Double vision

After ten years of writing this blog six times a week, you'd think I'd be inured.  You'd think I'd long ago have stopped running into weird ideas that I hadn't heard of.  You'd think it'd be impossible to surprise me any more.

You'd be wrong.

You've heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  Well, just yesterday, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to the homepage of the Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society, which takes it one step further:

Many prominent individuals are actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced.  That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection.  Clones can mate and reproduce clone children.  A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children. 

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion.  They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others. 

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill.  Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior. 

The eye is the window of the soul. In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within.  As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source.  Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment.  The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light.  They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, notwithstanding the fact that the last paragraph could be describing me before I've had a cup of coffee in the morning, the whole thing seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little shaky in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point.  (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.)  The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950’s.  This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor.  Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells.  To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change.  Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell."  The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed.  They developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment.  By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all. Not only do we have fake people walking around, some of them are actually robots. Jimmy Carter, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics.  Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff.  For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President.  On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter.  By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Brad Pitt and Jimmy Carter synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or something, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyoncé (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me choke-snort coffee all over my computer, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's rather tenuous grasp on reality?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone.  We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff.  Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry.  Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof.  Also the different color of his skin.  Its [sic] a very fine difference of the color.  Also the distance between body and head is now different.  Also his psychology while talking.  We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this.  We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then. They did lots of "stuff" and found out that (amongst other things) David Icke's head has moved farther away from his body.  Plus, they say they're being objective, so pretty much q.e.d., as far as I can see.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less blank and hollow-eyed, and hopefully fool more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.

**********************************

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Beelzebub

As further evidence that there is nothing so innocent and sweet that someone can't interpret it so as to make it appear satanic, today we consider the song "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo."

For those of you who don't have young children, this is the song from Cinderella that has the following dark, terrifying lyrics:

Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
Put 'em together, and what have you got?
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

So I think we can all agree that scare-wise, this ranks right up there with the pea-soup-puke scene from The Exorcist.

No, but really.  I'm not making this up.  I had no idea that this was a thing until I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, which had the following passage:

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo (also called the Magic Song) is a novelty song written in 1948 and featured in the 1950 animated Disney film Cinderella, performed by actress Verna Fulton.  It is also a transformation spell, with which the fairy godmother transforms Cinderella into a princess, a pumpkin into a coach and mice into footmen...   [M]agic is REAL; evil Satanic rituals aimed at harnessing and producing energy.  There is fraudulent stage magic, based on tricks and illusion, but even this requires invocations of demons and chanting of spells. 

Magicians work by exercising control over demons who are other-dimensional beings.  They often do this by calling the demons by name, by means of mental discipline and by leveraging symbols that are both concrete and imagined, as drawn in the air itself or expressed through other gestures.  Sometimes implements like bells, candles, incense, salt, knives or artifacts of various kinds are used, which are charged spiritually with demonic presence.

So that's pretty horrifying.  Here I thought that Disney just had old ladies in brightly-colored dresses dancing around singing nonsense to charm the children, when they were actually conjuring up other-dimensional demonic presences.

On the other hand, I always kind of pictured demons as having scary-sounding names like "Beelzebub" and "Mephistopheles."  You know, something with a little gravitas.  I'm don't think I'd be very frightened of a demon who answered to "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo."

Anyhow, I started to look into this, and down the Rabbit Hole I went.  Of course there was a mention of this over at the phenomenally wacky David Icke Forum:

Anyone else ever think about this phrase as being actual magik?...  Also interesting that the Dragon Ball Z creator used the three B's as evil magik characters within the series.  Bu had the ability to "absorb" his victims to make himself more powerful.  He would eventually kill both the wizards Bibbidi and his son Bobbidi.

Because the creator of Dragon Ball Z clearly didn't get the idea for the names from Cinderella, or anything.

But that was hardly the only mention.  The site Life, Hope, and Truth did a piece on the song, and others like it:

[T]he Bible is clear—light (God’s way) and darkness (Satan’s way) have no commonalities (2 Corinthians 6:14).  The same power fuels the magic that goes “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” in Cinderella (from a fairy godmother—a “good” witch) and the darkly prophetic “double, double toil and trouble” in Macbeth(from the evil witches). The power behind all witchcraft is Satan the devil. 

