IT's TOTAL WAR !!!!!

 A collection of radical right figures including white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders gathered in Manhattan for the New York Young Republicans Club’s (NYYRC) annual gala Saturday night, where that group’s president declared “total war” on perceived enemies.

“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” NYYRC president Gavin Wax declared to a room full of supporters at 583 Park Ave., an event venue on New York’s Upper East Side.

“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.

At the five-hour event, which Hatewatch reporters attended, white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE hobnobbed with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official. Donald Trump Jr. was also in attendance.

Republicans publicly lauded members in attendance from an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.

“Then Jan. 6 happened. And next thing you know, I organized the whole thing, along with Steve Bannon,” Greene said, referring to allegations that she had led reconnaissance tours of the Capitol for soon-to-be insurrectionists in the days prior to the violence.

“I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won,” she said, as attendees erupted in cheers and applause. “Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

Lots more to read about here:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/12/11/white-nationalists-other-republicans-brace-total-war

A bit of legal news: Things aren't always necessarily what they look like

Judge ‘Loose’ Cannon reluctantly dismisses 

her own partisan pro-Trump decision

The 11th Circuit federal appeals court rejected Aileen Cannon’s brazenly partisan decision to appoint a special master to review the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago. Her decision was widely seen as partisan and unjustified. The DoJ appealed and the appeals court said that Cannon’s court did not have jurisdiction to even hear Trump’s unfounded demand for a special master to review the Mar-a-Lago documents. Trump’s filing effectively slowed progress in the case by months.

The deadline for Trump to appeal to the appeals court decision to Supreme Court expired last Thursday. Trump did not appeal.

One could see this as a loss for Trump, but winning an obviously unwinnable motion probably was not what Trump intended. Instead, he arguably won by getting a delay in the DoJ investigation from the pro-Trump judge his legal team intentionally put the case in front of.

If Trump had not filed his demand for a special master to review documents and Cannon hadn’t gone along with it, the criminal case would have advanced farther between August and the November midterms. That was at a time when things looked a lot different. Trump took no political hit from the radical right until the last few weeks, not last August.

In August Trump appeared to be a lot more politically formidable. Everyone expected a devastating red wave to blow the Democrats out of control of congress. Trump arguably reinforced his image of untouchability by stiff-arming both the rule of law and common sense with his legally hopeless motion.[1] Confidence did not start to drop off until early voting polls came in within days of the November midterms. The unknowable thing is what if his supporters started writing him off and fracturing a month or two earlier. We cannot know if it would have made any difference in the House and Senate elections and majorities. It could have. 

In other words, if Trump had not filed this motion in August, it is possible (not certain) that the Republicans would not have taken control of the House and maybe even lost one or two seats in the Senate. 

All in all, one can think that Trump’s delay tactic more likely than not succeeded if one assumes it was filed to delay the DoJ’s investigation for political advantage, not to win on the legal merits. Maybe the whole point was to win by delaying, denying and obstructing, not to win on the merits.

Footnote: 

1. For example, I was unsure whether the radical right 11th Circuit appeals court would pass on the legal flaws in Cannon’s order for a special master. It was only after reading some of the appeals court decision to slap Cannon down hard, did the weakness of Trump’s motion become plausible. That is when I started to believe that Trump’s tactic was likely legally hopeless. That belief was cemented into certainty when Trump chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court.

This exemplifies a big problem with fomenting irrational, unfounded distrust in government, elections, political opposition, etc. Distrust can spread to and poison public confidence in the courts. That was where I was and still am. Even with this appeals court decision, I do not trust that radical right circuit will adhere to the rule of law when the stakes are much higher for the radical right than was the case here.   

News bits: Climate science modeling advances, etc.

Climate models start to get a grip

on the influence of clouds

A WaPo article discusses recent research on how clouds affect climate. The thin wispy clouds way high up in the air (cirrus clouds) have been known to tend to trap energy and increase global warming. Big fat clouds closer to the ground have been known to reflect solar energy, which tends to decrease warming. Advances in models are now digging into effects on clouds. The models are starting to generate predictions about what will happen to clouds and the impact on global warming that projected changes in clouds will probably exert.

Cirrus clouds are heat trappers

The WaPo writes:

First, the high, wispy cirrus clouds that trap the Earth’s radiation are expected to shift upward in the atmosphere, to lower temperature zones. Thanks to a complicated relationship between clouds and the radiation of the Earth, that will increase the amount of radiation that the cirrus clouds trap in the atmosphere. “When they rise, their greenhouse effect, or warming effect, on the Earth tends to increase,” Myers said.

