Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes

Ending the Year, Ending the Blog

2010-12-26T20:54:00.007-06:00

I want to first thank those of you who sent in holiday wishes, especially LizDitz. (I shall always cherish the word "sausageness.")

I have been silently collecting my favorite fails and wins all year, hoping to do a year in review. Or maybe a "Nude Girls of Skepticism" calendar. I think that the former will get me less sued (more about that later).

Ideological enemies FoxNews and CNN share the award for the worst science reporting of the year in what is sort of a poopy parenthesis for the year. In January, FoxNews opened an article with the words:

The tremendous volcanic eruption thought to be responsible for Earth's largest mass extinction — which killed more than 70 percent of plants and dinosaurs walking the planet 250 million years ago — is still taking lives today.

Oh, the wrong. This one stuck in the treads of my sneakers all year. The second really, really bad job of communicating science to the public came from this month, just a few days ago, when CNN picked up something that Oprah had dropped.

Big fail in the summary, Sanjay, and your producers should be put into a dishwasher until they apologize. The eye scraping and nasal probing or "blockhead trick"...WTF? These are long-known carnival tricks and shamanistic charlatanry! Do 5 minutes of Internet research, Gupta, and let these woo-mongers have it.

This year, also saw the growth of my menagerie by one cat:

This cat's arrival threatened to turn my website into simply a series of updates about the cat. We slowly wormed his way into our hearts, not unlike a heartworm, and we eventually settled on about a dozen names for him, but his full Pastifarian name is Randini Gavin McLoud, or Gavin for short. Later, however, a miracle took place, and the image of Cthulu appeared on his forehead:

Beholding the image, everyone in my house instantly went insane, but Skepchick recognized the significance of this appearance, and Gavin appeared on Cute Animal Fridays. We still haven't heard from Joe Nickell, however.

Leaving a long unpleasant streak on my radar for the first time this year was Mike Adams, Health Clown. He did first appear long ago in a post called "Mike Adams, Docktor of Physik with An Especialitee in Malajustments of the Humours." I revisited him many times over the year, because he is such a twisted goofball. Adams is clearly a danger to public health and aesthetics:

The occasion for my coverage of him was the Dr. Rachie Shorty Kerfuffle, when a bunch of charlatans were cheating to win completely unearned health awards. Rachael ultimately won for achievements in the field of awesome. During this dust-up, I declared Jan 25th International Dr. Rachie Awareness Day, a day to remind us to keep Dr. Rachie in your hearts all year long. Out of this, HJHOP was mentioned a couple of times on the Skeptic Zone, a weekly podcast out of Australia that everyone should listen to, and which has spawned no small number of Australian luminaries of science education. I met many of them face to face for the first time at Dragon*Con. I was in a dowsing demonstration during Rachael and Richards Mystery Investigators show, which was a hoot, and I introduced myself afterward. We were attacked by ghost orbs during the resulting photos:

(I think the one above and to the left of Richard's head is probably a guardian angel, the one above and to the right of his head is probably spirit energy manifesting, the one way above Rachael's head is my great-grandmother, and the one next to her head is actually just a mote of dust reflecting the camera flash or possibly a light out of focus in the window behind us.) That night, we (Animala and I) heard that the Skeptic Track people were gathering in the hotel bar on the first floor. Rachael came by and talked to us for about 20 minutes, which was swell of her, and later we sat and talked to James Randi for about 15 minutes. Also temporarily depriving Australia of her immediate awesomeness was Kylie Sturgess, to whom I introduced myself and who delivered an ear-schredding squee and rib-shattering hug. It was great to finally meet her in person.

Regarding Answers in Genesis, it was a bountiful year. It started with Bodie Hodge's series on Really Embarrassingly Stupid Questions That Would Shame Most 5th Graders but that AiG Takes Seriously and culminated in the secular apotheosis of literalism that took up Answers In Genesis's challenge to "Stand unashamedly on the Bible." The site was mentioned on Pharyngula, and the campaign to stand on Bibles became part of the American vernacular, or at last used as and example of a literal metaphor on the site TVTropes (under tag "real life").

I expanded my guitar and guitar accessories collection to what is basically perfection, with the addition of a Les Paul Studio, which I love, a Korg A3 signal processor, which is fantastic, a Keeley Modded TS 9, and finally a VoxAC 30 amp:

The whole set up (which I have since trimmed down a little and put on a pedal board) is featured in a post from August.

Woo-wise, this was a very interesting year for me, because I came into more direct contact with the weirdness than ever before. For instance, I visited the Georgia Guidestones. I also went to a psychic fair, where I was introduced to Robert Barner's homeopathic biofeedback, which was the biggest, most transparent load of horse leavings I had ever encountered. At the same psychic fair, a psychic talked to my grandmother, showing an uncanny ability to contact the living. Oh, I also got my cat certified in homeopathy; we were all so proud of her. I also attended my first webinar and live-tweeted Meryl Dorey's antivax strangeness. I, and most of Midtown, protested the Westboro Baptist Church's visit to Atlanta.

My increased contact with the world of woo, however, brought me some unwanted attention, which I have not written about here. These incidents have made me reconsider having a pseudonymous website, and I now feel that it will be better in the next year for me to write "on the record," as it were, under my own name in a new venue.

The first incident came after Dragon*Con. I had been to a pair of presentations by Chris Fleming, of the despicable show Psychic Kids. After his second talk, I recorded my exchange with him during the Q&A, when I asked if there was anyone who was independent of the show to looking after the children's interests. (The answer I got was basically, "What? My co-host is not independent?") This is an extremely important facet of normal, legitimate research, because kids are classified as an especially vulnerable population, and Hollywood has rules about kids working. I broadcast this conversation on my podcast. A lawyer in the Georgia AG's office has since said that I probably was within my rights to do so, but a few days after the podcast went up, I was contacted by the organizers of the Skeptic Track, Derek and Swoopy, both of whom I respect immensely. Swoopy sent me a strongly worded email, which warned me that if I did not take down the podcast, I could expect to hear from the Con's lawyers. My sense is that the lawyers affiliated with the show had complained about the podcast, and the Con wanted to send a clear message, which, holy shit, did they ever! Basically, I was told that I had jeopardized the entire existence of the Skeptic Track. I was, of course, not a representative of the Skeptic Track in any way shape or form. I was simply attending. Nonetheless, the recording came down instantly and I sent profuse apologies to... just about everyone in the world. When Skepchick recently raised the issue of that horrid show's renewal, I really wished that the recording was still around to inform the debate, but it was gone. The whole affair was deeply humiliating and frustrating.

Just about the time that I was starting to come back to post regularly on my site, I received an email from my boss to contact him or her at home. My boss wanted to let me know that I was going to be receiving a note from the office of Human Resources who had received a complaint about a website called Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes. This was a shock to me, since I have always tried to keep my work life and free time separate, and I have consciously never made my connection to any place of work public on the site. It has always been my own personal clubhouse, no work allowed. Hell, I don't even get email from the site at my work address. At any rate, someone creepily made the connection and talked to my superiors. I felt personally threatened, as nobody had contacted me about any factual errors or anything. This was when I restricted access to the site for a few days, which confused a number of regular readers. I was trying to ensure that if I had said something that was factually wrong, that I would try to, in good faith, limit the spread of any possible misinformation before the person/people contacted me. I still have no idea who complained or what the problem was. In the end I was not personally contacted by anyone about anything, so the site went back up.

And it will stay up.

This website has brought me immense amounts of joy and I have met a number of great people through it. It has been completely worth the time and trouble at all points, and the people who have participated over the years have made me immensely glad to have bothered. Nonetheless, I'm sure that I can do more as not-a-toad, and I want to write on the record. I have lined up a couple of higher-profile writing/speaking gigs with outside skeptical groups. I have a busy semester ahead of me and a lot of publishing to accomplish over the coming months. If there was ever a time to set aside this magnificent toy of a website, it would be now.

Keep this site on your RSS feeds for now, as I will make an announcement here of my new digs when I land. I do plan to continue contributing to the conversations we started here, just in a different forum, and I'd be happy to see you there as well. I am starting a much better thing, folks, and it would be a shame if you missed it.

HJ/B

Holiday wrap up...

2010-12-25T22:50:00.003-06:00

The day is drawing to a close. Presents have been opened. A large meal has been consumed. Everyone has gone home. The Dr. Who Christmas Special has been watched. It's pretty much over, so I'll sum up.

A meeting with extended family is often an opportunity to ply my trade in public. Some of them sort of know what I do, the type of stuff I teach about, so I often get a couple questions about pop culture stuff. This year, it was about The Fourth Kind. So, my cousin's husband asked me what I thought about it. Did I think that it was real? Well, everyone in the movie has a credit, including the people who are supposed to be in "documentary" footage. Also, I just read Whitley Strieber's Communion. A lot of that movie was lifted wholesale from that book, for instance, the owls that are serving as "masking memories."

"They said that it was based on a true story."

"Well, people do go missing in Nome, Alaska, but they disappear after they've been drinking. There's a similar movie in the works right now, Apollo 18, which will also pretend to be 'found footage'."

Now, the featured event was my first meeting with my sister's boyfriend, who I had not met. I had been warned that he was an arch-conservative and that I should not talk about... anything... with him. Indeed, this was one of the reasons I started my blog, to make sure that I had somewhere to spout off without upsetting my family.

But it was on.

I don't have great interest in the health care bill. But someone mentioned it and he suddenly appeared. And he was ready to go into it. I obliged.

He told me that Obama had told a bunch of elderly people in a speech that they should basically look into hospice, in the sense that the government would rather not pay for long-term end of life care. I asked him to find the speech for me, and handed him an iPad. He couldn't. But he was sure. He remembered seeing it. It was just a short part of the speech.

I vaguely remembered that speech. So, I went to a site that had collected all of Obama's speeches, did a subject search for "hospice" and I found the only occasions where he used the word. It happened about 4 times. Because he said that he said Obama used it in front of old people, I decided that it was probably his townhall in front of AARP. (Not a place I would think anyone would probably ever push death panels.) Guess what? Obama did not announce to a bunch of old people that he was going to kill them.

Also, I pointed out to the guy that the Obama plan was originally floated by the Republicans.

Heehee. I love evidence.

The war on Christmas just got stooopid...

2010-12-24T22:48:00.001-06:00

Yep. You saw that. And some of them think that they are adults.

The Christmas thing...

2010-12-24T18:21:00.002-06:00

So, after a glass of wine, my mother, a lightweight, wondered where she went wrong with her kids. I reminded her that I was one of her kids and that I was there in the room. And as far as I was concerned, I was pretty good. I mean, I got a nice job at a great school where I get to do lots of neat things. I occasionally donate time to various animal related causes. I have nothing left to prove to myself. I'm satisfied. How's that wrong, I wondered.

"Ah, but my kids they don't... Hell, you're an atheist."

Fuck, I thought we were past this. "Yeah? And I'm fine. I hardly ever kill people. I'm pretty nice."

"But do you believe in God?"

"Well, to be completely accurate, I don't know, but I'm vanishingly certain that there is no evidence for it."

"Do you believe in science?"

"No, science has proven itself to me. It's not like I have to have faith in the same sense that science works. I don't think that 'having faith' is in itself necessarily a positive quality."

"Well, I think it can be, and it depends on the person."

"Then stop haranguing me about being an atheist."

"But what about all the good that religion does? The music is good."

"Well, yeah the music is nice, but that doesn't make what it celebrates true. And the good things, sure, some people do nice things in the name of religion. I do nice things, however, in my own name because they are nice things to do."

"What did it for you?"

"How did I lose faith?"

"I don't know, I think I grew up. What made me realize in no uncertain terms that religion's primary interest was not others but itself was the priest scandal, but I was already on my way out...."

"Yeah, the Church took a big hit there. Lost a lot of people. That's when I decided that the hierarchy is not the church, but the people are."

"Yeah, well, your Church disagrees."

"But the people do lots of good...."

"And the Church takes credit for it."

"What do you mean?" She wasn't having it.

"I mean that I hang out with a lot of really nice people, most of them atheists."

"And I'm sure that they are nice people."

Ignoring what was should have been a given, I continued, "The Church has nothing to do with the fact that they are nice, and that I can get along with people everywhere. The Church swoops in, takes credit for people being nice to each other, and people shrug and say, sure. I don't get that. The golden rule is not some sort of mystical truth. It seems to be par for the course. I just don't feel the need to take credit for it like the Church does."

Then we had lunch.

Light Google Bomb and Get Away...Powerbalance Edition...

2010-12-24T13:28:00.003-06:00

Did you see what Power Balance wrote on their website?

POWER BALANCE WRISTBANDS

In our advertising we stated that Power Balance wristbands improved your strength, balance and flexibility.

We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct in breach of s52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974.

If you feel you have been misled by our promotions, we wish to unreservedly apologise and offer a full refund.

To obtain a refund please visit our website www.powerbalance.com.au or contact us toll-free on 1800 733 436

This offer will be available until 30th June 2011. To be eligible for a refund, together with return postage, you will need to return a genuine Power Balance product along with proof of purchase (including credit card records, store barcodes and receipts) from an authorised reseller in Australia.

This Corrective Notice has been paid for by Power Balance Australia Pty Ltd and placed pursuant to an undertaking to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission given under section 87B of the Trade Practices Act, 1974.

Power balance. Power balance. Power balance.

You suck Power Balance

Power balance. Power balance. Power balance.

Haha! France gets all the crazy people...

2010-12-23T21:50:00.003-06:00

Turns out, if you live in one little obscure town in France, you will be saved by the subterranean aliens who live there and will be whisked away to safety when the world ends in 2012.

Sucks to be France.

The week in conspiracy (Christmas edition)

2010-12-21T21:49:00.004-06:00

Even though I am officially on winter break, it turns out that irrational fear and paranoia never take a break.

Shit, I'm starting to sound like a PSA. Well, at least it gives me something to fall back on.

Anyway, this week brought forth new variations on the old stories that we are all so familiar with.

Fox's pundits seem to have taken the attack on Prince Charles and Camilla in stride, by which I mean, panicking over the upcoming socialist revolution!
Of course, Fox would never promote a transparently bogus conspiracy theory.
Rahm Emmanuel has his own Birthers! Very cute. (With a shout out to my buddy John at Johnsebben.com for pointing this one out to me.)
Birther who refused to deploy now faces 3 years in prison. Good.
This one is...just odd. First Harvard spawns the Unabomber, now the LGBT pee-vandal.
I'm dreading the upcoming conspiracy theories that will doubtlessly be spawned by Apollo 18, the film that will not take the hint that The Fourth Kind sucked and every associated with it should send me a personal apology in iambic pentameter.
A vague sense of conspiracism suffuses this article written by the only old lady who uses the Internet. (I am, of course, assuming that all old ladies are just like my mom.)
My favorite article title of the week: "When Brains are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Brains." Indeed. (From the notorious Canada Free Press.)
Evil truth-suppressing judicial cabal dismisses charges against guy selling conspiracy theories in Dealey Plaza.
David Aaronovich appears on the Lay Scientist to discuss a variety of conspiracy theories.
Turns out Wikileaks was able to find Obama's Birth Certificate.
Wikileaks Leaker Bradley Manning is a Fictitious Person. I mean, asks the author, where are the interviews of his parents? HMMM? Answer that one. Buahahaha!
Wikileaks is populated by Jew-haters.
Also, it is a Zionist conspiracy supported by the Mossad. If you don't understand how it can't be both, that's not my problem! :)
I'm sorry. I take it back. My favorite title this week is, "Why they want to homosexualize the military."
Nevada's GOP preoccupied with conspiracy theories.
NASA confirms that David Icke is right: the moon is hollow. (I mean, the moon rings like a bell, and bells are hollow. QED, biatches!)
Ooops! Scratch that Illuminati Jesuit conspiracy. It was actually the RAND Corporation planning to start WWIII. And they foolishly, as super villains often do, allowed full access of their super secret files to a total nutter.
Age of Autism finds that John Stossel's brother has BIG PHARMA TIES! Declines to explain, So what?
The Deadly Broccoli Uprising!
Paul discovers my beat!

Conspiracy Theory of the Week:

How the Animated Series G.I. Joe Predicted Today’s Illuminati Agenda

Camille is such a biaaatch!

2010-12-19T21:00:00.006-06:00

I have no idea who Camille is. But that hasn't stopped a bunch of fans of what can only be a rotten show, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (I've never seen it, but I've never heard the term "Real Housewives" used in a way that was not interchangeable with "gutterfolk," so I'll roll with it), from posting on HJHOP. They found me because I recently posted about Allison DuBois, the fake psychic who humiliated herself on that show a week ago. Seriously, the fans of the show seem to think that just because I have no comment filter they should deface my website with what I'm sure to them appear to be ideas, but which is more akin, as far as I can tell, to some sort of Internet-based dirty protest.

Nonetheless, I am more than happy to look at a couple of the dimwitted comments about psychics that have appeared on my site. For, as the kids say, lulz. A good one came from "Anonymous," though I think that is a pseudonym:

I think her little stint on Housewives was career suicide. Not that I ever thought she was a real "psychic" or "medium". I'm furious after seeing that episode.

Ah, very good! A clear-headed skeptic! Huzzah!

A real medium does not possess those qualities that she was exhibiting (regardless whether it was alcohol or not).

Fuck.

With all that negative engery she has...there's no way she can tap into anything.

So, you can tell if someone has energy just by looking at them? Why can't I do that? Actually, this, I think, reveals a lot, if I might theorize for a second (and I damn well might). If you like them, they are psychic. If you do not like them, they are not psychic. It seems to me that this is somehow an extrapolation of confirmation bias, that somehow whether or not you accept what someone says depends on how you feel about them, whether they confirm your idea of what a psychic should be, not whether or not they are actually psychic. And why would a paying customer go to a mean psychic? (All psychics who are not insane, by the way, are mean.)

Especially after her comment she made about knowing when Kyle will die and what would happen to her family......that is just something a real medium would never in a million years say or even think in such a vendictive way.

Why not? Actually, this is true, and perhaps there is some cultural conditioning going on here. I have a hypothesis that people have been conditioned to have really low standards for psychics. Essentially if they say nice things about you or your dead people, then you are happy.

