Assange Rap

With Jones harping on Wikileaks' alleged link to The Great Satan (George Soros), and Webster Tarpley calling Julian Assange an "MK-ULTRA zombie" (possibly because his mother's second ex-husband was involved with this when Assange was a child*), this video is well in order. Enjoy, and happiest holidays to everyone. We'll be back in the new year.




* It would be terribly ironic if Webster Tarpley, of all people, criticized anyone for cult involvement.

23 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas

"Now right where I live there's uranium in the water. And the hippies'll get mad if you cut a tree down to build a shed, but they're like, 'Gimme uranium, I want it'. I mean, this is eugenics, this is population reduction..."
(today's broadcast)

Actually, Mr. Jones, the hippies - and a lot of other people - are pissed. Not just about uranium in the water, but about uranium mining itself. Two years ago, a broad range of South Texas citizens formed the Alliance of Texas for Uranium Research and Action, with the stated aim to "protect water resources and keep uranium out of the drinking water". Specifically, ATURA is fighting for a moratorium on all uranium exploration and mining in Texas's drinking water aquifers. And they're not just talking about uranium contamination on the radio. They're organizing, lobbying, and protesting in every forum available to them. Check out their website and decide for yourself if every Texan besides Jones thinks "uranium is good for you."

24 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas

"THEY have life extension...."
(today's broadcast)

Once in a while, Jones tosses off a vague reference to his belief that the elite scumlords have access to miraculous medical procedures and cures the rest of us can never hope to even glimpse. Folks like Al Gore even travel with their own blood supplies, because they know plebe-donated blood is too contaminated for their patrician veins. Magic Johnson was given the secret cure for AIDS, which is really amazing because Magic Johnson never actually had AIDS. That must mean They're hiding a preventive cure for AIDS!

Those bastards.

But the elites aren't the only ones keeping a lid on these medical secrets. Jones informs us that black and Hispanic leaders are paid off to stay quiet about the fact that AIDS is a race-specific disease.

I have to wonder, if the world's most powerful people have access to life-extension technology, why don't they have magical weight-loss techniques yet? From what I understand, they still have to rely on plain ol' lipo and dieting, just like the peons.

Stomping on the First Ammendment

While Paul Joseph Watson condemns the "thuggery" of the two men who shoved a MoveOn.org supporter to the ground during a Rand Paul rally, and admits they should be prosecuted, he also contends that the woman tried to assault Rand Paul. A video posted at Prison Planet shows Lauren Valle, in red hoodie and blonde wig, breaking ahead of the crowd surrounding his vehicle as it pulls to a stop. She was portraying a corporate executive as part of a satirical MoveOn.org campaign. In the video, Valle holds her Rand Paul sign very close to Paul's open passenger window before he exits the vehicle. This is when an actual Paul supporter grabs her and pulls her away from the vehicle.
Watson even states that Valle's actions were "clearly more aggressive" than the actions of the man who shoved her to the pavement and the man who jammed his foot into her shoulder to help prevent her from getting to her feet.

This is an attempted assault? Holding a sign up to someone's face? While I question Valle's judgement in getting so close to the vehicle, it doesn't look to me like she was threatening Paul, nor was she in any position to harm him. Both of her hands are on the sign.

Watson also wrote an article about an incident that occurred the same night, pointing to it as evidence that the "establishment media" selectively covered the night's events. It seems a woman with an injured foot was also stomped on by a supporter of Rand Paul's rival, Jack Conway. But I think there could be other explanations for why this other incident received little coverage:

- The woman's name is unknown.
- The alleged perpetrator's identity is unknown.
- The circumstances of the alleged stomping are unknown.
- Having your foot stepped on in a crowd could be an accident (though the woman is reportedly pressing charges).
- The encounter was apparently not recorded, as the assault on Valle was.

As further supposed evidence that the media turns a blind eye to leftist violence, Watson mentions that an Obamacare supporter had his finger bitten off by a MoveOn.org activist at a rally last year. This case is more complicated than that, however. First of all, Bill Rice punched the unidentified man in the face and knocked him to the ground. The man got up and the two struggled before Rice's finger was bitten. In other words, we're not talking about an unprovoked assault. Capt. Ross Bonfiglio, a public information officer with the Ventura County Sheriff's Department, said that while Rice was certainly a victim, he was also the "primary aggressor". Also, because the biter remains unidentified (he fled), there is no way of knowing for certain that he was a MoveOn.org supporter.
The mainstream media did not ignore Rice's story, either. He was interviewed by a sympathetic Neil Cavuto on CNN.

Thuggery is thuggery. It should be unconditionally condemned regardless of who perpetrates it, and it should not be exploited for political ends. Alex Jones routinely castigates law enforcement for thuggery, but when it comes to thugs connected with a political candidate who has been a guest on his show, the tune changes. Then the thuggery, while still deplorable, becomes acceptable - even justified.

CPS Kidnapping and Persecution of Oath Keepers?

Not so fast....

Update (Oct. 15/10): According to an article posted at Infowars yesterday, Jonathan Irish has informed Jones that his infant daughter has been returned. He says he can't divulge any details due to a gag order, but he now claims that CPS investigated him only because he was confused with another man with a similar name who actually does have a record of domestic violence. As with everything else in the case, I don't know what to believe because there simply isn't enough information being provided from which to draw firm conclusions.

Jones has an intense hatred for social workers, particularly those employed by Child Protective Services (CPS). He has stated that social work was invented merely as a front for eugenics and racism (which would have been quite a shock to Dorothy Day, Jane Addams, and the other early social workers who did so much to help impoverished immigrants and their children). He has stated that most family court judges are sadistic pedophiles. He has stated that half of CPS workers are pedophiles.