That result has been known for about a decade, and indicates that clouds are likely to amplify global warming. But just in the past few years, researchers have also discovered that the number of low-level stratus or stratocumulus clouds are expected to decrease as the planet continues to warm. One study, in the journal Nature Climate Change, used satellite observations to discover how cloud formation is affected by ocean temperatures, wind speed, humidity and other factors — and then analyzed how those factors will change as the world warms.

“We concluded that as the ocean warms, the low-level clouds over the oceans tend to dissipate,” said Myers, one of the authors of the study. That means that there are fewer clouds to reflect sunlight and cool the earth — and the change in low-level clouds will also amplify global warming.

Researchers have also begun to understand how clouds will be affected by certain changes beyond warming — such as the reduction of artificial aerosols in the atmosphere. Clouds form around particles floating in the atmosphere, such as aerosols; it is possible, therefore, that low-level clouds would have decreased even more if not for human-induced air pollution. According to another study released last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sulfate aerosols have spurred cloud formation, thus masking some of the global warming that has already occurred. “There’s potential that as we clean up air pollution, we unmask global warming,” said Casey Wall, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo. 

Combined, these new findings have helped scientists zero in on how much the planet will warm if carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere were to double from preindustrial times. (Before the industrial revolution, CO2 concentration was around 280 parts per million, or ppm; now it has reached 412 ppm, and is still rising.) Scientists once estimated that if CO2 reached 560 ppm, the temperature would increase between 1.5 and 4 degrees Celsius — a range that spans a “still very livable planet” to “near-apocalypse levels of warming.” 

The new cloud research indicates that the lower estimates for warming are highly unlikely. Instead, the recent papers estimate that CO2 levels of 560 ppm would probably result in at least 3 or 3.5 degrees of warming. 

That doesn’t mean that the world will definitely hit 3 degrees of warming — if countries continue to shift to clean energy, CO2 in the atmosphere could be stabilized at a level significantly below 560 ppm. But it does mean that the most optimistic estimates for how warming will unfold have been taken off the table.

No doubt, the pro-pollution radical right propaganda Leviathan will spin this into a narrative something rationally incoherent but partisan coherent like this: “See, we told you, trying to clean up pollution makes things worse. The evidence shows that sulfur pollution is good for the good clouds. Your idiotic warnings about climate change are just hysterical socialist alarmism and lies. We are defenders of the good clouds and freedom.”

Cumulus clouds, the juicy good ones

The fentanyl plague 

The WaPo writes:

During the past seven years, as soaring quantities of fentanyl flooded into the United States, strategic blunders and cascading mistakes by successive U.S. administrations allowed the most lethal drug crisis in American history to become significantly worse, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Presidents from both parties failed to take effective action in the face of one of the most urgent threats to the nation’s security, one that claims more lives each year than car accidents, suicides or gun violence. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, the country’s premier anti-narcotics agency, stumbled through a series of missteps as it confronted the biggest challenge in its 50-year history. The agency was slow to respond as Mexican cartels supplanted Chinese producers, creating a massive illicit pharmaceutical industry that is now producing more fentanyl than ever.

The Department of Homeland Security, whose agencies are responsible for detecting illegal drugs at the nation’s borders, failed to ramp up scanning and inspection technology at official crossings, instead channeling $11 billion toward the construction of a border wall that does little to stop fentanyl traffickers.

“Law enforcement did the best it could,” said David King, executive director of a federal drug task force in San Diego. “We can only do so much. But in Washington, they have been very slow to respond to this and now we are at the confluence of paralysis.”

The DEA said it is now taking direct aim at the Mexican cartels and the fentanyl epidemic. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram acknowledged that the government remained too focused on heroin at the onset of the crisis, as Mexican traffickers ramped up production of synthetic opioids. 

The agency continues to count the death toll for 2021 — in a provisional tally seven months ago, it calculated the overall number of drug overdoses at 107,622. Two-thirds were due to fentanyl. 

There is one federal system that collects both fatal and nonfatal overdose data in real-time in several regions of the country. But the system, called ODMAP, is kept from public view. .... Without comprehensive data, the federal government is driving blind.

When President Richard M. Nixon launched America’s first war on drugs 51 years ago, annual overdose deaths stood at 6,771.

At a lethal fentanyl overdose scene

San Diego, Nov. 10, 2022

There you have it. A confluence of government paralysis helps build a useless wall and creates a situation that kills tens of thousands of people each year. Good job gridlocked government! Good job war on drugs! We went from 6,771 corpses/year to some unknown number over 100,000. That's a smashing success by any drug cartel’s standards!! MAGA!!