I feel bad for people who pay to see her.

Love and light man. This woman is a fraud.

Love and light? Are you Anna Robles? Here, let me put out some bad vibes~~~~~~~ There!

The next head-bashingly endumbening reply came from Maria, and this is damned painful:

I am going to say this.

"This." There. I said it. I'd say it again.

MY name is Maria I am a Spiritual Medium/Spiritual Advisor. Believe me or not I DONT Care.

That's great, so I can have guilt-free fun at your expense! Whee!

I Have been gifted for 16 years.

Are you sure the word your mom used wasn't "special"? Or do you perhaps mean that you have been passed around like a holiday fruitcake? Or are you both special and a fruitcake. I bet that's it.

Let me go on to tell you guys.

If what's past is prologue, what is it when it's all prologue? Does that mean that you are already done? Funk dat.

I saw the housewives show on thrusday and i picked up on alot about the Allison. I was very much surprised of how she acted. What i saw of her she is a evil person.

Wow. You must be psychic to have read all of the other boneheaded comments.

if she does have these gifts as she says there not from God. Need I SAY MORE?

Your homophones and prepositions are from Belzebub's backside, sweetie. And please don't say anything more. Why don't people who are kissed with the gift by God ever gifted rudimentary punctuation or capitalization skills, as in:

KYLE is not going to be divorcing her hubby or vice versa. I have picked up alot about KYLE and none of Allison said is true.!

Also, Kyle is a guy. Why would he be divorcing some woman's hubby? Or, vice versa, why would someone's husband be divorcing someone named Kyle, who is presumably a man?

I AM Typing all this on my moblie

Heehee. The LORD JEHOVAH is typing. Or I AM WHO AM MISTYPING ON MY MOBILE.

so its hard to explain everything.

That's just the words part, hon. Really, don't feel obliged to continue.

ANYONE WANT FREE READINGS I WILL GIVE YOU GUYS 1 FREE READING ON THE HOUSE! I FEEL everyone needs at least 1 free reading.. email with number @ divineheavenlyangels@hotmail.com

I'm going to do a little psychic experiment here...I'm reaching out into the universe and drawing on the powers of the Big Woozle in the Sky to divine that her name is regal...Lion? Lyons. Her name is Maria Lyons, and she is a transplant to Florida from Texas....I am using my psychic powers to peek into her mind...and...she is from...central, no, south-central Texas, from a very small town in Marina...Medina County--Natalia. So, San Antonio? She was born in...1983...a Taurus. April 25. Last week, her PC crashed and I have a strong psychic feeling that she has been perfectly ignored by...Tori Spelling? Really? Whatevs. Maria is really beautiful, actually, with long dark hair and dark eyes. I know this because I have a picture of her: http://www.divineheavenlyangels.net/resources/marai2.jpg), if I wanted a PI to follow her.

In order to really fuck with someone's brain, all a psychic needs is a phone number or some basic identifying information. You can get a name from that and an address, and then anything that a PI can look up in a LexisNexis database is available to the even the least literate psychic. Your life becomes an open book. I have already, in about 10 minutes, zoomed in on her identity precisely, identified some of her lotion-peddling friends. It would be wrong of me to befriend her on facebook and root about for info that way, and I have a conscience. But, really, who can afford to hire a PI?

Well, Maria can make it worth her while. You can see from her services page that she will not only take lots of money for doing nothing, but will also take more money for doing nothing, accepting donations as well as money for "psychic" services. (There's a reason her sign, Taurus, is that of the "bull".)

For five dollars a day, she will contact your angels. I presume she can promise this because she is holding the angels hostage in her basement and tortures them for information. For $90, she'll cast a prayer spell (or at least tell you she will) on your behalf. For a mere $100 she'll fuck up your memories of your dearly departed. (I don't know why granny needs the $100 on the other side, but I'm sure Maria will get it to her.) If you have 2 hours and $175 that you don't think would be better to give to the James Randi Education Foundation or used on porn or something, she'll teach you how contact your angels. Fuck! They're my angels! Gimme! Or, if you are completely without a clue, she will be your friend for $450 a month. Really. For $450 a month, I sure would have a PI do some digging.

Don't advertise your lame psychic performance art on my site, angel-knickers. I believe that every psychic deserves at least one free warning.

"Apart from the Marines, they're all dead butch"

2010-12-18T16:02:00.002-06:00

A little precision swanning about to celebrate the repeal of DADT!

I mean the Inniskillin Fusiliers and the Anglian Regiment are all right if you're interested in the art nouveau William Morris revival bit, but if you really want a regiment of the line that is really saying something about interior decor, then you've got to go for the Durham Light Infantry.

I think that is all of the gay army humor (or in this case, humour) I have. In all seriousness, it's a great day. Something rescued from this depressing lame duck session. Now, give them a country worth dying for and legalize gay marriage.

Allison DuBois is Bullshit

2010-12-16T22:50:00.004-06:00

Yeah, I noticed that there was a spike in traffic related to medium-performance artist Allison Dubois, who is a yeasty, curdled discharge. Most of the searches were "Allison Dubois bullshit."

I always knew that swearing phonetically for four years would eventually land me 18 additional hits.

Anyway, I have posted on bullshitting bullshitter Allison "I am so full of bullshit I have bullshit coming out of my tear ducts" Dubois, or "Senora Bullshit of Bullshitania" as she is known to her friends. And it seems that she said "bullshit" on TV. No, I don't mean talking the total bullshit that she talks constantly when she bullshits bullshittingly with bullshit imaginary dead people (which is nothing but the barest, most absolute and concentrated bullshit you are likely to find, the exploitive shrew). It seems like Allison DuBois (DuBois means, "of, related, or pertaining to bullshit" in French) was on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (which is apparently a show) tonight and said, "Bullshit."

Of course, I also found that Medium was cancelled in November.

Ha, as they say, ha.

You can read the old posts, which I am rather proud of at "Allison DuBois and Oprah Winfrey in the Matrix" and "Allison DuBois: As Evil as a Four-Dollar Bill." These two articles were part of the Skeptics Circle, when we used to do that. Good times, good times.

Morgan Freeman Dead. Is Morgan Freeman Alive?

2010-12-16T18:03:00.003-06:00

It turns out, yes he is! Yay!

Breaking News: Morgan Freeman Not Dead

I've waited so long to use that headline and then confirm that it is wrong. Ah, love it!

Bill Donohue has been writing drunk emails again!

2010-12-15T11:40:00.001-06:00

Bill Donohue actually wrote this and sent it out, apparently on purpose:

BEWARE OF CHRISTMAS PARTIES

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the advice given by the British law firm, BPE Solicitors, on how to handle Christmas parties:

This British law firm offers indispensable advice. "Christmas parties, with their mix of drink, high spirits and merriment, are one of the main potential sources of problems." Exactly right—this mix is combustible. But what problems are they talking about? "The claims which are most likely to arise are those around sexual harassment, bullying, assault and discrimination." Prudence dictates that the party be cancelled, but we at the Catholic League are going to risk it and see what happens.

The law firm does not lack for specifics. "Protection from harassment and discrimination relate to unwanted conduct on the grounds of sex, age, disability, gender reassignment, religion or belief, race, marital status and sexual orientation." Wow. The good news is that the Brits opt for the correct term—sex—which conveys a nature-based reason for sexual differences. The bad news is that they use the term "gender reassignment" when, in fact, it is not gender that is being "reassigned": the surgery alters one's anatomy. In any event, we are fortunate not to have any gender reassigned people working at the Catholic League (as far as I can tell, anyway), though I've had my doubts about a few recent applicants. Nice to know, too, that "belief" merits the same status as religion. If you can believe it.

The Brits also warn that at the Christmas party, "Muslim employees may feel excluded if the only religion option is an alcohol fueled trip to the pub." Good thing we don't hire any—all we do is go to pubs.

Finally, they suggest that employers should "identify areas where staff from other religions might be disadvantaged and then consider how those arrangements could be changed to overcome those disadvantaged." We don't have this problem either—we simply order them to convert and be done with it.

You are a hateful vomit-shrew, Bill. A wretched, sad failure of what superficially looks sort of like a human if you squint hard enough. Everything you are is perfectly wrong, and I'd pity you if you weren't so hateful and vile.

This week in conspiracy (12/13)

2010-12-13T19:15:00.003-06:00

It's been Monday all day, more than enough time for me to get to This Week in Conspiracy, so let's get right to it.

I can't wait for Google to give me the mark of the beast!
Robert Redford's got a movie about John Wilkes Booth? Hm.
Perfect failure of a human being, Mike "Health Muppet" Adams, is scared of fluoridation. Of course, he talks about the researchers infecting Guatemalans with STDs between 1946-1948 as if it is happening now, but that's only because, as far as I can tell, he never understood a single fucking thing that he has ever read.
Yay! Permanent war! I mean...SHIT!
In a sinister development, the government has started a website to combat conspiracy theories at http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html
This...er...uh...hm. No idea.
DARPA initiating "total tyranny program," also known as Operation Fuzzy Bunny.
Drug-addled vomit monster Rush "Mike Adams" Limbaugh wants Assange to find Obama's birth certificate.
You thought I was going to go a week without mentioning Gordon Duff, didn't you? Well, too bad.
HOLY NO SHIT, BATMAN! China has Windows source code!
Wikileaks is, or isn't, going to announce, or not announce, files related or unrelated to UFOs.
Pakistan gets Punk'd by anti-Indian Ashton Kutcher.
Good for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, who does everything short of calling Jesse Ventura a rotten, low-life sensationalist windbag of fail.
Did the Roman Piso family write the Bible, and if so, so what?
A truly hilarious and befuddling video about the occult symbolism of China's Olympic closing ceremonies.
Star Trek is a globalist fantasy.
I rather liked this approach to climate change conspiracies.
Bulgarian Orthodox Church head: "I am alive."
American Free Press: Beware Jewish Centrism!?!?@@!@111panic!
The reason the security line is so slow at the airport is that the radiated people at the front of the line have to climb over the bodies.

Conspiracy Theory of the Week (this was a tough one--either this or the Olympics one!):

Egyptian official thinks Israel may be behind shark attacks.

You're welcome, and I'm sorry.

How could an adult ever take Mike Adams seriously after this?

2010-12-12T11:17:00.006-06:00

I have seen some stupid shit in my day, much of it emanating from Mike Adams' website, but this one takes the taco. It's...so...mind-warpingly endumbening that there is nothing left to do but declare Mike Adams' career as a self-styled "Health Ranger" over and inaugurate an era of his new career, wombat-licking crazy hobo shouting on the street corner. Seriously.

It's called, and I am not at all exaggerating:

Principle of astrology proven to be scientific: planetary position imprints biological clocks of mammals

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

It opens with this charming sentence:

Mention the word "astrology" and skeptics go into an epileptic fit.

For a health ranger, you sure treat epileptics like garbage, you turd-blast.

The idea that someone's personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets has long been derided as "quackery" by the so-called "scientific" community which resists any notion based on holistic connections between individuals and the cosmos.

The problems with this sentence are many, so let's just dwell on the most obvious ones. 1) "Holistic" is undefined. 2) It was made by Mike Adams. 3) We are all connected to the cosmos; hell, we're part of it--didn't you ever see Sagan's...sorry, thought I was talking to an adult. Of course you haven't, you ridiculous man-child. 4) Position of planets relative to what? Earth? The sun? Each other? 5) By so-called, he means, "actual." 6) We'd love to understand any actual effect on personality of the celestial world, but there is as of yet no evidence that this is the case, there is no plausible mechanism by which those effects could be felt, and 7) HOLYSHITWHATAREYOULIVINGINTHE

FUCKINGMIDDLEAGESYOUHOPELESSFAILURE?

It's not even quackery. Astrology is an embarrassment to quackery!

According to the conventional view, your genes and your parenting determine your personality, and the position of planet Earth at the time of your birth has nothing to do with it.

Then again, conventional scientists don't believe the position of the moon has anything to do with life on Earth, either.

The phrase "conventional scientists" shouldn't exist, first of all. The only scientists are the ones who bend to convention, not flaky spandex-wearing half-men like you, Mike.

They dismiss the wisdom that farmers have known for ages -- that planting seeds or transplanting living plants in harmony with the moon cycles results in higher crop yields.

Well, if a farmer says it, it must be true. It's like a new type of logical fallacy: ad agricolam. Show me your fucking data, pants-boy.

Even the seeds inside humans are strongly influenced by the moon, as menstruation cycles and moon cycles are closely synchronized (28 days, roughly).

That's why when a woman takes birth control, the phases of the moon stop! Also, it's why all women's periods are perfectly synchron...'Aaaang on!!

Skeptics must be further bewildered by the new research published in Nature Neuroscience and conducted at Vanderbilt University which unintentionally provides scientific support for the fundamental principle of astrology -- namely, that the position of the planets at your time of birth influences your personality.

In this study, not only did the birth month impact personality; it also resulted in measurable functional changes in the brain.

This study, conducted on mice, showed that mice born in the winter showed a "consistent slowing" of their daytime activity. They were also more susceptible to symptoms that we might call "Seasonal Affective Disorder."

How much do you want to bet that he misreads this study? Anyone? Anyone?

It turns out, these researchers drew up natal charts for a bunch of rats and, holy shit, they were able to predict that the little guys would have bald tails and love cheese! Actually, not really. According to the abstract, the study, "Perinatal photoperiod imprints the circadian clock," reveals:

Using real-time gene expression imaging and behavioral analysis, we found that the perinatal photoperiod has lasting effects on the circadian rhythms expressed by clock neurons as well as on mouse behavior, and sets the responsiveness of the biological clock to subsequent changes in photoperiod. These developmental gene × environment interactions tune circadian clock responses to subsequent seasonal photoperiods and may contribute to the influence of season on neurobehavioral disorders in humans.

Uh...astrology? I see..."developmental gene × environment interactions", which sounds an assload like "your genes and your parenting"--that is, genetics and environment, and if part of your environment is the length of the day...well, so be it. Hardly a radical shift in our thinking about how personalities come about. It's not predicting events, it's making no exact predictions about individuals, it has exactly fuck-all to do with the position of the planets. It has to do with the length of the day.

Of course, this has as much to do with astrology as does a related article on the same web page as the abstract of the article you are failing to understand: "Photoperiodism in the Plant Kingdom". Mike goes on, fizzle that he is:

The study was carried out by Professor of Biological Sciences Douglas McMahon, graduate student Chris Ciarleglio, post-doctoral fellow Karen Gamble and two additional undergraduate students, none of whom believe in astrology, apparently. They do, of course, believe in science, which is why all their study findings have been draped in the language of science even though the findings are essentially supporting principles of astrology.

They don't believe in astrology. They don't believe in astrology. They don't believe in astrology. They don't believe in astrology. Tattoo that on the ass of your sheep, just to make sure that you remind yourself of it every night. The people who you are citing, you enfeebled nitwit, don't believe in astrology. Day length is determined by the speed of a planet's rotation on its axis, not its position relative to the sun or planets. You're pathetic.

"What is particularly striking about our results is the fact that the imprinting affects both the animal's behavior and the cycling of the neurons in the master biological clock in their brains," said Ciarleglio. This is one of the core principles of astrology: That the position of the planets at the time of your birth (which might be called the "season" of your birth) can actually result in changes in your brain physiology which impact lifelong behavior.

Swing and a miss! Here you have it, people! A man bad at everything! (Except, inexplicably, selling vitamins and quack cures.)

Once again, such an idea sounds preposterous to the scientifically trained, unless of course they discover it for themselves, at which point it's all suddenly very "scientific." Instead of calling it "astrology," they're now referring to it as "seasonal biology."

Another thing that occurs to me as I mull over epithets to describe you, your family, your pets, and your primary school teachers, is that this is an animal study, not a study of humans. That even if you were right, and, man (I use the term loosely), are you so wrong in every way, you still could not extrapolate and say that it reliably predicted anything in humans, much less any individual human.

We are made of star stuff, says Carl Sagan. He he's right: We are not only made of star stuff, we are influenced by that stuff, too. And finally, modern science is beginning to catch up to this greater truth that astrologers have known since the dawn of human existence on our tiny planet.

Carl Sagan would hold you down and fuck you retarded, Adams.

I need to calm down. Kitties it is.

UPDATE! GOOGLE RUINED MY MOMENT OF KITTY ZEN IN, LIKE, THE WORST WAY IMAGINABLE!

Stranger than fiction...

2010-12-09T11:41:00.003-06:00

It's taken me four years, but I finally get to make the following pop culture reference:

(My god, those sweaters are war crimes. Sure, we

were no longer wearing polyester pants, but at what cost?)

Reproductive scientists create mice from 2 fathers

HJ (via Skepchick)

MIke Adams Inadvertently Reassures Me That the CDC Does Not Listen To Feeble Antivax Cranks

2010-12-08T18:25:00.003-06:00

My father is an OB/GYN and, I'll say it, new mothers-to-be are often a very nervous group of people. Don't get me wrong, it might just be the parasite talking, but they ask questions like, "Is shampoo bad while I'm pregnant?" (Answer: Not if you don't drink gallons of it.) So, what about pregnancy and vaccinations? I mean, there you are actually injecting something into a woman. (Needles + pregnancy + fear)^ignorance = catnip for predatory fear-mongers like Mike Adams.

He can't help himself, I suppose. He is ruthlessly exploitive. He uses people's fears to sell them their dreams. There is no more simple marketing strategy, though that does not make it ethical. So, what is this grass-eating glob of monkey mucus saying? It came in an email to me this morning entitled:

H1N1 vaccine linked to 700 percent increase in miscarriages

Mike, you are a menace to women, children, and public health. But you are also an ass-clown.

The article is especially feeble, and once you start digging into it, it falls apart like a corpse being dragged along the highway, only more grotesque.

Recent data presented to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Advisory Committee on Children's Vaccines has revealed some shocking information about the effects of the H1N1 / swine flu vaccine on pregnant women. According to the report, the rate of miscarriage among pregnant women during the 2009 H1N1 / swine flu pandemic soared by over 700 percent compared to previous years, pointing directly to the vaccine as the culprit -- but the CDC denies the truth and continues to insist nobody has been harmed.

