There were giants in the Earth

I remember reacting with honest bafflement when Barack Obama was running for his first term as president in 2008, and one of the criticisms levied against him was that he was part of the "academic elite."

I mean, don't you want your elected leaders to be smarter than you are?  I sure do.  I know I'm not smart enough to run an entire country.  Hell, I'm not smart enough to be mayor of my village, much less responsible for anything grander.  But strangely, that doesn't seem to be the way a lot of people think.  My first inkling that I was in the minority for wanting the president to be brilliant was when George W. Bush was running during the lead-up to the 2000 election, and I heard people say they were voting for him because he was "one of the common folk" and "someone you could sit down and have a beer with."

Never mind that in Bush's case, he was born into money, and his folksy aw-shucks demeanor was a sham; it worked.  He got elected (twice).  "Vote for Dubya, At Least He Won't Make You Feel Intellectually Inferior" apparently was a viable campaign slogan.

The result of this attitude, of course, is that we end up with leaders who are grossly incompetent.  Some of them are genuine lunatics.  And shockingly, for once I'm not talking about Donald Trump here.

Eric Burlison is a member of the House of Representatives from Missouri.  He made a name for himself in 2013 by taking a copy of a gun control bill and using it for target practice at a gun range, then posting a video of the event.  Prior to the Biden/Trump debate in 2019, he informed people in outraged tones that Biden was going to be "jacked up" -- on Mountain Dew.  Last year he was one of 26 Representatives -- all Republican -- who voted against a resolution condemning white supremacy.  He has repeatedly claimed that the January 6 riots weren't incited by Trump, whom Burlison idolizes, but by the FBI, as part of a plot to discredit Dear Leader.

So far, none of this is outside the norm for the GOP these days.  But just a few days ago, Burlison showed that he'd set up permanent residence in CrazyTown with a claim that has a long history,  but that I'd dearly hoped had gone the way of the dodo.

Burlison thinks that the Nephilim are real, and that the Smithsonian Institute has bones of giant humanoids from North America (fossils that are evidence of the truth of Genesis 6:4, "There were giants in the Earth in those days"), but is covering it up.  

For those of you who are neither (1) biblical scholars nor (2) people who frequent the dark corners of Woo-Woo Conspiracy World, the Nephilim are a race of big powerful dudes mentioned in a handful of places in the Bible, and who were supposedly the offspring of humans and fallen angels.  And when I say they were big, I mean abso-fucking-lutely enormous.  In Numbers 13:32-33, we read, "And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight verily as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."

I mean, I'm pretty much of average height and build, but even so it'd take someone mighty tall to make me feel verily as a grasshopper.

A couple of archaeologists in Brazil excavating some Nephilim bones, or possibly a clever use of PhotoShop

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that way back in 2015 I wrote about a guy named Steven Quayle, who did a series of YouTube videos about how not only were there giant bones in the Smithsonian, but there was a program being run by the Evil Deep State to use Nephilim DNA to create a race of giant super-soldiers.  So that'd be pretty fucking scary, except for the fact that to believe it, you'd have to have the IQ of a bowl of pudding.

Which brings me back to Eric Burlison, who is all in on the idea of the Nephilim.  He's so convinced that "giants are real" (direct quote) that he was asked to speak at a conference of true believers called "NephCon 2025," which I swear I am not making up.

And one of the things he promised to do, in his keynote speech at NephCon, was to launch an investigation into the Smithsonian and their nefarious coverup of enormous humanoid bones that came from the descendants of fallen angels.

Your tax dollars at work.

Oh, and I haven't yet mentioned that Burlison is a prominent member of the House Oversight Committee, the main investigative panel in Congress.  Because having a member of one of the most powerful committees in our government giving the impression that he thinks Lost in Space is a scientific documentary isn't scary at all.

Every new thing that comes out of the current administration prompts me to think that we are truly in the most idiotic timeline possible.  Then along comes another elected official who does or says something even more idiotic.  It brings to mind the quip by Albert Einstein, "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

There's probably nothing much that can be done about Burlison; he's pretty well entrenched as the Republican representative from one of the deepest red regions of the country.  In that part of Missouri, a hard-boiled egg could run against a qualified Democrat, and people would vote for the egg as long as there was an "R" after its name.  So I'm afraid we're stuck with him.  At least if he's wasting his time searching for giant bones in storerooms in basement of the Smithsonian, he'll have less time to work toward taking away civil rights from people who are the wrong color, religion, or sexuality, which seems to be the other favorite occupation of the GOP lately.

How people like Burlison get elected has always been a mystery to me, but I'm beginning to think that it's not a fluke, but a systemic problem with the way a great many Americans think.  It all brings to mind the rather terrifying quote from French lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre; "Every country gets the government it deserves."

