I've sort of alluded to it, but grant fever took over the last couple of days as the deadline approaches. Unfortunately, it happened right around the time when the GMC ruling on Andrew Wakefield came down and came down hard on him and his unethical behavior. Oh, well, as they say, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. In any case, I doubt I'll get to Wakers before Monday, if then, given that there might be other things that catch my interest by then. In the meantime, as I recover from pulling a couple of near all-nighters in a row, check out this Classic Insolence from December 2006. After all, if you've been reading less than three years, it's new to you! Well probably. For all I know you went into the archives and read each and every bit of scintillating prose to flow from the keyboard of Orac. Or not. Either way, enjoy! It rarely gets nuttier than this. If memory serves me, I think that this post garnered more comments than any post prior to it had. I think you'll soon see why.
Ever since I started Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) back in June, I had always intended that someday I wanted to expand this loving deconstruction of various forms of woo beyond just medical woo and quackery. True, having a little fun with woo that claims to treat disease or restore health is something that I've gotten pretty good at. You may wonder why I would want to move beyond medicine occasionally. After all, there's no shortage of medical woo to deal with every Friday, and I'll almost certainly return to it next week.
Sometimes a skeptic needs a change of pace, and this is one of those times. Believe me, there's lots of really potent and strange woo out there that has little or nothing to do with medicine or health. There's paranormal woo, various forms of pseudoscience, and there are conspiracy theories, among other things. All share the same sort of magical thinking, cherry picking of data to support bizarre beliefs or conclusions, and the tendency to discount vast quantities of data that do not support their woo. So, consider this an experiment. If it doesn't work out, I'll drop it. So what woo did I have in mind this week? Well, this week marked the 65th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor; so I had contemplated Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories, but in reality very few people believe in those any more, other than a certain commenter yesterday. However, there is an event as traumatic that occurred a mere five years ago that is sometimes conflated with Pearl Harbor and that has already spawned a cottage industry of woo greatly beloved by the tinfoil hat brigade. So I decided to pull a particularly bizarre bit of 9/11 woo out of the woo folder on my computer in which I store potential targets for YFDoW. It's woo so strange that, until a few weeks ago, even I, connoisseur of all that is woo, hadn't even heard of it.
No doubt you've heard of the 9/11 "skeptics" who don't believe that the impact of two large jetliners was enough to bring down the Twin Towers. These and conspiracy theorists like them have been responsible for the movie Loose Change (the producers of which, contrary to their claims that they are doing this "for the victims," have some really vile and despicable things about those who died) and the 9/11 "Truth" movement. These guys love to spin tales about how somehow the U.S. government (sometimes, depending on who's telling the tale, with the help of the Mossad) was actually responsible for the attacks, how supposedly the planes alone were not enough to bring the buildings down, and how there must have been bombs or other devices already in the towers. All of this was done, if you believe the tinfoil hat brigade, for nefarious purposes like giving the government a pretext to invade Iraq, to enrich Haliburton, or a variety of other reasons connected to reality only in the most tenuous way, if even that. One of the more prevalent among the many competing claims (some of which are mutually exclusive) is that it wasn't really commercial jetliners that struck the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon at all, but rather missiles or refueling military tankers. Never mind the thousands of eyewitnesses and the copious photographic, documentary, and physical evidence that do in fact support the conventional idea that it was suicidally murderous Islamic terrorists who hijacked these jetliners and piloted them into these buildings. It must have been the government or the Jews who did it. Popular Mechanics and the most recent episode of Skeptic Magazine have deconstructed the conspiracy theories of the 9/11 "Truth" movement quite well, as has the blog Screw Loose Change and the website Debunking 911, including its claims that the fires in the building couldn't have weakened the steel enough to cause the buildings to fall and that there must have been explosive charges that caused a "controlled implosion."
So what do some 9/11 conspiracy theorists do when faced with such copious evidence refuting their crackpot ideas? They descend deeply into woo, of course! But what form does this woo take? Easy! Some argue that, even though so many photos, videos, and eyewitnesses documented commercial airliners crashing into the towers, it still wasn't really airliners because the government cleverly did something to disguise what really crashed into the towers. And how'd the government supposedly do it? And what sort of woo could top the woo already purveyed by the more "conventional" 9/11 "Truth" movement?
Holograms, of course. They postulate what is known as The Hologram Theory to explain how those alleged cruise missiles could appear to be jetliners:
The "Hologram Theory," as it relates to 9/11, proposes that no commercial airliners hit the World Trade Center on Sept 11 2001. Proponents of the theory contend that rather than full sized airliners, the World Trade Center was hit by "Cruise" type Missiles which appeared to the naked eye to be airliners through the use of sophisticated hologram technology. Rosalee Grable is one the the theory's leading proponents. One eyewitness described the 'airplane' he saw: "It just disappeared. It disappeared like a, like a, bad special effect. Disappeared right into the building." Eyewitness Accounts. This theory is controversial even among 9/11 researchers.