OK, so it was not, technically, a study designed by scientists or epidemiologists. It was presented to the CDC by Eileen Dannemann, who runs the National Coalition of Organized Women (those disorganized women could never present anything to the CDC!). Adams makes the mistake of giving the woman's name and the name of her organization, because even the most cursory look their website reveals that they are merely a faulty CAPS LOCK button away from being Time-Cube guy. Across the top of their website is the headline:

National Coalition Of Organized Women Looking For Those Who Have Had Adverse Reactions To Flu Shots

Why do I think that they might have an agenda? Hm. And you look at their website, and it is a testament to the post hoc fallacy and the deservedly beaten redheaded stepchild of scientific evidence, the anecdote.

Take for instance the compilation of anecdotes included in the report to the CDC. You can't discern anything like causality in these stories because they don't have a control. They simply don't. I also failed to see anywhere in the assembled materials that the spontaneous abortion rate in the HEALTHY population is somewhere around 20%. 1-in-five. That's not at all an unlikely outcome of pregnancy!

They go to the VAERS database, which, as Bill Atkinson of the CDC told the Atlanta Skeptics, accumulates a massive amount of information about vaccines, including adverse events (not the same as adverse reactions, mind you). As far as I can tell, they have pulled 222 anecdotes of miscarriages following vaccines from the data. That's 222 cases of so-the-fuck-whats? It looks like it was compiled on behalf of some sort of legal action, but I don't know which. I can only imagine that it failed fucking miserably.

Even though I looked everywhere on the website for a single controlled study--anything with a control group, really-- that illustrated...anything. None is present. That means, by necessity, that this wacky activist group is fundamentally incapable of establishing causality.

The Health Retard fails again! Keep it up, Mike!

Attorneys level their quack-zooka at PZ Meyers...

2010-12-07T17:29:00.003-06:00

Seriously, people. This is ridiculous. Naturopathic "doctor" Christopher Maloney, who will henceforth will be represented by the following symbol: had...apparently a lawyer who is a relative (the only lawyer who would take the case?) sent PZ Myers a letter some 8 months after's supporters had criticism of homeopathic quackery taken off of the Internet. This has the slowest lawyers in the profession, apparently. Actually, this titmouse sent me a couple of messages too, because not only is he a litigious fuckwit, but because he has delusions of significance.

Actually, my responses have some of my favorite slams in here, so I think that I will repost them, for old time's sake:

Anonymous said...
Hello, zombie drone,

Perhaps you missed the cry of your master, PZ? It wasn't me, please try to keep up.

FEBRUARY 19, 2010 9:21:00 PM CST

Bing said...
Dear ,

Lick it, fraud. How do you sleep at night? I mean, really? What's wrong with your conscience? Seriously, energy healers? Vaccine denial? You're a goddamned menace and deserve a damned thorough financial bankruptcy to go along with your complete moral bankruptcy.

I'll have you know that I have a long history of opposition to useless shitbags.

You will notice, you illiterate subnorm, that my original post says, "the people who support this bullshizzle" are the ones who did this, you ego-surfing sack of putrescence. This is because I was being as precise as I could be--notice I did not name you and that my syllogism (a logical argument) needs not PZ's assertions to hold true.

I vomit on your dog, you taint stain.

HJ

FEBRUARY 19, 2010 9:36:00 PM CST

Anonymous said...
After a diatribe like that, you have the gall to moderate my comments? Unfortunately, you display the standard level of intelligence of Myers' followers. Not a scientist among you, but you seem to know a good deal of profanity.

APRIL 16, 2010 9:12:00 PM CST
Bing said...
You don't know what gall is, but that's only because you aren't a real medical practitioner. And it's not just you, you self-centered glob of petrified rabbit droppings. All old posts are moderated after a few weeks. I was getting spammed by someone who was mentally ill and therefore had an excuse for being a trolling crap-monster, but that also means that other trolling crap-monsters like you, as well as useful members of society, have to wait before I automatically approve all comments, you fucking crybaby.

Intellectually and morally I am your superior, and I consider you a child. Yes, I swear, but, you see, only an infantile pigfucker would confuse the packaging for the content (even though I can sort of imagine you at Christmas complaining that all you got for Christmas again were boxes covered with wrapping paper).

So, what I think I am saying is that you can drown in a toilet for all I care, you desiccated ferret uterus.

HJ

Finally, I understand why there is a YouTube

2010-12-07T08:40:00.002-06:00

And it's this video:

This week in wikileaks...er conspiracy...

2010-12-06T19:24:00.003-06:00

You guessed it. The week was dominated by speculation about that pasty anarchist Julian Assange, who as far as I can tell has done a little more than get a bunch of informants arrested. Way to go, Julian! Conspiracy theorists, however, could not believe that the private and classified emails were utterly fucking dull. The conspiracy theorists got exactly what they wanted, all the classified banal bullshit --the story behind the story--and they don't believe it. Or they do. Or they don't. Or they do. Of course, imprints of the New World Order's private parts are all over wikileaks story, as when the NWO infiltrated Amazon.com. They got to Visa, but of course we all already knew that. Assange is like a hero to the conspiracists but also a source of disinformation. Muahaha! It's hard to untangle them. Take the following example from 911blogger.com. Or globalresearch. Maybe he was set up by the CIA.

Rush speculates about why Assange is not in prison....whoops!

Leak fails to confirm Hugo Chavez's conspiracy theories.

They revealed Qadafi (Kadhafi....Mo) to be a fucking nutter at length. But a handsome one!

The return of, holy shit, John Birch.

A funny little Red Scare.

Who is more Satan? George Soros or Ted Turner?

Some people are still scared of the Rothschilds. Take the American Free Press, for instance.

Of course, the Canada Free Press does not do much better, as Jim O'Neil writes for them without checking his dictionary to find out what words mean.

No wait. I like the Pacific Free Press best.

OHMIGOD! TruTV dropped the FEMA camp episode of Conspiracy Theory from reruns! I mean, if it weren't for wikileaks, I mean, youtube, we'd have no way of seeing it!

I think I know why they pulled this, Jesse. It's horrid. Bad. Rotten. They're saving your brand, prick!

Oswald's coffin for auction. Word of warning: Don't buy it. You will be hounded by lunatics until you die.

Oh, so is the Unabomber's cabin.

Islam is a cover for the progressive New World Order. Boy, won't they be surprised?

Silly Americans. The NWO is not against you. It's against the Muslims, duh.

Global warming is a NWO plot to...do...something.

FUCK YOU, ICELAND! That will teach you to be all...highly educated and check out so many library books! (HAARP, not cobweb of tectonic faults, causes Iceland's earthquakes. Dude. That miserable little fucking country rides the mid-ocean ridge!)

Birther case reaches California Supreme Court.

Conspiracy theory of the week:

2012 Olympics will be occasion for a false flag UFO invasion. There is no part of that I don't like, mostly because it has nothing to do with Assange.

Did you ever feel that you were forgetting something?

2010-12-05T21:56:00.003-06:00

I got a surprising whole lot accomplished this weekend. I made use of a raise that I received and finally got a cell phone, which is swell and completely addictive. (So many apps and toys! Why was I never told?! Seriously. I got GoogleSky and, you know, fuck you, Entire World, I've got things to look at.) And twitter. I was trying to twitter. I got my twit on at the Meryl Dorey webinar, which was somehow associated with that Vitamin D vendor Mayer Eisenstein. So, I twittered during that, which was a new format for bringing my snark to a new generation of distracted people who should be paying attention to the road.

There was no small amount of marathon grading this evening. Rewrites, mostly. Mostly very minor changes where students only "fixed" what I physically marked on their papers the first time. So, a few points here a few points there, but don't expect me to be wowed. So, massive piles of regrading were shoveled into the outbox tonight.

Mythbusters marathon? Totally watched it.

Got new keys made.

Went to Borders.

But there is something nagging at me. Something that I'm sure I'm supposed to do. Not blog-got that. Something work related.

The hell with it. If it was important, I'd remember. Clearly it's something I can put off until morning. See? Denial is great if you do it right!

I will play my guitar with headphones. I have it set up so it goes into a little mini amp at the end of my effects chain so I can get all the sounds pumped right into my little head. It's my favor to the neighbors. But I swear to god, I'm going to bring my entire huge rig back to St. Louis w/ me for break and actually play loudly. You know, not in an apartment complex.

Hm.

Yep. Guitar it is.

Meryl Dorey: Fucking microphones, how do they work?

2010-12-04T20:15:00.006-06:00

I did my very first webinar tonight, which was delivered by Meryl Dorey and in which she scolded skeptics and, more often, sceptics, for opposing her truly lunatic agenda. I learned a number of important life lessons from Meryl--above all, do not put your microphone into your tracheotomy. Second, Meryl is a hypocrite so colossal you could...drive a...tree...through her. See? No imagery yet devised can describe the magnitude of her hypocrisy! (OK, I think there may be a week-long word in German that could handle it, but it remains only predicted by theoretical linguists.)

Anyway, the relevant bit of galactically shameful hypocrisy is that her webinar was entitled: "Threats, Suppression and Health Fascism in Australia", but when skeptics asked questions...they were suppressed, actually kicked from the dialog that Meryl said she wanted to engage in!

(click to embiggen--it's worth it)

Holy crap, I love screen capture.

Mega- titanic- uber- giganto- fail-that-ate-New-York, Meryl. Very perfectly shabby.

Dear God, please flood Kentucky

2010-12-03T18:26:00.003-06:00

Kentucky is a horrid place, and if Perky Skeptic did not live there, it would be complete loss. Like Texas.

The folks who brought us the Creation Museum and pseudoscientific freak shows like Georgia "The Amazing Thud" Purdom, Jason "Skillet-head" Lisle and Bodie "Mercifully the Last of His Species" Hodge, are going to build a "life"-size ark to Biblical dimensions. It really should not only put a nail in the coffin about whether or not representatives of all the species in the world would be able to fit into such a structure, but seal it in a 2-foot thick lead liner at the bottom of a 12-foot hole in a river valley upstream from where they are building a new dam.

The people who are erecting this goofy enterprise will, of course, not see it this way.

Governor Steve Beshear, when asked at the announcement of the project about Kentuckians' constitutional rights, that is, the separation of church and state (in Kentucky, about 2 city blocks), totally shit in his hand: "The people of Kentucky didn't elect me governor to debate religion," Beshear said. "They elected me governor to create jobs. That's what we're doing here, and that's what we're going to continue to do" by giving some $36 million in tax breaks to a religious organization.

Wrong answer, dude. You were elected and swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. Also, strangely, not to duel:

I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth, and be faithful and true to the Commonwealth of Kentucky so long as I continue to be a citizen thereof, and that I will faithfully execute, to the best of my ability, the office of Governor according to law; and I do further solemnly swear that since the adoption of the present Constitution, I, being a citizen of this state, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this state, nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending, so help me God.

Yep, that's the actual oath. That has to be the best oath in the nation. And it gives me an idea. Muahaha. Muahahahaha! Muaaaaahhaaaahaa!

Anyway, while I work on that impossible dream, I thought I would comment on one of the more peculiar aspects of the statement released today by Ken "The Bearded Lady" Ham on his blog, Monkey Business:

Last year, a CBS News survey revealed that finding the remains of Noah’s Ark would be the greatest archaeological discovery of our day. It stated: “CBS’ 60 Minutes news program, in conjunction with Vanity Fair magazine, recently conducted a web survey asking which archaeological discovery would people want to be made next. The response: Noah’s Ark (43%), Atlantis (18%) Amelia Earhart’s plane (16%), Nixon’s lost tapes (13%), and Cleopatra’s barge (5%).”

Well, if you can't legitimately discover a boat the size of a baseball stadium on top of a fucking mountain, you might as build your own. It's just like the real thing, you know, only that it would exist. Also, what's with that strange list of archaeological discoveries? Cleopatra's barge? Really? America gives that much of a shit about it?

Anyway, while the discovery of an ark would be interesting, you need to be very, very careful about the implications. OK, someone goes up a mountain and finds a huge boat, filled with frozen animal shit of all species all over the world and a little plaque that says: "Noah, the first member of the mile-high club. Except for the rabbits, who are filthy abominations in the eyes of the Lord who chew their cud." (That last bit is in the bible. Oops. Biology fail of appropriately epic proportions!) This would be extremely interesting. But it doesn't mean that Jonah was swallowed by a sea creature. It wouldn't mean that Jesus rose from the dead or that he even existed (my opinion is, he may have lived and probably did, but so what?). It wouldn't mean that there was a garden of Eden. It wouldn't show that King David slew a giant. In short, even if you could come across such a remarkable discovery, you would still not have anything beyond, "Hey, big boat on a mountain built by Noah with frozen animal doody, kind of like that Bible story." And that's it. You can't go beyond the evidence. And, in the absence of any evidence that there was or could have possibly been a global Flood, you would in fact have to look for something other than a global flood to explain it. The evidence for a global flood would be, well, global, and it's just not.

Perhaps the reason why people think that it would such a big find is because it is so unlikely and improbable? Me? I would be jazzed to find, say, a variant of the Beowulf manuscript. That would rock out. Or a large collection of scrolls rescued from the Library at Alexandria or perhaps the works of Socrates. Wouldn't that be great? Or the female orgasm! (THANK YOU! I'll be your 1980s stand-up comedian all week! Tip your waitresses.)

The media has asked me many times: “How did you find such qualified and talented scientists and artists?” My answer has been:

"Talented artists? Where?"

“Just as God brought the animals to Noah and they boarded the Ark, the same God of the Bible brought talented people to Answers in Genesis for such a time as this: to build the Creation Museum.”

And now we are getting downright creepy. First, whenever the media is mentioned by Ken Ham, they are always "misrepresenting" him, not slobbering all over his feet. Secondly, if that was all the Almighty could muster, in terms of well-designed traffic flow at the Creation Museum, yikes. Thirdly, are you going to collecting artists two-by-two in breeding pairs? Last, clearly Ham is starting to reach the crazy grasshopper-eating stage of his prophetic calling.

Of course, Ken asks for money. You can buy beams and planks in the ark. Ham says that the Ark will cost $24.5 million dollars that could go to clothe naked porn stars, wash the homeless, research diseases, or whatever. Nope. All going to a creationist playground. The whole project, according to CNN is $150 million. That's a lot of clean homeless people.

This is another blemish on the already spotty face of Kentucky, and I for one am glad that it will be found in a state that nobody takes seriously.

This Week in Conspiracy

2010-12-01T21:32:00.005-06:00

Ah, it's that time of the week again. The time when I realized that I did not do my conspiracy theory post earlier and then get on with my life:

Glenn Beck: The TSA is going to become Obama's private army. I believe that's how the Nazis started. With pat-downs.
Before It's News reports that the US is behind the latest North Korean crisis. Or something.
My favorite source for really horrid analysis of art and media is Vigilant Citizen, which, this week, blows the fucking lid off of...Bank of America murals?
Ron Paul on ‘Opt-Out Day’: ‘If we tolerate’ the TSA, ‘there’s something wrong with us.’ (Ron, I hate to poop on your pancake, but if we don't tolerate this, there is still something wrong with you.)
Apollo 18 movie poster released. I think it was staged.
Punk band Capital releases rough mix of their song "Conspiracy Theory." I liked it.
Tragedy vultures at Dealy Plaza to fight eviction.
This pretty girl has a gun in her butt crack. Also another TSA conspiracy article, but that's not what I'm looking at.
Greek anarchists claim responsibility for European mail bombs. Believe in...scary NWO.
Tea Party fears "Orwellian" sustainability, toast.
Canada Free Press fail:

"It is indeed a social engineering, petri dish experiment of Big Brother, in cloning proles for the “New World Order.” The model is the conversion of sovereign nations into human zoos where a “tangle of squabbling nationalities” is the archetype, in emulation of the larger United Nations, to which all peoples will pledge their allegiance as “citizens of the world.”

Actor Michael Moriarty seems to have slipped the surly bounds of sanity.
And NewsWithViews has not started making sense, either.
If you would like to see pedestrian Fed fear, this self-described "truth excavator" fails to dig up a shred of truth. Better get a truth backhoe, or, better yet, take an American history class. Seriously, kid, while you can.
CERN, time-space travelers and indigo children, all in the same straight-to-the-Internet post. A tour de force, of sorts.
Dr. Dennis Cuddy is nowhere as hot as Dr. Lisa Cuddy. And he's being pursued by the Illuminati.
Ah, my people, the Catholics, are getting in on the NWO, but with the added twist that birth control is worse than the World Wars! They don't seem to realize that they are the NWO! Haha! Duh, pope!
Joseph Stalin, Chicken Plucker.
Electrician has opinion of Obama-Soros-Socialism! News at 11:00!
Uh, OK, world bankers are in here and the world is ending and everything, but what strikes me as most important about this press-release from a self-publishing house is the idea that only one rib will be raptured, not the whole body. Funk dat.
Fox has a double-standard when it comes to 9/11 Twoof.
I just like the title of this column from the Daily Telegraph: "Is Wikileaks a Front for the CIA or Mossad?"
Americans United calls out the Tea Party for their fairytale history of the United States.
Ah, a running commentary over a speech in Parliament. I think the Illuminati planted this video.

Clip of the week:

Anderson Cooper DESTROYS birther's Texan Rep. Leo Berman.

That's it for now. I barely touched the Wikileaks conspiracies. Can't process them all. I want to know when Assange is going to leak everything we know about teh alienz!!!!

I'm just going to rename the blog "Fuck Grading"

2010-11-29T21:30:00.002-06:00

Seriously.

Was jamming tonight on the old git-fiddle, which is always fun. Learning a new song, but this comes easier each time. Decided that subjects are no longer that important to sentences.

Anyway, I love my Korg A3 so very much. It has such great noises in it. Miraculous noises. I am currently looking for another one just in case mine should ever die. They stopped making these particular rack-mounted effects in the early nineties. As far as I can tell, what's out there is what's left. It was a great piece of equipment with a beautiful tone. Everything sounds professional coming through it. Even if I totally fuck up, it sounds like I fucked it up professionally. I got my first one for about $100. It was used and I don't think that it is in complete working order. I can only use the presets, because if I were to futz around with the settings, I could not save them. To get to the effects chains I need reset factory settings every time I turn it on. But the factory settings are freaking exquisite. Love it love it love it.

