JackTReason

There is nothing wrong with being prepared. I cannot imagine a scenario that could occur where I would regret preparedness. To be prepared is the most reasonable stance one can have. It is literally the motto of the Boy Scouts. Do you have a spare tire and a jack? Then you are prepared to change a flat. Get a AAA membership and you are prepared for a variety of road emergencies. How about some candles or an oil lamp? Now you are prepared to have some light in a power outage. The very idea of preparation in advance of adversity is as suitable a concept as any I can think of. If all of this is true, then why am I about to drop paragraphs against prepping for doomsday? Because it is most often done at the expense of more necessary actions. It is prioritizing one’s preparation that needs examination.

When you hear the word “prepper” you may immediately think of some guy stockpiling food and supplies in his bunker under an off-grid cabin in the mountains. You may have seen some of these sorts highlighted on some cable TV show doing exactly that. I am aware of those shows, but without a television or the inclination to watch, I’ve never seen one. But I get the idea and know or have met several – no, many – people who consider themselves preppers. The thing is, every prepper I’ve met has his priorities out of whack. They’re all preparing for a worst case scenario while failing to prepare for obvious and likely occurrences.

I did some prepping myself. In the face of the Y2K scare I laid up significant amounts of food and water, along with a variety of goods that I felt might be hard to get if we did have a catastrophe. You may laugh if you like, and many did when the calendar turned to the year 2000 with no significant trouble, but for a time serious people were very concerned about what would happen. To me, and some others I knew, it seemed prudent to hedge our bets and stock up on supplies and food. And over the counter medicines. And ammo. Okay, I admit it. For a time back then I got caught up in the moment and started to think the end was nigh.

Two things happened. First, clever programers found a solution to the computer date code issues. And second, I didn’t need to buy much food for most of the year 2000. In fact, buying all that canned food and bagged rice was cheaper because it was in bulk and purchased when on sale. Oh well. I am surely glad that I was prepared, but more glad that nothing bad happened. And since preparation for it resulted in nothing more terrible than having plenty of food that would last a long time (food that I could and did eat,) I consider the preparation worthwhile. Especially with the memory from the previous winter where, while living near Chicago, we experienced one of the largest snowfalls on record. The massive blizzard shut down the roads and highways for several days, and by the time I got to the supermarket the shelves were empty. Literally empty. I took pictures to work to show people, but they all had their own pictures from their supermarkets.

1999 supermarkets (and today’s) were much different from how they were in 1969. In those thirty years “just-in-time” delivery replaced grocery warehousing on site. As a child if a product was not on the shelf a clerk might check in the back. As an adult I found that if it wasn’t on the shelf it was most likely on a truck on its way. If the trucks can’t get there, the shelves become empty. After Y2K I have never worried about running out of food during a winter storm again. Evermore I would be prepared.

But that experience ran me right up against the world of prepping.

I’ll first clarify that when I say prepper, I am making a distinction from someone who makes preparations for rare but predictable scenarios. Preppers are not laying up some food and stores against a tough winter. Preppers are hoarding ammo and dehydrated foods for when the zombies attack. Preppers are reading books on bushcraft and how to run trout lines for post-apocalyptic survival. Preppers are spending hours in online forums discussing barter economy and what will be used for money after hyperinflation destroys all fiat currency.

What happens when you take a dive into that world is you discover the near universal belief that doomsday lies ahead. Maybe just ahead. In no time you are repeating the mantra that doomsday isn’t an if, but a when. And the when is wide open. Doomsday’s arrival is like the explosion of the Yellowstone caldera or an asteroid strike. It could be a thousand years from now or it could be before I finish this sentence. At that point you start to think that if it could happen any second you need to go deep and start prepping post haste. Better to get some of the prepping done right away.

But what, exactly, are we preparing for? Will it be civil war? Regular war? Nuclear war? A pandemic? The dreaded zombie apocalypse? The possibilities seem endless. At each step of prepping you find many more things to prep for. Once you start to plan for hunkering down at home you learn that you might not be at home when it starts. So you need prep gear for getting home. Then when you get home you might need to flee to another location, so you need a “bug out bag.” It’s for when you have to flee to the hills. And then you need to stockpile wherever it is you think you’re going to bug out to. After going to a prepper convention I decided that the hills are going to get mighty crowded.

