Today goes to eleven!!!
This is for Eve:
(With thanks to Brian Gregory, whose list, I trust, is getting shorter.)
RJB
Happy Nigel Tufnel Day!
November 11, 2011
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derp, fun | 
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Posted by Bob
This Week in Conspiracy (7 Nov 2011)
November 7, 2011We survived CSICon, and the audience survived my epic spiel (which was never certain). I met some pretty fab folks and enjoyed myself mightily. Eve did too. But just because we played hooky for a few days doesn’t mean that I could help but see the crazy stuff that streamed in on my mail, twitter, and reader feeds.
Let get it on.
This Week in I Made More as a Graduate Student than Anonymous Has Pulled In
I’m pretty sure that Anonymous is losing money hand over fist in the American market. This is as it should be.
- Best subtitle: “Shakespeare was a fraud, says the man who showed us space aliens building the pyramids.”
- “Entertaining but unconvincing.”
- “Exceptionally stupid.” Hear that, Rollo? You’re exceptional!
- Everyone in my hometown agrees: Roland Emmerich should be put in some sort of home. Or something to that effect. I love the comments which appear on another page, in which one person says, “Oh yeah, well there is evidence–cryptograms!” FFS STFU.
- “Anyone who sees Emmerich’s Anonymous […] will surely not be able to take such claims seriously.”
- “The notion that Shakespeare’s works were written by someone else is daft.“
- Haha! Someone else noticed that Emmerich was totally slutty with the thunderclaps-as-punctuation motif!
- “England is aghast.”
- “It’s comparable to saying that ‘a welfare mother couldn’t have written Harry Potter.’”
- “[M]aintaining that fantasy of a secret aristocratic Shakespeare means you must ignore dozens of inconvenient and straightforward pieces of evidence, early documents in which a wide range of witnesses identify Shakespeare as the poet.”
- “[I]f there were money in this, it would be settled in court in no time.”
- Guardian finds that about 12 percent of its Internet readers prone to take surveys are lucky to know how to use a mouse without choking on it.
And the other crazy:
- Jon Kay (author of Among the Truthers, which I wish I had written) looks at the Freudian roots of the Shakespeare conspiracy. A fun read.
- When your by-line reads, “He was very closely associated with Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and other leaders in the Arab World and in the Balkans,” it’s time to consider where your life went titanically fecking wrong.
- NASA and CalTech say that Comet Elenin (the lamest apocalypse ever this year) is gone and should be forgotten. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING!?! Perhaps the next apocalypse, YU55!!!
- David Icke: “Remember who you are.” Also, he’s apparently in New Zealand. Did anyone down there notice extra crazy?
- AHH! Death vortex!
- Alright, guys. Is in Nemesis or Nibiru? Make up your minds.
- Judy Wood (ugh) asks, “Where did the towers go on 9/11?” to the residents of an old folks’ home.
- Why are so many free energy patents denied? Because they are submitted by cranks, perhaps? Go ahead and build the damned things and get your Nobel Prize and you can tell the Patent Office to jam it.
- Just what Herman Cain needed this week, an endorsement by Pamela Geller.
- Oh, I need to be in Dallas on 22 November 2013, the 50th anniversary. Can someone please make this happen? Kthxbai.
- The Illuminati symbolism in an episode of Family Guy:
- OOH! Umberto Eco has released The Prague Cemetery! MUST HAVE!
- Governor Ventura considers White House run.
- This is just so weird. He who controls Princess Diana controls the world.
- Oh, you should read crank.net.
- God, I love what issues from the heaving loins of expolitics.com.
- News With Views does to my soul what the protester they talk about did to that police car.
- Climate change deniers need to stop it. Seriously, you’re embarrassing yourselves and you’re hurting EVERYONE. The erudite comments at the bottom of this SciFri article are telling.
- The Sovereign Citizens are starting to continue to creep me out yet more. They’re a real danger, people. So’s Fox, by the way.
- Wow. (We can say ex-actor at this point, can we not?) Michael Moriarty is…totally off his nut.
- “HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE SECRET CODE ILLUMINATI MASONRY MEDITATION” (“Things a lunatic would say? Words that have nothing to do with each other? Pass! Pass!”)