His experiences of CPS must be quite different from mine. When I was growing up, several friends were abused or neglected by their parents, and CPS turned a blind eye. One girl was raised by a mother who would make Joan Crawford look like a freaking saint, but after one weekend in a foster home, CPS decided that because the girl wasn't a complete train wreck yet, her mother must not be so bad. She was returned to her own home, and never received another visit from a social worker. In other words, she was condemned to several more years of hell. In another family, three siblings were allowed to remain with their mother even though a social worker knew there was no food in the house. Another family plagued by alcoholism and incest never even received a visit from CPS. If social workers are really the crazed Stormtrooper thugs Jones portrays them to be, they have a strange way of showing it in certain parts of the U.S.

On Friday's show, Jones' guests were a New Hampshire couple who claim that their newborn was removed from their care solely because the father, Jonathan (John) Irish, is a supporter of the group Oathkeepers. His fiancee claims the CPS began investigating them after finding a gun in their car, even though she had a concealed carry license for it. They were told Irish belonged to a militia.

If accurate, this would be disturbing story. But the problem is, we don't have enough information to judge its accuracy. As one commenter at a Snardfarker site, Patty Kearon, pointed out: "The most important information is missing from this case. Nobody has posted any of the most important information needed to draw any conclusions. We all need to see the petitions that brought the older children into CPC custody. CPS had already taken their first 2 children into custody. We need to see the disposition reports, permanency reports and other documents such as police reports. And are the case plan requirements based on some documented substantiated abuse? We no [sic] nothing about these things which are very important pieces of information. Somebody get this needed information on the web, and then after reading it all, then I will give you my honest opinion. And anybody who makes a judgement without this information is just as bad as the people you are making judgements about".

Other commenters mention that Irish's Oath Keepers affiliation was only one of several reasons listed for the intervention, that Irish has a history of domestic violence, that Irish may not actually be affiliated with Oath Keepers. Irish himself mentioned to Jones that the CPS report lists reported abuse of his fiancee, but denies he is abusive.
Undoubtedly, many babies have been born to Oath Keepers, yet there are no other reports of newborns being removed from these families.

A Concord Monitor article has this to say: "Court records show an ongoing investigation into charges that Irish abused Taylor and her two-year-old child", and "according to an affidavit provided to Irish by the state Division for Children, Youth and Families, state officials took the child because of Irish's long record of violence and abuse."
The affidavit also says that Rochester, New Hampshire police have documented a "lengthy history of domestic violence" between Irish and his fiancee, that a judge determined Irish abused his fiancee's two older children, that he failed to complete a court-ordered domestic violence course, and that a hearing was held last month to terminate the fiancee's parental rights over the other two children for these reasons.

It seems there's much we're not being told by the New Hampshire couple. Jones didn't ask the couple any questions; he accepted their story at face value, even referring to the social workers as "wolves", "fascists", "monsters", and "kidnappers". When Irish made a vague, confusing statement indicating that his fiancee's husband (not ex-husband, as Irish calls him) is listed as the baby's father, Jones instantly interpreted this as some sort of ploy on the part of CPS - without seeking any additional information. Any other interviewer would have asked some tough questions at this point, if only for clarification. Instead, Jones solicited donations for the couple's legal defense.

The mislabeling of Oathkeepers as a "militia" can probably be straightened out in court later this month. But what about the other issues that Jones did not address? It strikes me as irresponsible to give unconditional support to this young couple when we have no idea what's going on in this case. It's not a good idea to hold them up as examples of "persecution against Libertarians and conservatives" until more is known. As the Monitor article points out, many of the supporters rallying around Irish and his fiancee heard about the case at second or third hand, and know nothing about the abuse allegations.

At the end of his interview with Irish and his fiancee (I have not used her name here because it is given variously as Taylor and Janvrin; I don't know which is her real name), Jones admits that CPS has also failed to intervene in clear-cut cases of abuse and neglect. Strangely, though, he seems far less concerned about this than about the alleged persecution of a small number of allegedly innocent parents, and what he sees as widespread corruption in social work and the "adoption racket".

Addendum: Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oathkeepers, has a much more balanced and rational take on the case, as an article re-posted at Infowars shows. He realizes that Irish's Oath Keepers affiliation was not necessarily the dominant reason why the child was removed, and acknowledges that other issues were presented in the affidavit.

Still Waiting for That Race War

So it's been 30 days since the release of Machete, and though border violence has not abated, there seems to be no escalation in Mexican-on-American violence thanks to the movie. I saw it, and it's the usual zany, over-the-top Rodriguez fare. There's a political undertone, but it's hard to take seriously with lines like, "The bullet in his head was stopped by another bullet!". Anyone who takes Machete as a call to arms is seriously disturbed, and could just as easily be swayed by secret government messages in the Sunday comics or something.

I can recall many similar manufactured controversies. Years ago, Christians fretted that The Bridges of Madison County could give the green light for housewives to screw every traveling salesmen they met. Didn't happen. Then they worried that their kids might hook up with vagrant artists on cruise ships, because of Titanic. This probably did happen, but who cares? At least they didn't get tanked and fall off the damn boat like that one moron did on his honeymoon. More recently, there have been concerns that Avatar will usher in some kind of global eco-religion, though I really can't picture millions of people modeling themselves after Ferngully Smurfs.
In New Zealand, Reservoir Dogs came under heavy fire after a policeman was tortured and his house burned by a "Satanist". Turned out the guy did it himself, partly to get out of his marriage and partly for the insurance money.
The only movies that did seem to influence some already unbalanced people are Natural Born Killers and River's Edge (allegedly a favourite of the kids who murdered Elyse Pahler, though Slayer got the blame). Both of these films are heavily satirical, but not as zany as Machete. Hence, a few idiotic kids actually took them at face value. But we can't seriously argue that controversial films should be shelved to prevent a handful of dolts from being influenced by them. If we banned every film that could concievably encourage bad behaviour, we'd be left with very few. Maybe The Sound of Music, movies about talking animals, and some PG comedies would squeak by. That's not the kind of world I want to live in.

