Con-spiracies

by

“Loon gunman theory” (JFK assassination)

JFKLate November traditions in the U.S. go beyond turkey and football. At this time each year, old and new JFK conspiracy ideas are floated. This is the only conspiracy theory that the majority believes. It’s a fairly strong majority, too, with 61 percent in the latest Gallup poll saying they believe.

Of course, such numbers are irrelevant to what happened. No amount of belief makes anything true. But these numbers do shed some light on how conspiracy theories operate. Because the reason JFK assassination theories have the most believers is not because of evidence. More than 50 years and hundreds of books and videos later, not one irrefutable piece of proof has been presented. Rather, so many believe because of the momentous nature of the event: The head of the free world at the height of the Cold War was murdered in public in the presence of his wife. And it’s all pulled off by a barely employable drifter. People want to believe there is more there.

Another factor in so many believing is that there are dozens of sub-theories to choose from. This is made still easier in an era when anyone with a laptop and camera can present their ideas to the world in what skeptic leader Dr. Steven Novella calls “the cottage industry of conspiracy theorists.”

There is one question about the assassination that has always bugged me: What the hell is up with the failure to secure a tall building on a presidential motorcade route? But this question is about Secret Service laxity, not a suggestion that Kennedy’s protective detail was in on the plot. But if I was a conspiracy theorist, the unsecured schoolbook depository would be used, through the appeal to ignorance, as a point for my position. That’s how conspiracy theories work. Also, if the theorist is unable to present strong evidence, that’s proof the evidence has been hushed up. If contrary evidence is presented, it was fabricated. Those presenting strong counterarguments are shills or insiders.

But perhaps the most telling distinction among hardcore conspiracy theorists is what Novella calls “anomaly hunting,” where believers look for anything that might seem out of place. In the most extreme cases, the theorist goes in already convinced that the shooting, derailed train, or natural disaster is fake. In the wake of the on-air murder of TV reporter Alison Parker, some theorists were declaring her widower to be an actor. They said he was not emotional enough for someone who had lost his wife 36 hours prior. This supposed stolidity was presented as proof that no one was murdered. This overlooks the fact that grief is a rollercoaster. A person can be laughing at a memory of a loved one, then three minutes later be convulsing because they are crying so forcefully. The burden of proof is always on the one making the claim, and the vultures in these cases spectacularly fail to prove their point.

In most conspiracy theories, the conclusion is reached first, then the theorist works backward from there. For example, they will watch a press conference or memorial service and seek out ANYTHING that looks funny to them. They always find something, owing to their nonexistent standards. The most extreme of the extreme is nodisinfo.com. At a memorial for the Charleston church shooting victims, a woman seemed to have a hint of a smile and this was presented by nodisinfo as proof it was all fabricated. For good measure, she was said to look Jewish, proving the Zionists were behind the hoax. Then there was the YouTube video is which the fact that a spectator was looking at the sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger had already fallen was proof it was the Free Masons had staged it.

These two examples are especially silly, but others can seem a little more plausible when apparent anomalies are highlighted. These are easy to find because hundreds of people and thousands of actions can be involved in such incidents, so it would be impossible to fully explain every detail to the minutest point. This is especially true in times of extreme chaos, such as 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, or mass shootings. Also, everyone has their quirks and complexities, so not all people will not react the same to the situation around them, making supposed inconsistencies easier to find. Throw out enough of these and something may stick, especially if the listener wants it to.

For instance, there is a meme showing a falling Twin Tower that includes a window blowing out a few stories below the main collapsing cloud. A theorist had inserted a red arrow next to the smaller cloud and wrote, “Oops. We set this bomb off too soon.”

This could be the result of unequal pressure and it seems reasonable that it would be less than perfectly uniform when a massive building soaked with jet fuel collapses. Since I’m not completely sure about the specific reason for the smaller cloud is, the theorist can appeal to this ignorance and claim it has evidence for  his position. But he’s ignoring that the burden of proof is still on him to prove that it was done by Bush or Jews or Free Masons.

By contrast, NatGeo aired a multi-hour special that detailed the bin Laden plot. This included released documents and interviews with national security personnel, plus airport camera shots of the hijackers boarding the planes and telephone calls from victims to family members relating that Muslim extremists had commandeered the aircraft.

While we’re at it, I never understood what these bomb theories were supposed to mean anyway. Even if it the towers were brought down by explosives, how does that prove they were planted by government agents instead of terrorists?

Getting back to JFK and anomaly hunting, one supposed inconsistency centers on a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald holding the rifle used to kill Kennedy. I’m unsure why the theorists are fixated with this. Of the dozens of theories I’ve heard, none have claimed that Oswald didn’t do it. Rather, he’s presented as a stooge or lackey, a pawn in an Illuminati Bilderberg Cosa Nostra Commie Nazi game. But for whatever reason, the theorists chose this hunting ground to try and bag another anomaly.

The main points when claiming the photo is fake are allegedly inconsistent shadows and asserting that Oswald is positioned strangely, supposedly indicative of him being added to the shot.

With regard to the latter, it’s hard to guess precisely how a three dimensional object will look on a two dimensional image. Or it was until researchers at Dartmouth published a computer analysis of the photo. They created a 3-D reconstruction of the image, including Oswald’s skeleton and skin. They distributed the weight throughout his body, copied his stance, and determined his center of gravity. They concluded that his center of gravity was within his base of support, meaning his stance was stable. They also reconstructed the lighting and camera angle, and demonstrated that the shadows were consistent.

For the hardcore believer, this is easy to dismiss. Dartmouth merely works in conjunction with the CIA, Castro, and the mafia. For the more reasonable, the explanation will likely suffice, but this case shows how time-consuming it can be to do battle with conspiracy theories. It takes five seconds assert that Oswald or his shadows are fake. It takes five weeks to refute it.

by

“Blue it” (Project Blue Beam and China sky city)

skyguy

This fall, we had something a little different in skeptic news. It was nice to see something besides the usual essential oils, chemtrails, and clairvoyance. Specifically, there was a video that appeared to show skyscrapers floating on clouds above Foshan, China.