I never knew our government was so sophisticated. I wonder why it can't track down Osama Bin Laden. Oh, wait, according to some of these woos, our government in actuality doesn't want to find Bin Laden. Never mind. This "hologram theory," though, goes truly beyond the pale, far beyond conspiracy theorists who claim that there was never any plane in sight, but that it was all missiles hitting the buildings, and that the photographic evidence was misinterpreted, probably intentionally, or nearly every video that was taken that day was somehow altered. But let's hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Here is a purveyor of this particular brand of strange woo named Stefan Grossman putting forth the case for holograms:
The hologram theory says that south tower (WTC2) was not hit by a large Boeing 767-200 (flight UA175) but by a small USAF cruise missile or drone with a large holographic cloak around it that made it look like a flight UA175, i.e. a flying deception.
The hologram theory has been attacked and ridiculed like no other theory relating to 9-11. In fact, however, it is based on stringent science, on reports from the military community and on careful analysis of the photos and mainstream media news videos of the alleged "plane" crash into south tower and of at least 11 military stealth crafts close by the south tower.
Woo.
Serious woo.
Breathtakingly amazing woo, so much so that I stand in awe of how anyone can believe this stuff. And it amazes me even more that Mr. Grossman seems disturbed that this theory has been "attacked and ridiculed like no other." What reaction did he expect? People to slap themselves on the forehead and exclaim, "How obvious!"?
And there's more:
1. Based on the MIT study of the attacks and twin tower collapse, it is established science that the visible flying craft could not have done any, nor all, of the following:
- the entering craft is in south wall's shadow wedge but parts of the craft shine white like a lamp
- the visible flying craft emits a yellow flash instants before nose-touch-wall event
- the visible flying craft cuts six floors which is impossible (Prof. Wierzbicki, MIT)
- the entering craft creates dust pimples that blow outward as from explosions
- the sensitive wing tips do not bend or break off, nor do they flip forward
- the sensitive tips of tail rudder and elevator (winglets) do not break off
- no veer or teeter despite flying in at an angle (about 13 degrees)
- no deceleration despite calculated loss of kinetic energy of 26%
- no deformation, crumple or smash-up of the visible flying object
- no explosion until the visible flying object has faded out of sightPeople who are not dumb brainwashed American hoodlums and idiots, i.e. people who can use their senses and their brains, have observed that all the videos that CNN, ABC, NBC and other mainstream news stations showed on 9-11 and the days and weeks thereafter document beyond any doubt that the visible flying craft at south tower did all of the above.
According to the video documentation, not contradicted by any eyewitnesses, the outer skin of the visible flying craft did not react with the solid steel-column south wall of south tower as a physical solid object. It behaved like a purely visual thing like a hologram. It is very clear that "something" that made a (unusually deep) plane-like noise did fly into the south wall of south tower (and then faded into the building out of sight like a TV special effect, the explosion being delayed nearly for one whole second, etc.).
2. There is sufficient news from the military community to establish a prima facie case that such a hologram technology did exist on 9-11-1. See e-book "T MINUS 9-11" at www.gallerize.com with many links in the hologram chapter, further the web sites mentioned above.
There are two military project code names for this, namely project "Ghost Gun" and project "Blue Beam".
We actually have full proof of the existence, function and commercial useability of such 3D virtual imaging technology in form of so-called "Zebra holograms", see www.zebraimaging.com/ a spinoff of MIT and military research.
In keeping with statements from the military community, an Air Force theory manual outlines an "airborne holographic projector" that projects clouds, mountains, troops, tanks, airplanes in the air in order to deceive enemies or enemy populations, see
http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume4/chap03/b5_6.htm
These conspiracy theorists are big on pictures that purport to show that the planes supposedly "disappeared" into the buildings in a way that, according to them, was not physically possible. For example, here is one such animation. Here are more. Nearly all of them involve heavy manipulation or the dubious interpretation of what might be dust or artifacts. For example, here is a picture that purports to show the "hologram generators":
Convinced yet, or are you just another one of those "dumb brainwashed American hoodlums and idiots" (which you obviously must be if you don't buy this woo)? Then how about this picture?
Nahhh, those dots couldn't possibly be specks of dust on the lens of the camera, distant aircraft, or other things. Nosirreee, they have to be hologram generators. But I see from your silence that you're still not convinced. Well, then, how about this picture?
See? It's clear as day. It couldn't possibly be smoke or debris falling from the building, given how close the highlighted area is to the tower, could it? Perish the thought! It must be hologram generators. At least it is to the woos:
Diligent research has proven that these and many related photos are undoubtedly authentic. Apart from the hologram theory there is no other explanation for the many cloaked orbs in the air (nearly invisible due to their accommodation to their respective background, chameleon-type) together with the non-solid "ghost plane" that fades like a Hollywood special effect in a reactionless way into the steel highrise. The orbs were airborne holographic projectors, and the visible flying craft that did not crash but glided reactionless nearly a second prior to the explosion through the steel wall was a holographic projection, probably with a much smaller cruise missile inside (such as would fit the merely 99 foot wide entry hole). This is well within reach of the military technology and the rabidly insane intentions of the Bush-Clinton idiocracy.
