My Evening With L. Ron...

Look what I got for $2.63!


Yeah, that's right, I got my grubby paws on an whacko Scientology DVD for only $2.63 more than it's worth. I found this at a thrift store in Indiana along with a bunch of other Scientology crap, which means that not only did I unearth a veritable treasure trove of nonsense to make fun of examine, but also that someone knew enough to throw all of this flapdoodle away to begin with. The DVD I picked up was also happily unopened (until about 2 minutes ago), meaning it never had the chance to harm anyone impressionable.

In any event, on this disc is an interview with prolific sci-fi author and Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard that was apparently filmed in 1966. According to the back of the box, this is in fact the only recorded interview in which Hubbard ever took part. I'm going to try a bit of a live-blogging experiment here, typing out my impressions to the interview as it plays.

The first thing I have to say is that the production value of the disc itself is surprisingly high. I guess when John Travolta is paying the bills, you can afford to have animated menus and about two dozen subtitle tracks. For whatever reason, the audio is presented in 5.1 surround sound. Even as I type this, I have the impression of being trapped inside Hubbard's fleshy, gurgling throat as he explains his early life "studying the ways of 21 primitive races." His voice reminds me a bit of Richard Nixon, or maybe Jimmy Stewart if he were chewing an entire pack of gum.

I've paused the interview briefly to add this disc to the Access database I use to organize my DVDs. I'm not quite sure what genre to check off for something title An Introduction to Scientology. I don't have a "documentary" category, so "sci-fi" will have to suffice for now. I may change it to "comedy" later...

I have now have been listening to Hubbard drone on for a little over half an hour. There's not been much substance to Hubbard's statements. Apparently "survive!" is the driving, unifying goal of mankind (fair enough), but since "man is actually a spirit" only Scientology can really help you survive correctly. It's not a medical treatment or in any way akin to psychology (that's true too, but not the way Hubbard intends), but that it's nonetheless "used by medical professionals in different parts of the world" to cure diseases, although that's only an incidental side effect of it's true power. We are further told that folks using Scientology techniques have been proven to have increased IQ scores. By whom? Well,"by the professors of all the universities". Ah, well great...but how does bring about this increase in IQ? "By knowing certain things and then applying them." Clearly.

I'm increasingly amazed about how Hubbard is evading even softball questions by a friendly interviewer. He's actually stumbling over some of these questions, which makes me wonder if he didn't even bother to plan out his responses beforehand. For example, at one point the interviewer asks Hubbard how Scientology has proven that man is actually a spirit. Since Hubbard has said this at least eleven dozen times thus far in the interview, I would have assumed that he'd have some kind of at least slightly coherent reply. My assumption would have been wrong, as evinced by Hubbard's answer:

"Well, the early Greeks, for instance, worked along this line. They wanted to know what man was, and they concluded that he was a spirit clothed in flesh. And, uh, that happens to work out...and so forth."

He shortly thereafter states that Scientology has proved life after death, but that the proof is "too technical for this sort of program".

Right. The interview has finally sputtered to an end, culminating in Hubbard's swelling description of Scientology as a tool for mankind to move forward and better itself. This interview pre-dates Sea Org, so Scientology had not yet become a vehicle for Hubbard to remain at sea for months on end searching for treasured buried during his past lives.

I can't rightly say what it was that I expected out of this DVD, but I had at least hoped that Hubbard would somehow be glib, clever, or impressively conniving in his explanations and justifications of his pseudoscience/religion. He was not. He spent 51 minutes repeating a handful of banal platitudes and answering questions with only tangentially-related vagaries. Rather unsurprisingly, he did not mention body thetans, Xenu, or any of the most fantastical flummery associated with Scientology, but only alluded to the cult as a "path to freedom" and the "betterment of mankind". This doesn't strike me as anything close to convincing, but it's exactly the same flavor of comforting, vaguely mystical, pseudoscientific flummery that cults the world over promote with worrying success.

I don't have a pithy quote to end this post, but I'll leave with one from our pal L. Ron instead. It's far more elucidating than anything he said during his filmed interview.

"THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN CONTROL PEOPLE IS TO LIE TO THEM. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them."

- L. Ron Hubbard¹

______
1.) Quoted from Technical Volumes of Dianetics and Scientology, vol. 1, p. 418

The disc also came packaged with a a 40-something page booklet containing a biography of Hubbard that truly boggles the mind with its grandiosity. We learn that Hubbard was "a pioneer of American aviation" and a was blinded and lamed during World War II, only to somehow heal himself through sheer force of will. A long discussion of Hubbard's various claims about himself would take an entire book. (Like this one, courtesy of Operation Clambake, a website dedicated to exposing the truth about Scientology.)

