TWiC #2: Jay-Z and Beyonce’s demon baby will enslave us all

[I meant to write about a few different subjects this week, but got a little carried away with one in particular.]

You’ve probably heard from your jackass co-workers who read the tabloids that Beyonce gave birth to a human child this past week. But were you aware that this baby will one day reduce the human population of Earth to 500 million by instigating wars and spraying poison gas from commercial airplanes? IT IS TRUE.

Jay-Z, left, seen here warming Beyonce up to the idea of the pidder padder of little Antichrist feet. 

First, some background: There have been rumors going back a while that Jay-Z is a member of the Illuminati. The Illuminati actually existed back in the 18th century. It was this group of intellectuals who worked in secret to try to undermine the theocratic monarchies which had been so popular around the world for the past several centuries and replace them with the liberal democracies we enjoy today. Eventually the Illuminati became popular to the point where it could no longer operate in secret and disbanded. Today this is known as the Operation Ivy Effect.

Around this time, America was growing up as the first modern secular republic with its own wars, pubic hair, slaves, lack of confidence around girls, wholesale slaughters of the indigenous populations and all that jazz. So the people who might have joined the Illuminati in times past didn’t have to sneak around in the shadows to talk about why they thought secular values were better than following the divine right of kings. If being able to speak your mind openly in public without too much fear of being burned alive for heresy is winning, then the Illuminati had “won.”

If you take a map of Washington, DC, you can like draw lines through it and stuff.

But the fundamentalist Christians wouldn’t let it go. They had to keep believing that the Illuminati was still out to get them, somehow. So they projected their fear and hatred onto other groups. Freemasons, Catholics, Jesuits, Jews – they were all supposedly new hideouts for the old Illuminati who’s bent on global depopulation so they can control the world. This isn’t the root of all of the kookier conspiracy theories, but it is for a hell of a lot of them.

I’m not really clear on why Jay-Z became the target of the fundamentalists on the grounds that he’s a part of this “New World Order” conspiracy. They seem to think he uses Illuminati symbolism in his music, but that just raises the question of why a secret global takeover conspiracy would risk the cover they’ve supposedly used for the past few centuries just to put some of their symbols on a Jay-Z album. What’s the point of doing that?

I’ve noticed this kind of innuendo in conspiracy-mongering a lot before. The Beatles put backwards messages on Strawberry Fields Forever to tell fans that Paul McCartney is dead. There are messages on the dollar bill. Hollywood used 911 in movies and television because they all knew the government would blow up the World Trade Center buildings on September 11. It’s all absurd on its face, and if they get anywhere near a coherent reason for why they believe the conspirators publicly displayed their plans in this subliminal way, it never makes any fucking sense at all. It’s weird that the conspiracy subculture which thrives so much on narrative can’t seem to come up with a consistent, entertaining story to really explain the reasons for the “symbolism” which only they see.

And it’s no wonder only they see this symbolism. They’re the only ones who want it to be there so badly that they actually try to force it into existence by force of sheer will. Let’s go back to that Jay-Z album cover that put him on the anti-Illuminati types’ blacklist:

I mean, sure, gold is tacky. But demonic? I don’t think I’d go that far. It has some interesting detail in it, but it’s not what I would choose for cover art if I were making an album.

A blogger I picked at random sets me straight and explains some of the symbolism:

Triangles- These are designed as an inner frame in clusters around the album. Triangles are known symbols of the pyramid in the illuminati.

OH GOD NO NOT TRIANGLES! ANYTHING BUT TRIANGLES!

Baphomet- There are four huge symbols of the baphomet in the middle of all four walls of the album. The baphomet is a pagan deity symbol for the occult and satanism.

Here’s Baphomet:

Admittedly I kind of suck when it comes to aesthetics. But I really have no clue what this person is talking about with four Baphomets in the album cover. I see stuff in the places the blogger’s referring to, but I don’t see any goat heads. Later they misidentify tilted stars as “Pentagrams… Very known mason symbols.” They make such stretches in this way that it’s difficult to believe they’re perceiving these “symbols” for any reason other than that they simply want them to be there.

But the best part is in the update:

UPDATE: July 6, 2011- The album cover is ornate solid gold designed by Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci who is the same guy who designed the infamous Jesus is Lord T-shirts that the hip hip artists wear in order to deceive their fans. But it’s obvious whom they serve by this album cover.

That’s right, don’t be fooled, people! You saw the triangles, didn’t you? And the goats? No? Well, you saw the triangles, right? So… yeah! TRIANGLES OMGWTF.

To put the joking aside for a minute, this is how conspiracy believers inoculate themselves from disproof. Any evidence against them must itself be part of the conspiracy. If it turns out the guy who made the ‘Satanic’ album cover is a Christian, then his identity as a Christian is just a cover so he can deceive other Christians. If NIST finds that WTC Building 7 collapsed due to damage from debris and the fires that ensued instead of a controlled demolition, that just proves NIST was in on the 9/11 conspiracy. If some yokels call a press conference to show off their fake Bigfoot corpse and get called out on it, then they must have been part of a government plot to discredit cryptozoology.

Someone’s probably already made this connection before without my seeing it, but all this is a lot like the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s where people got whipped up into such a hysterical fear of Satanic cults kidnapping and murdering children that they started to smear some of the heavy metal and punk bands of the era as stealth Satanists. The only real differences are that this version hasn’t reached the scale of the 1980s one, and Jay-Z doesn’t seem to be adopting an over-the-top Satanic persona to mock his nutty critics while appealing to suburban teenagers who think upside down crosses are cool.

Maybe the non-reaction to the irrational fear of non-fundamentalist Christian rappers is enabling it. Maybe that’s why people feel comfortable with literally demonizing an infant.

Beyonce, seen here performing her hit single All The Single Ladies Must Bow Down Before Baphomet (Or Be Executed By The United Nations Military In A FEMA Internment Camp)

And then you’ve got the ridiculous excuses everyone in that last link parrots: That Ivy Blue means Illuminati’s Very Youngest / Born Living Under Evil. For starters, unless the Rap/R&B division of the Illuminati has developed a reverse aging potion, Ivy isn’t going to be the youngest member of the shady imaginary cabal for very long. Also, Eulb Yvi isn’t Latin for “Lucifer’s Daughter,” or anything else for that matter. It doesn’t mean anything in Latin. Some asshole behind a pulpit just made that up and people without critical thinking skills repeated it because believing it was true made them feel good.

Lastly, so what if they were Satanic members of a secret society bent on destroying theocracy? Satanism’s kind of silly in my opinion, but if the fight’s between secularists and theocrats, I don’t really need to take long to decide which side I’m on.

So to re-cap: The Illuminati doesn’t exist anymore except in the minds of hateful and gullible people who want an enemy. And even if they did, they’d pretty much be the good guys. Also, Jay-Z should start trolling the fuck out of these people by rapping about gun control, providing free abortion and sterilization services at his concerts, and hanging out with anyone named Rothschild. The worst case scenario is that the attempt to embarrass the conspiracy people into re-examining their beliefs backfires, but then Alex Jones has that on-air heart attack we all know is coming while talking about it. And that’s good enough.

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5 Ways 9/11 Truthers Are Like Creationists

On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories By Means of Natural Stupidity

Happy 9/11 anniversary everyone! This year is going to be extra special because we have ten fingers and we’ve set up our numerical system based on that arbitrary amount. The news media is going to capitalize on this hard: Fox News has a special on it about how George W. Bush killed Osama bin Laden on September 12 with only night-vision goggles and a sword. MSNBC has one about how we antagonized the Muslim world by locking up “suspected terrorists” indefinitely without charges and invading a few Middle Eastern countries. And the most outrageous of the tragedy opportunists are planning a march in Manhattan to mark the 10 year anniversary of everyone’s favorite act of mass murder.

Well, there’s no way we at The BEAST are going to pass on this moneymaking opportunity, so here are some ways in which everyone’s favorite paranoid conspiracy nuts are like a different group of paranoid conspiracy nuts. Enjoy!

Science via internet petitions

There are a lot of petitions on the internet tubes. It’s rare that they accomplish anything, but usually they at least have a clear purpose. And then you’ve got groups like the Discovery Institute and Patriots Question 9/11.

Back in 2001 the Discovery Institute released a statement titled A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism. It was signed by over 700 scientists (as of 2007) who claimed to be “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.”

