Liars and truthers

Words matter.

People with a commitment to the truth should demand that media and politicians make their statements using unambiguous language, and not hesitate to call them out when they don't.  Obfuscation is the next best thing to telling outright untruths; it misleads and confuses just as much.  Which, no doubt, is what was intended.

It's why my blood pressure spikes every time I hear how the media usually deals with the blatant falsehoods spoken by Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  They're not "alternate facts," not "opinions," not "differing interpretations."  They're lies.  And we should not waver in identifying them as such.

But the word I want to address today is "truther."  It's been appended to the loony claims of most of the current conspiracy theories.  We have 9/11 "truthers," Sandy Hook "truthers," flat Earth "truthers."  And it's a word the media, and everyone else, needs to stop using.  These people are not only not speaking the truth, they have no interest in the truth whatsoever.  All they want is to bend the facts to fit their warped view of how the world should work.  Any evidence that doesn't fit their claims is ignored, argued away, or labeled as a fabrication.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This comes up because of a pair of self-identified "truthers" who were arrested a couple of days ago for harassing the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, Frank Pomeroy.  This is doubly horrific; not only did Pomeroy have to deal with the massacre last November of his parishioners by shooter Devin Kelley, Pomeroy's fourteen-year-old daughter was killed in the tragedy.

But to people like Jodi Mann and Robert Ussery, this is just more fuel for the fire.  The "Deep State" engineered the event, they said, during which no one was actually killed.  Grieving friends and family members were played by "crisis actors."  The whole thing was staged to turn people against supporting the Second Amendment, which is the first step toward confiscating all guns and the government imposing martial law.

And the Sutherland Springs massacre isn't the only thing Mann and Ussery claim didn't happen.  According to Ussery and Mann's website, Side Thorn, neither did the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Boston Marathon, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and the Jason Aldean concert in Las Vegas.  All of them were complete fabrications.

This belief has led them to do things that any sane person would consider completely incomprehensible.  In the case of Pastor Pomeroy, the pair spray-painted "The Truth Will Set You Free" on a poster put up for friends of the pastor's slain daughter to sign.  Ussery and Mann demanded proof from her father that the girl even existed, demanding to see her birth certificate or other evidence that she wasn't -- as they claimed -- an invention of the media.  Ussery, Pomeroy said, repeatedly followed him around screaming threats, including one that he was going to "hang Pomeroy from a tree and pee on him while he's hanging."

So finally, the pair have been arrested for harassment.  Fortunately.  They've also sent threatening notes to the students-turned-activists who survived the Stoneman Douglas shooting.  They are, they said, actors, and the shooting was "100% a staged drill."

One of the students, Cameron Kasky, has responded to this allegation with his characteristic humor and grace, tweeting, "Anyone who saw me in last year's production of Fiddler on the Roof should know that no one would pay me for my acting."

The problem is, that's not going to stop Ussery and Mann and others like them.  These people are on a crusade, and welcome being arrested as a chance to give their lunacy a public forum.  But what prompted me to write this was not the craziness of an obviously false claim.

It's that the media has been consistently calling Ussery and Mann "truthers."

No, they are not truthers.  They are either delusional or else are outright and blatant liars.  They are promoting a dangerous conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact, and besides that, are attacking grieving family and friends of people who were victims of mass murderers.  There is no "truth" about this at all.

It's a deranged false claim, and the people promoting it are guilty of threats and harassment.  Pure and simple.

We need to stop soft-pedaling things.  It gains nothing, and in this case, subtly lends credence to people who do not deserve it.  The media -- and by extension, we who consume it -- need to be unhesitating in labeling a lie as such.

That is how you become a "truther."

Trump of Finland

So you know about the ongoing nonsense regarding whether Barack Obama was born on American soil?  The "Birther Truther" foolishness still plagues us here in the United States, even though Obama only has a little less than a year left of his presidency, and amazingly enough hasn't turned the White House into a mosque or ceded the country to Kenya or any of the hundreds of other silly things these people claimed.

