The attraction of fear

The question of the day is: why do people continue to support certifiable wackos long after their wacko status has been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt?

Yes, I know, it's when the wacko is espousing a view the wacko-supporter already believes.  But this brings up a deeper question; why do people want to believe ugly counterfactual nonsense?

Unsurprisingly, this topic comes up because of Alex Jones, who is somehow still out there broadcasting on InfoWars despite recently losing an appeal in the million dollar lawsuit for defamation and personal harm filed against him by parents who lost children in the Sandy Hook Massacre, which Jones described as a hoax and/or a false flag.

So you'd think that any credibility Jones had would be down the toilet, but apparently not.  In a story sent to me by my friend and fellow writer Dwayne Lanclos, whose blog The Critical Bible gives a fascinating lens into biblical history and archaeology, we find out that Jones is going strong and still as loony as ever.  Dwayne sent me a link to an article from Media Matters for America, which referenced the ongoing and increasingly bizarre determination by Donald Trump not to admit he made a silly mistake when he included Alabama in amongst states threatened by Hurricane Dorian.  Instead of doing what any normal person would have done -- chuckle and say, "whoa, that was a screw-up -- sorry" -- he not only acted like a toddler, stamping his feet and saying, "No, I was right!  I was right!", but produced a weather map he'd altered himself with a black sharpie as evidence, and weirdest of all, just yesterday tweeted a video of him with the altered map, combined with a cat chasing a laser pointer.

As an aside, how anyone can look at any of this behavior and not think, "Trump has lost his fucking marbles," I have no idea.  But so far, all that's happened is that Lindsay Graham made a statement in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News that "a third term is looking better and better."  And no, for the record, I didn't make that up.

Anyhow, Alex Jones decided to weigh in on the Hurricane Dorian/Alabama nonsense, and what he said you really should listen to (there's a video clip on the Media Matters link I posted above).  But in case you don't want to waste five minutes of your life you'll never get back again, here are the main points:

• Hurricane Dorian was directed by "weather weapons" to park over the Bahamas in an effort to discredit climate change denialists (whom Jones calls "realists").
• It was then directed toward Florida to threaten Mar-a-Lago and put Donald Trump at risk of financial loss.
• When Trump made his idiotic gaffe about Alabama, the people operating the "weather weapons" steered Dorian away from its original path to discredit him and make him look foolish.
• It's somehow significant that hurricanes usually originate with low-pressure cells in West Africa.  I have no idea why.

Now, to make it clear: I'm not really commenting on Jones, here.  It's yet to be established whether he believes all the conspiratorial horseshit he says, or if he's "an actor playing a role" (as his lawyer claimed in the custody case over Jones's children, which Jones ultimately lost).  And honestly, I don't really care which it is.

What concerns me are the folks who believe him, of which there is a sizable number to judge by the number of people calling in support during his show.  What in the hell can possibly be appealing about that viewpoint -- that there's some kind of vast conspiracy against Donald Trump, run by mythical people powerful enough to steer a category-5 hurricane?

Speaking of hurricanes, there's the statement by self-styled "Christian prophetess" Kat Kerr, who (1) claimed her prayers were shifting the hurricane's path, and (2) when that didn't work out so well, said that God destroyed the Bahamas on purpose.  Here's the exact quote:

The Bahamas got hit a lot. I am just gonna leak out a little information for you, that people may not even know about, but you need to know that a lot of the human trafficking goes on there, in that very place, and it’s being exposed, because God’s exposing stuff like that. 

… I’m not saying everyone on the island was involved in that, but that is a huge center, where a lot of people who are trapped in human trafficking, and those people doing it, are involved in a huge way, in the Bahamas, they use the Bahamas as part of their transport system… and they actually have tunnels — this is already gonna be in the news — they have tunnels where [they] file through there.  I think the tunnels were wiped out by the storm.

Which, now that I think of it, isn't so far off from a lot of genocidal shit God did in the Old Testament.

 But again, what I wonder is not about Kerr herself, because she's obviously a wingnut, but the people who hear this and go, "Yes, that makes sense!  Hallelujah!"  What could possibly be attractive about a god who destroys an entire fucking country to stop some human traffickers?

Then there's Rick Joyner, head of MorningStar Ministries, who says that Christians need to arm themselves because there's going to be a civil war, and they have to be ready to take out pretty much anyone who isn't a straight white conservative Christian:

We were meant to have militias throughout the country to defend our communities …  I think there is going to be a militia movement that unites and supports and is open about what they are doing and they are going to be trained and prepared to defend their communities. 

If Christians don’t get involved in things like that, [the] wrong people will get in,  Christians need to get in to set the course.  We’re not just going to attack other races; we’re here to defend and support.  Christians have to get engaged in it.  Jesus himself said, "There is a time to sell your coat and buy a sword."  That was the weapon of their day." 

We are entering a time for war and we need to mobilize.

So once again, I'm wondering who hears this, then looks around them and thinks, "Yup, that seems right to me."

Most blatant of all was the exchange between Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor of the New York Post and a devout conservative Catholic, and David French of the National Review, in which we find out that Ahmari believes Christians in the United States are literally in danger of being rounded up and killed.

Despite the fact that three-quarters of Americans consider themselves Christian, and Christians are the vast majority in every elected position in the country.

Ahmari said:

Now there are people who are called to [martyrdom], and they’ll face it when it happens, and they should.  And there are also religious people here … priests and so forth, who are called to this sort of heroic life.  But we shouldn’t want that for all Christians while we have political agency...  We should try to forestall the Colosseum.  So that means not Bernie Sanders.