Attempting a scientific explanation, some suggested it was a fata morgana, a mirage that can distort the appearance of distant objects, and is the likely reason for ghost ships spotted by 17th Century sailors. According to Wired science writer Matt Simon, when the sun heats up the atmosphere, it can create a gradient of temperatures. The air near the surface is cooler than the layers of air higher up. So when light hits a boundary between two layers that are different temperatures (and therefore different densities), the light refracts. Transitioning from Simon’s scientific explanation to my unscientific one, this screws with the viewers’ eyes and makes them think objects are higher than they actually are.

However, skeptic blogger Mick West notes that a fata morgana creates only a thin illusion close to the horizon. It also appears small and in the distance. None of these are consistent with the video of skyscrapers on a cloud.

Seeking another scientific explanation, some observers noted that, under specific conditions, clouds can isolate and obscure the foreground. This means that that tall objects, such as city buildings, can appear to be floating on those clouds. This is what happened in Huangshan City, China, in 2011. Mist arose from the flooded Xin’an River and made it appear the buildings downstream were floating above it.

But in the Foshan case, no mist is involved. There is just a fairly clear shot of buildings floating on a cloud. I anticipated hearing explanations centering on alien architecture, a government sanctuary city for an impending nuclear war, or a crack in space-time continuum that allowed us to briefly view another universe (albeit one that looks boringly like ours).

However, if any such ideas were voiced, they were shouted down by those blaming it on Project Blue Beam, the Illuminati’s space warfare division. The most popular conspiracy theorist guess is that NASA, as part of the New World Order, is creating a hologram of invading aliens or the second coming of Christ. The reasons given for doing this are typical of the ill-defined but nefarious purposes that the Illuminati is said to be doing anything. The floating city was intended to be a test to see if the hologram generator is ready. Indeed, what better way to keep an above Top Secret plot quiet than to have it include a spooky image that appears in broad daylight over a metropolitan area? It was never explained how NASA had gained permission to use Chinese airspace, although the default conspiracy theorist position would be that China is part of the plot, as am I for questioning this premise. Also never addressed was the flaw of hoping to gain control over a population by having Jesus return to a country that is three percent Christian.

While the video seems to lack a reasonable explanation, the fact that there is only one image would suggest it was fabricated. The idea that no one else would grab their cell phone and take a shot of a floating city seems unlikely. Also, it attracted attention only after the video was made, as there are no other reports of anyone noticing it at the time it was allegedly overhead.

But this is speculation. I like wrapping my posts up in nice, orderly, scientific bows, and I cannot do that in this case. I can only write, “I don’t know, let’s find out.” Although in this case, it’s more like, “I don’t know, that was kind of interesting, let’s go to Taco Bell.”

Both of those declarations indicate an ambiguity that is nowhere to be found by those on the other side. For example, YouTube poster Gaia declared the sky city to be, “Even more evidence of multinational shadow government megalomaniacs spending trillions of taxpayer dollars in order to further mess with our heads and push a few more million people onto psychotic drugs, dumbing down or killing us.”

Sounds like the dumbing down is proceeding as scheduled.

by

“Sour sweetener” (Aspartame)

diet soda health risks

The main argument against the supposed dangers of aspartame is that I’m alive and healthy enough to write about them.

The artificial sweetener was the target of one of the Internet’s first wide-ranging smear campaigns, and has since been linked to serious disease and even death. Given the number of diet sodas I drank from ages 25 to 45, I should be either be dead or writhing in agony wishing I was. The 1998 e-mail was forwarded millions of times and, despite being almost completely inaccurate, is still cited in some credulous circles.

However, an FDA report called aspartame, “one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved.” Indeed, metadata of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies done by private industry and government agencies showed the sweetener to be safe in normal doses. The one exception is that it should be avoided by those with the genetic disorder phenylketonuria.

Aspartame’s beginnings are similar to that of LSD, minus the crazy visions and sounds. Chemist James Schlatter was working to create an anti-ulcer drug when he licked his finger, unaware it had aspartame on it, and he noticed the sweetness. Had it not been for this accident, aspartame would have been an obscure gastrointestinal medication, as opposed to one of the world’s most ubiquitous substances. It also would not be part of Internet lore, specifically, the chain mail written by someone using the pseudonym Nancy Markle. The letter linked aspartame to Gulf War Syndrome, lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, and birth defects. Much of the e-mail consisted of silly correlation-causation errors, such pointing out that a significant percentage of lupus sufferers were diet soda drinkers, without offering evidence of a direct connection.

One isolated accuracy was the claim that aspartame ingestion produces methanol and formaldehyde. However, the author omitted just how little of these are made. The amounts are less than what is found in citrus fruit, which some anti-aspartame crusaders recommend being 75 percent of a person’s detox diet.

Like anything else, it’s the dose that matters. Two Tylenol will ease your backache, while two bottles will permanently relieve it and all other pains. A soda drinker would need to down 20 Diet Cokes a day to do damage.

The conspiracy allegations centered mainly on suggestions of an improper relationship between regulators and industry executives. Two persons, Samuel Skinner and Arthur Hayes, had worked for both government regulators and (indirectly) with G.D. Searle, an aspartame producer. An extensive review by the Government Accountability Office determined there was no impropriety and that the relationships did not impact the studies’ results. Depending on one’s viewpoint, this either ended the controversy or expanded the conspiracy, which now included the GAO.

For those that embrace the latter interpretation, Janet Starr Hull hosts a website where persons with scary sweetener stories can relate their experiences to others in a perpetual communal reinforcement party. Hull also issues dire warnings about adverse reactions and side effects from aspartame that seem to include almost every disease or malady ever identified. The absurdly exhaustive list is here. 

Per this list, diet cola aficionados should be a raging hoard of blind, deaf, suicidal epileptics. Any health concern, from a scratchy throats to lymphoma, can be blamed on aspartame. Hull even cautions that if nothing is wrong, that could be the artificial sweetener playing tricks: “It is typical that aspartame symptoms cannot be detected in lab tests and on x-rays. Textbook disorders and diseases may actually be a toxic load as a result of aspartame poisoning.”

Using pseudoscience standard operating procedure, Hull cites no peer reviewed studies, conducts none of her own, and wraps it in a commercial bow by selling products to fix the mess. She throws in the usual detoxing message, glossing over the fact that only the liver and kidneys can manage that. She also recommends a 10-step program, which includes such groundbreaking advice “be happy” and “get control of your life.”

