Thank you for saying this, Muna. I am too! That's kinda why I need to write this series - the urge to "win" is so strong, and so unhelpful in the long run. When the ego gets attached to always looking correct in an argument, it's a difficult thing to rewire in yourself - and it's a hard thing (but such a necessary thing) to admit you may be wrong about something, and hard to accept that potential wrongness is nothing to be ashamed of, if you approach it in a healthy and open-minded way...
Thank you, Mike, for not sending your cloud conspiracist my way. Though you may have set up your readers for disappointment by calling me an expert. I'm more of a head-in-the-clouds guy, really, more poetry than taxonomy.
I wish I'd known about your lovely, funny piece on unusual clouds from last August. I would have linked to it so my readers had something more cheerful to turn to on the topic.
It wasn't enough that birds aren't real, I guess. Now the curtains have been pulled back on clouds too? (Have they never exhaled on a cold day?) So much for the burgeoning field of aeroecology.
I hope they have a naming contest for the mummy perfume. "Afterlife" or "Pyramid Scheme" come to mind, but it's a golden opportunity for crowdsourcing.
I think Sebastian Junger dove into the mammalian dive reflex concept in a masterful chapter on drowning in The Perfect Storm. It's been many years, but I recall it as sort of a haunting attempt to convince readers that drowning in a mid-Atlantic maelstrom wasn't all that bad.
Ah! I have never read "The Perfect Storm" which is an idiocy on my part, since I thoroughly enjoyed "War" - if enjoyed is the right word, since it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I much prefer "Pyramid Scheme" (snork) to what marketers probably would/will come up with, along the lines of "Hot Mummy" or "Sexy Pharaoh" and so on. Well, I guess that's me not sleeping tonight. ("Well Preserved"? STOP Mike.)
I've very much been enjoying your work, Jason, and I promise I'll only send you the smallest number of conspiracy theorists I can possibly get away with.
Well, let's not be hasty. You can send pro-cloud conspiracy theorists my way anytime.
And don't stop field-testing mummy perfume names, please. What's the downside? "Mummy's Little Helper", etc.
I read Perfect Storm largely bc I had students who wanted to read it. We actually did a test of sorts, plunging our faces into a large bowl of cold water to see if we could notice a calming effect. Which failed, bc each teenage boy was sure another teenage boy would hold their faces underwater...
I'm finally going to subscribe to your wonderful work here, after a long period of haunting it quietly. My inbox has long been out of control, so I've held off on new subs for a while. But I'm looking forward to more amazing everything. We need it.
I confess that I would sniff a mummy on principle, but then I grew up partly in an archaeology lab so it doesn't even seem like a weird idea to me.
Do you read Adam Kucharski's essays? They often seem like they'd be up your street. I thought of you just a few minutes ago, reading this one: https://kucharski.substack.com/p/radar-riddles
You had me at " smelly mummies ". I'd read an article about them smelling spicy, salty, etc.
Dr. Bob Brier, AKA " Mr. Mummy ", the Egyptologist who recreated a classic mummification back in 1994 ( ? ) said that the cadaver that he & Ron Wade embalmed smelled spicy & salty more than anything.....
Enjoyed all the random tangents of this, but I loved this most: "Most people agree on a lot more than they disagree on - meaning that most of us are, very broadly speaking, standing on the same side of the fence on a lot of things, even if we’re unaware of it."
I've been trying to make the case for this for years. I'm sorry to say I don't think I've changed anyone's mind about that either. 😩
The cloud thing reminds me of the satire “movement,” Birds Aren’t Real, which really hooked the irony-deficient among us. Also - that face thing! Woah!🤯
Hah - yes! Must admit, the Birds Aren't Real thing caught me out the first time I saw it - one of those "you CANNOT be serious that people believe this nonsense" moments, until I realised it was satirical. But it makes me wonder: just how many other conspiracy theories started as jokes that got completely out of hand? (A few examples here: https://reason.com/2020/07/12/from-antifa-to-ufos-one-joke-can-spawn-a-thousand-conspiracies/ )
Oh my goodness the cloud guy! Rather liked your response actually. A friend of mine is an entomologist and teaches science in America. He has to have daily arguments with students about evolution over creationism. Exhausting.