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The mother of all pranks

Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England?

I'm guessing probably not.  At least I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about why she's memorable.  Well, not her in and of herself, exactly; but what happened to the poor woman, through no fault of her own.

Mrs. Tottenham is described as a "wealthy woman of good social standing" who lived in one of the better parts of Greater London, and seems to have mostly led an ordinary life until the morning of November 27, 1810.  She was awakened at five in the morning by a knock on the door.  Hastily donning her dressing gown, she answered it, and was met by a chimney sweep who said he'd "been sent for."  No sooner had she dismissed him, saying she'd done no such thing, than she was alarmed to see several other chimney sweeps approaching, followed in quick succession by a dozen different coal wagons, the drivers of each claiming that they'd been told to deliver coal to that address that morning.

But that was only the beginning.

At seven, the bakers started arriving.  One of them carried an elaborate wedding cake.  The bakers were followed by bootmakers.  After that, according to The London Times, there followed "upholsterers' goods in cart-loads, pianofortes, linen, jewellery [sic] and every other description of furniture, [that] were lodged as near as possible to the door of No. 54, with anxious tradespeople and a laughing mob.  With each new wave of arrivals, the crowd around the property grew, as many stayed to watch who would be the next to arrive...  Police summoned to the scene arrived to find six stout men bearing an organ, surrounded by wine-porters with permits, barbers with wigs, mantua-makers with band-boxes, [and] opticians with the various articles of their trade."

As the day progressed, she was accosted by forty butchers and forty fishmongers, each bringing a delivery of their respective viands, and pastry chefs with an estimated 2,500 raspberry tarts.  The police attempted to put a stop to it by blocking off both ends of the street, but people simply climbed over the barriers, saying they had their jobs to do.  In the mid-afternoon the chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company arrived, and shortly afterward the Duke of Gloucester, the last-mentioned of which was told that he'd been summoned to the deathbed of an obscure relative.

At five in the afternoon, about fifty women showed up, saying that they'd been informed there was an opening for domestic servants.  But the real pièce de resistance came at six, when an undertaker arrived bearing a coffin -- made to Mrs. Tottenham's measurements.

The hilarity -- for everyone but poor Mrs. Tottenham -- kept up until after dark, when the crowds finally dispersed, and the disappointed and pissed off merchants et al. gave up and went home.

A drawing of the Berners Street hoax by William Heath (1810) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The entire day, from a rented room across the street, there was a young man watching.  His name was Theodore Edward Hook.  Hook was the scion of minor nobility, and had been a brilliant (and precocious) student at Oxford University, matriculating at the age of sixteen.  He was a talented writer and musician, and in fact published his first novel when he was a teenager.

He was also a wicked practical joker.

He had made a bet -- the winner received one guinea -- that he could turn any address in London into the most talked-about spot in the world.  Working with two accomplices (who have never been identified, but one was alleged to be "a famous actress") he sent out between one and four thousand letters and postcards in the weeks preceding November 27.  The instructions differed, of course, but most of the recipients were given a specific time to arrive.  A bevy of dance instructors were told that Mrs. Tottenham was looking for lessons in the art for her daughter.  Some estate salesmen were informed that she required assistance in selling some property.  The two aforementioned chairmen were sent sinister notes that there had been allegations of fraud against an (unnamed) employee, and they should come to that address to hear "information that would be to their benefit."

Once Hook saw that his prank had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he got a little scared and decided it would be prudent to absent himself from town for a while, so he spent several weeks in the countryside with friends.  And sure enough, a search for the perpetrator(s) was undertaken, and significant rewards offered -- to no avail.

But it's an interesting thing about the psychology of people like Hook; they can't bear thinking that no one will ever find out how astonishingly clever they are.  (There have been murder mysteries predicated on this theme, my favorite of which is the brilliantly-crafted And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which I first read at age twelve with the result of being hooked on mysteries for life.)  Hook knew he was suspected of having had something to do with the Berners Street hoax, but no one could prove it, so all too quickly the furor died down.

Exactly what an egotist like Hook didn't want.  So...

... he admitted it.

It was in his semi-autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and spoken by the eponymous main character, but still, it's about as close to a confession as you can get:

[T]here's nothing like fun – what else made the effect in Berner's Street?  I am the man – I did it... copy the joke, and it ceases to be one; – any fool can imitate an example once set – but for originality of thought and design, I do think that was perfect.

Gilbert Gurney wasn't published until 1836.  There was no statute of limitations in England in the early nineteenth century, but after twenty-six years, the justice system didn't seem to think it was worth the trouble to go after Hook.  And interestingly, there was at least one allegation that he was laying claim to something he hadn't done.  Hook died in 1841 (of the effects of "dissipation"), and afterward his friend Nancy Matthews said that the prank wasn't Hook's doing, but had been perpetrated by "a young gentleman, now one of the most rigid churchmen in the kingdom." 