And he wasn't talking about some kind of metaphorical martyrdom, e.g., being pushed out of majority status.  He actually thinks that if Trump doesn't win, we atheists are going to start rounding Christians up and shooting them in the street.

French, for his part, found the whole thing amusing, which it would be if people weren't taking it seriously -- and basing their actions, and their votes, on this kind of fear.   "Do you think Bernie Sanders would bring the Colosseum?" he said.  "He doesn’t even have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell."  But during the q-and-a period that followed their debate, it was obvious that yes, Ahmari thought that -- and so did some of the audience.  One woman said, "I think socialism is the Colosseum.  Rounding up Christians."

Which also shows that there are people who need a refresher on the definition of "socialism."

Fear is a powerful motivator, and heaven knows Fox News and the extreme right talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson have been pushing the fear-message for years: you're at risk, anyone different is evil, prepare to defend yourself, there are sinister forces at work.  And I suspect that part of it is that there is bad stuff in the world, a lot of it random, and it might be more comforting that there's a reason behind it all -- even if the reason is horrible -- than thinking that the universe is simply a chaotic place where sometimes awful things happen to good people.

But still.  I don't see why the people who listen to all of this stuff don't suddenly wake up one morning and go, "Man, this is a terrible thing to believe about my fellow human beings, and a terrible thing to believe about the deity I think controls everything."  But they don't.  Somehow, bafflingly, some folks respond by doubling down their support for a president who seems to be progressively losing his mind, conspiracy theories claiming that The Forces of Evil can steer a hurricane solely to discredit climate change deniers, fear talk about arming yourself against people of other beliefs and other races, a conviction that liberals want nothing more than to round up and kill Christians, and a view of God as a vindictive being who'll destroy several islands in the effort to take out a few bad guys.

And that I truly don't comprehend.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: science historian James Burke's Circles: Fifty Round Trips Through History, Technology, Science, and Culture.  Burke made a name for himself with his brilliant show Connections, where he showed how one thing leads to another in discoveries, and sometimes two seemingly unconnected events can have a causal link (my favorite one is his episode about how the invention of the loom led to the invention of the computer).

In Circles, he takes us through fifty examples of connections that run in a loop -- jumping from one person or event to the next in his signature whimsical fashion, and somehow ending up in the end right back where he started.  His writing (and his films) always have an air of magic to me.  They're like watching a master conjuror create an illusion, and seeing what he's done with only the vaguest sense of how he pulled it off.

So if you're an aficionado of curiosities of the history of science, get Circles.  You won't be disappointed.

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

Schadenfreude in the morning

I just found out that Alex Jones has lost his platforms on Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.  And although I fully support the right to free speech, my reaction was:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, sputter* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

The reason given is that he repeatedly broke their rules against hate speech and the incitement of violence.  The only thing surprising about this is how long it took them to act.  This is the man who claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre never occurred, that no children had been killed, and the parents were "crisis actors" hired by the Left to fake a mass murder.  The result was ongoing harassment of the grieving parents by idiots who believe everything that Jones says.  He said the same thing about the Parkland/Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, adding there that the teenage survivors were being paid by Democrats to agitate against the NRA -- because clearly, articulate and intelligent young people are not able to form opinions of their own without being bought off by cynical politicians.

Jones, who has run InfoWars for many years, has spouted this kind of bullshit for as long as I can remember.  (Check out RationalWiki if you'd like to see a concise list of the insane ideas he's touted on his show.)  People call him a "Right-wing conspiracy theorist," which is an all-too-kind euphemism for "liar."  I'm fully convinced Jones knows exactly what he's doing; he whips up controversy because it gets viewers, gets clicks on his website, gets customers to buy his "male-enhancement" pills (no, I'm not making this up).  If there was any doubt about the fact that he's a con man and not a true believer, it was removed when Jones's lawyer, during the custody trial between Jones and his ex-wife, said Jones was "a performance artist playing a character."  In one of the many lawsuits Jones has faced, the defense attorney said, "No reasonable person would believe what Jones says" -- implying that if people are hoodwinked, it's their own fault.

Maybe.  I am neither qualified, nor interested, in debating the finer points of law surrounding culpability.  All I can say is that giving Alex Jones fewer platforms for spreading his sewage is unequivocally a good thing.  And I'm happy to say that Jones himself is taking it in his usual measured, dignified, thoughtful fashion.  I saw a YouTube clip showing his reaction when he heard the news, and because he also lost his YouTube channel *brief pause to stop guffawing again* I can't post a link to it, so here's the next closest thing.

I think we can all agree that we want Alex to know we're sending him our thoughts and prayers.

I'm not expecting his banishment to have much effect on the fans of InfoWars, or at least not right away.  After all, his claim (and the claims of his lawyers) that he was an actor -- i.e., he didn't actually believe everything he was saying -- hardly made a dent.  But given that these people have the attention span of a gnat -- and, apparently, the IQ of one as well -- it shouldn't take long for them to forget all about Jones and tune into some other conspiracy-touting nutjob.  Maybe Sean Hannity.  Or Ann Coulter.  (She's still around, isn't she?  I keep waiting for someone to dump a bucket of water on her and make her melt.)

But a tremendous amount of the toxic garbage making its way into the narrative of the extreme Right can be traced back to Jones, and if this really is sayonara, I'm glad to see him go.  Notwithstanding that he has been a fertile source of topics for Skeptophilia -- I've lost track of the number of times he's appeared here -- anything we can do to reduce the pollution stream is a good thing.

