If you’re thinking of doing anything productive with your life, you might want to hit the gas, since according to numerologist David Meade, April 23rd is going to be the day when the rogue solar system body known as Planet X (also called Nibiru by believers) appears in the sky above the Earth.
When that happens, life on Earth will be doomed by “huge volcanoes and volcanic eruptions due to [Nibiru’s] gravitational force,” Meade claimed in British tabloid The Express.
The Flat Earth movement is a loose coalition of those who believe that the Earth is actually a disc, and that depictions of the planet as a globe are fake. It’s a small cadre of internet dwellers, but it punches above its weight in terms of how vocal it is.
It boasts several extremely active Facebook groups, some heavily-watched YouTube videos, prominent celebrity believers, such as rapper B.O.B. and NBA star Kyrie Irving, and maybe the most important thing you need for success on the internet, countless woke memes.
And now, it’s having a film festival, exploring the idea that science has literally been lying to us THIS WHOLE TIME.
President Trump had his annual physical last Friday, and the results were revealed earlier this week. While it wasn’t quite the “healthiest man ever to exist in the universe” fiasco of the election, it gave rise to an instant conspiracy theory.
The “girther” movement saw the declaration that Trump was 6’3 and 239 pounds, and promptly decided it was a lie, based on a bunch of other people who are about 6’3 and 239 and don’t look a damn thing like Donald Trump.
Chatter about President Trump’s weight was deemed to be everything from an expected outgrowth of Trump tendency to lie about pretty much everything, to “hypocritical and ignorant” fat shaming.
While the “girth certificate” debate raged, I was disturbed by an actual omission in the president’s medical exam: we don’t know if he got his flu shot.
In fact, he almost certainly didn’t.
Let me get this out of the way now: I think Rush Limbaugh is a sausage casing stuffed with norco-infused Twinkie filling. I think he rots brains and poisons hearts and has a truly harmful effect on the people who listen to him.
But I don’t think he thinks hurricanes are fake.
You’ve probably noticed we’re in the middle of a hurricane pandemic, with Harvey having laid waste to Houston, Irma bearing down on Florida, and Jose and Katia forming up. If this were a SyFy Channel movie, we’d be at the point where all the hurricanes merge into a hypercane, and the war-happy president orders the hypercane be broken up with nukes, but all the nukes do is make the hypercane a nuclear hypercane, and the only person who can stop it is Michael Dudikoff, or his millennial equivalent.
(side note, I will absolutely write this movie for money)
I wrote this for ATTN: and don’t feel like it got the love it deserved. I dove into how you can tell if a new scientific finding making the media all a-flutter is actually worth your time, or something to be discarded.
How do you do that? If you can, try to read the study’s abstract on PubMed. If it’s a medical or drug discovery, see if it was a well-designed study, using randomized controlled trials and a large sample size.
Also see what conflicts of interest and funders the researchers are involved with. And if you can’t find that, try to find the impact factor of the journal. Is it well-respected by its peers. or an open-access journal that takes advantage of scientists by charging them to publish?
All that and more, can be found here.
Mike Rothschild 