Additionally, she advises asking people drinking diet soda if they have any of the symptoms Hull had outlined. So next time you see a strange woman downing Tab, ask her if she has been experiencing irritability or severe PMS. I’ll bet the reaction will indeed be hostility, one of the items on the list.

by

“Null and Bones Society” (Scientific Method, Challenger conspiracy)

MIXEDNUTS

I cringe when usually well-meaning people declare something to be “settled science.” This is most frequently heard with references to evolution, the Big Bang, and climate change. It is true that the evidence for all of these things is overwhelming. We’ve dealt with these evidences on this blog, and far better, more extensive documentation exists elsewhere. Still, scientists will always give a fair hearing to an alternate viewpoint that is reached by following the Scientific Method. This method consists of defining the question, developing a hypothesis, making a prediction, testing that prediction, attempting to falsify the prediction, analyzing the results using proper statistics, replication, peer review, and data sharing.

If scientific consensus meant an issue were settled, we would have never accepted heliocentrism, Germ Theory, or airplanes. However, those advances came from employing the Scientific Method. By contrast, denying evolution, the Big Bang, and climate change is based on negative evidence or cherry picking, both of which are inconsistent with sound science.

Here is an example of negative evidence, in this case for creationism. Answers in Genesis writes that chimpanzees are only capable of being bipedal for short distances. The writer therefore concludes that, “God created Adam and Eve fully functional and able to walk and talk. Humans were created on the same day as all kinds of land animals and did not evolve from apes or have to evolve the ability to walk.” There is nothing about man and chimps having distinct locomotion that would negate evolution or point to them not having common ancestors. But even if this were the case, it would be no point for creationism. Additionally, steps in the Scientific Method include testing a hypothesis and attempting to falsify it, and AIG never attempts this with their idea that God did it.

With regard to cherry picking, climate change deniers are fond of pointing out that warming has paused in the last 17 years, and they have graphs to prove it. However, this only works if you use 1998 as the starting point. Using 1997, 1999, 1915, 1950, or 2010 shows a rise in average global temperature. 1998 is the exception because of an unusually strong El Niño season.

If negative evidence and cherry picking are unavailable, there is always simply rejecting the truth. Consider Homo naledi. Naledi is an anagram of denial, and when this major discovery of extinct hominin bones was announced this year, some foxnews.com posters insisted the bones had been fabricated and planted. This blurs the line between anti-science and conspiracy, so let’s segue into the latter.

Just as astronomy, biology, chemistry, and physics are open to change through the Scientific Method, history can also be adjusted if supported by evidence. However, conspiracy theories rest on negative evidence, the argument from ignorance, and the appeal to personal incredulity.

I bravely entered the world of YouTube conspiracy videos to observe these creatures in their natural habitat. I felt an IQ drop of five points by the time I was done. I’ll need to hit the acupuncturist today to unblock this negativity.

In the argument from ignorance, a conclusion is reached based on a lack of proof from the other side and without considering all possibilities. The video I watched purported to expose the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster as a Free Mason hoax. It beings by begging the question, asserting without evidence or deference to logistics that if we went to the moon in 1969, we should be making daily commercial flights by now. This is used so establish that NASA is fraudulent.

Addressing the Challenger disaster specifically, the commentator points out that onlookers were not upset enough. He never considered that they might have been unaware what had happened in the immediate aftermath, that they were in shock, or that they were trying to digest it all. Since it is impossible to prove what anyone was thinking 29 years ago, this ignorance is claimed by the commentator as proof of his position that the observers were actors and the event staged. In still more appeal to ignorance, he chirps, “We don’t actually see the astronauts walk into the space shuttle. That could have been filmed anytime, it could have been faked.”

He also regularly uses the argument from incredulity, where one’s inability to believe something could be true is proof that it is false. Not only is that an unsound conclusion, it is often a deliberate ignorance. A short while after the Shuttle explodes, Christa McAuliffe’s parents were shown on the screen. The commentator said, “What I find strange is that 13 seconds after this massive explosion, if you were the cameraman, you wouldn’t take your shot off of it.”

For starters, there is more than one camera involved when national networks cover space launches. More importantly, there is zero evidence offered to support the commenter’s assertion that the parents being shown is indicative of a hoax. He provides only arguments from ignorance and unsupported speculation.

In another example of arguing from ignorance, he again excitedly notes the mostly stolid expressions. However, there was already smoke and fire from the boosters, so when the shuttle exploded, it was not readily apparent to everyone what had happened. The commentator said the spectators were not upset enough, yet later when they were crying, he cited this as proof they were planted actors.

Beyond these logical fallacies, another hallmark of conspiracy theorists is extreme hostility to contrary positions. Differing views are presented as evidence of the questioner being a shill or a fool. One poster asked what the incentive would be for Free Masons to stage the space shuttle hoax. The response: “There are all sorts of reasons to do this. The biggest one is to FUCK WITH OUR MINDS and by doing that they control us. WAKE UP IDIOT. For fucks sake get your head out of your asshole.”

Conspiracy theorists instruct us to disbelieve all media except their YouTube videos. Moreover, we are told to accept that a wicked cabal of anonymous men has the ability to stage elaborate hoaxes, invent AIDS, and instigate hurricanes, but remain unable to shut down videos exposing them.

When appealing to ignorance, the theorist is limited only by imagination. “There is no real shock from these people, a bit of a smile from one of them actually.” Because a skeptic cannot explain 29 years later why a person had a little grin, it proves that Free Masons and NASA blew up an unmanned Space Shuttle for the purpose of psychological warfare.

Later, the theorist shows a photo of Christa McAuliffe alongside a photo of Syracuse University professor Sharon McAuliffe and claims they are the same person. This even though the shape of the chin, nose, and ears are different. He makes no attempt to verify any of this is unchallenged by posters who are too busy calling skeptics sheeple. I’m sorry, that would be “SHEEPLE!!!!!”