So one question pops up, which party is more responsible for the gridlock, the useless wall and the failed war on drugs, or are they both at about the same level of incompetence, or if you are a drug lord, competence?

My assessment:

~65% Republican Party

~35% Democratic Party

The Tijuana border crossing south of San Diego

From the poisonous MAGA!! files: 

MAGA!! poisons Germany

An opinion piece in The Hill comments:

The terrorist plot foiled by German security services makes abundantly clear that far-right extremism is not a uniquely American problem, but a pervasive threat to Western democracy.

In a series of raids across Germany, 3,000 members of law enforcement apprehended 25 people suspected of plotting a coup.

Eerily reminiscent of certain aspects of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. capitol, the plan called for storming the Bundestag (parliament), murdering the chancellor and seizing ministers.

The plotters are associated with the Reichsbűrger movement, an anti-government group with approximately 21,000 followers that denies the legitimacy of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany). Like anti-government groups in the United States, the Reichsbűrgers resist what they consider government overreach. Some refuse to pay taxes and engage in other forms of civil disobedience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased support for the far right in America and Europe. COVID-deniers, vaccine skeptics and people angry at lockdowns have found extremist movements attractive.

Conspiracies fuel extremism on both sides of the Atlantic. The German prosecutor’s office explained that the Reichsbűrger followers “are firmly convinced that Germany is currently governed by members of a so-called ‘deep state.’”

QAnon followers in the United States have long believed that pedophile Satan worshipers control the government. They expect Donald Trump to return to power and defeat them.

The Reichsbűrger movement has a disturbing similarity to its American cousin the Oath Keepers. Both groups recruit former and active-duty military and police. 

This is more evidence of the poison stew of irrational, toxic rage, fear and hate that bigoted, authoritarian Trump and his corrupt, morally rotted Republican Party have unleashed on the America and the world. They continue to unleash the same poison stew today.  

From the fascist Republican criminals and politicians files:

MTG would have overthrown the government

if she and Bannon had been in charge

The Hill writes:

The White House lashed out at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Monday for saying the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol would have been armed and successful if she planned it, arguing her rhetoric is violent.

Greene on Saturday appeared to hit back at claims that she and former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon were involved in planning the Jan. 6 riots.

“And I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she said at a gala for the New York Young Republicans Club on Saturday.

News bits: Republican doublespeak, etc.

Republican doublespeak in Florida:

Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps

The AP writes:

Florida lawmakers released a massive property insurance bill that would create a $1 billion reinsurance fund, seek to reduce insurance lawsuits and force more people out of the state-created insurer of last resort even if it means property owners end up paying more.

The 123-page bill was filed Friday night, less than three days before lawmakers begin a special session on insurance, property tax relief for Hurricane Ian victims and reducing tolls for frequent commuters.

“The goal we all share is for Florida to have a robust property insurance market that offers homeowners the opportunity to shop for insurance that meets their needs and budget. We also want to make certain that when damage occurs, claims are paid promptly and fairly,” Republican Senate President Kathleen Passidomo said in a news release.

What?? Republicans claim to want a property insurance market that offers affordable insurance choices by forcing people out the the state-created, lower-cost insurer of last resort? If people in Florida get screwed, and they will, they voted for it. They deserve it. This is how Republicans treat average people: → → Pull yourself up by your bootstraps you lazy bums.

Thoughts about the limits of radical right

Christian bigotry

A WaPo opinion by E.J. Dionne articulates the issue nicely:

.... there is no obvious limiting principle for when religious convictions should allow exemption from anti-discrimination laws. If this exemption applies to same-sex couples, why not, for example, to interracial couples? Or to couples from different religions? Or for couples who opt for civil rather than religious marriages? Why not to other forms of discrimination that have nothing to do with marriage?

But such questions also invite us to examine the case from a different perspective: Why do conservative Christians want this exemption in the first place?

That question is neither naive nor rhetorical. Many traditionalist Christians view homosexual relationships as sinful. I think they are wrong, but I acknowledge that this is a long-held view. Yet many of the same Christians also view adultery as a sin. Jesus was tough on divorce. “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” he says in Matthew’s Gospel.

But unless I am missing something, we do not see court cases from website designers or florists or bakers about refusing to do business with people in their second or third marriages. We do not see the same ferocious response to adultery as we do to same-sex relationships. Heck, conservative Christians in large numbers were happy to put aside their moral qualms and vote twice for a serial adulterer. Why the selective forgiveness? Why the call to boycott only this one perceived sin?