- Oh, thank goodness Vigilant Citizen is still compiling these. Why can’t I have that many people commenting on my site? Chop, chop people!
- Jewish bankers in Libya. Sigh.
- “Geomagnetic Fields Gone Wild–Winter Superstorms Likely” (They shouldn’t be flashing us them if it is going to be freezing. They’ll catch their death of a cold. Also, this is meteorology of the absurd.)
- Gibson Guitars is just making me hate them as a corporation. Stop it. Cooperate, people. Your shameful behavior has convinced me to never by a new Gibson, and that’s not the Feds’ fault.
- Federal Jack interviews the author of “Dr. Mary’s Monkey: The Link Between Polio Vaccines, Cancer, & JFK’s Murder.” (Facepalm.)
- The Canadian National Newspaper reports that Bill Cooper predicted 9/11. Hey, I’m reading Bill Cooper’s book! It’s a waking death!
Twit of the week:
This came from the @poopy_poo, who is the soul of the age: “@davidicke I hope all your 13,000 followers will be attending wembley next year mr Icke, very excited to be coming :-)”
RJB
3 Comments | Anonymous the movie, conspiracy theory, critical thinking, humanities, John Orloff, mass media, politics, Roland Emmerich, Shakespeare authorship, Uncategorized, who was shakespeare | Permalink
Posted by Bob
A Review of Anonymous, Commonly Attributed to John Orloff
November 7, 2011As the closing credits rolled on Anonymous and Eve and I shouted our disapproval at the names that appeared on the screen (“Shame!” “Fail!” “Weak!”), a pair of old ladies in front of us started laughing.
“We were here for the 3:00 show,” one of them told us, “but the power went out. So they gave us free passes to see it again. I’m glad they did because I didn’t know what was going on the first time I saw it!”
And that’s the movie in a nutshell, a turd in a teapot, a tale told by an idiot, directed by a total spazz, and performed by a troupe of misguided failures.
The story was incoherent. Queen Elizabeth is a total ho, boinking everything that moves in her court. This includes her bastard son, the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Yuck and REALLY? (Several times in the movie, as Elizabeth was having a snit fit, Eve and I would turn to each other and say in our Queenie voice, “Who’s Queen?” Only really super cool people will laugh at that joke.)
The story was not told chronologically, which was a problem. It starts in the modern era, at a play or a lecture or something called “Anonymous.” It’s not clear. But what you do get, right out of the gate, is a completely useless series of questions by the character Underinformed Git (played by himself, Derek Jacobi), “Why aren’t books mentioned in Shakespeare’s will?” (What part of the “the whole damned estate” don’t you get, Rollo?) So, we were 2 minutes in, and I already wanted to kick a puppy.
Then we go almost to the end of the narrative proper, when Ben Jonson is getting done over good by the local constabulary for reasons that are not clear until the end. He’s hiding the plays written by de Vere-as-Shake-Speare. Jonson must be in on it because he is someone with credibility whose actual work (his elegy on Shakespeare faces the famous woodcut in the First Folio) totally f’in demolishes the Oxfordian fantasy before it got started. And then there is the little problem of the “Sweet Swan of Avon” elegy written, also by Jonson. Oh and the fact that Shakespeare was publishing long after de Vere was worm food. The solution? Make Jonson a conspirator and give him all of the plays to leak to Shakespeare slowly after de Vere’s death. Aaand your evidence for this is….apparently that you need it to be just so.
So, uh, then they are performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and everyone in court knows that it was written by a Bieber-aged de Vere…but then they all apparently forget that. My horse-drawn carriage has already thrown a wheel in that plot-hole.
Oxford is orphaned and raised by the Cecils who are advisors to the Queen. Turns out, go figure, that de Vere is smarter than all his tutors. The scene in which we are introduced to his Greek tutor, Latin tutor, cosmology tutor, etc. serves no functional purpose to the plot; it actually only underlines for Oxfordian cultists that de Vere had exactly the type of education they think that you need to write Shakespeare’s work. There were little nods to the in-group like that throughout the movie. For instance, you pan across Oxford’s office and see a falcon, you can almost hear Emmerich wondering out loud about how Shakespeare could know the vocabulary related to falconry if he was a bumpkin. And then you can almost hear a whoosh and a smack as I lose it.