Photos of six of the seven victims alongside pictures of persons with the same or similar names have made the Internet rounds. In some cases, the accompanying photos were of siblings of the deceased, and only one of the six bore a strong resemblance to his namesake. Snopes goes through an astronaut-by-astronaut refutation of the claim and points out, “This exercise demonstrates how easy it is to weave a conspiracy theory out of a few suggestive elements, but its premise defies credulity: NASA faked, for no explicable reason, the deaths of seven astronauts in a shuttle accident, then allowed those astronauts to openly live out the rest of their lives without even taking the basic steps of disguising their physical appearances or real names, and nobody noticed it until nearly 30 years later.” Of course, all this makes Snopes part of the conspiracy.

While the commentator is unconvinced of moon landings, shuttle flights, or satellite launches, he is not entirely averse to accepting aeronautic development. Late in the video, a white blur speeds across the screen. Skeptical sheeple think it’s is a bird, but our commenter assures us it is an alien spacecraft. Probably with a cargo of fabricated hominin bones.

by

“Not very illuminating” (Illuminati)

DORITO

There are a couple of lovable ironies centering on the Illuminati conspiracy theory, one of the most enduring and multi-layered tales in the history of paranoid thought. One irony is that despite being the focus of some of the more extreme conspiracy theorists, this secret society actually existed, in 18th Century Bavaria. Whereas no one has ever identified the shooter in the Grassy Knoll, landed the Loch Ness Monster, or caught X-Men loading chemtrails onto a 767, the Illuminati were real. They were a collection of forward-thinking men (and women, as part of the forward-thinking distinction). They sought to bloodlessly abolish monarchies, favored science over superstition, wanted to root out government corruption, encouraged freedom of expression, and sought to separate church and state.

Their plans were extinguished by the Bavarian monarchy and the Roman Catholic church, which is the second irony: That the Illuminati were crushed by a conspiracy. The society was forcibly disbanded in 1787. But there are those who insist it survived, prospered, and continues to increase their power exponentially. However, the admirable goals of the original group have been coopted by dark forces who impose their will through wars, famines, assassinations, and alliances. They are said to have infiltrated every aspect of government, business, and entertainment. The lack of evidence for this is touted as proof of their stealth and skill.

The reach of the Illuminati is limited only by the imagination of the accusers. This suppleness has allowed different Illuminati hunters to blame pop culture, capitalism, communism, Satanism, Catholicism, and Zionism. For one speaker, the Illuminati are responsible for the infiltration of the State Department by homosexuals in the 1950s. For another believer, they are responsible for afflicting those homosexuals with AIDS in the 1980s. The Illuminati are credited both with putting JFK in the White House and for placing Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Schoolbook Depository. They are responsible for Waterloo and Watergate, as well as the UN, ACLU, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hollywood, the CIA, and heroin. Members of immensely powerful families, such as the Kennedys, DuPonts, and Rothschilds, are said to be members. But usually no leaders are identified, other than unspecified Jewish bankers and/or reptilians.

Documenting Illuminati exposers would require volumes, and this is but a humble blog. So I will look at just one character, although they’re all pretty much the same. My focus is Michael Snyder at endoftheamericandream.com. His main targets are entertainers, mostly Jay Z and Beyoncé. Jay Z is regularly photographed putting his hands together in a method similar to a wide receiver catching a pass. For Snyder, this is an Illuminati symbol. In actuality, it is supposed to be a diamond, a reference to Jay Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella. Some believers retort that Diamond Jim Brady was one of them there Illuminati. And, of course the Rockefellers are Illuminati, so there’s another giveaway.

Let’s follow Snyder’s line of reasoning and see where we end up. Under a photo of Jay Z in the diamond pose, Snyder wastes no time getting to the logical fallacies, specifically Begging the Question: “Why are Jay Z, Beyonce, and Rihanna so obsessed with the Illuminati?” Our intrepid reporter then lays it out for us. “Jay Z and Beyoncé are seducing our kids into the occult and they are making the New World Order appear to be hip, trendy and cool.” Mm-huh, the Great Seal of the US is what kids are into these days. And there’s no way to gain more street cred than being seen with the Eye of Horus.

Snyder then inadvertently reveals where a paranoid mindset will lead one: “When you know what to look for, you start seeing these things just about everywhere around Jay Z and Beyoncé.” Which leads to this: “Jay Z had Rihanna hold aloft a flaming torch in his music videos in order to reference the Illuminati.”

He follows by listing supposed Illuminati members, who range from as liberal as George Clooney to as conservative as Dick Cheney. “We think they are enemies, but they are really working for the same side.” And this is all because, “Those that the Illuminati hate, Christians, are being increasingly demonized in this country.” For evidence, Snyder cites that some military posts briefly blocked the Southern Baptist Convention’s website. Today, temporarily denied access on a taxpayer-funded computer to a denominational subset’s home page; tomorrow, all Christians captured and fed to the lions.

Snyder is only one flavor of Illuminati hunters, targeting mainly black music and its assault on his religion. Others prefer the alien angle. While the perpetrators are changed, the message is the same: The Illuminati is consolidating even more power, and either the antichrist or a UFO invasion is coming. It’s the same message as from 10, 20, 50, and 100 years ago. These types of conspiracy theories thrive on the idea that a dystopian disaster is imminent, but it can never arrive. If we ever end up in FEMA camps, I suspect the theorists won’t say, “I told you so,” but will be warning us this is a precursor to the arrival of our Stalin ape-men overseers.

David Icke is one of those pushing the alien/reptilian angle. Here’s why these Sleestak are so powerful: “The reptilians, operating from the lower fourth dimension have a very different version of time than we have, hence they can see and plan down the three-dimensional timeline in a way that those in three-dimensional form cannot.” Even this isn’t enough plotting for Icke, who says unspecified entities control the reptilians, who control the Illuminati, who control the government, who control us. The Illuminati have unlimited power, saving the ability to silence Icke for exposing them.

Some entertainers, such as Katy Perry and Rihanna, joke about supporting or being threatened by the secret society, and mockingly include Illuminati symbols on their work. This either goes over the heads of the believers, who take it as an endorsement, or it’s presented as the entertainers’ nervous reaction to being exposed. Tupac Shakur asked why an allegedly secret organization was universally known, and there are competing scripts as to what happened next. The Illuminati either sent hitmen after him, or they promoted him and whisked him away to their underground headquarters, where he rooms with Yitzhak Rabin.

by

“Listless” (Alternative medicine murders)

DT

When 29 naturopaths were sickened at a seminar in Germany this month, they summoned paramedics instead of calling on their fellow practitioners in the same room. But there was more to this story than delicious irony.