What we are seeing in the opposition to same-sex marriage is less about religious faith than cultural predispositions.

Given the vast, uncheckable power the radical right Christian nationalist Supreme Court has, we are probably going to start to see the limits of hate and bigotry-inspired discrimination. It will take a few years, but some clarity will probably come. Maybe the day will come when Christians are willing and empowered to shun people in their second or third marriages and serial adulterers, but with the option to not discriminate against the bad ones they choose to forgive and/or ignore. 

For context, IMO intentional discrimination like what Christian nationalists employ against the LGBQT community is bigotry.

Bigotry: Unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group

Brain science: Misinformation tends to be more

powerful than information: The illusory truth effect

A WaPo article comments:

Blame the brain.

Many of the decisions we make as individuals and as a society depend on accurate information; however, our psychological biases and predispositions make us vulnerable to falsehoods.

As a result, misinformation is more likely to be believed, remembered and later recalled — even after we learn that it was false.

“On every level, I think that misinformation has the upper hand,” said Nathan Walter, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University who studies the correction of misinformation.

No one is completely immune to falsehoods, in part because of how our cognition is built and how misinformation exploits it.

We use mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to make many of our judgments, which benefit us. But our cognitive tendencies can make us susceptible to misinformation if we are not careful.

“By default, people will believe anything they see or hear,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who specializes in understanding how people respond to corrections of misinformation. In our day-to-day lives, “that makes a lot of sense because most things that we’re exposed to are true,” he said.

At the same time, the more we see something repeated, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. This “illusory truth effect” arises because we use familiarity and ease of understanding as a shorthand for truth; the more something is repeated, the more familiar and fluent it feels whether it is misinformation or fact.

“There is only typically one true version of a claim and an infinite number of ways you could falsify it, right?” said Nadia Brashier, a psychology professor at Purdue University who studies why people fall for fake news and misinformation. “So, if you hear something over and over again, probabilistically, it’s going to be the true thing.”

But these shortcuts do not work so well in our current political environment and social media, which can repeat and amplify falsehoods. One study found that even a single exposure to a fake headline made it seem truer. Politicians often repeat lies and seem to be aware of the power of the illusory truth effect, Brashier said.

Of course marketers, ideologues, politicians, propagandists, liars, grifters, demagogues, tyrants and kleptocrats all know about the power of the illusory truth effect. They do not just seem to be aware. They are practiced experts. 

Advances in deepfake technology: Posting photos of yourself poses a risk

ARS Technica writes:

AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease

AI tech makes it trivial to generate harmful fake photos from a few social media pictures

If you're one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.

If you haven't been paying attention to the rapid progress in AI image generators recently, seeing what we've pulled off above might be very alarming. Basically, computer scientists have figured out how to generate new photorealistic images of anything you can imagine by teaching AI using real photos, and the technology has accelerated rapidly over the past year.

By some counts, over 4 billion people use social media worldwide. If any of them have uploaded a handful of public photos online, they are susceptible to this kind of attack from a sufficiently motivated person. Whether it will actually happen or not is wildly variable from person to person, but everyone should know that this is possible from now on.  

Right now, you can try to take all your photos offline. Maybe that's a good idea. But for some people, like politicians or public figures, it's not feasible. And in other cases, friends may have published photos of you in group settings that are outside of your control.

If there are photos of yourself on the internet, don't antagonize people with computer skills. They can make your life unpleasant or miserable if they are motivated to do so.

Evidence of paranormal phenomena?

Professor Ian Stevenson

Scientific American writes:

If you’re anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like “reincarnation” or “parapsychology,” if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human intelligence whenever you catch a glimpse of that dandelion-colored cover of Heaven Is For Real or other such books, and become angry when hearing about an overly Botoxed charlatan telling a poor grieving mother how her daughter’s spirit is standing behind her, then keep reading, because you’re precisely the type of person who should be aware of the late Professor Ian Stevenson’s research on children’s memories of previous lives.

Stevenson, who died in 2007, was a psychiatrist by training—and a prominent one at that. In 1957, at the still academically tender age of 38, he’d been named Chair of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After arriving in Charlottesville, however, his hobbyhorse in the paranormal began turning into a full-grown steed. As you can imagine, investigating apparitions and reincarnation is not something the college administrators were expecting of the head of their mental health program. But in 1968, Chester Carlson, the wealthy inventor of the Xerox copying process who’d been introduced to Stevenson’s interests in reincarnation by his spiritualist wife, dropped dead of a heart attack in a Manhattan movie theatre, leaving a million dollars to UVA on the condition it be used to fund Stevenson’s paranormal investigations. That money enabled Stevenson to devote himself full-time to studying the minds of the dead, and over the next four decades, Stevenson’s discoveries as a parapsychologist served to sway more than a few skeptics and to lead his blushing acolytes to compare him to the likes of Darwin and Galileo.