So let me get this straight. To accept this woo--I mean "theory"--you have to believe a lot of highly improbable things. First, you have to believe that the U.S. government would commit mass murder of its own people in order (1) to provoke a war; (2) consolidate power; (3) protect Israel, and/or (4) eliminate civil liberties and bring about a dictatorship, plus whatever other unclear reasons that the tinfoil hat woos like to put forward. Now, I really, really don't like President Bush, but I don't think he's capable of such cold-blooded murder of Americans, and I doubt even the most rabid Daily Kos diarist or commenter does, either. Even if he were, I highly doubt that he or anyone in the present government (or in the Clinton Administration, for that matter) was competent enough to pull off something like this. Next, you have to believe that the U.S. government possesses some sort of secret hologram technology so sophisticated and so convincing that its images could fool tens of thousands of witnesses, photographers and TV cameramen, many of them professionals and many of them taking pictures and amateur video from a variety of angles, into thinking that little Cruise-type missiles were in actuality big passenger airliners. Of course, these guys also seem to neglect to explain how so very realistic a roar was created as the "hologram plane" flew overhead, given that Cruise missiles are neither as large nor as loud as a passenger airliner. And, of course, the "no plane" 9/11 conspiracy theorists seem to have little or nothing to explain what happened to the passengers on the planes who died. But if you can swallow all of that with utter credulity, you still have to believe that a government in command of such awesome secret technology would use it to disguise missiles as passenger airliners when it would be far more straightforward and inexpensive to use real passenger airliners rather than such elaborate trickery (trickery that might be discovered), not to mention that the government would intentionally destroy a section of the Pentagon and kill its own soldiers and employees to achieve this and that it would crash a plane in Pennsylvania to provide a "myth" of passengers resisting the terrorists.
And that's just the minimum you have to believe to buy this "hologram theory." Truly, magical thinking that leads to serious woo is not something that is restricted to quacks.
Of course, looking at the pictures above, it reminded me of the sort of evidence that UFO mavens like to produce in favor of their brand of woo. Yes, it's all there, the grainy pictures that don't definitively show a recognizable object, the pseudoscientific analyses of photos and video, and the fervent belief that the government is hiding something from them, the only people "smart enough" to "see through" the deception. Naturally, it's therefore not surprising that some "no plane" 9/11 conspiracy theorists would start saying that UFOs--yes, UFOs--were responsible:
2. Apart from these three large UFOs there were many strange things in the air around the Twin Towers in the morning of 9-11-1. Such as:
birds, some of them seeming unusually large
cruise missiles flying by/from the Woolworth building
helicopters buzzing above the attack site in that day's no-fly zone.
none of them identified or identifiable (not even the birds...).Let me put all those things aside here. They have been discussed, to the extent that they are important.
In the remoter drawers of their archives, researchers silently keep the records of the strange UFOs of 9-11. When I say strange, I mean: strange. - Details:
3. I totally agree that the UFO community is distracted with Aliens and ETs in a way that makes them sound like Chicken Little (the cartoon which runs around saying "the sky is falling").
In other words: Believing in a massive plot by the government to use sophisticated holographic generators to hide the use of Cruise missiles to destroy the buildings and murder thousands, all in order to start a war and consolidate power, is reasonable, but don't bring aliens or ETs into this. That's just crazy talk. But he goes on:
Here, it wasn't the sky is falling but the towers and the Pentagon. It takes no Chicken Little to reiterate that these buildings were attacked and fell (at the Pentagon, only a building wing, the WTC altogether). At the Manhattan towers, the many cameras of that day unwittingly captured a flotilla of unidentified and strange flying objects. Commonly acronymed as UFOs.
These appear to be advanced forms of electrokinetic/antigravity experiments of secret military programs, see:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ufophysics/grangemouth.htmIn particular, Los Angeles has its share of observable encounters with flying orbs, see:
http://forum.cropcircleresearch.com/cgi-bin/cutecast.pl?session=LQY2J5A…
5. A specialized site for the Los Angeles type orbs and comparing them with the WTC orbs of 9-11-1 was the site: http://www.orbwar.com
This site by early April 2005 was killed, presumably because it was blabbing out hot military secrets relating to the Pentagon's stealth technology. Fortunately for the cause of the truth coming out, archive copies exist on disk. Now I am happy to see that the site is back on the air again.
Hmmm. Not a very effective goverment conspiracy if it couldn't shut down a simple website like Orbwar and keep it from ever going back online, is it? (Maybe its owners failed to pay their ISP bandwidth charges or something.) I mean, if there really were such a conspiracy and I were in charge of it, I'd make damned sure that websites like this went down and stayed down (or never appeared in the first place). I suppose this "conspiracy" could be letting such sites remain because they are so kooky and cast discredit upon the "real" 9/11 "skeptics," but I probably wouldn't take the chance. In any case, these guys look less and less like Dr. No and more and more like Dr. Evil.
But if you really want to know just how loony this "no plane" woo is, consider this quote:
Advocates of the 'blue screen' or 'hologram' theory hold that the planes that hit the World Trade Center, or at least Flight 175, were ghost aircraft and that sophisticated image projection technology was used to fake the illusion of them entering the towers.
