Some Shroud presentation notes

Earlier this week I had a pretty long post on The BEAST about a Shroud of Turin presentation I attended. Some of the details didn’t really fit with how I wanted to write the story, so I thought I’d add them here. This isn’t an admission of hiding facts which would have contradicted what I had to say about Russ Breault’s presentation. These are neutral omissions that just would have made the article too sprawling and rambling. Still they’re kind of interesting and I thought I should get them down somewhere and this is kind of the place for me for that sort of thing. So here we go:

The church this was held at had two flags on either side of its altar. One was a US flag and the other was a “Christian flag.” Now these are used by lots of Christian organizations, but they’re all pretty creepy. Here is is outside of the HQ of Focus on the Family:

And here it is at a Ku Klux Klan HQ:

There were ushers, but they didn’t… erm.. ush anyone. They just stood by the exits. One man was going to the bathroom towards the end of the event and an usher approached him and asked if he was leaving. I don’t know why, but it seemed ominous. Maybe that’s just my own paranoia though.

If Joe Nickell were there, he didn’t ask a question afterwards. I saw one person raising his hand after the Q&A ended, but I kind of doubt that was him since he’d have known to try to get his question out there quickly. Breault mentioned beforehand that his Q&A would have to be brief.

The pastor of the church’s name is Andrew Abraham. He shook my hand and told me God blessed me. He didn’t seem like an asshole.

Breault said that we were living in an age of skepticism. People seem to just lap that stuff up. I wish as many people showed up at skeptics’ conventions as they do to church on Sundays.

At one point Breault brought up a slide of the Pope holding that incense thing they use before Mass. Like a teacher in a classroom he said something like “And this represents… what?” and there was this really awkward pause because this is at a Protestant church and they wouldn’t be expected to know these things, apparently. A few people did and spoke up eventually.

One of Breault’s defenses against the Carbon-dating of the Shroud was that the scientists took a sample of it at a point where it had been handled. This is illustrated in the pic I have on The BEAST article where some Bishops are holding it. Breault used similar images to make this point. Then he made a few jokes about how scientists are stupid for choosing that sample. But during the Q&A it came to light that the scientists were following the Church’s protocol, since they owned the thing after all. Breault admitted this, therefore admitting that he was knowingly deceiving the audience by making it seem like this “error” – at least it was an error as he saw it – was the fault of the scientists and not the Church. I would speculate that the Church wanted to sample a part of the shroud which could be questionable so that they could always fall back on an excuse like the one Breault used to make it seem like it is at worst, still a mystery.

There were around 150 people there. Most of the pews were full. There were very few people under 40. I only saw one couple with children. I sat in the back corner in a ‘reserved’ section, but nobody seemed to care. They had water but nobody took any. It took place at 107 Smith Street in Tonawanda, NY, which is Immanuel Lutheran Church.

Breault was selling DVDs. He mentioned them once at the end, but didn’t cite them during the talk which would have been really annoying.

OK, that’s about it. Hopefully I’ll update this blog more often, but then again I always say that.

Fox wins the morning

… for their excellent coverage of this political suicide. Just in case the editors at Fox accidentally acquire a sense of shame and this gets pulled or edited, here is a screenshot (click to enlarge):

Stay classy, Fox! Next they’re going to start their own It Gets Better project for young Republicans.

This is my favorite part:

As of this writing, Fox has not been able to obtain reaction from the White House.

Maybe they were not able to obtain a reaction from the White House because they for some reason wouldn’t return their phone call about why the President obviously made this guy kill himself. Or maybe they were not able to obtain a reaction from the White House because nobody at Fox could live with themselves after making that kind of phone call. I’d like to think that’s what it was.

I rarely read news story comments, but in this case… Well, prepare to be dazzled by the mathematical skills of “pieareround:”

How very sad for the family but it sounds like the student himself was making a political statement. Apparently both his present and his future looked bleak. So is it connected to Obama’s visit? Let’s do the math. Based on your proposed budgets your overall party isn’t very good at math so I’ll help you. A Junior in college is about 20 years old or approximately 4360 days old. He picked the one single day that Obama was there. The odds of this not being related are 1/7300. The odds of it being related are 7299/7300. So 0.02% chance it was not related to Obama’s visit. 99.98% that it was. That fact it was within hours (hour?) of Obama’s visit makes the odds it was connected jump to 99.99994%. You Democrat trolls (Drolls?) think it was a coincidence? Why don’t you Donkeys take off your blinders and try using objectivity? Go ahead and look it up, the definition is still the same. Yes, you drolls would be screaming there was a connection if the same thing happened with Bush. Both the family and this country have my condolences.