Most people, though, think that Matthews was trying to cover up for the lousy reputation of the Dearly Departed, and that Hook really was the guilty party.  Why he had targeted the unfortunate Mrs. Tottenham is unknown; some think he had a grudge against her for some reason, others that she was simply wealthy, a little uptight... and there was a room for rent across the street from where she lived.

I find it interesting to consider what would impel someone to do something like this.  It's funny, yes -- I have to admit laughing several times while reading the account -- but good heavens, consider the poor merchants and tradespeople who brought thousands of items thinking they were going to make some sales, and were turned away without so much as a ha'penny.  I'd have been pissed.  And Hook is damn lucky he wasn't caught; he'd likely have ended up in prison, and sued for everything he had to pay all the people whose services he'd fraudulently requested.

I've been the victim of practical jokes myself -- probably everyone has -- and there are ones that were genuinely good-hearted, like the students who put a huge wooden replica of the black obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my classroom on the last day of school, and arranged for the principal to play the theme music over the loudspeakers as soon as I walked in the door.  (I have never before or since been awake and so convinced I was dreaming.)  But practical jokes often contain a streak of cruelty, or (like Berners Street) at least a touch of "I don't give a damn whom I inconvenience."  "I was just joking" has been used way too many times to cover up for real harm done.  (It's why in general I loathe April Fool's Day.)

Anyhow, that's the story of one of the most elaborate pranks ever staged.  And I have to admit he planned the whole thing to a fare-thee-well.  Mrs. Tottenham came out none the worse for wear, and apparently told the story to uproarious laughter at cocktail parties for the rest of her life.  Me, though -- I'd much prefer having other stories to tell to my friends, so if any of you get any clever ideas, please don't.  For one thing, my three dogs would freak right the hell out.  For another, I have recently moved to an uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique, so you couldn't find me anyhow.

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The lady in red

I've been interested for years in how religions get started.

There are a handful that come about from the work of a single person; Joseph Smith with the Church of Latter-Day Saints, L. Ron Hubbard's creation of Scientology, and Mary Baker Eddy's launching of the Christian Science movement come to mind.   But I'm much more curious about ones that arise more organically, from a groundswell of belief that ends up sort of taking on a life of its own.

Of course, none of this happens in vacuo.  Belief systems always arise because of a combination of social conditions and prior beliefs.  Previous religious traditions are often combined, rearranged, jiggered around, and have new components added, resulting in something sufficiently different to what came before to warrant classification as a new religion.  In fact, this is so common that the anthropologists have a name for it; syncretism.  

As an example, let me tell you about one of the world's newest religions: the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.

The name translates to Our Lady of Holy Death, and the deity is a female figure that is a personification of death.  But it's not a belief system that reveres death; Santa Muerte is considered a protector figure, listening to and granting the prayers of devotees, and the association with death is that she guarantees to the faithful a peaceful transition to a pleasant afterlife.  Her depiction, though, isn't exactly reassuring:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The Church of Santa Muerte got its start in Mexico, and does share with my previous examples the fact that its meteoric rise popularity is largely due to the efforts of one person, Enriquita Romero, who founded a shrine to the goddess in Mexico City in 2001.  But the roots of the religion go back to at least the mid-twentieth century, when a belief system arose that took parts of Roman Catholicism and melded them with Indigenous beliefs, particularly the worship of the Aztec goddess of death Mictēcacihuātl, who played a similar role in pre-colonization Mexico.

You're probably wondering if the worship of Santa Muerte is more or less the same as the rituals associated with the Day of the Dead, given the similarity in the imagery.  The answer is that there is some overlap, but it's far from complete.  The Day of the Dead, celebrated on November 1 or 2 (it varies in different areas), is a thoroughly Catholicized practice that involves praying for the departed, decorating their graves, and going to Mass in the hopes that the devotions will improve the deceased family and friends' lot in the afterlife.  While Santa Muerte has some Christian symbolism incorporated into it, it is a religion of its own that has in fact been roundly condemned by both the Catholics and the evangelical Protestants.  Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, said, "It’s not religion just because it’s dressed up like religion; it’s a blasphemy against religion."  The Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, John Wester, told his flock outright that you can't be a Catholic and at the same time worship the Skeletal Lady.  Pope Francis himself visited Mexico in 2016, and on his first day there repudiated Santa Muerte as "blasphemous and satanic... a symbol of narco-culture."