The evidence they present to validate this notion is the contention that Flight 175 should have "bounced off" the tower yet sliced through it like a knife through butter.
The vast majority of the evidence is supported not by scientific analysis of what one would expect to happen when a large commercial airliner impacts a skyscraper at over 500 miles per hour, but with grainy Internet videos and hastily interpreted statements made by news reporters at ground zero.
If we are to believe, and the evidence suggests it to be so, that western intelligence agencies are carrying out acts of terror, to go to such lengths mandates the necessity of multi-layered fallback options if the criminals are caught red-handed. This is why a large scale terror attack is always shadowed by an almost identical government drill, as was the case with 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings. If significant and damning evidence were to be presented in a court of law powerful enough to have any impact that implicated high officials in acts of gross treason - the fallback option that it was "just part of the drill," remains as a last chance saloon.
If we are to consider that some form of high-tech hologram technology was utilized as part of a David Copperfield style sound and lights magic show that only made it appear as if Flight 175 had hit the south tower - then we are seriously entertaining the notion that the criminals who ran the attack did not bother to construct any fallback explanation if this massive public stunt had gone wrong.
What if the bombs inside the tower had failed due to faulty wiring or had only detonated a second after the hologram had been sent into the tower? How could that one be explained away? Who in their right mind would make such a huge gamble with no fallback option?
The above was written by 9/11 conspiracy theorist true believer Paul Watson and came from Prison Planet, a veritable cornucopia of conspiracy theories and woo-filled paranoia that routinely posits that Israel knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks and were somehow complicit in them. Pat over at Screw Loose Change has the perfect rebuttal to this:
Yes, and what if the bombs in the tower that caused the controlled demolition had failed due to faulty wiring, or had detonated in the wrong order, causing a bottom-up demolition? Who in their right mind, etc?
But what really amuses me about Paul Watson's article is what it says about the "no plane" 9/11 conspiracy theorists. After all, when people like Eric Salter, another 9/11 "skeptic" who clearly seems to believe that there was some sort of conspiracy to cover up what "really happened" on 9/11) writes a long article debunking your position and then a kook like Watson, who clearly believes that it was the U.S. government, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists acting at the behest of Osama Bin Laden, that was responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon, trashes you (and sounds almost reasonable doing it), that's a pretty big red flag that your position is some pretty amazingly bizarre woo indeed. In fact, it should tell you something when even died-in-the-wool woomeisters like the tinfoil hat brigade that believes that 9/11 was a massive government conspiracy (rather than a result of government complacency and incompetence that allowed terrorists who had been threatening for years to attack the U.S. homeland succeed in doing so) fear being tarnished by association with you and even go so far as to write, "The hologram theory is severely damaging to the credibility that the 9/11 truth movement has fought so hard to obtain and should therefore be sidelined and shunned at all costs."
Woo attacking even more woo-ey woo. It is a delicious irony indeed to savor.
ADDENDUM: Given that Christmas is just around the corner, here's a little bonus woo, a little cartoon poking fun at the woo that is the 9/11 conspiracy movement: The 12 Days of 9/11. My favorite line from this parody? It's got to be:
"Fiiiive dancing Jews!"
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Many senior veterans of the U.S. Counter-terrorism and Intelligence services do not accept the official account of 9/11.
- Terrell Arnold, former Deputy Director of Counter-Terrorism and Emergency Planning, U.S. State Department. "Washington leadership keeps the American people fixated on the events of 9/11. They have brought us no closer than we were on September 12, 2001 to resolving how it was executed and by what enemy. They tell us repeatedly that it was the work of al Qaida, but they have yet to show us the proofs. They told us the official version of what happened that day, but their story is laced with contradictions, and the facts visible on the ground at the time belie much of the official account. ... As an alleged post 9/11 defense, the War on Terrorism is a gigantic fraud."
- Ray McGovern, former Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) "I think at simplest terms, there's a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke."
- Bill Christison, former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. "I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. ... An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. ...The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them."
- Mel Goodman, former Division Chief of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs and Senior Analyst from 1966 - 1990. "The final [9/11 Commission] report is ultimately a coverup. I don't know how else to describe it."
For more info see the article "41 U.S. Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence Agency Veterans Challenge the Official Account of 9/11" http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Articles
As a medical professional, you might also be interested in the group Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth http://MP911Truth.org
Well well well
Huffington Post - Gates Makes $10 Billion Vaccines Pledge
DAVOS, Switzerland â The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will donate $10 billion over the next decade to research new vaccines and bring them to the world's poorest countries, the Microsoft co-founder and his wife said Friday.
...
Well well well what? :p
HuffPoo actually wrote an article regarding vaccines that was positive? The world must be coming to an end!
Of course, the loons showed up in the comments VERY quickly. Second comment appears to be claiming that vaccines should be denied to people as a form of population control. OMG MERCURY actually took an entire 15 minutes; surely a record.
