I haven’t heard about OOPARTS in ages — they’re a fad that seems to have faded. Pierre Stromberg sent me a note that he has rediscovered an OOPART, the notorious Coso Artifact, and I hadn’t heard about that in years, either.

OOPARTS are “Out Of Place ARTifactS”, and there was a time, back when the Ancient Astronauts craze was producing all kinds of crackpot books and magazine articles, unearthing and bizarrely interpreting artifacts that they couldn’t explain — so they resorted to a) claiming that aliens brought them to earth, or b) they were evidence that ancient humans were advanced, as the Bible shows(?), and that we’ve been in decline since the Fall. Watch this amusing little video from 2004 in which Donald Chittick mocks the von Dänikenites for thinking there were astronauts from outer space instead of God’s people here on Earth.

(Note: You can hear the weird consonants and cadences of Kent Hovind in Donald Chittick — it’s like these old school creationists are clones of each other. He also goes on and on about “man’s opinions” and different “interpretations” of science, just like Ken Ham.)

(Also amusing: the bit where he shows off a Homo erectus skull with a bullet hole, which he proves by running a metal rod through it to reveal the larger exit hole…the foramen magnum.)

Among the favorite pieces of garbage creationists trotted out as proof that ancient people were technologically sophisticated was a peculiar object that they claimed was found in a geode (which would make it very old, except…it wasn’t a geode), made of ceramic and metal rods.

Unfortunately for the whole delusion of OOPARTS, it turned out to be … a spark plug from a 1920s Model T, imbedded in some hardened muck. It then disappeared, and the creationists all stopped talking about it, and OOPARTS kind of shamefacedly disappeared from the lexicon.

Stromberg wrote to tell me, though, that it has been rediscovered! He has updated his article on the Coso Artifact, and has “arranged for Seattle’s Pacific Science Center to display the artifact starting December 1st as part of their new exhibition titled, ‘What Is Reality’.” So now you know where to go if you want to see another piece of creationist evidence.

Check out the Chittick video. It’s amazing how many off-the-wall crazy ideas he throws out one after the other, almost all of which creationists have discarded out of embarrassment.

Guaranteed.

When you hear these firefighter's say these fires are exploding, they are not kidding. The folage has been saturated from chem trails for decades, Barium and Aluminum. They are fighting a metal fire not wood. BTW, Barium and Aluminum, periodic table spell, BaAl. Coincidence? …-

— Mark Taylor (@patton6966) November 15, 2018

Also, the Lord told him to write a book.

You accuse one skeptic of rape, and next thing you know you’re the guy who’ll accuse anyone of rape. I get mentioned in this article about Tchiya Amet, the woman who is saying Neil Tyson raped her. She sounds credible. I can believe something happened. She definitely experienced some trauma around that time that led to her dropping out of grad school. She definitely believes she was the victim of a non-consensual sexual assault by Tyson. But…

I expect a little bit of corroborating evidence. Unfortunately, there isn’t any. A friend who testifies to her distress at the time, signs of a pattern of abuse by Tyson to others, anything. There’s nothing. Apparently, a news organization (Buzzfeed, maybe?) tried to investigate, but hit a wall where there was a complete absence of any indications that he’d been a predatory dudebro back in the day. That was where I was stuck, too. I don’t have any investigatory ability, and all I had was this one person’s words.

She doesn’t help her case with her willingness to invent patterns where there are none. She confronted him at a talk; she interprets him talking about black holes in an astronomy talk before the Q&A as some sleazy reference to having sex with her, even before she asks a question. When she gets to the microphone, she’s wearing a feathered headdress and Indian warpaint, and she raises a foot-long ankh before saying,

Today is national sexual assault awareness day, during national sexual assault awareness month, and I’m here because when I was a grad student at UT Austin in 1984, you raped me. I’m here to speak for all the people you’ve raped, assaulted, molested, violated, denigrated…and all the pain and suffering you’ve inflicted on them, and their parents and families and their children, including myself.

The presentation does not inspire confidence. When she says, “all the people”, I’d like her to name names to an investigator, because if it’s true that he perpetrated all these crimes, there’d be more evidence than a lone woman in an Indian costume waving an Egyptian symbol to support her accusation.

David Gee thinks there should be an investigation. It seems he’s even hired a private investigator to look into it.

Reporters could be hesitant to talk about this because of their love for Tyson, or because of their distrust in spiritual individuals, but no matter what, it is completely unacceptable. I’m not saying you should believe Amet 100% and take her story at face value because I’m not doing that. All I’m asking for is a real investigation, so we can find out what really happened.

If you knew Tyson and/or Amet during this period, or you have information about similar allegations, please contact me at: davidgeecontact@gmail.com. You never know what information might help.

Well, yeah, it should be looked into. But the first thing that should be examined has got to be offered up by Amet herself. She says that there were multiple instances of rape, assault, molestation, etc., and is willing to say so publicly. So who, when, where? Provide some leads. If she can’t, it sounds like she’s willing to throw around wild and false accusations with nothing to back them up, which hurts her credibility further.

Even people with weird beliefs get raped, but even people with weird beliefs ought to be able to provide some tangible clues if we’re to act on their accusations.

Sorry, buckos, it’s another comment on Jordan Peterson. But I think he’s losing it. He’s on a lengthy world tour and is posting delusional missives about his mental state.