Patriots Question 9/11 has also been compiling signatures, except each person who signs is supposed to write their own statement. This might be more democratic, but it also kind of defeats the purpose of having a petition in the first place. Everyone’s signing their name to different positions. So we’re talking about a spectrum of beliefs ranging from the somewhat reasonable, “I have significant criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report,” all the way over to collecting-your-piss-in-jars insane, “There were no planes, those were holographs.” They’ve only appeared to have gathered around 3500 signatures worldwide. On the internet.

The first problem with this approach is that you can’t successfully promote a scientific hypothesis by collecting signatures. You win these kinds of arguments by using evidence. And while it’s worthwhile to note when there’s an overwhelming consensus of relevant experts on a matter, these internet petitions use the widest possible definition of “scientist” or “engineer” conceivable. Are you a college freshman who happened to check off Engineering as a major on your admissions paperwork? Great! You qualify as an expert and your crackpot opinions about how George W. Bush done did that there 9/11 and a magical being created itself and then created all life on Earth somehow matters, according to the morons at Patriots Question 9/11 and the DI.

Even if the petition gatherers limited themselves to the relevant experts and emphasized the point that their petitions do not qualify as evidence, they would still fail. According to Denis Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers in their book Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, the 700 signatures gathered by the DI only represents 0.023% of scientists in the world. That means that 99.977% of scientists either have no problem with “Darwinism” or are too embarrassed to associate themselves with the clowns at the Discovery Institute.

Science via Mystery-mongering

Another logical fallacy both groups enjoy using is the appeal to ignorance. Here is how the retarded man-child Ann Coulter reiterates the same creationist PRATT she read in one of Michael Behe’s books:

It is a mathematical impossibility, for example, that all 30 to 40 parts of the cell’s flagellum — forget the 200 parts of the cilium! — could all arise at once by random mutation.

Once you get past the lie (i.e. that it really is mathematically impossible for the bacterial flagellum to evolve), we’re left with a standard God of the Gaps argument: If scientists can’t demonstrate exactly how it evolved, it must have been created. If evolutionary theory fails, then creationist beliefs win by default. It’s a shame that it never seems to work the other way around; that whenever creationist arguments fail, evolution is automatically vindicated.

But what makes this an even worse argument is the fact that empirical experiments have shown how the flagellum and the cilium (!) evolved. As I understand it, what gives these structures the illusion of design is something called interlocking complexity. Interlocking complexity means that you have several components of a structure, each of which appear to be useless on its own relative to the function of the overall structure. But — and this is the important part creationists can’t seem to comprehend — each of the components had a function on its own which was completely divorced from what it would do as a part of a greater whole.

Ken Miller made this point in a much better way than I could in his expert testimony at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case. The creationist Michael Behe used a mousetrap as an analogy for his beliefs about the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, claiming that each part of a mousetrap would be useless on its own and therefore the mousetrap must have been designed by an intelligent agent. Miller pointed out several uses for each part of a mousetrap, including by using a partial mousetrap as a clip for his tie during the proceedings. Even in the world of metaphor the creationists’ arguments end up turning on themselves.

But now I’ve strayed far from the original point, which was that demonstrating that we don’t know something, even if done successfully, can’t possibly prove anything beyond the fact that we don’t know something. It shouldn’t need to be said, but apparently it does. You can’t go directly from “I don’t know X” to “I can explain X with Y theory,” unless you have some evidence to support Y.

My favorite way the appeal to ignorance is used in 9/11 Troofer lore has to do with WTC Building 7 (nevar forget!). Truthers love to point out that the BBC reported its collapse 20 minutes before it actually happened. Even worse, the BBC report in question actually shows the building in the background standing upright and totally not collapsed. So how did the BBC know it was going to happen?

Again, troofers don’t seem to know. It’s a mystery! But obviously the conspiracy must have told the BBC that this was all part of the plan, because, well, whatever. It’s not like they could have discovered the building collapsed without being involved in the conspiracy.

And like the flagellum and cillia, this is yet another supposed mystery conspiracy nuts are trying to exploit which isn’t really much of a mystery at all. Even in the Alex Jones article linked to above, a hint is given as to how things actually went down:

As we have documented before, firefighters, police and first responders were all told to get back from the building because it was about to be brought down.

If you change the last three words to “collapse,” you get a perfect explanation for the BBC’s blunder in this one sentence. There was already significant damage to Building 7. The word of its probable collapse was making the rounds. Chaos and confusion ruled the day. Add in an overzealous BBC news team playing the odds poorly and you get a seemingly prophetic news report.

I know, it’s so sinister, isn’t it?

Whether you’re talking about our genes or our politics, nobody likes the idea of being subject to random forces. We like to be a part of a narrative. It’s comforting to think that we’re part of a deity’s plan. It’s also kind of comforting to think that evil plans are afoot, and we’re part of a team of underdogs who will thwart them. As Michael Shermer likes to point out, we are “story-telling animals.” But the reality of our situation isn’t dependent on those desires and sometimes not knowing something just means that we don’t know.

You don’t have to be racist to be a creationist or a truther, but it can’t hurt

A few years back I went to the Answers in Genesis Creationist “Museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. We kind of rushed through the actual exhibits because we had other priorities, but I do recall looking over this one, which PZ Myers later elaborated upon:

So Babel refers to the famous Tower of Babel story from Genesis where God got butthurt by a giant phallic tower so he divided humanity by language and, apparently, race. Hilariously enough, Ham plans on building a replica of the tower next to his fake museum. And this graphic is supposed to explain the origin of real-life human races based on that mythology.

If you click to embiggen the image above, you’ll see that the “Descendants of Ham” end up in Africa. Ham is one of Noah’s sons who, in Genesis 9, saw his father drunk and naked and so he dealt with the resultant trauma by cursing his own son. I’m sure it all made perfect sense in those days.

The idea that Ham’s descendants were then cursed, where they then traveled to Africa has been used to justify all kinds of awful treatment of those of African descent, including slavery. It was especially common in the 18th and 19th centuries, and remains so among the Mormons. To be fair, Ken Ham and AiG claim to oppose racism. But they still can’t bring themselves to denounce the myths which supported it so strongly for so many centuries.

The racism you can sometimes find in the 9/11 “truth” movement focuses more on Teh J00z. I’d really rather not link to it, but if you do a Google search for “9/11 truth Jews,” one of the results you’ll get on the first page is a YouTube video series called “Lies from the Jews in the 9/11 Truth Movement.” Apparently that refers to the supposed disinformation agents among the Troofers — government agents paid to spread lies about what Troofers believe with the intention of discrediting them. That’s a brand of anti-Semitic paranoia that goes beyond even the beliefs about 9/11 being a “Zionist plot” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion variety.

In that same Google search you’ll find on the front page a blogspot website which in my opinion is just too detailed to be a Poe, despite the 4chan-ish title, “Jews did 9/11.” It repeats all kinds of hateful lies about how Jews working in the WTC buildings were warned not to come to work and were then seen driving around in a van with decals on it celebrating the attacks. One of the articles is a McCarthyite list called “Jews in High Places,” as if being Jewish were like being a convicted child molester or something.

I could easily go on, but you get the picture. And this isn’t to say that every single person who shares these weird beliefs about the origin of species and 9/11 also need to have weird beliefs about race. But when you open the floodgates of irrationality, there’s not much to stop one from accepting all of that garbage.

Phony ‘peer reviewed’ journals

One of the easiest and most effective way of demonstrating the failures of both 9/11 conspiracy theories and evolution denialism is to point out that neither group seems willing to submit their “research” to peer review in a serious publication the way every real scientist does. Here is how U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton described this tendency among creationists in the decision for McLean v Arkansas Board of Education (emphasis mine):

The scientific community consists of individuals and groups, nationally and internationally, who work independently in such varied fields as biology, paleontology, geology, and astronomy. Their work is published and subject to review and testing by their peers. The journals for publication are both numerous and varied. There is, however, not one recognized scientific journal which has published an article espousing the creation science theory described in Section 4(a). Some of the State’s witnesses suggested that the scientific community was “close-minded” on the subject of creationism and that explained the lack of acceptance of the creation science arguments. Yet no witness produced a scientific article for which publication has been refused. Perhaps some members of the scientific community are resistant to new ideas. It is, however, inconceivable that such a loose knit group of independent thinkers in all the varied fields of science could, or would, so effectively censor new scientific thought.

