Notes on a supercluster

Today I'm going to focus on outer space, because if I don't I'll be forced to deal with events down here on Earth, and it's a little early to start drinking.

The James Webb Space Telescope just posted information on a structure called the Saraswati Supercluster,  which at a diameter of 650 million light years and a mass of twenty quadrillion times the mass of the Sun, is one of the largest gravitationally-bound structures known.  If you look toward the constellation Pisces, visible in the Northern Hemisphere from August to early January, you're staring right at the Saraswati Supercluster.

Not that you can see it with the naked eye.  Its center is about four billion light years away, meaning not only that it's extremely faint, the light from it has taken about a third of the age of the universe to get here, so it's really red-shifted.  Here's the rather mind-blowing image the JWST team just posted on their site:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pablo Carlos Budassi, Extended universe logarithmic illustration (English annotated), CC BY-SA 4.0]

On this diagram, the Sun and Solar System are at the center, and as you move outward the scale increases exponentially, allowing us to visualize -- or at least imagine -- the astonishing vastness of the universe.  (Saraswati is just slightly to the left of top center on the diagram.)

The name of the supercluster is from a Sanskrit word meaning "ever-flowing stream with many pools," which is appropriate.  It's made of forty-three galaxy clusters -- not galaxies, mind you, but galaxy clusters -- of which the largest, Abell 2631, is thought to be made up of over a thousand galaxies (and something on the order of a hundred trillion stars).

If your mind is not boggling yet, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

Because of its distance and faintness, we haven't known about Saraswati for all that long.  It was discovered in 2017 by a team of Indian astronomers led by Joydeep Bagchi from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, India, and since has been the object of intense study by astrophysicists for two main reasons.  First -- although it's phenomenally massive, its vast diameter makes it remarkable that it hangs together gravitationally.  (Remember that gravitational attraction falls off as the square of the distance; it never goes to zero, but it does get really weak.)  The fact that it does seem to be acting as a single structure could give us valuable information about the role of the elusive dark matter in making large objects stick together over time.

Second, it might provide some insight into solving another mystery, the question of how (or if) dark energy, the strange force that seems to be making the expansion of the universe speed up, is changing over time.  You may recall that just this past August, a pair of papers came out suggesting that the strength of this peculiar phenomenon might be decreasing; that instead of heading toward the rather ghastly prospect of a "Big Rip," where dark energy overpowers every other known force and tears matter apart into a soup of subatomic particles, the expansion might eventually stop or even reverse.  The old "oscillating universe" idea, that the universe goes through an endless series of expansions and collapses -- popularized by such brilliant luminaries of physics as Paul Steinhardt and Roger Penrose -- might have legs after all.  Studying Saraswati might give us more information about how the strength of dark energy has changed in the four-billion-odd years it's taken the light from the supercluster to arrive here.

So next time you look up into a clear night sky, think of what lies beyond the bit you can actually see.  Every individual star visible to the naked eye lives in a (relatively) tiny sphere in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.  The few bits that visible but are farther away -- the smear of light that is all we can discern of the rest of our own galaxy, as well as the few other galaxies we can see without a telescope (like Andromeda and the two Magellanic Clouds) are so distant that individual stars can't be resolved without magnification.  What we think of as the impressive grandeur of the night sky is, basically, like thinking you're a world traveler because you drove around your own neighborhood once or twice.

But I guess I need to come back down to Earth.  Unfortunately.  On the whole, I'm much happier looking up.  It makes the current horror show we're living through at least seem a little less overwhelming, and puts our own place in the universe into perspective.

Maybe if our so-called leaders spent more time stargazing, it might provide them with some much-needed humility.

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The necessity of representation

It's a weird time for queer representation in fiction.

There's some good news, for sure.  The surprise breakout hit Heated Rivalry, a steamy series about two closeted hockey superstars (played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams), got stunningly high viewership and ratings, with episode five ("I'll Believe in Anything") becoming the second-highest IMDb-rated television episode ever.  (Beaten only by the Breaking Bad episode "Ozymandias.")  The two leads, and costars François Arnaud and Robbie G. K., have been signed for two more seasons of the show.