The last objection has some merit.  As a movement that was underground for a long time (in fact, the Mexican government has gone so far as to bulldoze shrines and places of worship), it has become associated with people on the fringes of society -- the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, and people involved in the narcotics trade.  Interestingly enough, it's also become a haven for LGBTQ+ people; Santa Muerte herself is seen by many queer people in Mexico and Central America as their particular protector, who will intercede for them in matters of safety, prosperity, and love.  It's apparently become quite common for practitioners of Santa Muerte to officiate at same-sex weddings.

Its influence is spreading fast.  Andrew Chesnut, a historian who studies religion, has said that it is the single fastest-growing new religion in the world.  There are now places of worship in New York City, Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Tucson, and elsewhere, and even a temple built on a piece of ultra-expensive real estate on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood.

Honestly, I can understand the appeal.  When life is uncertain -- which it is now, for about a hundred different reasons -- putting your trust in a deity who champions the weak and powerless, protects the poor and oppressed, and (should death occur) makes the transition to the afterlife easy, has got to be attractive.  Anthropologist Lois Ann Lorentzen writes, "The subversive Santa Muerte, favored by undocumented migrants, including LGBTQ migrants, provides solace and protection against both church and state, while also reflecting their liminal, precarious lives."  Writer Carlos Garma calls it a "cult of crisis."

Myself, I'm not religious, but my attitude toward religion -- particularly this sort, which (unlike other religions I will refrain from naming) doesn't bludgeon its way into political power and then demand that everyone believe likewise, or else -- can be characterized as, "Whatever gets you through the day."  I've landed on a set of beliefs that (most of the time) helps me to make sense of the universe and keeps me putting one foot in front of the other.  Who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?

I used to be a great deal more militant about atheism, but I've come to recognize that (like everything) religion is complex.  My real beef is with religions that aren't content just to do their thing, but desire to compel universal compliance.  (And often create a fake persecution complex on the part of the true believers, because people who feel embattled and frightened will be much quicker to strike out in anger -- and are easier for the leaders to control.)  I'll fight like hell against religions that try to force adherence, or who muscle their way into public schools, which amounts to the same thing -- but otherwise?  Eh, I've got no problem with you.  Maybe I've tempered with age, or maybe I've just come to realize that "pick your battles" is one of the most important principles for a happy life.

So I'm more interested than repelled by Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.  If it gives you solace, and doesn't impel you to try to force me to believe, I'm happy you're happy.  It's a hard old world, and we need all the help we can get, wherever it comes from.

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The cost of regret

One of the most tragicomic moments in my life happened at my twentieth high school reunion.

I was painfully shy when I was young.  I brought the concept of "awkward teenager" to its absolute apex.  I made some passing attempts to fit in, but those were by and large failures.  I did have a few friends -- some of whom I am still in touch with, and whose friendship I treasure -- but to say I had no social life back then is an odds-on favorite for Understatement of the Year.

Anyhow, I was at the evening dance/party for my reunion, and did what I usually do at parties: got a drink and then stood around looking uncomfortable.  While I was standing there, I was approached by a woman on whom, when we were in high school, I had a crush of life-threatening proportions.  She came up and started chatting with me, and I relaxed a little, especially I after silently reassured myself that we weren't teenagers any more, and that I was indeed twenty years older than I had been when I graduated.

The conversation went here and there, and after a while she blushed a little and said, "I have a confession to make.  When we were in high school, I had a terrible crush on you, but I was too nervous to ask you out."

I goggled at her for a moment, and said, "Well, that's a little ironic..." and told her I'd felt the same way, and didn't ask her out for the same reason.

We had a good laugh over it, but really, it's kind of sad, isn't it?  We're so wrapped up in our neuroses and insecurities that we become our own worst enemies -- passing up opportunities that could have been rewarding purely out of fear.

Later that evening, in my hotel room, I spent an inordinate amount of time beating myself up over having been such a coward, and avoiding emotional risks whenever it was possible.  I spent a lot of time on that most fruitless of pursuits -- trying to map out what would have happened had I been braver.  I was put in mind of the poignant passage from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian, do you know it?

"But what would have been the good?" Lucy asked.

Aslan said nothing.

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?"

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No. Nobody is ever told that."

"Oh dear," said Lucy.

"But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan.  "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me – what will happen?  There is only one way of finding out."

When I first read this -- age about fifteen or so -- I remember being thunderstruck, because on some level I'd already recognized that one of the most consistent themes of my life was regret at not having made different decisions.  People I dearly wish I had not hurt.  Opportunities I passed up because of my shyness and risk-aversion.  And sadly, I didn't learn from these experiences, but allowed them to drive me further into avoidance.  I seemed to spend most of the following years planting my feet, mule-like, in a desperate attempt not to misstep, not recognizing that refusing to choose was itself a choice.