And of course, being a fact-free conspiracy, when the Show Us The Birth Certificate cadre were actually shown the birth certificate, they responded by claiming that it was a forgery.  Other "evidence" began to be trotted out, such as an alleged 1981 Columbia University identification card under the name "Barry Soetoro" with Obama's photograph, which says, in large unfriendly letters, "FOREIGN STUDENT."

This claim has been roundly debunked, of course.  The bar-coded ID card format wasn't even adopted by Columbia until 1996.  The individual who was issued the ID number shown turns out to be one Thomas Lugert, a Columbia student in 1998 who is white and looks nothing like President Obama.  But as I've said before: facts don't matter to these people.  If they have a claim they can shriek about, they'll shriek even louder if you show them why it can't possibly be true.

And you may recall that one of the leaders of the Barack-Born-In-Kenya model of reality was none other than Donald Trump.  As recently as July of last year, Trump was asked for his opinion on whether Obama was born in the United States, and he replied, "I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records."  Except, of course, for the fact that Obama did release his records.  It's just that conspiracy wackos don't become conspiracy wackos by falling for little tricks like hard evidence, and also that being Donald Trump means never having to admit you were wrong about anything.

The reason this all comes up, and what makes it kind of hilarious in a twisted way, is that there is a guy who is mounting a one-person campaign...

... to prove that Trump himself was born in Finland.

According to this guy, Donald Trump was born "Rögnvaldr Trømp," a name that immediately reminded me of the bit in the opening credits of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail that had lines like, "Mööse chöreögraphed by Hörst Pröt III."  And being something of a language geek, I was also struck by the fact that "Rögnvaldr Trømp" doesn't look like a Finnish name at all, but more like a bizarre hybrid of Norwegian and Icelandic.

But the lunacy doesn't end there.  According to the blogger in question -- whose name I wasn't able to find anywhere on the site, presumably because he's afraid that if he is ever identified, black-clad Finnish operatives are going to take him out for blowing the whistle -- the whole thing came from "sources close to the Clintons."  These "sources," he says, are certain that if Trump gets elected, he's going to sell us out to the "Euroleftists."  But best of all was a paragraph a little further down that I have to quote in toto, because just describing it would not give you the full impact of how truly wonderful it is:

According to Eurotech magnate Linus Torvalds, on whose Lapland estate Tromp and Princess Ivana are reported to own a summer home, the Congressman takes "an active hand" in the governance of his native Finland. Torvalds, head of pro-piracy tech firm Lindex, says that he "sees [Tromp] as a brother--no, a hellittelysana (Here he used a Finnish term of endearment which translates roughtly [sic] to 'solstice-father-brother') who has done more for Finlandia than any other man could dream."

Okay.  So it's "Linux," not "Lindex."  "Lindex" sounds like a spray cleaner you'd use for getting the dust off of computer monitor screens.  And hellittelysana isn't a Finnish term of endearment, it's the word that means "term of endearment."  So it'd be a little odd if someone called Trump that.  It'd be as if I said to Ted Cruz, "You are a complete and total epithet!"

So the whole thing is kind of ridiculous, although I have to admit that it's wonderful for the humorous irony value.  I doubt anyone will take it as seriously as the Obama birther thing was -- showing, perhaps, that Trump's opponents have a lot better critical thinking skills than his followers do.  But even if it never gains traction, I thought it merited a shout-out as being one of the most purely weird conspiracy theories I've ever run across.

And given how many conspiracy theories I've run through here in Skeptophilia, that by itself is worthy of note.

Over the moon

There are some woo-woo ideas that will never die.

I don't care how far-fetched they are, how many times skeptics debunk them, they will still show up over and over again.  These things are like the woo-woo version of a deerfly in summer, buzzing around your head no matter how often you slap it away.

Such is the "faked Moon landing" thing.  It's the tiredest, oldest trope from the conspiracy theory mindset, and I thought that the people who buy into such things had moved on to bigger and better conjectures, such as claiming that every time something bad happens, it's a "false flag" to distract us from... um, even worse things that the government is allegedly hiding from us.