Likewise, the extremely popular (and well-received by the critics) series Heartstopper, and the rom-com movie Red, White, and Royal Blue, have much-anticipated sequels coming out in 2026.

At the same time, though, the Stranger Things season five episode "The Bridge," where the character Will Byers came out to his friends as gay, got review-bombed, with 104,000 people weighing in (more than twice the average).  While some reviewers cited poor writing and too many extraneous plot lines -- not new criticisms of the series -- a good many railed against the coming-out scene as "jarring," as well as (I can't even say this word without clenching my jaw) "woke."  And of course, it wouldn't be complete without Elon Musk contributing some additional bigotry by tweeting, "It's completely unnecessary and forced on audiences who just want to watch some basic sci-fi."

Netflix also chose to cancel -- after one season, and high ratings -- the queer-inclusive shows Olympo and Boots, the latter after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called it "woke garbage."

Apparently us queer people simply existing is now "woke."

You hear from the homophobes that they're upset that "you can't turn the television on without seeing queer people."  Well, y'know what?  Given that recent surveys found that around ten percent of people in the United States self-identify as LGBTQ+, you kind of should expect that.  (And keep in mind that's only the people who were willing to admit to it.  Chances are, the number is significantly higher than that, considering the continuing stigma.)  

But you know what else?  If you don't want to watch queer-inclusive shows, there's a simple solution:

Don't.  Watch.  Them.

If you were caught off guard by Will Byers being gay, you weren't paying attention to the eight million clues that had been dropped along the way.  And as for Olympo and Boots, those were advertised as dramas about queer athletes and military men, respectively.  Judging by the ratings, neither of these shows was unpopular, or lacked viewers; they were axed simply because Netflix chose to kiss the asses of rich bigots who complained.

You homophobes honestly don't need to watch those shows and then whine, or (worse) brigade them.  There are plenty of one hundred percent straight television, movies, and books out there for you to enjoy.

And always have been.  One of the weirdest comments you hear about queer representation is that exposure to such content "turns people gay," as if some straight fourteen-year-old boy sees a single gay character on a television show and suddenly gets this dazed look and says, "I know!  I shall run out and kiss a boy right now."  Funny, though, that it doesn't seem to work the other way.  I grew up in the 1970s, and damn near every television show and movie I watched featured only straight people in straight relationships, and I came out queer anyhow.

It's almost like it doesn't matter what you watch.

Nota bene: bear in mind that I'm not talking about age-appropriateness, here.  That's an entirely different conversation.  Heated Rivalry has some scenes that aren't appropriate for people under eighteen, whatever their sexual orientation.  Too many people conflate these two entirely separate issues -- often deliberately, to muddy the waters.

But mere representation?  Yeah, it should be there, in all kinds of media.

We exist, dammit.  I spent four decades feeling invisible because society taught me that I should be ashamed of what I was and who I was.  Don't expect me and others like me to vanish again.

So yeah, we've got a way to go.  There's still way too much "When will there be a Straight Pride Month, hurr hurr hurr" bullshit whenever Pride rolls around.  (My stock answer is "Be glad you don't need one.")  And judging by the combination of accolades and condemnations we've seen just in the last month, our culture's attitudes toward queer people are still in a considerable state of ferment.

Let me end by saying what it means to queer people just to see themselves reflected in the fiction they read, watch, and hear.  We live in a society where a significant portion of our neighbors would like very much to pretend we don't exist, and where a vocal minority want to see us dead.  As for us, we just want to be who we are, openly and without shame or fear.  A friend of mine posted the following a few weeks ago:

As someone who was a queer kid who almost did turn into a dead kid (twice), I can say with some assurance that this strikes at the heart of the entire issue.  My suicide attempts, at ages 17 and 20, were not solely because I was closeted -- there's more to that story than I have the space or the inclination to go into right now -- but if I had honestly understood back then that I wasn't broken or in need of redemption, the effect on me would have been huge.  Just having one trusted mentor say, "I know, and it's okay" could have made all the difference.

Or -- failing that -- seeing consistent, positive LGBTQ+ representation in films, television, and books, reassurance that queer people didn't have to be nothing more than the punchlines of jokes, or (worse) damaged, loveless, hopeless, or dead.