So of course it kept happening.  My (all things considered) terrible choice not to fight against my parents' decision that I should live at home while going to college.  My (at the time) barely-acknowledged choice to keep my bisexuality hidden for decades.

It's not, mind you, that I'm unhappy with my life as it is. I have a wonderful wife, two sons I'm proud of, and spent 32 years in a rewarding career that I discovered quite by accident, as a consequence of other seemingly unrelated decisions I made.  I have twenty-four books in print, something I have dreamed about since elementary school.  I live in a wonderful part of the world, and have had the good fortune to travel and see dozens of other amazing places.

And I'm well aware of the fact that things could have turned out far worse. Whatever else you can say about the decision, my choice to live at home during college, with conservative, strait-laced parents who kept close tabs on me, kept me out of all sorts of trouble I might otherwise have gotten into.  If I'd come out as bisexual in college, it would have been in around 1980 -- and this was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was still poorly understood, and a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence.

There's any number of ways the course of my life could have been deflected into an alternate path, and led me to somewhere very different, for better or worse.  Big decisions -- where to go to college, who to marry, what career to pursue.  Tiny actions with big effects, such as Donna Noble's choice of which direction to turn at an intersection in the mind-blowing Doctor Who episode "Turn Left" -- and of which in my own case I'm almost certainly unaware because looking back, they seem entirely insignificant.

As I said, I like my life just fine.  Even so, I've never been able to shuck the regret, and more than that the fact that like Lucy Pevensie in Prince Caspian, I'll never know what would have happened had I done otherwise.

The topic comes up because of a fascinating paper in the journal Psychological Science called "The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret," by Lily FitzGibbon and Kou Muryama (of the University of Reading), and Asuka Komiya (of Hiroshima University).  They did a risk/choice/reward assessment task with 150 adults, and after the task was completed, the volunteers were allowed to pay for information about how they would have fared had they chosen differently.

It turns out, people are willing to pay a lot, even when they find out that they chose poorly (i.e. they would have had a greater reward had they made a different choice), and even though knowledge of their poor decision causes regret, self-doubt, and worse performance on subsequent tasks.  The authors write:

After one makes a decision, it is common to reflect not only on the outcome that was achieved but also on what might have been.  For example, one might consider whether going to a party would have been more fun than staying home to work on a manuscript.  These counterfactual comparisons can have negative emotional consequences; they can lead to the experience of regret. In the current study, we examined a commonly observed yet understudied aspect of counterfactual comparisons: the motivational lure of counterfactual information—counterfactual curiosity.  Specifically, we found that people are so strongly seduced to know counterfactual information that they are willing to incur costs for information about how much they could have won, even if the information is likely to trigger negative emotions (regret) and is noninstrumental to obtaining rewards.

Why would people seek out information when they know ahead of time it is likely to make them feel bad?  The authors write:

One explanation for seeking negative information is that people may also find it interesting to test their emotional responses—a mechanism that might also underlie so-called morbid curiosity.  Counterfactual information of the kind sought in the current experiments may be desirable because it has high personal relevance—it relates to decisions that one has made in the recent past.  People’s desire for information about their own performance is known to be strong enough to overcome cognitive biases such as inequality aversion.  Thus, opportunities to learn about oneself and the actual and counterfactual consequences of one’s decisions may have powerful motivational status.

Chances are, if I was able to do what Donna did in "Turn Left" and see the outcome had I chosen differently, I'd find the results for my life's path would be better in some aspects and worse in others.  Like everything, it's a mixed bag.  Given the opportunity to go back in time and actually change something -- well, tempting as it would be, I would be mighty hesitant to take that step and risk everything I currently have and have accomplished.

But still -- I'd like to know.  Even if in some cases, I'd have done far better making a different choice, and then would add the certainty of having made a bad decision on top of the more diffuse regret I already have.  The temptation to find out would be almost irresistible.

Maybe it's better, honestly, that we don't see the long-term consequences of our actions.  Fortunate, to put it in Aslan's words, that "Nobody is ever told that."  It's hard enough living with knowing you fell short or behaved badly; how much worse would it be if we saw that things could have been far better if we'd only chosen differently?

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The four-alarm fire

I present to you three recent articles with a linked theme.

The first is about a study at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Australia, and describes an mRNA vaccine that appears to be capable of stopping malaria in its tracks.  The impact of malaria is astonishing, a fact that often escapes the notice of those of us who live in temperate parts of the world where it doesn't occur.  I still remember my shock, when one of my biology professors asked what species of animal has caused more human deaths than any other -- in fact, more than all the other animals combined.

