JackTReason

The story is common enough: Someone goes to the doctor complaining of an illness and leaves with a prescription for a medication. Sometimes they also get an understanding of how that illness came to them, and even a mention or lecture of changes they could make to alleviate the condition. For chronic conditions most continue on the medication for great lengths of time. Sometimes the medications are increased, sometimes they are augmented, sometimes they are changed to different medicines or combinations of such; but less often does the patient set about to change the conditions that put them on the medicine to begin with. They may consider their condition was just a bad break, and that their meds are helping them cope. They feel some people are just unlucky and they get these conditions.
This is mostly not true.

I was once at the home of a couple, aged late sixties, who had a small kitchen table full of pill bottles between them. Pills for conditions and pills to counteract the side-effects of those pills and pills to counteract the side-effect of those counteracting pills. They each had two of those weekly plastic medicine sleeves (one wasn’t big enough) and they told me that they spent an hour on Saturday afternoon careful filling the sleeves with pills, and consulting charts they used to track pills and plan re-ordering. Their pill regimen was a part time job. It was a great awakening for me. This can’t be right, I thought. It can’t be that the human race could have survived and flourished for all these many thousands of generations without medicine if we were so prone to conditions that required them. And it isn’t just the race that has survived so long, but the individuals living into old age. Don’t be fooled by reports of life expectancy. We’ve all heard that people in past generations didn’t live past forty. This isn’t true at all. A cursory glance at a history book, or even our own individual genealogy, will show many people lived into their eighties and nineties long, long ago. You needn’t consult a bible to find very old people in our collective history.
The life-expectancy that we hear about is a birth-death model. That is, a child born today has a likelihood of living X number of years, on average, depending on where they live. It is an average for all human life. If one person lives to be one hundred, and another dies of crib death, the average of the two is fifty. When it says life expectancy was forty, it is an average that counts infant mortality to arrive at that number. Those numbers climb dramatically when and where we’ve eliminated or reduced death from childhood illness. And for the rest of the population we have seen increases. There are more people becoming centenarians. The average does go up a little do to medicine. And work place safety. And think of the bump when CPR (cardio pulmonary resuscitation) was developed. But it was always possible, bad luck notwithstanding, for individuals to live long and healthy lives – without medicine.

When it comes to how we approach health management. Some of it comes down to choices. Not a choice of which pill, but do we take pills at all? Can we replace pills with modified lifestyle? Can we strive to “un-catch” whatever ailment plagues us? Maybe, but we certainly can make changes that reduce our risk of these afflictions ahead of time. And millions of people make conscious choices to do that everyday in this world.

A relative of mine went to his doctor and asked about a pill he saw advertised on television. It was one of those “little purple pills.” The commercial promised relief from chronic heartburn attributed to acid reflux. The doctor did mention while he was writing the prescription that some people found success in combating acid reflux by dramatically changing their diets, or embarking on a complicated regimen of food combining. And yes, according to my relative, the doctor used the words “dramatically” and “complicated regimen.” In truth none of those words need apply.
I will allow that the doctor was repeating the sales pitch that the pharmaceutical rep laid on him, and even make a fifty cent wager that the doc got some incentive for prescribing that particular pill. But I’ll even lay it out there that this doctor, and perhaps even most doctors, don’t really think their patients are going to change their behavior anyway. And when thinking of more serious conditions it is the same. How often does an MD have to see fifty year old overweight men with diabetes before he realizes that if the general and absolute benefits and obvious increased enjoyment of a fit, healthy lifestyle haven’t persuaded them to make a change, then telling them it could alleviate the need for diabetes medicine isn’t likely to either. They tell them to try and lose some weight, and write the prescription.
And then there is their lack of education of nutrition. Doctors generally need to accumulate as little as eleven hours of nutritional knowledge in the course of their studies to meet the curriculum required. And this is usually self tallied. Read an article here or a study there and it adds up. They often do not know how effective dietary changes can be. While ignorance is the case for some, and willful self-interest is possible in others, I think they most simply become jaded. People are fat because they aren’t interested in changing the habits that made them fat. People who exercise and watch their diets were already doing that. Their actions aren’t driven in response to medical advice. They didn’t need to hear that it’s good for them to be healthy. Doctors don’t need to be corrupt (though some are) to give bad advice or prescribe pills when healthier options are available. They just need to be human. Your individual doctor, for all of the wealth of knowledge he has, should not be your only source for health information. But she should be one of your sources.

When it comes to those who make those pills, there is plenty to be wary of. The pharmaceutical industry provides funding for medical schools, and they advise those schools on curriculum; they promote the use of drugs directly to doctors through sales reps, all expense paid conferences, financial incentives, and advertising; they promote the use of their drugs directly to the would be patients in form or print and digital advertising; they market and sell medicine for normal conditions that do not require it (sometimes to the detriment of the individual, see osteopenia); and they have been accused of inventing diseases to medicate them. They might be evil if you believe in that sort of thing. I believe that they have too great an influence on the culture of healthcare. There are benefits to pills and times when they should be used, but not needing in the first place is better. And skepticism of pill companies is always warranted. But the reason they have so much influence is because much of what they make works. Medicine as a whole is largely worthwhile. My advice here isn’t to skip the doctor or the pill, but to take steps to eliminate the conditions that caused the need for the pill.

It is in our best interest to find better ways to approach our personal health. And there is plenty of information out there to help. Unfortunately there is plenty out there that will not help, and will likely even hurt. So here I am now deep into this post and finally getting to the point. The point is bad advice.

In the paragraphs above I tried to show why doctors and pill companies should be listened to with some level of skepticism and even occasional suspicion. And I’ve suggested that we adopt healthy choices to alleviate the need for medicine. It feels great to make a healthy change, and this kind of alternative approach is great. But sometimes we try to address everything with an alternative, and sometimes those alternatives are not going to help. But the reasons that we don’t carefully or successfully sort out good alternatives from bad ones are the same: ignorance and laziness.
If doctors and Big-Pharma are wrong, then whatever the alternative we find must be right. This is misguided logic that brings failure. Life is not simply making choices of who to believe. If we are willing to do the research we can find out a great deal about how we got the illnesses we have, and what changes we can make to alleviate them. We can find out what diet will lower our risk of the great killers our culture faces. But if we cheat and look for the shortcut to that research, we will often find ourselves following bad advice disseminated by fools and charlatans.