OH! The movie is so insulting to the playwrights of the age. They were basically all hacks and they sat together in the peanut gallery. The treatment of Shakespeare was basically defamation. Shakespeare was slightly less fluent in English than Jesse Ventura, perpetually drunk, and usually whoring. They even suggested that Shakespeare killed Christopher Marlowe! Anything you can do to make him look bad, s’pose. At one point the playwrights are at their whore-and-ale house, the Randy Badger (or something), and Jonson throws down, daring Shakespeare to write his name. Lamest. Challenge. Ever.
Did I mention that it made no sense and that it left two old ladies very confused?
There was one really phenomenal aspect to the film, however, the mustaches. Whoever did the facial arrangements should get an Oscar(tm). If you could roll that clip I brought…..
“F’in roses how do they work?” –Wm. Shkspere
First the Queen dumps him and then there’s a rebellion. Ed’s having a crappy day.
It’s been only 3 days, and I forget who this is. Well acted, my friend. But look at that beard!
Bad guy who is not Shakespeare.
“Fauntleroy, why do you never return my text messages?”
Lord Melchett: “BAAAAAAAAAA!”
“What would you, the audience, do?”
Seriously, Shakespeare’s facial wig carries the performance.
If they had spent half as much time grooming the plot as they did these guys’ upper lips, the movie would have passed. But it was badly told to the point that only a true believer could possibly invest in it. The infuriating thing at the end, however, was not that it crapped on the Bard, who can take care of himself, but that the little old ladies in front of us wondered out loud if their understanding of history had always been that bad. “No,” I assured them. “Roland Emmerich is just a bad person.”
RJB
14 Comments | Anonymous the movie, conspiracy theory, critical thinking, humanities, John Orloff, literature, mass media, Roland Emmerich, Shakespeare authorship, who was shakespeare | Permalink
Posted by Bob
The Week in Conspiracy (31 Oct 2011 edition)
October 31, 2011Hello, hello from the city where pants are optional, New Orleans. I gave my talk about anti-Jesuit and anti-Catholic conspiracy theories yesterday, and then we bopped along Canal Street to the Smarti Gras party.
- I know that when I need medical advice, I go to a strung-out, obviously intoxicated rapper. I mean, not me, Vigilant Citizen:
- David Icke warns us about RFID chips that can kill non-compliant implantees.
- The Chatanoogan will print anything. I mean, there’s a point in there, I think, but then they mention the New World Order. Grr.
- Jeez. Border-guarding failures pollute everything they touch, including OWS.
- It’s official. Canada admits that alien technology is in use…in the US? How can they admit that?
- Is this a real thing? Someone enlighten me about the “Lightbulb Conspiracy“.
- How one person decided to let go of reason and embrace the space brothers. I suspect that there is a very good chance that any story that starts, “I was a skeptic,” is being told by someone who wasn’t. Especially when it includes: “The last documentary I watched was a lecture by Linda Moulton-Howe on cattle mutilations. I could not believe what I was seeing. The question in my mind very quickly became not whether UFOs existed – they clearly did – but what they were.” You and skepticism are not even nodding acquaintances.
- This one goes out to Fraser Cain: Electrical Engineer Proves Einstein Wrong.
- Here’s something off the charts, even for me. It’s an interview with someone from the Andromeda Council about removing the Reptillian bases from the sea floor. (Robert Schaefer pointed this site out in his talk, and holy cow does it deliver!)
- From the Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy (or “UFOlogia”): abductee takes his complaint to court.
-
What’s wrong with this headline? “The Origins of Mankind finally REVEALED: Our Ancient Ancestors were from a solar system near the constellation Pleiades!“
- Check out the UFO Digest Newsletter!
- Alex Jones does not get genetic engineering.
- Oh, no! The Freemasons are in Ghana!
- Wow. Someone actually thinks that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are actually Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Also, more wow.
- Vigilant Citizen thinks that the streetlights are going to be spying on him.
- Another ancient alien base was found in China. This one is under a pyramid.
