into the mother of all tsunamis.

"Picture yourself standing off the coast of Cape Cod, in a shelf of shallow water," said Nadja Drabon of Harvard University, who led the study.  "It’s a low-energy environment, without strong currents.  Then all of a sudden, you have a giant tsunami, sweeping by and ripping up the seafloor."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of artist Donald Davis]

But this was a very different Earth from the one we currently live on; it's unlikely there was any multicellular life yet, and possibly not even any eukaryotic organisms.

"No complex life had formed yet, and only single-celled life was present in the form of bacteria and archaea," Drabon said.  "The oceans likely contained some life, but not as much as today in part due to a lack of nutrients.  Some people even describe the Archean oceans as ‘biological deserts.’  The Archean Earth was a water world with few islands sticking out.  It would have been a curious sight, as the oceans were probably green in color from iron-rich deep waters...  Before the impact, there was some, but not much, life in the oceans due to the lack of nutrients and electron donors such as iron in the shallow water.  The impact released essential nutrients, such as phosphorus, on a global scale.  A student aptly called this impact a ‘fertilizer bomb.’  Overall, this is very good news for the evolution of early life on Earth, as impacts would have been much more frequent during the early stages of life’s evolution than they are today."

Well, "very good news" for the survivors, I guess, but the life forms caught in the boiling-hot tsunami or the ones that got bombarded by a rain of molten rock spherules might have disagreed.

But being bacteria, their sky-high reproductive rate certainly allowed them to rebound rapidly, especially given that the impact had basically blenderized the oceans, churning up vast amounts of iron- and phosphorus-rich sediments.  This triggered a planet-wide bacterial bloom, and it's likely that once the dust settled, the Archean oceans were once again thriving.  Even though the first eukaryotes were still over a billion years in the future, the stage had been set for the slow progression that would ultimately lead to the tremendous diversification the ended the Precambrian Era.

So even a collision from a piece of rock four times bigger than Everest didn't wipe out all life, which -- as I said earlier -- is, I suppose, the silver lining to all this.  As Ian Malcolm so famously put it, "Life, uh, finds a way."

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The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday: does a good fictional story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest book ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad."

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot.

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-seven-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A few that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looks at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, "Demons of the Punjab," about the inevitability of death and grief, "Dot and Bubble," which deals with issues of institutionalized racism, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  The episode "Orphan 55," from the Thirteenth Doctor's run, pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me explain to you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to figure out what the lesson was. Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we readers will get to the punchline on our own.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea of what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Probably my most explicitly moral-centered tale, The Communion of Shadows, is about the fragility of life, the importance of taking emotional risks, and the absolute necessity of looking after the people we love, because we never know how long we have -- but I think the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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Tooth and claw

The earliest living things, way back in the Precambrian Era, were almost certainly either autotrophs (those that could produce their own nutrients from inorganic chemicals) or else scavengers.  One of the reasons for this inference is that these early life forms had few in the way of hard, fossilizable parts, of the kind you might use to protect yourself from predators.  Most of the fossils from that era are casts and impressions, and suggest soft-bodied organisms that, all things considered, had life fairly easy.

But the Cambrian Explosion saw the rather sudden evolution of exoskeletons, scales, spines... and big, nasty, pointy teeth.  There's credible evidence that one of the main reasons behind that rapid diversification was the evolution of carnivory.  Rather than waiting for your neighbor to die before you can have a snack, you hasten the process yourself -- and create strong selection for adaptations involving self-defense and speed.

After that, life became a much dicier business.  I was discussing this just a couple of days ago with the amazing paleontologist and writer Riley Black (you should definitely check out her books at the link provided).  She'd posted on Bluesky about the terrifying Cretaceous mosasaur Tylosaurus proriger, which got to be a mind-blowing twelve meters long (around the length of a school bus).  This species lived in the Western Interior Seaway, which back then covered the entire middle of the North American continent.  I commented to her what a difficult place that must have been even to survive in.  "We always describe the Western Interior Seaway as 'a warm, shallow sea,'" Riley responded.  "Ahh, soothing -- and not like 'holy shit these waters are full of TEETH!'"