If medical science seems too eager to push a pill at me, I should assume they are wrong. This is bad logic. It is the same with any absolutes. The government lied once therefore they always lie. The mainstream media got it wrong that time, so they are always wrong. And taken to the logical conclusion of those arguments, we are led to believe “they” are actively trying to harm us and should never be listened to. As a rule, your doctor means well and is more of an expert than people selling alternative treatments on a website. “Ask your doctor,” is pretty good advice. But don’t ask which pill you should take, ask what changes you could make to alleviate the condition. You might get a really good answer, and a suggestion for future research. Look at alternatives, and ask your doctor about them. Your doctor might not have the answer, but if he’s a good one he will start to look knowing that you are interested.
In the world of alternative cures there is ignorance and chicanery to go along with occasional good advice. The empty meaning of the word “natural” will often lead us to believe that something championed by alternative advocates is better. And in following those claims of alternative therapies and medicines we may cause great harm to ourselves. Trying to improve our health by trusting advice from unregulated sellers of magic powders is foolish. We need to understand how our bodies work, how disease develops, and why peer reviewed studies in accredited journals matter. We should find resources that are trustworthy, but we should check their math anyway. We may have been happily doing business at the same local bank for decades, but we still count our cash before leaving the teller window.
It would follow that it remains incumbent on each of us to do some of our own work. And when we do this we can use established methods to determine truth, or what is most likely truth. This means we need to understand what reason is and how it works, why some arguments are fallacies, and the importance of evidence. The simplistic view that if “the man” can’t be trusted, then whomever is opposite can be trusted, is foolish and naive. And this may seem daunting when you read it here, but it needn’t be. The simple starting point might be that when an alternative treatment seems appealing, do at least one thing that science would always prescribe: Try and debunk it. The web has science based sites that review alternative claims and examine their effectiveness. Often there are tests already done that show whether or not the claims have merit. Try to find the ones that say they don’t.
It is blindly following alternative health cures without examining them that can lead us to believing that microwave cooking “kills” nutrients and gives us cancer; or that vaccines are dangerous and part of a globalist plot to “dumb down” or reduce the population; or that commercial airlines are spraying chemicals over the population to poison us; or that the purpose of fluoridation of drinking water is nefarious. None of those things are true, but millions of people have been lured into believing them because of a convincing story. I believed some of them for awhile before I understood how to apply skepticism to what I heard. At first I was embarrassed to admit such foolishness, but in time I came to drop the shame. I am human, and didn’t know the difference between a good argument and a bad argument that sounded good.

An article shared on Facebook recently claimed that microwaving broccoli “killed” ninety-eight percent of the nutrients. Headline readers immediately responded by either declaring how woke they were to microwaves, or how they only use them for warming food, or how they will now stop using them to improve the nutrient content of their food. In skeptical inquiry, the best first question to ask is often: is this really a thing? I opened the article and looked for three things. First, who is making the claim?; second, what references do they cite?; and third, what are they selling?
In that case the claimant was a discredited alternative medical site that promotes pseudoscience. Their parent organization has been called out several times for promoting quack cures. They cited no studies to support the claim, but actually referenced other discredited sources who also made claims without sourced studies. And yes, their whole site was a sales platform for alternative cures. From naturopathic medicines to healing crystals, they have something for everyone. Even microwave free cookbooks. Before microwaves these were just called cookbooks, and you probably already own some. That site was selling any number of miracle cures and new age therapies, along with the usual litany of pseudoscientific nonsense so often peddled by quacks.
A quick search of the internet about microwave cooking found a wealth of information that show the opposite to be true. Microwaving is actually very good at retaining nutrients. A slightly deeper reading showed that the culprit in nutrient loss during cooking is water. So, boiling vegetables (whether in a pan on the stove or in a bowl in the microwave) will leach out a large part of the nutrients in the vegetables. Oh, and nutrients aren’t living, so you can’t really kill them.
Eight and a half minutes later I was back to Facebook refuting the claim and wondering why so many had just accepted it as true. It took little effort to refute it. Why don’t people look? Well, probably because it was presented in an official looking way, and by someone they trusted to be informed. And probably also because it attacks as dangerous some newer technology which we managed for all of humanity without, and a technology with the words “microwave radiation” in it at that. This isn’t a term we have hundreds of years of experience with, and one that few of us have ever really studied. A site proclaims that this new thing has hidden dangers to it, and our instinct is to become suspicious of it. But we should also be skeptical of the claim. Microwaves can be dangerous to people using pacemakers. And maybe if you stand directly in front of one while cooking something for a long time the radiation might effect you. Might. But studies have shown them to be safe. And apparently good for cooking vegetables.
I don’t use them much, but that has to do with a preference for slow cooking. I’ll have a post on that in the near future.

My relative could have stopped washing down every mouthful of food with a big drink of soda, and the acid reflux would likely have gone away. Perhaps not, but that is how that person eats. It was how we all ate in our family, a family whose members often carry antacid around with them or take purple pills. Except me. I chewed my food more and sipped instead of gulping drinks and the acid reflux went away.
I didn’t ask my doctor about acid reflux because I found it easy to look up. I found that is easy to address, and that the pills prescribed trick the body into thinking it had preformed a digestive step, and yes, studies have found associations between these pills and other illness and early death.
He should have been concerned that he had chronic heartburn. That is not normal. He should have looked into why he had acid reflux and how he could make changes to alleviate it. That is a good alternative to taking a pill.
But if he had instead found some claim that eating the leaves of some plant would relieve the symptoms, that would have been a bad alternative. The problem isn’t what to take, it is why you would need to take something at all. The alternate that works is finding cause and changing conditions to remove that cause. If you had a rock in your shoe that was making your foot hurt, you would remove the rock, not begin a regimen of aspirin to ease the pain.