Notice the Judge doesn’t say that the submitted papers to relevant journals have been rejected for good reasons, or that creationists have simply failed to respond to the reasons for which their studies were rejected. Creationists just hadn’t been turning in any studies at all, presumably because they just assume that the peer reviewers really are as close-minded as they themselves are. And not only have they not been turning in their homework, they expect to get an A+ for the assignment. And if they don’t get it, well, they’ll go to court to try to make sure they do.

As you might guess based on the above quote, the creationists lost the McLean case.  And they keep on losing, just like truthers keep losing in the court of public opinion. Since both groups are scared to death of scrutiny and claim to believe that the scientific community is conspiring against them, they make their own fake peer reviewed journals.

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The reason I’m calling these “peer reviewed journals” fake is because both of them are devoted to covering research which comes to a certain conclusion, instead of covering research within a certain field. The creationist one even says as much in the subtitle: “Building the creation model.” It’s not “Discovering the creation model” or “Studying the creation model.” They have to build the creation model on the pages of their little newsletters because the only thing you find in nature is the evolution model.

Just Lying

When ignorance, petitions, and racism fail to convince people of your weird beliefs, you can always just lie to try to make your point. My favorite creationist lie is an extreme example of quote-mining. Here is a selection from On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin creationists love to cite:

“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”

Wow, so Darwin thought the eye couldn’t have evolved… Sounds pretty amazing, right? And it’s right there in his most famous book. If that’s all you know of what Darwin thought about the evolution of the eye, it should be pretty telling. Those evolutionists must be pretty stupid to read that in their science book and still believe in evolution.

You might think something like that unless you read what immediately follows:

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

As you can see, the earlier Darwin quote was taken out of its context. Darwin was originally commenting on the superficial appearance of absurdity in his claim that all complex organs evolved from simpler ones. I have this pet peeve – and religious people seem most guilty of this – claiming that a quote they don’t happen to like was taken “out of context.” Whenever you hear that claim being made, you should ask the person making it what context they are talking about. Because 99 times out of 100, you’ll find that they don’t even know what it means to take a quote out of context. It’s just a kneejerk reaction. Go ahead – tell your religious friend about your favorite cruel and inhumane passage from the Bible or the Koran and ask them what they think about it, and chances are they’ll claim it’s taken out of context. And yet many will have no problem with actually taking Darwin out of context.

My favorite 9/11 Troofer lie is that 7 of the 9/11 hijackers are still alive. The BBC actually reported this on September 23, 2001. It really would be a serious blow to the “official story” if it were actually true. I remember hearing about it and having suspicions of my own.

But if you read to the end of the article, you’ll find a link to an editorial retraction of this story. The BBC cites “confusion” as the reason for their initial error and they denounce the conspiracy theories surrounding their report.

“The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names.”

Back when I was silly enough to argue with these people on internet forums, this issue was brought up. The person I was discussing it with said that the BBC’s later response was a “mainstream media opinion blog,” while her citation – the same one which linked to the correction – was objective reportage. So according to this Troofer, the BBC was totally credible when they were reporting something she happened to like, but suddenly became a part of the world gubbamint’s conspiracy machine of false flag terrorist oppression when they changed their position due to gathering more evidence. And when they say the hijackers were alive, that’s a fact; but when they say they’re dead, that’s just their opinion.

And that wasn’t an isolated incident. When I was searching for those citations, the first result on the Google Machine was for the popular Troofer website WhatReallyHappened.com, which repeats the exact same lie about 7 of the hijackers being alive without any information on the relevant updates from the BBC.

Everyone makes mistakes. Just twice in this very article we’ve got two big mistakes from a news organization as esteemed as the BBC. It happens. But when it does, the right thing to do, the adult thing to do, is to admit it and change your mind accordingly. That’s why people mock creationists and Troofers. They’d rather break than bend. They care more about coming to a conclusion which matches their ideology than one which matches the evidence. So if you’re a member of one of these groups and resent being lumped in with the other, you should remember that you did it to yourself.

Annie Jacobsen opposes the kinds of conspiracy theories she started

It’s silly to believe they’re aliens… They’re clearly part of a Nazi/Communist alliance’s propaganda campaign!

If I were to write a BEAST editorial about how journalists these days are being too offensive to people of faith and spirituality, everyone who read it would rightfully think of me as a huge hypocrite. Or maybe they’d think I’d suffered some kind of brain injury. When you’ve written about faith issues in the way I have, you kind of forfeit your right to complain about people doing the same

Similarly, if you write a book about Roswell and then promote it largely based on the final chapter which invents one of the most out-there conspiracy theories ever, you forfeit your right to complain about loony conspiracy theories. At least you should.

Apparently the NY Daily News doesn’t think so. Last Sunday they featured a mostly reasonable column by Annie Jacobsen about how America has become what she calls a conspiratocracy. It gives a crash course in the history of American conspiracy theories, and speculates as to why they’ve spread so rapidly recently.

There isn’t much with which to disagree in her piece, aside from that the subject she’s writing about is much too wide for a 450 word column. All of the conspiracy theories she mentions are definitely silly and deserving of increased mockery. But it’s definitely odd that Jacobsen would choose this as a topic given her recent past.

A few months ago, Jacobsen released a book about Area 51, the secretive military base which UFO believers claim is the headquarters of the government’s secret research on extraterrestrials and flying saucers. I have not read her book, but I did pay attention to how she promoted it, as authors do, in the media. Here she is on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but probably the most in-depth interview I heard was on NPR’s program Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I’ll get to that in a minute.

From what I’ve heard, most of the book is in the same vein as the NY Daily News column, rightfully debunking loony conspiracy theories about Area 51. But when you get to the last chapter, she introduces a bizarre conspiracy theory of her own to explain the 1947 Roswell incident which many believe to be a case of an alien spacecraft crashing in the New Mexico desert which was then quickly hushed up by the government. Here’s how she explained it to Terry Gross:

“The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman’s bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn’t compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. …

“What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin.”

So let’s count how many layers of absurdity we have here. The Soviets collaborated with the notorious Nazi Josef Mengele (1) in order to scare Americans by sending a flying saucer (2) across most of the continental US without detection until it crashed (3), presumably because it was piloted by mutated children disguised as aliens (4). And all of this is substantiated solely by one anonymous source speaking about something which allegedly happened over 60 years ago (5-infinity).

In that same interview, Jacobsen speculates that Mengele’s “child-sized aviators” were the subject of either surgical or genetic mutation. So the latter option would mean that Mengele rounded up people with odd genes in order to selectively breed them specifically for this program to be launched decades in the future in collaboration with the Russians. He must have had pretty amazing foresight in order to predict such an unlikely partnership.

Obviously this is all pretty ridiculous. If you have really low standards of evidence then it’s pretty easy to get away with this kind of “reporting” – all you have to do is find an old man far enough gone to make some kooky claims about having worked on this or that secret government project a lifetime ago, and you’ve got yourself a story. Make it the last chapter of your book and you’ll get on all the talk shows and sell lots of copies. It’s probably not a coincidence that “Con artist authors making up bullshit” doesn’t appear anywhere in Jacobsen’s explanation for why America’s become so obsessed with bullshit conspiracy theories lately. But it probably should be.

Troofers get serious, like srsly

For the 10th anniversary of 9/11, “truthers” have finally performed repeated experiments, written them up, and submitted their reports to peer review. They will be published in a credible scientific journal.

No, I kid. They made a comic book. From the USA Today:

In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, she figures out a practical way to travel back in time, so she ventures from present day to Manhattan an hour before the first plane hits the towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

Carl Carlson, killed when terrorists flew planes into the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on 9/11.

So you can probably see how this is going to turn out. Sandra’s going to try to warn the authorities of the attacks only to discover that those same authorities are the ones behind it all this time OMGWTF. Betrayed by her own government… trying to save her husband… in a world where nothing is as it seems… One woman stood up to… THE BIG LIE. I hope you read that in the movie trailer guy’s voice, except for the title, which would obviously just be shown in the trailer in black and white, full screen.

Let’s learn more about the people behind this comic book, Rick Veitch:

Going into this project, he didn’t consider himself a “Truther,” yet living during the eras of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Iran/Contra and the invasion of Iraq, Veitch admits that he’s skeptical about any “official” story provided by the government.

OK, does any 9/11 troofer not say that? I haven’t heard of any. They all seem to believe that whoever happens to believe something just a little bit crazier about 9/11 is the “truther.” “Hipsters” work the same way.