I would refer readers to the late Martin Gardner's article on Hubbard and dianetics from his classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science for a brief overview of Hubbard's largely fictional life and times.

More Islamic Brutality in Sudan

Here's another example of fundamentalist Islam's unthinking brutality: Silva Kashif, 16 year-old Sudanese girl, was recently stopped by police, dragged into court and tried in a matter of hours, then punished on the spot by the administration of 50 lashes. Her crime? Wearing a knee-length skirt in violation of the country's Shariah legal system. Making this travesty even more egregious, her parents were not notified by authorities under after the ordeal was already over. Furthermore, not only is Kashif too young to be legally sentenced to lashes even under Sudan's brutal legal system, she's also from the semi-autonomous region of Southern Sudan which (at least nominally) does not acknowledge Shariah law.

Shariah is a system of Islamic religious law and, as is typical of religious legal systems, it is intensely preoccupied with concepts of sexual purity and decency. This is especially true in Sudan, where the enforcement of so-called decency standards is about as hard-line as you can get. ¹ Dressing in a manner that causes "public discomfort" is crime in Sudan, and it shouldn't take much thought to come to the realization that "causing public discomfort" is a troublesomely nebulous definition. Apparently Ms. Kashif has retained legal council and is planning to sue for compensation, but it should never have even gotten to this point. The power of officials to randomly snatch up and flog any woman arbitrarily deigned to be dressed inappropriately has no place in any real legal system.²

If the Sudanese are so concerned about "decency", maybe they should worry about common human decency before they start hammering out of the details how short a skirt has to be to warrant a public beating.

_____
1.) Back in July, Lubna al-Hussein, a female media worker employed by the U.N., was arrested and fined by Sudanese officials for the terribly indecent act of wearing pants in public. Her arrest was part of a round-up of other pant-wearing women, ten of whom ultimately received lashings for their "crime".

2.) Boy, that sounds kind of familiar, huh?

Tom Biscardi, Sasquatch, and Silliness

Stop me if you've heard this one: Around this time last year, a couple of pranksters convinced the self-proclaimed "world's greatest Bigfoot hunter" Tom Biscardi that they had slayed a Sasquatch and had its carcass preserved in a deep freezer.¹ Ever the trusting soul, Biscardi hacked up an undisclosed (apparently large) sum of money to buy the corpse and called a huge press conference touting the "discovery" before actually bothering to examine it. Then, to absolutely no one's surprise but Biscardi's, the "corpse" proved to be a Halloween costume stuffed with animal entrails and the hoaxers disappeared with his cash.

So why the history lesson?

Well, Biscardi's back. This time he claims to have a Sasquatch toenail that he got from a guy named Larry Jenkins out in Arizona. Call me a cynic, but after the corpse thing last year and the Bigfoot webcam fiasco in 2005, he'd better have some damned convincing evidence this time.² Luckily the toenail has already been put through a battery of tests in an attempt to determine its origins. Even more luckily, Search For Bigfoot has an article up breathlessly describing the toenail and detailing an exchange between one of Biscardi's associates (referred to as "SL") and a nameless researcher from an unknown university who secretly ran the genetic tests on the nail.

Wait a second. Nameless researcher? Unknown university? Secret testing? That sounds more than a little sketchy, but for now we'll that slide and get to the meat of the matter: What did all these tests say? Unfortunately the article on the tests is a bit convoluted - Two Bigfoot hunters are writing about what was reported to them by this SL person, who was in contact with the folks from the mysterious University. Still, here's what was said about the magic toenail:

From the "1st response to SL from the university": The primate part seems to be right, but not the non-human part...it came back 99% homo sapien or human...

The original email from SL to the researcher doing the testing isn't posted, but the wording of the response is telling. I rather suspect the first e-mail from the Bigfoot folks might have gone a little something like "We found a nail that we think came from a non-human primate". Thus, the reply of "The primate part seems to be right, but not the non-human part..." seems to mean that "you're right that it's a primate nail, but not that it's non-human." I can't know that for sure, but that's certainly how it looks to me.

The SFB folks seem to read it differently, though: They assert that it means that the nail has 99% human DNA but 1% "non-human DNA". That's an odd reading of the text, and from it inexorably comes a leap of logic from the Bigfoot folks: "How many creatures are walking around the North American forest with 99% human DNA and 1% unknown primate? What else could it be..."