So there's a little tasty schadenfreude to go with your morning coffee.  Given how desperate I've been for good news, it's nice to be able to pass along some.  I don't really think this means Alex Jones will shut up -- nothing could accomplish that -- but at least it may mean that fewer people will be listening.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The devil on my shoulder

Me, trying to find a topic for today's Skeptophilia post:  Hmm.  Let's see, what do we have in the news today.  *sips coffee*  Science news, political news, religious news...

Diabolical voice from on my left shoulder:  How about Alex Jones?

Me:  No, everyone knows that Alex Jones is a certifiable wingnut.  Why would I want to...

Diabolical voice:  No, really.  You need to check out what Alex Jones just said.

Me (scowling angrily):  Why?  Everything that comes out of the man's mouth is either complete lunacy, or a desperate plea for attention, or both.  It's total clickbait.  I don't want to...

Diabolical voice:  C'mon.  You know you want to.

Me:  I'm sure there are much better things for me to be reading, not to mention writing about.

Diabolical voice (alluringly):  Alexxxx Jonnnessss...

Me:  Well, I don't know, it seems like a waste of time, but maybe...

Diabolical voice (in a whisper):  Take the bait, little mouse... take the bait...

Me:  Oh, fine, I guess one quick look won't hurt me.

Alex Jones:  Atrazine does have the same effects in mammals as it has in frogs.  And it changes areas of the brain associated with the olfactory nerve.  That's the nose, my friend.  That's the part of your brain that hooks to your nose.  And everything else that make men feel attracted to other men...  The Pentagon developed a Atrazine-type spray that they would spray.  They tested it actually in Iraq.  That's classified but it was -- it got leaked.  You can pull it up.  Gay bomb!  They always take like a clip of me going gay bomb, baby!  And then I show BBC, but they cut the BBC, and it's basically a chemical cocktail, not just of Atrazine.  They add some other chemicals.  It's classified.  But the word is, it's like, what's ecstasy's compound?  I forgot.  MDMA!  They mix that with Atrazine and stuff.  And then they spray that on you and you'll start having sex with a fire hydrant...  I mean, the point is, is that sex is all based not even on visual, men it's mainly -- but it's smells with women particularly.  But they can flip that on.  It's like perfume.  You know, everybody knows about that?  Well, they've got weaponized perfumes, basically that will make men attracted to other men and they want you to do that so you don't have kids.

Me (eyes spinning):  Yes... gay bombs... weaponized sex perfumes... mixed with atrazine and stuff...  "olfactory" means "nose," my friend...  guys humping fire hydrants...  It all makes so much sense, now!

Diabolical voice:  See, isn't this better than some silly story about new advancements in science?

Me:  ... thank heaven for Alex Jones, for having figured all this out!  Otherwise I might have inhaled some atrazine mixed with MDMA, and suddenly gotten the hots for that guy who lives down the street, which would make my life all higgledy-piggledy!  And if he turned me down, I'd have to look for a fire hydrant!

Diabolical voice:  Lucky you have me around, isn't it?

Me:  Really lucky.

Diabolical voice:  Next up: Rudy Giuliani explains how being loudly booed at Yankee Stadium means everyone loves him.

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This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.

The post-truth world

The Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2016 was "post-truth."

The OED defines "post-truth" as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."  So here we are using the prefix "post" not to mean "following in time sequence" but "after the point where it becomes irrelevant."

The fact that this term was even coined is unsettling.  Have we really come to a place where demonstrable truth is less important than belief?  Where Daniel Patrick Moynihan's trenchant quip, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts" is not argued against so much as it is ignored into nonexistence?

Unfortunately, the answer to both of these questions appears to be "yes."  This is the alarming conclusion of research done by University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, of the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering, who decided to study how people use social networks to respond to disasters and ended up uncovering something deeply disturbing about our society.

Starbird's research started after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013.  She was sifting through tweets that followed the attack, and noticed that there were the expected calls for help and outcries by worried family members about the safety of their loved ones, but there was something else, something considerably darker.

"There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing," Starbird said, in an interview with Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times.  "It was real tinfoil-hat stuff.  So we ignored it."

She began to realize her error when she did the same sort of analysis of subsequent disasters.  "After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these strange clusters of activity," Starbird said.  "It was so fringe we kind of laughed at it...  That was a terrible mistake.  We should have been studying it."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So she threw herself into a study of the networks on the internet that involve conspiracy theorists and conspiracy websites -- InfoWars, Before It's News, NewsBusters, NoDisinfo, the misleadingly-named Veterans Today, and hundreds of others.  And what she found was horrifying; these interconnected webs of misinformation and bizarre speculation form a powerful force for spreading their message -- one that rivals the power of legitimate media.

"More people are dipping into this stuff than I had ever imagined," Starbird said, noting that InfoWars alone gets the same web traffic as the Chicago Tribune.

Interestingly, the websites she's studying don't follow any kind of definitive political alignment.  InfoWars, for example, is right-wing; The Free Thought Project is left-wing.  Instead, the unifying theme is anti-globalism and xenophobia, which can manifest irrespective of political leaning.

"To be antiglobalist often included being anti-mainstream media, anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-U.S. government, and anti-European Union," Starbird said.  And that can appeal to both sides of the political spectrum.

The most frightening thing of all is how insulated this network is from the truth.  Since there are now hundreds of these sites, the usual mantra -- cross-check your sources -- doesn't help you much.  "Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’ " she said.  "But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people.  If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it."

Which supports a contention I've had for years; once you've trained people to doubt facts, deluded them into thinking that the raw data has spin, you can convince them of anything.  After that, everything they look at is seen through the lens of suspicion, as if the information itself had an agenda, was trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

And I'm as at a loss as Starbird is about how to combat it.  Yes, teach critical thinking and media analysis in schools; yes, harp on comparing your sources to known reliable media before you tweet or post on Facebook.  But this spider's web of interconnected sites is remarkably well-insulated from attack.  Anyone who contradicts the party line is either a dupe or a shill; either they've "drunk the KoolAid" (to use the conspiracy theorists' favorite line) or they've actively sold out to the other side.

