Alex Jones vs. the chickens

Every so often, there is justice in the world.

This time, the fabled chickens coming home to roost are casting their beady eyes on none other than Alex Jones, that purveyor of wacko fringe conspiracy theories about everything from the New World Order to "Pizzagate."  His wife, Kelly Jones, filed for divorce in 2015, and they are now in a custody battle over their three children.  Understandably, the fact that Alex Jones gives every evidence of being a raving maniac came up more than once.

"He’s not a stable person," Kelly Jones said in court.  "He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck.  He wants J Lo to get raped...  He broadcasts from home.  The children are there, watching him broadcast."

Which would certainly be enough for me, were I in her shoes.

Alex Jones's lawyer, Randall Wilhite, responded with an approach that strikes me as risky; he claims that Jones doesn't actually believe what he's saying.  "He's playing a character," Wilhite said. "He's a performance artist...  Using his on-air Infowars persona to evaluate him as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in Batman."

Yes, well, no one is claiming that what the Joker says has any connection to reality, whereas there are lots of people who believe everything Alex Jones says, not least the President of the United States.  In fact, Donald Trump appeared on Infowars last year, and told Jones, "Your reputation is amazing.  I will not let you down."

That connection has only grown stronger since Trump won the election.  Two weeks ago, Jones said on air that Trump had invited him to Mar-a-Lago, but Jones had to respectfully decline "due to family obligations."

"I'm still in regular telephone contact with the president," Jones said.  "But I must apologize, because I can't always answer the phone when he calls."

Trump's not the only one who takes Jones seriously.  Just last week, Lucy Richards of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was arrested after she missed her court date stemming from charges of making death threats to Leonard Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah died in the Sandy Hook massacre.  Guess why Richards threatened Pozner?

She believed that the Sandy Hook killings were a government-staged "false flag," that no children were killed, and that the grieving parents were "crisis actors" who had been hired to play the parts of bereaved family members of the supposed murdered children.  She wanted Pozner to confess that he was a government plant, and 'fess up that he didn't actually have a son named Noah.

All of which she found out by listening to Infowars and other alt-right conspiracy sites.

Pozner himself said he'd like to be at Jones's trial.  "I wish I could be there in the courtroom to stare him down to remind him of how he’s throwing salt on a wound," Pozner said, "and so he can remember how he handed out salt for other people to throw on mine."

As for Jones, you'd think the threat of losing custody of his children would be sufficient to get him to reconsider his loony on-air persona, whether or not he actually believes what he's saying.  But no: just last Friday, Jones had as a guest alt-right spokesperson Mike Cernovich (himself the focus of some scrutiny because of some horrific statements he made to the effect that most cases of rape are false accusations).  On this show, Jones and Cernovich discussed why the Obamas were in French Polynesia, and came to the conclusion that it's not because it's a nice place for a vacation, it's because French Polynesia doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States.  "Notice he’s staying out of the U.S. right as they move to try to overthrow Trump," Jones said.  About the Obamas' daughters, Sasha and Malia, Jones said, "The word is those are not even his kids."

"The word is."  Meaning "a goofy idea that Alex Jones just pulled out of his ass."

So apparently Jones doesn't think he's got anything to worry about regarding the upcoming custody case, even though if he wins it, he'll be effectively saying under oath "Your Honor, I am a big fat liar."  It's to be hoped that the judge won't buy this, and will slap him down hard, as he's richly deserved for some time now.  But the sad truth is that even if he does win -- in fact, even if he stood in the middle of Times Square and yelled, "Nothing I have ever said on air is the truth!  I lie every time I open my mouth!", it wouldn't diminish his popularity or trust amongst his listeners one bit.  Look at Trump's supporters; the man seems genetically incapable of uttering a true statement or living up to any of his campaign promises, but the diehards still consider him the next best thing to the Second Coming of Christ.  

Hell, they said Bill Clinton was slick.  I recall one comedian saying that Clinton could stand right in front of you and say, "I am not here," and everyone would look shocked and say, "Where'd he go?"  But Clinton was bush league with compared to either Trump or Jones.  The fact that Trump has a significant fraction of American voters convinced he's the Anointed One of God, despite the fact of being the only person I've ever seen who embodies all Seven Deadly Sins at the same time, is evidence of how fact-proof people have become.