"The Health Ranger" on Cancer Charities

I have heard Jones admonish his listeners not to donate to cancer research, because science isn't really looking for a cure (or has already found it, but won't tell us). Today, Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams said essentially the same thing. When you donate to cancer charities, a lot of the money goes toward cancer screening in poor neighborhoods.
So this is a bad thing? According to Adams, it is. He says that public health workers deliberately target low-income neighborhoods occupied by racial minorities in order to kill them. The example he used was of mobile labs offering free mammograms to poor black women. The women may think this is a sensible health precaution, but the radiation will end up killing them, he and Jones agreed.

Current research indicates that "mammography has an average lifetime risk of inducing 1.3 fatal breast cancers per 100,000 women aged 40 at exposure", according to an August New York Times story on the risks of imaging tests. In other words, mammograms can slightly increase the risk of breast cancer for women over 40. But of course if your breast cancer goes undetected, the chance of survival is low indeed. Screening is recommended for women over 40, and I see nothing sinister about offering free exams to women who could otherwise not afford any screening at all. The level of radiation used in mammography is lower than that used in other X-ray exams. It's highly unlikely that THEY give some free mammograms every year just to minutely increase the risk of breast cancer in a very small number of minority women. There are far more effective ways to eliminate a population, and THEY surely know that.

Cancer research funds do, believe it or not, go into actual cancer research. The notion that THEY will withhold a cure when/if one is discovered is absurd, because whoever makes that discovery is going to make himself and a lot of other people very, very rich. A cancer cure will be just as lucrative as cancer treatment, if not more so.

But cancer research doesn't focus solely on a cure; improved treatments, a higher standard of care, and more effective screening are all goals of cancer researchers. We've seen astonishing improvement in all these areas in the past decade alone. When I was a child, even the lowest doses of chemotherapy were a guarantee of terrible sickness, hair loss, and fatigue. Today, it is not. My grandfather recently underwent chemo without suffering more than a few minor side effects like constipation. Five years ago, my brother-in-law reached his fifth year with multiple myeloma. Thanks to state-of-the-art treatment in Toronto, he was active and independent until the very end of his life (in contradiction of what you'll hear about Canadian medicine from those who would prefer the more lucrative, privatized variety). It is worthwhile to donate to cancer research and cancer charities, if that's what you want to do. Don't let bizarre scare tactics and conspiracy speculating (I can't even call it theorizing) stop you.

CIA Admits Faking Bin Laden Videos: A Bald-faced Lie

I finally got around to checking Jones' claim - repeated numerous times since the summer - that the CIA has openly admitted to faking at least some of the Bin Laden videos. He never gave a source for this statement, and as it certainly wasn't in the headlines I had no idea what he was talking about.

It turns out he was bluffing.

In an interview with Max Keiser, Jones mentioned that the admission appeared in the Washington Post's "Spy Talk" section, an online column by Jeff Stein. He repeated his assertion that the "fat Osama" video was faked.
You can read the article Jones is referring to here. As you will see, it makes absolutely no mention of the actual Bin Laden videos, much less the "fat Osama" video that is widely considered a fake. The article is about the CIA's idea to create fake Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein videos with actors doing things their supporters wouldn't have liked (drinking, having gay sex, etc.), and the creation of one test video featuring dark-skinned CIA agents drinking alcohol around a campfire. The unnamed agents quoted by Stein claim that fake Bin Laden videos would have been too expensive and probably wouldn't have worked anyway, so the whole idea was ultimately rejected. Also, their superiors refused to give the green light for the project. One officer told Stein the project was taken up by the Army at Fort Bragg, but no details are provided. In short, no one connected with U.S. intelligence or the military has confessed to creating the "fat Osama" video or any of the others that have appeared.

I don't understand why Jones would lie about this. He certainly knows it isn't true. In a May 25th Prison Planet article, Steve Watson summarizes the Spy Talk piece and asks, "Could the CIA group of 'dark skinned actors' have been behind the infamous December 2001 'Fat-Nosed Bin Laden' video, that was magically found in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in?".
Jones has made the leap from speculation to solid "fact".

The Illusion of Green Fascism

In their latest campaign to prove that anyone who cares about the environment is a dangerous, misanthropic radical, Jones & Co. are scraping the barrel in search of extremists. Paul Joseph Watson came up with Charles Manson, and now he's trumpeting the brainfarts of an obscure radical from Finland, Pentti Linkola. Representing the far end of the environmentalist spectrum, Linkola actually does believe in things like human culling, fascism, and eugenics. He's an epic douchebag. And that's why he's not much of a threat to humanity as a whole: He'll never have a large enough following to implement any of his batshit crazy notions of how the world should be run.

The average environmentalist (including the ones that could be considered hardcore) is repelled by guys like Linkola. And the feeling is mutual. A year or two ago I attended a talk by Derrick Jensen, a California environmentalist who subtly promotes the bombing of dams to save the wild salmon. During the Q & A, nearly everyone asked him if it was not better to spread environmental responsibility by example (peaceful activism, recycling, and whatnot). He dismissed these people as "lifestylers" who would never made a real difference, tossing off comments like, "Composting wouldn't have stopped Hitler." Most of the small audience walked out of that room feeling that Jensen was a mentally unbalanced man. They may still read his books, but I don't think they'll be dynamiting a dam anytime soon.

The truth is, your typical environmentalist does not actually want to return to a pre-industrial, agrarian way of living. They want to keep their iPhones and their hybrid cars. The daffy siren call of folks like Linkola might snag their attention momentarily, but in the end they're not going to adopt any ideology that compromises their own comfort and security. They're not into power trips. They just want the world to be safer, healthier, and better.

Every belief system has its extremists. To pick them out of the crowd and hold them up as poster children is not only misleading, it's downright deceptive. You will not be likely to find a Linkola or a Jensen among the hippies at your local farmer's market. Not everyone who talks about conservation, alternative energy, or global warming is a threat to democracy. Jones is doing to environmentalists what he insists the New World Order is always doing to him: Falsely aligning him with violent extremists.