What I realized is that we can’t really know what doomsday will look like and what we will need when it comes, or rather if it comes. The “if” part is much harder to comprehend once you’ve walked in prepper boots, but it is the more reasonable conjunction. What experience do any of us have with doomsday? Apart from personal life tragedy that could claim that moniker, there aren’t many doomsdays to use as examples. Hurricanes have hit, volcanos have erupted, and invasions have happened; and in each of those events and some several others great tribulations were visited on the masses in certain areas. I’m sure the denizens of Pompeii would be just in stating autumn of 79 AD is when doomsday hit. And we’ve all seen film footage of streams of refugees pushing carts and carrying babies as they flee the ravages of war, both past and current. But Vesuvius was quiet for hundreds of years before the eruption of 79, and how do people know if they are going to be welcoming refugees, or if they themselves will be the refugees seeking welcome? And for all the destruction that earthquakes and hurricanes visit on people, we’ve always started picking up the pieces shortly after it was over and got back to our lives more or less as they were. None of them ever turned into doomsday. Some preparations for the sort of weather emergency likely where you live should suffice without hoarding two years supply of toilet paper and organizing a private militia.

But the chances that any of the doomsday scenarios will happen within the normal lifespan of an adult in urban or suburban America are very low. So prepping for them is not a good use of time and money unless those preparations coincidentally cover other, more likely needs, such as power outages and winter storms.
The real problem is that much of the time and money preppers spend working out solutions to unlikely doomsday scenarios is time and money that could have been spent preparing for likely future needs.

Most preppers that I’ve met are unprepared for a loss of a job. They have mortgages or pay rent, they carry credit card debt and a loan on their car. Most would need to replace the lost job with one at least as good within a few weeks time. They’re prepping for bugging out to the hills when they aren’t prepared for a recession. And we have historical recessions and depressions as examples. We know they happen. Doomsdays are theoretical.

Most of those preppers I’ve known are not prepared to send their children to college. Yet we know that children often wish to go to college and that it is often advantageous for them to do so.

Preppers I’ve met expect to confront doomsday by barricading themselves in their compound and returning to a lifestyle reminiscent of how they believe it was in the olden days. But in truth most of them are permanently tied to the modern world through medicine. The sad truth is we live in a country at a time when the obesity rate nears 50% and chronic health problems abound. And many people, all too often including the preppers, are going to spend the rest of their lives dependent on prescription drug refills and follow up appointments. If it isn’t diabetes it is hypertension. Or they’re on blood thinners, or other drugs to help their heart conditions. Not all but many preppers, certainly most that I’ve met, have chronic conditions that require medical attention and drugs, or will soon enough because of their poor health. They make their appointments with their doctors, they arrange for prescription refills by mail, and then they go back to prepping as if all of what they just did will somehow no longer matter after the apocalypse. They are not prepared to function without modern medication and expertise while they prepare for a world that will have none. If there is a single thing I would point at to illustrate the cognitive dissonance in most preppers it would be this.

People get sick, and divorced, and adopt puppies. Companies relocate and towns flourish and decline. Technology makes obsolete the previous new technology. Some amount of preparation is a good idea. Especially when preparing for things that we know happen. But prepping for things we fear but have never seen is imprudent.

As I write the world is in the grips of a pandemic. COVID-19, a novel coronavirus, is leaping in numbers around the globe. The virus, which appears to have come from bats and jumped to humans through some other transitory animals at a market in Wuhan, China, has reached the US. The numbers are growing in terms of cases and deaths, and our CDC (Center for Disease Control) is not optimistic about its spread. There are aspects to this virus and how easy it is to pass that it alarms even the most staid viral pathologists. This could be terrible.

One of the answers in combatting this virus is quarantine. Isolating those who have the disease, and those who have come in contact with those who do can be effective in slowing the spread. The slower spread will help the hospitals address the cases they see. As the virus spreads the risks rise for those who continue to mingle in crowds. We have official travel restrictions in place and stay at home orders. Companies are laying people off or insisting on working from home if optional. It is becoming more apparent that staying home presents less risk than standing in a queue at the supermarket wondering if the last person at the register had washed their hands.

Suddenly people aren’t laughing at preppers. Preppers, after all, can self-quarantine more easily.

But let me be clear: I never laughed at preppers. I have been concerned about them for reasons that I mentioned above, but laughing isn’t nice. Or helpful.

A century or so ago, and for most of time prior to that, the trip to the store was a planned event. People hitched their wagons and piled the kids aboard for a trip into town they might make once or twice a month. They would load their wagon with a variety of goods to last them until the next trip, and visit all the other services they needed while there. Blacksmiths, pharmacists, barbers, the post office, etc. When you were at home and time came to prepare dinner, if you ran out of something, you would not dash to the corner store or hop in the car. You would just do without.

I worked in ships at sea for many years of my life. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean is a poor time to find out you are out of something. Like sailors over the years, and farmers of old, what you have is what you eat.

If you keep some of those habits and buy more things less often. And if you focus on keeping enough on hand that you will need to make fewer trips to the store, you will be able to more easily stay home and weather the storm, meteorological or epidemiological.

Stocking up on groceries is not the same as hoarding. And being prepared is not the same as Prepping.