I suppose it’s a good sign that some truthers might not want to be lumped in with people who believe that there were no planes flying into the World Trade Center and that what we saw in the video footage were plane holograms. On the other hand, some believe the more outlandish claims like that are CoIntelPro-style disinformation campaigns meant to discredit truthers as a whole. They sometimes call it a poison pill. Veitch explains:

“If one scratches the surface of the commission report, one finds huge holes in the official story. There’s also a lot of disinformation out there and oddball conspiracy theories that need to be debunked.”

The thing is that there aren’t many things a cross-section of troofers would agree on. The various stories of what they say happened have different points of emphasis, stories of who was involved often contradict, even who was involved in the planning is under dispute amongst them. They have no real consensus except they don’t believe the “official story.”

That should send up red flags warning that maybe they’re wrong on their basic assumptions. Usually, as you get more evidence about a historical event, a certain general narrative emerges as the most probable. That doesn’t happen in this case. What you get is a mass splintering of different, mostly independent narratives. Since they’re unwilling to reconsider their basic preconceptions, it will become necessary to explain how all these other ideas about what happened had arisen. An individual truther will say that the others couldn’t possibly have just been following the evidence to see where it leads, because that’s exactly what they had been doing and they came to a completely different conclusion. That’s when it’s time to invent another unfalsifiable conspiracy theory, like the disinformation campaigns Veitch refers to.  He continues:

People who are paying attention are asking for a real in-depth investigation into all these nagging questions.

But that’s not what they’re getting. They’re getting a comic book. Funny how all the people talking about how everyone wants a “real investigation” never get around to actually doing one and always get distracted by for-profit enterprises selling their bogus fantasies to gullible suckers.

John Boehner is standing up for the stupid guy

The President of Republicans John Boehner went on the teevee this weekend to tell David Gregory that although he’s definitely not a birther, he doesn’t want to interfere with the right of Americans to believe stupid things by telling his supporters that they’re wrong about Obama’s place of birth and religion. From Politico:

When the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” asked Boehner whether he, as speaker of the House, had a responsibility to “stand up to that kind of ignorance,” Boehner told David Gregory: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.”

OK, got that? John Boehner is not interested in telling the American people what to think! He would never do such a thing. Right? Well, I decided to ask the Wikipedia to find out if that is actually true. Here are some things I found:

On May 25, 2006, Boehner issued a statement defending his agenda and attacking his “Democrat friends” such as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Boehner said regarding national security that voters “have a choice between a Republican Party that understands the stakes and is dedicated to victory, and a Democrat Party with a non-existent national security policy that sheepishly dismisses the challenges of a post-9/11 world and is all too willing to concede defeat on the battlefield in Iraq.”

-

Each and every day, Israel’s very existence is at stake.

-

We need to look at the American people and explain to them that we’re broke,” Boehner said. “If you have substantial non-Social Security income while you’re retired, why are we paying you at a time when we’re broke? We just need to be honest with people.

-

A ban on taxpayer funding of abortion is the will of the people and ought to be the law of the land.  But current law – particularly as enforced by this Administration – does not reflect the will of the people.

-

Those are all quotes from the House Majority Leader literally telling the American people what they should think. And not only that, but he’s also told the American people what to think in regards to how to pronounce his own name. If I think his name is pronounced ‘boner,’ isn’t it my right to call him that? Apparently he’s not as against telling people what to think as it seems he is when it comes to birtherism. But why the special exception in that case? Let’s go back to Politico to find out:

Boehner denied that he is willing to let those misperceptions remain because they weaken and delegitimize Obama.

Oh no, of course not.

The Social Network

Originally posted at The BEAST

Facebook is a social-networking website. You can sign up for it by logging into the world wide web and typing “http://www.facebook.com” into the address bar at the top. Remember, that’s facebook — all one word, all in lower-case letters. You will need a valid electronic mail “address” in order to create an “account,” which you can then use to stalk that girl who wouldn’t go to the dance with you in 8th grade because you were too “creepy” and “weird.” But now that you are a VERY SUCCESSFUL WRITER FOR THE INTERNET, she will doubtlessly throw herself at you and you can LAUGH and remind her of her cruelty as a 13 year old! It’s payback time! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Wait, what is this? A movie review? Whatever. OK, so this movie is about The Facesbooks. What follows is everything you need to know about this completely factual documentary.

First 5 Minutes: Zuckerberg is drunk in a bar and in the middle of a cocaine-fueled, xenophobic, anti-Chinese rant with some random girl. She refuses to fuck him next to the dumpster outside because he is too big of a nerd, so he walks back to his dorm alone and blueball’d.

5-8 Minutes: The actors have all forgotten their lines, so they walk around the Harvard campus in complete silence. One of the grip people improvise on piano with Trent Reznor. Fincher decided to use this footage during the opening credits as a prank.

8-15 Minutes: Zuckerberg gets back to his dorm and immediately goes on Omegle.com to start trolling 12 year olds. After his 15th beer, he decides to graduate to fapping on Chatroulette while wearing a Pedobear mask. Everyone is impressed by his mad pwning skillz. This sequence is interspliced with shots of a Freemason’s party where all attendees are required to recite an incantation to Jahbulon before they are allowed to do a keg stand.

15-18 Minutes: The admin applies /banhammer to Zuckerberg and his friends and then rounds him up for an IRL yelling session. That girl from The Office goes easy on him because she did well on Zuckerberg’s ripoff of hotornot.com.

18-24 Minutes: Introduce two stereotypical jocks who recruit Zuckerberg into their Secret Order. He swears a blood oath of loyalty to the Zacharias and Bradford von Preppytwin brothers.

25-33 Minutes: Zuckerberg decides to go undercover in the Secret Order in order to undermine it with the aid of his friend in a Jewish frat which is definitely not the Illuminati. They all listen to reggae and smoke weed together. This is all interspliced with some kind of legal proceedings where people in suits all poke Zuckerberg until he cries. Zacharias and Bradford has a sad about Zuckerberg ditching them all the time.

33-38 Minutes: The twins take out their frustration with Zuckerberg’s betrayal on their undergraduate sex slaves. Then marvel and thrill at the high-paced action of septegenerian attorneys sitting at a table with their clients taking a disposition. Zuckerberg decides that when he is a 33rd Degree Freemason, he will put signs on everyone which advertise their relationship status. But first he must launch Friendster, which he does.

39-44 Minutes: Twins realize that their Secret Order and all of their plans will be for naught. But they will not cut out Zuckerberg’s tongue, because he has already been initiated and that would displease their pagan gods. This is followed by more thrilling legal proceedings, which gives all of the paralegal clerks in the audience multiple orgasms.

45-50 Minutes: Bill Gates comes to Harvard to apologize for Windows Vista. Zuckerberg and his Illuminati partner pick up groupies and discuss how best to free the unwashed masses from the tyrannical power of the twins and their Secret Order. Ultimately they decide to do it by editing in a scene from the trailer at this point.

51-54 Minutes: Zuckerberg meets back up with the random girl at the bar from the beginning. He again asks for sex by the dumpster but she turns him down because he said mean things about her on the internet. In order to compensate for his shortcomings, he decides to expand the resistance to 3 chapters in Connecticut, New York, and California.

55-60 Minutes: The girl from The Office: “This must be hard” is what she said. Some other stuff happened, but I wasn’t really paying attention, something about Limewire.

61-66 Minutes: Twins meet with Larry Summers to try to convince him to let them get some of that TARP cash money. Summers refuses on the grounds that although they are big, they are not quite too big to fail. Then there are more legal proceedings. 97% of this movie has so far been made up of people sitting in chairs around a table in a room, talking. Truly this makes it worthy of 8 Oscar nominations.

67-71 Minutes: Mark and Eduardo meet up with the bass player from Metallica. This scene involves sitting around a table, but the talking is muted about by Trent Reznor’s jam sessions. Eventually the bassist shares his conspiracy theories about how the CIA is reading his mind and only his special aluminum foil hat can stop them.

72-76 Minutes: Back at the room with the table and the chairs and the talking, PETA accuses Eduardo of sacrificing chickens to his pagan gods and smearing an eerie logo which is the symbol of his order using their blood in the Harvard cafeteria.

77-84 Minutes: Next they hold some kind of hacking competition where the slowest worker is hanged and the fastest one is offered an exciting new life in forced labor. Everyone is very excited about this for some reason, so some of them move to California. Now instead of sitting around tables in brightly lit rooms, they are sitting around a table and talking at a rave party. They are going to start getting drunk, but then it cuts away because any fun in this movie would be too exciting and entertaining.