- Did someone try to assassinate a woman who claims to have schtupped Lee Harvey Oswald? Federal Jack reprints the story.
- This entry at ATS is pretty humdrum. The mother of all conspiracies is the Federal Reserve.
- That racist birther silliness will just not die.
- 9/11 Truthers slapped with sanctions for filing frivolous lawsuits. There should just be a stupid tax.
- This seems to be a freeman on the land sort of story, or “Sovereign Citizen” profile. They should be in a higher stupid tax bracket.
- A couple of climate change deniers have their asses handed to them by themselves.
- The War on Christmas starts earlier every year. Except when it doesn’t. The AFA apparently protests something that never happened.
- David Icke schools the OWS people.
- Run away! Solar tsunami!
- Subliminal (penis) Messages (worship Satan) Exposed.
- Vigilant Citizen and the symbolism of the “upside-down triangle.”
- Ahhh. A good old fashioned “aliens are manipulating our minds” conspiracy
- Public menace Mike Adams actually opposes a malaria vaccine. Also, he’s pro-cancer.
- Elenin? Really? It evaporated. It’s over. Done. No, it’s not causing earthquakes. Everyone knows that HAARP was responsible for the Turkey earthquake, anyway.
- Carl Teichrib is scared of the guys in fancy dress, as is Thomas Reese, Giulio Meotti, and Jimmy DeYoung.
- Chuck Norris is scared of DNA.
This week in straight to DVD:
Here is a compilation of reviews of Anonymous, a film in which Roland Emmerich does to Shakespeare what he does to little models of the White House.
- Here’s a credulous Review.
- This HuffPo writer thinks that a Marlowe-as-Shakespeare movie would have been better; if you are going to write bollocks, he writes, at least make it dramatic bollocks.
- Artsy NYT writer doesn’t care who wrote Shakespeare. Which is fine. The reason I fuss about it because adopting the conspiracy theory is to reject evidence freely available to anyone with a library card. When you toss out the evidence, you can say whatever you like, and Oxfordian nutters do. But you can’t call that learning or time well spent.
- Roland Emmerich makes people dumber. This is not a proud legacy.
- You go, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust! The Bard’s home county defends their favorite son.
- CBS should not mystery monger. Just let Shapiro speak. There is no method, you line-dropping dong-dong, just madness.
- The Washington Post reviews the movie, opening:
- “Damn absurd.”
- “Is this a turkey I see before me? Urm, yep.“
- “The film is as lurid, melodramatic and incoherent as the conspiracy theory it purports to endorse…”
- Christian Science Monitor’s take
- Years ago, Frontline dropped the ball on Shakespeare. I refuse to trust them on this issue.
- This dude gives the movie a B+.
- “One of histories stupider conspiracy theories.”
- It’s great that everyone is pointing to Shapiro’s excellent book.
- Crackpot Keir Cutler is a crackpot.
No week in conspiracy this week, folks! Tomorrow, I’ll be talking to Jon Ronson, who is Skyping into a few classes at Georgia Tech. Pretty exciting!
RJB
4 Comments | 9/11 conspiracy theories, Anonymous the movie, conspiracy theory, CSICon, history, John Orloff, mass media, politics, Roland Emmerich, Shakespeare authorship, Uncategorized, who was shakespeare | Permalink
Posted by Bob
Very Superstitious: The Token Skeptic Podcast
October 28, 2011Yo. We’re at CSICon, and you can’t make us not be. I had lunch with Eugenie Scott, Steve Novella and Richard Saunders.
Yeah, I’m just name dropping.
Let me do it again. Here’s a panel I was on with Steve Novella, Steven King and Barbara Drescher. Kylie Sturgess was the host.
RJB
3 Comments | CSICon, psychology, Superstition | Permalink
Posted by Bob
Good news! Roland Emmerich’s stinker Anonymous release limited!
October 24, 2011Heheh. I just saw news that the release of Anonymous has gone from 2000 theaters to 250. Eve and I would be happy to take credit for this if it weren’t for the fact that the whole world instantly realized that the entire premise was ridiculous. Also, I haven’t seen a positive review yet. Rollo is saying that it’s his idea. Go with that, kiddo. Embrace the fail.