I can imagine. Good grief. My hat is off to your friend - and anyone teaching science, but particularly anyone doing it in parts of America where stridently creationist parents have a lot of influence. What a legal minefield, on top of everything else, since it can fall under the category of attacking people's religious beliefs...
If you are stressed and anxious, and don’t want to end up with a wet face, running cold water over the inside of your wrists (over the pulse points) works well. And it is less likely to mess up your makeup.
That was an interesting conversation about the clouds! But it set me wondering about AI-driven character accounts. Since AI learns from the Internet, I thought it could not possibly be so deluded to think that clouds are government-controlled biological agent clusters. But then I started to worry, that perhaps there is enough deluded ‘information’ out there that it will soon become AI mainstream. 😱
Thank you for the wrists tip! I'll give that a try (it's certainly refreshing to plunge my hands into a cold stream when I'm out walking on a hot day)...
As for AI, since it learns from human behaviour & online work, I guess there's nothing to stop it picking up info from pseudoscience websites as well as credible ones? And combined with this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) - well, that could be a whole mess of problems, aye.
They must be very confused by all the built-up ice they can see in their freezer.
The 21st century problem is that core reality has broken down. Opposing ends of the political spectrum in the 20th century could disagree on everything, even violently, even to the point of there being actual WAR...but you probably wouldn't have Churchill and Hitler arguing about whether clouds exist.
It's the same 'flood the zone' concept that is Bannon's main tactic: if you question EVERYTHING, including seemingly obvious stuff like clouds, then it reduces the space for discussion about actually important, real things. Suddenly everything is a talking point or an argument, and so nothing is. It's all an exercise in obfuscation.
When I was much much much younger, I got into endless discussions with a good friend who often had a contrary point of view. His wife called it arguing. We called it recreational debate. There were no hard feelings and it was genuinely interesting to find out why someone else thought what he did. The same thing often happens with my husband. We can take opposite views and both be right.
I love you and your posts. Not just because you and they are wildly interesting. One of the things I really love is how they magically transport me out of early 2025 United States. The links from one interest thing to another take me down a succession of rabbit holes and wholly distract me from the current moment. They also often discuss things that I have or am wondering about. I am really looking forward to this new series for subscribers, and so happy I am now a subscriber. My friend, also a retired US federal employee, had a brief discussion of this topic as it seems vital to not only evicting the war criminal from our government, but to building community on shared values. Without that, we will be back where we currently are in no time. 💕
Obviously clouds aren't real. They live in the domain of birds, long ago disproven as real.
Man, I can't even keep up the joke any more. Someone will read this and think I'm being serious.
Mike, I will share my own personal rules for discussing something with someone w/an opposite (and incompatible) viewpoint: insist on the conversation taking place one on one. Without that, the showmanship is just way too much to overcome.
First of all: you made me read through way too much bullocks to get to what I wanted to get to :D So allow me to share a side-thought before I get to the core of my comment as well.
This is a topic that has been on my mind a lot over the past year or so and that I've been wanting to explore as well. When I read you'd do a series on it, I went from "Cool!" to "Well, now I can't write about it anymore." The same thing happened yesterday when I was reading a book that's just full of things that resonate with me. Something to work on.
Now for my actual comment:
Just as with so many things, when we enter into a conversation with someone of a different opinion, we often aim to control. We want the other person to hear us, to change their minds, to start behaving differently. In other words: we want to control what they think and do.
That doesn't work.
We all just want to be heard, seen, and understood and I think there lies a power. I don't know how, yet, but if we're blocking a conversation with someone because we are convinced they won't change their mind, we
1. rob ourselves of learning something that could help us have similar conversations in the future.