85-89 Minutes:

The twins lose at some sport or something. They didn’t score enough points for their squadron to get the trophy. So in their rage they decide to disembowel Mark – legally, of course, by forcing him to sit in a chair around a table while talking. I’m at the edge of my seat nearly in a coma in anticipation of how this turns out!

90-102 Minutes: It looks like the Metallica bassist is replacing Eduardo, judging from the seating arrangements of the meetings, which are unbelievably still going on. Meanwhile, Eduardo’s girlfriend starts a fire and causes too much excitement, which means they will both be banished from the script.

103-115 Minutes: Eduardo starts yelling around a table instead of just talking which is a terrible breach of contract for this movie. He also moves things. Obviously, security is called to escort him off set. The meta part of this movie ends, and even more lawyering ensues. Movie ends with Mark trolling the random bar girl.

Similar:

• Avatarded
• Up
• District 9
• Toy Story 3
• Winter’s Bone
• The Kids Are All Right
• Inception
• 127 Black Swan

Egyptian government official uncovers the secret Israeli / shark alliance

There was a shark attack in Egypt last weekend. A German tourist was killed. So obviously it was a Jewish conspiracy. Duh. From the Jerusalem Post:

“What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark [in the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm,” South Sinai Gov. Muhammad Abdel Fadil Shousha was quoted as saying

I wonder if the hypothesis of sharks just being dicks who kill almost everything they smell is out of the question for this guy, or if it just needs more time to confirm.

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!

The Simpsons decide not to set off nukes inside the US

So now we can add the writers for the Simpsons to the seemingly endless list of people the 9/11 troofers believe were involved in the implausibly large conspiracy. The NY Observer is reporting on some blog post by a conspiracy theorist who believes that the sort of recent episode about Springfield adopting Big Brother-y surveillance policies hinted at a “false flag” nuclear attack which was supposed to take place last weekend.

These kinds of things are really popular with conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, but it’s not always clear what the connections between world politics and pop media actually are supposed to be. This one seems to think that the Simpsons writers are using this foreshadowing as a warning. Because if there’s one group of people you’d expect to know about the imminent nuclear attack the US government was planning to use against itself in order to justify enacting martial law, it’s the writers of The Simpsons.

The other way conspiracy theorists make connections between the TV they watch and their fantasy world they imagine is by claiming clips like this one from 1997 are actually a way the conspirators have of bragging about their future plans. It’s apparently not enough that the conspirators always seem to get away with their evil deeds with nobody but a few of the most unhinged noticing, they have to go one step further by forcing sitcom writers to inject little clues into their jokes just to fuck with the unthinking “sheeple.”

That or, you know, coincidences happen and crazy people latch on to them in order to justify their warped worldview. One or the other, I guess.

Anyway, as you may have noticed, there was no nuclear attack last weekend. Hooray! But now conspiracy theorists need to find some way to reconcile their predictions with the fact that they failed to materialize. One way to do this would be to admit that maybe their predictions were incorrect. Or they could go with the self-aggrandizement route, by claiming that their own rantings exposed the secret plan, which would then need to be called off. And thanks to the vigilance of the “Infowars” crowd, we’ve been spared from martial law another day. AGAIN.

Juice boxes will make you GAY

Hey everyone! Let’s watch Alex Jones destroy a juice box to discover the thin piece of plastic which is making him hang out at truck stop restrooms every night:

Stewart v. troofers

Most people reading this have probably already heard of the Daily Show / Colbert Report concurrent demos in Washington, DC on October 30. If you haven’t, click on one of the images below.

It’s a great move to set up a demonstration this way because the March To Keep Fear Alive will have this automatic effect of co-opting any counter-demonstrators. The teabaggers have this paranoia about people infiltrating their rallies in order to discredit them. So it’s pretty likely some will try to retaliate against this real or imagined injustice. But that’s where the line between the Colbertesque satirical teabaggers and the sincere ones starts to get a little fuzzy.

I’m not going to this, but if I were I’d have trouble deciding which one of these two events to focus on, if that would even be a decision attendees would need to make. You’ve got the crazy satire marching around, and then you’ve got the sanity rally, probably at or near the Lincoln Memorial. So there will probably be a lot of cross-over of people going from one to the other. So even these hypothetical counter-demonstrators who intentionally stick around the sanity rally to try to discredit it will also be assimilated into the Stewart / Colbert hive mind.

But  the teabaggers aren’t the only target here. If you watch the Daily Show video linked to above, you’ll see that Stewart also goes after the 9/11 troofers by suggesting a “9/11 was an outside job” protest sign. So given their notorious ultrasensitivity, I decided to check what they thought of all this. Here’s what I found on Alex Jones‘ Prison Planet forums:

So these idiots who have been castigating George Bush and Co., also have been pretty good going after Obama’s crew are now equating the LaRouche antics (making everyone they disagree with appear as Hitler) to the majority who don’t believe in government telling the truth.  In my view this is just to hobble the 18-34 crowd that watches these assclowns from doing anything meaningful, like this david icke video advocates:

The same poster later elaborates:

Hey man, if you’re all for killing the momentum of the Tea PArty and 9/11 truth then promote these assclowns all you want. It’s perfectly obvious they’re using their honor to earn a buck and don’t give a damn about anything.

Hey, killing the momentum of the “Tea PArty and 9/11 truth” sounds like a good idea to me. So let’s get on with the promotion of the assclowns.

Later we get this gem:

All he’s doing is training people to tune out and not care.

Apparently if you can’t really care about rationality and reason and sanity. You can only care if you have crazy beliefs about the gubbuhmint’s “false flag” 9/11 attacks. They really think they’re the only ones who care about anything. Anyone who disagrees is just lazy or stupid or complacent. They’re more intellectually isolated than the Bush administration.

Or even the teabaggers, for that matter; even the crazier ones who believe he’s a secret Muslim from Kenya. Presumably, they at least believe that Obama cares about something, even if it’s a secret evil communist plan to destroy America. The troofers won’t even grant outsiders that much.

The 5 Worst Quacks Around Today

[Re-posted at The BEAST]

I’m going to have to limit this list to people who are currently practicing some form of quackery, because if I tried to make a historical list I’d feel compelled to handicap for that person’s period in history. So Isaac Newton, who was literally one of the smartest people ever, believed in alchemy. The great 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler believed in astrology. Lots of the ancient Greek philosophers believed in demons. Demons that controlled their thoughts. Seriously. But you’ve really got to cut them some slack because of how primitive human understanding was in their times. If you’re living in a technologically advanced society today, as the five below are, you really have no excuse for that kind of ignorance. So to make it a level playing field, here are what I think are the worst purveyors of antiscientific pseudomedicine around today.

Jenny McCarthy

There’s a significance to this picture. The website advertised across her boobs is one McCarthy used to run, and it no longer exists. You wouldn’t know it from reading her antivaccine rants on the HuffPo nowadays, but Jenny McCarthy used to believe that her son was a something called an “indigo child.” Indigo children are supposed to represent the next stage of human evolution, according to some New Age whackaloon named Nancy Ann Tappe. It’s apparently pretty important that they have blond hair and blue eyes. They are supposed to have paranormal powers, and exploring those powers early in life seems to have the effect of making them appear to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. But they’re NOT AUTISTIC. They’re just… you know, special. Like little, supernatural, card-counting, Aryan snowflakes.

But the problem with Indigo Children is that eventually they grow up to be Indigo Adults and are expected to take on Indigo Responsibilities and an Indigo Spouse and an Indigo Mortgage, maybe even get an Indigo Job which allows them to make an Indigo profit off of their Indigo paranormal powers. And the problem with this (SPOILER ALERT) is that the whole idea of the Indigo kids is a ridiculous lie. So they never manage to demonstrate their paranormal abilities in any meaningful test comparable to any test a normal employer would use on a job applicant.

So if her child’s still going to be a precious and unique snowflake, Jenny McCarthy would need to find a new narrative which doesn’t involve him reading minds or astral projection or that kind of crap. This is where the disgraced Dr. Andrew Wakefield enters the story with his stories about how the MMR vaccine causes autism, even though it doesn’t. And this meeting of Wakefield’s data manipulation and lying with McCarthy’s (and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey’s) abuse of celebrity status is the origin of the modern antivaccination movement.