Those fools think it was a coincidence! Obviously there’s only a 0.02% chance of that! It’s MATH!

UPDATE

Rachel Maddow on shutting down the state-run press in Libya

I’m still trying to get caught up from stuff that happened a week or so ago, so you’ll have to bare with me if you’ve already heard about this.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow usually does a decent job at reporting. She definitely has a perspective, and it’s usually completely in line with the Democratic Party line. Sometimes she criticizes them for giving in too much to Republicans and for being the wimps they are, but more often than not her editorializing crosses over into the same kind of partisan propaganda you get at Fox.

So it’s pretty weird for her to have a guest on where, through her questions, Maddow appears to take a more authoritarian position. But that’s what happened when she had MSNBC military consultant Jack Jacobs on her program. Here’s what she asked him:

One of the things that people have questioned is if the U.S. has this high level of electronic capability, why is Libyan state TV still on the air? Is that not one of the things they would want to shut down?

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting points out that this idea of taking out the state press in a country with which the US is at war is the same kind of thing Fox advocated during the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, along with several examples. The style in rhetoric is different, but the message is the same: Hey, we’re here to liberate you people, but the first thing we’ve got to do to free you from this dictator is to shut down news organizations we don’t happen to like. Once you only have the press we like, then you’ll really be “free.”

The FAIR report above is in a sense a little unfair to Maddow in comparing her to people advocating bombing journalists. The context of her discussion with Jacobs was the military’s ability to jam communications. The context of the Fox comments was bombing and killing journalists. The former’s called prior restraint; the latter’s a war crime. One means that some people can’t do their jobs, the other means that people end up getting killed. Still, it’s disappointing to see MSNBC cheerlead so enthusiastically for war in the way they have been lately.

What Fox teevee people say when they think they’re off-camera

SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that Cal Thomas is a total dick then, too!

Fox was planning on running this segment about how NBC supposedly didn’t cover that story about how General Electic didn’t pay any taxes last year. GE is the parent company of NBC, so on its face it looks like this would be a good example of the business side of NBC interfering with its news side. But the problem is that whoever was planning that segment didn’t bother to check to see if that was actually true or not (as it turns out, it wasn’t).

So it was apparently up to guest Jim Pinkerton to do the fact-checking for the staff of the show, while the cameras were already rolling. The rest of the guests basically ignored him and went on with the segment, almost as if the segment were scripted and Pinkerton had just made a bad impromptu joke. Then someone off camera calls “Cut!” but the cameras are still rolling, so we all get to see how Fox deals with the facts being wrong for their show in the middle of them making their show.

The best part by far is when Pinkerton points out for the second time that NBC Nightly News covered the story the previous night, and Cal Thomas still doesn’t believe it , so he asks Pinkerton if he actually saw it. It turns out he did. I half expected Thomas to start throwing a temper tantrum right there, insisting that he didn’t see what he saw.

Fox for some reason uploaded the full video, including the off-camera parts, and then pulled it. But you can’t delete something from the internet, so here it is:

The SPJ and undercover journalism

The “Society of Professional Journalists” is pretty upset with the way that nobody covering the story seems to get angry enough about how Murphy was deceptive in his talk with Governor Walker. They cite their own ethical code in that journalists should be “honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting news.”

So Murphy clearly violated the SPJ’s ethical code as far as not being honest since he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. But if you’re going to whine about every time a journalists lies in order to obtain information, then that effectively make all undercover journalism “unethical” according to the standards of the Society of Professional Journalists. In fact, let’s see what the SPJ’s Code of Ethics has to say about undercover journalism:

Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story.

If someone at the SPJ were to actually read the story, they might have noticed that the very first thing they will read is a quote from a Democratic state senator in Wisconsin saying, and this is a paraphrase, that traditional open methods of contacting Governor Walker in order to obtain information vital to the public have not yielded results. So my question to the SPJ is: How exactly does Murphy’s story not qualify as an exception to the SPJ’s “no undercover work” rule?