And as for Jones, I am certain that however the custody trial comes out, he won't lose a single listener, and he'll be right there to launch the next round of horrible rumors and conspiracy theories.  Even if the chickens come home to roost, Jones probably won't have any difficulty converting most of them to fricassée.

The problem with Seymour

A few months ago, I made the point that the fallacy called appeal to authority is not as simple as it sounds.

On the surface, it's about not trusting authorities and public figures simply because they're well-known names.  You can convince anyone of anything, seemingly, if you append the words "Albert Einstein said so" after your claim; it's the reason I fight every year in my intro neuroscience class with the spurious claim that humans use only 10% of their brains.  You see this idea attributed to Einstein all the time -- although it's unlikely that he ever said such a thing, adding "apocryphal quotes" as another layer of fallacy to this claim, and the claim itself is demonstrably false.

The problem is, of course, there are some areas where Einstein was an expert.  Adding "Einstein said so" to a discussion of general relativity is pretty persuasive, given that relativity has passed every scientific test it's been put through.  But notice the difference; we're not accepting relativity because a respect physicist thought it was true.  Said respected physicist's ideas still had to be vetted, retested, and peer-reviewed.  It's the vindication of his theories that conferred credibility on his name, not the other way around.

The situation becomes even blurrier when you have someone whose work in a particular field starts out valid and evidence-based, and then at some point veers off into wild speculation.  This is the core of the problem with an appeal to authority; someone having one or two right ideas in the past is no insurance against his/her being wildly wrong later.

This is the situation we find ourselves in with Seymour Hersh.  Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist whose work on exposing the truth about the My Lai Massacre and the torture of prisoners of war by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib was groundbreaking.  His dogged determination to get at the facts, even at the cost of embarrassing the American government and damaging the reputation of the U.S. overseas, earned him a well-deserved name as one of the giants of journalism.

Seymour Hersh [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, Hersh seems to have gone badly off the rails lately.  His latest piece, which he's pursuing with the tenacity of a bloodhound, is about the claim that the public version of the death of Osama bin Laden is a complete fabrication -- that the United States had captured bin Laden all the way back in 2006, and with help from the Saudis was using him as leverage against al Qaeda.  When his usefulness began to wane, they had him killed and then faked a raid against his compound in Abbottabad, then made public the story of the brave soldiers who'd risked their lives to take down a wanted terrorist.

The problem is, as is described in more detail in an article in Vox, the claim is supported by little in the way of evidence.  Hersh's two sources admittedly have no direct knowledge of what happened.  The story itself is fraught with self-contradictions and inconsistencies.  And then, to make matters worse, Hersh has recently begun to claim that the United States government has been infiltrated by members of Opus Dei (a Roman Catholic spiritual organization made famous, or infamous, by The DaVinci Code), that the chemical weapons attacks in Syria were "false flags" staged by the Turkish government, and that the U.S. is training Iranian terrorists in Nevada.

None of these, apparently, have any evidential support beyond "an anonymous source told me."  Hersh, seemingly, has slipped from being a hard-hitting investigative reporter to a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.

He's not backing down, however.  He granted an interview to Slate in which he reiterated everything he's said.  He seems to spend equal time during the interview defending himself without introducing any further facts, and disparaging the interviewer, journalist Isaac Chotiner.  "What difference does it make what the fuck I think about journalism?" Hersh asked Chotiner.  "I don’t think much of the journalism that I see.  If you think I write stories where it is all right to just be good enough, are you kidding?  You think I have a cavalier attitude on throwing stuff out?  Are you kidding?  I am not cavalier about what I do for a living."

And only a moment earlier, when asked a question he didn't like, he said to Chotiner, "Oh poor you, you don’t know anything.  It is amazing you can speak the God’s English."

This is a vivid, and rather sad, example of why a person's reputation isn't sufficient to establish the veracity of their claims.  No one -- including both Albert Einstein and Seymour Hersh -- have the right to rest on their laurels, to expect people to believe something just because they've appended their name to it.