It's one reason I have LGBTQ+ representation in my own books.  Maybe someone reading them will be like I was back then -- afraid, alone, and closeted.  If my writing can console one of those folks, reassure them that they're just fine as they are, maybe even pry open the closet door a little and let some light in -- well, I don't know that I could ask for anything more as an author.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about wondering how the trajectory of my life would have been different had I made different choices -- amongst them, coming out when I was a teenager.  Of course, you can't ever know the answer to that, so all the regrets I sometimes wrestle with are the very definition of fruitless.  But I do know that we can demand a better world now.  For everyone, including the marginalized and stigmatized.

And if that's "woke," I proudly accept the label.

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Lost and found

I'm currently reading Michael Novacek's fascinating book Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, which is about the expeditions led by Novacek into the backcountry of the Mongolian Gobi Desert in search of late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils.

And they found 'em.  In abundance.  The remains that Novacek's team unearthed changed our understanding of the evolution of dinosaurs and early mammals in central Asia -- I've already lost count of the number of new species his group found, and I'm only about a third of the way through the book.

What struck me, though, is the combination of physical and personal hardship that the team members were willing to tolerate to achieve their goals.  The Gobi Desert is, even today, largely untraveled and unmapped; the nomadic groups that live in its arid wastes have to keep moving to survive in a climate that is broiling hot in the summer and viciously cold in the winter, has little in the way of drinkable fresh water, and is thin pasturage for domestic animals even at the best of times.  These scientists launched into the arid badlands in old, Soviet-era trucks that broke down every time someone sneezed hard, with carefully-rationed food, water, and gasoline, and exactly zero margin for error.

The fact that they not only survived, but achieved their scientific goals (and then some), is downright astonishing.  And every other page, I've shaken my head and thought, "I would never have the courage to do something like this.  Not in a million years."

Keep in mind, too, that this is coming from someone who did his share of backcountry camping, mostly in the Cascades and Olympics of Washington State.  Being a teacher has its perks -- June, July, and August being top of the list -- and when I was in my twenties I frequently disappeared into the fir-shrouded forests during the summer for weeks at a time.  So I'm no stranger to sleeping outdoors and hiking with a heavy pack.  (Or at least I was.  Now that I am Of A Certain Age, I'm afraid my appreciation of the creature comforts has done nothing but increase.)

But still: I would never have been brave enough to take off into the wilds of Mongolia the way Novacek et al. did (repeatedly).  Which probably would have scotched any intent I might have had to become a paleontologist.

On the other hand, sometimes -- admittedly, it's probably rare -- great paleontological discoveries can come from merely opening the right drawer in a museum.  The reason the topic comes up (besides my current reading-in-progress) is the chance find by paleontologist Georgios Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, who was doing some research in London's Natural History Museum and stumbled across the bones of a very unusual fossil snake that had been overlooked for forty years.

Dubbed Paradoxophidion richardoweni -- "Richard Owen's paradoxical snake" -- it lived in England during the Eocene Epoch, something like 37 million years ago.  At that point, England was a great deal warmer than it is now.  The world was just exiting the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, at eight degrees Celsius higher than today one of the highest global average temperatures ever recorded.  The hot times favored diversification of ectothermic animals -- such as snakes -- in what are now regions with much cooler climates.

"It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there," said study lead author Georgalis.  "So, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling.  It's especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there's not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened."

The snake species, Georgalis said, seems to be related to a group called acrochordids now found only in southeast Asia and Australia -- although more study is needed to be certain.  And it also brought up the tantalizing question of what else might be hiding in museum drawers and cabinets.

"I'm planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen" Georgalis said.  "These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century.  There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven't been investigated before that I'm interested in looking at.  These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution."

So I guess you don't need to endure sandstorms and blistering heat and terrible food to make significant contributions to the field.

