Skeptical Humanities

Yep. You heard right. There are even more conspiracies this week. I thought that we were full up, that every permutation of wacky had been tried. Apparently, however, there is no fixed quota of b.s. that conspiracists are trying to fill. So we dive back in.

• It’s Genetic Farmageddon! When an article starts, “An arrogant scientific elite has divorced themselves from common sense, morality, and the rest of the human species in their quest for full spectrum scientific domination,” you know you have objective reporting. You left out them twisting their evil mustachios, Daniel. Somehow, he ends up at “super-intelligent A.I. may lead to a devastating world war that could kill billions of people.”
• I’m sorry, I meant, “Electronic Armageddon!“
• Susan Lindauer says that there are videotapes missing from the World Trade Center. As a bit of background, she was arrested for spying for the Iraqis and found mentally incompetent to contribute to her own defense. Also, if you read this, she offers no source or evidence, just a story, and then she thinks that there is something suspicious about there being no video of this. Funk dat. Oh wait, she says she has a “high level State Department source with a top security clearance.” Well, that settles it. She was also found to have classic delusions of grandeur, I believe, by her defense team.
• A little 9/11 analysis. “11 Reasons Why The 9/11 Fable is So Popular.” On their list: 1) “The bigness of the lie” followed by immediate self-Godwining, 2) “Mythical archetype of Osama Bin Laden and Islamic terrorists,” 3) “Most people are children who are easily controlled by fear,” 4) “Peer pressure, and the fear of mockery and ridicule” (it’s true, if you don’t want to be mocked, don’t become a Truther), 5) makes no sense, 6) the “financial- terrorism- media- military- industrial- Zionist- congressional complex” (their term, not mine), 7) “Mass social, cultural, and political brainwashing,” 8) “A lack of knowledge of history,” 9) “A lack of skepticism, curiosity and a sense of wonder,” 10) “A lack of humility to admit ignorance” (AHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA! ahem. AAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!), 11) “The 9/11 lie is sacred.” There you have it. The worst analysis of anything ever. Notice, “we might, just possibly, be wrong” doesn’t occur to them. Also, I’m rather annoyed that their title does not use the word fable correctly, but that’s the English major in me, played in my fable by a knowledgeable, avuncular owl.
• Is the above “financial- terrorism- media- military- industrial- Zionist- congressional complex” related to Mike Adams’ “Chemical- agra- medical- pharma industrial complex business“?
• An interesting pairing provided by FederalJack, who I endorse for the entertainment value. First, “It’s Official, We Live in a Police State.” Less than an hour later: “Federal officials are circulating to all 18,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies a… civil rights video??!!” Nice f’ing police state. Here’s officer Lyons, the face of totalitarianism:

• Here’s another FederalJack screamer: “Who Are The Bankers That Benefit From The Norway Terror Attacks?” It’s like analysis, but without competency or reason.
• Are UFOs possibly video projections? Alex Jones thinks they might be.
• Korean pop star’s reputation ruined by conspiracy theory. No, not because he harbored one.
• I do not think that word means what you think it means: scapegoat.
• “High-ranking” people you have never heard of rent out space at National Press Club to prattle on about UFOs.
• A nice little essay about conspiracy theories and how they help the Arab world hurt itself.
• Andrew Rosenkranz discusses the increase of white supremacism in Florida. Also, he’s concerned that he keeps tossing “heads.”