Claims stand or fall on the basis of one thing; the evidence.  And what Hersh has brought forth thus far is of such poor quality that about the only one he's convincing is Alex Jones.

Bringing down the false flag

Of all the nutty beliefs I've examined over the years, the one that I have the hardest time understanding is the whole "false flag" thing.

The idea here is that the government (usually the United States government, although other countries have been accused of this as well) manufactures calamities in order to distract the citizens ("sheeple") from what they're really trying to do.  Their actual aims usually involve establishing a fascist dictatorship, disarming everyone, rounding up and executing civilians, and other special offers.

The fact that none of the latter ever happens doesn't seem to matter much.  Each time there's a new tragedy, raving wackmobiles like Alex Jones start yammering on about how it never really happened, it was just a staged event with "crisis actors" designed to divert your attention.  Maybe they really think by making all this shit up (what they would call "focusing your attention on reality") they're preventing the Bad Guys from killing us all.  Maybe they picture themselves as the dam holding back the flood, that without their brave reporting, we'd all find ourselves in FEMA death camps.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or maybe they're just loons.  I dunno.

So, here are a few things that are said to be "false flags:"

• The Sandy Hook massacre
• The Columbine shootings
• The Boston Marathon bombing
• Hurricane Katrina
• The Bali bombing
• 9/11
• The crash of Malaysia Airlines Flights MH17 and 370
• Hurricane Sandy
• The recent Ebola outbreak in Africa
• The riots in Ferguson, Missouri
• The riots and looting in Egypt following the fall of Hosni Mubarak
• The entire situation in the Ukraine

Yes, you're understanding this correctly; to the false-flagazoids, either (1) these events never happened, or (2) they were pre-arranged and orchestrated by the government for their own purposes.

But what about eyewitnesses, you may be asking, not to mention victims?

That you'd even ask the question means you've "drunk the KoolAid."  The so-called eyewitnesses and victims are either government plants, or else entirely fictitious.

And the conspiracy theorists work fast.  Whenever a story hits the news, you can almost set your watch and time how long it'll take before false-flag accusations start hitting the conspiracy websites.  It's only taken a day or so for the two current tragedies -- the Nepal earthquake and the Baltimore riots -- to be declared false flags by these crazies.  (Don't believe me?  Go here and here, if you can stand to.)

So as I'm considering this whole bizarre phenomenon, the thought crossed my mind; do these people believe that nothing bad ever happens unless it's caused by the government?  Or maybe that nothing bad ever happens at all, given that they seem to think that most of the awful things in the news were invented by the media?

So it occurred to me that maybe this was the common thread.  If you believe in false flags, it gives you a number of comforting fictions to fall back on:

1. Most of the catastrophes that get reported aren't real.
2. Even the ones that are real were staged by the government, so there's always a faceless entity there to blame if you don't like what's going on.
3. Because you are aware of the ruse, it means that you are in the know, i.e., you're not a "sheeple."

But I think there's a fourth underlying cause, here.  If you attribute everything down to your hangnails to the Evil Illuminati, you don't ever have to look at the underlying causes of the things that could be addressed.  If Sandy Hook and Columbine were fictional, then we never have to discuss the American attitude toward guns.  If Ferguson and Baltimore were staged by the police, then we can avoid talking about race and the enculturation of privilege.  If 9/11 was an inside job, we never have to consider the role that American foreign policy has had in the instability in the Middle East, nor our support of the repressive theocracy in Saudi Arabia because of our reliance on oil.

And if we disbelieve in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Nepal earthquake, we never have to confront the fact that the world is a big, scary, chaotic place, where terrible things sometimes just happen for no apparent reason other than the steering currents in the south Atlantic and the movement of tectonic plates under the Himalayas.  It means we can avoid dealing with our own fear, accepting our own mortality, understanding that we're always insecure, always in danger, and that none of us is going to get out of here alive.

But the blindness comes with a cost, and it isn't just the terrible cost of buying a lie instead of seeking the truth.  The worst part of all of this is that is absolves us of the responsibility of doing something to offer aid to the victims of these catastrophes.  We can sit back, secure in the superiority of our false knowledge, saying that we don't have to reach out and help anyone, because there's no one there to help.