So, what is to be made of this apparent straight-to-DVD upcoming box office failure? Other than “fun of”?
RJB
3 Comments | Anonymous the movie, critical thinking, derp, mass media, Roland Emmerich, Shakespeare authorship, who was shakespeare | Permalink
Posted by Bob
This Week in Conspiracy (23 Oct 2011)
October 23, 2011I won’t have time to do everything that I need to in the few days that I have before CSICon. But I make a point of doing this, even if it hurts a little.
So, given the time crunch, I’m going to do as much as I can in an hour. GO!
- Muammar Gaddafi , Sofa King, Dead. Or as @conspiracywatch tweeted: “@ConspiracyWATCH I’m still not convinced Gaddafi was killed. The US/Western media pathologically lies already… not sure yet. Could be…” IMF and World Bank now in Libya. Clearly they are vultures. Or MG destroyed all private enterprise–how do you make an economy out of what he left behind? Of course, this has been planned for decades as an 1980s sitcom predicted the year of MG’s death. Now, I would have liked to have seen MG tried in Scotland–no, wait, Texas–but there are a lot of people whose perspective on the world is so far out there that they actually lament MG’s ignoble demise. Now the only question is who should be blow up next? Hugo Chavez is looking pretty weak…For a surrealist news reporting on the death, visit David Icke’s site. Alex Jones’s writers, of course, can’t tell the difference between war and democracy, which is probably why they are always so worked up. Russia Today’s coverage is hard hitting (the floor, next to the toilet) as usual. Of course, Tony Blair is behind the killing because he benefits from MG’s death. GodLikeProductions thinks that MG’s head is two-dimensional. Really.
- Eric Jon Phelps: Occupy Wall Street: Prelude to Jesuit Fascism. He might agree with some points made here, that the OWS may be a prelude to One World Gummint, which Soros is behind, apparently, and Gorbachev is all over. But will he go so far to occupy closets? But at least the 9/11 Truthers aren’t showing up…oh. “What do we want?” “TYRANNY!” “When do we want it?” “As soon as possible!” The only problems that Truth Excavator has with OWS are that 1) they don’t care about 9/11 Truth, and 2) they aren’t complaining about the Fed.
- Why aren’t the sailors on the ship that “tossed Osama bin Laden over the side” talking? Could it be because they are being blackmailed? Or could it be something more sinister, like, it fecking happened?
- OH NOES! JOOS HAS PERFECTED UFO TECHNOLOGEEE!!
- Why are we being forced to go to digital TV? To free up bandwidth for Words with Friends? HELL NO! MIND CONTROL!
- Teaching critical thinking at Alex Jones.
- Roland Emmerich’s new film is getting…”reviewed” is a deceptively neutral word for what’s happening to it in the press. Oh, also here. To celebrate, Emmerich released a short video about what a titanic, smug moron he is:
- In additional Shakespeare news, Forbes’s Alex Knapp wrote a piece, “Yes, Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare” and got inundated with…enthusiastic correspondence. He contacted me and Eve about coming up with a reply to the specific claims of Shakespeare deniers, and we’re happy to help. Also, John Orloff, the screenwriter of Anonymous, left a smudge in the comments on my post about his indignation at the HuffPo.
- Holy crap! I thought Ron Paul reminded me of someone! It’s Pat Buchanan!
- Godlike Productions stepped in it this week when they tweeted:
They actually tweeted the word "Negro".
- Of course, when you hit the link in the tweet, you get this.
- I look forward to apologies from all the people who thought that Elenin was going to kill us all. Oh, wait. They are now messing themselves over the very pretty Eta Carinae going not supernova, but hypernova!!!eleven!!1emphasis!
- NRA head says that in Obama’s NEXT term (he sounds like Harold Camping), that the Administration is going to “break the back” of the 2nd Amendment. Obama has made no move on the 2nd Amendment at all. He has other things to worry about.
- FEMA, FCC announce national test of emergency alert systems…to warn us about when they are going to round us up and take over our brains?
- It’s all so simple: the New World Order, finally mapped.