It is important to remember that many forms of media, even children’s entertainment, promote the idea of “good” witchcraft.  This is a very sly attempt to deceive the world about the true source of all power apart from God: demonic darkness.

And here I thought both Cinderella and Macbeth were fiction.  Shows you what I know.

It wouldn't be complete, however, unless Focus on the Family got involved, which they did, with an article called, I shit you not, "Is 'Bibbidy-Bobbidi-Boo' Taboo?  Magic in Children’s Entertainment." At least the author comes to the conclusion that Cinderella is probably okay, although it's still better not to mess around with magic at all:

We’d suggest that it is important for parents to pay close attention to the manner in which spiritual power is presented in any story.  It’s crucial to ask questions like, "Who is the source of this power?  How is it portrayed?  What are the results of its use?"  Good spiritual power – for example, the power by which the apostles healed the sick and the lame in Jesus’ name – comes from God.  He gives it to His people to accomplish His purposes, and it is always used for His glory.  Occultic or evil spiritual power, on the other hand, serves the user’s own selfish interests.  It is dangerous, destructive and manipulative in nature.

You have to wonder where turning mice into horses falls on that spectrum.

But to return to my earlier point: fiction, people.  This is all fiction.  I.e., not true.  You can bibbidi and bobbidi all you want, you can even boo occasionally, and you're never going to improve your wardrobe or get a garden vegetable to turn into a transportation device.

I invite you to try, though.  It'd be entertaining for the rest of us.

Anyhow, to the person who sent me the first link, all I can say is: thanks.  The imprint of the keyboard I now have on my forehead will be a source of much amusement for my students.  As far as the people who believe all this horseshit: please, please don't go see Fantasia.  You'd probably piss yourself during the walking-broom scene.

Acceleration causation station

You might have heard that a while back, there was a recall on Toyotas because of a problem with stuck accelerator pedals, a malfunction that cost several lives and had one man unjustly imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter.  Toyota was accused of covering up the problem to avoid the cost of a recall, and ultimately paid out $1.2 billion in repairs and reparations to avoid prosecution.

What you may not know is that the entire problem was caused by...

... HAARP.

Yes, HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array of creepy-looking antennas out on the Alaskan tundra that has been blamed for everything from the Fukushima earthquake to Hurricane Katrina.  

Okay, I know HAARP shut down in 2014.

That's what they want you to believe.

HAARP [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So now here's another thing to lay at the feet of the Illuminati, who are (of course) the ones who operate the research station.  At least, that's the contention of the people over at the David Icke Forum, which acts as some kind of clearinghouse for loonies who don't think that anything happens by chance.

Here's the actual quote:

There seems [sic] to be a lot of accidents happening lately because of electronics failure. Many aircraft have fallen out of the sky due to autopilot error, etc. 

Trains have collided because switching stations have failed. 

Now the Toyota accelerator problem.  Truth is, GM, Ford and Toyota have all had the problem for years. 

I suggest that the nanoscale particles of silver released from the Chemtrail program in the form of silver-iodide that allows electrically charged ions to be directed and controlled through HAARP technologies is getting into electronics and reeking [sic] havoc by "tricking" (shorting) electro-mechanical switches.

Well, that's definitely the first thing I think of when I have car problems.  A while back, my 2007 Honda Element, which I love even though it looks kind of like a blue toaster on wheels, started making a weird grinding noise that seemed to come from the rear passenger side.  I immediately took it to my mechanic, Rick.

"Rick," I said, "I think something's wrong with the suspension or brakes back there.  Or, possibly, silver iodide nanoparticles released in the form of chemtrails by an atmospheric monitoring station in Alaska are tricking my car's electro-mechanical parts, thus "reeking havoc."

Turned out it was a stuck brake caliper.  Or at least that's what Rick told me.  There's always the possibility that he might be a secret Illuminati member himself, in which case I've now revealed to Them that I know what they're up to.