To which I say: fuck that.  I haven't been able to find anywhere to which you can donate for the victims of the Baltimore riots -- there may be campaigns started in the next days, so keep your eyes open.  But here are two to help the victims of the Nepalese earthquake -- an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for shelters and medical aid, and one of my favorite charities, Médecins Sans Frontières.  Please consider donating to either or both.  

Because despite what the conspiracy theorists would have you believe, compassion and love will always beat suspicion, hatred, and fear.

Shooting down the false flag

I'm frequently asked how I can write daily on this blog without losing my marbles.  Deliberately immersing myself in the silly things some people believe, you'd think, would be a recipe for cynicism and/or despair.

The truth is, I'm still generally an optimist.  When you think about it, it'd be kind of silly to have a blog like this if I thought gullibility was incurable.  I'm confident that people can adopt a skeptical outlook, and can choose to look at the world through the lens of evidence and logic.

But it doesn't mean I don't sometimes get angry.

The thing that pushes the rage button the hardest is the combination of stubborn ignorance and lack of compassion.  When someone makes a claim that not only flies in the face of rationality, but dehumanizes and demeans, that makes me see red.

Like the claim that is popping up all over conspiracy websites, that the whole Ebola epidemic is being faked by "crisis actors."

Scientists working at the site of an Ebola outbreak [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I've dealt with this topic before, but from the standpoint of actors staging school shootings -- a heinous enough claim.  But now, we have people saying that there's no such thing as Ebola.  The whole thing, they say, was invented so as to give world leaders (especially President Obama) the leverage to declare martial law and turn the United States into a dictatorship.

There's been buzz about this on the r/conspiracy subreddit, which is hardly surprising given that this is where the whole "crisis actors" nonsense gained traction after the Sandy Hook massacre.  Here's how it's being framed:

You have them in Africa, in New York, San Francisco, Haiti, and other places. Yes, they are sick and they are dying. But that doesn’t make an epidemic, because the tiny virus that was supposed to be at the bottom of all this is missing from the equation. 

This tells you how to invent a fake epidemic. You take many sick and dying people, and you claim there is one germ that is causing all the trouble. You promote a few diagnostic tests that ‘will confirm the presence of the germ’ and you tell people they must be tested. 

But the tests don’t really confirm the presence of the germ. They’re deceptive and useless. Of course, the test will register positive in many cases. These positive people are said to be victims of the one germ that is at the root of the epidemic. 

You tie together and link together people who are sick and dying for various reasons, and you claim they’re all dying because of the One Germ. That gives you a powerful psychological ploy, because people are always looking for the one unified thing that explains a whole host of disturbing facts. You give them what they want.

This is from a blog post from Jon Rappoport, who (by the way) also claims that there's no such thing as SARS, and that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

Mad yet?  Wait till you see the piece that showed up over at UFO Blogger yesterday -- that hospitals are hiring actors to feign symptoms of Ebola, for some undisclosed purpose.  The author of the post includes the following quote from New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation's chief medical officer, Dr. Ross Wilson: "If those patients have symptoms and a travel history we would expect them to be isolated within a few minutes in that emergency room.  Then we would call the Department of Health and complete a further work-up with the patient being isolated."

My guess is that the reason (assuming the story isn't an out-and-out lie) is to train hospital staff in proper protocol for dealing with a dangerous virus, but that isn't the implication.  The implication is that the whole thing is fake, that what the CDC is saying is nothing more than a smokescreen.

A "false flag."  Oh, how I hate that phrase.  And no, I'm not going to present the evidence to the contrary, because a simple online search for scientific papers about this disease will turn up so much information that I wouldn't have room to fit it in this post.

The degree to which this kind of claim is irresponsible is staggering, but so is the lack of simple compassion.  There have been 4,000 deaths from this hideous disease to date, with every indication that we haven't even neared the peak.  There are five suspected and one confirmed cases in Spain, and another couple of suspected cases here in the United States besides the one man who died two days ago -- pointing to the possibility that we may have a bigger problem than anyone thought at first.  To demean the suffering of the victims, and the efforts of the medical establishment to combat this virus, is disrespectful at best and ugly, belittling propaganda at worst.