Traditional open methods had not yielded this information, contrary to what certain pols and politicians have been saying (more on that later). The information we uncovered is vital to the public. This should be a textbook case of acceptable undercover journalism according to the SPJ’s own standards.

lol

Wow, I’ve let this blog sit for a while now. Kind of busy at the moment though, so be patient. Or don’t. Whatever. Look at this:

My e-mail interview with Betsy Rothstein, the brilliant mind behind FishBowelDC

Subject: WHY AM I BLOCKED?

Josh: Please unblock me immediately. Thanks.

Betsy Rothstein: who are you? Why should I care?

J: Unblock me right now please. Thank you!

B: Listen…asshole. Answer my questions and I might consider it. Anyone who acts like a jerk on the site can and will get blocked and I owe you zero explanation.

J: My name shows up in the email so you know who I am. And you want comments is why you should care. Now please unblock me RIGHT NOW. Thanks!

B: No. I don’t have to do anything. Tell me where you work, who the hell you are. You clearly don’t know how to behave properly.

J: I already told you who I am. Now UNBLOCK ME RIGHT NOW because it is very important that I am able to comment on your blog!

B: look. I don’t care. Go away.

J: I WASN’T ASKING I WAS TELLING.

B: oh really. Go to hell. I’m TELLING you that too.

J: Yeah, whatever, just unblock me right now. Do it to it.

B: You don’t get to order anything.
We don’t want you on the site. Final.

J: Lots of people want lots of things. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you immediately unblock me. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

B: the issue is you have zero rights here. Got it?

J: No. You are incorrect. You will immediately unblock me. Thank you.

J: Look Betty, I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. The truth is that if you review my comments, you’ll find that I’ve been nothing but supportive of your work and have only offered encouragement. I do this because I truly believe you are a candle in the darkness of Washington politics bringing truth and freedom to us all – no matter what everyone else says about you. So I implore you to please unblock me. Thank you for your courteous and quick responses.

Loathsome follow-up

So a lot of people helped make the 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010 list a huge success. We had over 200,000 views just in the past 5 days, which is as big of a jump in our stats as we’ve had in the WordPress era. We got links from Patton Oswalt, PZ Myers, Fark, The Daily What, Kottke, Balloon Juice, MetaFilter, Something Awful, Cracked Magazine, Reddit, and many more I’m too lazy to look up. Even #33 seemed to kind of appreciate it, and it’s nice to see that he at least took our ribbing well. And we’ve about quadrupled our number of followers on Twitter. So thanks to you all.

I sent out a series of spammish tweets to everyone on the list who had a Twitter account I could find, but so far haven’t heard back from any of them besides Lindelof. There is a small chance they have other things to do than respond, but I like to think that they’re all too devastated and embarrassed.

Most comments were overwhelmingly positive, and the negative ones really reeked of sour grapes: “Why don’t you include YOURSELF?” “Hey, you forgot YOURSELF!” At the risk of sounding like an Objectivist, I have to wonder: If these people think Murphy’s attempt at heaping scorn on who we think are deserving of it failed so badly, why then would that be an effective way to condemn ourselves? Shouldn’t we be on some other, better version of a loathsome list? Like, one of O’Reilly’s “pinheads,” maybe?

Bill O'Reilly has a problem with this dude.

But anyway, that’s a pretty standard response from conservative who somehow find the loathsome list. Surprisingly there haven’t been any parody entries for the Beast or Ian, at least none that I’ve seen yet. And another surprising thing, to go back to Lindelof, is how fanatically devoted his fans seem to be. Seriously, look at this:

Fuck you for putting Damon Lindelof on this list. You insinuate that the entire show “LOST” was purgatory. This insinuation reveals that your hatred for the finale is not the result of any inadequacy on Mr. Lindelof’s part, but your own inability to follow, process, or comprehend a plot that is more complex and layered than a standard children’s story (Bambi, for example). Any dimwit who followed the show knows that the island (the “whole thing”) was not purgatory or the afterlife. Here’s a suggestion: stop trying to watch shows that are beyond your IQ level.

Wow, so I just noticed that as I’m typing this, Murphy seemed to be doing pretty much the same thing in the form of a new [sic]. So I’m going to stop now.