The gist of it is that antivaccers think that “toxins” in vaccines cause injuries to children. One of those injuries we refer to as autism. And what’s funny is that the “toxins” still allegedly cause those injuries years after they’ve been removed from the shots. You might consider that and think that it proves them wrong, but you’re stupid for thinking that. It really proves just how super-powerful these “toxins” get when they cause autism without even actually being there.

I’m sure lots of former and current models are intelligent and thoughtful people, but McCarthy really does fit the stereotype of the ditzy blonde, combined with a jaw-dropping arrogance and cold-heartedness. For example:

Response to a question about her interacting with actual medical doctors: I did a lot of digging on my own, the “University of Google” (source)

My greatest lesson is always to trust the mommy instinct. Always trust yourself. Always trust the gut instinct. It will never let you down. (source)

Response to how scientists disagree with her: My science is Evan. He’s at home. That’s my science. (source)

Autism, as I see it, steals the soul from a child; then, if allowed, relentlessly sucks life’s marrow out of the family members, one by one…(source)

I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s shit. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.(source)

You might be thinking that spreading this kind of weird, eugenics-y conspiracy theories would only affect those who buy into it. If a parent wants to have their kid die from an easily preventable disease, that’s their right, right? But even if you accept that those children are just the property of their parents, refusing to vaccinate still affects others by threatening herd immunity. More on that later.

But there is a lighter, unintentionally funny side of McCarthy. Here she is on CNN:

Mercury is the second worst neurotoxin on the planet, and that’s a fact. Get it out of our shots!

OK, got that? Jenny McCarthy does not want anyone injecting the second worst neurotoxin on the planet. But what about the first worst neurotoxin on the planet?

I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally, so I can still move my face. But I really do think it’s a savior.

So when you’re injecting something with trace amounts of neurotoxins to immunize against preventable diseases, that’s an outrage that must be stopped. But when you’re injecting something with trace amounts of neurotoxins to get rid of a few wrinkles, that’s the act of a “savior.”

Leonard Horowitz

Horowitz is on a mission to tell the world about how AIDS was created by the government. If you’ve ever wondered where Jeremiah Wright got that idea, this is the guy.

Horowitz runs a publishing company in Idaho called Tetrahedron which sells his books and DVDs about how you can use the Bible to cure diseases and walk on water and how the government 9/11′d the WTC themselves and how the Apocalypse is imminent and much, much more. He also sells lots of “alternative medicine” (i.e. not medicine) through the “Healthy World Store.” Let’s take a look at some of the products.

Breath of the Earth Hawaiian Holy Water
HYPERCHARGE NATURAL HEALING using Hawaiian Holy Water researched by Dr. Len Horowitz and Dr. Masaru Emoto. This water holds the spiritual blessing of the Big Island of Hawaii, revered by Kahuna’s as the sacred rebirthing place spiraling down from the center the universe. This supercharged blessed water is recommended for its “purgative and restorative” properties. It ousts negativity and general pathology, and lays the foundation for the creation of paradise.
Price: $24.20

Yeah, that’s right: $24 for a bottle of water. And the justification for that in its description is basically a bottled water commercial on acid. That’s the least expensive product, tied with a colon cleansing product. Here’s another product Horowitz is trying to sell to the gullible:

Holy Harmony Perfect Circle of Sound Tuning Forks (Complete Set)
Used for healing, chakra balancing, or instrument tuning, the 9 Holy Harmony Tuning Forks contain the 6 frequencies (“the original Solfeggio”) found in “Healing Code” by Dr. Leonard Horowitz and Dr. Joseph Puleo; plus 3 newly discovered frequencies completing this numeric series and creating “God’s Perfect Circle of Sound.”
Price: $188.00

Yeah, that or you could just buy a set of tuning forks from Amazon for under $20. That’s somewhere close to a 1,000% mark-up, just for the pleasure of having Horowitz’s name and delusional ravings about magical frequencies attached to it.

One of his old products was deleted from the internets, but Horowitz claimed that it could treat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome back in 2003 when that was a thing. The “treatment” was a naturopathic / homeopathic nasal spray. The FDA did their job and explained to Horowitz that they weren’t having any of it, which explains why you need to use the Wayback Machine to find the original and hilarious press release.

OK, now here’s the most despicable one of all:

C-Cure Membership
Few products can honestly claim to cure cancer, but C-CURE challenges the risky old slash, burn and poison approach of chemo and radiation therapies and even expensive and risky removal of many skin cancers. C-CURE stands for Concentrated – Cancer Undermining and Restorative Emulsion. THIS PRODUCT IS FREE FOR EXPERIMENTAL USE ONLY AS PER FDA’s EXTORTIONISTIC COERCIVE REGULATIONS SOLELY SERVING THE CANCER INDUSTRY.
Price: $386.00

How much cognitive dissonance can the human mind stand? Well, it’s apparently enough to be able to rant about the “CANCER INDUSTRY” within a short description of a sham product you’re selling for almost four hundred bucks. Notice how it mentions curing cancer, but doesn’t actually say that it is a cure for cancer. It “challenges” normal cancer treatments. That’s a trick these hucksters use to get around the OPPRESSIVE AND TYRANNICAL REGULATIONS OF THE FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION. As a quick side note, if you listen to the first link in this section, which is a debate between Horowitz and a grad student on HIV/AIDS, you’ll notice that he really does speak in caps-lock mode very often.

Speaking of that debate, I’m going to finish this section with how his opponent broke down what is wrong with this kind of approach to an attempt at medicine and how it reveals what she perceives as Horowitz’s deceit regarding the supposed efficacy of these products:

Lets pretend [Horowitz] really, REALLY thinks that [his crap] can ‘help people’. Why doesnt he do what is necessary to get this information mainstream (and I dont mean publishing straight to consumer books)? Why doesnt he get in a lab and do research? If I screwed up in the lab and accidentally *cured* HIV with a mixture of Flonase, coffee, and calcium, I would beg my boss for a few supplies to run some preliminary experiments! If they turned out well, I’d call the people who make Flonase and beg them to give it a try. If they ignored me, ‘Id take it to their competition. If they ignored me, I’d write a grant and try to do it myself. I would not stock up on Flonase, coffee, and calcium and make little bottles of it in my bathtub and sell it to AIDS patients for $189.99. Nothing about his behavior makes me think he thinks the crap he’s selling actually works, especially considering the gravity of the diseases he proclaims he can cure.

Jim McCormick

Admittedly this guy doesn’t have the track record of his colleagues on this list. He’s really only known for one thing, and it doesn’t involve Satanic vaccines or Nazi doctors who hate mothers or anything like that.

McCormick is the inventor of a product called the ADE 651. It made the news a while back in the NY Times and Esquire and the BBC and NPR and… well, you get the point.

The James Randi Educational Foundation is credited with bringing attention to the ADE 651 so-called “bomb detector” and the British company (ATSC) who manufactures and profits off of it. The JREF issued a simple challenge for anyone to test it under controlled conditions with positive results. If anyone could do that, they would win a million dollars from the JREF. So far the challenge has remained unmet.

The ADE 651 initially didn’t even contain any electronic components. It’s basically just a stick in a box. Here is what it looks like:

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that this thing was being used by our troops in Iraq up until recently. And some Iraqi police are still using it. Here is what one of the device’s defenders had to say about it:

Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is detecting bombs. I don’t care what they say. I know more about bombs than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.
-Major-General Jehad al-Jabiri of the Interior Ministry’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives

Even though the aforementioned JREF challenge had been in place since October of 2008, the media outrage over McCormick’s fraud really took off during a series of IED bombings while the ADE 651 was being widely used in Iraq. The British government was similarly outraged, arrested the executive of ATCS, Ltd. – after the government had already paid that company at least $85 million for these devices – and banned the export of ADE 651s.

But it all started with one “entrepreneur” named Jim McCormick who decided to put some plastic together and sell the Ideomotor Effect for profit at the expense of innocent lives. What a class act.

Kevin Trudeau

If you’ve ever found yourself in a drug-induced haze in front of a television at 3:45 AM during the middle of the last decade (and let’s face it – if you’re reading this then that applies to you), then you know Kevin Trudeau. He’s the infomercial guy who wants to tell you about all the natural cures “they” don’t want you to know about. He also wants to tell you about the free money “they” don’t want you to know about. But have you heard about Kevin Trudeau’s larceny, credit card fraud, SEC lawsuit for running an illegal pyramid scheme, Federal Trade Commission fines, contempt of court charges, and subsequent prison sentence – all of which “they” don’t want you to know about?