Sure, as we watch to see how this pandemic affects us it is easy to wonder if preppers are the smart ones. I say the answer is no. In their efforts to prepare for the end of the world as we know it, they have inadvertently prepared for one aspect of a really bad virus. But the simple task of stocking your larder and cooking more of your own meals would take care of that too. And it would leave you more time and money to prepare for how you will pay for your daughter’s college now that she wants to go to medical school and become Surgeon General.

March 19, 2020 is the first day of spring, as marked by the apparent sun crossing over the equator heading north. We call it the vernal equinox.
But it hardly feels like a day for celebration, and even optimism seems imprudent until we grasp the full measure of what we are in for.
I will look instead at what we might already recognize as lessons. I see these four as most important.

One: The stock market isn’t nearly as important as we are told.

It has troubled me for some time now how hourly and half-hourly news broadcasts include several mentions of the Dow Jones stock average including how many points it is up or down. On a market valued above $20,000 dollars we hear even the smallest incremental change. The Dow is up two and a half points, or down a half-point. These are inconsequential numbers. Even if it is hundreds of points, these are intermediary numbers referencing only what is transpiring on the trading floor at the time. It will have almost no bearing on what the end of the day trading will be, nor effect in any meaningful way the lives of all but a few people. It would be like a semi-hourly update on the number of cars on an expressway in your city. Or checking your blood pressure every half-hour. It is only noteworthy if it is significantly lesser or greater than typical. But it is treated to this position of importance as if it is relevant to our daily lives and economic vitality.
The last weeks have been devastating for the stock market indices. The fear of economic recession in concurrence and in the wake of the pandemic has caused the markets to lose all of the gains, which were considerable, made since Donald Trump took office. And for all of those who have been buying stock during that stretch, they now own stock worth considerably less – on paper – than they were a couple of weeks ago. And many millions of people are counting on having that stock to sell in time for their retirement. Millions have their pensions and 401K plans invested in the markets and are watching their paper wealth vanish before their eyes. Of course it is only paper wealth. Or perhaps we should call it digital wealth these days. But in either case it isn’t real wealth. You have to sell those stocks to use the money they are worth. You still own the same stocks. Or better put, you haven’t lost anything until you sell them at a loss. And the money you sell them for needs to buy what you expect it to buy for it to matter. Hopefully people heed sound advice and avoid volatile markets when they are close to needing to withdraw money for retirement.
But while there may be some wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the investor set and some fretting about retirement from others, most people are much more concerned about how they are going to survive if and when they lose their jobs.
With all the people in the country whose lives are balanced on a blade of competing credits and debits, the immediate future looks bleak. Almost instantly their children are home from school on a long term basis. I don’t have exact numbers, but it may be that most households have both parents working, and then you add in the single-parent ones and that is a huge number of people who need to become homeschoolers. At the very least they no longer have a place where the kids will be guided and guarded for six or so hours a day. Even daycares are closing. Many parents are going to have to stay home.
As it happens many of those parents are going to stay home anyway, as thousands of businesses close their doors. Anyone whose job it was to serve people, entertain people, arrange travel for people, or mind the places where people go to visit such as museums or sports venues, are already out of work or will be very soon. The people who make things that are not essential will also be sent home. Perhaps this will be short term, but it doesn’t look like that. And while some companies are keeping people on the payroll, most are not or cannot.
These people are in serious financial trouble. Paper wealth in the markets is not their chief concern. Paper money in their wallets is.

Two: Gathering our needs on a daily basis is imprudent.