Dick Gregory Again

I say "again" because Dick Gregory is to conspiranoia what Seth Rogan is to mediocre comedies: You just can't rid of the guy. He rocks as a comedian and an activist, but as a semi-professional paranoid he sucks. Every time you hear a weird or stupid conspiracy theory, you can bet that Dick Gregory has already made it weirder or stupider.

- At the height of the Atlanta child killings, which were likely the work of a sexual predator, Gregory declared that research scientists were probably killing young black boys for their foreskins, to use in some arcane cancer treatment that was being kept secret. This was after he declared that the KKK was responsible.
- Bizarrely, he insisted that Michael Jackson did not do inappropriate things with young boys even after Michael Jackson appeared in a British documentary and talked openly about doing inappropriate things with young boys. On the radio show Make It Plain, he speculated that the FBI and other shadowy figures framed Jackson to get their hands on the Beatles catalogue. In 2005 Gregory told NPR that MJ probably had a same-sex attraction for children because he was injected with female hormones as a boy - a rumour that went around in the '80s - then came out with (surprise!) another really odd conspiracy theory: "You look at women that use birth control pills; some of them have a strong attraction for another woman because birth control pills have female hormones in it. Most of them don't know this, and that's what this whole game is." (I don't know of any research that would back this up, but by all means fill me in if I've missed something epic.)
- Big shock: Dick Gregory proclaimed that Michael Jackson was murdered and that he had not been abusing drugs, telling a Nancy Grace interviewer and others that Jackson feared for his life in 2005. He implies that whoever was supposedly trying to get MJ back then patiently waited 4 years to murder him.
- When the Zapruder film was first shown to the American public on TV and declared to be proof of a second gunman (which it is not), Dick Gregory was there.
- In the '70s, he teamed up with the deeply shady lawyer Mark Lane to prove that the FBI killed MLK Jr. (While William Pepper's An Act of State makes a fairly convincing case for this, the proof is still not in 40 years later.)
- When AIDS hit, Dick Gregory was one of the first to declare that the government probably invented it to kill black people. (Today it's cool to say that, but when Dick Gregory said it, it was still slightly insane.)
- Right after Katrina, he wondered about the levees being secretly dynamited (a rumour that has popped up after each and every flood in the history of New Orleans, always without much evidence).
- At some point he hopped on the raw food and milk-is-a-deadly-poison bandwagons, and began going on dangerously long liquid fasts for both health and political reasons. An unsourced interview clip shows him telling people that animals won't drink tapwater because they know it's full of poison gas, and that "all diseases come from lack of drinking water".
- He decided that NASA faked the moon landings (and apparently all the space junk, too).
- In the NPR interview, he fretted that the CIA or the FBI might use his credit card to purchase plane tickets for terrorists.
- In a particularly bizarre rant posted on YouTube, Gregory says violence by black children should be blamed on whatever the white people are putting into malt liquor. "And it's your fault, too! Malt liquor is made by white companies but only sold in black neighborhoods, and you ain't checked it to see what's in it!" He's also very upset about manganese, which he claims is responsible for the elevated crime rate in a small Australian town located near a manganese mine. "Manganese will make you kill your mama... How much manganese are you sprayin' in my neighborhood at night while I'm asleep?!" At the end of the rant he makes a kind of menacing comment that white folks should be grateful for Hillary and Obama, "'cause if y'all had a brother like me, y'all would really be in trouble!"
- One of his strangest food-related theories (*explained* here) is that genetically engineered tomatoes containing fish cells would cause not only the tomato, but the human body, to retain water. "Waterlogged" tomato eaters will go to the doctor, be given bad medical advice, and end up dead. (Perhaps we'll never know, because that particular tomato died on the vine, so to speak.)
- And now, of course, Dick Gregory is a Truther. And he's going on some kind of liquid diet until the Truth comes out. He's giving Them until 2012.

Lest you go thinking that Gregory says these things because he's a patriot who just wants to make his country a better place, let me point out that he has described the U.S. as a "racist, evil, nasty country" and in a speech called it "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet". Doesn't sound to me like he holds out much hope for it.

Charles Manson is an Environmentalist

Since the Discovery Channel shooting, Jones' constant refrain has been that most - if not all - environmentalists are dangerous whackos. Last week, guest host Ringo Starr Paul Joseph Watson *proved* this by pointing out that Charlie Manson is a radical environmentalist who says "the same things" Al Gore, John Holdren, and other environmentalists say (I don't recall those guys saying they'd like to kill 50 million people, but never mind).

I'd like to criticize this sort of dodgy guilt-by-association logic, but instead I'll embrace it. You know, joining instead of beating.

• Two months before it killed a dozen Tokyo subway passengers with sarin gas, the Japanese death cult Aum Shinrikyo (now known as "Aleph") published an articled titled "Manual of Fear: The Jewish Ambition" in its periodical Vajrayana Sacca. It declared that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was an authentic plan for Jewish world takeover, blamed Israel for the genocide in Rwanda, and explained how postwar Japan was supposedly enslaved by Jews and Freemasons. The authors declared war on the murderous "shadow government" that "plans to brainwash and control" everyone, writing "Japanese, awaken! The enemy's plot has long sing torn our lives to shreds!". In addition to this b.s., leader Shoko Asahara told his followers that the U.S. government and the Japanese military were spraying cult facilities with sarin gas from airplanes.
• The Order, the white supremacist gang that killed Alan Berg, believed the American government had to be taken back from a coalition of Jews, bankers, and Communists.
• The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a cult offshoot of the LDS Church, believes the U.S. government is an anti-Christian "Beast system" with no real authority over them. For this reason they often do not pay taxes, ignore child labour laws, illegally apply for welfare and government subsidies to "bleed the Beast", and feel free to "marry" girls as young as 12.
• Tony Alamo, an evangelist recently convicted of sexually abusing ("marrying") girls as young as 8, tells his followers that his arrest was part of a Vatican/government plot to destroy his ministry. He also says that 9/11 was an inside job and there is a worldwide depopulation effort afoot.
• Jim Jones convinced his followers to commit suicide by telling them that the U.S. government was massed against them; they were pinned down in the jungle by military snipers, and the only way out was death. To convince them to move to the jungle in the first place, Jones had told them the U.S. government was planning to incarcerate them in "fascist concentration camps".
  