This also highlights the critical importance of museums in the entire scientific enterprise.  I found out yesterday the amazing news that one of our best local museums, the Paleontological Research Institution/Museum of the Earth, has received enough donations to remain open -- funding cuts were looking likely to shutter it permanently.  On the one hand, I'm thrilled that enough people were willing to donate to keep this wonderful place going (and if you're willing, I encourage you to go to their website and do so as well -- even if they met their goal, they can still put every penny to good use).  On the other, though, isn't it sad that we never seem to run out of money for stuff like funding war and paying kickbacks to corporate billionaires, but cutting-edge scientific establishments that are inspirations to thousands basically have to hold a bake sale to stay in business?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matt Wedel, Yale brontosaurus, CC BY 4.0]

In any case, here's another puzzle piece adding to the picture of what the Earth was like tens of millions of years ago, that had been hidden away in a museum cabinet for four decades.  I find the whole thing endlessly fascinating, which probably explains why the topic of paleontology is such a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia. 

But as interested as I am, I still don't think I'd be brave enough to venture into the Gobi Desert to study it.

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High strangeness in Warminster

Just about everyone has heard about the Roswell Incident, the 1947 discovery of military balloon debris near Roswell, New Mexico that gave rise to a million (and counting) conspiracy theories suggesting that the crash site had actually been pieces of a downed spacecraft, complete with the corpses of the alien crew.  But have you heard about the Warminster Thing?

It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard.  This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.

Here are the basics of the claim.

In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above.  It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles.  "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported.  "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones."  Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside.  There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation).  But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."

Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.

At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds.  At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road.  But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close.  Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel."  The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.

But the incident wasn't over yet.  As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack."  "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."

A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force.  Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place.  I could hear an odd humming tone.  It was most unusual.  It lasted no more than a minute."

All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.

Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.

There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds.  People reported flocks of birds being found dead.  "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported.  "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow.  It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."

This time, though, people began seeing things as well.

Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars.  Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky.  Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it.  It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall.  It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it.  It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."

By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:

By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965.  He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.

So, what's going on here?

There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them.  The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster.  The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.

A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts."  Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect."  It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life.  He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing.  They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.

Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.

In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth.  (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here.  I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)

So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory.  When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.

Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation.  Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.  

The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident.  That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.

The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything.  We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category.  Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965.  Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria."  But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.

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The mystery of the Travellers

Monday's post, about the difficulty of defining the term race, prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to ask if I'd ever heard of the Irish Travellers.

I asked if they were Romani (colloquially referred to as Gypsies, although that term is now usually considered a slur) who live in Ireland.  She said no -- the story is more interesting than that.

And indeed it is.

The Travellers, or Mincéirí, are a generally nomadic group of people whose origins are shrouded in mystery, but who by some accounts have lived on the island as an identifiable group since at least the twelfth century C.E.  In the Irish language they're called An Lucht Siúil -- "the walking people."  They have a distinct style of dress, including emphasis on beadwork and embroidery, and their own sets of tunes and songs.  They even speak a separate language -- Shelta -- which contains words from Irish and English, as well as a number of what appear to be neologisms.  It's not been well-studied, because as a group with a history of persecution, the Travellers are (understandably) reluctant to share their knowledge with outsiders.  What's known of it, though, seems to be mutually unintelligible to both speakers of Irish and English, and to qualify as an actual separate language (i.e., not a dialect or a pidgin).

Despite the fact that they've experienced discrimination, and the difficulty of maintaining their lifestyle in the face of an increasingly homogenized, technological world, there are still over thirty thousand people in Ireland who self-identify as Travellers.

A Traveller caravan in July 1954 [Image credit: National Library of Ireland]

Their origins are a mystery.  There are Romani in Ireland, just as there are in most European countries; although they occupy a similar societal niche as the Travellers, they seem to be unrelated.  (Genetic studies of Romani have shown fairly conclusively that they are an Indo-Aryan people who made their way into Europe something like a thousand years ago from what is now the Indian state of Rajasthan.)  An analysis of the genetics of the Travellers has found that they are essentially Irish in origin, although have been reproductively isolated from the rest of the population since at least the eleventh century C.E., and possibly before.  This study concluded that while related, the Travellers are as distinct from the rest of the Irish as the Icelanders are from the Norwegians.