What's interesting, though, is that even though we think of predators as mostly being macroscopic carnivores, this practice goes all the way down to the microscopic.  The topic comes up because of a paper this week in Science about some research at ETH Zürich about a species of predatory marine bacteria called Aureispira.  These little things are downright terrifying.  They slither about on the ocean floor looking for prey -- other bacteria, especially those of the genus Vibrio -- and when they encounter one, they throw out structures that look like grappling hooks.  The hooks get tangled in the victim's flagella, and at that point it's game over.  The prey is pulled toward the predator, and when it's close enough, it shoots the prey with a microscopic bolt gun, and then chows down.

Aureispira isn't a one-off.  The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus forms what have been called "wolf packs" -- biofilms of millions of bacteria that can be up to several centimeters wide, that glide along soil particles, digesting any other bacteria or fungi they happen to run across. 

A "wolf pack" of Myxococcus xanthus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Trance Gemini, M. xanthus development, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This one immediately put me in mind of one of the most terrifying episodes of The X Files; "Field Trip."  In this freaky story, people are put into a series of powerful hallucinations after inhaling spores of a microorganism.  The hallucinations keep the victim quiet -- while (s)he is then slowly digested.

Of course, the microbe in "Field Trip" isn't real (thank heaven), but there are plenty of little horrors in the world of the tiny that are just as scary.  Take, for example, the aptly-named Vampirococcus, which is an anaerobic aquatic genus that latches onto other bacterial cells and sucks out their cytoplasm.

But the weirdest one of all is the bizarre Bdellovibrio, which is a free-swimming aquatic bacterium that launches itself at other single-celled organisms, moving at about a hundred times its own body length per second, then uses its flagella to spin at an unimaginable one hundred revolutions per second, turning itself into a living drill.  The prey's cell membrane is punctured in short order, and the Bdellovibrio burrows inside to feast on the innards.

So.  Yeah.  When Alfred, Lord Tennyson said that nature is "red in tooth and claw," I doubt he was thinking of bacteria.  But some of them are as scary as the mosasaurs I was discussing with Riley Black.  The world is a dangerous place -- even on the scale of the very, very small.

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Bibbity bobbity bullshit

This weekend, I stumbled upon one of those websites that is such a distilled bottle of crazy that I just have to tell you about it.  It involves the BBC, Walt Disney, Satan, Madonna, the Illuminati, the Jews, J. Edgar Hoover, the Hapsburg dynasty, O. J. Simpson, Donny Osmond, and the Mouseketeers.

Among other things.  If I listed everything these people tried to connect, that'd be my whole post.  The site, called This Present Crisis, brings not only "wingnuttery" but "wall of text" to new heights.  So let me see if I can summarize, here:

First, let's start by saying that Walt Disney was a bad, bad man.  This is in part because his family name really shouldn't be Disney, but d'Isgny, which is what it was when the first Disney came over from Normandy in 1066 with William the Conqueror.  The name was anglicized to "Disney" and the family has been traveling under an assumed name ever since, which is evil since apparently they're the only ones who ever did this.  As evidence, we're told that Walt's cousin, Wesley Ernest Disney, was a lawyer in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, a county which is controlled by Satan.  Wesley was also a Freemason, and later lived in Tulsa, which is "a powerful city of the Illuminati hierarchy."  And I think we can all agree that being an evil Illuminati mind-control agent is the only possible explanation for someone choosing to live in both Muskogee and Tulsa.

Yes.  Apparently, they is.