Conspiracy Theory of the Week:
You win! Please! Stop sending me this! Everyone I have ever met since I got out of short-pants has sent me this at least twice! Are you guys coordinating this??? Hey, I’m “just asking questions.”
Hey, not bad for an hour.
RJB
1 Comment | 9/11 conspiracy theories, Anonymous the movie, conspiracy theory, critical thinking, CSICon, history, John Orloff, mass media, politics, Roland Emmerich, Shakespeare authorship, urban legend, who was shakespeare | Permalink
Posted by Bob
Welcome to the end of the world…
October 21, 2011Shatner did “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It’s worse than Camping could have hoped for:
RJB (who blames Eve)
3 Comments | art, derp, fun | Permalink
Posted by Bob
“Anonymous” Screenwriter John Orloff: Name Dropping and Wrong
October 18, 2011John Orloff, who wrote the screenplay for the badly titled Anonymous (as Eve points out, it should be Pseudonymous) out-stupided the Huffington Post on their own turf, which is no mean feat. He took issue with the phrase “urban legend.” I agree. They should have used the phrase, “unfettered clacking bollocks.” I intend to use his little screed in future classes to teach logical fallacies. His letter went as follows:
I’d like to think current and past US Supreme Court Justices don’t believe in Urban Legends. Namely, Justices Stevens, Blackmun, O’Connor and Scalia all think there is reason to doubt the validity of the actor William Shakespeare having written the plays history ascribes to him.
Wow. Not a Shakespearean scholar among them. Ok, you’re name dropping, but the sad fact is that just because you don’t like to think about it doesn’t mean it’s not true. This is the appeal to personal incredulity. “I can’t believe that these smart people would believe an urban legend, therefore, Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare.”
As does historian David McCullough. As do authors such as Mark Twain (whose last book, “Is Shakespeare Dead” is dedicated to the issue), Henry James (who said he was “haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting Public”), and Walt Whitman (to name a few).
This is a classic appeal to false authority. You could fart sonnets like an angel and still not have a rollicking clue about the reams of scholarship backing the mainstream view.
As do Shakespearean actors Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, and Orson Welles (who directed and starred in several Shakespeare plays).
Yawn. Appeal to false authority. Sorry.
And Mark Rylance, who is not only perhaps the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation, but a man who was also the Artistic Director of the Globe Theater in London for ten years. Think about that last name; the man who ran the Globe theater for a decade doesn’t think Shakespeare wrote a single word.
Wow. I’m willing to bet if I look in my university databases I’ll find he never had to publish a goddamned thing under peer review:
- Academic Search Complete ( 0 )
- Research Library ( 0 )
- Project Muse ( 0 )
- MLA International Bibliography ( 1 )
- Essay & General Literature Index ( 0 )
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index ( 0 )
- Humanities Int’l Index ( 0 )
That single entry is in a book about the resurrection of the Globe Theater, and it does not address authorship. And it’s not you like are citing an independent authority, since he’s in the freaking movie. “Well, my friends think so,” is as unconvincing as, “My mom says I’m smart.”
And we can add Sigmund Freud in there as well.
SO!?!
An Urban Myth is something proven to be false. I’m not sure we’re there on this particular issue.
Well, I disagree with your definition of urban myth, but the burden of proof is not on mainstream academia. We don’t default to the position that you know your head from your ham hocks.
And how do you know that someone wasn’t scared by Eddie Murphy in an elevator?
Either way, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s statement on the subject when he was asked about the Authorship Issue. His response? He replied he wasn’t that interested in Oxford because, in his words: “I don’t like to have my myths tampered with”.
He meant the Shakespeare myth.
He meant, “Get stuffed, bozo. I’m not interested.” It doesn’t matter how many amateurs you say you surround yourself with, you’re still sitting on the short bus. (Yes, the actors and directors have a skill set that is completely unrelated to scholarship.)
Your software is broken, kiddo. Don’t try to contribute to the Great Discussion, because you’ll only embarrass yourself.