Turns out, of course, it's the mosquito.  Between malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, and a host of other less-common diseases like chikungunya, eastern equine encephalitis, and West Nile virus, mosquitoes (actually several species, but lumping them together for the sake of simplicity) have by far outstripped all other animals in their negative impact on humans.  And of the diseases they carry, malaria is the worst, infecting an estimated three hundred million people per year, and causing six hundred thousand annual fatalities.

The new vaccine is, like the COVID-19 vaccine, an activated piece of messenger RNA.  In this case, it targets a gene in the malaria microorganism that is essential to the pathogen's reproduction within the mosquito.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Supyyyy, Double-stranded RNA, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In preclinical trials, the vaccine caused a 99.7% drop in transmission rates.  The potential impact of a therapy with this efficacy is astronomical, especially given that post-infection medical treatment for malaria is of limited benefit -- and has to be administered for the remainder of the patient's life.  A vaccine that could stop malaria transmission almost completely would have as great a positive effect on life in equatorial regions of the world as the smallpox and polio vaccines did globally in the twentieth century.

The second is a series of studies having to do with the use of mRNA vaccines to target cancer.  The difficulty with conventional chemotherapy is that it's hard to find chemicals that kill tumor cells without damaging your own tissues; as I'm sure many of you know all too well, chemotherapy drugs often come along with miserable and long-lasting side effects.  The effectiveness of mRNA cancer treatments is that the strand of mRNA can be designed to target tumor-specific antigens, turning them into what amount to "smart bombs" that destroy cancerous tissues without harming the rest of the body.  The therapy has been demonstrated to be useful against a variety of types of cancer, including the deadly and extremely hard to treat pancreatic cancer.  There has even been dramatic work done that has raised the possibility of a universal cancer vaccine -- something about which University of Florida researcher Duane Mitchell said, "What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction.  And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients — even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine."

The third is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just announced that he's canceling five hundred million dollars in funding for the development of mRNA vaccines.

Let me be blunt, here.

This action will kill people.

Not that RFK cares.  His dangerous lies were directly responsible for the vaccine avoidance that caused a devastating outbreak of measles in Samoa that killed eighty people, mostly children -- an action for which he has yet to take responsibility.  (This, of course, is hardly surprising; "It's someone else's fault" should be the new motto of the GOP.)

RFK has built his entire stance on lies.  He called the COVID-19 vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made," despite the CDC finding that vaccination saved more than two hundred thousand lives during the peak of the pandemic.  He has claimed without any scientific basis that all mRNA vaccines are dangerous, and in fact has talked about it in such a way as to lead people to believe that mRNA itself is a dangerous chemical, despite the fact that anyone who passed high school biology should recognize how ridiculous this is.  (I actually saw someone post, apparently seriously, that they would "never allow mRNA in their body," to which I responded, "good luck with that.")

I know there's some stiff competition, but I think RFK would top the list of the Most Dangerous Trump Appointees.  His fear-based, anti-science policies are going to directly result in deaths -- if we're lucky, it'll only be in the thousands, but if we have another pandemic, it could well be in the millions.  The scariest part is that I have no idea what we can do about it.  Besides not taking responsibility, the other thing the Republicans seem to be awfully good at is not bowing to pressure from knowledgeable experts.  In fact, being countered makes them double down and hang on even harder.

And can I point out here that almost half of the research funding RFK cut could be offset by canceling the plans for Trump's fucking Versailles-wannabe golden ballroom?

This is a four-alarm fire, and it seems like barely anyone is paying attention.  Certainly no one who can do anything about it.  This goes way beyond whether any of us will be able to get flu and COVID boosters this fall; this is about basic medical research that can save countless lives.  But ignorance and anti-science dogmatism are winning at the moment.

I just hope that we won't have to wait until a deadly global pandemic for people to wake up and start objecting -- and getting this ignorant, dramatically unqualified ideologue out of a position he never should have been appointed to in the first place.

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Trials and tribulations

A friend of mine posted a link on social media about how forty percent of Republicans approve of how Donald Trump has handled the whole horrible mess surrounding the incriminating written records from convicted pedophiles Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, despite the fact that the way he's handled it is (1) denying the records exist, (2) saying that the records don't include him, (3) saying that Obama created the records to slander him, and (4) saying okay, but Bill Clinton is in there, too, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Apparently, a significant proportion of MAGA-inclined individuals think this is all just hunky-dory, and are capable of believing all four of these things simultaneously.

My friend appended a comment to the effect that the whole world has gone crazy.  And I certainly understand how he could reach that conclusion.  But still, I think he's got it wrong.

The world hasn't gone crazy.  The world is crazy.  The world has always been crazy.  It's just that because there are now eight billion people on the planet and a lot of us are electronically connected, the craziness is amplified more, and spreads faster, than before.