People seemed to be woefully short of everything it takes to run a household. The moment the idea of quarantine became news, people rushed to the stores in panic mode and hoarded everything they feared running out of. People fought over toilet paper. This, by the way, is a product that a hundred or so years ago people didn’t even want at all. It isn’t that we didn’t wipe our bottoms, it’s just that we had millennia of experience with other utensils and contrivances. And many of these people were buying far more of that product, as well as many others, than they could use in a year, as opposed to the month or so they might be facing.
Panic buying and ill-conceived hoarding is endemic in a culture used to instant gratification and on demand access to goods. In the past several decades it is rare to find our markets short of even one or two items on our list. On these rare occasions we simply choose from another brand to satisfy our needs. To reach a store and find empty shelves in America is so rare that people are taking pictures of those empty shelves to share on Twitter and Facebook.
And based on the propensity for people living from paycheck to paycheck, I have little doubt that much of the hoarding was done on credit. People borrowing money to buy things they should have had already.
A far cry from our ancestors of even a few generations ago. There was no running to the corner store for most people in America at the turn of the previous century. Excepting those numbers who lived in the bustling cities, most people made trips to the store on a weekly or even less frequent basis. They had staple goods and made food from scratch. What they didn’t have they did without.
And not having money to buy things is another problem. While real wages for working people have remained flat or declined over the decades, Americans have had it fairly stable since WWII. Yes, the 2009 recession was rough and many people were out of work, but unemployment insurance, and other social programs did much to help avoid the kind of national distress we had during the Great Depression. And few remain who remember the rationing and general shortages of WWII. In fact, it is that ignorance of history that has exacerbated the current crisis.
As a child of the 1970s, I remember asking the supermarket clerks and managers to check in the back for items absent from the shelves. This was possible because stores still warehoused stock well beyond what the shelves held for commonly sold items. Since then stores have switched to “just in time” delivery. Trucks come in daily and stock hits the shelf every night. There is no back room to check in. Products are automatically ordered when the inventory lowers to a number that varies based on sales history. There is no back room storage.
People are running their homes in much the same way. They eat more and more prepared meals, and cook fewer and fewer things themselves. And by cook I do not mean heat pre made meals in the oven, or slap together burgers or sandwiches. Like sewing, cooking is becoming a lost art, practiced as a hobby by home chefs. Many people I know use their microwave oven more than any other appliance, and it is mostly used to heat foods prepared elsewhere. For years now Americans have spent more money at restaurants than at supermarkets. This means that many people have no more food in their house than enough prepared meals to last until their next shopping trip. And that trip is often just stopping at the store on the way home from work to pick up dinner. Holding stock goods and staple products at home for meal preparation is part of our past for many in this country. At their homes, just like the supermarket, there is no back room storage.
Our habit of devoting as much of our paychecks as we do to pre made meals would stagger our great-grandparents. Our grandparents too if we are old enough. But we do this in part to allow more of our time to be spent on entertainment. Whether it is sports, movies, gaming, or the vast spectrum of cable and subscription channels that deliver shows of every imaginable sort to our homes, we watch or play at a great deal of it. And we can do that while waiting for food delivery or for the microwave to beep. And a generation ago it was a rare treat to have Pizza or Chinese food delivered, today nearly all restaurants offer delivery and people take advantage of that service frequently.
In these ways, along with our compulsion to own more stuff, we now manage our lives in accordance with the world we are in. When we want it, we order it. And instead of saving for the things we want, we charge it against future earnings and pay over time with little thought to the premium we are paying in the form of commercial interest. Only the very rich and the very poor own their cars outright. Everyone else is servicing a note. Four decades ago car notes were 36 months. Today some loans are 84 months. 7 years to pay for a car. Most people who make such a deal will trade it in far short of that date with outstanding debt rolled into their new purchase. Many people are paying monthly to buy their cell phones.
Between the debts incurred for ownership, subscriptions to monthly services, and paying others to do the cooking, Americans are dependent on that next check. Add to that the tendency to whip out a credit card whenever the balance is low enough, and we have a people with a cost of living as high as their earnings with little or no room for error. The classic advice from financial planners is to have six-months savings put away for emergencies. For most Americans that is a farcical notion. Many can’t go two weeks. Most can’t go more than a month.
We are learning that having our outgo match our income does not work.
And having a lifestyle designed around convenience leaves us vulnerable.
Expecting to be able to get what we want at any time is a poor plan to follow.

Three: We are learning that our base health standard is terrible.

Our national obesity rate is approaching 50%. That puts half of the people in the country at risk of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease just to get started. And this also puts us at greater risk from COVID-19.
We are tied to prescription medicines for our very survival. We must add to our concerns of having enough food to sustain us in quarantine, sufficient refills for the drugs we depend on to keep us from needing critical care. It is speculative to wonder what our ancestors would think if they could have looked into a crystal ball and seen our conditions today, but it seems to me that shock would best describe their reaction. For a hardy people who bore up in the face of disease and famine, it would be a shock to see what we have become. With the incredible surplus available and the advantage of so many conveniences, that we have turned into an obese people tethered to a stream of drugs and debt is a shock to me, and I am watching it in real time.
Our health is more important then we realized.

Four: We are learning that individualism and isolationism are of less value than cooperation and community.

This lesson seems to be one that we need to learn again and again throughout history. While we may aspire to the ideals of Emersonian self-reliance and stand tall to salute our local and national banners, through the ages it is the community of people and the cooperation of nations that has mattered most to our survival. From the small group of boys who bind together against the single bully on the schoolyard, to the formation of governmental plans to aid the most people in times of crisis, we are best and accomplish the most when we work together. We need each other. Even the strongest individual can be brought down by adversity. And even when the sole man survives, the world he is left with is diminished from the deaths of so many others. We are learning again that it is in our best interest to ensure that everyone can get and afford healthcare, and that everyone has protections against economic failure and famine.
Going it alone is an unwise policy.

One: The stock market doesn’t matter that much.

Two: Preparing for emergency is valuable.

Three: Get healthier.

Four: Embrace social welfare.

Jack T. Reason.