Arianna is very much complicit in helping to create the sad mental state of the people involved. There needs to be a call for accountability for her, Oprah, ...well Jenny needs to lose her show.
Apparently the deluded celebrities and wackaloons are making a fad of publicly losing it (Kirstie Alley was my favorite - people were asking here questions about Scientology and medication and she had a very public freakout that made the rounds of the publications)
It's Jenny McCarthy's turn!
Digital Spy:
Jenny McCarthy has revealed that she has a crush on Jesus.
The former Playboy model, whose partner is The Truman Show actor Jim Carrey, said that she thinks that Jesus Christ would be a great boyfriend if he wasn't "dead".
McCarthy wrote on her Twitter page: "I'm looking at a picture of Jesus on the wall. I would have totally dated Jesus. Love that beard. Too bad he's dead."
Some of the star's followers on the social networking site then took offence to this, McCarthy wrote: "Okay, Okay my friends. I know Jesus is not dead. I'm saying that the fact his body has 'risen from the dead' makes him un-datable."
Later that day, McCarthy tweeted: "Did they do circumcisions in Jesus days?"
Although I may poke fun at these authors(especially those seeking fame and fortune),I recognize that in *some* cases we might be dealing with signs of a serious mental illness.(fyi:despite my ed/training,I do not work with an SMI population)If you view the tortuous causal connections,highly unlikely scenarios,convoluted motivations depicted,the disguises,facades,transformations,and coded messages so prevalent, and the sense of earth-shattering *importance*, you'll find many commonalities with the productions of the mentality ill.Ian Chovill,a Canadian treated for schizophrenia,educates the public and maintains a website("The Experience of Schizophrenia")in which, among other things, he recounts his some of his own "persistent" theories in great detail(about evolution, AIDS,aliens).On a personal level, I was privy to the development of an individual's beliefs(my SO's relative left many taped messages about his own "enemies list" and their manoeuverings) prior to treatment.We should always remember:while some people are entertained by science fiction, others believe it to be literally true.
They're forgetting that to establish guilt, you need more than motive: you need evidence that the crime took place, and that the person or people accused could have committed it.
Even if I think Bush, or Cheney, would have been willing to murder three thousand New Yorkers to get his war, that doesn't prove he did. It doesn't even prove that he deliberately looked the other way (which would make him an accessory before the fact).
Fwiw, I wouldn't be surprised if someone who was that cavalier about Iraqi civilians didn't care that much about New Yorkers, who could easily be painted as a bunch of liberal homosexual etc. rather than the "real Americans" who he wants to be identified with. That doesn't prove guilt. It doesn't even justify an indictment. Hating people is not by itself a crime. They can think any dark thoughts they want, so long as they don't act on them.
Jenny McCarthy believed her son was the next stage of human evolution before she went antivax.
But of course, her "mommy instinct" is still infallible despite being so grossly wrong before.
"I'm always right, no matter what!"
"A little bit ago you said that 1+1=green eggs and ham."
"NAH NAH NAH I CAN'T HEAR YOU I'M ALWAYS RIGHT!!!"
What reaction did he expect? People to slap themselves on the forehead and exclaim, "How obvious!"?
Actually, yes: in the closed system that is their worldview, their version of events is THE ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION, such an obvious and irrefutably simple truth that NO ONE in his right mind could POSSIBLY see things any other way -- there'd have to be a huge and pervasive conspiracy using god-like powers to keep everyone else from seeing what they see.
Seriously. This is how I felt at the age of twelve when I first discovered Marxism: it was such a simple and obvious technocratic solution that no one could possibly have any excuse not to see it my way. This sort of technocratic naivete is expected for bookish teenagers; but when people just grow older without growing out of that phase, it becomes a pathology. Or a religion.
If these idjuts had actually visited the website, they would see that the holograms made by Zebra Imaging are printed holograms, i.e. even if we assume there was some refinement of the technology that would make it viable for the purposes at hand, there would be no "projectors" to be captured on video.
Every single one of my comments on HuffPo is going through. My links to the Jenny McCarthy Body Count site have been approved for the first time ever. I'm posting Ben Goldacre's Guardian piece "The media are equally guilty over the MMR vaccine scare" - no problem. Wheee!
(They're still one of the few who hasn't written about Wakefield though)
@Jen
I actually managed to get some comments posted over at AoA on a thread tangentially about OSR#1. Not all of them were allowed through (including my final post), but most of them were. I was quite surprised. The conversation was finally shut down, though, because we were, admittedly, off-topic from the OP.
So... They can holographically hide a cruise missile behind the image of a plane, but they can't hide the holographic projector thingies....
Yeah... definitely wooney toons here.
@Todd W
Do you think everybody is thinking they're about to get clobbered on the issue? I'm enjoying this so much, because the press articles are so strongly worded, sometimes I only need to quote the title to get the point across at a glance. Other posters in the thread are openly hostile to the anti-vaxxers.
@Jen
Hard to say. Maybe they're just trying to revamp their image, especially with the fallout over Loe Fisher's libel suit against Offit, Wallace and Wired. They keep getting hammered over and over regarding their censoring of dissenting comments. Hard to take them seriously when they do that, so perhaps it's a token step toward legitimacy.