So yeah, sometimes I do get angry.  Like this morning.  I will admit to having yelled, "Are you fucking kidding me?" at my computer when I discovered this story.  But I remain confident that the good guys -- the compassionate, rational, kind, honorable people -- still far outnumber the bad.

And as for the bottom-feeders who are currently claiming that the Ebola epidemic is fake; I'd like to suggest that you crawl back in your holes, and get out of the way of the people who are actually doing something to help the people who are suffering from this very real, and very dangerous, virus.

Flight of the dead

If there's a group of people that I enjoy arguing with even less than I enjoy arguing with young-earth creationists, it's conspiracy theorists.

At least the young-earth creationists admit that there's evidence out there that needs an explanation.  Fossils?  Left behind by the Great Flood.  Genetic and morphological homology between related species?  Coincidence.  Light from stars further away than 6,000 light years?  The speed of light changes as it goes.  Or light stretches.  Or weakens.  Or something.

So, okay, they're wrong, about nearly everything scientific that you could be wrong about.  But at least they don't come up with batshit crazy nonsense for which there is no evidence, and then argue that your evidence doesn't exist.

Which is, by and large, the conspiracy theorist's favorite modus operandi.  Take, for example, the latest wacko explanation (if I can dignify it by that name) of the recent tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17 by Ukrainian separatists: the whole thing was staged in order to force a confrontation between the United States and Russia, and the plane itself was being flown remotely and was peopled entirely by corpses.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

My first thought upon reading this was that the originator of this "theory" must have believed that the Sherlock Holmes episode "A Scandal in Belgravia" was a historical documentary.  What evidence, you might rightly ask, does anyone have that this conjecture is true, other than that provided by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Cumberbatch?

A statement that rebel leader Igor Girkin made that a number of the bodies at the crash site did not appear to be "fresh."

Well, if the plane I'm on gets blown out of the sky, and I fall 30,000 feet, I'm guessing I won't be looking my "freshest" at that point, either.  And afterwards, Girkin reportedly said that he could "neither confirm or deny" the claim.

But that was all it took.  The plane was full of corpses.  The whole thing was a setup.  This, despite the fact that one of the passengers on the doomed plane, Mohammed Ali Mohammed Salim of Kuala Lumpur, took a video of himself and other passengers getting settled right before the plane was preparing to take off, and uploaded it to Instagram along with the message that he was "a little nervous."

For good reason, as it turned out.

But no, say the conspiracy theorists, Salim's video itself is a fake, made hurriedly by the Evil Conspirators once Pillars of Sanity and Rationalism like Alex Jones and Jeff Rense began to figure the whole thing out.

Then, of course, we had the people who said that it couldn't be a coincidence that disaster has struck Malaysia Airlines twice within just a few months.  Maybe... maybe it wasn't a coincidence.  In fact, maybe MH 17 and MH 370, the flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean this past March were...

... the same plane.

At least, I think that's what is being claimed on this site, wherein we are treated to the following brain-boggling chain of thought:

How brain dead do they think we are??? 

Our previous articles have covered the MH370 who, when, where and why but not the WHAT. What happened to MH370 after they whisked it into the airport hangar at Diego Garcia? 

The WHAT question has now been answered. MH370 was remarked and became Malaysian flight MH17. It was flown to Amsterdam where it picked up passengers and flew over the western allied Ukraine where it "disappeared from radar" and was shot down and destroyed. The Russian government was blamed in order to alienate and inflame existing Ukraine tensions with Russia. Now who would want to do that exactly???? Duh... 

In view of the unlikely coincidence of two Malaysian Boing 777's being downed within 3 months of each other, there's undoubtedly a connection! 

Over 500 passengers have been murdered on board two "downed" Malaysian Boeing 777's within 3 months of each other. This is NOT a coincidence. 

Well, yes, actually it is.  That's what you call it when two events coincide.

Oh, and from March to July isn't three months.  But maybe I'm splitting hairs, here.