2. rob them from seeing that talking to "the other side" isn't necessarily like talking to a wall.
Do I think we should all enter into a discussion with everyone who disagrees with us? I don't. Especially not when it happens online in a disrespectful way. We all have limited capacity for these things and I think even more than being willing to change your mind, having respect for the other person is key.
A few months ago, I had several conversations with someone from a very different background to mine, about a situation we viewed from almost opposite angles. He didn't change his mind on the topic and neither did I, but my heart feels full when I think back on how openly and calmly we had these conversations. I also have more understanding now of where he was coming from, and perhaps, he now has a better understanding of my point of view.
And yes, having these types of conversations calmly and respectfully is hard. It requires a great deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation. But that's a story for another time.
Clouds are for suckers! And don't even get me started on rain, clearly invented to make us think water can fall from the sky. As if!
SO MANY LIES, right? I mean, how does the "rain" get up there in the first place? When was the last time we saw it raining *upwards*, eh?
[Author's note: when the wind is strong enough here in Scotland, it rains upwards.]
Yeah, good thing the governments got old artists in the cloud hoax early. Museums full of clouds in all kinds of colors!
Can you imagine what this person might think of rainbows? 🌈
Rainbows = THE DEEP STATE HAS RADICALIZED THE SKY.
I'm also fascinated by those folk that see a depiction of a rainbow and immediately start shrieking "STOP FOISTING YOUR LGBTQ+ IDEAS UPON US" etc, as if rainbows don't have a thousand different cultural meanings already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_in_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_in_mythology
Next the sky will fall on our heads (Astrix)
Those Romans are crazy!
#wokesky 🤣
Thank you so much this made me feel seen sometimes I'm a little too invested I'm being right and having the last word
Thank you for saying this, Muna. I am too! That's kinda why I need to write this series - the urge to "win" is so strong, and so unhelpful in the long run. When the ego gets attached to always looking correct in an argument, it's a difficult thing to rewire in yourself - and it's a hard thing (but such a necessary thing) to admit you may be wrong about something, and hard to accept that potential wrongness is nothing to be ashamed of, if you approach it in a healthy and open-minded way...
OMG IT’S FOGVID24 :D
OMG, I Googled, and I never knew about this until now: https://thred.com/culture/fogvid-was-our-favourite-conspiracy-theory-of-2024/ I'm not sure if I should say thank you or not! Dear lordy.
I found out about it when I was googling what I might be ill with a few weeks ago. I put it in this post at the beginning. You’ll never walk through fog the same again https://open.substack.com/pub/activehumanity/p/compassionate-spaces?r=b2ib9&utm_medium=ios
I can't believe I missed it. WHAT ON EARTH.
There’s an amazing thread about it on Bluesky by Angie Rasmussen that I thoroughly recommend
I’ve found it for you. Goodnight! https://bsky.app/profile/angierasmussen.bsky.social/post/3leptihivak25
Thank you, Mike, for not sending your cloud conspiracist my way. Though you may have set up your readers for disappointment by calling me an expert. I'm more of a head-in-the-clouds guy, really, more poetry than taxonomy.
I wish I'd known about your lovely, funny piece on unusual clouds from last August. I would have linked to it so my readers had something more cheerful to turn to on the topic.
It wasn't enough that birds aren't real, I guess. Now the curtains have been pulled back on clouds too? (Have they never exhaled on a cold day?) So much for the burgeoning field of aeroecology.
I hope they have a naming contest for the mummy perfume. "Afterlife" or "Pyramid Scheme" come to mind, but it's a golden opportunity for crowdsourcing.
I think Sebastian Junger dove into the mammalian dive reflex concept in a masterful chapter on drowning in The Perfect Storm. It's been many years, but I recall it as sort of a haunting attempt to convince readers that drowning in a mid-Atlantic maelstrom wasn't all that bad.