Some stuff which makes WikiLeaks look bad

I’m definitely pro-WikiLeaks, as anyone who’s read what I’ve written on the subject would definitely know. But like any other issue, it’s not entirely black and white. And since I already know I’m biased in one direction, I’m definitely at risk for ignoring information which doesn’t fit with said bias. So in order to try to correct that, here are some recent reports which might make one think twice before unconditionally supporting WL:

1. ARS Technica: Some former WikiLeaks workers are starting up an alternative whistleblowing website called OpenLeaks. Their chief complaints seem to be that WL has become too America-centric and politically ideological, and that it relies too much on one person – presumably Julian Assange – instead of operating more democratically.
2. The Guardian: In an interview, Julian Assange claimed that a leak involving corruption in Kenyan politics led to the death of 1,300 people and the displacement of 350,000. The context was the tough moral questions the organization faces in dealing with such sensitive information. Assange referred to it as a “chilling statistic.”
3. Threat Level: WikiLeaks had pledged to assist in the defense fund of Pfc. Bradley Manning who’s been accused of leaking the Afghan War Diaries months ago, but has not yet made good on that pledge. WL spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson claims the payment is currently being processed.
4. Threat Level: The Wired blog is reporting based on an anonymous source that the organization is now “in chaos” and that “the organization will most likely start to fall apart now.” Time Magazine, however, disagrees.
5. Reporters Without Borders: The free press advocacy group tries to convince Assange that WL is setting a bad precedent for free speech on the internet.

Despite all this, I’m still definitely on WL’s side. It’s not reasonable to expect every single thing an organization does to be either completely good or completely evil. There’s always going to be nuances when it comes to these really big issues like war and the law and the conflict between transparency and secrecy. But at the same time it’s important to keep all this in perspective.

UPDATE: WikiLeaks has transferred $15,000 to Bradley Manning’s defense fund as of January 13, 2011.

WikiLeaks v. State Department

There’s been another major WikiLeaks data dump. The previous ones which made the news here in America focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this one shifts focus from the Pentagon to the State Department, releasing around 250,000 lightly classified documents which reveal the inner workings of US diplomatic relations.

The usual cast of clowns are up in arms about this, calling for a quasi-Stalinist government stranglehold of information and war on the press for reporting  embarrassing facts about them. Republican Congressman Pete King of Long Island, NY, is calling for WikiLeaks to be classified as a terrorist organization, and the reality television star / internet troll Sarah Palin compared WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the Taliban.  She also suggested that the government use “cyber tools” in order to track him down. Perhaps the cyber police could use their cyber tools in order to backtrace it. And when that happens, consequences will never be the same.

But the American right wing isn’t the only political faction angry with WikiLeaks. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that WikiLeaks is part of an American plot against his country with the goal of stopping Iranian nuclear capabilities because some of the leaked cables contain pleas from other countries in the region calling on the American political leadership to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

To be fair, Ahmadinejad is not exactly the Taliban. For one thing, Iran is mostly Shia while the Taliban is Sunni. But when you’ve got two opposing sides, like the political leaderships of America and Iran, and they both accuse a journalistic organization of being on the side of their enemy, then that’s a pretty strong indication that the journalistic organization in question is not a part of either camp. They’re just doing their job. And that job happens to involve publishing information which will make powerful people in all camps extremely angry.

I normally stay away from sports metaphors, but if you’ve got two opposing teams both of which accuse the referee of favoring their opponents, then similarly that would be a pretty strong indication that the ref is actually being fair and that it’s the players who are biased in their own favor. WikiLeaks is like that kind of referee, but obviously on a much more significant scale.

So the whining of world political leaders over WikiLeaks have basically here been reduced to the level of discourse normally reserved for Buffalo sports fans. Or even, now, the players themselves, but that’s a different story altogether. It’s pathetic.

Joe Lieberman has also weighed in on the subject. He, like many others, is of the opinion that WL puts American lives at risk, but stops short of calling them a terrorist organization. White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs also reiterated the claim that WL puts American lives at risk. But this seems to be largely just chest-pounding, since neither statements contain any specific information in the now-public cables which connect the data to any risk at all. Lieberman and Gibbs are simply asserting that claim without any data to support their assertions. And it can’t reasonably be said that drawing a specific connection between the cables and supposed danger to American diplomats must remained classified because thanks to WikiLeaks and the newspapers involved, those cables are now available to the public.