@Todd
The balance of comments is so different this time, I imagine that TONS of commenters are getting their posts through unchallenged for the first time. I would love for a writer to peek in with editorial staff there and see what changed.
Since Orac doesn't have time to cover it today, by all means read about the GMC's findings on Wakefield here. Money shot:
Dr Andrew Wakefield, the expert at the centre of the MMR controversy, "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant" and showed a "callous disregard" for the suffering of children involved in his research, the General Medical Council (GMC) has ruled.
Wakefield also acted dishonestly and was misleading and irresponsible in the way he described research that was later published in the Lancet medical journal, the GMC said. He had gone against the interests of children in his care, and his conduct brought the medical profession "into disrepute"
There were apparently hundreds of pro-Wakefield protesters outside the meeting. Go figure.
What amazes me is how these hologram nuts are credulous enough to believe They can create amazing, revolutionary holographic projection technology---and then do such a bad job of making a "fake" airplane projection! If it's just a hologram, why didn't They project a realistic-looking crash? Hollywood has been doing it for years!
Dr Evan Harris MP blog
Dr Andrew Wakefield and the MMR Scare
Evan on C4 News
"I was on Channel 4 News last night talking about the MMR Scare â up against Richard Halvorsen â which you might like to take a look at."
It still surprises me that people think that since the planes "obviously" weren't enough to bring down the towers that in addition to firing *something* into the buildings, they also planted a long stretch of explosives throughout the building to actually bring them down.
I continue to wonder why it wasn't that a few Al-Qaeda members (err, government insiders, rather) got jobs working as part of the maintenance crew for the building so they'd have access to the building to actually place the charges and then just blow the damn thing up in the first place, rather than deal with planes or holograms or whatever other hokey shit they would pull off. If I was going to destroy a huge building, I'd do it as cheaply as I could.
"People who are not dumb brainwashed American hoodlums and idiots, i.e. people who can use their senses and their brains have observed that all the videos that CNN, ABC, NBC and other mainstream news stations showed on 9-11 and the days and weeks thereafter document beyond any doubt that the visible flying craft at south tower did all of the above."
God, I love this debate tactic so much. IF THEY DON'T AGREE WITH ME THEY'RE COMPLETE IDIOTS.
You know..
when I was away at the last secret Conspiracy/One World Power Convention (and tech show) we talked alot about how to cause the 9-11 events. Some of us thought it would be best to simply stage a big terror bombing of the WTC.. but no, ELVIS insisted that we develop a multilevel attack plan, with blombs planted throughout both buildings, all to be blown in sequence with a Windows 3.0 computer controlling it. Then,to throw off suspicion and investigators, we were going to stage a hijacking of airliners to crash into the tower at the exact second we trigger the bombs. But then we had a better idea,... lets create a ILLUSION of airliners being hijacked and crashed into the twin towers (and we later added the Pentagon at the insistence of our GOTH/WICCAN colleagues... they loved the symbolism) and instead of using the airliners, we would use highly technical holographic projectors during broad daylight. The best part was being able to contact the Scientologists in Hollywood who were able to steal some of the STAR TREK HOLO-DECK TECHNOLOGY (it's all real you know...) and instead of actual planes, we created images of the planes. THen we took all the people in the planes that we had to hijack anyway in order to support the plan, and we forced them to land on a deserted jungle island off the coast of Africa, where we had built a huge underground research facility. You probably heard a few things about that island, we originally worked on it with a cover story of the JURASSIC PARK movies.
So then we sprayed anthrax toxic dust all over Manhattan, using special versions of the BLack Helicopter Brigade, equipped with holographic cloaking technology... but because we weren't able to use the thimersal to preserve the anthrax, most of the people survived. Especially the ZIONISTs... because they were tipped off somehow. Probably reading the retranslated predictions of Nostrodamus.
I was about to find out about what BUSH-CHENEY-HALLIBURTON-BLACKWATER-GENERAL MOTORS-MERCK was planning for 2010...but then, I had to check out of the hotel. When I got back to the conference room... it was not there. It was all the same furniture, but the drapes were different. And there were little pieces of mylar balloons all over the floor.
So you see, I KNOW the conspiracy exists. Ask Michael Moore and Bill Maher. They were there. Really.
BlueMaxx: You did all that and all you got out of it was...what? A slightly more paranoid populace willing to take off its shoes and get digitally naked before boarding planes? Why didn't you take over the world or oat least the country while you had everyone off balance? Sheesh. Incompetent conspirators.
BlueMaxx: You did all that and all you got out of it was...what?
A lousy t-shirt.
@ BlueMaxx:Excellent job!( Mr. Geithner told me send his regards; see you at the Bohemian Grove in June).
The hologram hypothesis isn't necessarily the strangest bit of Truther mega-woo.
The story that the towers were taken down by "nuclear shape-charges" makes even the hologram folks blush. Of course they say this hypothesis too far is 'government disinformation' planted to 'discredit the serious skeptics'.