Today I gave my talk on What the BLEEP Do We Know!? It was my first talk on it. My students were stunned by what I had put them through. Apparently there is a 300 minute long director's cut which nobody has ever watched ever. My reading quiz question was, "Name one utterly inappropriate thing that Amanda (Marlee Matlin's character) does at the wedding reception."

In my next class, I will be giving them my lecture about how to become a cult leader. Heehee.

RIP, Leslie Nielsen

2010-11-28T22:19:00.003-06:00

Leslie Neilsen has died at the age of 432 of pneumonia. I hope that when Leslie walks through the pearly gates, some angel stands up, points, and announces: "Hey! It's Enrico Pallazzo!" Seriously, I'm reading through some of the lines he has delivered. So, so funny. I'm going to have to watch some of the original Police Squad now.

Dolphins and teleportation. No shit.

2010-11-27T17:53:00.005-06:00

There are no words to describe what I am looking at right now. At least no words that I would feel comfortable using for at least the last 15 years, because the first phrase that comes to mind is, "Holy shit that is the gayest thing that I have ever seen in my entire life." Before you jump all over me for using the "g" word, please know that when I was 20 or so, I dropped the disparaging g-bomb in front of someone I did not know was a homosexual and holy shit did I feel bad. Rotten and crappy. We were good friends, I think, after I crawled and scraped and was all meager and rotten for a while.

But holy shit is this gay.

It's the Dolphin and Teleportation Conference and...I can't think of how someone could be more of a perfect flake than to take this seriously. Except perhaps organize a dolphin and teleportation conference.

Every profession has its conferences. I imagine there is a big dry cleaning conference somewhere each year. I imagine that Dolphin Teleporters are very busy. (At any rate, all the firms that make up Big Dolphin Teleportation just want to protect their monopolies on Dolphin Teleportation.) Nonetheless, five dolphin teleportation experts will presumably beam in instead of showing up in a car or something.

Andrew D. Basiago - Time traveled to Mars
Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, M ED - Martians on Earth
Laura Magdalene Eisenhower - Mars recruit
Jean-Luc Bozzoli - Inner-Spatial artist
Joan Ocean, MS - Dolphins & Windows in time

Andrew Basiago, apparently, has a fucking Tardis. And Laura Eisenhower, really related to the former President (Ike's great-granddaughter), believes that Alternative 3 is real and claims to have been approached to participate in the Mars colonization project.

The schedule seems to be laid back (centered to emulate the crazy):

We will join the dolphins in the gentle warm waters learning directly from them while experiencing their unconditional love.

And then we will come together in a beautiful oceanside setting to share our personal experiences and to hear the actual life stories of time travel to Mars from our expert Speakers and co-leaders with Joan and Jean-Luc. Their story is one of synchronicity and divine guidance. Living in different parts of the northern hemisphere, these people were unexpectedly brought together to complete a specific task of revealing galactic civilizations other than our own, to Earth's population.

Their story of how they came together and what they were tasked to do, will amaze, inspire and then comfort you. It is a reminder of the greater world that works within us in a benevolent way when we are willing to step forward without fear of reprisals, and without prejudice and judgment.

At this Symposium, we will be deeply touched, while immersed in love, appreciation and inspiration.

Wow. Gay as the daffodils. Coincidentally, right next to this description is a picture of a woman who is about to be deeply touched by a dolphin:

LOOK OUT, LADY!

The dolphins, people, do not give a shit. Really. They want tuna. That's all. If you don't have tuna, you are worth fuck-all to a dolphin. If you teleported into the presence of dolphins they would not be impressed. Unless you had tuna. And then they would use you until your tuna was gone and then ignore you.

Joan Ocean, by the way, is the one organizing this, I think. She has goof coming out of both ears. Take her Sasquatch page, which begins:

Did you know that Sasquatch can:

Read
Write
Shape-shift
Project Their Voice
Create Infrasound that affects the environment
De-materialize at will, or cause you to have an experience of lost time so you think they de-materialized.
Travel 300 miles a day on foot.
Live in well-lighted underground facilities
Contact and live with Star People
Tell us about our past and our future.
Have lived here longer than the human race.

Fuck. You have transdimensional, underground civilizations hanging with aliens. (I had to make sure that "star people" were in fact extraterrestrials. I thought they might be what crystal children grow into.) It looks like they may be responsible for lost time of alien abductees. The number of well-defined conspiracy narratives and abductee reports are all present. And you thought New Agers weren't able to apply Occam's Razor!

Anyway, I can't go. I'm going to the "Squirrels and Bounding Conference" outside of Boise this spring. I can't be in two places at once...unless I skip MLA and go to the "House Cats and Bi-location Conference" over winter break! Score!

HJHOP (mini) Book Review: The First Chapter of Left Behind

2010-11-27T12:37:00.004-06:00

The night that Phil Plait was in Georgia a few weeks ago, I had some time to kill before my ride out to western Georgia showed up, so I walked around the Perimeter Mall and found a Goodwill. The used books section was truly craptastic. Just look at the titles acquired that I would never reward the publishers for producing:

John Hagee, The Beginning of the End: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Coming Antichrist (Why anyone would want to assassinate a violin player with polio is beyond me.)
Adriana Rocha and Kristi Jorde, A Child of Eternity: An Extraordinary Young Girl's Message from the World Beyond (A fucking awful book about Facilitated Communication.)
Ed Hindson, Is the Antichrist Alive and Well?: 10 Keys to His Identity
John Hogue, Nostradamus and the Millenium
Jonathan Karl, The Right to Bear Arms

I also picked up a "Practical Guide to Past Lives" (It makes you wonder what the impractical guides were like!) and Life After Life, which set off the Near-Death Experience phenom. But of all of the books I picked up, the one I needed to read, I thought, was Left Behind, first book in the "God Is An Omnipotent Prick" series.

I thought, well, maybe there is something good about the series, but I was wrong. My thinking had been that the premise "A bunch of people disappear for no reason" might be creepy and cool. Then people go around trying to figure out what had happened to them. Nope.

Even the non-believers know exactly what has happened when it happens. Indeed, the first chapter ends, vomitously: "The terrifying truth was that he knew all too well. Irene had been right. He, and most of his passengers, had been left behind."

Fuck.

And the whole first chapter is backstory. Russia has invaded Israel and been completely wiped out for no apparent reason and no loss of life on the part of the Israelis. The reasons that Russia invades, as far as I can tell, are that they are unable to benefit from farming techniques developed in Israel. Really. It's like like every broadcast of the 700 Club, John Hagee and the fucking Van Impe's rolled into one mass of tedious, after-the-fact exposition.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing creative about this book in the first chapter. It is an echo chamber of the hack theology masquerading as American Protestantism for the last century and a half.

Oh, I and I fucking hate the opening line: "Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched." From the first line you know he's fucked. The authors have managed to completely avoid the need for competent plot development and development of suspense, opting instead to prophecize narrative failure absolute.

Man. I thought that The Faerie Queene were the hardest two pages I had ever read.

My mind is on a book I will never touch, a book I know terrifyingly all too well, one that I am happy to see left behind.

Withdrawal is not fun...

2010-11-26T17:57:00.004-06:00

I have been on a Class II controlled substance (Adderall) since I was 12. This means that even though the drug has legitimate medical uses, it is likely to be abused. I fart along daily with the same dose in my system that I have had for years, but every so often (only very occasionally), I fuck up and wait too long to get a new prescription. This can leaves me for several days where the amount in my system drops and you find out what a Class II substance can do to you. In my case, it's pretty mild, honestly. I think that the headache that I had the other day was part of it. My bowels do the Montezuma two-step. You feel a little out of phase. If it's really bad, my personality changes and I become indignant. (HA!)

Now, I have been on this drug since I was twelve. Far more than half of my natural life has been medicated. I make my damned MD appointments when I've made them. So, it should not be a big deal, at least as far as I see it, that I get a holdover prescription for the week until I can get in to see my doc. No such luck. So, as best I can tell, I am feeling icky for no real legitimate reason.

So, I'm indignant.

Yuck.

When I went to look up the class of drug I was on, I came across the following statement:

All the special rules and "red tape" surrounding the use of Adderall may seem inconvenient, but they were put in place to prevent abuse of medications like Adderall.

It doesn't seem inconvenient, bucko. It's an ass-chafing week-long stretch of avoidable discomfort. I have to have a new written script every single month--no phoning or faxing in my prescription. No refills. It's the aggravating tempo of my life.

HUMOROUS UPDATE: I was fixing a typo I had noticed and on the screen that told me the page had been updated, Google ads recommend that I go into rehab. Thanks, Google Ads! You are clearly more concerned than my doctor about my well-being.

This Week in Conspiracy (11/23))

2010-11-23T19:00:00.004-06:00

Back to the grind, folks. After a long day of nothing but a gigantic headache happening, it's time for another conspiracy theory post.

Don't everyone cheer at once.

Jesse the Dishonorable "finds" FEMA death camps.
50 Cent, member of an organization so secret that he can wear a hat proclaiming his membership and nobody notices.
Ed Asner is a 9/11 Truther? I mean, Ed Asner is still alive?
Is Sarah Palin a secret liberal socialist communist like George Soros?
CRIPPLE FIGHT!
Ooh! Crypto-birtherism! Kill me!
No! Wait! The Ulster Defense Force killed Kennedy! (It's nice to see something new, for once.)
Oh, and Marilyn Monroe was tricked into suicide.
Bristol Palin at the center of the LEAST INTERESTING CONSPIRACY THEORY EVER!
Ah! 6 alien-related conspiracy theories! This is not a bad hall of fame, actually. At least they got space Nazis in there! Gotta have space Nazis!
Texas State Rep Leo Burman: Unprincipled or simply too retarded to be left unattended because he him submit a bullshit birther bill.

The Illuminati clearly just crashed my PC. Damn it.

Gordon Duff rides again! The jet contrail, he believes, was a Chinese sub based missile launch.
Neat! A very old chemtrail claim!
Chip Berlet is doing the tour thang. Way to go, Chip!
Jesse Ventura is also going to air the deathbed confessions of Kennedy, despite the fact the you need a larynx and cerebral cortex to confess on your deathbed. Also, don't touch Jesse's junk.
I don't know what to make of the group who publishes Gordon Duff when they report on Identity Christianity (who say, pasty Americans are the real Israel).
Check out the Glenn Beck conspiracy generator!
Denver International Airport allows film crews into their death camp, er, underground network of tunnels.

Yep. that's about all. Sorry I'm not more chatty. I will be again, I promise.

Guess which job I'm not applying for...

2010-11-23T08:38:00.002-06:00

The one that has this as a requirement to teach English:

Additional Qualifications:
* A personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
* An ability to model and communicate the Christian experience to students as related to life and learning
* Competence in MS Office (e.g. Word, PowerPoint).

Yeah, I never got a handle on Access.

In the evening...

2010-11-21T18:28:00.002-06:00

It's a strange night here at Chez McGhandi, not externally so much as internally. I had a hell of a weekend, most of it spent unconscious. This is not a bad thing. It was an unrelenting week. New project after new project, meeting after meeting, student conference after student conference. I have not had a chance to work on my own scholarship for a while now, and I am concerned that I will not be able to for a little while yet. On Friday I was watching on the couch watching an episode of Dr. Who season 5, and at some point my brain said, "Bing, you sleep now." Then I imagine there was an audible thud. About half an hour later, I came to in the least comfortable position ever achieved on a couch and decided that I should go to bed. It was really early for me--no later than 7:00 by then--and I slept. I knew I was going to sleep, just not so much.

At any rate, I am trying to get across the idea that I slept like a crazy person this weekend. I got some work done, never as much as I would like, but a good deal of work. Most of it of a grading nature.

There was a meeting of the Atlanta Skeptics this weekend. Bart Farkas, Development Officer of the JREF was there, and he introduced us to the sorts of applications that the JREF received for the Million Dollar Challenge. Some are out there. Really quite remarkably far out there. Like once they received an application in macramé. Yeah.

Here. Enjoy Time Cube:

The Dumbest Story Ever Told

2010-11-17T19:30:00.002-06:00

Simcha Jacobovici is the biggest idiot who has ever lived. I say this without fear of contradiction or even serious challenge. Indeed, it is by a wide, wide margin that this dickhead has managed to carve out the most highly public failure of a career in bullshit archaeology. Simcha Jacobovici goes by the name The Naked ~~Lunatic~~ Archaeologist, which is also the name of his show. The only possible contender for the As Big An Idiot As Simcha Jacobovici Award is James Cameron, who has to be the most gullible sugar daddy in the history of pseudohistorical incompetence.

Actually, that gives me an idea.

James Cameron, I wanted you to know that I found the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado. Give me one million dollars and I will hire a film crew and go out into the Everglades and Dondequiera, South America and point to exactly where they used to be. Fucking. History Channel. Magic. What do you say, Jimmy?

So, why am I unloading on the international disgrace known as Simcha Jacobovici? Because of something that he did to my eyes and brain tonight. It all began as I waited to go into a meeting this afternoon. Outside my boss's office is a bookshelf where you take a book or leave a book. I saw a thin cardboard DVD sleeve bearing the title The Exodus Decoded. In a red band at the top it reads: "FOR YOUR EMMY CONSIDERATION--OUTSTANDING NON-FICTION SPECIAL."

A quick check of IMDB reveals that it won nothing. Nothing at all. If I had been a judge for the Emmy, I would have taken awards away from James Cameron, just on fucking principle.

It's like The Da Vinci Code, except that the main character is completely incompetent at everything he tries. As with conspiracy theories, the clues are everywhere if you just know how to look, and according to Jacobovici every single biblical scholar, archaeologist, and historian has been entirely wrong..."until now." (As we watched this horrid thing, my roommate Animala and I considered inventing a drinking game every time Jacobovici said, "....until now." But we soon realized that if we ever played this game, we would quickly become raging alcoholics.)

Seriously, this guy is so bad at his job, you can tell that the people surrounding him, actual scientists and scholars, are just appalled at everything that comes out of his mouth. He is so staggeringly intolerable to the professionals around him that the only way he can hide their abject horror and disdain for is to keep them almost entirely out of frame. Indeed, his academic betters, for whom scholarship is more than pointing to a random object and saying, "SEE! THE BIBLE (WELL ONLY REALLY THE OLD TESTAMENT) IS TRUE!" when they are showing him their museum collections, often look appalled at his uninterrupted existence on this planet. The best example of this was in The Lost Tomb of Jesus, another Cameron-funded pasture patty--you could tell that during the tour of the Israel Museum collection of ossuaries that Jacobovici was on the last nerve of the curator, David Mevorah. See the following clip from 1:00-2:40, the exchange. Jacobovici has no basic concept of the restraints in interpretation to which professional archaeologists judiciously limit themselves. (It's called competency, Simcha. Look it up.)

Now go to 5:49 and see Mevorah get a little more annoyed. David, you have the patience of a zen master. Seriously. I had kind of hoped that the interview would deteriorate into ossuaries being broken over Jacobovichi's head, but no such luck.

Anyway, Jacobovichi cites without horror the pseudoscholar and Velikovskite John Bimson. You may be familiar with Velikovsky's hypothesis that Jupiter farted Venus, which zoomed around the solar system, had a number of near-misses with the earth and caused Noah's Flood, the Egyptian plagues, manna from heaven (in a rain of hydrocarbons, which are unfortunately not carbohydrates), before settling down in its current orbit. Of course, I believe Carl Sagan calculated that in order to generate the escape velocity to propel a "comet" the size of Venus off of Jupiter at 60km/sec, you would need more energy than would be released by 100 million of the largest solar flares ever observed on the surface of the sun. And Jacobovichi actually doesn't punch this guy--he embraces him and cites him, presumably as an authority or intellectual superior, which, actually, I can see.

The problem is that Jacobovich's incoherent ramblings are as implausible as Velikovsky's harebrained hypothesis. A more "just-so" hypothesis has never been, and in this case it is the eruption of the badass Santorini volcano. Really, his bullshit utterly fucking fabricated chronology of disaster smacks of Answers in Genesis-level catastrophicism bullshit.

The other intellectual ~~powerhouse~~ outhouse that Jacobovici cites approvingly (and repeatedly relies on) is a hopeless ding-dong by the name of Charles Pellegrino, whose Ph.D. is in theoretical archaeology, as in, his degree in archaeology is entirely theoretical and without basis in reality.

I actually have a lot of work to accomplish before I go to sleep, but I would like to direct you to the Higgaion blog, which published perhaps the most perfect, thorough and utter savaging of bullshit that I have ever encountered. Seriously, Jacobovici's documentary is raped and left in a gutter to die. It's a fucking wonderful thing to watch, and you just want to kick it while it's lying there, sobbing and humiliated. The reason why I examine unqualified incompetents like the bozos mentioned here is because by simply assuming that they are magnificently, extravagantly, exquisitely wrong, when you fact check you invariably inadvertently learn a lot.

This Week in Conspiracy (11/16)

2010-11-16T21:46:00.002-06:00

The cholera-spreading UN peace keepers in my bedroom demand that I present you with the week that was weak. Who am I but one to obey?

Should academic free speech include Holocaust denial? (My take, no for people whose relevant area involves the history of the period, because it demonstrates incompetency. Otherwise, there's not much you can do when someone has tenure other than only bring kosher food items to faculty meetings. Of course, this guy's book's title seems to suggest he's a bit of a conspiracist, but I'll wait until I read it.)

Is CERN the new HAARP? A crazy person correlates CERN experiments and earthquakes.

A play explores a Kennedy conspiracy theory.

Stupid fucking contrail bullshit.

Clearly Sharia is coming to the US. After all, Oklahomans aren't clearly all dirt-eating yokels.

Secret Service Agents recall Kennedy assassination.

FoxNews: A perfect storm of conspiracy.

Bart Simpson brought down the towers. (Why do people selectively edit out the Empire State Building in that frame; if they didn't it would read 1911, which, coincidentally the year of the first seaplane launch...COINCIDENCE!?! Look what happened 4 days later on Jan 30th.)