Moving away from cults, here a few more examples:

• In the early '80s, many gay men refused to undergo AIDS tests because they believed a rumour that they would be quarantined in U.S. concentration camps.
• The jihadists who planned the '93 World Trade Center bombing believed Arab-Americans would be rounded up and placed in U.S. concentration camps.
  
• In addition to warning the world about violent "Jewish Satanism" (and employing the blood libel), Pam Schuffert warns that if you find coloured stickers on your rural mailbox, you're going to be captured and taken to a U.S. concentration camp.
• John Todd, a convicted rapist who claimed to be a former Druid/Satanist/witch and collected money from various churches for telling his absurd stories, lived with the Weaver family shortly before they moved to Ruby Ridge. At this time in his "ministry" he was collecting firearms and money for an armed compound that never materialized, and was telling the Weavers (and anyone else who would listen) that Christians and Patriots would soon be rounded up and thrown into U.S. concentration camps.
  

All Crazy Gunmen are Left-wing

For over 20 years, James Von Brunn made it clear to the world that he loathed non-whites and non-Christians. But when Von Brunn walked into the D.C. Holocaust Museum last year and opened fire on the security guards, Alex Jones declared that the shooting was probably engineered jointly by the government (as part of a "Valkyrie takeover drill", whatever that is) and the Anti-Defamation League. Von Brunn was possibly threatened into participating.

Timothy McVeigh made it crystal clear that he planned the Oklahoma City Bombing partly in retalation for the Waco massacre. But in Jonestown, he's just an FBI patsy whose handlers probably told him he was fighting white supremacists, and he confessed multiple times only because he was drugged by the CIA.

When Joseph Stack plowed an airplane into an Austin office tower in February, he left behind a vitriolic letter blaming the IRS for all his troubles. But Stack, too, was just a government patsy - part of the Great Tea Partier Frameup of 2010 that never actually happened.

When children shoot up their schools, it's not because they're mentally ill or because they're psychotic little assholes, even if the videos and writings they leave behind point clearly in one of those directions. It's because of psych meds they might not even be taking.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA/military plant who didn't shoot at anyone. He was forced to pose as a leftist.

But when James Lee entered Discovery Channel headquarters and threatened to shoot employees for not doing enough to save the planet, leaving behind a radical environmentalist screed, Alex Jones accepted the media's explanation at face value.

So you see, when a right-wing extremist shoots people, he's only doing it on behalf of the government (or because he has been drugged and/or threatened by the government). His stated motives are not the real motives, and his intended goal is not his intended goal. But if a left-wing extremist shoots people, he really is doing exactly what he says he's doing.

"Paranoia Porn"

Thoughts on the Nightline piece on Jones and the accompanying ABC News article "Angry in America"

I did not like the overall tone of the reporting. If Alex Jones is inadvertently inciting violent actions by unbalanced listeners (and there's not much evidence of that; just an incident in Bohemian Grove that I'll describe later in this post), then Nightline had better go after the other conservative broadcasters who spew anger and paranoia, men with much bigger audiences than Jones - Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck. Any one of them could accidentally influence unstable fans to do crazy things to "save the country" or "get the bad guys".
Nor do I think that "paranoia porn" (while funny) is an appropriate label for the hardcore fearmongering and misinfo that these broadcasters represent. We can't forget that while the things Jones & Company say are amusing to some, it's all deadly serious to others.

But ABC did have some key, valid points: Jones is angry, and Jones is paranoid, and Jones twists the news out of all recognition to make it sound like part of a New World Order takeover agenda. Reporter Dan Harris heard Jones declaring that a CNN article endorses a one-child policy for America (it's Jones' contention that a global one-child policy will be instituted), but when Harris read the article he found a humorous piece that mentioned one-child policy in a sarcastic manner. This is something Jones does again and again: He finds sinister NWO propaganda in Squidbillies, articles with ironic titles, movies that he likes, and movies that he doesn't like (although, if he watched them carefully, he would see that some of them are actually consistent with his own beliefs).

In my opinion, the greatest "danger" posed by Jones is not violence by unhinged listeners, but the ignorance, fear, paranoia, and hatred that is instilled in many of his fans by the distorted information he and his guests provide. Do we really want a large group of people believing that:

• schizophrenics are demons?
• hate crimes are actually just events staged by Jewish interest groups?
• you should never go to the doctor?
• all food and water contamination is part of the plan to kill 90% of us?
• psychiatric meds are bad and you should never take them?
  
• if your country makes some guns illegal, it's morally acceptable to keep your guns and ambush police officers?

Do we want people fearing post offices, draconian plots that never happen, more draconian plots that never happen, and "imminent" gun confiscation?
At least one of Jones' fans went into hiding with his family last year to avoid corpse-eating robots, flu vaccines, and "imminent" martial law.
In 2002, believing that "child molesters and human sacrificers" were vacationing at Bohemian Grove, Richard McCaslin snuck onto the property armed with a handgun, a rifle, a sword, a knife, and a crossbow. He was apprehended before anyone was harmed.

But the bottom line is that Alex Jones isn't responsible for his listeners' actions. He has every right to spew misinformation and paranoia over the airwaves - a Constitutional right. And it's not the mainstream media's job to make people paranoid about his paranoia, as Nightline tried to do. It's up to the listeners themselves to check Jones' facts and think for themselves.

