Weekend Roundup: Marzulli's Vegas Shooter Freakout, Mathematician's Attempt to Google Noah's Flood into Existence, and More!

Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli has always been creepy with his weird combination of Christian extremism and recycled rightwing talking points, but he is slipping farther and farther into the realm of utterly, irredeemably paranoid. In his latest radio broadcast, he was unable to handle the fact that the Las Vegas mass shooter, Stephen Paddock, who killed more than 50 people last weekend, was a wealthy old white male. Because he didn’t fit Marzulli’s preconceptions about what a violent person should be (brown or black, Muslim, etc.), he proposed that Paddock was the victim of CIA mind control experiments, or else that there was a vast conspiracy fomented by the media to frame him. Marzulli turned the subject to himself and added that he is himself a former drug user who consumed copious amounts of LSD and other mind-altering substances, and he claims that the drugs he did before the age of 30 opened him to “the lower astral” where demons live. He then turned his radio show into a lengthy diatribe about the way the U.S. government is feeding drugs to mass shooters in order to take control of them and use them to shoot up America. He added that Islamic State has a “zombie drug” that removes free will, and he speculates that any conservative can fall victim to mind control from liberals, spy agencies, or Muslims.

​Marzulli also defended the rights of fascists and Nazis to exercise free speech. Meanwhile, former alt-right Aryan separatist Jason Reza Jorjani is out of a job after the New Jersey Institute of Technology fired him for the Hitler-loving comments he made in an undercover video seen in the New York Times. Jorjani, who has written extensively about his preference for Aryans and his appreciation for Nazi-era philosophers, claims that his comments praising Hitler as a great European leader were taken out of context.
 
On a lighter note, a drunk Wyoming man was arrested for public intoxication after he claimed that he was a time traveler coming to warn everyone of an alien invasion. He said that the only way he could travel through time was to let aliens fill him with alcohol.
 
Meanwhile, over at Graham Hancock’s website, Hancock is promoting the work of Michael Jaye, a catastrophist and mathematician who feels that geologists of the nineteenth century were too hasty in concluding that Noah’s Flood never happened. Jane said he was inspired by Google Earth images, which show underwater features on the continental shelf, and therefore came to believe that a catastrophic flood must have overwhelmed formerly exposed land. Based on Hancock’s own work (though more closely aping Ignatius Donnelly’s Ragnarok), Jaye has tried to disprove all of modern geology in order to justify Donnelly’s and/or Hancock’s claim that a comet destroyed Atlantis, and he discovered that geologists have a different idea. Naturally, he has a resentment of professional academics even though he has a Ph.D. himself and served as a professor of mathematics

Interestingly, today’s lettered geologists staffing the science’s premier journals do not know the source of the fundamental ‘no flood, ever’ tenet, described above. They simply accept ‘no flood’ as an article of their faith, and, as Graham alludes to above, they immediately discount anyone thinking otherwise. I know this because I have dealt with them. Many of them. I have found that the very few aware of the history are wholly uncritical of the conclusion relative to its supporting evidence. Uncritical?

​Does that sound weird? Sure it does. That’s because Jaye mistakes a scientific conclusion for an article of faith. Jaye’s quaint conception that a scientific conclusion is only as valid as the belief system of the person who first proposed it is touching, especially considering the version of “science” he proposes to replace it is based on Iron Age mythology and racist European fantasies. Does he know the history of his own idea? But the larger problem is that Jaye, a mathematician, thinks that he knows more about geology than geologists and therefore can assert, against facts, that the Earth was once 80% exposed land until a comet brought all the ocean water to Earth. In a very minor sense, he correctly noted that the continental shelves were once exposed, when ocean water was locked up in glaciers, but this does not translate into “proof” that the oceans are a recent phenomenon of the past few thousand years. Just for starters, how does the think fossil shells got on top of mountains in layers dating back before the imagined comet if there were no oceans for the mountains to rise up out of via plate tectonics? Where, similarly, does he think that Ice Age glaciers came from if there was no water?
 
Jaye, however, is positively scientific compared to Malcolm Hutton’s latest Ancient Origins article on Egyptian conspiracies. He begins with a whopper. He found a sensational article written in 1935 by an entomologist—yes, a bug scientist—named Edwin Armytage who visited the excavation of the pyramid of Khentkaus I by the Egyptologist Selim Hassan, which began in 1932, and reported back, wrongly, that the valley temple and other associated structures near the pyramid were the remains of an underground “secret city.” Hutton scoffs at the idea that Armytage could have exaggerated his account or misunderstood what he saw, preferring a conspiracy: “...then came silence, as if every living Egyptologist had lost all interest in this wonderful underground metropolis.”
 
He also makes note of the hole on the top of the Sphinx’s head, which he claims was intentionally covered up for nefarious reasons. In reality, the large hole is believed to have been used to attach a headdress in the New Kingdom period but had been extended several times by treasure hunters looking for secret chambers—possibly following medieval guidebooks which counseled such actions. Engineer Emile Baraize filled it with cement in the 1920s in the hope of stabilizing the head and preventing further damage. Baraize similarly closed off a New Kingdom pit that had been dug between the Sphinx’s paws during his restoration work. All of this was documented and is not a secret.
 
Hutton, you will recall, is an advocate of the crackpot claim that a second Sphinx is buried on the Giza plateau next to the famous Sphinx. He has become irrationally upset that no one believes him, least of all the Egyptologists who walk across that ground regularly. “Why would those two Egyptologists be so alarmed by the suggestion that there was something that had been missed for centuries?  Is it possible that they don’t want to reveal something beneath that mound?”