But back to Cousin Walt.  Walt Disney, the site says, started off bad and got worse.  He was an "occult sadistic porn king," evidently, and if that wasn't bad enough, he went on to make the movie Bambi:

The Hapsburgs of the 13th Illuminati bloodline had a sex salon in Vienna where a porn photographer named Felix Salten worked.  Felix… wrote a book Bambi which was then translated into English by the infamous communist Whittaker Chambers.  The elite were just beginning to form the roots for today’s environmental movement.  The book appealed to Disney because Disney liked animals better than people.  In the book, tame animals view humans as gods; while the wild and free animals see humans as demons…  The book begins with both free and tame animals viewing humans as rightly having dominion over them.  In the end, the animals view all humans as simply being on the same level as animals, a vicious animal only fit to be killed…

Well, I'm not sure that's exactly the message of the movie, frankly.  I will admit that I was amongst the children traumatized by the death of Bambi's mommy, but now with the wisdom of age and the experience of having collided with four deer in one six-month period, resulting in a total of $20,000 of damage to our various cars, I'm finding myself siding with the hunter.  The hunter probably would have been doing humanity a service by offing Bambi as well, and maybe Thumper, too.

But anyway.  Disney somehow connects to the BBC, which was also inspired by Satan, because if you take a BBC jingle from the 1930s and play it backwards, it says, "Live in sin.  Lucifer is nice.  Lucifer exploit them."  The BBC is controlled by Freemasons, who were also influencing Disney to do more bad stuff, like putting subliminal sexual messages in movies like The Little Mermaid.

So finally things got so bad that J. Edgar Hoover got involved.  (Yes, I know that Hoover died seventeen years before The Little Mermaid was released.  Just bear with me, here.)  Hoover found out that Disney had no birth certificate, and apparently, didn't know who his parents were.  So he provided Disney with a fake birth certificate, which Disney then showed to his parents.  (Yes, I know that one sentence ago I said that he didn't have parents.  I'm as confused as you are).  His father committed suicide and his mother lived the rest of her life as his maid.  Hoover did all of this so he could blackmail Disney.

Anyhow, Disney was in trouble after all of that, so he appealed to the Rothschild family, which is bankrolled by Jews (you knew they'd be involved) and (more) Freemasons.  The Rothschilds were the ones who helped lawyer Johnnie Cochran to win his case and free O. J. Simpson, all of which was somehow orchestrated by Walt Disney.  (Yes, I know that Disney died in 1966 and the O. J. trial was in 1995.  Stop asking questions.)  By this time (whenever the fuck time it actually is), Disney was a multimillionaire, and had mind-control child slaves called Mouseketeers to do his every bidding.

Then Donny and Marie Osmond get involved.  The Osmonds are actually "programmed multiples," meaning that there are dozens of identical Donnies and Maries, as if one of each wasn't enough, because this is the only way that they could have done two hundred shows a year without dropping dead of exhaustion.  Because their dad is a member of the Mormon Illuminati or something, although the site isn't clear on this point.

The author also ties in Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Lucas, and the Mafia.  (Of course the Mafia are involved.  Being bad guys, they'd have to be.)  But by this time, the neurons in my prefrontal cortex were beginning to scream for mercy, so I'm just going to leave you to take a look at the site yourself, if you dare.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm no great fan of Disney myself.  I think their movies are largely stereotypical schlock, and their "planned community" of Celebration, Florida, where everything is owned by Disney, is downright creepy.  Hating crowds and noise the way I do, if I was offered the choice of a visit to Disneyland or having my prostate examined by Edward Scissorhands, I'd have to think about it.  And whenever I hear the song "It's a Small World After All" I want to stick any available objects in my ears, even if those objects are fondue forks.

But I'm doubtful that any of the Illuminati conspiracy stuff is real.  If it were, don't you think more Americans would be brainless zombies?  (Although considering how many people still support Donald Trump...)  Anyhow, I'm sorry, but "bibbity bobbity boo" is not some kind of coded message from the Freemasons.  Most of us have seen many Disney movies and come out none the worse for wear.  Even I sat through The Little Mermaid, under some conditions of duress, and I wasn't aware of any subtle sexual messages, although as a biologist it did bother me no end that the character "Flounder" was clearly not a flounder.