The naturopaths seemed to have been sickened due to the ingestion of an illegal, psychedelic amphetamine. It has yet to be determined if this was a drug orgy, medical testing gone awry, or a deliberate poisoning. But for those unencumbered by waiting for the results of an investigation, this was the continuation of a summer-long assault on alternative medicine clinicians by the government and/or the pharmaceutical industry. The other herbalist hits and homeopathic homicides took place in the U.S., so this adds a tantalizing cross-Atlantic twist to the mix.

The most prominent of these deaths was the suicide of anti-vaccination doctor Jeff Bradstreet, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound less than a week after FDA agents raided his office. Then a number of other deaths were tied to Bradstreet’s in what was presented as a genocide aimed at reflexologists, shamans, and applied kinesiologists. However, if Big Pharma is behind this, it is going about it in an inefficient manner. The alternative medicine practitioners are being killed off at a rate so slow, the mass murder is being outpaced by the number of new clinicians setting up practice.

Moreover, Reason examined the cases and found the number of deaths consistent with what would be expected from such a large pool of potential victims. Additionally, half of those dying were not alternative specialists, but authentic ones with medical degrees. So using the logic of the conspiracy theorists, there’s reason to believe that Big Alterna Medicine is whacking mainstream doctors. Reason is a libertarian-leaning website that doesn’t normally deal with skeptic issues, but brought this one up in order to segue into the following paragraph:

“What is known as ‘complementary’ or ‘integrative’ health is firmly entrenched in the medical establishment, with a well-funded center at the National Institutes of Health, working to promote alternative treatments at dozens of medical centers. Yet despite $5.5 billion spent over the last 23 years, they’ve found no alternative cures. It’s an astonishing record of taxpayer-funded futility.”

This highlights one of the absurdities of the theory. While it saddens and sickens me, counterfeit doctors now work along genuine ones in hospitals and at university medical centers. Reiki clinicians, radionics practitioners, crystal healers, acupuncturists, and aromatherapists have been given a place in integrative and complementary medicine wings, even at elite institutions.

I do not know when double blind studies became superfluous in determining which medicines works. I don’t know how techniques that bypass the Scientific Method became accepted as cures and treatments by the medical establishment. This is as nonsensical as Carl Sagan working with Sydney Omarr, or Stephen Jay Gould collaborating on a paper with Ken Ham. Nevertheless, the medical industry isn’t killing alternative practitioners. It is funding, embracing, and promoting them.

The hysteria over alternative medicine workers being slaughtered is the result of unjustified inferences and outright fabrications. For example, HealthNutNews reported that, on the day of Bradstreet’s suicide, three alternative doctors went missing in New Mexico. However, a subsequent article in the Daily Beast revealed that this trio were mainstream doctors, not alternative ones. Nor were they subject to an FDA raid or investigation. In fact, no one on these alleged hit lists were being targeted by the FDA, except for Bradstreet.

Others doctors who died or disappeared, and were falsely said to be alternative specialists, were: retired ophthalmologist Patrick Fitzpatrick; general family practitioner Amanda Crews; obstetrician-gynecologist Ronald Schwartz; dentist Norm Castellano; and pulmonologist Jeffrey Whiteside.

And there’s not much mystery among the alternative practitioners on these imaginary hit lists. Nicholas Gonzalez died of cardiac arrest. One osteopath and one holistic practitioner were murdered, but suspects with no ties to the FDA or pharmaceutical industry were arrested in these cases.

That leaves two chiropractors who died for undetermined reasons, and these two deaths do no not exactly leave alternative medicine on the verge of extinction. In fact, the number of alternative medicine practitioners who died of mysterious causes is exceeded by the number of people who have died after climbing into tiger cages. Maybe Big Pharma and Big Cats are in this one together.

by

“Terminal illness” (Denver airport conspiracy)

scary plane

Airplanes are sometimes associated with danger, but seldom involving Nazi reptilians hoisting chemical weapons and enslaving victims. But Denver International Airport is the locale from which the Illuminati will unleash a genocide, which will in turn usher in the New World Order. Talk about a flight delay.

These ideas can be traced to Alex Christian, who is sometimes thought to be a dead man, but this is doubly erroneous. Christian is, in fact, a living woman who now shuns publicity since agents of an undetermined species want her killed.

Combining apophenia, pareidolia, and ample spare time, Christian noticed some supposed anomalies in the Denver airport’s design. These included underground tunnels, which were originally used for an automated luggage system. With the tunnels no longer serving this function, their obvious purpose is to house a slave labor force. Outside these gulags, barbed wire around the airport keeps hostages in, as opposed to keeping terrorists out. If viewed from the air, the runways vaguely suggest a swastika, if one ignores its disconnected nature and an extra appendage. The viewer also has to discount some of the runways, including the largest one.

The airport made news for reasons unrelated to a dystopian descent in 2007, when 14 aircraft had their windshields shatter. The windshields were struck by debris that was driven by cold, rapid winds. Believers considered this explanation to be a cover for the real reason, electromagnetic pulses. However, an electromagnetic pulse would only affect electronics, not glass.

So maybe there haven’t been any nuclear detonations at DIA. Nevertheless, a planned mass extinction awaits. The Illuminati were thoughtful enough to detail their plans for this airport-based global genocide on two large murals in the terminals. One mural depicts a Nazi-like soldier with dead women and children scattered around him and Third World populations succumbing. However, elite species are protected from the apocalypse in sealed containers, and the Mayan symbol for 2012 is stamped all over it. The second mural is an opposite vision, one of bliss and tranquilly. Artist Leo Tanguma insists the murals reflect Mankind journeying from destruction to peace, a statement he presumably made while having a laser gun pointed at him.

On the floor near the murals is written “Au Ag”, a reference to gold and silver, but this happens to also be the chemical abbreviation for Australia Antigen, the toxin Illuminati henchmen will gas us with. Also sprinkled throughout the airport is a language believers long suspected to be from an alien species, but which was revealed to be Navajo. This either negates the alien language claim or bolsters the idea that the Navajo emigrated from Pluto.