My interpretation and the SFB interpretation couldn't be more different. One means that Biscardi has once again been played for a sap, this time by a dude who mailed him a nasty old toenail, while the other means that (holy shit!) Bigfoot is real. It seems we're at a loggerheads. If only there was some kind of clarification available so we'd know what the 99% bit meant. Oh wait, there is:

From "the next correspondence from the University": What the 99% means is that we are confident to that percentage that it is human...³

From SL, reporting on an e-mail from the University that was not posted in its entirety: She [the researcher] said that the lab had also compared the nail to primate nail photos...[and] concluded it was likely human in origin.

That seems pretty open-and-shut, but the folks at Search For Bigfoot seem to have been reading different e-mails than the ones that they posted on their site. They claim towards the end of the article that "they [the researchers] have told us that the DNA and the physical properties of the nail indicate that it is not human."

WHAT?!?

The researchers said that they're 99% certain the nail is human! The genetic material taken from the nail, as well as its morphology compared to the nails of known non-human primates, led them to conclude that "it was likely of human origins". The lab itself, at least according to the e-mails posted, never says that the DNA is "99% human, 1% non-human". That was flatly made up by the Bigfoot hunters because, to all appearances, they can't freakin' read. They've somehow twisted "We're 99% sure it's human" into "it's 99% human and 1% monster". Amazing! Even more amazingly, the author of the article then tries to end with a zinger:

I guess "science" doesn't mean that much to scientists if it makes them question the work they've done in the past.

I think a better wrap-up would be that science doesn't mean that much to Sasquatch hunters with low reading comprehension.

1.) Remember?
2.) Take a look at the title of the article linked here. Apparently even the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization thinks of Tom as a "notorious huckster".
3.) Italics mine.

Can't Say I'm Surprised...

Well, our whacky friend Dennis Markuze, aka David Mabus, aka That Canadian Weirdo, has apparently sent PZ Myers something like 60 pages of death threats. I'm not entirely convinced that I think this guy is dangerous (He can't be bothered to actually write new rants for his mass e-mails, so why should we expect him to make a trip from the frozen north to hack PZ to bits?), I'm glad PZ has contacted the cops about him. Being an irritating dingus on the internet is one thing, but sending people reams of death threats is something else entirely.

Hoagland's Heroes

Chances are that if you've ever listened to Coast to Coast AM or any watched any History Channel shows about aliens you've run into Richard Hoagland. He's best known to the public as the fellow who's always going on about the "face on Mars", but his repertoire is rather more widespread than that. You see, Hoagland has a superpower: When a mortal man looks at grainy old photos from 30 year-old NASA moon missions he just sees a picture of the moon; If Richard Hoagland looks at the same photo, he sees cosmodromes, dead aliens, the severed heads of robots, and the Moon Kingdom from Sailor Moon.

My favorite part about Hoagland, and the "space photo-analyst" species of conspiracy theorist in general, is that he obviously isn't taking his own pictures of the surface of the moon or Mars. He's just looking at NASA pictures that have already been analyzed, touched up, etc. and that were then released to the general public. Does he honestly think that NASA (or rather the evil version of NASA that he imagines to exist) accidentally released a bunch of photographs of secret moon towers and alien artifacts? Apparently so.

Hoagland's "theories" have already been flogged to death repeatedly over the years by better folks than myself. I bring this up only because I stumbled upon a copy of Hoagland's 2007 book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA while looking through the Science section at my local bookstore yesterday. A quick shuffle through the pages convinced me that I just couldn't pass it up. In it we "learn" that NASA, which Hoagland appears at this point to be claiming is run by sorcerors, has managed to conceal photographic evidence of alien civilizations in our solar system so perfectly that only the mighty and learned Richard Hoagland has managed to see through their foul web of obfuscations. We also learn that NASA and its shadowy masters may have assassinated JFK to foil his attempts to cooperate with the Russians in regard to the space program.* Oh, and apparently because Apollo 16 landed on the moon on the 20th of April it's secretly tied by crazy occult mysticism to Adolf Hitler's birthday? (That bit is really italicized in the book.)

Needless to say I couldn't catch sight of a pile of woo this big and steaming without putting on my gloves and digging in. Even as I type this post the book is speeding to me by way of Amazon. In a couple of weeks I'm going on vacation to the wild hinterlands that are rural Pennsylvania, and while I'm there I'm going to type up a full review. Bet you can't wait...

*Nevermind for a moment that the U.S. and Soviet space programs at the time were in no small part big dick contests during which each side was trying to show the other that it possessed superior ballistic missile technology. Seriously, does every so-called conspiracy have to go back to the JFK assassination?