How could this have happened?  One hypothesis -- and it's no more than that -- is that the ancestors of the Travellers belonged to an itinerant profession that was looked down upon and segregated not because of genetic unrelatedness, but because of social stigma (similar to the Dalits of India).  Like many people with a history of oppression, they are struggling to maintain their language, culture, and identity, and have finally achieved recognition by the Irish government as a distinct ethnic group worthy of protection.

Logo of the All-Travellers Forum (Mincéir Whiden is Shelta for "Travellers talking")

This group highlights once again the difficulty of defining what we mean by race or ethnicity.  Genetically, the Travellers are very similar to the Irish, and seem to share a common origin some time in the last millennium.  Their language, Shelta, probably started out being a pidgin of Old Gaelic and Middle English, but now (like the Kreyòl language of Haiti) has evolved and strengthened into an actual complex and complete language.  Culturally, they're distinct enough to warrant governmental recognition and at least some efforts toward protection and support.

This is hardly the only such case known.  Here in the United States, we've got the Melungeons of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Redbones of southwestern Louisiana, all of which seem from genetic studies to be "tri-racial isolates" descended from a combination of sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, and western European ancestors, but who -- like the Travellers -- have been separate long enough to develop their own distinct cultures.  My mother's people, the Cajuns, are another such case; they're predominantly of Nova Scotian French ancestry, but have a good admixture of Indigenous Canadian, French Creole, Spanish, and German ancestry, and by virtue of being isolated for a good two centuries, have developed a unique culture and language.  My having learned French as a child from my older relatives means I have a strong Cajun accent when I speak it.  When I've visited Québec, I've often found it difficult to understand and be understood -- another example, to pilfer a quip from Oscar Wilde, of two countries separated by the same language.

So there you have it.  Thank you to the reader who suggested the topic; I always love it when my research for this blog results in my learning something I hadn't known about.  I find human genetics, ethnicity, language, and migration patterns endlessly fascinating -- explaining my choice of a field for my master's degree, and the frequency with which the topic shows up here at Skeptophilia.  And I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the truth is more complex than our desire to pigeonhole reality would suggest.  As Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a time or a life looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Just to be on the safe side

Here in the United States there is escalating concern among many of us that health insurance rates are going to skyrocket, since Donald Trump's campaign promise of making health care affordable is still at the tentative thoughts about a potential discussion of a concept of a plan stage.  The Republicans in Congress are understandably unconcerned, because they have their health insurance paid for.

It's the "I just ate dinner, so there's no such thing as a hunger problem" approach to things.

While health insurance and car insurance have always made good sense to me -- paying some amount monthly to guarantee not being bankrupted if you have a huge emergency -- a lot of kinds of insurance are just weird.  Take, for example, life insurance.  I guess in some ways it's reasonable; a cash payout to survivors to replace the income of a principal breadwinner, for example.  But in a lot of ways it seems like the insurance company betting every month that you'll live longer than you think you will, and if you die young, you win.

This is far from the weirdest thing people have insured, however.  Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, and Bob Dylan all have their vocal cords insured with Lloyd's of London, although in Dylan's case you have to wonder how much worse his voice would have to get before he'd be entitled to file a claim.  Michael Flatley, of Riverdance fame, has his legs insured for $47 million dollars.  I guess these, too, make some degree of sense, though, since all these people depend on the insured parts for their livelihood.

An insurance policy from 1851  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, Life insurance certificate issued by the Yorkshire Fire & Life Insurance Company to Samuel Holt, Liverpool, England, 1851.  British Museum, London, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But it only gets stranger from here.  Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth insured his penis, which is named -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "Little Elvis," for a million dollars.  What I wonder about this is how he became concerned he was at risk of losing it.  I mean, I'm as fond of mine as the next guy, but I've never really had any serious worries that it was going to get stolen or something.  Be that as it may, apparently Roth is All Shook Up about the possibility, to the point that he'll pay a premium monthly just to be sure he's adequately compensated if Little Elvis decides to Return to Sender.

Then there are the three sisters in Inverness, Scotland, who each paid £100 annually for a policy with a £1,000,000 payout if any of them experienced a virgin conception and gave birth to the Second Coming of Christ.  Apparently their motivation was concern over the emotional stress of raising baby Jesus, which I have to admit would be a challenge to even the most well-intentioned parent.  The company that issued the policy, British Insurance, eventually cancelled it, however.  "The Catholic Church is up in arms about what we've been doing," said Simon Burgess, the company's managing director.  "We have withdrawn the cover because it was causing a furore."