But I listened when my doctor told me I was pre-diabetic and should consider medicating myself accordingly. Or, I thought, I could look into the what is the diet of people who don’t have diabetes. Yep, there are large populations of people who don’t have diabetes. It turns out they also don’t have heart disease or hypertension either. Obesity can cause diabetes. Duh. It also can cause hearth disease, and hypertension, and more. Is that the only cause? No, but if we are obese, we should know that changing that will likely reduce our risk of disease. For all the politically correct calls not to fat shame, we are forgetting that obesity is unhealthy. There is a big difference between rejecting societal standards of physical beauty and recognizing that obesity puts us at risk of serious health consequences. We shouldn’t be shaming fat people, but we shouldn’t be pretending it’s just fine either.
I found that through diet I can reduce my risk of diabetes, heart disease, allergies, hypertension, and cancer. I changed my diet and my doctor beamed at the new test results. No need for any prescription drugs. She encouraged me to try and stick with it. The prescription she wrote was “keep it up.” It seems easy enough and I expect I will, but even if I don’t I feel good and I’ve no need for the pills she would have otherwise advised.

In my search for better treatment I also found people that are claiming that eating a whole bunch of habanero peppers will cure cancer. There are plenty of studies that show the claims of better health through diet and weight loss to be true, and none that support the Habanero claims. This is the nature of the internet. Plenty of truth to be found, along with plenty of nonsense.
Sometimes the pill from your doctor is the best choice, at least to start with. And sometimes the alternate claim is pseudoscientific foolishness. The only way to know is to do the research. But until you do, stop sharing bad information. Too often the people in our lives assume we know what we’re talking about and follow it. Learn how to read claims skeptically. Learn how to research claims and the people making them. Everyone has an agenda.

We can do a lot to make ourselves healthier, and healthier people have fewer of the chronic conditions that plague the pill-popping public. Taking steps to improving your health are positive changes that seem alternative to mainstream medicine, but in truth it is not. This is advice that your doctor should be giving you and probably is giving you, though he or she may not try very hard. (See above.) Stopping smoking, losing weight, switching to a plant-based diet, and getting regular exercise all have proven positive effects on our health and reduce our chances of suffering from many of the maladies that kill our western populations at increasing rates. But that doesn’t mean that medical treatment isn’t good. It doesn’t mean that magic crystals or spiritual healing is a reliable alternative. And it doesn’t mean that microwaves are dangerous.

The term political correctness, typically abbreviated PC as the term has come to be used since the late 20th century, has morphed again into a pejorative to be thrown at anyone who objects to politeness.
The definition: Political Correctness; the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
This seems like it isn’t so bad. Who really thinks excluding or insulting groups that have been disadvantaged is cool? Really, when I first started hearing the term in the 1980s I thought, well isn’t that just being polite? Today we hear people complaining about PC culture because people object to the use of the N-word, or making fun of disabled people. But before PC ever came to the fore, polite people wouldn’t say or do those things anyway. (Or at least not where it would cause offense.) And how did it come to be a badge of honor to proudly be impolite, rude, and offensive? There is nothing wrong with being polite, nor from voicing objection to someone being rude. Whatever you call it, politeness or political correctness, some of that is okay.
So I do understand both the need for us to be conscious of what we say and how it is perceived by those who hear us, and that we also should be free from attack by those who are really trying to stifle free speech and prevent someone’s view from being offered to the public forum. There are times and places for every word, and incumbent on us to understand when those words are not pejoratives. The reason political correctness has become such a derided term is not just because rude people don’t like to be called rude, it is also because some people are looking for a chance to be offended. They have taken the general idea of not insulting or demeaning people to the extreme level of not allowing discussions at all, regardless of the merit. This is PC overreach. It was politically incorrect to make fun of a cripple. Now it is politically incorrect to use the word cripple. Acceptable terms change, but when a person is called out for saying someone suffered a crippling injury, that is overreach.

Now I’ll get on to the point, which is crackpots. Merriam-Webster defines crackpot as: one given to eccentric or lunatic notions. That seems simple enough. And I’m not going to explore in depth the etymology of the word, but I’m guessing it is comparing a person’s head with a pot, and that a cracked one will result in leakage. A crackpot then has something leaking out of his head, and that explains his eccentric or lunatic notions. But while PC overreach has tried to halt the use of certain terms, or criticism of certain groups, Political Correctness overreach has also demanded that we give fair time to every opinion as long as those alluded to words are not used, or groups are not addressed. And crackpot is a pejorative. And you shouldn’t call someone a crackpot. At least not until you are sure that they are.

PC has failed us as far as crackpots are concerned. We have become so inured to the idea that every opinion should be heard and treated fairly that we give crackpots the platform to advance their lunacy. Including the rantings of crackpots in discussion gives them credibility that the uninformed may take seriously. and to their great harm.
Some may question the connection I make between crackpot theories and PC culture, but I see them as linked. They are linked through the words “free speech.” As if to deny someone a platform to voice their opinion is the same as oppressing them. The recognition of the overuse of that phrase cannot be exaggerated. At times I think “free speech” is the most overused phrase in American English today. Likewise, it is among the most misunderstood phrases being bandied about. In the strictest sense it is the right to express an opinion without censorship or restraint. But we all know that some speech deserves no such blanket freedom.
If some middle aged man is standing in your living room and in front of your adolescent daughter describing the sex acts he would like to perform on her, I expect ( I hope) you’re going to censor the hell of out him. Censor him right out the door with stipulations of serious consequences should he approach your threshold or daughter again. Likewise is it with everyone’s home and every other property or venue except those which are in their nature public forums. And even then some fair regulation to that speech is appropriate. You may stand on the street corner saying what you like, but you may not threaten passersby with violence.
That’s the broad use. The pointedly American use is found in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution where such freedoms are protected. This is precisely stating that the government may not stop you from having your say. And again, there remains room for some restriction in some cases. The short of it is that the First Amendment does not require that every crackpot theory must be heard, only that the government can’t make them stop.