Once you've accepted that, there's no way out.

"I used to be a techno-utopian," Starbird told Westneat.  "Now I can’t believe that I’m sitting here talking to you about all this...  My fear is that we may be headed toward the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore... Alex Jones is a kind of prophet.  There really is an information war for your mind.

"And we’re losing it."

Fake news filter

New from the Unintentional Irony department, we have: Alex Jones of InfoWars is launching an effort to combat fake news on the internet.

Yes, the same man who thinks that the Moon landing was staged.  Who had a meltdown, complete with sobbing, on-air because he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win, and "she is the Antichrist."  Who claimed that the U.S. government was adding chemicals to juice boxes to "turn children gay."  Who promotes something called "horny goat weed" to enhance male virility.

I bet you thought I was going to say "okay, I made the last one up."  Ha, shows you what you know.  Also shows you how completely batshit insane Alex Jones is.

"We are launching a fake news analysis center to combat lies and fake stories being pushed by the mainstream media," Jones said in his radio show this week.  "What’s happening is very, very simple.  Mainstream dinosaur discredited media that have fake pollsters and fake media analysts and all the disinformation that’s been totally repudiated and proven to be a lie — they weren’t wrong, they were congenital liars on purpose — they're now desperate attempt is to flood the web through third-party sites they control with so much fake news and disinformation that it discredits the entire web itself, and then they will preside over the false flag they’ve staged and claim that they can only be trusted."

It's not that I don't think that fake news is a problem, as anyone who read my post from two days ago knows.  It's more that putting Jones in charge of deciding what constitutes disinformation is a little like the Scientologists running a cult awareness help center.

Oh, wait.  They did that.

Interesting too that in the same radio show, Jones made the claim that "three million votes in the U.S. presidential election were cast by illegal aliens, according to Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organization.  If true, this would mean that Donald Trump still won the contest despite widespread vote fraud and almost certainly won the popular vote.  'We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens,' tweeted Phillips after reporting that the group had completed an analysis of a database of 180 million voter registrations."

Phillips himself is no newcomer to such claims.  In 2013 he claimed in an article in Breitbart that the 2012 election was "the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world."  Funny, then, that independent non-partisan poll monitoring agencies have found no instances of voter fraud in either the 2012 or 2016 elections.  The only "voting irregularities" this time around were caused by machine failures and human error, and amounted to less than a thousand votes nationwide -- i.e., not enough to make a difference.

But that doesn't fit the narrative that the government is being run by an evil cadre of all-powerful Illuminati who will do anything to stay in power.  So Phillips is right, q.e.d.

So anyhow, it's oddly reassuring that Alex Jones isn't going to give up his loony version of reality just because his Golden Boy (or Orange Boy, as the case may be) is now the president elect.  And the fact that he's set himself up as the arbiter of what's real and what's fake is perhaps unsurprising.  We can look forward to many more missives from InfoWars about the "mainstream dinosaur discredited media," so I guess that means I will be tirelessly pursuing stories for Skeptophilia for a while longer.  Especially once this "horny goat weed" starts to kick in.

Apocalypse whenever

I have an update for those of you who are worried about when the world is going to end, or civilization is going to fall, which honestly would happen anyhow if the world ended.

This update comes from sources that conveniently ignore the fact that previous predictions of the world's end have had a 100% failure rate.  Every time we're told that an asteroid is going to end it all, or the Rapture is going to happen, or the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons are going to run roughshod over the populace, what happens is...

... nothing.  Civilization, or what passes for it these days, just keeps bumbling along as usual.  There are no death comets, no killer plagues, no Second Comings of Deities.  All of which I find reassuring but at the same time vaguely disappointing, because I live in the middle of rural upstate New York and we could really use some excitement around here most days.

Of course, a batting average of zero isn't enough to discourage these folks.  This time it's gonna happen, cross our hearts and hope to die in horrible agony when the Earth explodes.

First, we have the Nibiru cadre, who have been predicting the arrival of Nibiru for decades, kind of like what happened in Waiting for Guffman but not nearly as funny.  This time, though, we can say for sure that Nibiru is approaching because there's going to be a "Blood Moon" (better known to those of us who aren't insane as a lunar eclipse).  Yes, I know that lunar eclipses happen every year, but this one is different.  Don't ask me how.

According to an article in Express, the fabled tenth planet is due to arrive any time now, and has been captured in a video.  Not a NASA video, mind you.  A video taken by an anonymous YouTube subscriber, which as we all know is a highly reliable source of scientific research.

"And now," writes the author of the article, Jon Austin, "conspiracy theorists have somehow tied it in with the infamous blood moon events of a year ago that appears [sic] to be happening again."

What?  Those events of last year wherein nothing happened?  Ah, yes, I remember thinking at the time, "Heaven help us all if this happens again!  Scariest non-events I've ever seen!"

According to this bizarre view of how the world in general, and astronomy in particular, works, the "blood moons" aren't caused by the Earth's shadow.  Nope.  The Nibiroonies have "now tried to tie together the two myths and even claim it is the shadow of Nibiru causing the blood moons."

Because it's not like if there was a planet near enough, and big enough, to cast a giant shadow over the moon, NASA would notice it, or anything.