So I guess if Christ's rebirth occurs in Inverness, the New Holy Family are going to be on their own.

Then there are the estimated 37,000 people who have purchased insurance against the possibility of their being abducted by aliens.  Presumably this is for people who are abducted and then returned, because if you were whisked off to Zeta Reticuli or wherever permanently, it'd be kind of hard to file a claim.  It sounds weird, but the insurance companies that have offered such a policy seem to recognize that it's a great way to get people's money with a near-zero chance of ever having to pay anything to the insured.  Apparently the London-based company Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson offered a policy -- now discontinued -- that provided double indemnity if the abduction resulted in pregnancy.  This explicitly even applied to men, because you never know what those crafty aliens might be capable of.

What I wonder most about alien abduction insurance, though, is how the hell they calculated the premium.  Insurance companies hire people called actuaries, whose job it is to assess the overall risk of the company having to pay out, and then fix the premiums at a level that would allow the company to cover their expenses (including payouts) and still turn a profit.  So: the higher the risk of payout, the higher the premium.  That's why smokers pay more for life insurance, for example.  But how do you assess the risk for something that has never happened, and which (to all appearances) won't ever happen?  My guess is the actuaries stayed up late one night discussing it, and after a few martinis they said, "Fuck it, let's just charge 'em a hundred bucks yearly per million and call it good."

Anyhow, here's yet more evidence that I have zero understanding of my fellow humans.  I mean, okay, I get why the insurance companies do this.  Despite reassuring us that they're Like a Good Neighbor and that You're In Good Hands, the reason they exist is to rake in truly enormous amounts of cash for their CEOs and stockholders.  But what motivates the people who purchase these policies?  Are they really that worried they'll be abducted and/or impregnated?  Like with David Lee Roth's wee friend, you have to wonder if any of these people understand the concept of actual risk.

Or maybe they all have way more money than I do, and figure, "What the hell, I can afford it, may as well sleep a little more soundly at night."

Me, I'm willing to take my chances.  I'm already paying an astronomical amount for health insurance, and that's only going to get worse given the current regime's Corporate Profits FTW attitude.  As far as my various body parts and my likelihood of being abducted by aliens, I think I'll just deal with it if it happens.  And I doubt seriously if my wife and I would be chosen as parents to Jesus 2.0.  I think as a pair of sixty-something atheists, we're probably unlikely to be anywhere near the top of the list.

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Race to the bottom

The Greek philosopher Socrates made a name for himself -- as well as a good many enemies -- by pouncing on people who were using words like "virtue" or "truth" or "evil" and demanding that they define them.  Then, by asking further questions, he gradually and inexorably demonstrated that those who were so confidently proclaiming their opinions couldn't come up with a thoughtful, rational, self-consistent definition of the terms they were using.

It's a technique we should employ when people use the word race.

Especially covert racists like Donald Trump and overt ones like Stephen Miller, despite the baffling question of how either one of them can look in the mirror in the morning and think, "Yeah, baby, that's a Master Race face, right there."  The notoriously anti-immigrant Trump made the news a few days ago by saying he's tired of immigrants from "shithole countries" but would be just thrilled to welcome lots of immigrants from (for example) Norway, prompting many Norwegians to injure themselves laughing, which wasn't a big deal for them because at least they have a free national health care system.  The subtext, of course, is that the northern European countries Trump is so fond of have lots of light-skinned people, and the "shithole countries" he hates mostly don't, but even he hasn't gotten bold enough to say it that bluntly.

Then there was Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller, who tweeted the heartwarming Christmas message that he'd watched a Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin Christmas special with his kids, and "imagine watching that and thinking we need infinity migrants," because apparently there's nothing like celebrating the birth of the baby of a homeless Middle Eastern couple so poor they had to bed him down in a stable by sending as many brown-skinned immigrants as you can find to concentration camps.  Miller's statement becomes even more insane when you realize that the two performers he was enjoying with his kids, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were both the children of poor Italian immigrants.