Ah! I have never read "The Perfect Storm" which is an idiocy on my part, since I thoroughly enjoyed "War" - if enjoyed is the right word, since it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I much prefer "Pyramid Scheme" (snork) to what marketers probably would/will come up with, along the lines of "Hot Mummy" or "Sexy Pharaoh" and so on. Well, I guess that's me not sleeping tonight. ("Well Preserved"? STOP Mike.)
I've very much been enjoying your work, Jason, and I promise I'll only send you the smallest number of conspiracy theorists I can possibly get away with.
Well, let's not be hasty. You can send pro-cloud conspiracy theorists my way anytime.
And don't stop field-testing mummy perfume names, please. What's the downside? "Mummy's Little Helper", etc.
I read Perfect Storm largely bc I had students who wanted to read it. We actually did a test of sorts, plunging our faces into a large bowl of cold water to see if we could notice a calming effect. Which failed, bc each teenage boy was sure another teenage boy would hold their faces underwater...
I'm finally going to subscribe to your wonderful work here, after a long period of haunting it quietly. My inbox has long been out of control, so I've held off on new subs for a while. But I'm looking forward to more amazing everything. We need it.
I confess that I would sniff a mummy on principle, but then I grew up partly in an archaeology lab so it doesn't even seem like a weird idea to me.
Do you read Adam Kucharski's essays? They often seem like they'd be up your street. I thought of you just a few minutes ago, reading this one: https://kucharski.substack.com/p/radar-riddles
I do not read Adam! And I've just rectified this by subscribing to him - thank you, Hanne. His newsletter looks terrific.
You had me at " smelly mummies ". I'd read an article about them smelling spicy, salty, etc.
Dr. Bob Brier, AKA " Mr. Mummy ", the Egyptologist who recreated a classic mummification back in 1994 ( ? ) said that the cadaver that he & Ron Wade embalmed smelled spicy & salty more than anything.....
I'll have to look that up. Thanks, Daniel!
I'm like a moth to a flame with this kind of subject matter.
My college syllabus was..... ephemeral ( ? ).
Enjoyed all the random tangents of this, but I loved this most: "Most people agree on a lot more than they disagree on - meaning that most of us are, very broadly speaking, standing on the same side of the fence on a lot of things, even if we’re unaware of it."
I've been trying to make the case for this for years. I'm sorry to say I don't think I've changed anyone's mind about that either. 😩
Thanks, Mike.
The cloud thing reminds me of the satire “movement,” Birds Aren’t Real, which really hooked the irony-deficient among us. Also - that face thing! Woah!🤯
Hah - yes! Must admit, the Birds Aren't Real thing caught me out the first time I saw it - one of those "you CANNOT be serious that people believe this nonsense" moments, until I realised it was satirical. But it makes me wonder: just how many other conspiracy theories started as jokes that got completely out of hand? (A few examples here: https://reason.com/2020/07/12/from-antifa-to-ufos-one-joke-can-spawn-a-thousand-conspiracies/ )
Oh my goodness the cloud guy! Rather liked your response actually. A friend of mine is an entomologist and teaches science in America. He has to have daily arguments with students about evolution over creationism. Exhausting.
I can imagine. Good grief. My hat is off to your friend - and anyone teaching science, but particularly anyone doing it in parts of America where stridently creationist parents have a lot of influence. What a legal minefield, on top of everything else, since it can fall under the category of attacking people's religious beliefs...
I just had to go do a bit of Googling to try to understand where you even start with such a thing - and this popped up: https://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/earthhistory/creahow.html
He gets in trouble for nothing all the time.
If you are stressed and anxious, and don’t want to end up with a wet face, running cold water over the inside of your wrists (over the pulse points) works well. And it is less likely to mess up your makeup.