So now that I've given myself away, I guess I better watch myself.  Who knows what they'll beam silver iodide into next?  Maybe my computer at school.  Although considering that it already takes twenty minutes just to boot up when I turn it on, maybe that'll make it work better.  Heaven knows nothing else the IT guys have tried has made any difference.  My own contention is that the problem is caused by the fact that my school computer is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel, and that it's as slow as it is because the hamster's kind of pooped out after all these years.

But I digress.

In any case, let me say it as clearly as I know how: HAARP was shut down three years ago.  Any problems you have with your car, up to and including a stuck accelerator, are caused by mechanical failures, not by "silver iodide particles," which you can't "direct and control" using some kind of magic laser beam from space anyhow.  So just relax, and go back to chewing at the straps of your straitjacket, or whatever it was you were doing before.

In any case, I'd better wrap this up, because I've got to get showered, get some breakfast and coffee, and head on out to school.  Turn my computer on, and then wait twenty minutes to see if the hamster is in the mood to run today.

That's no moon. It's a space station.

The whole subject of "book reviews" has been much on my mind lately, because being (as well as a blogger) a fiction writer, with several titles to my name on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I am constantly monitoring my links to see if I've gotten good reviews.  Or bad reviews.  Or any reviews.  Because, let's face it, Brendan Behan was on to something when he said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

On the other hand, you have to wonder how accurate reviews really are, and I mean no disrespect to the people who have reviewed my work.  Especially those who have given it five stars.

The subject comes up because I was doing some research for today's post, on a topic suggested by a student, to wit, the conjecture that the Moon is an artificial construct.  It seems like the first serious exploration of the claim was done by Christopher Knight in his 2007 book, Who Built The Moon?, but it has recently come back to light because the cause has been taken up by noted wingnut David Icke in his latest publication, Human Race, Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More.  And no, I'm not making that title up, and I wonder if you had the same reaction as I did when you read it, which is to hear deep voices in the background going, "A wimoweh, a wimoweh, a wimoweh."

Be that as it may, Icke is into the artificial-moon theory in a big way.  Here's a quote from his book:

I had that overwhelming feeling at my computer that the Moon was artificial and was being used to control life on this planet.  It is the Reptilians’ control system.  The placement of the Moon dictates the speed of Earth’s rotation and the angle at which it rotates – 22.5 degrees from vertical.  This angle creates the four seasons because of the way planet faces the Sun during its annual orbit.  The Moon has a major influence on the tides – far more than the Sun – and with the human body consisting of some 70 per cent water it is bound to have a fantastic influence on us, even on that level alone.  The Moon also dictates so much of our relationship with time, and the term ‘month’ is really Moonth, a period based on the cycles of the Moon.  The realisation that the Moon is a gigantic spacecraft is the strand that connects all the rest, not just in relation to Moon anomalies, but also to life on Earth and the conspiracy to enslave humanity.  The fact is that the Reptilians in the Moon and in underground bases on Mars depend on humans and the Earth for food – their very survival.   This is one key reason why they are desperate not to be exposed.  Water and other resources are constantly being taken from this planet to the Moon and Mars and this is not a new phenomena, either.  Ancient Zulu stories say the same.

Well, far be it from me to rely on the findings of science when they're contradicted by "ancient Zulu stories."  Even if it implies that because the human body is 70% water, we experience tides.

[image courtesy of photographer Luc Viatour and the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyway, Icke goes on like this for 690 pages, talking about how the Moon must be hollow, that it's older than the Earth is, and has "anomalous quantities" of "metals such as brass and mica" (for the non-geologists in the studio audience, let me point out that mica isn't a metal), that particles of metallic iron on the Moon's surface are "mysteriously resistant to rusting" (not a surprise given that rusting is oxidation, a process that is unlikely to occur in a place with no atmosphere), and that the maria ("seas") are places where meteorite collisions resulted in damage, which had to be repaired by the Reptilians using "an artificial cement-like substance."

690 pages of this. And it costs $25.84, plus shipping and handling, to purchase it from Amazon.