I bet Jesse Ventura pees himself when someone mentions "FEMA camps."

Is 50-cent a member of the Illuminati? (No, you are thinking about Lady Gaga. It's easy to mistake the one for the other.)

Jon Stewart on the Missile that Ate California:

Missile: Impossible

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Rally to Restore Sanity

This week on the editorial page:

If a crazy person writes a letter in Florida, does anyone listen? God is a Reagan Republican.

Also, the tea party in Belleville, IL.

That's it. I'm in hell. G'night.

HJ

Actual headline from Mike Adams

2010-11-15T17:47:00.002-06:00

This one comes from the tree-eating Garden Weasel himself:

Woman cures cancer using plant foods (plus other news)

Thomas the Apostle, the only pal of Jesus I could bear to have a beer with

2010-11-14T18:32:00.005-06:00

Laundry rooms are sensory deprivation chambers of sorts. The steady whir of the machinery softens all other sensory input, leaving me alone with my brain. This is often a frightening prospect, and tonight, in my head, I found myself among the apostles a couple of hours after the Resurrection. I imagine the room that the Apostles were cowering in to be a sort of dank place with bare walls, as inconspicuous as possible. They mumble a lot.

So, Jesus comes in without knocking. "BOO!" he says. After the initial freak out, Jesus leaves to go flying around like Superman or whatever he was doing before the Ascension. The apostles are left pinching each other and recounting what just happened to each other, as if they weren't all there. This, of course, is what people do, because the Apostles were just people.

Then we pick up the story from John 20:

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe."

Good for you, Thomas. Thomas held out for eight of what must have been the least tolerable days of his entire life, squished in with a bunch of people who could not stop talking about what they had seen. Can you imagine how shitty it must have been for him? Here are your 10 closest chums (remember, one killed himself), and they all share an experience that you didn't. You become an outsider among intimates. Usually, the way group dynamics play out like this is that Thomas would basically accept what his trusted confidants reported. I would surely be tempted to. But Thomas, the one who could think, realized the huge nature of the claim and set up perhaps the best available criteria for validating it. It's as close to an empirical investigation as would be available in a 1st-century hideout.

Imagine, eight days among enthusiastic, motivated and endlessly irritating Jesus freaks. Shit, Thomas deserves to be a saint just for surviving that! Anyway, eight days later, Jesus pops in again. "You guys wanna hang?" (Crucifixion joke here.)

Anyway, at this point, Jesus holds out his hands and says, "Check it out. Go on. Poke it." Thomas, realizing how gross that would be, falls down and worships. Then comes the biggest interpolation in the whole damned Bible, when Jesus says:

"Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Yeah, not big on empiricism, Jesus is. This is a total "wink wink" passage. I suspect that it is written with to coerce people who have no chance of ever seeing Jesus into believing. I mean, if the writer mentioned Jesus turning to him and saying, "John, get this down. I just remembered a beatitude I totally forgot to mention and this is a teachable moment," then it might be a little more credible, but this was totally put in later, as far as I can tell. The character of Jesus that we see in the beatitudes, by the way, is completely different from the one here saying, "Get down and worship me." Jesus talks about all the nice things you should be doing for everyone else in the beatitudes (in 11 of the 12 beatitudes in the synoptic gospels, at least). There are no beatitudes in John. This pronouncement about who gets an intangible blessing is all about not needing evidence, and should be anathema to any thinking individual. If someone claims they have risen from dead, by God, the burden of proof is on them to prove it. You shouldn't buy off disbelief with blessings and lowering bars of evidence for your flock! What a rotten thing to do.

HJHOP Movie Review: Death of a Ghost Hunter, or F*cking Foley, How Does That Work?

2010-11-13T22:03:00.005-06:00

It is hard to believe that the $5 I spent renting this movie equaled .1% of the box office gross of this stinker ($3490). I would guessed that it would have been closer to 30% of the box office take.

So, this money pit starred...nobody, really. It was like having lemon juice poured into my eyes. The entire score consisted of two notes, bing and bong. Something would be about to happen and you'd hear it, "bing.......bong....bing......bong." Of course, sometimes nothing would happen and you'd hear the bing bonging and just wishing that it would go away. Of course, it seems that, given the budget, the filmmakers could only afford the two notes.

The story revolves around a woman who was offered $1510 more than this movie grossed to spend three nights investigating a haunted house where freaky sex Christians tortured girls and got themselves murdered and suicided. She is joined by a journalist, a camera guy, and a psycho Christian who was apparently raised at the bottom of a plot hole. They are all murdered. Oh, yeah. Spoiler alert about that.

Patti Tindall, of "Folic Acid Awareness" commercial campaign, is Carter Somethingorother. She is a ghost hunter who contracts a case of death and is trapped in the house for eternity. Oh, spoiler alert about that too. The acting, across the board, was nightmarish. Seriously, the guys on the Dutch Masters box are more animated. Dame Edna puts on a more convincing performance. The controlling metaphor is a woman peeing into a suitcase, where the woman represents the filmmakers and the suitcase is the audience.

As far as I could tell, the sound was edited by two people. One of them was Superman and could hear a bumblebee fart on the other side of Central Park at rush hour. The other was an elderly gentleman who spent 40 years testing safe decibel levels for jet engines. Seriously, in the same conversation one character could not be heard while the other was tearing my speakers.

The movie seems to be the fault of Mike Marsh and Sean Tretta, who for some reason took direct responsibility for just about everything that happened on that screen. Seriously, I feel the need to wash the front of my TV set now, that was so painful.

Ask Tom Wilson (Biff Tannen)

2010-11-13T07:39:00.001-06:00

This was posted by Flavin, and because there was a Back to the Future marathon last weekend, this struck me as perfect.

Endless Skeptical Weekend

2010-11-12T14:26:00.002-06:00

It's a busy week for the Atlanta skeptics. Phil Plait was here the other day. Well, not here, but over at...a university too damned close to Alabama for my liking. He was talking about Death from the Skies. Turns out the universe hates you personally and will do anything to get at you.

Tonight, Ben Radford and Jim Underdown are going to be meeting with us to kickoff of the IIG Atlanta branch. We are working on getting this up and running, and this is the weekend we do it all. Hot damn. I have been looking to do this sort of thing for a while now, and now we can. Woo to the hoo. The festivities will take two days, culminating in a 3-hour workshop with Ben Radford tomorrow night. You know I'm there. Pictures to follow.

Tits

2010-11-11T21:44:00.005-06:00

The makers of a boob-job cream, as the ridiculous product was delicately described by Joel at the Young Australian Skeptics, are apparently going after multiple websites that criticize their improbable product.

This ridiculous company, Rodial Limited, which sells the miracle ta-ta enhancement cream, clearly has too many unoccupied lawyers on staff and they seem to be threatening people who dare raise the possibility that they are possibly complete charlatan cranks. SLAPP libel suits are common in the UK, and English law specifically has made London the libel lawsuit capital of the world. In the most recent incursion of libel laws into science, The Mail quoted Dr. Dalia Nield of the London Clinic, who said that the cream was "highly unlikely" to work, and that if the proposed mechanism by which the cream is claimed to raise your bust size, moving fat cells around, it might actually be dangerous. (Hey, why doesn't it move the fat in your hands when you smear it to increase your hand size?)

Sense About Science picked up this story, and guess what? The lawyers for Rodial Limited sent a letter to the site requesting that Sense About Science not cover the issue:

To quote Sense About Science:

Further to the story above we have been contacted by Rodial Limited's solicitors, Hegarty LLP, requesting that we do not release this story. Having attempted to silence the criticism of the 'Boob Job' product by Dr Dalia Nield they are now attempting to silence publicity about that. We will not agree to this. We have taken legal advice throughout. Threats against scientific comment are worthy of public attention and we won't be silenced by a lawyer's letter.

Wrong.

Fucking.

Move.

Honestly, this has to stop. England, you need to reform your libel laws now in the interest of public health. Keep libel laws out of science. Honestly, I'm so disgusted, if the lawyers of Rodial want to take issue with this post, they can consider themselves already told to suck it and save the electrons. Seriously. Anything that is sent to me will go straight to the web.

Dear future federal prisoner...

2010-11-11T19:21:00.004-06:00

Today, I received a wonderful comment from a skinheadlet on an old post, a white supremacist poetry slam, which I repost here:

Whomever "corrected" this poem did not go to college as I am in high school and the poetic techniques that the true author of this poem writes are put their for emphasis. Capitalizing certain words etc are poetic techniques. 1488

Ah, from the mouths of babes comes...well, now that I think about it, mostly drool and vomit. Yep. This comes from the mouth of a babe.

Your first word is wrong, as it is the subject of the sentence. Your second word, corrected, is simply inaccurate. Why would I, who finds everything that the poem stands for pathetic and execrable (look it up, junior), "correct" it? I judged it and found it wanting. Need I go on? You write like a promising drop out, and if your parents only could have afforded the abortion, we wouldn't need to have this conversation.

Listen, don't embarrass yourself or your family by trying to go to college. Save your money, start a meth lab, and sleep with your sister one night when you are both high. This is really all anyone expects of you.

Dear World: You Are Insane

2010-11-11T19:13:00.003-06:00

It needed to be said and said soon. A new conspiracy theory is brewing and it has the big mean Muslims at Google piddling on the graves of our sainted veterans, every one of whom was immaculately conceived and only killed bad people.

See the crescent moon in front of the sun where it makes no sense (it should be eclipsing the sun)? God, it's a clearer reference to the movie Saving Private Ryan (the transparent flag with the sun streaming through is a common visual theme in the movie) than it is to Islam. So, what I'm saying is, "Grow the fuck up, universe. For real."

A post about Worldview Weekend? That's a blast from the past!

2010-11-10T19:16:00.006-06:00

Yup. It's been a while. Brannon Howse, for all his fear mongering and lunacy, hasn't said anything new or interesting in eons. He jumped the shark a long time ago and is, for all practical purposes, old news as far as I am concerned. I went to his crazy-palooza earlier this year, and really, it was a fleecing. The baldest soaking of the politically naive for cash that I had ever encountered. It was a horrid thing to behold.

Still, however, the toilet goblin still sends me email every single day. The headline included, "The Ten Commandments of the Anti-Christ," which was intriguing, and therefore nothing that Howse could have written. Instead, he was reposting the work of David R. Reagan of Total Batshit Ministries (formerly Lamb and Lion Ministries).

So, what is David panicking about tonight? The Georgia Guidestones! Yay! They are a lot like that mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, only they attract loons.

"This means...almost exactly nothing."

So, what's wrong with the Guidestones, David?

Several years ago I conducted a Gospel meeting in Toccoa, Georgia. While I was there I decided to check on a rumor I had heard about a mammoth granite monument that supposedly had been erected in the nearby town of Elberton in March 1980.

What's with this "supposedly" stuff? They were built in 1980. This is common knowledge.

According to the rumor, the monument had been paid for by a mysterious group affiliated with the New Age Movement, an international amalgamation of Humanist societies whose aim is to prepare the way for the coming of "Lord Maetrea," a Messiah who will save the world.

Wait, a rumor? Where's your evidence that the rumor is true?

The guiding force behind the movement is the Lucis Trust located at the United Nations Plaza in New York. The movement has been well documented in Constance Cumby's book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow. This is the same group that ran full page ads in all the leading U.S. newspapers in the spring of 1982 announcing "the Christ is now here" and will soon reveal himself. The group also runs ads in magazines promoting a special Humanist prayer.

The movement may or may not be "well" documented in that tome (honestly, I doubt it because every sentence quivers with delusional paranoia), but as with so much fringe writing, it is available in its entirety online. At no point does The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow (scribd) even mention the Georgia Guidestones. Not once. This is a purely fanciful, imaginary connection. The entire basis of your argument is completely and perfectly without justification.

I was able to confirm that the remarkable monument truly does exist.

You make it sound like you discovered the source of the Nile or something. Way to go, Dr. Livingstone! Ever hear of the Googles? Anyway, he describes the monument, explains that nobody knows who financed it except the local banker who had to know (for legal reasons). I won't subject you to David's prose, though. I'll instead subject you to my prose. The stones read, by the way:

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.

Based on my study of the New Age Movement, I have no doubt that the Georgia Guidestones are an expression of the basic philosophy of that movement. Since Satan is using that movement to herald the emergence of a universal False Messiah, I can only conclude that the Georgia Guidestones may well contain the ten commandments of the Anti-Christ.

Look at how ominous the very first commandment is: "Maintain humanity under five hundred million in perpetual balance with nature." There are 5 billion people on the earth today. To implement this first commandment, 4.5 billion people will have to be eliminated!

True, that is unnerving, but it is also just a few words on a sloppily executed granite monument. However, it's quite interesting. Later, under "Further Evidence" you cite the touristy brochure/booklet (scribd) that is distributed by the people who actually executed the commission. This booklet is the source of the story as you have it, but you selectively quote it. Clearly you interpret all books as badly as you do the Bible. Let's imagine the letter in the booklet you quote is real. I suspect the author was someone in town, someone associated with the granite business, if not the granite workers themselves who financed the stones--the author/publisher of the booklet says follows every use of the phrase "Georgia Guidestones" with (TM ), which seems really proprietary to me. But whatever. Let's imagine that the letter you cite as evidence of their intention is worth citing, then, how can you possibly ignore the bit that says:

A few generations of single child families will permit improvement of living standards in even the most impoverished nations.

The author is not talking about killing everyone. He's just letting the current population "age out," as it were. Now, he suggests draconian measures that would rob the individual of reproductive freedoms, but then again, your people also would rob people of their reproductive freedoms, so it seems to be sort of a crappy wash from where I'm standing.

Commandment 4 makes it clear that all true Christians would be a clear target of any elimination program, because Christians give primacy to faith.

Fuck everyone else, by the way.

Commandment 2 is an expression of the Nazi concept of controlled reproduction of the species.

Yeah, this is a sickening idea. It's a statement about eugenics that creeps my shit out. However, the Nazis were not into the breeding for "diversity," asshat.

Commandments 2, 5, 7 & 8 are the cornerstones of centralized, world government.

You must mean 5 and 6 and either 7 or 8.

5 Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6 Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7 Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8 Balance personal rights with social duties.

Actually, they are saying, "Let nations be sovereign "rule internally" and don't go to war, because war is bad." I know this because I can read. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Commandment 9 is an expression of the essence of most oriental, mystical religions.

Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.

I thought you guys were all about truth(TM) and love. I understand that you hate beauty (I mean, just look at evangelist hair), but being in harmony with god...that's something you all are supposed to like.

Satan knows Bible prophecy. He can read the signs of the times. He knows that Jesus is coming soon. Satan is preparing Mankind for the acceptance of his ultimate ploy to deceive the World - the unveiling of his Anti-Christ.

By publishing his intentions on a rock in the middle of Balls-All, Georgia? The Lord may work in mysterious ways, but the Devil is completely nutters!

The Bible tells us that Satan disguises himself as "an angel of light" and that his servants disguise themselves as "servants of righteousness" (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). Isn't it interesting that the man who financed the Georgia Guidestones called himself "R. C. Christian"? Is that a coincidence or a revelation?

Neither. I... I Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

My friends, we live in an age of deception. Jesus said that in the end times "false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders so as to mislead, if possible even the elect" (Matthew 24:24). We must be spiritually discerning. We must "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1).

You have forced me to this. I just...I can't do this anymore.

9/11 music...

2010-11-08T21:07:00.003-06:00

Yeah. It's a real thing. Found out about it tonight. You know how I went to the chemtrail movie a few weeks ago? Well, I have a gigantic new collection of conspiracy movies. I've been watching these movies for the last few days, and, man, are they repetitive! The only interesting thing that I have encountered, the only thing at all new, is the concept of 9/11 music. For instance, take the song that is playing over the closing credits of Dave van Kleist's magnum (what's Latin for poop?) 9/11 Ripple Effect. I was not able to find a free audio version of the strange soft-rock 9/11 song (link is to a video) that played over the credits, but I found the dance remixes of the song:

http://www.sooutthere.com/download/911-building-7-dance-track

How do you make the Bee Gee's even more grating? Check it out!

White supremacists hate zombies (really)....

2010-11-08T17:56:00.008-06:00

Today, I popped into the office of a colleague who shares an interest in conspiracy theories and who is building up quite a collection of primary sources. Anyway, he handed me a large, folded-over book list from "Invictus Books" ("invictus" means "white trash" in Latin). My colleague pointed out that "Invictus" was the name of the poem that Timothy McVeigh recited for his final words, which is enough of a crime to warrant the death penalty, if I'm to be honest (and when am I ever not?). The entire poem is on the cover. "Bing," he said. "I'm on their fucking mailing list."

"That sucks....Can I make a copy?" I asked, trying to make lemonade using his lemons. What he gave me is beyond horrid. I have a hard time believing that this is actually a place, but it seems to me to be a source of all sorts of alternative fiction by far-right-wing racist separatist barfs. Let me give you a sample of some of their offerings. A few books, frankly, I approve of: 1984, Animal Farm, and On the Origin of Species (yeah). Some I am completely indifferent to: The Nietzsche Reader, Plato's Republic, The Portable Jung. The rest are awful and you should never hesitate to laugh openly--and invite others to laugh and point--at anyone you see carrying any of them.

The two most important, from a "proven capacity to circulate among the insane" perspective is The Turner Diaries and Behold a Pale Horse, both of which I intend to download later tonight from the web. The first is a racist novel about some white guy. The second is a huge conspiracy tome that runs 500 pages, outlining the whole New World Order.

But the other books in the catalog are a real treasure trove of lunacy. They include:

Whitey Revolutionary
Green Day: A Novel of Totalitarian UN Control (that title really flows off the tongue)
The entire SS culture series (a lot of Nazi era reprints)
White Self Hate: Master Stroke of the Enemy
The Fuhrer's Courage
Positive Christianity in the Third Reich (refutes the claim that the Third Reich was anti-Christian)
Nude Photography in Nazi Germany ("Over 100 explicit b/w nude photos celebrating the natural beauty of Aryan women.")