Bet You Can't Guess Who the Antichrist Is...

This was over on Pharyngula already but I couldn't pass up posting it here. The internet is rife with websites reporting to unveil the identity of the Antichrist*, but only one loon had the foresight to snatch up the domain name AntichristIdentity.com. Unfortunately, he also took the easy way out by fingering Barack Obama, because the whackjobs have never, ever accused a Democratic president of being the Antichrist before. (Remember when Jimmy Carter "gave away" the Panama Canal?) Anyway, there's really not much to see except the age-old predilection for crazy websites to have really, really ugly formats.+ The best part, however, is that this (Unfortunately Blogspot can't replicate the original 48-point font):

The Evidence Provided on the Obama Deceptions & Frightening Involvement with the New World Agenda is Under a threat of Being Taken Offline. You Must Act Now to Receive it...Fast

Is almost immediately followed by this:

I was put off by the typical sensationalist views of every election.

Pardon me for finding that just a little hard to believe...


*I thought it was that Sam Neil guy who was also in Jurassic Park.
+ Not that I can throw any stones...

Speaking of the Redneck Fringe...

Apparently some lunatic named Derik Bonestroo walked into his workplace at a ski resort in Colorado on the 30th of December and opened fire on his coworkers in the hopes of killing all the non-Christians. The full story from the Denver Post is here. According to witnesses, Bonestroo walked into a meeting of ski lift operators, fired a shot into the ceiling, and proclaimed that "If you're not Christian, you're going to die" before spraying the crowd with his Glock. Bonestroo fatally shot the resort's general manager, Brian Mahon, during the attack. He later killed himself after being wounded by a sheriff's deputy. During a subsequent search of the rented room where he lived, investigators found the mutilated body of his cat. He was wearing tactical gear and other military-style equipment, leading police to believe that he was planning the attack for some time.

This is a troubling reminder of what can happen when someone with head full of supernatural fairytales goes off the deep end.* There's very little difference between a lunatic shooting people for Jesus and a lunatic blowing people up for Allah - one way or another it boils down to a psychopath murdering people to satisfy their imaginary friend.

*PZ Myers notes that whether someone claims to be acting on orders from Yahweh or is just plain batshit "there isn't much difference between either condition".

Delightful as Always...

I saw this over on Bay of Fundie this morning. The rancor in the letter is representative of only the most extreme redneck fringe of the population, but some of the reasoning (e.g. "Freedom of religion only means you get to choose what kind of Christian you are.") is actually pretty close to arguments I've heard in person from otherwise intelligent people. Oh well. Follow the link to get a gander at some good old-fashioned Christian inclusiveness.

Possummomma Offline...?

Possummomma and her blog "Atheist in a Mivivan" have been veritable institutions of the internet atheist community for years now, but it sadly appears that a group of crazed Fundagelicals has finally forced her offline. The story is a long and bizarre one, involving a cadre of rabid fans of that show John and Kate Plus 8, and I dare not attempt to untie such a Gordian knot of weirdness for readers here. Luckily someone else has done it for me. Seriously, read the link - There's a whole lot of concentrated crazy going on here. This kind of stupid, crazy shit burns me, especially when it happens to someone as nice as Possummomma.

Now I don't know Possummomma personally and I've posted on her blog a grand total of maybe twice, but I'm a regular reader over there. She's a classy lady and a eloquent writer, and I'll never forget the day I got a massively CC'ed e-mail in which she pointedly took that David Mabus loon to task for sending her daughter harassing e-mails. We need more folks like her and it pains me to see her silenced by a group of whackjobs.

Like tons of her other readers, I'd like to express my support for Possummomma and her family. Hopefully she'll be back online soon, in spite of all the ridiculous allegations and intimidation being thrown her way.

Considering the Source: A Primer

Our friend Steve has left us another vitriolic post in which he has "cast the pearls of valuable evidence before the swine" of skeptics like Jak and myself, all the while sneering that we'd never look at the valuable links that he so magnanimously Googled up for us. Well, I've checked them out and now I think it's time for a lesson. Keeping with yesterday's theme of considering sources, let's have a look at some of the websites that our friend Steve has offered up as evidence that the HAARP facility in Alaska is actually a gigantic killing machine:

EastlundScience.com - The website run under the auspices of the deceased Columbia University physicist Bernard Eastlund, who worked on concepts similar to those utilized by HAARP. (He also helped to invent the fast-drying labels of Coors beer cans.) This site expresses concerns that HAARP-like technology could be used to defeat satellites, but since this can already be accomplished using, oh, I dunno, a Ticonderoga Class Aegis Cruiser armed with Raytheon SM-3 missiles, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. On the subject of weather modification, however, the site has this to say:

One of the reasons weather modification is not a science is that scientists have made what they considered to be reasonable assessments of the relative size of forcing technologies (such as wind generators, microwave heaters, or explosions) and determined that the large size of weather systems make it useless to attempt to change weather patterns with human intervention.