Crisis?

Illegal immigration down 67% from 2000 levels, study shows.

An Open Response to Critics of the Last Post

To those who have complained that I'm "defending" Adderall, prescription drugs in general, flu shots, the CDC, or whatever in the last post: I was not vouching for the safety or efficacy of any of the specific things in the "Lindsay Lohan Poisoned" post. I was pointing out that most of the information Jones gave in his video was wildly inaccurate. Not just in picky little details, but in major ones. He told you, as just one example, that the Council of Europe considers the H1N1 vaccine "toxic". I don't whether it's "toxic" or not, but I do know that the Council of Europe has said no such thing. Maybe Jones knows that, too.
Jones being wrong doesn't necessarily mean Adderall is good, or the WHO is always right. It means that Jones either wasn't paying any attention to his source material, or he deliberately presented misinformation and/or lies to millions of listeners. Take your pick. Whichever you choose, I suggest you consider whether it's truly possible for someone to be right about "the Big Picture" when they're consistentently wrong about the basic facts.

Check Jones' facts. Think for yourself.

"Lindsay Lohan Poisoned"

How many times can one person be wrong in 11 minutes? Let's find out.

Lately, Jones has been telling his radio listeners what to search for on Google, exercising his awesome power to influence Google Trends. Top searches he has created in this way include "Barry Soetoro", "Google Spies", and "Poison Tap Water". The latest is "Lindsay Logan Poisoned". Jones also made a short video on this theme, which you can watch below.

Since I am neither a 14-year-old girl nor an avid reader of Us Weekly, I actually had to waste some of my life looking into this. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat, so here's the deal:

Earlier this month, a California judge ordered 24-year-old Lindsay Lohan to undergo three months of rehab for alcohol abuse and drug addiction as part of her jail sentence, after she failed to show up for a DUI/cocaine posession hearing. She was reportedly using methamphetamine as well as cocaine. Upon examining her, however, UCLA doctors determined that she was neither an alcoholic nor a drug addict. This was a surprising diagnosis, because Lohan has been in rehab three times in the past three years, and has sporadically attended AA meetings since the age of 20.
The UCLA doctors also concluded she doesn't have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Bipolar Disorder, as other doctors had reportedly diagnosed.
They took her off the smorgasbord of medications she had been taking for these and other disorders: Adderall for ADHD; Ambien for sleeping problems; Nexium for heartburn; Trazadone and Zoloft for depression, and the potent painkiller Dilaudid for God-knows-what. She was released from treatment after less than a month.

After a year of treating Lohan like a coked-out street whore, TMZ and other gossip outlets pounced on this news and declared that all of Lohan's problems may have been caused by "bad diagnosis". This is a very popular media tactic: Trample celebrities into the dirt, then offer them a scrap of last-minute redemption when they can't be brought any lower.
Jones hopped on that bandwagon. Adderall, he says in his video message, is a methamphetamine that causes such adverse health effects as "brain shrinkage" and "heart expansion". He claims a junior high classmate died of a Ritalin-induced heart attack.

I'm going to set aside the question of whether children are being misdiagnosed with ADD/ADHD (IMO, they are) and just deal with the adverse effects of Adderall and other ADHD drugs for now.* There are some very important things to point out.

- We don't actually know if Lohan was diagnosed as having ADHD. An earlier tabloid report alleged she was taking Adderall for weight loss, as some people do (and she did drop a suspicious amount of weight at one time). Until this is resolved, we can't really blame some nameless doctors for misdiagnosing her.
- Her prior history of alcoholism and cocaine possession indicates that she does have substance abuse issues, so not all of her misbehaviour can be chalked up to prescription drug use.
- Adderall is an amphetamine. That means it's a stimulant. Contrary to what Jones says, though, Adderall effects are not just like the effects of cocaine or methamphetamine, which are more potent than prescription ADHD drugs.
- Jones claims in his video that "brain shrinkage" and "heart expansion" are two potential side effects listed on the insert for Adderall. Neither of these things are true. The most serious potential side effect of Adderall is increased blood pressure, which can pose a risk to children and teens with pre-existing heart conditions. It is apparently true that ADHD children, on average, have brains 3-4% smaller than the brains of children without the disorder, and a 10-year NIMH study concluded in 2002 that this holds true even for unmedicated ADHD kids. However, as I've repeatedly warned, it's foolish to concentrate on the results of a single study. More studies will have to be done before we can say with confidence that ADHD drugs do or do not cause a decrease in brain matter.
- "New reports have come out that over 80% of prescription drugs don't treat what they claim they're treating and have toxic side effects." This comes from a single source, New Jersey professor Donald Light, who presented a paper to the American Sociological Association earlier this month. It's curious that he presented it to sociologists, rather than to anyone in the medical field, but at any rate this paper ("Pharmaceuticals: A Two-Tier Market for Producing 'Lemons' and Serious Harm") has not yet been published, so it's impossible to check Light's facts at this time.
- Jones states that "fluoride-based" SSRIs like Prozac are hallucinogens, and repeats his misconception that most school shootings and infanticides are triggered by SSRI use. SSRIs are not "fluorine-based"; they contain a minute quantity of fluorine. This is explained very clearly on a JREF forum thread; you can check the details for yourself. Hallucinations are an extremely rare side effect of SSRIs, but SSRIs are not hallucinogens (which cause hallucinations in nearly everyone). As explained by Dr. David E. Nichols in this New York Times article, "While antidepressants like Prozac work by making the neurotransmitter serotonin linger in the gaps between brain cells, hallucinogens have a different mechanism of action. They are what are called serotonin agonists -- molecules that are very similar to the body's natural serotonin and, when taken in large doses, push the serotonin system into overdrive, making many brain systems more sensitive."