Then we have the revelation that Obama and his evil henchmen are planning a scheme to destroy America and take down other major world governments along with it.  According to the site What Does It Mean?, the president and his collaborators have a Cunning Plan to unleash upon us, despite the fact that the guy only has five months left in office, so if he really has been intending to destroy the United States, he's gotten off to an awfully slow start.

But no, the article says, he's palling up with Hillary Clinton, who apparently rivals Obama himself for being the embodiment of pure evil.  And they've teamed up with the people who run Google for a conspiracy trifecta to accomplish the following:

1.) [D]isabling of advertisements on all websites critical of the Obama-Clinton regime, including the globally popular Antiwar.com, in order to destroy them.

2.) Deleting Donald Trump from the search list of candidates running for the US presidency. 

3.) Developing and employing a filter so that the name Donald Trump won’t even show up on anyone’s computer device or smart phone.

4.) Hiding in their search results information relating to Hillary Clinton’s health and the massive numbers of suspicions deaths associated with her.

5.) Being supported in their hiding Hillary Clinton health information by the New York Times, with one of their insiders admitting what they’re doing.

Myself, I would be thrilled if something would prevent my ever having to look at a photograph of Donald Trump again.  If that's what the conspiracy's about, I'm all for it.

And as evidence for all of this, they cite...

... InfoWars.  Yes, Alex Jones, who despite having a screw loose is still considered by some to have inside information about the plots that are running rampant in our government, but which never seem to accomplish a damn thing.

It's sort of like the "Obama's coming for your guns" thing you hear all the time from the far-right.  I mean, dude had eight years to take all our guns, and as a nation we're still as heavily armed as ever.  And the contentions that Obama's a radical Muslim.  Really?  He drinks beer, eats bacon, doesn't fast during Ramadan, and supports LGBT rights.  If the guy is a Muslim, he's the worst Muslim ever.

Last, we've got the weird coincidence of three separate lightning strikes that killed hundreds of reindeer (in Norway) and cattle (in the US), and which is said to be HAARP gearing up for a major strike on the populated places of the earth.  Add this to the fact that there's a hurricane in Florida as we speak, because that's not common or anything.  HAARP has done all this as a sort of test run, and next thing we know, there'll be earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and the works, and civilization will have no other choice besides giving up and collapsing.

What's funniest about all of this is that just last week, the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, which now owns HAARP, had an open house last week wherein they invited anyone with questions or suspicions to stop by for a tour of the place so they can see what it actually does, which is to study high-altitude atmospheric phenomena.  I coulda told them this strategy wouldn't work; if you demonstrate conclusively to the conspiracy theorists that HAARP was a harmless scientific study facility, they will either (1) tell you that the real HAARP had been moved elsewhere, or (2) that you are only saying this because you are under the influence of a mind-control beam, which is one of the things HAARP is supposedly able to do.  So you can't win.  These are people who think a lack of evidence is evidence.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Three ways in which we will almost certainly not be meeting the fall of civilization as we know it.  It's kind of anticlimactic, really.  We're moving into autumn, here in the northeast.  School's starting, the days are getting shorter, and we soon will be battening down the hatches for cold weather.  Myself, I think an apocalypse would be a nice change of pace.  I'm not in favor of wholesale destruction, mind you, but a minor catastrophe or two would go a long way toward alleviating the monotony.

Scooby Doo vs. Jade Helm

For the past seven years, we've heard over and over that President Obama is planning on taking away our guns, outlawing Christianity, rounding True Americans up into FEMA- run death camps, and establishing a fascist dictatorship.

I think if my American readers will take a moment to look around them, they can confirm for themselves that none of this has happened.

You would think that a zero-percent success rate at predicting the future would induce some of the loonies who have been spouting this nonsense to reconsider their arguments.  You would think that if, after seven years, there's been no sign of a Liberal Gestapo forming, people would say, "Wow.  I guess I was wrong about all of that.  What a goober I am."

You would be wrong.

New from the "No, really!  Listen!  This time it's real!" department, we have the contention that Jade Helm 15, a military operation in the southwestern United States, is a cover for the impending takeover of Texas.

Why Texas?  Well, insofar as you can ask any kind of logical question about this claim, apparently Texans think that it's because they're the last bastion of patriotism, and Obama wants to shut 'em down.  Or something like that.  Bastrop, Texas resident Bob Wells summarized the idea thusly:

It’s the same thing that happened in Nazi Germany: You get the people used to the troops on the street, the appearance of uniformed troops and the militarization of the police.  They’re gathering intelligence.  That’s what they’re doing.  And they’re moving logistics in place for martial law.  That’s my feeling.  Now, I could be wrong.  I hope I am wrong.  I hope I’m a 'conspiracy theorist.'

The unspoken punch line, of course, was "But I'm not."  And all of this is despite the efforts of military leaders to quell the panic.  Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria was sent in to a public meeting to clarify what was going on and answer any questions, and he was met with this sign:

[image courtesy of photographer Jay Janner and the Austin American-Statesman]

Lastoria soldiered on despite the crazy-talk.  No, there wouldn't be soldiers running around gunning down innocent civilians.  The whole thing was pre-planned to take place in remote areas, and they'd made a map available of where the operation was occurring.  Soldiers participating in the activity would be wearing orange armbands, so that anyone who saw them would know who they were and what they were doing.

The whole thing, Lastoria said, was to train soldiers in how to work in hostile areas.  They were not implying that Texas was a hostile area.

Although he may well have changed his mind on that point after the meeting.