Stevenson’s main claim to fame was his meticulous studies of children’s memories of previous lives. Here’s one of thousands of cases. In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way.

This Sri Lankan case is one of Stevenson’s approximately 3000 such “past life” case reports from all over the world, and these accounts are in an entirely different kind of parapsychological ballpark than tales featuring a middle-aged divorcée in a tie-dyed tunic who claims to be the reincarnation of Pocahantas. More often than not, Stevenson could identify an actual figure that once lived based solely on the statements given by the child. Some cases were much stronger than others, but I must say, when you actually read them firsthand, many are exceedingly difficult to explain away by rational, non-paranormal means. Much of this is due to Stevenson’s own exhaustive efforts to disconfirm the paranormal account. “We can strive toward objectivity by exposing as fully as possible all observations that tend to weaken our preferred interpretation of the data,” he wrote. “If adversaries fire at us, let them use ammunition that we have given them.” And if truth be told, he excelled at debunking the debunkers.

I’d be happy to say it’s all complete and utter nonsense—a moldering cesspool of irredeemable, anti-scientific drivel. The trouble is, it’s not entirely apparent to me that it is. So why aren’t scientists taking Stevenson’s data more seriously? The data don’t “fit” our working model of materialistic brain science, surely. But does our refusal to even look at his findings, let alone to debate them, come down to our fear of being wrong? “The wish not to believe,” Stevenson once said, “can influence as strongly as the wish to believe.”

Stevenson’s magnum opus, published in 1997, was a 2,268-page, two-volume work called Reincarnation and Biology. Many of his subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without a lower leg. There were scar-like, hypopigmented birthmarks and port-wine stains, and some awfully strange-looking moles in areas where you almost never find moles, like on the soles of the feet. Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.

Stevenson, an expert on psychosomatic medicine, suspected strong emotions are (somehow) related to a child’s retention of past-life memories. Traumatic deaths, he thought, leave an emotional imprint. Indeed, most of the children he studied claimed that they had met a violent end previously. There was also a gap of a few years between lives; reincarnation is never immediate. And for the most part, souls seemed to stay local. That's to say, the “previous personality” often lived in a distant village, but not quite so far away as to require a passport. Oftentimes, Stevenson observed, the child had habits and fears linked to the nature of death. Those who said they’d drowned in a previous life had an unusually intense fear of water; those who were stabbed displayed a crippling knife phobia, and so on. There were even three cases of children who’d reacted violently when they’d unexpectedly crossed paths with their own “murderers.” It’s bizarre to picture preschoolers lunging for the throats of adult strangers. Nonetheless, it made sense to Stevenson, since in his view, the children were attacking those who’d gotten away with their murders.

Interestingly, and contrary to most religious notions of reincarnation, there was zero evidence of karma. On the whole, it appeared to be a fairly mechanical soul-rebirthing process, not a moralistic one. What those mechanisms involve, exactly, is anyone’s guess—even Stevenson’s. But he didn’t see grandiose theorizing as part of his job. His job, rather, was simply to gather all the anomalous data, investigate them carefully, and rule out, using every possible method available to him, the rational explanations. And to many, he was successful at doing just that. Towards the end of her own storied life, the physicist Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf—...., surmised that Stevenson’s work had established that “the statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming … that cumulatively the evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science.” Stevenson himself was convinced that, once the precise mechanisms underlying his observations were known, it would bring about “a conceptual revolution that will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison.” It’s hard to argue with that, assuming it ever does happen.

What is a rational person to make of evidence like this? Stevenson does not sound like a crackpot, unless defines people who do paranormal research as crackpots. He did the only thing he could do within the limits of modern science. He collected the data and verified as much of it as he could. He was honest about bits of data, e.g., false assertions of fact, that could be construed to be weak or anomalous. Then he found that he could not explain all the data by known science, anomalous or not. So, he just left all of it to others to explain.

The consensus knee jerk reaction probably is to reject the data because current science cannot explain it. Stevenson was probably right when he commented that the wish not to believe something can influence as strongly as the wish to believe. I sure don’t know how to explain this.