What gets me about this, and (in fact) what gets me about all conspiracy theories, is how the proponents of these nutty ideas think that an absence of evidence is actually a point in their favor.  No conclusive proof that the dead bodies at the MH 17 crash site were already badly decomposed?  Well, it must be true, then.  No trace whatsoever of missing flight MH 370?  It must have landed on Diego Garcia.

Which, of course, makes them impossible to counter.  Any evidence you can produce against their argument has been manufactured; any lack of evidence on their part is just proof of how sneaky these false-flag-loving illuminati are.

All of which kind of makes me pine for a nice rip-roaring argument with a young-earth creationist.  Ken Ham?  Kent Hovind?  Andrew Snelling?  Anyone?

Damn.

False flags and Fort Hood

Sometimes I can simply laugh at the goofy ideas people have.  It was the genesis of this blog, really; to shine some light, both in the sense of "illumination" and also in the figurative sense of "light-heartedness," on the loopy stuff that we see on a daily basis.  And being a naturally optimistic person, I like it when my daily excursion into wingnuttery doesn't bring me down.

But there are times that I just want to scream.

Like today.  Because the conspiracy theorists are already howling about the Fort Hood shooting being a setup, a false flag, a hoax, before the victims have even been named, barely giving the smoke time to clear.

[image courtesy of photographer Michael Heckman and the Wikimedia Commons]

What, it's not enough for you people that four people are dead, including the shooter, and sixteen are wounded?  It's not enough that the gunman's widow, the mother of a three-year-old child, was "hysterical" upon finding out what her husband had done?  It's not enough that she now has to cope with raising a child who will forever live under the stigma of her father's crime?

Nope.  The tragedy itself is never enough for you people, is it?  It always has to be more.  It always has to be a plot, a piece of the Big Evil Puzzle that is how you see the world.  Don't believe me?  Here's a sampling of the comments that appeared on the Conspiracy subreddit today:

SOLDIERS shooting SOLDIERS means only one thing... TYRANNY... someone CHOOSE [sic] GOD OVER MONEY... IF you believe what the ZIONIST BANKER OWNED MEDIA SAYS your [sic] TRULY ASLEEP... YOU have chosen the GREEN PILL OF THE MATRIX... 

Active shooter = false flag know that the words coming from the media is a LIE.  ACTIVE SHOOTER IS ALL WE HERE.  STOP THE FAKE SHOOTINGS FUCKERS!!! 

Wherever u hear the phrase ACTIVE SHOOTER. this is a drill people. just another hoax!!!  Active shooter = drill and or false flag to disarm the people.  Watch how shady this BULLSHIT story changes 100 times! 

Another Obama Muslim gone psycho?  I suppose Obama will also give this brutal attack another mere "workplace violence" status instead of a "military attack" or "invasion."  I smell another Obama false flag plot, like all the rest of the phoney-baloney false flag terrorist attacks. 

This is a distraction, people.  They're getting too close to finding Flight 370 and needed something to turn our attention to.  Every time we get close to the truth, they set up something like this and most Americans fall for it.  Wake up!

Okay, let me say this loud and clear, so you wackos can hear me:

You have zero information on this.  You are doing what you do best, which is making shit up to force the story to conform to your warped worldview.  The shooter -- Ivan Lopez -- is only now being investigated, and so we don't yet know who he was or why he did what he did.  Could he have been a terrorist?  Maybe.  Could he have been some kind of Muslim convert, with a jihadist axe to grind?  I guess, although there's no indication of it.  Could he have had PTSD and had some kind of psychotic break?  Possible.  The point here is that you don't know, and I don't either.

The difference is that I'm not claiming that I do.

What I find most stomach-turning about the people who yammer on about this sort of thing is that they really feel like they're being noble and courageous and iconoclastic by making these sorts of statements.  But you know what?  All it amounts to is using the human cost of an as-yet unexplained tragedy to score political points, which when you think about it, is kind of the opposite of noble and courageous.  Because they don't care about facts, or logic, or evidence; all they care about is using any means they can to bolster a bitter, twisted worldview that sees everything in the world as evidence of a conspiracy.