Why We Should Not Believe

Some of the smartest people I know believe in some form of reincarnation. They contrast mostly with people who believe in a heavenly afterlife. And those people who believe in heaven mostly also believe in a less than heavenly afterlife for many others. Some many millions believe that reincarnation is a repeated process that ends when one learns all the lessons of the many lives we live and go to nirvana, which is a kind of heaven, I guess. It seems that when you put all of these people together you get a massive majority who think there is something beyond or after the corporeal existence we now experience.
In the vast majority we reject the idea of a permanent extinction of ourselves. The body dies and rots. We don’t deny that. But across time and culture we separate our bodies from ourselves, or at least we believe that this happens at our physical death.
There’s a whole lot of stuff to unpack in that, from the how and why to the when and where. I’ll take that up in force another time, and only touch on it here. Today I’ll mostly stick with reincarnation. And to be more narrow, I’ll skip entirely the versions of this belief where each new life is in the body of some different creature. A dog in one, a mouse, a fly, a bird, etc, in others. I’ll stick only to the concept that a person lived as a person in a previous life, and that they will become yet another person in the next, and so on.
Let me get out early that I am not claiming it isn’t true, but I believe a careful look at reason will likely bring most people to the rejection of the claim that it is a real phenomenon. Or more simply that the idea is implausible and does not meet the burden of proof.
Let’s get started.

Most of us have heard claims of reincarnation. Whether in books, TV or film, or personal anecdotes; they range from the absurd to the compelling. But the problem with these claims is that they are not falsifiable. That is one of the distinctions between science and pseudoscience. I can say that I have never heard a reincarnation story that held up well to scrutiny. But I can’t say that I never will. I can’t prove a negative. No one can. (Yes, one can be inferred under some circumstances, but it is unlikely.) And so when someone claims a previous life, you can’t prove them wrong. And since you can’t prove any claim wrong, and since all claims cannot be true, we are left with all claims being possibly true and possibly false. This makes every claim worthless from a truth perspective. If a claim could lead to either a true conclusion or a false conclusion, than it is not a reliable path to truth. Ultimately, all claims of reincarnation are stories that are impossible to prove from the evidence available.

To our minds there is no difference from an experience we had, and an experience we believe we had but didn’t. Vast studies have been done and shelves full of books have been written about implanted memories and our inability to distinguish between those and actual memories. What we remember about our past life could well have been learned about or invented during this life. I could go on about this for a time, but to learn more please research false memory.
But what about the things that would only have been known to that past person? Throw them out. There is no way to tell the difference between a fact known only to the deceased person and the imagination of the claimant. You cannot verify it a true claim without admitting it could have been learned. If only the dead know, then you can’t prove your claim true; and if the claim can be verified, then someone else knew it and could have been the source of your knowledge. To add to this thought I’ll say that whenever I hear or read the claim of knowledge that only could be known to the dead person I suspect deceit and fraud at work. It is the ultimate unprovable claim, and is offered to overcome objections of learned knowledge.
What about young children, too young to have learned, who relate details of a known person and their life?
This is where a skeptical mind can be helpful. Have you really heard such a story as described? Or have you heard a similar story from an adult claiming that he knew all this when he was a young child? Or a parent claiming it was what they heard from a child? The simple idea that a child started revealing details about a past life into a tape-recorder when they were just able to speak unprompted by an adult strains credibility. The idea that an adult could reflect back to his or her early childhood and remember themselves remembering a past life cannot be treated as reliable. Perhaps their tale is compelling, and maybe even makes you wonder. But as to the truth of that claim, how could you do to prove it? You couldn’t, which makes anecdotes such poor evidence. But there are so many stories, surely they can’t all be false! But if each one is unreliable for its unfalsifiability, then collectively they aren’t evidence of reincarnation. A thousand bad pieces of evidence do not add up to one good one.

Try it this way: If I say that I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte, can you prove I am not? No, you can’t. I could spend all evening enlightening (or boring) you with amazing details and insights of Napoleon’s life, even from a first person perspective and you would still recognize that I could have learned it all. I could claim to know something that only the emperor himself could have known, but how would you know I wasn’t making it up? If only Napoleon could have known it, how can you verify that my claim is true? And because of the obvious supposition that a person might make such a claim in an attempt to gain notoriety or fame, your incredulity of my story would be just. But there are five-thousand guys out there claiming that they were Napoleon, surely they all can’t be false! Sure, I don’t believe this one, and that one, and that one; and I’m not going to check them all, but one must be true, right? This is where we acknowledge that lots of bad evidence doesn’t add up to some good evidence. That should be re-read. Millions and millions of believing children does not make a real Santa Claus. You can take the example and apply it anywhere it fits. Five-thousand stories of being reincarnated from Cleopatra does not prove that one of them is true. It could be a million claims or three, and we are still left with an unfalsifiable claim.