But the cries of “free speech” have become so frequent that many of us have come to believe that we must let them have their say. This is political correctness run amok.
TV news anchor: “NASA is developing the means to send a manned mission to Mars. Now for another viewpoint and in support of free speech, let’s hear from a man who says the Earth is flat and Mars is just an image projected by the government to control us and keep us from finding the truth.”
This example is extreme, but only a little. The truth is that in our PC world today we hear someone say the Earth is flat, or that the Moon landings were faked, or that commercial aircraft routinely spray chemicals to poison the population, and we treat these claims as if we must oblige them a forum and equal treatment to other claims. We do not. These are the mental ramblings of unhinged crackpots. And every time we hear them we should be identifying them as such. We should call them crackpots, PC be damned.

What’s that? You think that 300 years of history never happened but were just added to the calendar? (Phantom Time Hypothesis) Oh I see, you’re a crackpot. Buildings with windows partially below the street level is evidence of a world-wide mud flood that has been covered up and removed from the historical record? (Mud Flood Hypothesis) You’re a crackpot. The Sixteenth Amendment (Income Tax) is invalid because Ohio wasn’t a state when the Constitution was signed? Crackpot. You can declare yourself a sovereign citizen and you’re no longer subject to federal law? Crackpot.
We have millions of Americans who actually believe that the world is controlled (to one degree of another) by shape-shifting reptilian overlords who originate from outer space or from another dimension. They are all crackpots. Some never had the mental facilities to know any different or how to analyze information, while others must have had something leak out of their heads. The latter had their pots cracked, while the former were born with them so impaired.

The standard of evidence for claims is relative to the claim itself. If I say that I saw a movie about alien abduction, it is a claim that can be believed without any evidence. Claiming to have seen a movie hardly warrants scrutiny. If I say that I was abducted by aliens myself, it is a claim which requires a high degree of evidence, beginning with evidence that aliens exists at all in any way other than theoretical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A million people or more asserting something and insisting that it’s true, are not evidence of anything other than the widespread belief itself. Their belief, their initial claim, must have evidence that rises to the level of the claim.

Crackpots.

Before I start I want the reader to do an honest mental check. When you read the title, did you immediately and automatically think of extraterrestrial space craft? You know, flying saucers? It’s okay if you did and I will be addressing those, but an extra moment of thinking will have most of you recognizing that UFO is an acronym for Unidentified Flying Object. In that it means only that it is an object that is flying and that it has not been identified. The thought process that went on in my head when I hear UFO, as well as in the heads of so many others I’ve spoken to, is one that I accept is near universal and it went like this:
One: is that ET?
Two: okay, it isn’t identified so it might just be something from earth.
Three: I can’t tell what it is so it might be ET, but it might not be.
It took me many years to realize how illogical an approach this was and thus, a great deal of misunderstanding and unreasonable assumptions have been made.
I’ll jump ahead to the conclusion briefly before going on. I hope you all aren’t in the mood for suspense. The short answer is that they almost certainly were not ET. Or at least we have no good reason to think that they were. From here the rest will be an explanation why.

The search for information about UFOs has taught me a few things. The first is that they technically aren’t always objects at all, but rather sightings, and often they are mislabeled in that they often aren’t flying. But of the sightings I include all photos, videos, and verbal and written descriptions made by eye-witnesses. We can divide them into three categories; misunderstanding of some earthly or natural cosmological phenomenon, outright fraud, and those that even with great scrutiny we still cannot identify. The first two groups make up the bulk of sightings, and once explained they are no longer UFOs, and the last group is the smallest group by far, and includes only the most compelling and unexplained of these sightings.
I’ll use a personal experience as an example of the first category. I was camping with my ex-wife in New Hampshire many years ago, and as we laid back on the grass and looked up at the dark night sky we witnessed the most incredible UFO sighting that either one of us had ever experienced. High in the night sky a roundish yellow ball of light streaked across the black, star filled sky at unimaginable speed. It was exactly big enough, roundish enough, and yellow enough that it could not have been a shooting star. And it appeared out of nowhere in the left of our vision and disappeared as quickly to the far right of our vision a moment later. So quickly did it travel through that vast amount of space that it could only have been traveling at speeds heretofore unknown to air or space craft of earthly origin. We tried to find words to express our astonishment, and got no further than agreeing that we both saw it, and we both agreed, more or less, to what we saw. But to our amazement and to my lifelong delight since then, another one passed by. But this one lit up a little earlier in its flight and passed between us and a tree branch above us on the left and dimmed before going out. We both recognized what it was and began laughing. What could only have been an alien craft traveling at mach ten far up in the sky, was only moving about ten miles an hour and only five feet away from us. It was a firefly.
Try this; hold your pointed finger out at arms length from your face and swing it quickly while trying to follow your fingertip with your eyes. Now imagine how fast that would be going if it were traveling at the height of an aircraft, miles in the air. Right, there isn’t anything we know of that can travel that fast. But it is like watching a race car from the stands at a Formula One race. It is hard to believe that it is going just as fast on the other side of the track as when it streaks passed close in front of you, though it is.

It is hard to gauge the distance of a point of light in contrasting darkness. She and I had been looking deep into space and contemplating the vastness of the cosmos. With our attention so directed, it isn’t a surprise that an unexpected light would seem to be deep in the space we were viewing.
And no, I don’t know how many UFO sightings turned out to be fireflies, but the trick of depth or other perception is certainly a main cause of mistaken sightings. A search of explained UFO sightings will provide plenty of examples of numbers and types of mistakes that are made in the initial claims.