So anyway, I'm wading through all of this, and just shaking my head, but then I saw the thing that made me shake my head so much I looked like I had a severe disorder of the central nervous system -- that this book has received 110 reviews, of which 74 gave it five stars.  Here are a few selected phrases from these reviews:

• Icke is one of the very few conspiracy whistleblowers who has developed a relatively advanced spiritual awareness from which he can provide a useful context and understanding of the material he has uncovered.
• If you are sick of all this government crap then you should read this book because it really opens your eyes to the truth and makes you realize how stupid and fake this world really is.
• This could be the most important book EVER written. If you don't know where the world is headed, you need to find out and David Icke tells how we can return to freedom.
• Most informative book there is about what is happening in the world today and who is causing it. It also tells you what you can do to change it. 

All of which makes me, as a teacher of critical thinking, want to weep softly and bang my head on my desk.  However, there is one thought that gives me hope.

Reviews are, by their very nature, a skewed sample.  People who review this book have (one would hope) read it, which means that the presumably huge number of people in this world who would read the book's description, see its price, and then laugh and say "no freakin' way" are already eliminated from the pool.  Only once you have forked over your $25.84 (plus shipping and handling) are you going to be able to review the book, and this speaks to a certain level of, shall we say, credulity right from the starting gate.

So, anyway, I'm trying to be positive, here, which is sometimes difficult.  Wingnuts will always be out there trumpeting their theories; that is, after all, what wingnuts do.  And there will always be a small group of people who think that their nutty ideas make total sense, and I emphasize the words "small group" with every hopeful thought of which I am capable.  For right now, I'll just try to put the whole thing out of my mind, if only to stop the voices in my head from singing, "A wimoweh, a wimoweh, a wimoweh," which is getting a little annoying.

Don't trust everyone

There's an odd tendency of conspiracy theorists to eat their young.

Not literally, of course.  I wouldn't want that to get out as some kind of meta-conspiracy-theory.  But I've noticed that although the conspiracy theories themselves never seem to die, the conspiracy theorists seem to have a relatively short half-life before they implode.

Again, not literally.  Don't get your hopes up.

I think the reason for this is that once you abandon logic and evidence as the sine qua non of understanding, you are out in some kind of netherworld of lies, suppositions, and paranoia, and it's only a matter of time before you become victim to the same foolishness you were perpetrating.  You give people the impression that no one is to be trusted, that anyone and everyone could be part of the conspiracy, and before you know it, your followers have decided that you're right... and include you in the assessment.

So it's with some degree of amusement that I report to you that it's finally happened to the archduke and court jester of the conspiracy theory world -- David Icke and Alex Jones.

Icke was outed, fittingly enough, in a YouTube video in which he is caught "shape-shifting into a Reptilian."  Odd, isn't it, that these Reptilian overlords of ours are brilliant enough to infiltrate themselves into every level of government, break into the sanctum sanctorum of military intelligence, and then can't remember to keep their costumes in place when they're on the air?  But yes, you heard it here first: Icke, who said that Reptilians are in control of everything from the CIA to the U.S. public education system, is himself a Reptilian.

Even more wryly amusing is the fact that Alex Jones had the whistle blown on the site Before It's News, because they're about the only website that is even more bizarrely paranoid than Jones's own site InfoWars.  Here's the exposé about Jones:

Skeptics at first, may think that the vertical slits in Alex Jones’ pupils, are caused by a blurring effect, when the video frame is frozen.  But the unedited video footage – that can easily be verified through the original InfoWars video that is posted on YouTube, reveals that THE VERTICAL SLITS IN ALEX JONES’ EYES ARE MOVING SIDE TO SIDE – AND SO WHY, WHY, WHY DO HORIZONTAL SLITS NEVER APPEAR?  It is also noteworthy when the reptilian eyes manifest through Jones, that the iris narrows significantly, and is then bordered on each side, with black lines.  This cannot be a blurring effect, as there is not enough black on the borders of his iris to do so.  And the “reptilian iris” effect also manifests when his eyes are moving side to side – and so, should the slits not be HORIZONTAL when this happens?  And so the blurring argument – the argument that the serpentine slits in Alex Jones’ eyes are caused by eye movement, is pure fantasy.  But the reality remains, Alex Jones is now manifesting, on multiple occasions, REPTILIAN SHAPESHIFTING EYES.