Did anyone else see the recent xkcd about truthers? And, I guess, about the problems of taking the middle path between two opposites too.
I loved the South Park parody, where the "9/11 Truth" movement turns out to be sponsored by George Bush.
"nuclear shaped charges"? Meaningless phrase. A shaped charge is just a load of conventional explosives with a metal-lined cavity in it.
Conspiracy theories like these exist because the Federal government has lost all credibility. After everything that's happened over the last fifty years, you'd have to be insane to believe anything they say about anything, so even if they're telling the truth, nobody's going to buy it. Things used to be different. For example, if the government assured the country that the Lusitania wasn't carrying munitions, most Americans were still gullible enough to believe them.
That's all changed. Our glorious leaders (along with the "respectable" media and, lately, the international scientific community) have squandered their credibility with decades of lies. Nobody believes them any more because they're proven liars. It's just that simple. And nobody has any problem believing that they're capable of staging terrorist attacks against their own citizens. Once you pull off a Tonkin Gulf Incident, everything starts to look like a false flag attack. Some of these conspiracy theories are crazy, true, but none of them are as crazy as believing the Federal government.
You know, nobody pointed out that #1's quotes about the 9/11 Commission's Report being a "cover-up" are leaving out the question of what it's covering up.
There's a world of difference between covering up basic imcompetance - which is something I pretty much assumed was going to happen from the getgo - and covering up some kind of massive conspiracy.
Alan Miller in comment #1 above can't understand that what constitutes the "account" of 9/11 is the massive evidence from multiple sources that converges on the conclusion of what happened on 9/11. The 9/11 Denial Movement of which Alan Miller is undoubtedly a part has yet to produce a single piece of actual evidence to refute any of the physical and documentary evidence that Arab hijackers under the direction of Osama bin Laden successfully hijacked 4 commercial aircraft and 3 succeeded in reaching their targets.
Those of us who have fought the insanity of 9/11 conspiracy theories online since 9/11 still marvel at the absolute suspension of logic and critical thinking 9/11 Deniers. In the end we end up with wild Hologram theories, not to speak of AA77 never hit the Pentagon (http://www.citizeninvestigationteam.com/, http://pilotsfor911truth.org/) and "Star War Space Beams" destroyed the World Trade Center Towers (http://www.drjudywood.com/)
9/11 "Truthers" have been relegated to the trash bin of history along with their fellow round-earth deniers, moon-landing deniers, Creationists, and Holocaust Deniers.
I'm confused. Is a "9/11 denier" like a "global warming denier?" You know, those nut jobs who said the IPCC was faking its data for political reasons?
I'm confused. Is a "9/11 denier" like a "global warming denier?" You know, those nut jobs who said the IPCC was faking its data for political reasons?
In a word: yes. There are plenty of nuanced views that one might reasonably hold, on the spectrum from full acceptance of climate 'alarmist' claims to skepticism of some scientific claims and resistance to various political responses to climate change, that don't necessarily lock-step with the IPCC.
However, "faking data" @ the IPCC alleges a far-flung conspiracy that would be absurd in its own right. There is clearly a portion of the anthropogenic-global-warming-is-not-real crowd that rely upon tactics and logical gymnastics more befitting of anti-vaccination or HIV-denaial or moon landing hoaxers than an honest skepticism.
Ha ha ha
9/11 Truth Campaign
Is the latest Scientology religion, Mind control and the programing of Biophysics in Human Brain?
The last thing legitimate Scientology critics need is for the tinfoil brigade to get involved. Scientology has created quite enough tinfoil on its own, thank you.
TINFOIL?
what I find funny is that we actually use, for as long as I can recall, ALUMINUM foil. Which is rather radiolucent as far as a shield against cell phone evil rays, as well as the cosmic mind control beams. It DOES protect against sunburn I guess, as long as you are UNDER it, and not having it reflect and concentrate more UVA/UVB onto your skin.
AND we of course are all aware that ALUMINUM is an ingredient in some vaccines, so is linked/not linked/suspected/proven to be a causative agent for Alzheimers/Shingles/9-11 paranoia/ color blindness.
Looking for a HOMEOPATHIC GREEN RECYCLING determination here: if I take aluminum foil or pepsi can and recycle it, melting it and blending it with other molten aluminum, and then making new foil/cans/pie tins out of it, does it REMEMBER it used to have pizza wrapped in it, or a DIET PEPSI?
Only if shaken, but then it would reverse the effects. So eating a pizza wrapped in homeopathic tin foil that was used to wrap another pizza will make you skinny, but if it used to be a Diet Pepsi can then it will make you fat.
Conspiracy theories like these exist because the Federal government has lost all credibility...
No, they exist because there are people who can't handle reality due to ignorance, bigotry, poorly developed reasoning ability, or actual mental illness. And they existed before the Federal government was even created, let alone before it "lost all credibility."