A time capsule at the airport is complete with a braille translation. According to some chat room sleuths, this is a keypad to access the secret subterranean slavery service. Additionally, a capstone in the airport serves as a beacon for a mothership, and the plotters also acknowledge their Freemason collaborators by installing their symbols around the airport.

Indeed, for an all-powerful conglomerate, these architects of calamity are rather myopic and thickheaded. They announced their plans, albeit in code speak, in the open at the world’s 19th busiest airport. Believers say this is done to mock and taunt us about our impending doom. But even this would fail to explain why they built their bunker under a plain, as opposed to going a little ways west and taking advantage of the Rocky Mountains, to construct what Jesse Ventura called a sanctuary to survive the 2012 Mayan apocalypse.

Jared Maher of the Denver alternative weekly Westword spoke with Jay Weidner, one of the most prominent of the Denver International Airport conspiracy theory proponents. Like Ventura, he interpreted the murals to be portending the 2012 Mayan-prophesied collapse that would result in worldwide martial law.

One does not become a conspiracy theorist darling or prophet by letting a missed apocalypse throw you off your sleuthy stride. “There’s some profound shift that’s about to happen,” Weidner now says. “And for those of us who are prescient, aware, and conscious, we can feel there’s something going on here.”

This line of thinking offers a sense of control and comfort, as well as self-congratulations for being so observant. It is also tantalizing to think that something sinister is always on the horizon, about to happen, and since it never quite arrives, the emotion can be maintained indefinitely.

Still, Weidner has a ways to go before matching David Icke, who is often placed in the middle of Venn Diagrams of Irrational Thought since his worldview incorporates conspiracies, the paranormal, pseudoscience, alternative medicine, religion, and UFOs. Icke wrote, “Denver is scheduled to be the Western headquarters of the U.S. New World Order during a martial law take over.” He cites an unnamed eyewitness who reports that DIA houses “human slaves, many of them children, under control of the reptilians.”

Conversely, Len Horowitz insists that there are no prisoner children with lizard-like overseers. This is because Horowitz considers them a decoy to deflect from the real story: New Nazi Party Members are working with petroleum and pharmaceutical executives to poison the planet. For evidence, Horowitz points to a rainbow on the second mural, which he says is symbolism for the toxins that will sprayed on the duped masses. Icke and Horowitz, by the way, are part of each other’s conspiracy narrative in a humanoid reptile vs. reincarnated Nazi feud. It’s sort of like a 1950s black-and-white movie, except it’s in color, it’s in real life, and the subjects are even less believable.

by

“Power tripping” (Electric lines and smart meters)

HITLERMETER

When electrons move through a current or wire, they produce invisible fields of electric and magnetic energy, and these are known collectively as electromagnetic fields. But for some persons, there are implications more sinister than powering a lava lamp or electric stove. To believers, these fields are lethal, and they’re not referring to the guy who accidentally killed himself when he used a stove to heat his lava lamp.

EMFs are most frequently delivered through power lines. The ubiquity of these lines and the continually lengthening average life span would seem to contradict claims regarding health damage. More importantly, there is no identified mechanism by which electromagnetic fields would cause cancer, the illness most frequently attributed to the lines.

When radiation ionizes, this gain or loss of an electron can break the bond that holds molecules (such as DNA) together, and the result may be carcinogenic. But this danger does not extend to low-frequency fields. According to Dr. Robert Park of the American Physical Society, “All known cancer-inducing agents…act by breaking chemical bonds. Not until the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum is reached, beyond visible light, beyond infrared, and far, far beyond microwaves, do photons have sufficient energy to break chemical bonds.”

So, electromagnetic fields are low energy, they don’t ionize, and won’t damage DNA or cells. It’s OK to blend that gluten-free organic pomegranate smoothie as long as you don’t mind it swirling about in a container made of synthetic chemicals.

If magnetic fields caused illness, patterns would show increased risk with more exposure. This is not the case, and computational biologist Steven Salzberg traced this unfounded concern to a 1979 study that drew a correlation between high-voltage power lines and leukemia in Denver children. Additional research was done on the issue, and a 1995 review of the studies concluded, “There is no known mechanism by which magnetic fields of the type generated by high voltage power lines can play a role in cancer development. “

Then in 2002, the World Health Organization announced, “There is little evidence that mutations could be directly caused by extremely low frequency magnetic fields, which are not classifiable as to their carcinogenicity to humans.”

But as long as technology advances, concern over it will follow. Once power lines were cleared of wrongdoing, smart meters became the electric company resource responsible for slaying children. Smart meters measure the amount of electricity used, then transmit that information to the power company without an employee having to come to a house and read it. The smart meters emit EMFs for only about 45 seconds per day and they emit less than a Fry Daddy, but they are considered by some people to be sources of deadly radiation. Despite the meters spitting out EMFs less than .1 percent of the day, persons with electromagnetic hypersensitivity insist they can feel EMFs lurking and pouncing all the time.

These electro-sensitive people report suffering various physical and psychological ailments they say are caused by household appliances. Electro-sensitive is not a medical term and is self-described, self-diagnosed, and possibly self-medicated. It’s hard to say how many persons are afflicted by this psychosomatic illness. One telephone survey in California had three percent of respondents claiming it, but most of those with it might be avoiding telephones.

Double-blind, controlled studies have repeatedly shown that electro-sensitives are unable to distinguish between genuine and sham electro-magnetic fields. When notional cell phones or other devices were used, symptoms were still reported. This is due to the placebo’s lesser-known sibling, the Noncebo Effect. British physician and academic Ben Goldacre explained, “If one thinks something causes harm, one’s stress level rises. Some of the symptoms of stress are sleeplessness, palpitations, headaches and anxiety, the exact symptoms reported by sufferers of electro-sensitivity.

Therefore, the illness is suggested by sweat, not studies. The National Research Council reviewed 500 studies conducted over 20 years and found “no conclusive and consistent evidence” that electromagnetic fields harm humans. Then in 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine published the largest study ever on the relationship between electromagnetic fields and childhood leukemia. It involved over 1,200 youth, half with the cancer and half without. The results found “no evidence that magnetic field levels in the home increased the risk for childhood leukemia.”