Nonetheless, Eastlund apparently really did think that weather manipulation was ultimately possible, but the site also notes that the HAARP antenna array is far too small for such endeavors. Furthermore, nowhere even in the most far-fetched possibilities listed on this site is man-made earthquake technology even mentioned. That being said, regardless of what Eastlund may or may not have thought, the official HAARP website states the following:

The HAARP facility will not affect the weather. Transmitted energy in the frequency ranges that will be used by HAARP is not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere - the two levels of the atmosphere that produce the earth's weather. Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near-vacuum of the rarefied region above about 70 km known as the ionosphere.

The ionosphere is created and continuously replenished as the sun's radiation interacts with the highest levels of the Earth's atmosphere. The downward coupling from the ionosphere to the stratosphere/troposphere is extremely weak, and no association between natural ionospheric variability and surface weather and climate has been found, even at the extraordinarily high levels of ionospheric turbulence that the sun can produce during a geomagnetic storm. If the ionospheric storms caused by the sun itself don't affect the surface weather, there is no chance that HAARP can do so either.

Keep in mind that even if the ionosphere did have an effect on surface weather, HAARP causes fluctuations in the ionosphere that are vastly weaker than the naturally occurring fluctuations it experiences every day because of the sun.

Of further note, I'd like to point out that simply having patented something doesn't actually mean that it works - the U.S. Patent Office is not in the business of determining if inventions are functional, but rather it is in the business of determining if they are ripped off. See for example this list of perpetual motion machine patents.

BroJon.org - This site is a clearinghouse of news links mixed in with in-house conspiracy essays that warn of "Media Mind Control", claim that climate change is untrue, and attempt to prove that catastrophism is the primary method of speciation on the planet. Among the other services this site offers is an "earthquake calculator"(Based on Stonehenge, they claim. According to our BroJon friends natural disasters almost always occur during full moons. Perhaps it's also a werewolf detector.) and a "remote viewing aptitude test".

FromTheWilderness.com - Run by Michael Ruppert, this site has the ostensibly noble goal of serving as a watchdog against governmental encroachments on civil liberties in the post 9/11 world. The HAARP article was written by Michel Chossudovsky an economics professor from the University of Ottawa, citing sources such as EarthPulse.com and Dr. Rosalie Bertell, a biometrics specialist who also opposes mammograms, the irradiation of food to kill bacteria, and all nuclear power. Chossudovsky is concerned that technology such as what he thinks HAARP is could be used to enforce U.S. hegemony and economic globalization, to which he is opposed.

It's worth noting that much of the to-do about HAARP seems to be generated by Bertell, Chossudovsky and a fellow named Nick Begich. (Begich calls himself a doctor because of his degree from the the Open International University for Complementary Medicines.*) These three extensively cite each other (Chossudovsky's paper cites both of them, for example.) and it is a handful of their essays that most commonly pop up when you look for scary HAARP stuff online. (In fact, one of the links we looked at yesterday took us to a paper by Bertell.) Much of what they claim is either based on their own naked assertions or citations that reference one another's naked assertions.

Crystalinks.com - Run by Ellie Crystal, "psychic and reiki master" and her mystical companion "a spirit named Zoroaster", this site is, frankly, a big concentrated pile of woo-woo. She claims to hold a "Ph.D. in metaphysical studies" but lists no university in her biography. Actually, there are two biographies on her site and only one mentions the Ph.D. - the other only says that she has a Masters of Psychology from NYU. This is extra confusing because both of these biographies are on the same page. She has an enormous number of articles, most of which are apparently culled from Wikipedia - Her HAARP article is essentially just a cut and paste job from the Wikipedia entry, right down to the section headings. Also of note is her "Predictions for 2001" page, which claims to have an extremely detailed prediction of the September 11th attacks...too bad the Web Archive shows that this page didn't exist before 2005.