There's a glut of other mangled information and misinformation in this 11-minute video. Jones repeats the "lithium in the water" and "brain-eating vaccine" nonsense, as I knew he would. Probably the most flagrant *mistakes* he makes concern Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg's call for an inquiry into the possibility that WHO and pharmaceutical manufacturers conspired to hype the threat of H1N1.
First of all, Jones confuses the Council of Europe with the Council of the European Union when he states that Dr. Wodarg is on an "EU Commission". The Council of Europe is unaffiliated with the EU, though the two bodies do have common goals and a degree of cooperation. I know the names are similar, but let's get them straight. Wodarg was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
Jones' EU/Council of Europe confusion is particularly weird when you realize that Wodarg was actually a guest on Jones' show in February (you can listen to that interview on YouTube; Jones repeatedly tries to lead Wodarg into agreeing with various Swine Flu conspiracy theories, but Wodarg doesn't take the bait).
Secondly - but far more importantly - Jones states that Wodarg's inquiry has "conclusively found" that the H1N1 vaccine is "toxic". This is absolutely false. The inquiry focused on whether WHO and/or vaccine manufacturers exaggerated the severity of the H1N1 pandemic, not on the efficacy or safety of the European H1N1 vaccines. The committee's 18-page provisional report can be read in its entirety at the PACE website. I read it, and aside from concerns of possible insufficient testing of the vaccines and their elevated price (due to the use of patented adjuvants), author Paul Flynn makes no conclusions about the vaccines themselves.
Dr. Wodarg (who is no longer a member of the Council of Europe, but acted as an advisor for the inquiry) hasn't made any allegations about the "toxicity" of the H1N1 vaccines, either. Like PACE members, he has only expressed concerns that the vaccines may have been inadequately tested. He is not an opponent of vaccination. On the contrary, in an interview posted on his personal website, he stated that one of his central complaints about the handling of H1N1 was that the medical establishment could have inexpensively vaccinated the population by simply adding H1N1 virus to the flu vaccines already in stock. This couldn't be done, he complained, because some of the additives in the vaccines are patented. As mentioned, this criticism is echoed in Flynn's report.

I repeat: The Council of Europe does not claim that the H1N1 vaccine is "toxic".

Jones goes on to say that England has suspended H1N1 vaccination because of a tenfold increase in convulsions in children under the age of 5. He even shows a screenshot of the July 31 London Telegraph article that supposedly imparts this information

Clearly, he did not read the article. It has nothing to do with H1N1. It concerns one particular brand of seasonal flu vaccine in Australia. Neither Australia nor England has suspended H1N1 vaccinations! To date, the only country to suspend vaccinations for non-shortage reasons is Finland, and that involved concerns that a particular brand of vaccine (Pandemix) had caused narcolepsy in 27 residents of that country. This was a precautionary measure. Doctors in Finland are currently trying to determine if there is any link between the vaccine and the disorder.

Where on earth is Alex Jones getting all this inaccurate information? How do you confuse Australia with England and Finland, convulsions with narcolepsy, the European Union with the Council of Europe? I don't like to imagine that he's simply creating factoids to fit his own perspective, but his consistent lack of fact-checking and his insistence on repeating invalid information are starting to eat away at the benefit of the doubt.






* I sometimes wonder if Jones has ADD. He doesn't seem to research any single topic for more than a few minutes, and he complained that an episode of Squidbillies went on forever. It was 15 minutes long.

"The Pentagon probably wrote that up."

This. Is the funniest. Shit. I have ever seen.
With all earnestness, in his most serious listen-to-me-I'm-a-serious-radio-personality voice, Alex Jones dissects the New World Order subversive mass-programming messages concealed within...

Squidbillies.



This really does speak for itself, but a few comments are in order:

1. For a guy who doesn't watch much TV, Jones seems to watch a lot of TV.
2. As I've mentioned, GMO corn has not been shown to sterilize animals in any major study, much less "every major study". I'm not saying the stuff is necessarily good; I'm just saying let's get the facts straight before we start scaring millions of people.
3. Fluoride shrinks testicles? Are we sure about this? And how is "Barak Hussein Obama wants to put fluoride in your water to sterilize your testicles" any different from what Jones is saying? For that matter, why does Jones feel entitled to call everyone morons, but woe betide any cartoon that makes fun of anthropomorphic squids?
4. "If more than used for brushing is swallowed" is not a typo, dude.
5. If everyone is trying to covertly kill you, they're not going to tell you how they're doing it.
6. I'm pretty sure that redneck cepholopods and a "Rockefeller-type" character (Dan Halen) on a cable cartoon show are not actually role models to any sane person. If you start drinking fluoridated tapwater strictly because they do it on Squidbillies, then I suppose you'll also dress up as a giant banana the next time you go hunting, too.
7. Stereotypes in cartoons are not exactly one of the most pressing issues on the planet. I'd also like to point out that Squidbillies creator/writer Dave Willis is a native Georgian with no known ties to the Pentagon or any other government body.

Oh, and DO NOT TOUCH THE TRIM!

Brain-Eating B.S.

They're coming to get you, Barbara...

By Infowars standards, vaccines that will "lobotomize" the population are old news; Jones & Co. have already returned to calling Obama "Barry Soetoro" and freaking about the tapwater. But we'll go over the issue, anyway, because I'm sure Jones will return to it at some point, throwing references to "lobotomy vaccines" and "lithium in the water" into his broadcasts as though they're well-established facts of life.

The "lobotomy vaccines", as you've probably guessed, don't actually exist. Jones is referring to the research of Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford professor who has been studying the effects of chronic stress on animals and humans for the past three decades. In 2003, he announced that he is conducting research to develop a "vaccine-like" form of genetic therapy that will, if effective, buffer people from the adverse health effects of stress. The idea is to deliver to the cortex genes that produce neuroprotective proteins, counteracting the stress response.