But the whole idea of reincarnation is implausible at the start. When did reincarnation begin? There are something like seven-point-seven billion people on the planet at this writing. At the time of Napoleon (er, I mean me, or one of those other guys) there was less than a billion. If reincarnation began then, that means less than one out of seven people could be reincarnated. Or did it begin at the beginnings of civilization? Or when man began walking upright? Was Napoleon reincarnated from a caveman? No matter where you begin, it is mathematically impossible for everyone to have a past life. Do people develop the ability to reincarnate, or is it just some people alway reappearing in a new body? Either only some people reincarnate, whether selectively or randomly, or reincarnation is spread like a shotgun blast into future generations. Believers in reincarnation always begin their argument with unfalsifiable claims, when what they need to do is offer a model of how it works. They need to show a mechanism to explain it. They need to begin with what it is that is being passed on.

Countless studies have shown that what we think and know are products of our brains, and that our brains cease to function when we die. (As in permanent death, not simple heart failure prior to revival.) There has never been anything evidenced to show that any part of that brain function, our thoughts, or feelings carries on outside of our physical selves in the present, or continues after death. Does the essence of self float up into the ether and waft around until picked up by some new person? And what if they find that new person occupied already? In trying to imagine how it would work I’m left with the feeling that silliness was not considered when reincarnation was first proposed. A reasonable claim for reincarnation needs to identify and prove the existence of some extracorporeal intelligence and a method for transmitting it forward into another being. Without that the stories and claims are nothing but fanciful tales built on false premises and poor reasoning.

The simple assertion that people are reincarnated is not a complete logical syllogism. To work the claim of reincarnation through logic let’s build one. A syllogism is a short form logical structure to demonstrate a conclusion from two or more premises. If the syllogism is structurally sound and the premises are true, than the conclusion must be true. A common example goes like this:

 Premise 1: All men are mortal
Premise 2: Socrates was a man
Conclusion: Socrates was mortal.

The structure is correct as are both premises, therefor the conclusion is true.
We could change this syllogism to make it not correct.

Premise 1: All men are mortal
Premise 2: Dogs often bark
Conclusion: Socrates was a dog.

Here the two premises are true while the conclusion is false. This is because of a logical fallacy known as a non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow the premises.

Another would be:

Premise 1: All men are card sharps
Premise 2: Socrates was a man
Conclusion: Socrates was a card sharp

Here with have structurally sound syllogism that reaches a false conclusion because one of the premises is false.

So to make a claim for reincarnation we might state it thus:

Premise 1: The human soul is made of energy
Premise 2: Energy cannot be destroyed
Conclusion: The soul continues on after we die

In this there are two fallacies. The second is that if it did prove that the soul continues after death it does not prove that it begins in a new body. But the first error is that premise 1 is an assertion without evidence. There is no evidence that such a thing as a soul is real, let alone what it might be made of. Prior to accepting that our soul, our consciousness, or whatever one might call it returns to another life after we die, we must first prove it exists at all separate from what was created by our brains during our lives. This is the opposite of what has been found in serious study over many decades. We have good reason to believe that consciousness is a product of a functioning brain in a living person and that it ceases to exist upon the death of that brain.
This makes premise 1 unproven which leads to a false conclusion. You could try and structure a syllogism in a variety of ways, but in the end no claim of past or future life can be treated seriously without first proving the existence of an immortal conscious and a means of transfer. Simply asserting that it is true and relating unprovable stories cannot be considered a reliable path to truth.

It seems to me that life is a wondrous thing. A once in forever thing to be dealt with as we wish and with awareness of its finality, and our immortality is the spread of our DNA throughout the collective whole of us. I’ve done a lot of genealogical research. One side of my family is well documented and a unique surname appears so far and wide in the United States that I cannot count my cousins so numerous are they. And that is only going back a couple and a half centuries. Our collective interconnectedness boggles the mind. Unless you are from Africa, you probably have two-percent neanderthal DNA. The interbreeding between humans and neanderthals began after humans migrated out of Africa. From over thirty-thousand years ago they remain immortal in you. And in me. And if any of us die without producing offspring (and I hope many do for the sake of the planet), we can rest assure that the genes in us are a lot like the genes in everyone else. But having genetic history is not the same as conscious history, and it should not be inferred. I make mention of DNA to give comfort to our desire to outlast our bodies.

We may feel like we have always been conscious and it may seem impossible to imagine not being so, but we haven’t any good reason to think otherwise. Questions about why we are here, and what happens next may entertain and stimulate our minds on long winter nights, but they remain as unanswerable as ever. At least in any way that could be called reasonable. We are here. We will die. Momento Mori as the stoics of ancient Rome would say. We do not (and maybe cannot) know if anything is beyond, but we have no evidence that there is and no reason to think it so. That we don’t know leaves us unsatisfied, but it doesn’t give us license to invent something to fill in the space. “We don’t know what happens, therefore this happens” is a logical fallacy. Reincarnation is an assertion without evidence born from our finite brains attempting to deny mortality.