What does all of this mean? Well, for one thing it means that our friend Steven suggests that we should trust the word of conspiracy theorists and pseudo-psychic hucksters rather than, say, the independent scientists that actually run HAARP. However, I imagine that the information given on the HAARP website won't be considered valid by our friend because, as he has noted repeatedly, the government might be lying. Now, I have no doubt that the government has lied, does lie, and will lie again, but that doesn't mean that we should embrace as canon any conspiracy theory that we can conceive of as possible. It also doesn't mean that we should trust a psychic to tell us how a sophisticated ionospheric research program works, nor does it mean we should place all of our faith in half a dozen papers with inbred citations from a handful of scholars who are working far outside of their fields.

Sorry Steve, I remain skeptical.

*The University's website it is here, though it apparently hasn't been updated since 2005. This "university" may no longer be in operation and is decried even by freakin' chiropractors for being shady.

Harping on HAARP...

A fellow named Steve recently posted a comment on here lambasting me for being, shock of shocks, an ignorant, close-minded skeptic who resorts to ad hominem attacks. He was referring to this post, in which I made fun of a Youtube conspiracy crank because she forgot that rainbows exist and thus posted a video in which she blamed the mysterious appearance of a rainbow in her sprinkler on a far-reaching government conspiracy. In all honesty I'm not going to claim that I didn't for example, call her...let's see...an "internet weirdo", a "conspiracy nut", and ...actually, I think those were the only pejorative terms I used. On further consideration, I'll add "loon", "wingnut" and "smacktard" to the list. (Alas, being spotlighted by PZ Myers has led this particular oddball to make many of her videos private, which makes it difficult to explain her claims without sounding like I'm exaggerating. Go to her profile if my video links don't work.)

There are issues of contention between skeptics and True Believers™ that are deserving of measured and carefully laid out arguments. Attributing rainbows to the evil machinations of the New World Order is not one of them. Nor is the belief that sun glare reflecting off of the hoods of cars is actually a "HAARP laser". Nor is the assertion that the moon is a giant mirror. Stupidity on that order of magnitude is not deserving of well measured refutation so much as simple derision. Granted, there's a sense in which I feel bad for the True Believers™ like this lady who have "fallen down the rabbit hole" of their own delusions so far that they can no longer see the light of day, but my sympathies don't extend nearly far enough to make me pretend that such lunacy represents anything close to an actual position worthy of consideration.

Steve then goes on to defend our rainbow-fearing friend as a "conscientious, truth-seeking individual" rather than a "self-proclaimed skeptic" like your ol' pal Skippy. He then accuses me of buying into the "pablum being fed [to me] by our nation's (dis)information sources". That is, I'm afraid, a rather typical argument. I'll note with no small sense of smarmy self-satisfaction that I predicted in the very post that Steve takes issue with that I would be accused of "buying into the government's line instead of going down the rabbit hole."

He then claims that "there exists far more evidence to support HAARP's military/black-ops uses than you have even begun to touch" and urges me to "get to work" because I have "the entire internet' with which to uncover the truth. Pardon me for questioning the internet as the final arbiter of reality, but for the time being let's overlook the whole "no fact-checking or editing" thing and just roll with it. I plugged "HAARP weapon applications" into Google. The first link that came up is from 9/11 "Troofer" James Rense. It also offers a link to explain "how the Zionists hijacked Christianity", but at this point Rense is more concerned with whining about Barack Obama. The second link is from good ol' Jesus-Is-Savior.com, a mirror site for Jesus-Is-Lord.com which many of you will remember from my Poe's Law post. The third link is a video from Ben Fulford, a pal of Rense, which decries HAARP as one of the evils of "Zionist occupied America".

Thus far we're three for three on articles coming from foaming conspiracy theorists who are preoccupied with the idea of a global plot by the Jews. That right there is some objective freakin' research. It's also worth noting that the article on Jesus-Is-Savior article is copied from EarthPulse.com, which is also happy to tell you about "laser acupuncture" and "USSR Hypnosis at a Distance". Perhaps, just perhaps, some of the "research" that conspiracy theorists have done on HAARP is actually something more along the lines of agenda-driven fear mongering or just plain and simple silliness.

On the other hand, when it comes to HAARP being able to cause massive scary weather effects and earthquakes, one thing I do know is this: The HAARP antenna is capable of sending a signal into the ionosphere that is not even 1/200 as powerful as the random fluctuations that the ionosphere experiences daily. You see, the ionosphere is affected primarily by the ultraviolet energy produced by the sun. It seems to me, reading articles by the conspiracy buffs, that they think that the government has somehow managed, for a mere $250 million, to build an antennae array capable of overpowering the energy output of the freakin' sun, which is, frankly, hilarious.