• Sam Blumenfield examines “ The Hegelian Statist Virus in the Republican Party”.
• Fag judges may be fag-enabling fags. From the ever-delightful couple Charlie “Butts” and “Peter” LaBarbera.
• Let’s give Vigilant Citizen a shout out, eh wot? Be careful, fellas. That first model is actually a man.
• Moon base or volcano? You decide. Your answer will depend on whether or not you are already on the moon, however.
• Is Jewish Ex-Congressman Weiner’s Devout Muslim Wife, Working For Hillary Clinton, A Spy? This author is a horrid person. This is evidencelessness embodied. Just guilt by racist association, a new type of logical fallacy.
• Is someone at Above Top Secret actually thinking about inner-Earth-dwelling UFOs? Be still, my beating heart.
• I’ll let you decipher this: “Hoagland weaves together an intense eye-opener which connects Comet Elenin with September 11, the original masonic message, the bombing in Norway and the secret space program.”
• Here’s a bit of uncritical thinking: “Only a domestic terror attack can rescue Brand Obama.” How about growing a ball? That might help.
• Here’s one that was popular in the deliberately-misrepresent-o-sphere this week. My Pet Goat aficionado George W. Bush basically admitted that he was deliberately slow to move on 9/11, basically allowing it to happen on purpose, in order to not freak out a bunch of kids. I hate conspiracy theorists who make me defend Bush. Lots.
• New World Order’s favorite band? Megadeath.
• NaturalNews is positively soiling itself over what I will dub murder-weeds.
• Here’s a new one. They are no longer conspiracy theorists. They are “disinformation specialists.” Boy, do they ever not have irony.
• A UFO at the bottom of the Baltic Sea?
• The ADL on Sovereign Citizens, who actually scare me.
• This is interesting. The title is “Tea Party Pawns of the Illuminati,” but only a minority of people who read Before It’s News and vote on the veracity of the story think that’s a fact. I’m not going to say it’s because they are reasonable, but because a lot of them probably like the Tea Party. The funny thing about this is that Dick Armey, former House leader, if I remember correctly, helped fund the Tea Party through FreedomWorks. If you think that the Republicans are in the thrall of the Illuminati, why would you assume that the Tea Party wasn’t? I merely ask.
• Are UFOs controlling our ICBMs? Robert Hastings thinks so. Hear him not laughed out of a conversation:

• KXAS, a television station in Texas, captures a bug on camera, calls in UFO investigatiors. Why do they not call IIG? We look at this sort of thing all of the time! Decide for yourself:

• Here’s a survey of blurry globs of light in the sky. Or just aliens..I’m sorry. “Star Travelers.”
• Here’s a ripe little slice of hell: Alex Jones interviews Lydon LaRouche.
• UFO blogger reposts “History” channel documentary, “UFOs and the Old West,” or, Firefly.

Norway:

• That Norwegian nut Breivik expresses similar fears to those in the American anti-Sharia movement.
• Chip Berlet et al. on the far-right meme of “cultural Marxism,” which Breivik feared.
• On the Media found someone who actually read the 1500-word manifesto. Fascinating, and a must-read (ok, listen) analysis.
• Breivik covered in Iran: “Rothschild historian shares Anders Breivik’s Bat(ty) Zionist ideas about Muslims.” Yes, the site’s registered in Tehran.
• Zen Gardner sees a false flag operation. He never doesn’t.
• Michael Barkun, whose A Culture of Conspiracy is required reading in my classes, talked about the “Cultural Marxism” angle of the attacks and their real counterparts in America.

I figure a Michael Barkun reference is a good note to end on. It’s back into the trenches. Toodle-pip!

RJB

It’s been another busy week in the wackosphere. We’re also reminded that the racism and fear that lies behind our tendency to demonize people who are not like us can kill. A lot is coming in from Norway still, but it seems clear that the guy who went on a rampage is speaking the language of the conspiracist. This is why this is important. More about Oslo below, but trust me, I’d rather be making snarky remarks about people who think Amy Winehouse is still alive or was murdered or has been dead for months….

• Above Top Secret filed a story about genetic engineering under “cryptozoology.” No, this is science, nothing new… and read a book fercrissakes.
• UN peacekeepers may change their helmets from blue to green, apparently to enforce the new global envirofascism. GAH! How is global warming a conspiracy? I mean, really, who’s supposed to benefit? Jeesh!
• Personally, I think there was a second pie thrower.
• “10 Reasons Why America is a Failed Terrorist State.”
• Wow. This post, comparing the movie Deep Impact to the apparent incoming apocalypse by Comet Elgin, is a textbook study in confirmation bias.
• I saw it on twitter, so it must be true.
• “Egyptian Archaeologist Admits That Pyramids May Contain Alien Technology.” To be fair, they never said he was a good archaeologist.
• Is Facebook the Pied Piper of the “Technological Control Grid“? Alex Jones uses the word “grid” in a way that is not a way. Also, “matrix.”
• For all of Federal Jack’s fear of a false flag attack on the highly symbolic day of 11 Sept 2011, they never let us know how to distinguish a real attack from a false flag attack. As far as I can tell, they look exactly the same.
• So, Wachovia is planning to overthrow the Mexican government? OK, not exactly, but it would have been a snappy conspiracy theory.
• Cowboys and Aliens writer/producer Roberto Orci comes out of the cuckoo clock at ComicCon, claiming that there is a government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens.
• Jesse Ventura claims we’re living in a fascist country now, proving once and for all that this privileged git has no idea what fascism is.
• How about something uplifting? Here’s “The Satanic Face of Walt Disney”:

OSLO

My take on the Oslo massacre? The suspect’s rant, “2803: A European Declaration of Independence” (warning: huge pdf) is long. Like 1,500 pages long, and I’ve only been able to get a sense of the sweep of the conspiracy theory overall. Honestly, right now I’m working on another project and can’t quite dig too deeply into the conspiracy. But the tropes of national infiltration and media/government complicity are common in just about every perceived global conspiracy. The one thing that stuck out to me was his fear of “cultural Marxism,” is not foreign to American conspiracy theories. When you google that term, whatever it is supposed to mean (usually, “being more liberal than me”), you get Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily (home of the birth certificate conspiracy). You get Brannon Howse from Worldview Weekend. And these conspiracy theories get people killed. The most dismaying thing is the number of people who just don’t get it, even when they are horrified by such a massacre, people who say, “What a nightmare, but you do have to worry about the cultural Marxists.” And this is why we will certainly see this type of slaughter again.

Certain conspiracists think that the comparisons of Breivik to Timothy McVeigh are part of the government’s plan to sculpt a narrative. They are, based on my reading of sections of Breivik’s manifesto, extremely apt comparisons. Take, for instance, the sections detailing how someone should go about hiding weapons and carrying out guerilla warfare against the state. There was a section on preparing and burying weapons for later use that could have been lifted from The Turner Diaries, a book (really, violent porn for racists) that was apparently in McVeigh’s car when he was arrested, and which has a scene in which a government building (in the Turner Diaries, it is the FBI HQ) is destroyed by a truck bomb. Oh, and there is that whole truck bomb element in Oslo. This is not a random attack, but one which is (within limits) predictable and which you can anticipate by immersing yourself in…the type of stuff that I have had to read lately.

My copy of The Turner Diaries, by the way, has a blurb by Tim McVeigh on it. How’s that for a ripe little slice of publishing hell? And you wonder why I’m grumpy all the time.

So, let’s get dirty.

• Talk2Action is a great place to start, and Chip Berlet does an excellent job filling in the cultural and historical background of the type of conspiracism that Breivik was acting on. This link is a portal to a number of good articles about related topics.
• Jonathan Kay is monitoring the conspiracy theories that are popping up around the Oslo massacre.
• Though Cowards Flinch is also monitoring the conspiracy theories as they tumble out onto the web.
• “Lone Nut, T Party, Freemason, Cop, Terrorist” Kills Liberal Children. Of course, it’s all about you, Jack Blood.
• White people can be terrorists too, Alex. And your correspondent seems to mistake “white” for “middle class.”
• I have not seen the claim confirmed that the police knew the shooter’s name before they got to the island, but even if that is so, so what? Since the initial question seems to come from a new anchor, I think we have the “9/11 effect”, quoting people on the day of the event who have no freaking clue what is going on. But we’ll see.
• We’re not going to do this second shooter for this one too, are we? Apparently we are. Notice how there is not a reference to a single person who SAW two shooters. We merely have inconsistent descriptions of a single person, which are par for the course for eyewitness testimony. So, Tarpley, is it because of Wikileaks? Is it because of Norway’s position on NATO? Or does it really not matter? Looking away from the real motivation ensures that you will completely useless when it comes to combating the problem. Thanks for playing. (With thanks to Raymond Wiley.)
• Alex Jones’s people have been trying to link the shooting to Mossad. Because they are motivated, racist barfs. Take: “Wayne Madsen: Link Between Breivik and Israeli Mossad.” Mardsen also penned: “After Oslo: Time to Crack Down on Mossad Terrorism.”
• But enough of that. Time to bring on the class. Glenn Beck compares the dead children to the Hitlerjugend. From the Telegraph. You’ll notice at the end how Beck’s 9/12 camps teach children as young as 8.
• Now, you too, with google on your side, can pull timelines out of your ear and tart them up with lots of seeming references. You’re a real detective doing important things, and you don’t even have to get off your heinder!
• From The Guardian, I encounter the term “Eurabia” for the first time, a supposed deal to hand over European sovereignty to Muslims. It reminds me of the goofy Mexican “reconquista” or UN colonization of the US or the truly gratuitous attempts to ban sharia in Kansas.

That’s all I can stomach this week. No conspiracy theory of the week. It’s just not that type of week.

RJB