It may be that in the days to come we will find out more about Ivan Lopez and why he took a gun and shot 19 of his fellow soldiers.  Because Lopez ended the shooting by taking his own life, it may be that we will never know.  It is the sad truth about many tragedies of this type that the real reasons behind it might be forever out of our reach.

So to the wackos who are circling around this story like flies around roadkill, I would like to recommend that you do what a responsible person does when (s)he has no facts or information: shut the fuck up.

Silencing Alex Jones

Okay, I'm not going to beat around the bush, here.  Let's cut right to the chase.

Alex Jones needs to shut the hell up.

Before the dust even settled after Monday's horrific bombing at the Boston Marathon, Alex Jones and his wacko followers were claiming that the government had planted the bombs.  Here's a direct quote of his tweet from Monday, shortly after the story broke:

Our hearts go out to those that are hurt or killed #Boston marathon – but this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag

And immediately afterwards, the following was making the rounds on Facebook:

Man, Jones et al. must think these conspirators are idiots.  Can't you imagine it?  Evil, Boris-and-Natasha types, but from our own government, concoct this big secret plan to blow up people at the Boston Marathon -- and then they slip up and post about it on the internet three days early.

Oopsie! 

How dumb would you have to be?  And yet... to Jones, these are the ultra-intelligent supervillains who are running everything.

Oh, and why do Jones and his knuckle-dragging True Believers think the government planted the bombs on Monday?  Because (1) it was Tax Day; and (2) so that the Transportation Safety Authority and other government agencies would have justification to clamp down and Deny Us Our Rights.

Same as the Newtown Massacre.  Same as Jared Loughner shooting up the crowd in Tucson, Arizona.  Same as the theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado.  Same as the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Same as 9/11.

In Jones' bizarro world, bad things don't sometimes just... happen.  Crazy people don't sometimes get hold of guns and kill people.  Religious extremists don't just slaughter innocents because of their warped view of what god wants them to do.  No; it all has to be the Big Bad Government, who in Jones' mythological view of the universe has replaced Satan as the root of all evil.

Look, it's not that I'm some sort of apologist for everything our government does.  I am well aware that we've pulled some really shady stuff, sometimes, and our projected self-image as the Global Good Guy is frequently unwarranted.  But using a tragedy like Monday's bombing as fodder for your delusional worldview, and then to trumpet that worldview publicly in order to make money, is a slap in the face to the people who survived the bombing (many of them with dreadful injuries), and to the families of the victims who died.

And it's time that we stand up and tell Alex Jones, as the leader of the pack, to shut up.

Toward that end: here is a list of the sixty AM and FM radio stations that carry his show.  Take a moment to look through the list, and then send a letter or an email to the stations of your choice and ask them to drop their sponsorship of this asshole.  He needs to have his forum taken away.

Of course, if it happens, he'll just claim that the government is trying to silence him.  But that won't matter much if no one is listening any more.

The Great Hantavirus Pandemic Conspiracy

Since we were talking about conspiracies yesterday, I thought I'd continue in the same vein by taking a look at the recent hantavirus outbreak in Yosemite National Park.

Here are the facts -- not that those tend to matter to conspiracy theorists.

Hantavirus is an RNA virus that is carried by deer mice, and is present in their urine, droppings, and saliva.  When deer mice come into contact with human -- e.g. in cabins -- the mouse droppings dry out, and the resultant dust can be inhaled, carrying the virus into the human respiratory system.  Once a human is infected, the disease progresses rapidly, beginning with flulike symptoms, and eventually causing pneumonia and acute respiratory distress.  There is no treatment, and even with medical care, about half of infected patients die.  (Source)

The recent outbreak in Yosemite National Park, in the "Signature Tent Cabins," led to 10,000 people being exposed.  Note that this is simply the number who occupied the cabins this summer; it is unknown how many of them actually came in contact with the virus.  As of right now, six people have been confirmed to have contracted the disease, and two of the infected have died.  (Source)  The cabins were closed on August 24, and as hantavirus has an incubation period of two to four weeks, it is likely that there will be few other cases amongst the people who visited the park.