If you really just need some kind of answer to the meaning of it all, Douglas Adams helped us all out years ago. That answer is 42.

I’ve written about the Deep State Conspiracy before, but here’s a quick recap:
There are those who believe that a secret cabal of international “globalists” are controlling the US government (as well as most national governments and all international governmental agencies, i.e., the World Bank and the United Nations). In the US they do this by giving orders to entrenched government bureaucrats and career employees with the assistance of some willing elected officials. The conspiracy believers call these people the “Deep State.” As such, the country is not run by and for the benefit of the American people, but rather by these globalists who have as their aim various nefarious goals of world dominations and enslavement of the once free people of America.
To sell this conspiracy to each other and the likewise gullible, they cite actual governmental and international organizations, but they reframe what those agencies do to conform to their conspiracy beliefs. Further, they invent powers for these agencies that they do not possess, misrepresent actions they have taken, claim knowledge of information that is invisible to the rest of us, and assert motivations for these actions and inventions.
That all of these theories rely on first cause belief that such a conspiracy exists and that every action no matter how benign is part of the conspiracy calls for the rational mind to immediately dismiss them. And that each and every agency and department has a historically verified reason for its creation that responds to needs that existed when they were created adds to the reason why these conspiracies should be rejected as unsound paranoia.

Russia, under the governorship of Vladimir Putin, and under KGB influence during the Soviet years, recognizes that fostering these conspiracies in the US is to their advantage. By doing so, they seek to sew division and distrust among the American people for their government and for its international involvement. The hoped for result is the US taking an isolationist posture, thereby weakening the international groups that rely on the might of the US to maintain global cooperation. The Soviet Union did, and Russia now, continues to foster these conspiracies while promoting itself as a helping hand in the fight against globalism. A broad view makes it easier to see that this long term goal is not to stop globalism, but to stop only the globalism that threatens Russian influence.

Putin has been trying to regain the reach that Russia had during the Soviet era. The chief and obvious threat to that expansion is the international organizations that offer support and protection to those countries who don’t wish to fall under Russian sway. Think NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a large block of countries, chiefly bordering the North Atlantic Ocean and strengthened by the membership of the United States, which maintains treaties of mutual defense with members. To attack one is to attack them all, and NATO is far too strong a force for Russia to attempt to fight. It is the treaties and cooperation between world governments that pose the most effective resistance to Russian aggression and expansion. For Russia to get its way, NATO needs to be weakened and the US needs to get out of Europe. An isolationist America is in the best interest of Russia. They have been spreading propaganda along those lines and support any American voices who agree wherever and whenever they can. Russia recognizes that offering platitudes to “the good old days” and endorsing separatist views will divide America. They encourage sexism and racism, nationalism and xenophobia, and of course the grand conspiracy of the International Banker and the One World Government to aid in sewing that division.

Donald Trump, President Donald Trump, most probably believes those conspiracies. It is almost certain that many of his advisors past and present believe them. From Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and Trump’s affection for Breitbart News and InfoWars, to his resistance to rejecting the support of alt-right and white supremacists groups who he knows believe in these conspiracies, it seems more probable than not the he sees them as real. It may be, and I think probable, that Trump walks around the White House convinced that within the US Government there exists a clandestine power seeking to foster the globalist agenda. He sees himself as the great hero, placing himself in the midst of the jungle where he will tear it down and save America from enslavement. He will make America like he thinks it used to be. He will MAGA. That he is flatly ignorant of our history and accepts the revised conspiratorial version is apparent.

I was watching on YouTube a clip from a news program where former CIA director John Brennan expressed dismay at how Trump refuses to listen to the intelligence experts and instead follow his own instincts. If I had Mr. Brennan’s number I could call him and give him this thought: Trump thinks the Intelligence Community is part of the deep state. He is trusting that other piece of the conspiracy theory, the part where Russia is our friend helping us fight off the globalists. Yes, he believes Putin rather than American intelligence agents. This seems too wild to believe until you consider it from the perspective that he is onboard the conspiracy train. It seems evident to me that in Trump’s mind he is resisting a full out assault on him by the globalists. He may consider any action fair game. Whether that is an executive coup or a call for uprising and even civil war, there may be no line that Trump will not cross. The idea that he could be disabused of the absurdity of this conspiracy is not realistic. It would require him to admit he was wrong. He is a narcissistic, insecure, paranoid sociopath and is incapable of even recognizing his own fault, much less admitting to it.

Currently the House of Representatives is conducting an impeachment inquiry. Should they find sufficient evidence to support they will vote to Impeach him. This would send the process to the Senate where a trial would be held. As long as Trump holds that the Senate would not convict him, and as of right now there is little chance they would, he may restrain himself from his worst impulses. But should that change, we need to look out. I believe, based on the view that I’ve written here, the Trump would rather tear down the entire US government than give in to the deep state.