And of course, such a claim wouldn't be complete without Alex Jones fanning the flames.  Jones, who amazingly enough is still on the air even though he (1) has been batting zero, prediction-wise, for decades, and (2) apparently has three-quarters of a pound of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain, opined thusly on his broadcast InfoWars:

[Some] eerie footage out of Fort Lauderdale shows troops conducting a martial law-style drill under the cover of night training to intern citizens.  The secretive drill directly dovetails with the Jade Helm military exercises, in which 1,200 special forces troops will descend on ten US states for domestic training...  I happen to have met the governor when he was attorney general years ago. I happen to know, somewhat, his chief of staff. I happen to know multiple billionaires that know the governor very well and have had dinner with him and he’s stayed at their house, and they tell me he knows exactly what’s going on...  Texas is listed as a hostile sector. Of course we are. We're here defending the republic.

And apparently this ties into a claim that they're using abandon Wal-Mart stores as operational headquarters.

Oh, and people have seen said Wal-Marts being filled with empty coffins, for when the military launches their actual plan and starts slaughtering people.

You know, I'm perfectly willing to believe that our government has sponsored some pretty shady deals, and I'm sure that we don't know 5% of what is actually going on.  Fine.  But if there really was some kind of super-secret plan to stage a military takeover of Texas as a means for establishing a dictatorship in the United States, do you really think that:

1. They'd hold question-and-answer sessions to tell everyone about it?
2. They'd publish a map telling people where the operation was taking place?
3. A certifiable wingnut like Alex Jones would correctly figure out what's happening?
4. The participants would take the amazingly covert and secretive step of wearing orange arm bands, for fuck's sake?

And you'd also think that after years of claiming that the United States was going to go down in flames, and being wrong every time, that no one would be listening to Alex Jones any more.

But the way these things work is that the people who rant about them think, afterwards, when nothing untoward happened, that it was only their bravery and selflessness in speaking up that stopped the evil government from succeeding in their evil plans.  You can almost hear the government leaders saying, "Drat!  We'd have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids and your stupid dog!"

You can't win.

Battle of the wingnuts

Today, in the "More the Merrier" department, we have a story that involves Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Cliven Bundy, Gandhi, Jesse Ventura, President Obama, and tangentially, Natural News.  How can we go wrong?

The whole thing started a year ago, when Beck called Jones out on his media outlet The Blaze for acting like he was batshit crazy, and yet calling himself a "sane conservative."  Beck was especially incensed by liberal commentator Piers Morgan's interviewing Jones on the topic of gun control, and thereby making it look like Jones was the face of conservatism.  "Unsurprisingly, Jones made a fool of himself," Beck wrote, "giving the left the poster boy for their attempts to paint every logical conservative as an extremist nut job."

Well, Jones wasn't going to stand for that kind of talk, and this started a game of loony one-upmanship to see who could launch the wildest attack against the other.  Things really took off with the Cliven Bundy standoff this spring, in which Beck (surprisingly) took a stand against Bundy and his "sovereign citizen" wackos, and Jones blew up.  He called Beck a "Judas goat" (whatever the fuck that is) for not supporting Bundy's fight against the United States government, and later, referred to Beck as a "Benedict Arnold."

This led Beck to state, "I'm not going to respond to Alex Jones any more... he has his platform, and people who listen to him, and that's fine."

But the battle was far from over.  With Jones, the battle is never over.  So dear readers, pop yourself some popcorn, and sit back, cause shit's about to get real.

This week, Jones released what he calls a "huge story."  Not only is Beck a "Judas goat" and a "Benedict Arnold," he's... get ready...

... working for President Obama.

*gasp of horror*

Here's the introduction to the video:

David Knight joins Alex to discuss the accusation Glenn Beck recently made claiming that Alex is dangerous.  Beck claims Alex knowingly edited Cliven Bundy’s statements and wants a violent revolution to occur.  Any occasional listener to the show can testify to, Alex is neither about a violent revolution nor was he covering up Bundy’s remarks. 

After all the attacks that Beck launches towards Alex and Infowars.com its [sic] becoming very obvious that Beck isn’t taking the queues [sic] from the SPLC or other groups like that, He’s writing the talking points.  Evidence thus far is suggesting that Glenn Beck IS a white house [sic] operative!

Right.  Glenn Beck is a White House operative.  The man who, just this summer, said that President Obama was "about to snap and start rounding up conservatives and putting them into death camps."

But the real fun starts in the video itself, which I strongly recommend all of you watch (it's on the link above).  I will warn you against drinking anything while watching it, though, and be forewarned that I will not be held responsible for any damage to your computer that might occur if you fail to heed these words.

In case you don't have the time or inclination to watch what amounts to sixteen minutes of an insane man going "Woogie woogie woogie woogie pfthththptptptptptpt," I present to you some highlights:

"This isn't about Beck, this is about what's going to happen when the globalists blow up another Oklahoma City building and try to start a new war...  I do not want to hear that I want a violent revolution so that when the feds blow up another Oklahoma City, I get the blame." 

"I don't attack Glenn Beck when he says horrible things about me.  I mean, he said I have sex with Charlie Sheen in showers, folks." 

"What'll happen?  Well, Alex Jones has been arrested, and Ron Paul just died of a stroke, wink wink, and I think it's normal that he died of a stroke, he was old, and Rand Paul just was in a car wreck, his back's broken, and Alex Jones was in a shootout with cops, and they took him out." 

"This guy, this guy probably meets with Obama!" 

"We wouldn't cover this if it was just Glenn Beck saying this, but he's saying White House talking points, Media Matters talking points that he originated.  So for anyone who's trained in tracking PsyOps and stuff, now it all clicked for me.  Why he says I want him arrested and put in a camp.  He said that a week and a half ago, we played the bizarre clip.  Why he says I want violence, why he says InfoWars wants violence.  Why we were covering up the racism of Cliven Bundy.  We were there in hours and uncovered it, the way it was spun is terrible.  We're all about fighting racism, here."