So, anyway, that's the situation.  Scary for those exposed, sad for those who have actually contracted the disease, and otherwise, it's pretty much over.  Hantavirus has never been shown to be transmissible from human to human, so that's it for the epidemic (if I can call an outbreak that sickened six people that).

But try telling your average conspiracy theorist that.

Here are a few direct quotes from conspiracy sites.  I am including only a few, because after reading these, I felt my cerebral cortex turning to cream of wheat, and I had to stop.  (Spelling and punctuation has been left intact, because that improves the overall effect.)

• This could be the new Pandemic, the worldwide killer that wipes out mankind ,in the 14th century the Black Death wiped out 25 million people and this was before planes and easy travel throughout the world, if that many people died in the 14th century imagine the destruction and devestation in the modern world where you can jump on a plane tomorrow and end up in Timbuktoo ,25 million would be like chicken feed ,make no mistake this has no cure and if it goes airborne and can be transmitted through handshakes ,coughs and sneezes ,the world will have no need to be worried about any asteroid hitting or Yellowstone erupting in 2012.

•  Remember the big rig that spilled 600 25# bags of sulfur near the entrance to Yosemite in April?  Anyone wondering if that stuff was really sulfur?  It closed the roads nearby.  Was this just an excuse to close everything up so they could spray the park with deadly hantavirus?  Just in time for summer vacations...

•  Its another false flag operation to draw attention away from what's going on at the Democratic National Convention.  Like we can't see through what their doing.

• Obama and his cronies are hiding their role in this.  Start a deadly pandemic in an election year, so that it gives you something to claim you're fighting against.  And while millions are dying, they get into office permanently.  Watch for it, sheeple.  You'll be living in a fascist dictatorship before you know it... if you're one of the survivors.

• There are now 12000 people sick with this right now and that's the ones we know about, how many more, are we being told the total truth about this, in less than a week thousands more infected, imagine a month, a year, 5 yrs from now planet earth could be the corpse planet, maybe this is why their looking at other planets that could support life.

Oh, okay!  And maybe all of these are true!  At the same time!  It's a pandemic, millions are sick and we aren't being told, because President Obama ordered the National Park Service to spray deer mice in Yosemite with hantavirus and release them in the cabins so that vacationing people would get ill during the Democratic National Convention, allowing the delegates to appoint him Supreme Dictator of the Earth without anyone noticing, and now that this has happened he will take his cronies on a spaceship to another habitable planet, leaving the rest of the Earth's population to die in agony.

Hey, it could happen.

What blows my mind about all of this is how fact-resistant these people are.  Show them press releases from the National Institute of Health, explaining that hantavirus doesn't seem to be communicable from one human to another, and stating that only six people have so far been sickened?  It's all part of the government's disinformation plan.  Tell them that the sulfur spill in April was just an accident, and was cleaned up quickly, and had nothing to do with the outbreak?  Riiiight.  Sure it was an accident.  *wink, wink*  Explain that hantavirus was already present in deer mouse populations, and there would be no need for anyone to "spray the park with the virus," even if someone wanted to do so, which no one does?  Ha.  So you say.  You poor, deluded fool, you.

You get the feeling these people love it when bad things happen, so they can have more things to blame the government for.  They don't seem to have any sense that being that we live in the natural world, bad stuff sometimes just happens.  Storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods... and disease outbreaks.  No human agency is necessary for any of this stuff, much as they would like that to be the case.

And finally, don't these conspiracy theorists give you the impression that they think that the government is a lot more powerful, and efficient, than it actually is?  My own sense is that our elected officials look more like the Keystone Kops than they do like the Men in Black.  If they even knew how to create a catastrophe, I doubt they could successfully pull it off, much less keep it quiet.

But maybe that's the point.  The people who believe in conspiracy theories find it weirdly comforting that someone is in charge, even if that someone has evil intentions.  The idea that hantavirus has shown up in Yosemite because the Evil Government put it there is easier to live with, somehow, than the idea that bad stuff just happens sometimes, because life is a risky chaotic jumble, and there is no pattern, no Grand Reason That Things Happen.

Or maybe they're just batshit crazy.