What's funnier than the article itself, though, is that they illustrate their contention with a picture of the "Gorn" from the Star Trek original series episode "Arena."

You may remember this episode because it contained the most ridiculous fight scene ever filmed, featuring Captain Kirk fighting a guy wearing a huge plastic dinosaur head.  But evidently the dinosaur head prevented the actor playing the Gorn from seeing very well, so he would lunge at Kirk, and miss him by about ten feet.  Kirk, of course, being Kirk, would pretend that he was in extreme danger, and he would immediately drop and roll, giving him ample opportunity to tear his shirt, because no episode of the original series was complete if you didn't get a chance to see at least one of William Shatner's nipples.  The Gorn, however, would go staggering off in some random direction until he happened by pure chance to locate Kirk again, and the whole scenario would replay.

It was a little like an extremely slow-moving two-person game of "Marco Polo."

But I digress.

Anyhow, there you have it.   Two alien infiltrators exposed, by people who evidently don't understand the concept of "video compression artifact."  But even stranger is that the conspiracy theorists themselves don't realize how they are setting themselves up to be knocked down.  David Icke and Alex Jones have been preaching to people for ages not to trust... well, everyone.

They, of all people, should be entirely unsurprised to find that some people are now beginning to realize that everyone includes them.

Double vision

After four years of writing this blog six times a week, you'd think I'd be inured.  You'd think I'd long ago have stopped running into weird ideas that I hadn't heard of.  You'd think it'd be impossible to surprise me any more.

You'd be wrong.

You've heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  Well, just yesterday, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to the homepage of the Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society, which takes it one step further:

Many prominent individuals are actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced. That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection. Clones can mate and reproduce clone children. A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children. 

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion. They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others. 

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill. Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior. 

The eye is the window of the soul. In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within. As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source. Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment. The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light. They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, notwithstanding the fact that the last paragraph could be describing me before I've had a cup of coffee in the morning, the whole thing seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little shaky in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point. (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.) The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950’s. This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor. Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells. To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change. Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell." The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed. They developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment. By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all.  Not only do we have fake people walking around, some of them are actually robots.  Jimmy Carter, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics. Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff. For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President. On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter. By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Brad Pitt and Jimmy Carter synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or something, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyonce (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me sit up and take notice, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's rather tenuous grasp on reality?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone. We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff. Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry. Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof. Also the different color of his skin. Its a very fine difference of the color. Also the distance between body and head is now different. Also his psychology while talking. We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this. We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then.  If they say they're being objective, I'm convinced.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less blank and hollow-eyed, and hopefully fool more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.

Biebs in space

Writing this blog sometimes puts me into very odd conversations.

Witness what happened yesterday, an exchange between myself and a friend that started out with the odd question, "Do you know what Justin Bieber is?"

I responded, "Of course I know who Justin Bieber is."

"Not who," my friend said.  "What."

"Um," I said, showing my usual articulateness when confronted with peculiar questions.  "Well, he's a pop singer whose songs make me want to remove my ears with a vegetable peeler.  He also, by his recent behavior, appears to be a spoiled rotten brat."

"Nope," my friend said.  "He's an alien."

At that point, the light dawned.  Like I said, sometimes I'm a magnet for bizarre claims, but that doesn't mean that I'm quick on the uptake about it.  "Lemme guess," I said.  "Someone found a photograph of him where he appears to have antennae, or something."

"Better than that.  Video footage, where his eyes seem to turn into reptile eyes."

"Marvy," I responded.  "Bieber's one of the reptilian overlords.  I shoulda known."

So my friend directed me to an article on Huffington Post amusingly titled, "Fox News Accidentally Reveals That Justin Bieber is a Reptile."

Apparently what happened is that an alert Fox News viewer, whose YouTube handle is RyGuyVA, was watching the footage showing the Biebs in court after his unfortunate run-in with marijuana, prescription medications, a Lamborghini, and a Miami Beach police officer (in that order).  And RyGuyVA notice that in one frame, Bieber's eyes appear to change.

"Boom," RyGuyVA says.  "I always though that stuff was BS. But come on."