RJB
28 Comments | academia, Anonymous the movie, art, conspiracy theory, critical thinking, derp, history, John Orloff, mass media, Roland Emmerich, Shakespeare authorship, Uncategorized, urban legend, who was shakespeare | Permalink
Posted by Bob
This Week in Conspiracy (16 Oct 2011)
October 16, 2011My every waking moment is consumed by CSICon at this point. Currently, I’m looking into the idea of “human hybrids,” whatever the crap those are supposed to be. I mean, hybrids with what? There are, of course, the innumerable human-alien hybridizations, but the guy I’m talking about doesn’t believe that there are such things as aliens. So, hybridized with what? I think that “hybridization” might be a code word for “I don’t understand genetics.” But he does talk about the hybrids’ sterility. God, muddling through the brains of conspiracy theorists is such a muddle. I think that there is a strain of the “medical experimentation” trope in there, but… yeah, that’s not exactly right, either. Oh well.
But enough of my foolish problems. Onto the foolish problems of others!
- Beyonce not pregnant for some reason!
- Who’s behind the Christian-Muslim clashes in Egypt? JOOOOOS! I mean, if you can’t trust Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who can you trust?
- It’s time to put Mike Adams in an institution and take away his Internet connection for his own good. He thinks that Occupy Atlanta is zombie Communist indoctrination.
- In other Occupy Whatever news, it’s all a false flag operation, or Cointelpro.
- Coed Freemason Paintball. There. Those are three words you weren’t expecting to see together today.
- The Larouche folks have warned us of a British backed coup of the Obama White House.
- Why did Queen Elizabeth II and the Vatican commit genocide of Canadian native children during a trip there? Hm? Show me a bone or STFU.
- The Occupy the Whole World-ers really are anti-Semites. I mean, if you can’t trust Rush Limbaugh (see really horrid shit here), who can you trust?
- “What do we want?” “Time travel!” “When do we want it?” “That’s irrelevant!” Man files patent for time machine.
- Hundreds of incompetent dentists speak up against fluoridation.
- Here’s a not batshit analysis of the Fed’s new interest in social media.
- Scientists invent history-erasing time cloak or something.
- Everything I’m seeing about the alleged Iranian assassination plot on US soil expresses disbelief–or at least notes that the whole thing defies precedent. NPR noted this, though they are still investigating, even finding a possible motive. The conspiracy theorists have ben wetting themselves over this, accusing the US of orchestrating it, though this seems to be a knee-jerk reaction and not the product of reason applied to evidence. PrisonPlanet says we’ve given Israel the OK to bomb Iran. I mean, there’s no doubt that the coordinated press releases by the Obama Administration across so many departments suggests that this was a coordinated disclosure of info, but they did file charges and have opened themselves to the possibility of being humiliated in open court. Hugo Chavez thinks that the plot was cooked up by the US. I mean, if you can’t trust Hugo Chavez, who can you trust?
- All top-secret FEMA death camps conveniently listed on google maps.
- Glenn Beck will be in New Orleans during CSICon. I cordially invite him to my conspiracy theory panel.
- More aliens on the moon goofiness.
- A failbook contribution from Eve.
- Are nuclear weapons being tested beneath Hoover Dam? A guy who made the mistake of getting automated updates about earthquakes from the USGS thinks so, and writes to his paper about it.
- Is the New World Order unravelling? asks Pat Buchanan. I mean, if you can’t trust Pat Buchanan, who can you trust?
- I eye-roll at people who think there is anything principled about not getting vaccinated.
- “The Mossad setup the US Government to believe that Libya had sent death squads to kill President Reagan.” Warning: Porn Mustaches.
- Ah, another example of 9/11 doggerel filk rap.
- Performance art brought down the WTC. I knew nothing good could come from performance art.
- UFO Digest, known for its calm analysis of the confirmed extraterrestrial presence among us, gives its take on the Uganda deployment.
- Here you go. Proof that Obama was a member of the American Communist Party, if by “was a member” means “was endorsed by,” by “American Communist Party (est. 1919)” you mean “the New Party, which was established in 1993.”
Conspiracy theory of the week:
- Get to a higher dimension! A massive gravity wave coming!
Well, I’m going to hide in a bunker. See you all next week!
RJB
1 Comment | 9/11 conspiracy theories, conspiracy theory, CSICon, history, mass media, politics, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Bob
Skeptical Humanities 