The Causal Links Between Emotions, Sharks, and Thunderstorms

[recording begins] As to your listed goals, I have prepared you to fulfill one of them.
--You wish to declaim any possible higher intellect, telepathy, or empathy from sea creatures to humans to further convince any suspicious MiBs of the impossibility of you being extraterrestrial. 

Uh, yes?

[neuralink burst containing suggested topics]Oh! Those two are good ones. Ready to record?

Recording.

So—[gill sound translatable to ‘ahem’] –I’d like to address the topic of shark attacks in the Carolinas. Contrary to any possible conspiracy theory of government experiment or rogue geneticist, this cluster of activity does NOT indicate that sharks are sensing the anger felt collectively in the region over certain political events that have coincided. That would be a clear confusion of causality.

With?

Sorry. A clear confusion between cause and effect.

You are claiming that the sharks being drawn to the area caused the political events or the emotions?

What?! [gill spasm: laughter] NO. Yeesh. That’s funny, though. No. The emotions helped cause the sharks to be drawn to the area, all right—

You said that relationship was backward.

No, I didn’t. In this case, there was an effect of the emotions that was also a cause of the sharks drawn to the area.

Explain.

Okay. As an example . . . Think of offshore fishing. Some people use, for example, chum.

They use friends for bait.

NOOOOO! They chop up raw fish and dump it as bait. It’s called chumming the waters.

This would always call sharks.

--Except the fisherman felt differently recently, didn’t they? They chopped the chum with different levels of vigor, completion, and precision. They used different amounts. Their chum drops were less consistent between fishermen, because the fishermen felt more strongly different from each other. So the sharks were drawn differently. Of course this is only one example--there might be--

So, a causal chain, rather than a single effect.

Yes! And the lightning, too.

The emotions caused the lightning storms?

No, that’s just a straight reversal. Extreme behavior in the more suggestible parts of humanity clusters around weather events. Like the fact that more murders happen at 92 degrees Fahrenheit. In this case, the weather imbalances finally brought the storms. Shelob? When you blog this, put it through that subroutine for clever titling—this idea is fairly important.

Processing. [recording ends]