Seriously, look into those eyes.  Don't they seem bent on world domination?

Of course, the easier explanation is that it's a "video compression artifact," a loss of video data as it is reduced to fit available storage space or transmission bandwidth.  And as we've seen before, you can turn grainy images into anything.  Take a look at the "unfocused gaze illusion" -- in which your brain takes a blurry image of a human face and makes a decision (wrong, as it turns out) about which way the eyes are pointing.  Even more startling is the effect of focusing a blurred image of Charles Allen Gilbert's painting "All is Vanity" -- pass your cursor over the fuzzy image and watch what it turns into!

But of course, there are people who would just love to belieb that Justin is an all-powerful alien.  And I have to admit that "reptilian overlord" has more gravitas than "drug-addled twit."  Given that there are conspiracy theorists like the wonderfully bizarre David Icke who think that bunches of famous people are reptilian aliens, including various pharaohs, kings and queens (including Queen Elizabeth II of England), 43 of the US Presidents (no word I could find on which ones were left out), the entirety of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, and the late comedian Bob Hope, it's no real surprise that Justin Bieber should be on the list, too.  I guess they need someone to provide them with music, out there in Reptilian Command Central.

At this point, though, don't you think he's kind of overstayed his welcome here on Earth?  I mean, besides the annoying songs, he's now breaking the law and just generally making a nuisance of himself, to the point that there's now a "We The People" petition to deport him back to his native Canada.  But if he's really an alien, then why should we burden Canada with him?  Put him on a rocket and send him out into space, is what I suggest.  Let his reptilian buddies pick him up and bring him back to Zeta Reticuli, or wherever the hell they're supposed to be from.

That'd turn me into a belieber.

Space cubes

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that we survived (1) the Rapture, (2) the Mayan apocalypse, and (3) the 2012 Christmas shopping season.  The bad news is that the Borg are on their way.  [Source]

At least, that is the claim of such pinnacles of rationality as David Icke and Alex Collier, both of whose names you may have seen once or twice in Skeptophilia before.  Icke, you may recall, is the one who believes that American public schools are being run by aliens; Collier, on the other hand, claims that there was a giant alien/human war back in the 1930s, which none of us have heard about because the war propelled us through a rip in the space-time continuum into an alternate timeline, and now we have to try to get back into our correct timeline, without even being able to consult Geordi LaForge for advice.

Now, because two minds of this caliber are clearly better than one, Icke and Collier have teamed up to analyze the data coming in from NASA's SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), and have come to the terrifying conclusion that the Borg cube has arrived, and is hovering menacingly just inside the corona of the sun.

So, let's just take a look at some of the photographs in question, whatchasay?

Spokespeople for NASA say that these images aren't of a giant cubical spacecraft; they're basically just blank spots where there's missing data.  Icke and Collier aren't convinced, however.  They take the evidence from the photograph, which consists solely of a couple of blank squares, and come to the only conclusion you could draw from this:

The cube is a "GOD" (Galactic Obliteration Device) launched by an evil alien race, which is coming to Earth to destroy it as per the Book of Revelation Chapter 21, wherein we find out that the "City of God" that is supposed to descend during the End Times is square in shape, and since squares are kind of like cubes, this thing is going to come to Earth and the Borg are then going to annihilate the human race in the Battle of Armageddon, which fulfills the scriptural prophecy even though I've read the Book of Revelation and I don't remember any mention of the Second Coming of Locutus.

Apparently, this idea didn't originate with Icke and Collier, but was the brainchild of the LLF (Luciferian Liberation Front).  Which gives it ever so much more credibility, given that this is the same group of wingnuts who believe that the biblical story is literally true, except that Jesus was actually a superpowerful cyborg from another planet.

Of course, Icke, Collier, and the LLF aren't the only ones who have weighed in on the anomalous squares in the SOHO photographs.  Scott Waring, of UFO Sightings Daily, thinks that the cube is a giant spacecraft, but that it doesn't have anything to do with either the Borg or the Book of Revelation.  No, Waring said, don't be a loon.  There are two other, much more likely, possibilities: "Such huge objects are present either because the sun is hollow or because energy is being harvested from the sun."