But people?  People have always been loony, or at least a great many of them.  And here's another thing; that saying about "the cream always rises to the top" is patent nonsense.  Yeah, the situation right now is pretty extreme, but a lot of our previous presidents were nothing to brag about.  I mean, Nixon?  George W. Bush?  Reagan?  I think writer Dave Barry hit closer to the mark: "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that person is crazy."

But if you still think today's leaders (and the ones who support them) are any nuttier than those in the past, allow me to introduce you to Pope Stephen VI.

Stephen was pope for only a little over a year, from May 896 to August 897.  He started out as a priest in Rome, but other than that we know little about his background.  Apparently in 892 he was appointed as bishop of Anangni "against his will" by the pope at the time, one Formosus.

Formosus died on April 11, 896, and was succeeded by Pope Boniface VI, who reigned for fifteen days.  (Amazingly, he's not the pope with the shortest reign; that dubious honor goes to Urban VII, who died of malaria twelve days after getting the nod from the College of Cardinals.)  Boniface supposedly died of gout, but given that the church historian Caesar Baronius called him a "disgusting monster guilty of adultery and homicide," it's possible he was given a little help in shuffling off this mortal coil.

Anyhow, the next guy to be elected was the reluctant bishop Stephen.  And this is when things really went off the rails.

Formosus had gotten himself involved in playing politics with the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire quipped, was "neither Roman nor holy."  The current emperor was Lambert of Spoleto, whom Formosus himself had crowned, but in 893 the pope was becoming a little twitchy about how aggressive the Spoleto faction was getting, and decided to invite Arnulf of Carinthia, Lambert's rival, to Rome.

Formosus crowned him emperor too.

This would probably have devolved into a bloodbath had both Arnulf and Formosus not conveniently died within months of each other in 896.  Whew, disaster averted, right?  All settled, right?

Wrong.

Lambert of Spoleto and his redoubtable mother, Ageltrude, came to Rome, stomped into the papal residence, and said to the pope -- at this point Stephen VI -- "what the fuck, dude, I thought we had an agreement?"  Stephen babbled something to the effect that it hadn't been him who'd double-crossed Lambert, it'd been that rat Formosus, and what the hell do you want me to do about it anyway, he's already dead?

Dead-shmead, doesn't matter, Lambert said, and demanded that Stephen make amends.

So he did.

He dug up Formosus's rotting corpse and put it on trial.

Le Pape Formose et Etienne VI, by Jean-Paul Laurens (1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- that Formosus couldn't exactly speak on his own behalf.  As James Randi put it, "It's easy to talk to the dead; the difficulty is in getting them to talk back."  So Stephen appointed a deacon to be the voice of Formosus's defense.

I'm sure you can predict how effective a strategy that was.

At one point, Stephen demanded of the corpse, "When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?", and the deacon didn't have a good answer.  In fact, since the deacon was one of Stephen's friends, he deliberately didn't have a good answer for anything.  In the end (surprise!) Formosus was found guilty, stripped of his papal vestments, had three fingers of his right hand (the ones used in papal blessings) cut off, and was interred in a graveyard for the poor.  Then Stephen decided this wasn't sufficient, so he dug up the corpse again, tied stones to it, and threw it into the Tiber River.  All of Formosus's official acts were revoked and invalidated.

This, unfortunately, included Stephen's appointment as bishop of Anangni, but it took everyone a while to realize that.

Even this wasn't the end of it, though.  Despite being weighted down, the corpse washed up on the shores of the river, and people started claiming that touching it had worked miracles.  Cured the ill, made the lame walk, that sort of thing.  Maybe Formosus had been a holy man after all!  The public sentiment turned against Stephen, and he was deposed and arrested -- and one of the charges was that he'd become pope after telling everyone he was a bishop when he actually wasn't.  Given how widely he was hated, no one came up with the objection, "But... wasn't he the one who made the declaration that invalidated his own appointment as bishop?"  Didn't matter, as it turned out.  Stephen was strangled in prison in August of 897, after a reign of only fourteen months.  As for Formosus, his body was reclothed in the papal vestments and was reburied in St. Peter's Basilica, where he's remained ever since.  The next pope, Theodore II, only reigned for twenty days (cause of death unknown but highly suspicious), so he didn't have time to do much other than say "You know, I always thought Formosus was actually an okay guy," but the one after that, John IX (who reigned for a whole two years, which was pretty good for the time) rehabilitated Formosus completely, reinstated all of his official acts, excommunicated seven cardinals who'd gone along with the "Cadaver Synod," as it became known, and announced a prohibition against putting any more corpses on trial.

Which you'd think would be one of those things you wouldn't have to pass a law about.