The next group are frauds. There are countless people wishing for some kind of notoriety. That there are UFO frauds is clear. Just like there are Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, and crop circle frauds, there are UFO frauds. When you can see the wire holding the saucer between trees and then zoom in to read Mattel on the side, it’s safe to say you’ve got a fraud. And some frauds started their life as misidentified sightings. After having it explained what they had witnessed, many people change their story in order to nullify the explanation. They thought they saw something, and when they found out they didn’t, they changed the story or lied about it to support the claim that they did. Or they were so invested in their belief that they modified what they remembered to support it. I have known many people who made a claim of some phenomenon that after it is refuted, return with a slightly different claim later. I’ll eventually write a post about reincarnation that will include an example of this.

But all of the misidentified and fraudulent claims stop being UFOs once they are identified, and that leaves the remaining group. In reality, this group is likely made up of the other two groups. We just can’t prove it.
Let me rephrase: we don’t know yet, but all of our experience suggests that if we do come to know, we will find that these claims are either a mistake or a fraud. None of our experience has lead us to conclude that those unidentified were intelligent alien life.
The most common reason they remain unidentified is lack of evidence. The photo or video isn’t clear enough, or steady enough, or close enough. There is too much glare from light sources, there wasn’t enough ambient light, the object blended in with the background too well, there wasn’t any background to give scale, etc. When it comes to stories it is harder to explain because what we see and what we think we see are often two different things. And when it comes to memory, forget it (pun intended). Memory is unreliable. Oh, you want to know why? Go look up false memory and get a headful. I won’t dive into it here for sake of time and space, but I can swear to being absolutely sure of a remembered moment or mental vision of an object in such perfect clarity that I remain to this day flabbergasted at the reality that I had them wrong. In proofs that were iron-clad I saw that some of my memories were in error. Great studies have been done that attest to this phenomenon. You remember what you tell yourself to remember. In the immediate moments after seeing something that you can’t explain, your brain will decide an explanation and build memory to support that explanation. We are hard-wired to search for patterns and order. Our minds will fill in whatever data we need to make what we see fit in some way.

But at the pinnacle of those cases that remain unexplained there are those where rubber hits the road. These are the most compelling. And it is on that road where we slip on the most visible of all banana peels. We make a leap from “I don’t know” to “therefore it must be.” And now we’ll go back briefly to what I mentioned earlier of the thought process behind the word UFO. [From is it Et? To maybe or maybe not ET.] The problem here is putting ET as a reasonable possibility in the first place. The leap made here is much greater than one would first notice. We don’t really know if there is any ET.

In 1961 Frank Drake wrote an equation as a probabilistic argument to foster discussion for scientists in the search for extraterrestrial life. The Drake Equation has come to be taken as way of estimating the number of extant civilizations capable of radio communications in the Milky Way Galaxy. Never meant to be an actual estimate, but more a base for discussion. It considers such things as how many stars are there, how many might have planets, how many of those planets might be capable of the life needed, and so on. He estimated rather widely that there are between  one-thousand and one-hundred million such civilizations. The numbers have changed as more information has been developed, but it remains a probabilistic estimate. This has lead many to conclude not only that it is beyond likely that there is intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy, but that it is improbable that their isn’t. In response there is what is called The Fermi Paradox: Where is everybody?
This illustrates the difference of theoretical existence and observed existence. One is a virtual certainty of life that we concede must be out there, and the other is the actual life that we can observe and identify. The latter of the two has never been reliably observed and verified. So every time we decide that the video, photo, or story is credible as an alien craft, we don’t really know at all that such a craft exists. The leap we are making is from a mathematical probability that life exists alien to our planet, all the way to this is it right here.
And then ask the question: How would we know it is ET? We don’t have an actual ET to compare it to, so all we can do is compare it to what we already understand. In truth, we’re deciding that since it isn’t one of the things we know, it must therefore be alien to us. This is an argument that should be called (if someone hasn’t already done it) the ET Of The Gaps. That is taken from the theistic argument called God Of The Gaps that claims proof of god by squeezing a god in to fill any unexplained phenomenon. With each knew understanding the God Of The Gaps becomes an ever shrinking god, falling further away with each new discovery.
ET Of The Gaps plants ET whenever we can’t identify a claim. It is a fallacy of logic. It does not follow that unexplained give license to assign cause.

All we can know about the most compelling of all UFO sightings is that it doesn’t look like anything we know. But since we have never seen an alien craft we don’t have any idea what it would look like if it even exists much less if it visited earth. When we find ourselves thinking that it “looks like” an alien craft, we must remind ourselves that the only alien craft we’ve ever seen is in our collective imagination. I know that it is tempting to compare a sighting to previous sightings but this only means that we are comparing it to something else we never identified. In practice we are comparing our sightings to a movie, or artist’s rendering, or some assumption made about what they look like. It is a good time to point out that the very first modern UFO claim from 1946 in Washington State was misreported as a saucer. The claimant has ever since made it clear that he never said it looked like a saucer, but rather that it moved across the sky like someone throwing a saucer. The reporter claimed in the story that is was saucer shaped. Ever since then sightings have favored saucer shaped claims. We think saucer because a reporter said saucer.

During a debate on this subject a friend of mine drew from his quiver a golden arrow, sure to silence my skepticism. He got it from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as stated by his character Sherlock Holmes. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
As I remember it, (memory, see above) I paused and considered the statement. He had a gotcha smile on his face that vanished when I asked, How do we know we’ve eliminated all the impossible? Because really, there it is. The great author of those wonderful detective stories had made a logical fallacy that few of his readers ever noticed. There is always something we haven’t though of. When we, or anyone else, no matter how well trained one is or how good whatever data one has collected is, we are still comparing it to what we think it isn’t. And there could always be something more that it is, things we just haven’t thought of. The only way we can know this answer is to have one that we can test. We need a craft to put through controlled tests to rule out other possibilities. Better yet, talk with the pilot of that alien craft and eliminate the possibility that it is inauthentic. In truth, proving that alien life has been here is probably the hardest thing to do, and it should be. We’ve got tens of millions of people in this country alone sure in their minds that aliens have visited earth, while we have yet to prove actual aliens exist. Yes, we accept that they most likely do, but that we have never heard from them or discovered any evidence of them does not strengthen that concession.