Likewise, the idea that earthquakes can be caused by ionospheric disturbances is kind of out of left field. While it is apparently the case that earthquakes of sufficient size can cause certain atmospheric effects (including effects that can be detected before the quake itself "begins"), I can't find anything that indicates that the reverse is true. Well, that is to say, I can't find anything that indicates the reverse is true when I'm looking at real science websites or journals. What I can find are plenty of naked assertions that ionospheric effects can cause earthquakes on sites like, say, AwakeFromYourSlumber.com and PropagandaMatrix.com. (The former is also concerned about the "Zionists" - a recurring theme, it seems.)

Our friend Steve, who doesn't, I should note, actually claim himself that HAARP causes earthquakes, may do well to remember the old cliche about considering the source. Now, I'll go out on a limb and say that maybe HAARP-based technologies could potentially be used to screw with various forms of communications, but that's not what the majority of conspiracy crowd is going on about. They tend to talk about HAARP as an earthquake-generating doomsday weapon or some kind of laser device (for some reason), which is just plain isn't. There's a difference between keeping a healthy eye on the government and becoming a member of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade, and from what I've seen most, if not all, of the HAARP conspiracy buffs fall into the latter category.

They might be better off if they actually studied up on the issues that concern them, looked at the best available information, and did their best to base their positions on observable reality. Then they could look at new claims through a filter of reasonableness and plausibility, using this process as well as further study to help them determine if the claim should be accepted or rejected. Furthermore, they would do well to remain open-minded...but not quite so open-minded that their brains drip out. You know, kind of like a skeptic.

The End is Nigh...Again....

Youtube (and Above Top Secret) user DanielsMagi apparently thinks that the world is going to end sometime soon, during a mythical month called either "Septmember" or "Septemeber". He/she/they has joined an illustrious list of dinguses (Holy crap, Firefox recognizes that as a word!) throughout history who have forgotten that the end of the world spoken of in the Bible was expected to have occurred back then. He also seems to forget that there are, to use a scientific term, assloads of eclipses and thus that noting that "holy crap, there's going be a solar and a lunar eclipse next month" means smeg because that same situation has popped up repeatedly throughout all of history. Also of hilarious note is that he links to a freakin' Youtube video as "scientific proof of the star of Bethlehem".

I rather suspect that September (which I assume is what he means by "Septemeber") will come and go as always, with nothing more unusual than the beginning of the third season of Dexter to show for it. Come October 1st, if by some far off chance I remember to do so, I'm going to PM our friend on Youtube and ask why the world didn't end. I rather suspect that he's already got an excuse in mind, since he's already posted a Youtube comment to the effect that he's not actually sure the world will end this month, but rather that he's just posting his crazy video in case the Rapture happens so we wicked heathens will have the answer and not be swayed by Anti-Christ's excuses about aliens...or something. You know, because DanielsMagi will be in Heaven and thus won't be around to explain it to us poor suffering souls.

In any event, let's enjoy September (and Dexter) and, come October, we'll see what our friend has to say for himself. In the meantime I recommend digging around in the Youtube comments for the video to watch the Rapture-believing and non-Rapture-believing folks argue or passing the time by reading this always timely list of failed end of the world predictions from James Randi.

Bill Donohue - Still A Raving Ass...

The Catholic League is basically a vehicle through which Bill Donohue bitches about things that he considers to be anti-Catholic. Since Bill Donohue appears to have an enormous persecution complex, he does an awful lot of bitching. His latest ravings about "hate crimes against Catholics" is in regards to P.Z. Myers and his recent bemusement over the row about a Florida student who, horror of horrors, left a Catholic mass with a Eucharist in his pocket to protest fees that University of Central Florida.

The Catholic League has claimed that this is "beyond a hate crime" and has called for the expulsion of the student in question. Myer's responded to the debacle with this blog post, which, of course, pissed off the Catholic League even more. Donohue is now calling for Myers' head on a pike, and his minions have begun to deluge both the University of Minnesota and Dr. Myers with hate mail.

Naturally the web's skeptics have been quick to defend Myers, and I'm sure that some of them have sent some unfriendly correspondence to Donohue and his lackeys, and this of course plays right in to Donohue's martyr fantasies. He has summoned up the gall to accuse Myers of promoting hysterics (Remember that it was Donohue who called for the destruction of a student's academic future over the theft of a minor religious token that was, in any event, destined to be consumed, processed, and ultimately flushed down the toilet anyway.) and is now calling on his website for additional security for Catholics during the Republican National Convention (which will take place in Minnesota this September) for fear that the atheists will rise up and smite them.