That was an interesting conversation about the clouds! But it set me wondering about AI-driven character accounts. Since AI learns from the Internet, I thought it could not possibly be so deluded to think that clouds are government-controlled biological agent clusters. But then I started to worry, that perhaps there is enough deluded ‘information’ out there that it will soon become AI mainstream. 😱
Thank you for the wrists tip! I'll give that a try (it's certainly refreshing to plunge my hands into a cold stream when I'm out walking on a hot day)...
As for AI, since it learns from human behaviour & online work, I guess there's nothing to stop it picking up info from pseudoscience websites as well as credible ones? And combined with this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) - well, that could be a whole mess of problems, aye.
They must be very confused by all the built-up ice they can see in their freezer.
The 21st century problem is that core reality has broken down. Opposing ends of the political spectrum in the 20th century could disagree on everything, even violently, even to the point of there being actual WAR...but you probably wouldn't have Churchill and Hitler arguing about whether clouds exist.
It's the same 'flood the zone' concept that is Bannon's main tactic: if you question EVERYTHING, including seemingly obvious stuff like clouds, then it reduces the space for discussion about actually important, real things. Suddenly everything is a talking point or an argument, and so nothing is. It's all an exercise in obfuscation.
When I was much much much younger, I got into endless discussions with a good friend who often had a contrary point of view. His wife called it arguing. We called it recreational debate. There were no hard feelings and it was genuinely interesting to find out why someone else thought what he did. The same thing often happens with my husband. We can take opposite views and both be right.
I love you and your posts. Not just because you and they are wildly interesting. One of the things I really love is how they magically transport me out of early 2025 United States. The links from one interest thing to another take me down a succession of rabbit holes and wholly distract me from the current moment. They also often discuss things that I have or am wondering about. I am really looking forward to this new series for subscribers, and so happy I am now a subscriber. My friend, also a retired US federal employee, had a brief discussion of this topic as it seems vital to not only evicting the war criminal from our government, but to building community on shared values. Without that, we will be back where we currently are in no time. 💕
Obviously clouds aren't real. They live in the domain of birds, long ago disproven as real.
Man, I can't even keep up the joke any more. Someone will read this and think I'm being serious.
Mike, I will share my own personal rules for discussing something with someone w/an opposite (and incompatible) viewpoint: insist on the conversation taking place one on one. Without that, the showmanship is just way too much to overcome.
First of all: you made me read through way too much bullocks to get to what I wanted to get to :D So allow me to share a side-thought before I get to the core of my comment as well.
This is a topic that has been on my mind a lot over the past year or so and that I've been wanting to explore as well. When I read you'd do a series on it, I went from "Cool!" to "Well, now I can't write about it anymore." The same thing happened yesterday when I was reading a book that's just full of things that resonate with me. Something to work on.
Now for my actual comment:
Just as with so many things, when we enter into a conversation with someone of a different opinion, we often aim to control. We want the other person to hear us, to change their minds, to start behaving differently. In other words: we want to control what they think and do.
That doesn't work.
We all just want to be heard, seen, and understood and I think there lies a power. I don't know how, yet, but if we're blocking a conversation with someone because we are convinced they won't change their mind, we
1. rob ourselves of learning something that could help us have similar conversations in the future.
2. rob them from seeing that talking to "the other side" isn't necessarily like talking to a wall.
Do I think we should all enter into a discussion with everyone who disagrees with us? I don't. Especially not when it happens online in a disrespectful way. We all have limited capacity for these things and I think even more than being willing to change your mind, having respect for the other person is key.
A few months ago, I had several conversations with someone from a very different background to mine, about a situation we viewed from almost opposite angles. He didn't change his mind on the topic and neither did I, but my heart feels full when I think back on how openly and calmly we had these conversations. I also have more understanding now of where he was coming from, and perhaps, he now has a better understanding of my point of view.
And yes, having these types of conversations calmly and respectfully is hard. It requires a great deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation. But that's a story for another time.