Kevin Trudeau started off his career as a fraud by running credit card scams. He went off to Prison University for that, where he teamed up with a fellow inmate “they” don’t want you to know about. On the outside they started up a multilevel marketing scam “they” don’t want you to know about. So he was originally selling Horowitz-esque products, like a necklace with a magical piece of metal to stop cell phones and radio waves from microwaving your brain. It’s not quite a tin-foil hat, but it’s pretty close. He’s also very into colloidal silver, which gives your skin a nice, permanent silvery hue which “they” most certainly don’t want you to know about.

By 2004, the Federal Trade Commission was so fed up with Trudeau (and rightfully so), that they banned him from selling anything on infomercials other than “informational publicans,” which are protected by the First Amendment.

Now you’ve really got to kind of begrudgingly admire Trudeau for how he took hold of the crisis of being banned and Jujitsu-flipped it into an opportunity to rake in even more cash. From there, he kept on making those infomercials most people know him from, but this time he just sold his books. Since the products he was selling on television were just his books, he was only obligated to tell the truth about the contents of his books – which of course themselves were simply advertisements for his products in book form. His book could say that purple rabbits will invade the Czech Republic tomorrow; but as long as he remembered to insert a phrase like “in my book” in the middle of his late night squawkings, he could talk about the purple rabbits and still legally be considered “informative.”

So instead of buying airtime to hock his useless products directly to his marks, Trudeau was buying airtime to sell his advertisements to an audience which would then pay him again for those same products. So the FTC decision to ban Trudeau from infomercials with a loophole unfortunately had the opposite of the deterrent effect it was intended to have. So much for that shadowy government conspiracy always keeping the non-working naturopath man down.

His books encouraged a lot of thoughtless behavior, like avoiding chemotherapy when you have cancer, sunscreen, deodorant, vaccinations and really any form of medicine. Eventually Trudeau couldn’t help but violate the terms of his infomercial loophole by lying about the contents of his own book about weight loss secrets, which he had allegedly written. In the press release “they” don’t want you to know about, the FTC fined Trudeau $5 million and banned him from infomercials altogether.

And the real bitch of it is that even after all that, the guy still has a net worth of $10 million.

Oh, and by the way, here is a shot of a page in one of his books where he endorses Dianetics:

Meryl Dorey

Meryl Dorey is antivaccine activist in Australia, but she was born in America. She heads the Australian Vaccination Network. They lobby against vaccination, speak out against it – along with all other medicine – and in favor of homeopathy. Even though their mission statement claims that they are “dedicated to the idea that health can be achieved and maintained without the use of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines,” until recently they claimed that they weren’t anti-vaccine. They claimed they were just spreading information so that people could make their own choices. As if frightening parents and lying to them and then mumbling, “But do what you want,” afterwards doesn’t count as advocacy.

Dorey also wrote in her book Voodoo Children that nobody dies from diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and other vaccine-preventable illnesses. This is just not true, and that fact was brought home to her when a four week old child named Dana McCaffrey died from pertussis. The McCaffreys lived in an area of New South Wales, Australia, which had a very low rate of vaccine compliance. This stopped herd immunity in the region, which is supposed to protect infants and people who for legitimate medical reasons can not take vaccinations.

The AVN immediately began harassing the bereaved parents, claiming that they and the government were lying about their baby’s illness. When those conspiracy theories were debunked, Dorety started claiming that the pertussis vaccine wasn’t effective even though it is.

If you wanted to invent a fictional character that started off with a dangerous and misanthropic belief who denied all the contrary evidence and twisted around facts so that they were more complicit with her conclusion, then that character would be indistinguishable from the real-life Dorey.

Now the bright side to all this is that Dorey’s organization is in financial and legal trouble. The New South Wales Office of Liquor, Gaming, & Racing has been investigating their legal authority to raise funds, and just two weeks ago they ruled that they had “detected a number of breaches of charity fundraising laws.” Dorey hasn’t commented yet, but hopefully they’ll find some nice little island for her somewhere near Antarctica. No vaccines there, you see.

Kenya-controlled US Supreme Court rules against Orly Taitz

Last September, federal judge Clay Land of Georgia ordered the dentist / birther / internet troll Orly Taitz pay a $20,000 fine for violating Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Taitz of course realized that Clay Land was a communist fascist Maoist Muslim Marxist traitor and appealed. This appeal was denied by another al Qaeda Nazi posing as a federal judge, and on it went like that until Taitz started trolling members of the Supreme Court on ChatRoulette.

She first decided to go after Clarence Thomas, the most likely candidate to bring her case before the Court since he is also a bit of a crackpot. The way it works is that to get the Supreme Court to appeal your case, you have to convince one of the nine justices to introduce it to the Court. It’s kind of like how anyone can actually write the words of a piece of legislation, but they need at least one member of Congress to sponsor it.

In what was for him a rare moment of sanity, Justice Thomas sent Taitz’s e-mail to his spam folder and told her to STFU and pay her stupid fine already. After she made sure Thomas’ Hotmail account wasn’t hijacked by someone from /b/, Taitz decided to try her luck with Justice Alito. Normally when someone pesters a second justice after being denied by the first, the justice will just bring the case before the Court to spare the others, since a person like that (i.e. like Taitz) will probably just go individually to each and every member of the Court and troll them until they give in.

So that’s what Alito did and today they ruled that the fine would be upheld. So you might think that a patriotic American like Taitz would see that they had gone to the highest court in the country but that justice wasn’t on their side, right? Well, not so much. Like another similarly hypocritical douchenozzle, Taitz is appealing to the “international court of Human Rights,” an institution which appears to not even exist. There’s the European Court of Human Rights. And there’s the International Court of Justice. But there’s no such thing as the International Court of Human Rights. Taitz is now filing appeals to institutions which don’t even exist outside of her imagination.

The 5 Best Cases of Religious Schadenfreude

[reposted at The BEAST]

Schadenfreude isn’t even the best word to describe what you feel when you hear about cases like these. It’s a very specific kind of schadenfreude: one where you know that the subject’s irrational beliefs somehow shaped their own downfall, so that their own life becomes a case study against the very worldview they had adopted. We’re all happy that Hitler killed himself in the end, but how much sweeter would it have been if rumors of him being part Jewish had sent him to his own gas chambers? Clearly, that would have been awesome. So let’s look at some cases like that.

Paul Ingram

What he believed:

Paul Ingram was a chief civil deputy of the Olympia, Washington’s sheriff’s office and the Chairman of the local Republican Party. He was also a fundamentalist Christian, and one day one of his daughters returned from a church “retreat” with “recovered memories” of Satanic ritual abuse by, among others, her father.

This was in the late 1980s, during the height of the “Satanic panic,” when stories like Ingram’s were about as common as stories of Mexicans invading Texas ranches are today. When the accused denied any such abuse, the accusers would claim that the abuser was repressing their own memories just as the victim had. That would mean that it’s time for a “therapy” session so that the accused could recover their memories and confess. On the other hand, if the accused confessed immediately, they were also seen as guilty. Much like the old witch hunts from centuries ago, all accused were presumed guilty and there was no way for them to prove their innocence.

Since Ingram was generally supportive of this idea that there were rings of Satanic cults raping and torturing their own children, he was open to the idea that he himself had been involved but had suppressed his memories. His pastor and a court-appointed “therapist” supported this hypothesis and kept him in the dark when skeptical investigators challenged the accusations.

The Schadenfreude:

Ingram acquired a Christian attorney with limited experience in criminal law, who let Ingram plead guilty. Pretty much immediately after being sentenced, the reality of his situation started to dawn on him and he tried to withdraw his guilty plea with the aid of a legitimate law firm. The motion was denied, and Ingram went to prison. He remained there for the next 15 years and was released in 2003. Further details of the case are available here.

Kent Hovind

What he believes:

Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind is primarily known as a Young Earth Creationist (YEC), but he believes just about any crazy ideas he hears about. Even as YECs go, Hovind’s the worst of the worst. Exhibit A: Answers in Genesis has a list of arguments they wish other YECs would stop using because they’re so easy to refute that even my old friend Ken Ham is embarrassed by them. Most of them were and still are old favorites of “Dr. Dino,” so he responded to what he saw as AIG’s unreasonable attempt at quality control (an “overreaction”) with a long, psychotic rant (deleted from his site but archived here), buffered with his customers’ testimonials of his “integrity.”