Several translations of Mein Kampf (including the "Nazi Translation", whatever that is)
Tales of the Holohoax, a comic book
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ("It may be a fake, but whoever wrote it definitely understands the Jewish mind.")
David Duke's My Awakening ("In the first two parts he unloads both barrels, one on Blacks and the other on Jews.")
How to Win Friends and Influence People (No shit? "#1 Don't shop at Invictus Books.")
Pat Buchanan's Death of the West (How does that make you feel, Pat?)
Writings by Eric Rudolph "the pro-life Olympic bomber"
The Secret Doctrine by Helena Fucking Blavatsky (Really? Blavatsky? Really? Lame!)
A toilet trove of "how to disappear" style survivalist books
A buttload of Celtic and Nordic mythology
A number of metal parking-style signs, like "Panzer Parking Only"

Lastly there was this little gem:

Claaaa-aaasy.

While this list is abhorrent on many levels and the people who write these books are not quite entirely people, I need to read a number of them because...that's what I do. You have to know what tune the devil is playing, and I have a suspicion that a lot of ideas that are working their ways into mainstream political culture are originating on the far racist right. We need to be able to see where these ideas come from and call people out when they use them, or just inform them of their provenance when they use those ideas unthinkingly. So, I was looking for which ones come in free online form (a lot of this type of stuff is freely distributed among the lunatic fringe, like the free movies I picked up at the chemtrail movie I went to), and I came across the strangest post-apocalyptic reading list over at stormfront. I will highlight the ones that really surprised me:

1. Boston's Gun Bible by Boston T. Party
2. Crisis Preparedness Handbook: A Complete Guide to Home Storage and Physical Survival by Jack A. Spigarelli
3. Ditch Medicine: Advanced Field Procedures For Emergencies by Hugh Coffee
4. U.S. Army Special Forces Medical Handbook by Craig Glen K.
5. SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea by John Lofty Wiseman
6. Extreme Survival Almanac: Everything You Need to Know to Live Through a Shipwreck, Plane Crash, or Any Outdoor Crisis Imaginable by Reid Kincaid
7. Boston on Surviving Y2K by Kenneth W. Royce
8. The Collapse by Jeff Stanfield
9. Molon Labe! by Javelin Press
10. Enemies Foreign and Domestic by Matthew Bracken
11. Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista by Matthew Bracken
12. Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse: A Novel of the Turbulent Near Future
13. Unintended Consequences by John Ross
14. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
15. The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Resistance by Vin Suprynowicz
16. Amerikan Sunset by Jennifer Ladewig
17. Things Fall Apart by Fred Heiser
18. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
19. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
20. The Rift by Walter J. Williams
21. Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven
22. Trigger Effect by Dewey Gram
23. Vandenberg: A novel by Oliver Lange
24. The Postman by David Brin
25. The Running Man by Stephen King
26. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
27. Trial by Fire by Harold Coyle
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
30. THE THIRD REVOLUTION by Anthony F. Lewis
31. Civil War II: The Coming Breakup of America by Thomas W. Chittum
32. The Turner Diaries: A Novel by Andrew MacDonald
33. Hunter by Andrew MacDonald
34. Hear The Cradle Song by O.T. Gunnarsson
35. The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks
36. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
37. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
38. Day by Day Armageddon (A Zombie Novel) by J. L. Bourne
39. Every Sigh, the End: A Novel About Zombies by Jason S. Hornsby
40. Down the Road: On the Last Day by Bowie Ibarra
41. 28 Days Later: The Aftermath by Steve Niles
42. The Rising by Brian Keene
43. Autumn: The Human Condition by David Moody
44. Autumn - The City by David Moody
45. Autumn - Purification by David Moody
46. Hurricane Katrina Survival Stories: Courage in a time of tragedy and confusion by Dee Van Dyk
47. The Great New Orleans Gun Grab by Gordon Hutchinson
48. Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending Their Lives With Firearms by Robert A. Waters
49. The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves With a Firearm by Robert A. Waters
50. Forensic Analysis of the April 11th 1986 Miami Shootout by French Anderson MD

The zombie novels really surprised me. Big scary black Jewish zombies. BOO!

HJ (a proud race traitor!)

PS: Here's a picture of Hitler with a very manly, Teutonic camel-toe:

Behold the mighty German knees! Heehee!

Right wing violence...

2010-11-08T04:26:00.001-06:00

It's not pretty, but it's outlined at Crooks and Liars.

This Week in Conspiracy

2010-11-07T18:43:00.003-06:00

I am trying very hard to not bludgeon my whining cat, Mina. You have no idea. Oh, cripes. She just knocked a box of plastic forks off of the fridge. Have to go get my cat-disciplining stick.

Anyway, as I struggle against the impulse to felinicide, I thought I'd bring you another edition of the week that was weak.

Are the bed bugs from Plum Island?

Jeese Ventura Investigates Wall Street, fails at life.

Alex Jones: Rand Paul Already Being Used as a Scapegoat. The word you're looking for, Alex, is "punchline."

Initiative 300 fails.

Roger Leir, defective podiatrist, was on Coast to Coast.

Yvette Carnell perfectly fails to understand the word skeptic. Ouch.

Isn't listening to a pastor about the economy a lot like going to a plumber for a colonoscopy?

My favorite headline this week: "Alex Jones' audio blog: the true nature of evil."

I can't decide what to think of this. But it smacks of a manufactured conspiracy against, admittedly, that wacko Arizonan sheriff. Surely nobody that evil is so stupid as to send out this email.

Oklahoma bans Sharia Law.

Alex Jones asks for $500,000 to continue the war on leprechauns. Seriously, institutionalize this man.

Micky discovers the government cartoon conspiracy against Glenn Beck. HAHA!

Glenn Beck: An inspiration to unhinged gunmen

Aliens! Terrorism! Revelation! Scientists who appear on in National Geographic! Ahh!

That's it for now, space cadets!

Alex Jones, Stalker Clown, Tries Really Hard to Cry...

2010-11-06T13:49:00.003-06:00

This is...unlike...anything I have seen in a long time. Remember John Oliver on election night, how he was wearing a green suit? Well, Alex Jones went there first, but you know, he was serious. Behold, the disembodied, floating head of goof:

20 IQ points lower? Silly! You can't have negative IQ! Deny them your vital essence, Alex!

How is he not in an institution? (Texas does not count.)

Conspiracy in the news...

2010-11-05T19:29:00.002-06:00

This is not a regular conspiracy theory of the week. This is just today's news.

Did the UN introduce cholera to Haiti? Really probably not. We know that cholera follows on the heels of natural disasters and lack of clean water. Haiti is a fucked-up little sort of country. I'm surprised we haven't already seen it. But the idea that people are responsible for natural disaster and the type of outbreaks that follow it...a conspiracy theory as old as the hills. Think of the Jews supposed to poisoning the wells during the Plague. (No one pointed out that the Jews were dying too.)

Furthermore. I want to know why the media is not leading with the headline, "Republicans win your trust, immediately blatantly lie, you suckers." The headline, "Republicans take aim at cost of Obama’s trip to India," is uninformative and blatantly misleading at best.

Grumble.

Is an ounce of prevention really worth pound of cure?

2010-11-04T19:27:00.003-06:00

Is an ounce of prevention really worth pound of cure? This is the type of problem that keeps me up at night, because I know in the morning I am going to have to do basic math to answer the question and then I will have to post it to my blog for all the world to check my work. Damn it.

Fine. I will do math, but only for the kids.

Now, when I decided to do this, I realized that I would have to find units that could be shared by both prevention and cure, something that tied both vaccines and health care together. Well, both of these have cost, so I could compare the cost of vaccination versus the cost of hospitalization. I am going to take the vaccine I most recently received, the dTap booster that I got at Dragon*Con. That dose, which I got for free, came to the CDC at the price of $26.25/dose. Therefore, $26.25 is my ounce of prevention.

Now the reason that I got the vaccine is because I do not want to infect any children with the whooping cough. 90 percent of pertussis related hospital stays are infants, so I decided that the average cost of a hospital stay for an infant would be my pound of cure. The average cost of an infant hospitalization for pertussis is $9,586.

$9,586/$26.25 = 365 ounces of prevention in every pound of cure.

Divide that by 16 oz per lb and you find that:

An ounce of prevention is worth 22.82lbs of cure. Exactly.

"Compared to what?"

2010-11-04T14:49:00.008-06:00

This post, I need to say right off the bat, could not have been written, nay conceived, without the expertise of the CDC's medical epidemiologist Dr. Bill Atkinson, who as you might know, has been a force for public health for over 20 years. Recently, Bill, Maria Walters, and the Skepchicks launched a campaign to vaccinate folks against pertussis at Dragon*Con, and we fully expect that with more lead time next year, their efforts to vaccine the hell out of Nerdlanta will be victorious and complete! I met Bill at the vaccination clinic, and he generously agreed to come to my classes and talk about alternative medicine, especially the anti-vaccine movement and how to evaluate a clinical trial.

What he revealed was a stunning look at how vaccines are tested.

Bill discussed a clinical trial for the shingles vaccine. Shingles is caused by a nasty virus, herpes zoster, that hides out in the nerves of those of you who have had chickenpox. When it comes out to play, it can result in painful, persistent blistering. (Warning, this is gross.)

Thus Spake Zoster.

I don't want this. This disease, as far as I can tell, dogs the elderly, but can also appear in young people. I remember a friend in grade school (8th grade) who was kept home in misery because of shingles under his arm. It occurs to me that he could still be having outbreaks of this. Yikes!

In the last couple of years, a vaccine for shingles has been developed, and a clinical study...no, let's call it a "science party"... was thrown where two types of party favors were given out. The first was a placebo, the second, experimental vaccine. This was one hell of a party, including 38,546 patients over the age of 60, all of them "doing shots", as it were. The "science party" raged continuously between November 1998 and September 2001 at 22 different academic centers around the country.

It was all fun and games, however, until Bill gave us a sobering number. Of the 19,270 people who received the vaccine, 793 of the patients died.

Shingles vaccine! Run away!

Before you personally wet yourself over this (WARNING: Do NOT follow link), Brave Sir Robin, Bill asked, what else would you like to know?

"What did they die from?"

"Were they sick ahead of time?"

"What about the placebo group?"

Bang. Bill brought up a slide. 795 people in the placebo group died versus 793 in the vaccine group. No difference.

This clever reveal made a crucial, fundamental point not only about assessing vaccine efficacy, but also about understanding randomized studies in general:

When you say, "My grandpa had the experimental shingles vaccine and then he died," it tells you nothing about the vaccine.

When you document 793 people dying after receiving an experimental vaccine, it tells you nothing about the vaccine.

If you tell me that 1,000,000 children showed signs of autism in a global trial after getting a vaccine, you have told me nothing about the vaccine. When you say it outside of a clinical trial, you have told me...even less.

Your numbers, no matter how high or big or scary, are not only meaningless, but, to the layman like me, potentially dangerously misleading. Any meaningful interpretation of adverse outcomes in these types of trials depends on the researcher, layman, or journalist asking, "Compared to what?"

In fact, the shingles vaccine trial is a damned good trial, and should probably get its own book in the Bible of Medical Science ("...A reading from the Letter of the Shingles Prevention Study Group to the FDA").

You can check out the abstract of the study here. A flowchart that describes the study and its subsequent adverse events (different from "adverse reactions," mind you) study can be found here.

Mayer Eisenstein's Ludicrous Existence

2010-11-03T12:59:00.004-06:00

Dr. Mayer Eisenstein. I have no idea how I started receiving his emails, but they basically arrive every single day. Usually, he's quacking on about Vitamin D and how it is essentially a miracle cure for most things (except obesity, apparently). Anyway, today this guy sent me an email that said:

Anyway, there is no useful information in the email. Only a scary statement and an invitation to give him money to learn what he means. (His bound bullshit now costs only $25--was $40!)

This is cynical in the extreme, and knowing that over a dozen studies have failed to show any link between vaccines and autism, knowing that kids and vulnerable populations that depend on the immunity of the herd are suffering and dying of vaccine-preventable diseases, knowing that the paper that set off the vaccine-autism scare was faked, disowned by every coauthor who could be contacted, and eventually retracted by the journal that published it, knowing all this and hearing this statement I am led to wonder what the fuck do you have say in this country to show that you are not a competent physician and have your license taken away?

I'm dead serious. How are these people practicing medicine? Flaunting your credentials while saying that vaccines cause autism seems to me to be mass malpractice, hurting people who are not even your patients. So, what I am asking is how does one see to it that someone's medical credentials are stripped? I really want to know. The Chicago Tribune seems to think that he may not be an asset to public health, at least they do in their unambiguously titled, "Autism doctor: Troubling record trails doctor treating autism."

"In the name of safety," the article says, "Dr. Mayer Eisenstein's practice embraces home births and shuns vaccines, but parents' lawsuits tell a story of harm and death."

It goes on:

[H]is suburban Chicago practice, currently known as Homefirst, garnered an alarming record: It was on the losing side of one of the largest U.S. jury verdicts -- $30 million -- ever awarded to the family of a newborn in a wrongful-death suit.

In court records dating back three decades, the families of dead and brain-damaged children repeatedly alleged that doctors who work for Eisenstein made harmful mistakes -- sometimes the same error more than once. His practice also has been dogged by accusations in court records that its offshore malpractice policy was phony.

So, I want to know what it takes to lose your fucking license. Someone please tell me.

"Dr." Joe Mercola clearly wants to set you on fire!

2010-11-02T14:55:00.004-06:00

I mean, just look what arrived in my email this morning:

Which, of course, led me to a dark place:

Watch out when you make unverified medical claims, Joe. When you do, you are playing with fire!

Why Aren't You Reading Harriet Hall?

2010-11-02T08:16:00.002-06:00

I mean, other than the obvious answer, that you are here reading me. Get out!

Screw you, Eugene, Oregon! You're nothing compared to Lansing! Hear me? Nothing!

2010-11-02T08:08:00.002-06:00

According to Alexa:

Hjhop.blogspot.com's three-month global Alexa traffic rank is 978,724. The site is relatively popular among users in the cities of Lansing (where it is ranked #1,735) and Eugene (#3,053). About 95% of visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 334,612. The fraction of visits to Hjhop.blogspot.com referred by search engines is roughly 3%. Visitors to this site view 1.4 unique pages each day on average.

Should we be vaccinating health care workers?

2010-11-01T13:42:00.011-06:00

Note: The following is blog post is for Vaccine Awareness Week.

Also, Joe Mercola is a trouser weasel.

Hell, yes. If you are capable of getting a flu shot and you work with sick people, it should be simply unconscionable for you to put the people who trust you at additional risk.

Of course, the National Vaccine Information Center, which has the least accurate name since Intelligent Design, disagrees. Barbara Loe Fisher, who you may remember sued...everyone...last year (OK Amy Wallace and Paul Offit, as best I can tell) before her suit was dismissed, is panicking. Cripes, panicking isn't strong enough a word. She's like the Glenn Beck of vaccines.

She starts her article with her vaccination dystopia, which as a consumer of medicine, sounds pretty much like a paradise to me:

Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are ordering all employees to get a flu shot every year or be sent home for two weeks without pay to “think about it.” Anyone, who still refuses to get a flu shot after that, is fired.

This statement is largely true. And good. The notion that someone who worked with immune-suppressed children might actually decide to not be vaccinated is unacceptable. In fact, keeping the hospitals as healthy as possible is an important factor in maintaining a healthy population during a health crisis. Also, the populations who you find in hospitals, including the elderly and the very young, are precisely the populations from whom flu exacts the highest toll. We can easily turn the question around: Should we force patients, who are a vulnerable population, to stay in hospitals that are not ready for a flu pandemic, where 2/3 of the medical staff (the number indicated her article who resist vaccination) are potential bearers of infectious disease? You're right, Barbara, and while we're at it, doctors should have the right to decide whether to wash their hands before they operate, and nurses should be allowed to opt out of mandatory hand sanitation because changing bandages.

I'm very glad Barbara does not have a position of meaningful influence.

But she anticipates a much larger project to (gasp) make people healthy!!!

[M]edical organizations [have launched] a national crusade to force everyone employed in a “healthcare setting” to get a flu shot every year, whether they have direct contact with patients or not. That’s right. Not just doctors and nurses, but every single person who has anything to do with the health care facility, including students, volunteers, and contract workers.

She's talking about the American Academy of Pediatrics and, ahem, epidemiologists. Students, volunteers and even contract workers do come into contact with patients--hospitals are positively crawling with sick people!

OK, we can come to a compromise, I think. We can just ban sick people from hospitals. There. Everyone is happy.

An exception could be made if the doctors in charge approve a “medical exemption” to vaccination, which, today, is about as hard to get as a job.

You should cultivate some meaningful job skills, then, Barbara.
Then she jumps the shark:

It is not a pretty sight to watch doctors acting more like thugs than healers.

Who says you can't be both thug and healer? I give you Dr. Dre.

When doctors threaten people with financial ruin for refusing to shut up and salute smartly, there is something wrong.

No, something is wrong when knowledgeable healthcare professionals knowingly put patients at risk. And it's clearly hospital administration, not doctors, who have the authority to apply this rule to their workforce. Why are you demonizing doctors?

Trust is replaced with fear and anger. People start asking questions. Questions like: Who will be threatened and punished next for refusing a flu shot?

The answer is YOU, me, and every American.

Now, who's replacing trust in doctors with unjustified fear and anger, you unreflective hypocrite? But we are going careen off the Cliff of Common Sense into Chemtrail-Crazy Canyon:

We are next in line because when doctors trade in their white coats for military uniforms, going after their own is just the first step on the road to going after the rest of us. If this latest power grab is allowed to set precedent in America, the only question in the future will be: how many vaccines will we be forced to take or lose our jobs, our health insurance, our right to enter a hospital, or receive medical care, or get on a plane, or check into a hotel if we can’t prove we have gotten vaccinated?

I noticed that she stopped citing sources a couple of paragraphs back. As much as I enjoy the paranoid delusions of others, this has just gotten strange. She then jabbers inanely about Hitler and the Nuremberg Trials, as if well-establish public health measures were in any way related to what happened in the Holocaust. You trivialize the enormity of the suffering of Europe's Jews and other ethnic and political minorities. Badly.