We’ve never heard from them – as far as we know! Ah yes, the great conspiracy of hidden aliens. The argument that the government knows about aliens and is keeping that knowledge secret is all by itself a logical fallacy. It is called Unfalsifiability. A proposition that can’t be argued against or proven wrong because it can’t be tested is outside of the realm of reasonable argument. Here would be a good time to insert Russell’s Teapot. Bertram Russell was a philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and nobel laureate. He used a teapot to illustrate that the burden of proof was on the person making the unfalsifiable claim. He wrote: “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.”
He goes on from there to claim that since it can’t be proven not to exist, it is unreasonable to doubt it. So goes the unfalsifiable claim. It follows from Russell’s example that the person making the positive claim holds the burden of proof of that claim.
This is the entirety of the argument that government is hiding knowledge of aliens. The claimants are trying to shift the burden of proof of their assertion. All they have to do is prove it. They have not. Occasionally some former government worker (or someone claiming to be) trots out and claims to be “in the know,” but when asked for evidence insists that he’s seen it, or has confirmation from some other insider. When someone claims secret knowledge and that you need to trust them on its authenticity, run away. As the late, great Christopher Hitchens said in what is now called Hitchens’s Razor, “What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
And the reason for someone making such a claim can be as simple as wanting to be important. Just wanting people to pay attention is enough motivation for people to make outlandish claims. We’ve all seen it. Some of us have even done it.

In 2004 off the coast of San Diego, California, two F-18 fighter jets from the US aircraft carrier Nimitz experienced an encounter of some kind that is of the most compelling nature. Radar from another ship picked up objects and the planes were sent to investigate. Two trained aviators claimed to see a tic tac shaped object above the sea causing the water to churn and then it maneuvered away from them as they approached in a manner and at presumed speeds unlike anything they were aware of. They chased it and encountered it again, when it seemed to maneuver away and disappeared. One pilot said that whatever he saw was out of this world. There is more to this story of course. And in a skeptical inquiry it certainly is found to have some odor. From the misidentification of who released the report to the public, and the inaccurate implications that government agencies considered this as credible evidence of alien visitation, there are good reasons to be skeptical of this as read in the papers. A closer reading reveals that there are people who will profit from the public believing this to be a real alien encounter, and that those people are behind the dissemination of the event.
A skeptical respondent suggested three possibilities. The first was observational mistakes; the second was the object was US military technology that the pilots were not aware of, and the third was alien craft. I disagree. After US military tech, I would place foreign earthbound military tech, and civilian tech before alien as more likely. I would even put deliberate fraud ahead of alien craft. Because we know of US, foreign, and civilian tech, and we know of fraud. We don’t know of alien anything at all.
We tend to give pilots and astronauts, as well as other professionals, a pass on these things. We assume that their training and skill eliminates the possibility of error in their claim. That isn’t fair. They are people too and they have the same hard wiring to fit things together in a way that makes sense. They may be better at discerning evidence, but not infallible. They are also just as susceptible to logical fallacy as the rest of us. When he said that what he saw was out of this world he was committing the ET Of The Gaps fallacy. All he could reliably say was that he didn’t know what it was. That’s the end. It was other than what he was aware of. Unless we concede that he is aware of every possibility in the world, we cannot accept his hypothesis that it was otherworldly. And his declaration of its otherworldly origins demonstrate his bias.
Sometimes we have to accept that we don’t have enough information to make a conclusion. We also tend to forgive them of having motive to promote the claim. I’m not saying that makes anyone a liar, just that a fabrication in part should be considered as a possibility in examining evidence. In this case one of the pilots made a recording of himself explaining the encounter that was constructed to look like a secret military debriefing. It was not. Was he motivated by the prospect of money or fame that might come from marketing this supposed encounter to an eager public? I don’t know, but before I accept that he is infallible, I need to rule out the possibility that he is willing to misrepresent the facts. I cannot.
Whatever it was that caused this sighting is unknown in any real and tangible way. No matter how extraordinary the details are, what we have remains outside of our knowledge.

And here it is with UFOs.
Since we don’t have evidence of extraterrestrial life, we can’t assume it has been here.
Since we haven’t any evidence to compare other sightings with, we can’t conclude any more than the sighting didn’t match that which we already know, and since that knowledge is conditional to that sighting the knowledge is incomplete.
It is a false dichotomy to force a choice between the two possibilities was it or wasn’t it an alien? While there is truth in the claim that either there is alien life capable of visiting earth, or there is not, it is not reasonable to insist that we have the answer. And when it comes to a UFO sighting, I don’t know is the best answer until we have sufficient reason to conclude otherwise.

Of that third group, those most compelling of claims, we can reasonably conclude that they would likely prove to be in one of the two previous groups were we to have more data to examine, and that no claim of alien visitation should be considered as probable until we have established that alien existence is actual; and then that they are capable of such a visit. The acceptance of such an astounding claim should not be considered at all with anything less than unquestionable evidence. That evidence has never been presented. The very best of the claims, the claims that most defy our understanding of the known, remain categorized as “what else could it be?” ET of the gaps claims. For me on one particular night, it could only have been alien until it wasn’t. What else could it be? It could be a firefly.

We live in a time with more conspiracy theories than one can shake a stick at. Believe me, I know several people with graduate degrees in stick-shaking. The biggies include One World Government (into which I’ll throw the Deep State, the Illuminati, Bilderberg, Federal Reserve, World Bankers, and The International Jew, all of which are often intermingled by proponents), Anti-Vaccines, Chem-trails, Anti-Fluoridation, (all demons created by big-pharma), The Kennedy(s)Assassination(s), Moon Landing Hoax, Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, Young Earth, Phantom Time, and Mud Flood; Alien Visitation, Crashes, Encounters, Kidnapping, Medical Experiments; Government coverups of Alien Visitation, Crashes, Encounters, Kidnapping, and Medical Experiments; Global Warming Hoax, Reptilian Shape-Shifters, and many more. I keep ending this list and then remembering more. I do not intend to address these individually here except for illustration in selected cases. The goal for this paper is less a debunking, and more a sweeping up of them all at once as wasted mental energy.