The only way that the position of “WL endangers Americans” can be maintained would be if a much more general connection were to be made. For example, since the release of these documents makes the DoS look bad, then other countries might be less willing to cooperate with them. But that would be the case for any reporting which reflected poorly on the State Department. Taken to its logical conclusion, that line of thinking would mean a necessary prior restraint on any reporting on the State Department, which would be a problem in a country with something like a First Amendment and a Supreme Court which rules against prior restraint.

If that weren’t bad enough for this “OMG Julian Assange endangers Americans” argument, there’s one final nail in the coffin here. Prior to the release of these documents, WL offered to review the information by proxy with the State Department, just as they had with the Pentagon in the previous cases involving military issues. Here is a link to the relevant correspondences from the UK’s Index on Censorship, but this is the important quote which gives lie to this claim about how the State Department would do anything to prevent these alleged risks to American lives, from State Department legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh:

We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials

So even if you were to believe the ‘putting lives at risk’ claim at face value, the underlying and unspoken claim that the State Department cares very much about these risks is completely ridiculous. They clearly don’t care enough about these imaginary risks to bother talking to a few icky computer nerd hackers. Gross!

Juan Williams, not quite as much of a dick as you’d think

I like NPR. A lot. I like NPR probably more than is healthy. But this whole Juan Williams thing is kind of disturbing. He was fired from NPR for comments he made on Bill O’Reilly’s show about the Mohammmedans. Here is the quote as it appeared in the original video edited by ThinkProgress:

I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous. Now, I remember also that when the Times Square bomber was at court, I think this was just last week. He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts.

So that sounds really bad, right? We don’t all start distrusting Christians because of Timothy McVeigh, we don’t all start distrusting Jews because of Bernie Madoff, but apparently it’s OK to distrust Muslims because of al Qaeda? Should Muslims be afraid to rideon a plane with conservative public radio pundits? That’s kind of fucked up. Normal, sane people don’t take one specific group and extrapolate it in order to try to make it representative of a much larger group. That’s crazy.

But the thing is that the end of that paragraph was snipped off by ThinkProgress in their video. Here’s what he said next:

But I think there are people who want to somehow remind us all as President Bush did after 9/11, it’s not a war against Islam.

And then later O’Reilly, who of course has no problem at all with making the exact opposite case as Williams is here in context, tries to goad Williams into agreeing that it really is a war against Islam because “they” attacked us. Here is how Williams responded:

Hold on, because if you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals—very obnoxious—you don’t say first and foremost, “We got a problem with Christians.” That’s crazy.

That quote actually sounds a lot like the responses liberals gave to Williams’ out of context quote. But judging from the coverage I’ve seen of the whole affair, it appears that most of them aren’t even aware that Williams was agreeing with them when you read what he had to say in context.

In fact the coverage of these facts was so slim that I had to hear about it on NPR, which brings this post full circle into how awesome NPR is – except apparently in their upper-level editorial decisions. It’s funny how Fox News doesn’t seem to be making that big of a deal of this, isn’t it? I think that’s strange…

The position On The Media takes is that the higher-ups at NPR had been displeased with some of his more out-there statements (for example) and that they had used this instance as an opportunity to fire him for an accumulation of stupid things said by him. It would’ve all gone much more smoothly if they had just waited to shitcan him until the next time Williams actually said something stupid without any further context.

Random notes on Lily Dale

There were a lot of details left out of my recent article on Lilydale which didn’t really fit into the story that well. We wanted to get to the punchline of having the medium identify Taibbi and Randi as spirits around me before boring people with too much of the minutiae, even if some of it was kind of funny/interesting.

Before we even got into Lily Dale, we stopped at the National Spiritualist Association, which was a small one-story building overlooking the Cassadaga Lakes. It was all very scenic. If I were setting up some kind of pyramid scheme targeting gullible hippies, that’s the kind of place I would pick for a headquarters.