Take Doctors & Scientists Off the Pedestal

Now, we come full circle to 2010, as we witness doctors in positions of authority threatening people with loss of employment and financial ruin if they refuse to get injected every year with influenza vaccine, a vaccine that carries two risks: the risk of injury or death and the risk of not working at all.

Why are we letting fellow citizens with M.D. or Ph.D. written after their names to tell us what kinds of risks to take with our lives or the lives of our children? Why do we continue to put doctors and scientists on a pedestal in America and fail to put boundaries on the power they too often wield with callous disregard for the informed consent ethic, civil liberties and individual human life?

Clearly, energy workers are better credentialed and qualified to make public health decisions than physicians and otherwise credentialed experts. First of all, when you consider it is generally not the physicians who are requiring this in hospitals, you look like an ass. A multicolor baboon ass in 3D IMAX format, actually. Nonetheless, I have always been struck by the knee-jerk devaluing of expertise in our country, what Hoffstadter wrote about in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. There is, of course, no reason to allow physicians to do whatever they like, but their expertise should have a bearing on public policy. I honestly have worries that someone who does not believe that vaccinations are generally safe and effective may not have the required expertise or competency to work in a hospital. I think that is why so many alt health quacks go it alone--they simply don't have what it takes to be the profession. We have to have minimum standards when it comes to cultivating public health, and krill oil salesmen, back-crackers and vitamin hawkers just don't cut the mustard.

This...long period of time...in conspiracy!

2010-10-31T18:59:00.002-06:00

Been a while, eh? But I have been dredging the floor of the Internet this entire time, collecting little scraps of conspiracy for you.

Jesuit Footage: The Vatican Finding Nibiru The Tenth Planet Of The Solar System (What's wrong with that headline? I mean, besides its existence?)
Here's something posted by somebody with some sort of disorder!
Jesse Ventura continues to embarrass himself by not scheduling tours ahead of time. Failure.
Founding Fathers were Antichrists, says new straight-to-youtube movie (from Christian News Wires). Oh, here are some clips, because, hey, straight-to-youtube. This is so refreshingly bizarre.
New word: "Spyocracy."
I just like the name Dr. Shahida Wizarat. Also HAARP is a WMD. Big yawn.
Was Paul the Psychic Octopus assassinated?
Gordon Duff: "The term “Orwellian” is far from adequate. " I agree, but for completely different reasons.
Randy Quaid: "Heath Ledger, Chris Penn and David Carradine were assassinated." Christ, who did Carradine piss off?
Yes, Denver. You are all morons. Every last one of you.
Beck inconsistent--as well as unstable!
Canada has Freemen on the Land too! I'll be damned.
Alex Jones' little friend: "The Daily Show actually employs angry, sometimes violent, anti-American radicals and globalists who peddle the REAL conspiracy theories concerning U.S. domestic and foreign policy, geopolitics and science." Dude. They make poop jokes.
This blog has South Korea and UFOs. I'm as happy as I have ever been.
Is Sarah Palin really a citizen? And for that matter, is Alaska really a state? (Actually, I saw a sign at the Rally for Sanity/Fear that said, "Birthers for Hawaiian Statehood." I almost asphyxiated on the humor.)
Bill Gates to kill us with vaccines. From First Thoughts. Guys, don't publish until you have had second thoughts.

I want to know who keeps dirtying my clothes every week! I think it's probably the Jesuits. I have months worth of conspiracy stuff in a backlog. I'll try to get to some of it soonishly.

The Evolushunz...

2010-10-30T18:15:00.004-06:00

I am a teacher. My entire professional career, I have pretty much designed every single syllabus to avoid having to do anything with evolution. Let's face it, I teach English. Evolution sort of falls outside of my normal range of duties. Occasionally, in years past, a student might slip an argument for creationism into a writing assignment, but it's never a happy experience to grade it. I have found myself having to ask for rewrites about other topics. The most flagrant example was about 5 years ago, and it still sticks with me. If I remember correctly, I was on a plane when I read it, and all I can say is that I am lucky I was not seated in a emergency aisle, because I would have gone out that door. The assignment was "react to an article you disagree with," and she chose an editorial from Scientific American, I think it was, that was called "20 Mistakes that Creationists Make" (or something to that effect). It was a bulleted list of logical fallacies and bad arguments that biologists have to contend with. Well, this girl, named each fallacy and then made it: "It's only a theory" equivocation? Well, she'd say that creationists use it because evolution is only a theory.

Cripes.

After that, I decided that evolution was on my short list of no-go topics, which includes abortion, the Second Amendment, and campus drinking policies.

This week, however, I've had to talk about it. It's unavoidable. Deep down, I've been terrified of it. there is an excellent chance that I will alienate a good number of my students. We started by watching Expelled and Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial over two nights.

This was when notes came in to me from my students that said: "I can't believe how oppressed IDers are."

Fuck.

The morning of class, I wrote up my notes about Expelled and how basically every substantive point is flat wrong. I showed what ID is up against, that is, what it has to not only explain, but what it has to explain better. I showed that numerous lines of evidence point to evolution, that these lines of evidence mutually confirm one another. Then I showed the misrepresentation of evolution in Expelled. I illustrated how the people who said that they had been injured somehow by an intergenerational conspiracy of atheistic scientists who knew that evolution was wrong were not being accurate. And then I asked my students to write about their reactions to the class. They submitted paragraphs to me anonymously through their workshop group leaders. That worked well, I thought.

I would say that, in the aggregate, the students I am teaching are representative of the country as a whole. Everything from 6-day creationists to atheists, and every stripe of in-between. Many of them have thought about this issue quite a bit and have developed sophisticated understandings about the physical and metaphysical. I was positively tickled to have students make statements about my religion and being wrong and contradictory and all sorts of fun stuff. This is how it should be. Never tip your hand to the students and make the best arguments, no matter what issue you are discussing. A lot of fun. We start wading into some of the strange permutations of Intelligent Design next week. Can't wait. So much fun.

Are you planning to write in support of science?

2010-10-29T20:38:00.004-06:00

In the spirit of "take back the night", I see this as a sort of "take back the science" campaign directed at vaccination. (Of course, most take back the night campaigns now take place in the early evening around dinner. But no matter!) If you write a blog post about vaccination next week, I'll put up a link, or if you submit one to me directly at littletinyfeardemon, I'll put it up here!

Here's the call for posts up at Science-Based Medicine:

What I’d love to see from November 1-6 are a tsunami (word choice intentional) of posts that:
Include science-based discussions of the safety and efficacy of vaccines
Include science-based refutations of anti-vaccine misinformation
Specifically refute posts by Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher during that week. (You can throw in Age of Autism, too, if you like.)

Start thinking about this. I would love to see the misguided efforts of the antivaxxers blow back in their faces.

Doug Giles: "Negress Uppity"

2010-10-28T16:04:00.002-06:00

Well, here's a nice little slice of hell. It's a video from conservative typist (I can't really call it writing) Doug Giles.

Who said that people who support the Tea Party are racist? Only the people, like Giles, who support the Tea Party.

Nobody should ever strike another person, but how much of a savaging did the woman give the reporter? So big that the reporter did not even report it in her article from the rally.

I hope you never stop pissing blood, Doug.

HJHOP Movie Review: G. Edward Griffin's "Fucking Clouds: How Do They Work?"

2010-10-24T20:18:00.007-06:00

Last night, a handful of Atlanta skeptics attended the world premiere of G. Edward Griffin's new documentary, What in the World Are They Spraying?, which was screened last night at the Atlanta History Center, an otherwise respectable institution. We were there not just for the show, but also for the political spectacle that took place in the hall outside the screening room.

In much the way the 9/11 Truther screening of Engineering Destruction brought with it a coterie of politically naive activists hawking conspiracies, we expected much the same at the movie. We were not disappointed.

In fact, we were terrified.

After buying our tickets, I hit the display tables. The first was the table of georgiacarry.org, which declares that its mission is to restore "the right to bear arms in Georgia." (Christ, if you have spent any time in the pawn shops here, you can only wonder which rights are being withheld. Concealed tactical nuclear weapons, fercrissakes?) Of course, the scary upshot of this table's presence at a chemtrail event is that people who think that evil elites are spraying us all day from the engines of airplanes are arming themselves to the fucking teeth and want more guns. That's some scary stupid.

Next I wandered over to the table with the CDs and DVDs on it. An amiable chap was distributing disks with conspiracist audio and video and chatting with people:

"The beauty of this is that nobody knows you got this information," he said, referring to the CD format. "They don't have your IPO or whatever; they don't know how many times you watched it." (He's right. I'd hate for "them" to know about my initial public offering.)

"You handed a lot of these out last time I was at the Federal Reserve," an older guy next to him said. (The region's Federal Reserve branch is near me in Midtown Atlanta, and sometimes you can see protesters outside distributing literature.)

Indeed, much of the modern conspiracy theory movement is about distributing information; in this sense it is quite evangelical. The guy behind the table told me, when I asked if I could take some CDs: "The reason that there are two of the same [disk] is that you can keep one for yourself and give one to a coworker or someone at church or something, and with two people having the same information, you can start a conversation and draw people into it and create what I call 'buzz.' If we can get six percent of the population educated on just whats on these CDs, then it's just a matter of time."

(I'll be sure to distribute them the next time I'm at church, I thought.) Why six percent?

"Six percent," he continued, "is the point on the bell curve where it becomes common knowledge. That's not a whole lot of people." I was apparently wrong to think that "common knowledge" meant knowledge that was common to everyone. Stupid words.

At this point, Masala Skeptic arrived, and there was much hushed and nervous chatting among the reasonable. We expressed both fear and the desirability of beers. I came back to the table where the guy was handing out videos.

"They wanted $700 plus 40% of court costs for not having my vehicle registered," he was saying. "I had a license plate on it, it was insured, it had been registered--they knew exactly who I was, they could pull it up on the computer--it wasn't registered as collateral on the national debt. [...] That's why they wanted $700."

"How's that?" I asked.

"Ok...I can't prove this quite yet, but there's a guy out west who has been doing the research. Everything you own is used as collateral on the national debt [dramatic pause]...including your social security card, your birth certificate [dramatic pause]...That's some really weird stuff."

"Who's researching that?" I asked.

"A lot of people. If you just..." At this point a woman, who was worried that the gummint was ruling us under admiralty law, jumped in, failing to understand how conversations progress. I redirected the man back to my question.

"I didn't get the guy's name," he said. "But if you look at 55 Waters Street, New York, New York, the depository trust company or corporation [which, it turns out, trades in Treasury securities] it'll give you some sort of idea of ..." and he trailed off, saying that he had to be working. "That's just kind of a rabbit hole to go down [Ah, the inevitable, Alice in Wonderland/Matrix reference!] I haven't exactly figured out how they do it..." Then another one of his friends came in and the conversation was over.

At this point, the skeptical away team had assembled: Masala Skeptic, Krelnik, Cabana Boy, Animala and Bing, and we were off to our seats.

The place was disturbingly full. We sat in business class, which meant that we were only out $10 a pop and sat off to one side. As we took it all in, a cadaverous undertaker-looking guy handed out slips of paper about the swine flu and advertising a site called, AmericanPatriotNews.info, which actually has "the earth is growing" conspiracy.

He mentioned that up to 80% of humans were going to be killed by depopulation tactics, which he called "genocide."

"Hell, that's omnicide," I remarked, and the couple in front of me sort of snickered.

"Yeah, that's sort of extreme," the boy-half said, "but when you read about the vaccinations and how toxic they are..."

"Well, that's the thing about the great vaccine scares...there's just not a lot of evidence to support it. Vaccines are incredibly safe." I told him that I had recently talked to a person from the CDC, and he showed me a study of the shingles vaccine. A double-blinded study. Freaking beautiful work of art, that study. Conclusion of the study: the vaccine works and it does not kill people. "So, they work, and they're largely safe. I mean, have you heard something else?"

"Well, yeah I've read that they suspended them in the UK, India, Australia, they suspended giving out the flu vaccines because they...the under fives were basically going into epileptic shock and seizures, and so they suspended them."

I can't find any evidence of this from reputable sources. Indeed, India is asking for vaccine and developing a new type of flu vaccine production program, according to the sources I looked at. OK, the website birdflu666.com had something about this, but it's called "birdflu666," fercryinoutloud. But this does not help my new friend. He said that it was all about Big Pharma earning money. I said it really wasn't, that you don't make money on something that you give out once and never have to administer again; you make it on drugs you take every day for the rest of your life.

I thought I was exquisitely clear, had good solid answers for every single question and assertion that he made. I know he was not convinced in the slightest.

Then the feature presentation. First, G. Edward Griffin came out and got a preemptive standing ovation, which creeped the shit out of all of the skeptics, as far as I could tell. I wasn't expecting it, because he's a crazy guy. Wrote a book about Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society. Yikes! But that's besides the point. The filmmakers, to use the term loosely, had recruited him in what seems to have resulted in their raising money to make a movie about chemtrails. Fucking chemtrails.

Remember, we were in a room full of armed grown-ups.

Mike Murphy and Paul Wittenberger were the director and producer. They are politically naive and scientifically illiterate, but at least their technical prowess as reporters, documentarians and "conspiracy historians" were non-existent.

The flyer that was being handed out with the tickets read: "Tonight, Griffin, co-producer Mike Murphy and director Paul Wittenberger will personally screen the results of their perilous journey of fact finding and gathering of scientific data. They will not only confirm that 'chemtrails' are a reality, but also ask the questions of what they consist of, are there adverse effects, who is conducting these activities--and to what end?" Murphy and Wittenberger systematically and categorically failed in all of these endeavors, and their parents, who I suspect live upstairs from them, should be deeply ashamed.

The "peril" we were promised was non-existent. They farted around in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, on beaches of Hawaii, and in Belgium. The biggest hazard they faced was their ears going pop while they were landing (in a fucking plane!!!) in these various delightful locales.

So, what were they doing in these various places? Well collecting scientific data, of course! Using ph strips they seem to have gotten at Walgreens!

Wait? Really? You're going to make a movie about that? Mega-feeble.

So they go to these places, stick their strips in the mud and then ooh and ahh about how bad the soil is. And the cause? Aluminum. Who is putting it there?

The Aluminati, of course. (Just kidding. They aren't clever enough to think that one up.)

The premise of this unfortunate flick is that the aluminum that is changing the ph of the soil comes from airplanes. They perfectly avoided demonstrating anything like a link between airplanes and ground ph, and they never once addressed, when they examined the soil, that the ph of soil is variable depending on the time of year. Absolutely all of the movie is based on the premise that contrails that linger in the air longer than others (they don't give a real figure on how long a water contrail is supposed to last--and it will vary depending on atmospheric conditions) those that linger longer are actually chemtrails. The people responsible for this botch further claim that the metals in the soil, especially aluminum, originate in the chemtrails. The problem with that is that there is an easy way to test this hypothesis that they do not consider. They could sample a "chemtrail." If there is aluminum in them, then you can speculate and test the proposition that the aluminum in the soil comes from the aluminum in trails. But they haven't even bothered to do that. Perhaps it would be impractical to, I dunno, fly behind one of these, and, honestly, I'm not sure how one would sample what came out the back of an airplane engine, but I'm guessing you could do it by analyzing the change in the spectrum of light passing through it as a "chemtrail" crossed in front of the sun. Easy peasy.

As far as I can tell, they managed to find no qualified experts. They are willing to interview absolutely anybody as an expert, including a former Arizona politician with a grotesquely incontinent uterus and who fears the Illuminati, a bunch of Hawaiian hippies who don't know how shirts work, Muriel Hemingway, and a 16-year old high school student. Climate scientists? Fuck 'em. They don't need knowledgeable experts when they have a vague sense of conspiracy!

Perhaps the low point of the evening (besides the beginning of the film) was the end of the film, the last 30 minutes before the end credits, when the people with the cameras went to Washington to raise awareness of the issue of the uninstitutionalized mentally ill.

Now, when I lobbied in D.C. there was a protocol. We had to call ahead and make appointments to see the staffs of the various reps we were visiting. The people with cameras people charged up into the faces of unsuspecting representatives and asked, "What do you think about geoengineering [the pretense of saving the world from global warming that justifies spraying]?" Until a week ago, I did not know what geoengineering was. How the fuck is some suit going to a meeting going to actually be able to sit down and discuss this topic intelligently? Indeed, if they were concerned about their topic, they would have sat down with their reps while they had time to talk and listen, not while they were in transit! That's the worst time to talk about something. Indeed, the whole incident was about the spectacle of the ambush, not about the issue. And every rep acted as if they had never heard of what the guy with the square head was talking about. They came away looking very shabby, immature and naive. This movie is what would happen if the crazy rainbow lady had a production budget.

And the editing. Holy shit, was the editing incompetent! In one scene, I think they were going to meet Griffin for the first time (yes, he's in the fucking movie too, the shamelessly self-promoting garden gnome) and when Square Head goes to shake his hand the film inexplicably slows down, clearly to ponder the moment's complete insignificance. It made about as much sense as, I don't know, going into bullet-time during a cafe scene in a romantic comedy. It was conspicuously bad.

I suspect that these poor fucks were taken by Griffin--it really looks like they did all the work for him. They didn't seem to realize that when you interview the person who is funding your project, what you are doing is technically an advertisement for the person paying you, not journalism. When the scientific and political product is so devastatingly shabby, it seems that their project was hijacked as a platform for Griffin to promote himself. The whole movie was self-referential and "meta". I almost feel sorry for them.

But not quite.

An explanation and an apology

2010-10-23T12:53:00.002-06:00

Folks,

I need to apologize to my regular readers (and there are clearly many more of you than I was aware of before this) for disappearing the entire website for a number of days, but it was a rather peculiar few days here at the pad. I feel owe you all something of an explanation.

Someone, I honestly have no idea who, contacted an utterly unrelated third party to complain about this website. This was a new thing for me. I am used to people contacting me directly through the site when they have a problem with something that I have said, and if I get something factually wrong, I sure as hell want to know about it. Going around both me and Blogger, apparently, that was new.

When I was contacted by this third party, who had questions for me, I was honest in my answers but was stunned that someone was no longer going after the ideas I present here, but me personally.