What puts this into even finer focus is that there's no good definition of what race actually means, and that's even if you ask the scientists who study it.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it's meaningless, but what's certain is that (1) it has little to no genetic basis, and (2) it's primarily cultural.  The characteristics laypeople usually use to define race -- things like skin, eye, and hair color, hair texture, eye shape, and various other facial features -- are under the control of only a handful of genes, and are highly responsive to natural selection based upon climate.  (For example, West Africans and Indigenous Australians have a lot of the same "tropical" characteristics -- dark skin and eyes, curly hair, broad noses -- and yet are very distantly related.)

Besides the bigoted nonsense from Trump and Miller, the other reason this comes up is that I'm currently reading the book Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.  Cavalli-Sforza, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was something of the elder statesman in the field of human population genetics, and his work is rightly viewed as foundational in our understanding of race, ethnicity, migration, and human evolution.  Despite my background in the field -- population genetics is one of only a small number of disciplines in which I can honestly consider my background reasonably solid -- I have had a couple of eye-opening moments while reading this book.  And there was one that made me say, out loud, "Wow!", which I reproduce verbatim below:

Classification based on continental origin could furnish a first approximation of racial division, until we realize that Asia and even Africa and the Americas are very heterogeneous...  The observation has been made that almost any human group -- from a village in the Pyrenees or Alps, to a Pygmy camp in Africa -- displays almost the same average difference between individuals, although gene frequencies typically differ from village to village by some small amount.  Any small village typically contains about the same genetic variation as another village located on any other continent.  Each population is a microcosm that recapitulates the entire human macrocosm even if the precise genetic compositions vary slightly.  Naturally, a small village in the Alps, or a Pygmy camp of thirty people, is somewhat less heterogeneous genetically than a large country, for example, China, but perhaps only by a factor of two.  On average, these populations have a heterogeneity among individuals only slighly less than that in evidence in the whole world.  Regardless of the type of genetic markers used... the variation between two random individuals within any one population is 85% as large as that between two individuals randomly selected from the world's population.

Just to hammer that point home: pick two people, one of them of the same race as you, and who lives near you in your home town, and the other of a different race from the other side of the world.  The average genetic distance between you, the neighbor, and the other-race "foreigner" is only about fifteen percent, and perhaps much less.

Appearance confounds.  We here in the United States (and many people in western Europe) would call a San Bushman living right next door to a Tswana man in Botswana as both the same race ("Black"), and an English woman and a Japanese woman of different races, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown the San and Tswana are far more distantly related to each other than the English are to the Japanese.  (In fact, sub-Saharan Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together -- unsurprising if you consider that this is where the human race got its start, but perhaps surprising to those who believe in the principle of skin color über alles.)

Bigotry, of course, is based in fear.  People like Trump and Miller are afraid of white people becoming a minority because of how they and their cronies treat minorities, and they're in terror of the idea of being on the receiving end for a change.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking for an open-borders policy; despite (once again) what you hear from the current regime, no one I've ever heard has demanded letting anyone and everyone in.  There are real problems with overcrowding, stress on social support systems, cross-border drug trafficking, and so on.  But neither is the answer "America is for white people, so keep everyone else out" -- especially given that we Americans of European descent are here because we swiped the land only a couple of centuries ago from indigenous people who had been here for tens of thousands of years.

And who didn't, despite what you hear from J. D. Vance's outrageous lies, "engage in widespread child sacrifice" until the Christians came in and forced them to stop.

Anyhow, I'm going to play Socrates.  If Trump, Vance, Miller et al. want to have race-based quotas for immigration, I want them to give me a rational, scientifically-credible definition for what race actually means.  My guess is that if Cavalli-Sforza couldn't do it, neither can they.

So maybe they should just shut the fuck up about it.

I suspect all this won't sit well with the bigots, and they'd be just as happy if I'd go somewhere quiet and drink my nice big cup of hemlock.  Well, sorry, chums, that ain't gonna happen.  If reality and the truth make you uncomfortable, seems like that's a "you problem."

Maybe you should take to heart the wise words of another great thinker -- the Fourth Doctor:  "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

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