But if you like inadvertent humor, the best moment came about twelve minutes in, when Jones and his pal David Knight were discussing a quote that Knight had used:  "First they assassinate your character, and then they assassinate you."  Knight said he thought the quote originated with Jesse Ventura.

"No," Jones said.  "Actually, I think it was Gandhi."

Yup.  Easy to see how you could get Jesse "The Body" Ventura confused with Mohandas Gandhi.  Understandable mistake.

Oh, and for the record, neither Ventura nor Gandhi ever said any such thing, as far as I can find.

So that's the latest salvo between Beck and Jones, each one seeing who can out-wacko whom.

But I haven't shown you the Natural News tie-in, yet!  Just this week, as if on cue, we had a repost over at the wonderful subreddit r/conspiratard of a "Sheeple Quiz" written by Mike Adams, who may be in hot contention with Beck and Jones for who is the biggest nutjob.  You must take a look at it.  (Important warning: every time you answer "B," your name gets boosted higher on the list of people who are being considered for FEMA death camps.)

So there you have it.  Today's dip in the deep end.  Myself, I'm waiting for Beck's rebuttal, which should be epic.  However he says that he's not going to talk about Alex Jones any more, I can't imagine him taking this lying down.  I mean, having sex in the shower with Charlie Sheen is one thing, but insinuations of meeting with President Obama are just crossing the line.

Katy of the Illuminati

As a blogger, I get some funny spam sometimes.

The one recently that made me laugh the hardest was an email invitation to join the Illuminati, which I include below, verbatim:

WELCOME TO THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ILLUMINATI.
Are you a business man, politician, musical, student
and you want to be rich, powerful and be famous in life.
You can achieve your dreams by beaning [sic] a member of
the illuminati. With this all your dreams and heart
desire can be fully accomplish, if you really want to be a member of the great illuminati then you can contact
destinysmart11@gmail.com or call+2348104933655

My favorite part was that I could achieve my dreams by beaning a member of the Illuminati, because honestly, that seems to have no downside that I can see.

The whole ultra-secret conspiracy worldview, wherein the puppet strings are being pulled by some super-powerful cadre of initiates and adepts, is a popular trope of fiction.  It's part of the universe of The X Files; it was a theme in just about every one of David Lynch's movies and television shows; it was a central plot element in Umberto Eco's amazing novel Foucault's Pendulum.

But still, there's that important word "fiction" there that a lot of people don't seem to focus on.

Which is why I'm reasonably certain that pop singer Katy Perry is trolling the gullible in her latest publicity stunt, in which she is saying that she'd like to join the Illuminati herself.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole thing started, unsurprisingly, with Alex Jones, who at this point should probably not be allowed outside unsupervised.  Following Perry's performance of her song "Dark Horse" at this year's Grammy Awards, Jones commented that it amounted to "an Illuminati priestess conduct(ing) a witchcraft ceremony in front of the entire world."

Well, far be it from an entertainer to lose an opportunity like that.  Following Brendan Behan's dictum that there is no such thing as bad publicity, Perry stirred up things further in an interview last week with Rolling Stone.

"If the Illuminati exist, I would like to be invited," Perry said.  "I see all that shit and I’m like: 'Come on, let me in! I want to be in the club.'"

Indeed.  If I could be part of a magical secret society that had the key to the ultimate power of the universe, I'd want in, too, notwithstanding the fact that there's no particular reason the Illuminati would want a 50-something science nerd with no other obvious qualifications as a member.

That she was trolling Jones et al. became apparent later in the interview, though.  "It sounds crazy," Perry admitted.  "Weird people on the internet that have nothing to do find, like, strange triangles in your hand motions...  I guess you’ve made it when they think you’re in the Illuminati.  But I believe in aliens, so if people want to believe in Illuminati, great."

Which is the right attitude, all things considered.  But honestly, if there is any truth to this, I doubt that getting in would be as easy as making a specific hand gesture in public, or responding to a spam email.  Because, you know, if the Illuminati exist, they're probably a little more thoughtful about their admission policies than that.  What I find endlessly funny about Alex Jones and his followers is that they think the world is being run by people who are super-intelligent and secretive and evil, and simultaneously so stupid that their identities and motives could be figured out by a clown like Alex Jones.

But just for the record, if I'm wrong, and there are any Illuminati reading this, I just made a triangular hand motion, so I'm expecting my Welcome Letter to arrive in the mail this week.  Does being an Illuminatus give you discounts at restaurants?  You know, like AARP?  If so, I think it's worth it just for that alone.

There's this thing called "reality." You might want to check it out.

As a blogger who focuses continually on the crazy ideas people have, you'd think that after a while, I'd either (1) become cynical, (2) give up, or (3) devolve into what Robert Chazz Chute, the interviewer who chatted with me on the Cool People Podcasts, called "being a dick to dumb people."

I'd like to think that I avoid that trilemma most of the time.  But every once in a while, I run into something that makes me want to jump up and down and scream, "How in the hell can you believe this?  Are you a moron?  Or what?"  But I refrain from doing this, because usually I write in the early morning, and I don't want to wake up my wife.  Also, I own a nervous, neurotic border collie, who reacts to any stressful situations by peeing on the floor, so I'd like to avoid that if at all possible.

Just today, though, I ran into not one, but two stories that had that effect on me.

Now, note in each case, it's not the originator of the story that I want to yell at.  There are many loony people in the world, and it's well within their rights to publish their loony ideas online.  However, it is (in my opinion) beholden upon the rest of us to say, in as gentle a fashion as possible, "There, there, now.  Don't get yourself all worked up.  Just have a nice cup of cocoa and take a nap, and you'll feel better."