Now, it could be some untutored person or persons. Someone who simply did not realize that they could contact me, that I have always been accessible by anyone who ever sent me a personal email ever. I temporarily pulled my website behind a "subscription wall" so that if I had done someone wrong (and I don't think that I have) that nobody else would be able to access it. In a word, it was an act of good faith. However, as time passes and nobody contacts me to lodge a specific complaint (and I know they know how to), it becomes harder and harder to justify keeping the entire site down, and the whole situation begins to look like an attempt to intimidate me rather than register a legitimate grievance.

HJHOP, in its current incarnation at least, is not long for this world, people. I am going to be moving on to other projects very soon, and I think that things are going to change here by the end of the year. I am contemplating picking up a couple of correspondents and serving as a sort of managing editor for the website. (If you have any interest in getting on, let me know and we can talk.) Simply put, I can't continue at the pace I have been keeping here.

Of course, I appreciate the concern of all those who wrote to me, including those who were in something of a panic. That was very cute! :)

As was done unto me....

2010-10-17T21:38:00.002-06:00

...so I do unto you.

HJ (w/a tip of the hat to johnsebben.com)

Inspired

2010-10-15T20:14:00.000-06:00

Just. Wow. I hope this shows up on blogger.

Imagine-a-jump-john-lennon-vs.-van-halen by jackstanleywp

White Supremacist Poetry Slam!

2010-10-15T19:06:00.004-06:00

As you may know, from time to time I like to give back to the community that has done so much for me. As an English teacher, I have few discernible talents, I often resort to critiquing the poetry of the white supremacists at stormfront.org, which is categorically awful to a syllable, not that they know what syllables are or what to do with them. So, in the spirit of my being a fundamentally better person than they could ever aspire to be, I give you the following literary canker sore:

I'm dancing on the grave of Meryl Dorey's charitable status

2010-10-14T14:51:00.007-06:00

Huzzah! Meryl Dorey, whose Australian (anti-)Vaccination Network has been in deep trouble for, oops, not registering as a charity while collecting donations, keeping their funds in inappropriately sized boxes, which somehow led to vast wads of cash vanishing, and stealing intellectual property, has had her charitable status revoked!

Woohoo! Here's a copy of the revocation, which I shall read out in the children's intensive care ward every year at Christmas:

The best part of the email she sent out was at the bottom, a standard statement that's at the bottom of all of her emails:

About Australian Vaccination Network, Inc.

The AVN is a non-profit, volunteer-run charitable association. Since 1994, the AVN has provided information and support to the general community who are trying to make informed choices about vaccination and health. Their lobbying in Federal Parliament has ensured that compulsory vaccination for children has not come to pass and they are the major reporters of vaccine adverse reactions to ADRAC (The Adverse Drug Reactions Advisory Committee).

Gonna have to change that first sentence, Meryl! Hahaha!

HJHOP Movie Review: Disaster movie overload

2010-10-11T16:59:00.007-06:00

Hey, y'all. Bing here. Not totally back from my blog vacation, but I have had some extra time tonight and wanted to get a little personal writing in. I've officially started the job hunt, sending off my first application of the season to my alma mater, which really needs me back. Also, I was able to get an article off to a teaching journal. When it arrived, the editor was online and she wrote back that my style was original and refreshing, or something. Like I've always said, nobody can resist the word "pigfucker."

Anyway, it's been a fairly productive month for me. I've gotten a couple of large projects off of the ground, am looking to publish under my real name (for once), and am generally having a pretty good go right now. My big plan this weekend was to go to my place of employment, plug my guitar into my amp, turn the amp up to eleven, and rock Atlanta retarded. I was ready to go. I was going to set up on a fourth-story balcony overlooking a courtyard at my building, but on Saturday, the day before Bingfest 2010 (3 hours of sex, drugs and calculus), I scoped out where I should unload the 150lbs of gear I intended to bring. The sidewalks near all easy access points to the building were closed. I had a swear and stomped my little foot. I figured that with the car I was going to use, I would need at least 3 people to move all this stuff in. Grr. One day, people.

In the meantime, I have been watching disaster movies. Specifically, 2012 disaster movies. The three that I watched yesterday and the day before were:

2012

2012: Doomsday

2012: Supernova

These are listed in no particular order of badness. Each one of these was a cinematic abortion.

First was 2012: Doomsday. The Earth is "aligned" with the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy and the interior of the earth is heating up, or something. The movie opens at the base of a volcano, which disappointingly does not kill all of the main characters. At an archaeological dig in Mexico, and the chief digger, Albino McHonkeypants finds a crucifix at a Mayan site and decides that Mayan culture was actually white European culture. Thanks, white master, and happy Christopher Columbus Day! This links Christianity and the New World in a way almost as goofy as Mormonism. At any rate, this $12 Catholic supply crucifix needs to be delivered to another temple for some reason or another. A Mexican woman, who might be having a baby without knowing man in either the Biblical or Mayan sense, needs to give birth on an altar at the same temple, for some reason. And...then there is an atheist whose irritating mother needs to be fucking raptured already. They are all converging on this temple...for some reason. In this movie god kills a lot of secondary characters in some pretty low-budget ways. First, the wife of the archaeologist dies of a little ouchy on her back. An irritating photojournalist who is clearly trying to get into the pants of a chipmunk-faced missionary is, I shit you not, impaled by hail.

The script was clearly written NASA climatologists ("The temperature is going to reach minus 20 degrees...below zero!"), or possibly heavily sedated monkeys. It stars nobody and had a production budget of 12 pesos. Cinematically, it is like having your eyes removed, fucked, and put back into your head. The extra features were my favorite bit, where you learn about what a low-rent job it was. Something that stuck out at the beginning was the endless helicopter shots up a river that had nothing to do with...anything in the movie. It turns out, the people with the cameras were given a free helicopter ride and had an assload of footage. As far as I can tell, this is the movie equivalent of forcing someone to watch your fucking home movies.

The comments to the trailer (below) are precious. It's not the worst movie ever, however. Just really, really, really, really bad.

The woman screaming "What's happening?!?" represents the movie-goer, except that this woman apparently cares.

Next was 2012, last year's mega blockbuster. Big special effects do not a good movie make. OK, in this nightmare scenario, the sun is giving off neutrinos that have "mutated" (I shit you not) and are now microwaving the interior of the planet. Basically, the crust of the earth is going to slide around and all sorts of shit's gonna happen, floods reaching the summit of Mt. Everest, supervolcanoes and Woody Harrelson getting yet another job as a whacked out whacko. Danny Glover is the President of the United States (Morgan Freeman was apparently unavailable), but he is struck and killed by an aircraft carrier, so the Undersecretary of Water Management takes over. Here's the entire plot summary: John Cusack, in variously sized planes, barely escapes as runways collapse behind him. Fuck.

And, just as in real life, in 2012 nobody pays any attention to Africa the entire time.

Last was le turd de resistance, 2012: Supernova. This was actually produced by the same company that released 2012: Doomsday. In this movie, I have no idea what the fuck happens. Apparently there's a supernova that they detected before the blast got here (ahem) and so there is a precise countdown to the moment when the supernova blast is going to fuck up the earth in no uncertain terms. There's an unlikable character who is...I have no clue what he is supposed to be. An astronaut? A soldier? Director of Mission Control? If Gene Kranz ever sees this, he's gonna be sick all over vest. Either that or declare, "Failure is desirable."

So the main character, whoever the fuck he is, needs to get to a base for some reason, but on the way there he is attacked by Iranians wearing Palestinian garb. (Ouch.) I think that he knows that it is the end of the world, because he takes his family with him, but then he sends them back and they get lost in the desert, much like the viewer. The wife(?) and daughter(?), who are somehow not related, get chased by lightning, tornadoes, and creepy California rednecks.

How is our hero(?) going to save the world? Fire nukes in the general direction of the blast so that they make some sort of force field. I don't know. I started bleeding from the eyes at this point. I was pleased to hear in the extra features that the "star" of the picture did not have a stunt double, so he got smacked around a lot.

Oh, during earthquakes, when everyone is lurching around like on the bridge of the Enterprise, someone forgot to move the camera. It's. So. Bad. I should also mention that NASA, in this movie at least, launches shuttles from the middle of Joshua Tree National Forest, and that they can "rig" shuttles so they can be launched manually.

With beautiful establishing shots filmed as someone drove past NASA, this movie is a testimony to how little can be accomplished without a budget. In true Space Mutiny style, space stations are clearly set in industrial warehouses, the evil foreign characters have rotten accents, and in the least surprising twist in the history of things resembling cinema, the bad guy is the Chinese woman. OH FUCK, I should have said spoiler alert. Oh, well. Can't be helped.

Anyway, I demand an apology from everyone who participated in the making of these movies. You are to movie making what I am to yodeling. Please burn down your own studios to prevent another disastrous round of disaster flicks.

There's a cow at the end of this video...

2010-10-08T21:43:00.000-06:00

Is there a cure for god?

2010-10-06T04:51:00.004-06:00

Busy. So insanely busy. Trying to remember what the principle of making sure that there is even being a mystery to investigate is called. Crap.

Meanwhile, however, as I tried to jog my memory on the Intertoobies, I came across this. Benefit from my ignorance:

The first 3 are "no." The fourth is "depends."

Back to work.

We have a blurry image of the culprit...

2010-10-03T21:51:00.001-06:00

We better enhance it:

HJ (who was cracked up by this one rather a whole lot)

Rick Sanchez Fired, Jew Still Employed--LMAO

2010-10-01T23:25:00.005-06:00

I shit you not, I was at the back of a public radio event that Rick "Filthy" Sanchez was at and even from literally the seat farthest away from him in that massive concert hall, I was still overwhelmed by the odor of donkey scrotum. Seriously, I heard him for about 5 minutes, and it was over. This guy is an unpleasant, thoughtless, boorish ogre. And I wanted to see him tazed, over and over for hours.

Then I wrote about it. An HJHOP Flashback (does not count as going off of bloggy vacation).

It's like I'm a psychic. Or that he is an outstandingly bad person.

Update: Oh, he's also a vapid man-ditz. Not in a small way. Seriously, look at these links and never stop laughing. See? and Here and here and here and here. (Links from the Randi forum. And now Randi has fucked up my fonts.)

I'm not too busy to get my cat certified in homeopathy...

2010-09-21T14:53:00.002-06:00

Hey, I got lots going on.

About this site...

2010-09-14T00:05:00.003-06:00

I am going to take a hiatus from blogging for a while. I need to think about what I want this site to be.

I appreciate your readership, and I hope you won't be strangers.

HJ/B

My life is over! Over!

2010-09-13T20:12:00.002-06:00

Bloglines is shutting down.

I got the message a few days ago, and it throws off everything. Ack! It's part of my morning ritual. At about 5:15, I come downstairs, download the previous day's most popular NPR stories or my favorite podcasts and set out for work at 5:30. I've been doing this with bloglines for years now. And now it's over. The thing I liked about bloglines is that I was able to read a good chunk of individual posts/stories very easily by scrolling through the feeds. I haven't seen google reader do this, but I'll have to futz with the settings to make sure.

I'm losing my bus route and rss feeder. I'm doomed. DoOoOoOmEd!

I'm hunkering down into survival mode here. I have a ton of grading and writing and revising to do in the next few days. Grading stops me from doing...all other important things for extended periods of time. I have reports to write up about my summer class (that has to happen tomorrow). I have an article that I am writing/revising, and that is not going so well. And then there is at least an entire class worth of reading that I need to do. All that's at the office. Couple that with a couple of program meetings, and you have one very busy little toaster.

Oh, and I need to get things to the folks who will be writing letters of recommendation for me as I go back on the job-scavenger hunt again.

Fuckola.

Want to see something calming, majestic and beautiful? Here's film of the motion of Jupiter over the period of a night as seen through a relatively small telescope. I tell you, this type of digital wizardry was barely imaginable when I was into amateur astronomy. Now, it's pretty much standard:

Lovely.

A night at home with my work...

2010-09-12T19:15:00.002-06:00

Oh, hell, I'm going to be so busy over the next few days.

Last night, I had a couple of pitchers of beer as I drank with 9/11 Truthers. A little podcast will be coming out soon about it. If I had gotten up to the microphone before Q&A ended after the presentation, I would have been able to ask my question in front of a lot of people. But the thing was so poorly planned that they couldn't complete the damned presentation because they ran out of time and they had almost no time scheduled for Q&A. I was in line, however, and meant to ask the question.

Anyway, after Derek Johnson's presentation, "Engineering Destruction," a lot of the group reconvened at Manuel's, where the Atlanta Skeptics meet. Our wonderful waitress was a little surprised to see me and Animala with these people. I said it was "research" and she said that she thought they were a little gross but she had to serve them. I felt similarly dirty.

I grabbed some audio outside, where I talked to a guy in a powder-blue shirt with a swastika superimposed over the outline of America. And, god damn it. I forgot to turn off the recorder, so by the time that I got to Derek Johnson to ask my question, the fucking thing was full and had turned itself off without me knowing it.

Damn it.

My question was great and his answer was lame and you'll just have to listen to the podcast.

I have a number of wacky issues of Republic Magazine that I picked up and really must read now.

Getting my conspiracy on...

2010-09-10T20:13:00.002-06:00

Sorry about the lack of conspiracy theory postings lately. Things have been sort of hectic with the Con and school starting up and all. I am consolidating my sources for the next "This Week in Conspiracy" and will probably include my trip to the 9/11 Truther Ball. I am going to ask a few questions very quickly. And then hide. I have a feeling that this is going to be interesting. I am going with a couple of other interested academics. I'm the only one who wants to stir the pot, as far as I know. :)

Keep it real. I may not return.

He runs his campaign from a van down by the river.

2010-09-09T20:49:00.003-06:00

Seriously, you need to go see tengrain over Mock, Paper, Scissors. Hear a stump speech from a man with no sense of depth perception. It's hilarious.

Con Crud...

2010-09-08T17:31:00.002-06:00

Oh man, am I unwell. I have aches and sneezing and how does all that mucus get in there anyway? Seriously, last night it was like a spigot.

And now Baby Man has shown up to whine and cry and be fussy. Pity my roommate.

Regardless, I just listened to the most recent Skeptic Zone podcast, which has some pretty fantastic audio of Brian Dunning putting the smack down on a BBC natural health expert. You need to hear it. You can hear the guy choking back tears it's such a sting.

Anyway, I am trying to work through the crippling, heart-rending sniffles and finish the Dragon*Con podcast.

Blech.

HJ (ANIMALA! BRING ME HOT TOWELS!!!!)

Crap. Harriet Hall and O Magazine go their separate ways...

2010-09-07T07:55:00.002-06:00

Dr. Hall of Science-Based Medicine tells the story here. Oprah, you have lost a great asset who could have helped your readers.

My Dragon*Con is over...

2010-09-06T12:29:00.002-06:00

I will be doing a post-game write up/podcast today. Then it's back to reality.

Dragon*Con Day 2

2010-09-04T19:28:00.007-06:00

Had a hell of a day, again, of course, like you do at Dragon*Con. Let me show you the kind of day that I had:

That's me and James Randi, you know, just kind of chilling. Randi is very, very good with people and is always fun to listen to.

This is me getting a free whooping cough vaccination at the free vaccine clinic for free. Then I used the good vibes that were injected into my shoulder to get discounted Surly. And then, donning said Surly, I went to see Richard Saunders and Rachael Dunlop do their Mystery Investigators show to a group of enthusiastic and really quite clever kids. (Apparently, active critical thinkers bring their kids along for the intellectual ride. It was gratifying.) I got good and volunteered to go up and be in the dowsing demonstration, during which I permanently put myself out of the running for the $1,000,000 prize. (I did walk away with a Minty, however.) Afterwards, I really had to introduce myself, and there were photos all around. Also we were visited by orbs:

I think the one above and to the left of Richard's head is probably a guardian angel, the one above and to the right of his head is probably spirit energy manifesting, the one way above Rachael's head is my great-grandmother, and the one next to her head is actually just a mote of dust reflecting the camera flash or possibly a light out of focus in the window behind us. The best part of their show was when they told the kids that they have a right to ask for evidence, an immensely gratifying message to see kids get. And it could not be in more stark contrast to the next session I attended over at the Paranormal Track, where a mother actually said that her daughter was seeing things and wondered how to protect her. (Sometimes the mother detected them too.)

Things got a little heated during my back-and-forth with psychic Chris Fleming of "Paranormal Kids," and I think I kept my cool until he suggested I had not done my research. I'll cover this on the next podcast, which will be quite soon. It's good listening.

Dragon*Con: Day 1

2010-09-04T00:02:00.002-06:00

Stood in line.

The list of celebs I saw at the celebrity petting zoo was impressive.

Saw James Randi and Armin Shimmerman.

Went to a psychic/ghost hunter session. Going to ask a flurry of questions that will hurt their public image in front of people who admire them tomorrow.

I totally scored a Buzzed Aldrin off of Rebecca Watson tonight because of my expert knowledge of the orgasm.

Shook Kevin Murphy's hand and gave a nod to Bill Corbett.

Have to shower because I smell like a Wookie's ass-crack.

Atlanta Skeptics' StarParty

2010-09-02T22:49:00.002-06:00

Totally awesome.

I sort of met Dr. Rachael Dunlop, Brian Dunning, Pamela Gay, Fraser Cain, an assload of Skepchicks. George Hrab was playing "I Am the Walrus" when we left. Oh! I held Little Nommington! (And here I thought the whole time that the walrus was Paul.) I took a picture, but I can't find my damned camera cable, which sort of defeats the purpose of getting a not-junky camera, does it not?

I could have stayed longer, honestly. I'm looking forward to the Con, however.

Here's wombat combat:

Dragon*Con is almost...almost here

2010-09-02T14:22:00.002-06:00

Tonight, the Atlanta Skeptics are hosting their Star Party. A number of luminaries will be there, shining so brightly that we won't be able to see a damned thing. The physics department at Emory is hosting the event. It is the kicking off of what promises to be a positively bonkers weekend. I am going to grab audio and just enjoy the hell out of myself this weekend.

Man, I need this.