Here he is with Sasha Baren Cohen on his Ali G Show, doing his standard creationist shtick.

And if you’re on a road trip, or have a few hours to kill, you really have to listen to this hilarious debate on the Infidel Guy show between Hovind and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci.

But you miss out on the whole picture here unless you take into account some of Hovind’s other lesser-known beliefs. Hovind’s also a rabid conspiracy theorist. And when you think about it, this is pretty much necessary for creationists as well as any other science deniers. There would have to be a vast conspiracy afoot for evolution to be both false and widely accepted by the vast majority of scientists in relevant fields. And when you give credibility to the idea that most scientists are lying about their work in order to promote what Hovind sees as their religion, it’s not too much of a stretch to apply that same paranoid approach to politics.

So for example, Hovind believes that flu vaccines are a plot to make people dependent on the government. And it’s not just any government, but a “one world government” (as opposed to a multiple worlds government, I guess). And this “one world government” is going to be run by Freemasons and Catholics and Muslims and Jews. Also the trails that airplanes leave are really made of poisonous chemicals to kill most of the global population, but somehow magically spare the lives of the “one world government” conspirators.

I could go on in this vein for a while, but I’ll spare the reader and cut straight to the most relevant of Hovind’s conspiracy theories – you don’t have to pay taxes! See, the Bible doesn’t say anything about a federal income tax. It just says that you have to render unto Caesar that which is Caeser’s. But Caesar has been dead for thousands of years, so that is just ancient history. How could Kent Hovind pay Caesar? He couldn’t, that’s how.

The Schadenfreude:

In January of 2007, Hovind began serving a ten year sentence after being convicted on 58 counts of federal crimes. He remains in prison today, where he writes e-mail to God and whines about what he perceives as his own martyrdom. Unlike Paul Ingram, Hovind remains committed to the same worldview which has caused him so much harm.

He cried like a little baby at his sentencing, begging that he be allowed to “just go home” and to have his friends pay his back taxes so he could continue preaching. The courts were having none of it, and they rejected all of his appeals – probably because they were the ravings of a deranged lunatic. Later his property at the Dinosaur Adventure Land – Hovind’s lame attempt at a creationist Disneyworld in Pensacola – was confiscated by federal authorities. Hovind is scheduled to be released in 2015.

Joseph Smith

What he believed:

So this is the Mormon guy. You probably already know the story of the magical stones and the golden tablets and how he met an angel while meditating on a mountaintop and all that Lord of the Rings crap. What you might not know is that starting a weird cult like the LDS Church took a few trial runs before it all really took hold in Utah.

Joseph Smith never even made it to Utah. It was his successor, Brigham Young, who had established Utah as home of the Mormons. While Smith was in charge, the LDS Church was a roving band of wanderers who tried settling every now and then until they were driven out by the local communities. Smith took his snake oil show on the road from Palmyra, NY to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, each time declaring that the new Mormon home was some kind of holy land. And each time they had to leave it was because their beliefs were just too fucking crazy for words.

The Schadenfreude:

By the time Smith made it to Illinois, his ego was getting to be a liability. He became the mayor of a small town and took charge of a militia, which he then used to try to suppress a local newspaper which printed things the LDS Church did not like. Since he had to worry about that pesky First Amendment, the governor of Illionois at the time came after Smith and put him in jail.

While awaiting trial, Smith’s followers attempted a jailbreak. They sneaked a gun into prison and Smith tried to shoot his way out. This turned out to be a bad idea, even for the mid 19th century. He was shot and killed during the escape attempt.

Hulda Regehr Clark

What she believed:

Hulda Clark was a notorious quack who believed that she could cure all diseases. Her primary focus was on cancer – that is ALL cancers. One of her books was called The Cure of All Cancers. Another was called The Cure For HIV/AIDS. Another was called The Cure For All Diseases.

Clark called herself a naturopath, which is a bullshit term alternative medicine practitioners use. She had a problem with conventional Western medicine (a.k.a. medicine) because medical practitioners, especially ones critical of Clark, are “arrogant.” Someone who wrote a book called The Cure For All Diseases is calling someone else arrogant. Let that settle in your mind for a minute.

The Schadenfreude:

Clark had her problems with the Federal Trade Commission and the Food & Drug Administration, as well as local authorities for practicing medicine without a license; but as you can probably tell from the use of past tense in this section, the real hilarity was when she died. Of cancer – which, if you remember from the above is something she claimed she could cure.

Yanadi Kondaiah

What he believed:

This one is easily my favorite, and the simplest. Kondaiah was a “holy man” in India who claimed to have a magical leg. He claimed it had “healing power.” He also made claims to be able to predict the future, but the article’s not exactly clear on whether or not that power came from his leg.

The Schadenfreude:

Some enterprising folks asked themselves why they should pay to make wishes on a holy man’s leg when they can amputate it for free. And so that’s what they did. First they got him drunk. Then he passed out. Then the two men hacked off his leg with a hunting knife and hauled it off. Hilarity ensued.

Alex Jones is a lying piece of shit

There’s an embedded link to the full comic, but this story adds another participant in the extended game of Telephone that is our public discourse on scientific issues. And that person is a notoriously unhinged nutcase called Alex Jones.

It all started with a profile of Robert Sapolsky in Wired Magazine by the excellent science writer Jonah Lehrer. In part it covered some work Sapolsky and others are doing on a possible vaccine which may be able to reduce neural damage caused by chronic stress. This would be analogous to the first panel in the above SMBC comic.

The second panel matches up with how the Daily Fail tried to relay that information to their generally clueless readers. Here’s how they interpreted Sapolsky’s work:

Forget the age-old remedies of yoga, meditation or popping pills. Relieving chronic stress could soon be as simple as having an injection, according to scientists.

Academics say they are close to developing the first vaccine for stress – a single jab that would help us relax without slowing down.

So that’s bad enough, right? The Daily Fail failed to distinguish between our own subjective perception of stress and the purely material neurological damage it causes. But the failure of science coverage in the media has not ended yet. Enter Alex Jones:

If you don’t know, Jones is this conspiracy theorist who does a radio show which is very popular amongst people who think that the UN is going to invade Kansas in black helicopters piloted by illegal immigrants who use microchips to take away our guns and 9/11 was an “inside job,” etc…

As you might guess, he’s also against vaccinations. So when he saw that the Daily Fail had reported on something that had something to do with vaccines, he just knew that the “New World Order” must be behind it, somehow. And so he screamed in a video and on his blog about how he had discovered the hidden truth behind this article, which is that evil scientists are plotting against his normal, gasoline-huffing audience. The guv-mint, they just want to control you, see? So they make them up this here vaccine and they a-tell ya that it’ll calm ya down. But it’s really just to make you a passive and obedient SERF WHARGARBL.

So you start with a group of people who are trying to understand the damage caused by chronic stress and what can be done to reduce it. Then you add a filter of media failure and general incompetence, and all it takes to turn the story completely ass-backwards is to add a pathologically anti-science lunatic with a bullhorn into the mix. When Lehrer later followed up on this weird phenomenon, he was met by an army of angry, Jones-motivated commenters. Here is an excerpt of one I picked at random just now:

Nice try CoIntellPro Agent. Gee, I wonder how and why you got this out so darn fast, lol. If only you knew how damned obvious you are.

The word for being aware of such things as that the New World Order, or The Shadow Government is going to attempt to dumb down or pacify the people prior to culling them is not being “Paranoid” as you suggest. It is merely being “Circumspect”. If a smart Jew in the mid to late 1930’s tried to warn other Jews (and I’m sure that they did) that the Nazi’s ENDGAME was to eventually imprison and exterminate all Jews, they would not have been being “Paranoid”. They would have merely been being “Circumspect” after reading or hearing factual evidence that supported their worst fears. Learn to differentiate between the two, vastly different terms. Thee is no grey area between the two.

Oh, and, by the way, the Nazi’s also spiked the imprisoned Jew’s water supply with Fluoride to make them passive. Yep, the same stuff they have been spiking everyone’s city water with here in Amerika during the last 40+ years.

But there is a happy ending to this story, friends, because then Lehrer followed up on the follow-up (YO DAWG I HERD U LIKE FOLLOW-UPS) with a blog post about the psychology of conspiracy theories and cognitive dissonance. Very interesting stuff, and very well written. So now I’m sure the conspiracy nuts will see the error of their ways and stop supporting stupid bullshit. Or maybe not.