We were only inside for a moment before being escorted out by a nice woman named Paula, but that was just because there was some kind of private class going on and not because we stormed in wearing orange jumpsuits while waving dowsing rods around and yelling about how we were picking up very powerful energy vibes of gullibility in this location. That was something we’d talked about doing but laziness and a lack of funding made that impossible.

This is totally a cliché, but every group setting in Lily Dale just reeked of Patchouli. We’ve all known people who might go overboard with that stuff even as potent as it is, but imagine that times a hundred.

The woman doing the warm-up act said that Lily Dale was on one of the only old growth forests in the Northeast, even though there are 210,000 acres of old growth forests in NY state alone.

Just before I got my reading, two young African-American women raised their hands to get a reading by request from a medium. I was under the impression that doing readings “don’t work that way” and that the spirits are very mysterious about how they go about communicating. But the medium complied and told them that they were being visited by their grandmother, who was – GASP – from the South! And what’s even more surprising is that she was very spiritual and liked to sing a lot. Another Indian woman was told that she was visited by relatives from another country who wanted her to hold on to her cultural heritage.

In other words, anything that distinguished someone from the crowd at all was the basis for their reading. Guys, including myself, were told that it was time to advance their career. Younger people were contacted by the old, and vice versa. If the mark looked confused by a medium’s use of a stereotype, then the medium would tell her that this was a long-forgotten ancestor from several generations back. The rest was just random guesses, which is where confirmation bias did its thing.

I had kind of guessed beforehand that the crowd would be mostly female based on footage I’d seen of similar events, but I had really underestimated the proportion – at least on the day we went. It was at least a 95% female audience. And yet still my smoothest “Lllladies” yielded no positive results.

So lastly we were pretty lucky I guess to get a public reading for a couple reasons. One is that there were tons of witnesses – not that we know any of them and could get them to verify what happened, but still. The other is that according to the official Lily Dale website, the cost of a private reading starts at $40. Maybe that would’ve yielded a lot more funny material, but I’ll have to leave that to other skeptics with bigger bank accounts.

WikiLeaks v. Pentagon

So it’s been a week since WikiLeaks published the leaked internal US military documents which detail some aspects of the occupation of Afghanistan which the administration would rather not emphasize. Like how Pakistan’s ISI is funneling our ‘aid’ back to the Taliban, which they then use to attack our troops. And civilian casualties are being massively underreported. And there’s a secret task force which captures and executes Taliban leaders. Oh yeah, and the US military is paying Afghani journalists to write favorable stories about the occupation.

Certain people can be expected to react to this leak in certain ways. Republicans will insist that we firebomb the internet and every last one of its many series of pneumatic tubes. Liz Cheney just now said something like that, as if anyone gives a shit.  Newt Gingrich is calling it treason, etc.

If you’ve paid attention to the Obama administration’s pattern of hostility towards whistleblowers, then it’s not very difficult to predict how they would react. Here’s White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs being questioned:

Q Thanks, Robert. Two questions, a few on WikiLeaks. What was the President’s reaction once he heard about the leaking –
MR. GIBBS: Well, I remember talking to the President sometime last week after discussions with news organizations that these stories were coming. Look, I think our reaction to this type of material, a breach of federal law, is always the same, and that is whenever you have the potential for names and for operations and for programs to be out there in the public domain, that it — besides being against the law — has a potential to be very harmful to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe.

OK, got that? This is all VERY SERIOUS and will PUT ALL OF OUR TROOPS IN DANGER, and by the way it’s also a FEDERAL CRIME. If it’s putting our troops in danger to have this information publicly available, it must be the case that this is new information in the public sphere. Because if it were already known, then there would be no danger in releasing it. Right? Well, only a few questions later, Gibbs contradicts that line of reasoning:

MR. GIBBS:  Well, let’s understand a few things about the documents.  Based on what we’ve seen, I don’t think that what is being reported hasn’t in many ways been publicly discussed either by you all or by representatives of the U.S. government for quite some time.

So the WikiLeaks data dump is at the same time both YAWN OLD NEWS and VERY SERIOUS TREASONOUS TROOP-KILLING CRIMES. Julian Assange must be both a dangerous anti-American criminal and a harmless kid living in his parent’s basement all at the same time. That’s pretty much how it plays out inside the heads of people like Robert Gibbs and the President.