So many of these have cross support between them. Some are deeply intwined and necessary for each other. For example, Ancient Aliens (shoot, left that one off my list) is completely dependent on Alien Visitation, and most of the Modern Alien claims are universally believed in the community. But other connections are made. I’ve heard the brothers Kennedy were killed to keep them silent about Aliens, and also that it was because they were going to end the Vietnam War, or shut down the Federal Reserve System, or take down the New World Order. (The shotgun blast of claims should raise red flags of any skeptic. Tossing out a bunch of motives is a way of suggesting that at least one of them must be true, even if no one motive has good evidence to support it.) And when I read about Mud Flood Theory I usually find Phantom Time Theory close at hand.

If you’re unaware of those last two here’s a briefing. Mud Flooders believe that there was a world wide flood that happened sometime in the last few centuries and that it wiped out the civilization of Tartaria. It is best evidenced by looking at old buildings with basement windows. Apparently this means that a mud flood happened and covered part of these buildings and it was hidden from us all until everyone forgot about it. Phantom Time says that some several hundred years ago the calendar was changed to add a few hundred years. This means that right now it is the 1700s, and some three hundred years of the dark ages never happened.

If you’re thinking that both of those sound like absurd nonsense and that they can only be humor-trolling or lunatic rantings you are correct. And while there are trolls teasing these and many other conspiracy claims along for the sake of humor, there are ernest devotees to them all. And here is the bad news, all of these theories have the same value. If you believe any of these you should have your head examined. No, it doesn’t mean you are actually crazy, but the cranial examination I suggest is to fix how you examine information. These theories take hold (to lesser or greater degree) because they are presented in ways that make the choice in believing them seem reasonable. This isn’t because they are, but because people are mostly not very good at recognizing flaws in logic. Flaws that when examined show that the original proposal has no good reason for us considering it.

When someone sees an unexplained light in the sky and says that he isn’t sure if it is something unexplained or an alien space craft, we are presented with a false dichotomy. Firstly, there are numerous diverse natural or artificial earthborn possibilities for why they couldn’t identify the light, and second, there has never been evidence that actual aliens exist, much less that they have been to earth. The choice between unknown or alien is absurd. The choice is only can we explain it or not. To offer as a choice something we don’t know exists or what it would look like if it did exist is unreasonable. You could rationally make the same argument and replace alien with Santa Claus, Superman, A flying Unicorn, or Russell’s Teapot. Unknown is unknown. Offering alternatives is nothing but an attempt to explain it without evidence to do so.

In this manner all of these theories break apart. That people spend months and years of their lives tearing some of these apart point by point is worthy enough, but it is only necessary because the masses fail at Thinking 101. Why is credibility placed in the claim at the outset? Well, one reason is that it is presented as if it a claim of equal merit. Many of us shake our heads when media sources attempt to show balanced news. They place in opposition tested scientific explanations with pseudoscientific claims as if they are two competing theories of equal merit. Where the first are facts we have good reason to believe are correct, and the second are unreasonable, belief driven claims that have no evidence to back them up.
TV Host: “That was a senior scientist from NOAA explaining with detailed charts and studies compiled over the years and examined by teams of experts showing human cause for global warming. For a completing claim we have a spokesman from the Flat Young Earth Society who says that hobgoblins brainwashed people into believing science is real. It is up to the viewer to decide which is true.”

Asking the question, “What makes this claim credible?” can began a path to understanding why we shouldn’t give them room, and what doing so does to our minds.

When presented with a conspiracy claim we should all begin with the question, “Is this a thing?” Often we find that there is no credible reason to think it is true, and immediate and comprehensive evidence should be presented if the claimant wishes to be heard.

A man I know was trying to sell me on Chemtrails. (Chemical trails, chemicals sprayed from commercial aircraft over the population for some nefarious purpose.) He began by defining them as vapor trails from aircraft that persisted for a longer duration than contrails. (Condensation trails, a normal byproduct of modern flight.) He amplified the definition by claiming that people noticed that these trails last much longer than did the trails from thirty or so years ago, and that contrails should disappear within a short time while chemtrails last for hours.
The argument is dead on arrival. The assertion begins by relying on memory, which we know to be faulty, and then ignores that others do remember persistent contrails. And then ignores available evidence of those persistent contrails. Films from World War Two show bombers leaving persistent contrails and military historians have written of the frustration military leaders had over the increased visibility of the planes that such persistent contrails caused. And, the meteorological model that permits contrails, that is the range of temperature and humidity conditions needed, fully explains both short and long contrails at once. All of these make clear that the original premise had no merit.
The sad thing is that he persists with the argument. He can’t see the argument was over. The initial claim had been shown faulty. Since we know that contrails existed prior to the claimants assertion, where from comes the chemtrails? If chemtrails and contrails are indistinguishable from one another, then where did the notion of chemtrails come from? In the broadest picture, the claim of chemtrails started with as a misunderstanding of how contrails form and why they persist or disappear. The claim continues because those asserting the existence of chemtrails didn’t like the answer. They claim that some  contrails are still different in some nuanced way. (Special pleading fallacy.) Or they leap to a different piece of evidence that they hope the listener might not have an explanation for. Or they reference other times when our government did commit some terrible act on the people, or hid from us some information. These may be true, but are a non sequitur to the claim at hand. This conspiracy claim persists because the claimant wants to believe it. It stopped being about evidence as soon as he adopted it as a belief. That spraying chemicals from commercial jets would be impractical for various reasons, including the likelihood that they would just blow out over the ocean, or be so dispersed to become ineffective. Or that the process would require unknown thousands of people to be silently in on the conspiracy, or that investigations by numerous bodies both private and governmental have turned up zero evidence that this is being done. None of these arguments persuaded a change of mind. And when I pointed out that the people doing and ordering the spraying would have to breathe the same air, he offered that they might have been made immune to the effects. (Moving the goalpost fallacy.)