So this entire website strikes me as lunacy.  Entertaining, in a bizarre sort of way, but lunacy.

Except for the the thing about the Mouseketeers.  Anyone who is willing to dance around while wearing those ear-hats is definitely being controlled by an evil power of some kind.

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The illusion of balance

I got an interesting email, undoubtedly prompted by one of my recent anti-Trump posts.  Here's the salient part:

People like you calling yourself skeptics make me laugh.  One look at what you write and anyone can see you're biased.  You're constantly going on about left-wing liberal crap, and calling ideas you don't like words like nonsense and stupid and ridiculous.  You don't even give the opposite side a fair hearing.  You dismiss stuff without even giving it good consideration, and call it "skepticism."  At least you could be honest enough to admit you're not fair and unbiased.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's start with the easy stuff first.  

I'm not unbiased, and have never claimed I am, for the very good reason that everyone is biased.  No exceptions.  

Skepticism doesn't mean eliminating all biases -- that's almost certainly impossible.  As British science historian James Burke points out, in his mindblowing series The Day the Universe Changed, the whole enterprise of knowledge is biased right down to its roots, because your preconceived notions about how the world works will determine what tools you use to study it, how you will analyze the data once you've got it, and even what you consider to be reliable evidence.

So sure, as skeptics we should try to expunge all the biases we can, and for the rest, keep them well in mind.  A bias can't hurt you if it's right in front of your eyes.  As an example, my post yesterday -- about a claim that Breakthrough Listen has found incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- revealed my clear bias to doubt the person who made the claim.  However, the important thing is that (1) I stated it up front, and (2) at the end of the post, I admitted explicitly that I could be wrong.  (And in this case, would be thrilled if I were.)  In the end, the evidence decides the outcome.  If the aliens have been talking to us, I'll have no choice but to admit that my bias led me astray, and to change my mind.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What the guy who emailed me seems to want, though, is always to have some sort of "fair hearing" for the talking points of the other side(s).  Which in some cases is a reasonable request, I suppose, but we need to make sure we understand what "fair and balanced" means.  In the realm of science, it's not "fair and balanced" to have a geology textbook give equal time to plate tectonics and the claim of somebody who thinks the mantle of the Earth is filled with banana pudding.  There are some ideas that can be dismissed out of hand, based on the available evidence; young-Earth creationism, alchemy, homeopathy, and the geocentric model are obvious examples.

There's more to it than this, though, because he touched on the subject of politics, which for a lot of people skates out over very thin ice.  And sure, here as well I have my biases, but I'm perfectly open about them.  I do lean left; no question about it.  I hope I don't do so thoughtlessly, and with no chance of having my mind changed if I'm wrong, but I've been a liberal all my life and probably always will be.

But my attempting to be fair doesn't mean I'm any more required to give credence to absurd or dangerous ideas in politics than I am in any other realm.  "Balance" doesn't mean pretending that people promoting democracy and those promoting fascism are morally equivalent.  It doesn't mean we should give equal weight to >99.5% of climatologists and to the <0.5% who think that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening.  It doesn't mean we have to give the same respect to those campaigning for equal rights and those who think that people of other races are inferior or that queer people should be lined up and shot.

So okay, we should listen to both sides.  And then give our support to the one that is moral, just, and in line with the facts and evidence.

In summary, I'm obligated to treat all humans with equal respect, but that doesn't mean all ideas are worthy of equal respect.  You may not like it, but sometimes the fair, balanced, appropriate, and -- dare I say it -- skeptical response is to say, "That idea is wrong/immoral/dangerous/flat-out idiotic."

In any case, I'm not going to apologize for my biases, although I will try to keep my eyes on them at all times.  And if knowing that I'm (1) liberal, (2) understand and trust science, (3) support democracy and human rights, and (4) champion LGBTQ+ people ('cuz I am one) bothers you, you're not going to have much fun while visiting my blog. 

But after all this -- well, if you really do get your jollies from reading stuff that pisses you off, then knock yourself out.  

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