To conclude, if you are have power lines running to your home and are serviced by a smart meter, strong evidence suggests you are not at increased risk, and here are some signs to look for that indicate you may not have cancer:

  • Consistency in bladder habits
  • Quick-healing sores
  • Usual bleeding and discharge
  • Smooth skin
  • Ease in swallowing
  • Stagnation in the size, shape, and color of warts and moles
  • Coughs of a normal duration
  • Robust appetite
  • Weight maintenance
  • Ability to manage pain
  • Explained vomiting
  • Being persistently long-winded
by

“Read Allah bout it” (Muslim conspiracy theories)

GUITARSHARKI have been on an unintended conspiracy theory kick of late, with four straight posts focusing on the topic. Let’s keep it going by addressing conspiracy theories with an Islamic flavor.

Muslim conspiracy theorists attribute so much power to Mossad and the CIA, it seems they should be worshipping those agencies instead of Allah. This power was displayed during a string of shark attacks in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, in 2010. Before delving into the attacks and their conspiratorial aftermath, please allow me a personal tangent. I knew Sharm el Sheikh shark victims before they were cool. I lived there for six months in 1999, where I met Herb. Herb had a mantra, “Everything is easy when the will is strong,” which he claimed to recite 500 times a day. Skeptic or not, I have no doubt about this. I would hear him saying it out loud to himself as he bicycled across the desert at night. He had an amazing biography that included fishing with Hemingway, introducing 15-year-old Mike Tyson to his trainer, and receiving unsolicited job offers of up to $500,000 a year. He turned the jobs down because he didn’t want to wear a suit.

I was interviewing him once when he decided that Muhammad Ali would be a better source for my question, so he thumbed through his rolodex for Ali’s home phone number. He stopped after realizing that the former heavyweight champion’s Parkinson’s disease would keep him from being speaking well enough. So he went to plan B, Norman Mailer. Norm wasn’t in, which was fine. The idea of conducting an unplanned and unscripted interview with Norman Mailer tended toward the intimidating side.

At any rate, Herb’s life experiences also included being bit by a shark during his daily three-mile swim from Sharm El Sheik to Tiran Island, Saudi Arabia. More than a decade later, shark attacks became common in the area for one week. There were five attacks, one of them fatal. Other than Herb’s shoulder being bit, there wasn’t much history of shark attacks in the area. The most likely reason for the abrupt spike was the dumping of sheep carcasses during an Islamic festival two weeks prior. But why blame Muslims when scapegoat Jews are nearby?

Some Egyptians, including the South Sinai governor, figured that Mossad agents were behind the attacks. This was typical of a pervading mindset in the region that sees Israel, and to a lesser extent the U.S., as behind any misfortune. Even the electricity going out is seen as sign of infidel sabotage. The shark attack victims were all Europeans, so the idea was that Israel was trying to cripple the city’s robust tourism industry. To do so, they captured a shark and planted a GPS unit on its back. That still leaves no explanation for how a device that tracks movement would enable a cartilaginous fish to be moved by remote control and then forced to chomp on a Ukrainian leg. On the flip side, a guy named Spielberg directed Jaws.

Keeping with unpopular animals, another idea posits that Mossad agents train vultures to spy on Saudi Arabia. One of these ornithological espionage agents, R65, was captured by Saudi Arabian security forces, wearing a bracelet declaring, “Tel Aviv University.” As Top Secret efforts go, emblazoning your nation’s capital on your spy’s footwear is an unorthodox strategy.

The university reported the vulture was part of a migration study, which is code talk for Zionist insurgency. Other birds have not returned, meaning they are out there getting more information. How they get it, what they have reported, and how they speak Hebrew is unknown. They are spies, after all.

Having promulgated theories based on sea and air, a ground-bound conspiracy is easy to concoct. Istanbul is the only city in the world that occupies two continents, and this has symbolic as well as geographic relevance. Turkey is a not-quite-east, not quite-west, locale that serves as both a dividing line between, and place of diplomacy for, two vastly different cultures. Turkey is populated by persons who would be comfortable living in places as disparate as Greece and Iran, and it borders both. So Istanbul provides just the right element for a Zionist plot to insult Turkishness though power chords.

The 2010 Sonisphere festival in Istanbul featured Metallica and Megadeth. But its most distinguishing characteristic was that it occurred the same month as a Gaza flotilla raid that killed nine Turks. As such, the concert was meant to mock the deaths by celebrating at a time of grieving. The headbanging was organized by Purple Concerts, which is run by Israelis. Of course, the show had been planned long before the raid took place. Or had the raid been planned long before the show took place? Conspiratorial minds want to know.

For evidence, Turkey’s Vakit newspaper noted both alcohol and Rammstein were present. Sonisphere played in 10 other countries in 2010, so the organizers were evidently also making fun of Greece for its debt crisis and needling Spain for losing the World Cup final.

Moving on. Hindu-Muslim rivalries are mostly associated with Kashmir, but if there’s a holy war brewing, Iran needs a slice of the jihad pie. Hence, its state-owned mouthpiece pushes the idea that Mossad agents cooperated with India to plot Umar Farouk Mutallab’s attempted plane bombing in 2009.

In the scheme, an Israeli security company paid for the would-be bomber’s plane ticket from Amsterdam to Detroit. He lacked a passport, but a mysterious “Indian man” arranged passage onto the plane. All this was made easier by Israel clandestinely controlling Nigeria and Yemen, where Mutallab was born and trained, respectively. The goal was to give the U.S. an excuse to invade Nigeria and Yemen. What interest Israel had in the U.S. invading countries that, per the theory, it already controlled, is never explained.

These have all been comical ideas, but we now make an abrupt transition to the jihad against polio vaccinations. As dangerous and unhinged as the U.S. anti-vaccine movement is, the threats to murder doctors, legislators, and lobbyists are unlikely to be carried out. Not so when a fatwa is ordered. In fact, scores of aid workers and their security guards have been killed since the latest vaccine jihad was declared in 2012. Another tragedy is the doubling of polio cases in Pakistan’s tribal regions during the time.