The one thing all conspiracy theories have in common is that they say "this makes sense. There is a reason that I can explain and you can understand." That can be very tempting, compared to the tangle of complication, conflicting motives, and contingency that we're actually dealing with. A friend of mine has, as the motto on her blog, "It's always more complicated." Conspiracy theories say "it's basically simple." There may be endless tendrils and patches and epicycles, but the core answer is something like "the Trilateral Commission is running the world" or "the Mafia wanted JFK dead" or "Bush did it."
There were no commercial plane crashes on 9/11. Read this article again. This author uses "evidence" which has never in world history ever been used to physically verify a plane or a plane crash. They have used witnesses, video, photos, and film. All of which have never physically verified a plane crash in world history. Only debris with serial numbers can verify a plane or a plane crash. On 9/11....not ONE single piece of verifiable debris has ever been found from any of the 4 planes from any of the 4 locations on 9/11. None of the black boxes, voice data recorders, of flight data recorders had serial numbers. A first in aviation history and it happened 4 times on the morning of 9/11.
There were no commercial plane crashes on 9/11. The entire never ending US global war on a tactic known as terror is a lie. One of the implications of this lie is the criminal exposure of the US media. The US media is owned and produced by the worlds largest military contractors. GE owns NBC, Westinghouse owns CBS, and all the video on the day of 9/11 came from one source....Rupert Murdoch and Fox.....Murdoch just so happens to be best friends with Larry Silverstein the recent owner of the WTC complexes in which ALL seven of the WTC's were destroyed on 9/11 earning Silverstein $7 Billion dollars.
There were no commercial plane crashes on 9/11. There were no WMD's in Iraq. The false wars were brought to you by the same people and for the same reasons. What the gatekeepers want you to focus on as is apparent in this article is exactly "how" these murderers killed so many. Since they are the killers they know....and if you try and "solve their crimes" and are incorrect according to them....then anything you say is ridiculed. Never try to solve their crimes because the second you do they are already on an entirely different set of crimes.
There were no commercial plane crashes on 9/11. Who knows how or why they killed so many especially the millions that have died because of false invasions and excuses for war. Just know that they lied and will stage and lie again. Trust nothing from a military owned media outlet. There were no commercial plane crashes on 9/11. The events of 9/11 now employ millions of people and is worth Trillions of dollars. Many people will desperately try and protect that industry at all costs. Just verify the plane debris through a serial number.....you cant....there isnt any debris with a serial number. There were no commercial plane crashes on 9/11.
Wow, just wow! 9/11 truthling incompetance at it's absolute finest right above me! Gerard Holmgren passed away in May 2010 http://www.onlinetributes.com.au/Gerard_Holmgren/
Yet apparently he's now posting from beyond the grave in July 2010! If this truthling had bothered to do the most basic research instead of copy and paste spamming they would know this. Have you truthlings no shame? Clearly not.
who is more foolish the fool or the fool that follows.
Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance
http://hubpages.com/hub/Georges_Washington_did_acknowledge_the_Doctrine…
I can definitely see your point(s) about the vaxers, and even though you don't spend much time attempting to look at the other side's p.o.v., I feel that your devastating ridicule of their 'logic' is probably well-founded and completely justified(from my perspective of limited knowledge about it), since you are a doctor and all. And I thank you for not sparing the rod, so to speak, because it is such an important issue, and not to be trivilized.
I see, though, that your rapier wit comes off as a little more strained and less insightful when you really don't have a dog in that hunt. I say this because it's concievable that, to a new reader, you might appear less convincing as a whole- your unimpeachable credibility on the vaccine issues could be dismissed by some kid who thinks you are a shill for Big Pharma AND Big Brother. Just sayin', thanks for the great blog...
I can definitely see your point(s) about the vaxers, and even though you don't spend much time attempting to look at the other side's p.o.v., I feel that your devastating ridicule of their 'logic' is probably well-founded and completely justified(from my perspective of limited knowledge about it), since you are a doctor and all. And I thank you for not sparing the rod, so to speak, because it is such an important issue, and not to be trivilized.
I see, though, that your rapier wit comes off as a little more strained and less insightful when you really don't have a dog in that hunt. I say this because it's concievable that, to a new reader, you might appear less convincing as a whole- your unimpeachable credibility on the vaccine issues could be dismissed by some kid who thinks you are a shill for Big Pharma AND Big Brother. Just sayin', thanks for the great blog...
They were Foo Fighters! Chemtrail planes are the same thing! They are fake holograms! They use these to harass people (Targeted Individuals). I've had hundreds of them over my house in the past two years. Police use them, NASA, NSA, CIA, and even civilians use them to harass people. Most of the people I know who are being harassed are whisteblowers, people who have an invention that someone wants to steal, LOTS of Masonic/Satanic Ritual Abuse (child sexual abuse, esp. by Prists) victims, and PSYCHICS. They call anyone with psychic ability "political dissidents", esp. Remote Viewers. These things can look VERY real, but they ALL have black orbs around them, just like the Foo Fighters! My youtube is Ella5024, if you want to see some of my videos.
Seriously? It was the rock band?
I always though Dave Grohl looked a bit shady....
It seems like people will always believe what they want to believe no matter how foolish it may be.
I hope I have enough sense to keep myself out of that category.