So it’s 2:39 a.m. in Oslo, Norway. I woke up in a too-hot hotel room out of a fitful nightmare, which I can only partially remember. I haven’t had a dream that I could recall even that clearly in a very long period of time. The last one was about traveling and speaking and not getting enough to eat. That was about six months ago. It occurred just before I embarked on what has now been a nine-month, 85-city world tour. I am on a very restricted diet, eating only beef and water, as a consequence of what appears to be a rather intractable auto-immune disease. I was concerned at some deep unconscious level about what might go wrong if I set out to talk with 250,000 people: If I could not eat, then I could not think and then things would not go well. Hence the nightmare. It was a warning of what might go wrong (and has not).

Has too.

I don’t remember my dreams very often, either, but when I do, they tend to be surreal and sort of playful (I’m one of those lucid dreamers). I don’t think I’ve ever had a violent dream about beating people up — maybe it’s because I eat a healthy diet — but it seems to be one of his themes.

In this dream I was speaking to a young man. He was very garrulous and irritating; he was unkempt, poorly put together, and he simply would not shut up. Everything he said was designed to provoke and to test. He finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance. I grabbed him, physically, and threw him against the wall. It was like wrestling with dough.

In my dream, I wrestled my opponent to the ground. He was still talking, mindlessly, mechanically, rapidly, nonstop. I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling.

You’d think a psychologist would be able to provide some insight into all this. But no. It was because he had a bad experience with a French journalist the day before. He was resentful because the journalist wouldn’t swallow the bullshit he peddles, so he had a dream about forcing him to accept what he said. His response is to dehumanize someone who disagreed with him.

I hadn’t spent two hours talking to a person. The person wasn’t there, or was barely there (even though the journalist had the makings, I would say, of a fine young man). I couldn’t reach him. Instead, I had a very irritating discussion with an ideologically possessed puppet and that was both too familiar and too unpleasant. I had a shower, and we went for a steak, and we tried to put the episode behind us, as we must, under such conditions, when the next city and the next audience beckons, the very next day. But the part of me that lurks underneath, dreaming, still had something to say.

And that something was SHUT UP!, and also to regurgitate that NPC meme that’s making the rounds of the right-wing trolls.

He’s not holding up well under the strain of his diet and finding out that a lot of people can see right through him. Poor man.

I am accused on YouTube of being a liberal snob and parroting the radical left’s blank-slate narrative that everything we do is socially constructed by someone who offers up his ironic credentials: he’s a STEM student in a major university.

Dave Bloom 1 day ago 12 Subscribers
@PZ Myers By the way, your general undertone of ‘you plebs lack the intelligence sufficient to grasp my brilliance’ is just more liberal narcissism. I’m a STEM student in a major university. Someone apparently thought my logic was adequate.

I just found that hilarious. He is valid because he’s on the bottom rung of a socially constructed hierarchy! Apparently, that hierarchy is genetic and evolutionarily deep, because Lobsters.

By the way, everything is socially constructed. Everything is genetic. You can’t separate the two.

This week, an organization calling itself the “Munk Debates” hosted an event in Toronto. Even knowing that much, I would have rolled my eyes — these public debate shows, whether it’s Munk or Pangburn or whatever otherwise tedious troll has decided to stake their reputation on hosting assholes arguing with each other — are a waste of time. This one in particular was a debate between David “Cheerleader for Bush & the Slaughter of Muslims” Frum and Steve “Proud Racist” Bannon on the subject of “Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist not liberal”.

This was rather like inviting Ken Ham and Kent Hovind to debate on whether the future of science is creationism or evolution. That, too, could be presented as a “public service” by allowing ideas to be “vigorously contested,” but it would be a lie. Debates never accomplish anything. I very much like this summary of the process by Tabatha Southey:

The truth is that while debates can be fun to watch and some people are very skilled at doing them, debates very seldom change anything, especially minds. In fact, in the real-life debates, the audience vote found that “opinions remain entrenched—neither side wins,” as the Munk Debates tweeted, after announcing that Bannon had won. It’s fitting that the Munk masquerade ball ended with fake news. These kinds of things are mostly advertisements for the people involved. Debates are the exhibition basketball of academia and politics.

Regardless of whom public opinion deemed the “winner” of our all-too-real Bannon vs. Frum debate, merely placing Steve “Camp of the Saints” Bannon up on that stage only boosted his rightly flagging mainstream influence. People like to endlessly chide that “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”—but the truth is, no one ever chased off a desperate showman with a spotlight.

Yeah, it was a ridiculous conclusion: the Munk Debates announced that, on the basis of a comparison of pre- and post-debate surveys, Bannon had swayed the most attendees. It turned out that they’d counted wrong, and no one had changed their minds in the debate. No one should be surprised, especially when it’s a couple of conservatives differing only in degree debating liberalism.

I have a suggestion for all the debaters out there, happily riding the gravy train provided by impresarios selling tickets to on-stage conflicts between opposing views (it’s great! They get to milk both sides for money!): just tell them no. That’s hard when they’re waving big money at you, but we’ve got to kill this debate culture, which is really just a pretense masking reactionaries finding excuses to present the illusion that their ideas are equally credible with their opponents. Tell them no, but give them an alternative: you’ll give them a talk or discussion with the audience on their stage, but you’re just not going share a platform with racists or religious lunatics.

The shiny new Skepticon has re-emerged. It’s going to be held on 9-11 August 2019, which is great for me, since it doesn’t fall in the heart of the Fall Semester anymore, and it’s moving from Springfield, Missouri to the big city of St Louis. You can reserve a room already. So mark your calendars and start saving pennies for the trip this summer.

Now we just have to watch for the inevitable tease as they release the speakers’ names one by one. They always have new and interesting voices on their schedule, so you can trust that it’s going to be good.