Oh.  Okay.  That makes all kinds of sense.

My own personal opinion is that NASA should hire someone whose sole job is to scan their photographs, looking for ones with glitches, dead pixels, missing data, and so on, and make sure that those flawed photographs never make it online.  We rationalist skeptics have enough trouble keeping everyone's eye on the ball without goofed-up pics from NASA making it worse.

Of course, if NASA did hire someone to do this, Icke, Collier et al. would eventually find out about it, and then there's be allegations of a conspiracy and coverup designed to keep all of us from finding out about the impending alien invasion.  Accusations would be leveled.  The word "sheeple" would be used.

You can't win.

Public schools, alien overlords, and banned words

I am happy to be able to tell you that we finally have figured out what is wrong with the public education system in the United States: it is being turned into a factory for brainwashing children by our elite alien overlords.

If by now the name "David Icke" comes to mind, you have evidently escaped brainwashing yourself, possibly by going to private school.  David Icke is the conspiracy theorist's conspiracy theorist.  His ideas are so bizarre and abstruse that they probably are secrets even from himself, and his book The Greatest Secret has been called "the Rosetta Stone of conspiracy theories."  This seems fairly generous, frankly, because most of what I've read by Icke is patent horse waste.  My favorite example is that various public figures are actually reptilian aliens masquerading as humans, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.

I bet you thought I was going to say "Okay, I made the last one up."  Nope.  That is the level of conspiracy theory that David Icke has reached -- he says even the world of washed-up folk singers has been infiltrated.  Next thing you know, we'll find out that Snooki is actually a reptilian alien.  And then all of a sudden the fact that her baby is due on December 21, 2012 will make terrible, terrible sense.

In any case, David Icke has now come forth with a new claim -- that the American public school system exists solely to turn children into obedient little automatons, because that's what the Archons want.  (Source)  You really should watch the video clip attached, which contains quotes such as, "These guys, the manipulators (the Archons) know it's an illusion, know reality is all in our minds, so they know that if they program our minds with the right illusion, we'll create it physically.  The educational system is massively, massively part of that."

All I can say is, if I was creating an illusion with my mind, it wouldn't be this one.  The illusion I want to have is me on the beach in Costa Rica, clad in nothing but swim trunks, holding a margarita.  But maybe I wasn't programmed properly, so what I got was upstate New York in March.

Be that as it may, we will leave behind David Icke for a different sort of wingnuttery -- the kind that comes out of the actual educational system.  Perhaps you haven't heard about it, but a story broke a couple of days ago about a policy by the New York City Education Department regarding fifty words that are banned from appearing on standardized tests.  (Source)

If you immediately thought of George Carlin, so did I; but interestingly, only one of the banned words is even vaguely naughty, and that's "sex."  Mustn't find out if children understand how humans procreate!  The other words fall into a few loose classes:

• Words that someone, somewhere might take exception to, on religious grounds: dinosaurs, evolution, Halloween, the occult, fortunetelling, parapsychology, witchcraft
• Words describing things we'd like to pretend that children don't know exist: alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, junk food, pornography, rap music
• Words that get people emotionally stirred up: abuse, cancer, catastrophes (tsunamis/hurricanes), crime, death, homelessness, poverty, slavery, terrorism, war

Yes -- in New York City schools, standardized tests can't mention slavery, terrorism, or war.

I wish I was making this up.  The powers-that-be in the New York City School District think that it is somehow acceptable to give children tests, and (worse) use those test scores to evaluate not only the children themselves, but their teachers, school administrators, and schools as a whole -- and never once ask a single question regarding war or sex, which are the two biggest drivers for human history I can think of.  We are successfully creating a school system that is so bland, mechanized, and PC that it merely labeling a word as "controversial" can get it banned from appearing on the test.  Did you know that "hunting" can't appear on standardized tests in New York City?

And don't even start with me about eliminating any mention of evolution.

You know, it pains me to say so, but I'm beginning to wonder if David Icke might have a point.  Not about the Archons; why would we need reptilian overlords to destroy public education, when the people we've elected to oversee it seem to be doing a damn good job of it without any alien intervention?