But all that’s not that surprising, especially given the aforementioned administration’s record on whistleblowers and the internet in general. What’s more surprising is that one of the three publications given access to the documents pre-publication, the NY Times, has basically been toeing the administration’s line on their own leak. And the Washington Post has been producing their copy on the subject pretty much directly from the Republicans’ playbook. The two other newspapers (Der Spiegel and The Guardian) have been a bit more responsible and independent, to their credit.

If you’ve been following the ongoing saga of WikiLeaks, you might remember the ‘Collateral Murder’ video they released a few months ago of the US military shooting at a group of people from a helicopter which turned out to be civilians and a journalist. US Army Intelligence Analyst Bradley Manning was charged with forwarding the video based on an online conversation he had with a hacker named Adrian Lamo who subsequently informed on him. Manning is now in the brig in Virginia, where he faces a sentence of up to 52 years. And now the NY Times is quoting unnamed Pentagon officials who claim that Manning is a “person of interest” in the case of these newly-released documents. Here you can find a support group for Manning.

The Pentagon’s also going after WikiLeaks founder/editor Julian Assange, who’s more or less on the run. He is wanted for questioning, presumably to verify or deny whether or not Manning was the source of the Afghan War Diary. And oh yeah, they’d also like WikiLeaks to be shut down, please. For now, Assange is staying out of the US and responding strongly to comments from the administration. As a side note, he’s also trying to turn Iceland into a journalistic refugee’s paradise.

Now two more things just happened in the past day or two. First, a WikiLeaks volunteer named Jacob Appelbaum was detained, searched, and interrogated by US Customs officials at the Newark airport. They asked him to decrypt his laptop, an offer he refused. Then they confiscated it, but his laptop had no storage device and therefore there was nothing for the officials to search. He was later approached by FBI agents at a conference where he gave a talk in place of Julian Assange, who could not attend for reasons which should by now be pretty obvious.

The second recent development was WikiLeaks posting a mysterious encrypted 1.4 GB file called ‘insurance’ on their Afghan War Logs page. There are no instructions or details on what it’s supposed to be, but the general consensus is that a password will be issued in the event that anything fishy happens to WikiLeaks, Assange, or anyone associated with them. This is turning into a very interesting conflict, much better than anti-war protesters v. cops. But don’t bother downloading the file just to see if the password is “password,” that’s already been checked.

X-Day fallout

Last week I wrote about the X-Day festival in Sherman, NY. It was basically 1100 words of “Meh,” but what was more interesting than the story itself was how a few SubGeniuses revealed themselves to be very thin-skinned and incapable of tolerating any criticism.

Most reacted in a pretty lukewarm way, which is kind of what I expected. But someone called Ankara immediately started freaking out that anyone could possibly disparage the boring little camp-out. First Ankara was mad that I arrived there after it ended. Since that wasn’t even true, s/he decided to get mad that I left too early. Since that wasn’t really true either, s/he just starting calling me a liar while offering excuses in response to what I said – which makes no sense at all. Either I was lying, in which case a response to specific claims isn’t really warranted; or I wasn’t, in which case it might be. Another commenter who seems to have found my article almost immediately after it was posted was very mad at me for “not know[ing] how to camp” (true, but irrelevant) and “think[ing] that naked people kill and cars don’t.”

This all seemed very weird to me. I’m used to devotees of serious religions being upset by something I did or said, but it’s different when coming from an obvious parody of a religion. There is a lot of mockery of extreme fundamentalism within the Church of the SubGenius (the funniest part of the spoken word bit I saw was when Stang mentioned his son, “who doesn’t really believe in ‘Bob’,” to which someone angrily shouted “WHAT?!”), but this backlash, albeit from a small minority of a small minority, didn’t fit into that mold at all. It’s as if there are a thousand jokes soaring miles over the oblivious heads of these mouth-breathing imbeciles. And as “Bob” tells us, “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

Just one last thing I should address is this accusation that I intended to do a negative review. I’m not going to pretend that I never do that, but this was clearly not one of those cases. For one thing, I emailed Ivan Stang asking for an interview using my real name and email address. I never would have done that if I meant for this to be a smear job. And I definitely would’ve plotted out some way to express my dismay at the stupidity of it all in advance, which is a pretty normal practice of mine under those circumstances.

I don’t have time to write about this now but something needs to be said