Maulana Fazlullah of the Pakistani Taliban considers the vaccinations a “conspiracy of Jews and Christians to make Muslims impotent and stunt their growth.” He also declared it to be against Islam to combat a disease before contracting it. He additionally declared women in public to be an obscenity, so he encourages the kidnapping and human trafficking of female health care workers.

We will close by returning a lighter note, specifically the idea of pig’s blood in cola. According to the Al-Riyadh Newspaper, “The scientific and medical research says that drinking Pepsi and Coke leads to cancer because the key element is taken from pork sausage. The pig is the only animal that eats dirt, dung and urine, which makes for lethal germs and microbes.”

The article goes through a host of maladies associated with the drinks, then warns, “Drinking six bottles of Pepsi or Coke at one time causes instant death.” Presumably at the hands of a Muslim polio jihadist.

by

“History lessen” (Alternate chronologies)

SABRENAP

History is the study of past events and revise means to reconsider and alter something in light of further evidence. Therefore, historical revisionism can be valid, and the negative connotation the term carries is not necessarily justified. In fact, the term should be used to differentiate it from people who advocate untruths, such as holocaust deniers and Boston Marathon bombing truthers.

We can see both legitimate and unsound examples of rewriting history by considering some aspects of the slave trade. One of the images most associated with slavery in the United States is the plantation. However, most masters owned just one or two slaves. There is nothing about this that would be controversial, nor would any controversy be enough in itself to lessen the legitimacy of the fact.

Then we have the fact that there were black slave owners in the United States. And in Virginia, white indentured servants could be sold. These statements have the redeeming value of being true and bringing them up for the sake of education is fine and even encouraged if someone asserted otherwise. The misuse would come if a member of Stromfront.org wrote, “Blacks owned slaves and whites could be sold, so the races were equal under the law, and those who say otherwise are the true racists and trying to promote their Zionist agenda.”

While this hypothetical keyboard bigot would be drawing a false conclusion, he at least he began with a correct statement. It gets worse when someone uses selective facts to justify a position. An example would be, “Most slaves who were given the option of staying with their former owners after the Civil War did so. This shows that the horrors of slavery were greatly exaggerated.” This conclusion glosses over the lack of options for people who, through no fault of their own, were penny-less, uneducated, and living in a country that granted them no rights, save the ability to leave their former owners. This position would also fail to address the moral failure of buying and owning humans, confining them against their will, and abusing them with impunity. So while it would be absurd to conclude that former slaves staying with their owners proved slavery wasn’t that bad, the notion at least began with an accurate statement that was then twisted in to a pretzel of faulty logic.

Taking it even further are those who just make stuff up, such as those espousing Armenian genocide denial. Another example is Joseph Stalin having enemies erased from photos, which his minions did an amazing job of, considering what they had to work with in those pre-computer days.

But even these fabrications are related to a single event that took place over a limited number of years. There are a handful of people who take it much further and seek to erase centuries from the history books. They invent an alternate chronology that discards or rearranges elements of traditional history to form new narratives. This does not refer to reexamining evidence, considering new angles, or confronting recently unearthed information. It refers to wiping out entire swaths of history to fit an agenda, be it nationalism, religion, anti-religion, or ego.

One could consider Young Earth Creationists and Hare Krishna creationists to be alternate chronologists, albeit lazy ones who are single-minded and offer no evidence to support their position. YECs aim to reduce the amount of time life has existed on Earth by four billion years, while Krishna creationists want to extend it by that amount. In both cases, they are limited to one topic (how old Earth is and long it has been inhabited), and their rationale exists solely in their interpretation of their sacred texts. Full-blown alternate chronologists, by contrast, launch far more ambitious plans and at least try to come up with evidence for their positions.

The most prominent modern-day alternate chronologist is Anatoly Fomenko. He is something of an anti-creationist, but just as wrong as the YEC and Hare Krishna gangs. His chronology asserts that most of recorded history was written by the church in order to match Biblical events, and that genuine history only began in the 11th century.

He argues that events attributed to the civilizations of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages. Fomenko also claims historical characters are reused or conglomerates. For example, Plato, Plotinus, and Gemistus Pletho were the same person, and Ivan the Terrible is presented as a composite of four rulers. He accuses historians of reusing the same account of events in multiple times and locations. For example, Byzantine history from 300s to 800s and English history from 600s to 1000s are the same historical copy and paste. And rather than being documented accounts, tales from Mesopotamia, Greece, and Egypt are Renaissance-era fiction.

This may be the longest and most detailed conspiracy ever alleged. It involves denying major events, such as insisting there were no Tartar or Mongol invasions and conquests. The subterfuge also addresses minor issues, with ancient Greek and Roman statues actually being built during the Renaissance to provide historical cover. Fomenko is a Russian imperialist and his incentive for all this is in denying that lowly ethnicities were capable of squashing his beloved motherland.

His ideas are refuted by archaeological dating, carbon dating, and Mesopotamian astronomy records. Of course, these are dismissed as fabricated artifacts that are part of the cover-up. This cover-up would be mean that conspirators would have had to write records on clay and in cuneiform, long after this method and style of writing went extinct. Also, many of the rulers that Fomenko claims are fabricated are on coins that are still being unearthed.

The primary issue with his hypothesis is the selective pruning and mixing of dates, events, and rulers, which makes the whole idea a perpetual ad hoc exercise.

Another alternate chronologist is Heribert Illig. His phantom time hypothesis holds that the years 614-911 were fabricated so Holy Roman Emperor Otto III could be on the throne at the new millennium. This would mean no Charlemagne, no defeat of the Tang Dynasty, and no Viking raids. Ancient astronomy records, archaeological remains, and dendrochronology dating methods all refute the notion of phantom time.

Then we have Jean Hardouin, who detected a plot to forge almost all classical texts, ancient art, and coins. Hardouin deduced this through a series of clues embedded in classical works. He believed 13th Century forgers had not only manufactured the texts but a host of later references to them. The forgers’ goal was to bolster atheism by introducing elements of heathenism into Christianity.

None of these men put forth anything resembling a plausible scenario, although a drastically altered timeline could explain the skills of Stalin’s henchmen if they were using PhotoShop.