*And Why It Is Silly To Criticize Others For Saying It.

If you are an American resident and not in a cave or under a rock, the phrase “Thoughts And Prayers” should be familiar to you. It is a common exclamation made by elected officials and other public figures when a tragedy takes place at some location removed from them. It is uttered most notably when a mass shooting has taken place. For the average person will likely see the comment first posted by someone critical of that very response. I’ll walk through this to better explain the path of my thinking.

Somewhere in America, perhaps at a school or a workplace, an armed individual opens fire on unarmed persons. These people may be known to the assailant directly or tangentially, or perhaps randomly chosen because they are present. The usual news cycle follows with announcements of the attack having just happened or maybe even still unfolding. In the immediate aftermath, some elected official tweets their concern for those at the center of the assault with the titular phrase. Soon after, and often before the rest of the country is aware of the attacks, and almost always before most are aware of the tweet, response tweets leap to Twitter, and then to the news cycle, attacking the tweeter for his/her empty gesture. This scenario has played out often enough that I must believe that my readers are familiar with it. So here we go:

They are right, Thoughts And Prayers is an empty gesture. Exactly like any comment about any tragedy made my anyone unrelated to the incident trying to express care and concern. It does one thing only, and that is to draw attention to the english speaking world that the tweeter is a caring person. Yes, that is the point. The tweeter is trying to make the story about them and how caring and concerned they are. The correct response? Well, nothing. That is, unless the tragedy occurred in your district, or because of your position in leadership it is expected that you should acknowledge you are aware of the incident. Then, the response should omit any reference to prayers, or hope, or wishes, or any sort of non-factual based affirmations. You are concerned. Of course you are. Everyone who hears of this is concerned. Everyone hopes for the best. It doesn’t need to be said. Instead try: “I have just been informed of an apparent fill in the blank at XZY location, and I am contacting local officials to see what I can do or what resources I can provide.” That’s it. You are aware and you are finding out what actions you can take. You’ve informed your constituents that you are doing your job. Everyone knows you care. Or should know, and an attack on you for not offering caring thoughts should be dismissed as trolling.

But I said that it is also silly to criticize someone for saying Thoughts And Prayers, didn’t I? Yes, I did, and yes, it is. At a moment of tragedy, it might be wrong to trumpet what caring person you are, but it is also wrong – for the exact same reason – to trumpet about how someone’s gesture is empty. If their Thoughts And Prayers are only to draw attention to themselves, then the critical response is only to draw attention as well. “Your thoughts and prayers are an empty gesture. Look at me calling you out!” It is a naked attempt to claim moral superiority. It is trying to make the tragedy about how you feel about someone else.
But most often when people come to criticize others for saying Thoughts And Prayers, the criticism is used as a platform to suggest that they should have done something else, and that had they done that something else this tragedy would not have happened. That too is an empty gesture. It is usually formed along the line of, “You took money from the NRA, and that makes you responsible for this killing!” That is, don’t give us your thoughts and prayers, commit to the impossible task of disarming the American people. It could be logically rephrased, “You get support from beer companies, and that makes you responsible for the drunk driver who killed someone!”
Whether a politician supports gun rights or not; whether he or she receives campaign support from the NRA or not; they are not responsible for the actions of another person. The absurd notion of tying someone’s defense of gun ownership and the the Constitutional Amendment that protects it to someone committing murder with a gun should be rejected by any reasonable mind. And the person making that claim should be treated as an empty-headed rabble rouser. To allow a person to the table who makes such imbecilic statements, is the equivalent to putting a flat Earth proponent on a panel discussing missions to Mars. They have demonstrated unreasonable and unsound thinking, and should be dismissed.
Even if the person who states Thoughts And Prayers were an NRA member, or even an executive of the NRA, it would be the same. The NRA does not endorse using a firearm to shoot innocent people anymore than AAA endorses driving a car into a crowd of people on the sidewalk.
You can both support the right of an adult to drink alcohol and be against drinking and driving. You can be pro freedom of speech and against hate speech. You can favor armed citizenry and oppose murder.

Does this mean that we can say nothing? No. We can follow the news of these events. We can discuss them and advance our opinions of the causes and methods of reducing them, when and where appropriate. There should be local, regional, and national dialog taking place with the goal of finding workable solutions to the causes of these tragedies. But when it comes to Thoughts And Prayers, we should curb our tongues.
The correct thing to offer is help if you are in such a position to facilitate it. The correct response is no response. One might think they are calling someone out for their hypocrisy, but in truth, they are only calling attention to themselves.
Let’s stop pretending that our response to a tragedy is more important to the tragedy itself. Stop saying thoughts and prayers, and stop confronting people for doing so.

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.