The Catholic League claims that it exists to "safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened", and as you can see, it works towards this end by trampling the rights of everyone else.

Fuck off, Bill. It's a goddamned cracker.

I Love E-Mail...

Really, I do. I don't get an enormous amount of it that actually counts for squat, but e-mail has made my life a lot easier over the years - There's simply not a more convenient to stay in touch with your friends. One other thing that I like about e-mail is that you can filter it. The days of tons and tons of spam are gone thanks to high quality free filtering software that anyone can access. The account I use for my blog filters my incoming mail for junk, as does the e-mail account that it forwards everything to, as does the e-mail account that that forwards everything to. As such, there's not a whole lot of junk that gets through to old Skippy and thus I feel pretty content to leave my e-mail hanging out there for everyone to see.

Our friend Dennis Markuze of Quebec, Canada, who goes by the name David Mabus on this and every other blog he chooses to infect, likes e-mail too. I know this because he's tried to send me a bit over the last couple of days. I can only assume that this is his revenge for my calling him a ninny recently and suggesting that he might want to reconsider going off his meds. All I can say is that this isn't quite on par with his threats to crawl out of my TV and eat my soul like in that movie The Ring.

Dennis' home e-mail address and personal info have been widely disseminated online, and while I'm not quite base enough to repost them here, I'm going to note for everyone else's convenience that those of you with functional e-mail accessible through their Blogspot profiles may was to keep an eye on their in-boxes for Dennis' salty leavings. His current spamming address is davidmabus2009@gmail.com for those of you who'd like to block him in advance. I'm sure he'll have another one in the next few days.

On the plus side, without Dennis I'm not sure I'd ever have occasion to use the term "Nostradummy", which I'm quite tickled with even though no one else seems to be.

Who the hell is David Mabus?

A couple of weeks ago I made a post about James Randi's presence on Youtube, which honestly is not the kind of thing that usually attracts more than a couple of comments around here. Much to my surprise, I got a comment from a user named David that was essentially an a-grammatical explosion of written diarrhea, peppered with random links in much the way a watery dump might be studded with undigested corn. He mostly seemed to want to crow about the end of the Million Dollar Challenge, but he also mentioned the departure of Ellen Johnson from American Atheists*, so I'm not all that sure what he was getting at.

I didn't think much of it at the time, and just responded by linking him back to this post in which I predicted pretty much this same sort of shenanigans in response to the impending end of Randi's Challenge. While it proved, obviously, that I am in fact magic, it got no response and really nothing came of it at all.

Then today I was perusing PZ Myers' blog and happened to note a user named David Mabus in the Dungeon, which is a rogue's gallery of banned users. Turns out its the same loon that had posted on my blog, and apparently he boldly traverses the internet pasting the exact same rant (Seriously. Verbatim.), as well as one or two other pre-prepared jobs, on skeptical blogs and forums. Apparently this David Mabus fellow and our own David here are one and the same.

And yet the plot thickens...

Turns out David Mabus is actually Dennis Markuze, a Nostradummy from Canada who's greatest "contribution" to the prophecy movement is a weird claim that Nostradamus predicted the coming of Depeche Mode and, through this, the World Trade Center attacks. Apparently we have a celebrity in our midst. I don't know if I take it as a sign of Dennis' decline or my ascension that he's left off bothering Randi and PZ and is now skulking around here.

*Believe it or not I don't pay much attention to the goings-on of atheist organizations. I had to Wiki American Atheists after reading David's post to even get any context for why he was happy about Johnson leaving.

Tom Cruise: Scientologist and Man of Action...

Wow. A Tom Cruise Scientology indoctrination video has hit the internet, revealing just another aspect of what a freakin' loon this fellow is. It's being pulled down off the web as fast as the Scientologists can find it and send in copyright claims, but the clip is still available on Defamer. Pull up some popcorn and enjoy. By the way, he keeps referencing "KSW". In case you're wondering, that stands for "Keep Scientology Working", a policy letter "which establishes the infallibility of Hubbard's so-called "technology'" according to the Xenu Directory. Apparently one of Hubbard's core teachings was "use as many acronyms as possible".

What's extra fun is listening him talk about how he "has to do something" ad nauseum, as though his magical Scientology powers have given him a Spider-Man-like responsibility to save the world (from Xenu, one would assume) by making as many Mission Impossible movies as possible. Note the wild claim that "Tom Cruise has helped a billion people with Scientology" statistic at the end.