So it was with a weary sort of surprise that I saw the claim resurface not once, but twice, lately.  In the first rehashing, we hear that there has been a video of Stanley Kubrick released in which he admits that he filmed the Moon landing shots -- i.e., they were sound-stage fakes filmed in Hollywood.

In the video, Kubrick is allegedly being interviewed by filmmaker T. Patrick Murray, and says the following:

Kubrick: I perpetrated a huge fraud on the American public, which I am now about to detail, involving the United States government and NASA, that the Moon landings were faked, that the Moon landings ALL were faked , and that I was the person who filmed it. 

Murray: Ok. (laughs) What are you talking ... You're serious. Ok. 

Kubrick: I'm serious. Dead serious. Yes, it was fake. 

Murray: Why are you telling the world? Why does the world need to know that the Moon landings aren't real and you faked them? 

Kubrick: I consider them to be my masterpiece.

Then, supposedly Kubrick told Murray to hide the film for fifteen years -- and shortly afterwards, Kubrick died.

*cue scary music*

There are several problems with all of this, besides the obvious consideration that anyone who believes that the Moon landings were faked must have a single Hostess Ho-Ho where most of us have a brain:

• Both T. Patrick Murray and Kubrick's widow have come out with statements saying that the film is a fraud.
• The man in the interview really doesn't look (or sound) like the real Stanley Kubrick.
• At one point, the interviewer slips up and calls the guy playing Kubrick "Tom."
• The film is dated "May 1999," which is two months after Kubrick died.

But do go on about how convincing it all is.

The second story was probably triggered by the first bringing Kubrick's name back into the spotlight apropos of the Moon landings.  And what it claims is that Kubrick hid a bunch of hints regarding the fake Moon landings in his movie The Shining.

The website is a rambling, incoherent mess of "evidence" that includes such nonsense as the "explanation" about why Kubrick changed the number of the haunted room from 217 (what it was in the Stephen King novel the movie is based upon) to 237.

It's because it's 237,000 miles from the Earth to the Moon, of course.

Unfortunately, the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, where the movie was filmed, blows that silliness away -- right on their website, they explain that they did that because they didn't want people avoiding room 217, so they asked Kubrick to change it to a room number that doesn't exist in the hotel.

We are also given incontrovertible evidence like the fact that Stuart Ullman, the manager of the Overlook Hotel who gives Jack Torrance the job as caretaker, is wearing red, white, and blue (well, maroon, white, and blue, to be accurate), so the Overlook represents America.  And that Jack Torrance is the stand-in for Kubrick himself -- because neither one combs his hair much.  And that there is a "Native American motif" on the wall in one scene that "looks like rocket ships."  And that the snowstorm that strands the family in the hotel is "a symbol of the Cold War."

It couldn't be because the movie is set in the Colorado Rockies in winter, or anything.

Oh, and at one point, the character of Danny is wearing an Apollo 11 sweater, so when he stands up, we're witnessing the "symbolic launch of Apollo 11."

Someone asked Kubrick's directorial assistant, Leon Vitali, about that.  "That was knitted by a friend of [costume designer] Milena Canner," Vitali said.  "Stanley wanted something that looked handmade, and Milena arrived on the set one day and said, ‘How about this?’ It was just the sort of thing that a kid that age would have liked."

Vitali also said that he'd seen a documentary that connected Kubrick and the film to the Moon landings, and spent the entire time he was watching it "falling about laughing," adding that the contention is "absolute balderdash."

Not that this will convince the conspiracy theorists.  A higher-up denying things just makes them conspiracy harder.

So anyhow, this one will bounce around for a while on the interwebz, and then sooner or later fade back into well-deserved obscurity.  But there's no reason to believe it will be gone.  The oldies-but-goodies never stay gone.  They keep coming up like clockwork...

... like the rising of the Moon.  Wonder if that's a coincidence?

Nah, probably not.