So there's some prime grade-A craziness that shows our current lunacy is nothing new.  I've heard it seriously claimed that the Earth is the mental ward of the universe; no less a luminary than George Bernard Shaw said, "The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum."  I doubt Shaw was completely serious, but you know, I think he had a point.  And it's cold comfort to realize that the kind of insanity we're living through now has been going on for a very long time, given that at the moment we're stuck in the middle of it.

Humans seem to be capable of some serious nuttiness, and it all gets amplified a thousandfold when the nuts end up in charge.  But it bears keeping in mind that the nuts wouldn't end up in charge if it weren't for the support of lots of ordinary people, so we can't so easily absolve ourselves of the blame.

But "at least Donald Trump hasn't dug up a dead guy and put him on trial" is kind of a weak reassurance.  Especially since you can always follow that up with a powerful little word:

"... yet."

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Old as the hills

In northwestern Australia, there's an administrative region called Pilbara.

Even though on a map, it looks kind of long and narrow, it's big.  The area of Pilbara is just shy of that of California and Nevada put together.  (I suspect that I'm like many non-Australians in consistently forgetting just how big Australia is.  It's the sixth largest country in the world, and is almost the same size as the continental United States.  Flying from Sydney to Perth is comparable to flying from Atlanta to Los Angeles.)

Pilbara is also extremely hot and dry, and very sparsely populated, with only a bit over sixty thousand residents total, most of whom live in the western third of the region.  The northeastern quadrant is part of the aptly-named Great Sandy Desert, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.  There are only a few Indigenous tribes that somehow eke out a living there, most notably the Martu, but by and large it's uninhabited.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brian Voon Yee Yap, aka Yewenyi, at en.wikipedia]

What brings up the topic, though, is that Pilbara is interesting for another reason than its hostile climate.

It is the home to some of the oldest rocks on Earth.

The Pilbara Craton -- a craton is a contiguous piece of continental crust -- is estimated to be around three and a half billion years old.  For reference, the Earth's crust only solidified 4.4 billion years ago.  Since that time, plate tectonics took over, and as I've described before, tectonic processes excel at recycling crust.  At collisional margins such as trenches and convergent zones, usually one piece slides under the other and is melted as it sinks.  Even in places where two thick, cold continental plates run into each other -- examples are the Alps and the Himalayas -- the rocks are deformed, buried, or eroded.

The result is we have very few really old rocks left.  The only ones even on the same time scale as Pilbara are the Barberton Greenstone Belt of South Africa and the Canadian Shield (and even the latter has been heavily metamorphosed since its formation).

This makes Pilbara a great place to research if you're interested in the conditions of the Precambrian Earth -- as long as you can tolerate lots of sand, temperatures that often exceed 36 C, and a fun kind of grass called Triodia that has leaf margins made of silica.

Better known as glass.

Frolicking in a field of Triodia is like running through a meadow made of Exacto knives.

Be that as it may, geologists and paleontologists have begun a thorough study of this fascinating if forbidding chunk of rock.  The most recent reconstructions suggest that both Pilbara and the aforementioned Barberton Greenstone were once part of an equatorial supercontinent called Vaalbara (which preceded the supercontinent most people think of -- Pangaea -- by a good three billion years).  And those might be the only chunks of that enormous piece of land left intact.

There are two other reasons Pilbara is remarkable.

It contains numerous fossilized stromatolites, which are layered sedimentary structures formed by cyanobacteria, thought to be the earliest photosynthetic life forms.  There are still stromatolites forming today -- probably not coincidentally, in shallow bays in Western Australia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons photographer Paul Harrison (Reading UK), March 2005, Stromatolites growing in Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, Shark Bay in Western Australia.]

As such, the Pilbara stromatolite fossils are the oldest certain traces of life on Earth, dating to 3.48 billion years ago.

The other reason is that it's also home to a massive impact crater dating to 3.47 billion years ago.  Shortly after those earliest, tentative life forms were living and thriving in the warm shallow ocean waters, a huge meteorite struck near what is now the town of Marble Bar, forming a crater and shatter cone between 16 and 45 kilometers in diameter (because of erosion, it's hard even for the geologists to determine where its edges lie).  The resulting Miralga Impact Structure blew tremendous amounts of molten debris up into the air, and some of it landed on that chunk of Vaalbara that would eventually end up in South Africa -- only to be recovered by geologists almost three and a half billion years later.

So there's a place in Australia that gives new meaning to the phrase "old as the hills."  Given its remoteness and inhospitable climate, I'm unlikely ever to visit there, but there's something appealing about the idea.  Walking on rock that is an intact remnant of a continent from over three billion years ago is kind of awe-inspiring.  Even if all the other rock is still here somewhere -- melted and reformed and eroded multiple times -- the idea that this chunk of the Earth has somehow lasted that long more or less intact is mighty impressive.

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