That is, of course, not what happened.  In each of these cases, the "comments" section filled up immediately with people who not only didn't argue with the person in question, they agreed.  They considered the wingnut's ideas logical.  They praised the courage of the originators for taking such a controversial stance.

Not one comment -- not one -- said, "Hey.  Reality.  It's over here.  You might want to give it a look."

Let's start with Starre Vartan, a writer for the Mother Nature Network, who wrote an opinion piece decrying public schools' abandonment of teaching children cursive.  Now, I myself am very much in favor of getting rid of cursive, largely because I never really managed well with cursive myself.  My cursive writing looks a little like the Elvish script from The Lord of the Rings, as written by an Elf with a severe disorder of the central nervous system.  I can't read my own cursive writing.  I don't know how anyone else would manage.

But Ms. Vartan is all up in arms over losing cursive.  Why, you might ask?  Is it because it's a valuable skill having to do with improving hand/eye coordination?  Is it because it's a fine old tradition that deserves to be continued?  Is it because, done properly, it is beautiful and artistic?

Nope.  None of the above.  Ms. Vartan believes that cursive is being abandoned...

... because there is some sort of a conspiracy to render children incapable of reading the Constitution.

She states, "It's near-impossible to read cursive if you can't write it," which certainly isn't true in my case, and honestly, is almost certainly untrue in general.  Generating script (productive language) and deciphering script (receptive language) aren't even done in the same parts of the brain, for cryin' in the sink; there's no reason to believe that even a person who has never written cursive in his life wouldn't be perfectly capable of being taught to read it.  As far as the governmental connection, she quotes Michael Sull: "There are so many children today who can't even read cursive writing, let alone write it.  They'll never be able to read anything that was written in the 19th century.  They won't be able to read the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or anything written during the Civil War.  They're missing an entire portion of our country's history."

Because, of course, those documents don't exist in any other forms besides the cursive original.  Like, online, or in high school history texts, or anything.

Now, as I said, Ms. Vartan is perfectly within her rights to post her opinion, just as I do here in my blog.  But what I found appalling was that no one in the comments section even points out what were, to me, completely obvious broken links in the logical chain.  The comments virtually all began with phrases like, "What a good point!"  (There were two, in fact, that stated that the commenters had gone to school in Italy and Romania, respectively, and that they had learned cursive in grade school, and how much better the schools were there because of that.)

The second example came from none other than Alex Jones, who is so far gone on the wingnut spectrum that I am frankly stunned when he can say anything more coherent than "woogie woogie woogie pfththtptptptptptppt."  Jones has had a lot to say about Syria lately, most of which has contained the words "false flag" and has made no sense whatsoever, not that anyone should really find that surprising.  But he really outdid himself yesterday.  Here's what he said:

But it’s the globalists here running my life, that’s why they’re my front-and-center problem.  Because they are the biggest, most organized, eugenics-based, scientific dictatorship, trans-humanists at the top that plan the extinction of almost everybody and a new species to rise up or humans merged with machines.

That’s their religion, and no one’s discussing that.  Everyone is going to be deindustrialized, everyone is going to be put back into the Stone Age and controlled.  And Obama and the globalists and the robber barons, they’re going to fly around in their jetcopters and their Air Forces Ones and their red carpets, like gods above us.  And they’re going to get the life-extension technologies.

So the contention is that President Obama is in cahoots with various corporate leaders to kill most of us and return the rest of us to "the Stone Age," while they become immortal cyborgs who ride around on red carpets.

You know, it's an amazing day when someone can make the writings of L. Ron Hubbard appear sane.

And once again, how did people respond, on Jones' site InfoWars?  Here is a sampling (spelling and grammar are as written):

I've said it before and I'll say it again; How can we blame our government for supporting terrorists when WE are still supporting terrorists IN OUR GOVERNMENT??

I know people are afraid to believe, REFUSE to believe we've already been overthrown, but its true. There is no risk of it happening, it already has. We are wading through the changes one decade at a time. Changes happen slowly for a reason. Hitler did what he did overnight, and almost didnt fail.. Youre going to tell me people with the same ideas dont exist today? That your going to wake up and be in a completely different country one morning? They are going as slow as they have to to make it work, and I assure you all of their players are in place. There are thousands of people who do nothing with their lives but figure out how to implement a unified luciferian control over the globe. And MILLIONS who are indirectly doing work for said goal and dont even realize it.

These fckrs are planning more evil, something big too. Ya'll think they are just going to roll over and admit their defeat and wrongdoings? When most wake up, their pants will be around their ankles wondering WTF happened.

Alex Jones the Illuminati owned and run shill designed to discredit the Patriot Movement and keep it in the dark as to the real and obvious cause of their oppression.

Okay.  Give me a moment, here, to get my blood pressure back down.

There.  Somewhat better now.  In my calmer moments, I am willing to consider that the people who respond to stories like these do not represent a good sampling of the American public.  For one thing, most clear-thinking people probably wouldn't bother to take the time to register on a site so they can comment on a story that is obviously ridiculous; said clear-thinkers probably have better things to do, such as actually having jobs and families and lives.  Also, there's the possibility -- certain, I think, in Jones' case -- that dissenters, especially those like myself who would be likely to refer to Jones as a "raving whackjob," would be blocked from posting on the site in short order.

So I live in hope that what we're seeing in these comments is not a representative sampling of the opinions, and intelligence level, of the American citizenry.  And that hope will keep me posting here.  Cynicism is, after all, not a happy spot.  As my dad used to say: "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right."