The first question should always be: Is this really a thing? As Christopher Hitchens stated, Any assertion made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. It has also been said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Are those contrails or chemtrails? The question is a false dichotomy. There is no reason for us to think that chemtrails are real in the first place. Phrasing the question as if chemtrails is one of two choices is claiming that chemtrails are a reasonable choice, which we have zero evidence to support.
This same case can be made for many of the conspiracy claims made above. Is it really a thing? Does the assertion have plain and provable evidence to support it? Did aliens help build the pyramids? Where is the evidence that aliens actually exist? In fact, all alien claims first require evidence that intelligent alien life exists in any way besides a theoretical one. Is an elite cabal working behind the scenes to create a one-world government? First, is there really such cabal? How have you proved this?
The process of questioning the assertions will often debunk the claim at the starting gate.
The goal of securing a better future for humanity is dependent on more of us engaging in rational discourse. To do this we must start by weeding out the irrational non-starters. Before we ask what is likely to be true, we should first determine if we are being lured into an untenable position.

Our World Through Reason, Skepticism, And Critical Thinking.

The quote from Popeye is, “That’s all I can stands, cuz I can’t stands n’more!”
I open with this as it best expresses my general frustration. I keep waiting for voices of reason to emerge large in the public sphere and quiet the absurd rhetoric that has become the mainstay of national discourse. Whether it is politics, environment, economics, diet and health, or any number of other areas of public thought and action; the preeminence of poorly reasoned, emotion driven information is poisoning the minds of the citizenry and driving us toward a frightful future. I find it necessary to weigh into the fray and add my voice in hopes of turning the tide. I can’t stands it n’more!

I was born at an early age, and knew very little of the world at my beginning. It might be said that I made few decisions for myself for quite some time after I was born. Thus, I had to rely on the direction I got from my parents and older siblings to make my way in the world. Notwithstanding my slight jest, this mirrors everyone else in their early years. We all were incapable of self-sufficiency at any level as infants. We could only cry to indicate a need, and even that left our caretakers guessing as to what that need was.
As we grew we began to discover the world with our own senses, and use our innate reasoning skills to figure things out, all the while we were fed a steady diet of “how to” from those above us. So much of what we learned was from outside instruction that we accepted much of it uncritically. It is no wonder that we passed through our childhood and adolescence and into adulthood trusting the information that some sources gave us. We always did have reason, and we often used it. But just as when we were young, we often relied on our trusted sources without examination. How often did we question direction as children only to hear some version of “because I said so.” Our critical skills and natural skepticism were squelched early by well meaning people who were focused on the outcome at the moment. We came to accept some things as true for no reason besides someone telling us so. I cannot recall how often I heard during my years in the navy some young sailor begin a declaration, “My daddy said,” as if it went without question that his father was the absolute authority on whatever subject was at hand. We have our heads full of knowledge that we believe to be true even though it has never been validated. We can all bring forth untold numbers of things we believe we know, but many of those things, maybe even most, we can’t say how we know or where we learned them. Sometimes daddy was mistaken. And more importantly, he didn’t know how he got there. More than likely it was from a previous claim by someone he trusted.

So how do we know if those things are true? The short answer is that we don’t, at least not without investigation. And while many don’t affect our lives in a tangible way, many do. Many of these kernels of knowledge we possess have guided our lives and still lead us in our choices. Because some, or much, of the knowledge is faulty we make choices that are detrimental to our future, both individually and collectively. We must know that the steps we take are based on sound reasoning. The more we reason our way through life, the more likely we are to make good choices. The reverse is likewise true. Further, the less reasoning we do, the less able we are to discern truth. This leads us to stop figuring things out, and to look for sources we trust. Those sources are almost always found in confirmation bias. The people and places we trust are the ones who say what we already think is true. Unchecked by skepticism and reason, these lead us to seeking the source rather than the information. It stops mattering what they say, and only matters who is saying it. In viewing this from the outside it doesn’t take much to see that this can lead to manipulation of those who flock to sources they are familiar with without critically examining what they say.

Let me state this frankly: If you haven’t examined critically some belief you have, you should not count on it being true.
There are three categories of knowledge in this sense: what we know which is likely to be true, what we know which is likely to be false, and what we don’t know.
Of those three, a wise person puts most everything into the third category and there it stays until it has been critically examined. Once it is moved to one of the other two categories it is left with a tiny flag that says: re-examine upon receipt of new information.
It is a folly of youth to feel certain in one’s knowledge. As if to not know marks stupidity and immaturity. In reality it is the admission of ignorance that allows us to learn. And leaving open the door to being wrong allows us to adapt and re-examine new information.
The intelligent person knows to ask questions; but the wise person knows to question answers.
We rarely can put our finger on when or where it was that we learned much of what fills our head as decided knowledge. Perhaps it was at school. Maybe we read it in the paper or saw it on the television. Often it was told us from a trusted source such as family or friend. Much of what we have learned came in the form of ancillary information. We picked it up while learning about something else. Perhaps we learned what a paddock is when we read some children’s book about horses. That book might be accurate about horses, but if we learned about the jungles of Africa from reading Tarzan books we should avoid intelligent conversations on the subject. The wealth of information we hold that came from such obscure and unidentifiable sources is staggering.

And while skeptically questioning each new thing that comes to our view is impractical, it is imperative that we do so with information that will guide our choices and inform our decisions. Every time you see, read, or hear something you must understand that the source has a point of view. The better we are at recognizing this the better we are at discerning when that source strays from provable fact into assertion and opinion.
The following writings will approach information from that perspective.