Sapolsky says he's doing this research because relaxation techniques, talk therapy, and drugs (which only mask the effects of stress, rather than relieving them) are not solving the problem. He admits that his treatment is still years away from the clinical-trial phase, but feels it's crucial for science to tackle stress head-on. After observing the behavior of wild baboons in Kenya, Sapolsky came to suspect that tolerating a rigid social hierarchy can greatly increase stress and its assorted ills, particularly if submission is drummed into us from a young age. (I'm sure Alex Jones would agree with that.)

Sapolsky's work was recently profiled in a Wired magazine online article by Jonah Leher. It was this article (or a recap in London's Daily Mail) that spurred Jones to raise the alarm about "brain-eating vaccines". Jones ignored the bulk of the Wired article, which dealt with the well-documented effects of chronic stress and the possible evils of subordination, and went straight for the "vaccinelike treatment". And rather than weighing the pros and cons of such a hypothetical treatment, he summarily decided it was just another New World Order attempt to make us stupid, submissive, and apathetic. He automatically assigned the worst possible motives to Sapolsky and his assistants: Scientific tyranny. Never mind that Sapolsky's dream of a stress treatment may never materialize. Never mind that it will not, in all likelihood, ever become mandatory even if it does reach the market someday.
I encourage you to look into Sapolsky's work for yourself before deciding it's part of some NWO zombification plan. I don't fully understand all the science behind it, but I do realize that stress treatment is not intended to render people passive, stupid, or emotionless. Nor will it nullify the fight-or-flight response. It will not disable or destroy any part of the brain, as lobotomies did.

Jonah Leher responded to the panic with an editorial, pointing out that the Daily Mail condensed, paraphrased, and sexed-up the details of the Wired article. This triggered "right-wing paranoia", and soon other media outlets were portraying Sapolsky as a mad scientist attempting to create a zombie army. Leher concludes his commentary in a nasty way, declaring, "Alex Jones is a liar".

Jones isn't lying. He's just not fully informed about the research, he's jumping to the worst conclusions without talking to any of the principal players like Sapolsky, and he's villifying a potentionally beneficial treatment that hasn't even been tested on humans yet (and won't be for years, according to Sapolsky himself).
Jones has challenged Leher to be interviewed on his show, to prove that Jones' "documented" assertions about Sapolsky's research and other NWO mind-control plots are wrong. If Leher accepts this challenge and is allowed to speak freely on the program, I think Jones' wildly hyperbolic statements about "brain-eating vaccines" will be shown to be the alarmist factoids that they are.

Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)

In an August 4th Infowars article, Paul Joseph Watson states that "major mental health professionals are already pushing for lithium to be introduced into water supplies as a means of mass medicating against 'mood disorders'". Scary sh**, right? Yes, it is - until you realize that the only "major mental health professionals" even suggesting lithium in the water amount to exactly four Japanese researchers and one flake in Vancouver. And the Japanese guys made their suggestion in the pages of a periodical that isn't even remotely peer-reviewed, Medical Hypotheses. As one blogger put it, this is where scientists go when they are drunk or bored. It is not a medical journal by any stretch of the imagination.
In their Medical Hypotheses article, the Japanese researchers cited their own study, supposedly showing minor correlations between natural lithium levels in water supplies and suicide rates, which could be interpreted to indicate that more lithium equals fewer suicides. These results were published in The British Journal of Psychiatry last year, but the authors didn't suggest adding lithium to drinking water at that time. For that, they had to turn to a non-scientific journal. The only other similar study was conducted in Texas in the early '70s.
The Japanese study was also cited by the Vancouver professor who believes it merits further research, and that this "further research" (which no one seems to be conducting) could merit experimental dosing of water supplies.
Aside from these five dudes (who are insane, IMO), no one else in the scientific community is seriously advocating the use of lithium in the water. No one. In fact, pretty much everyone except these five guys is in perfect agreement that adding potent psychoactive substances to drinking water is a very bad idea. For Watson and Jones to suggest otherwise is irresponsibly alarmist. This is just one more example of the media taking the results of a single study and running wild with them, hyping the news until it's so out of proportion it's barely recognizable as science anymore. Jones should be media-savvy enough to realize this.

Watson's article is absolutely bursting with misinformation like "lithium in the water". Examples:

- "The U.S. government has been forced to admit that childhood vaccines preserved with thimerosol have contributed to the explosion in autism cases in the United States." This is in reference to the 2008 Poling decision, handed down by the federal "vaccine court". The government paid damages to the parents of 9-year-old Hannah Poling, who claimed their daughter suffered neurological damage from a series of routine childhood inoculations. People who still believe - despite a complete absence of evidence - that mercury in the vaccine preservative thimerosol causes autism in children celebrated the Poling decision, and frequently point to it as definitive proof that autism is linked to vaccines. The problem with this conclusion is that Hannah Poling isn't autistic. She suffered neurological damage due to a brain disease (encephalopathy) brought about by a mitochondrial disorder. To date, there has been no research into a possible link between mitochondrial disorders and vaccines. This is why the vaccine court conceded the case without an evidentiary hearing. The Polings couldn't provide any evidence that vaccination caused their daughter's impairment, and the court couldn't provide any evidence that it didn't. In short, the government couldn't "admit" anything.
Furthermore, Watson's mention of thimerosol is completely out of line, because the Polings believed their daughter was injured not by the preservative in the vaccines, but by immunological overload from having too many vaccinations at once. (Never mind that the viral load in the smallpox vaccine alone was greater than all the current childhood vaccines put together, and that this didn't result in an autism explosion in the 1950s!)

- John Holdren (Obama's science czar) is still promoting the use of sterilants in drinking water to curb the population. Watson points to a 2006 article written by Holdren as evidence of this, but all the article shows us is that Holdren is still concerned (as are many people) about runaway population growth. Nowhere in the article does he advocate involuntary sterilization. Being concerned about overpopulation does not mean you are into eugenics, mass murder, or any of the other things Jones warns us the "elites" are into, even if you did express a few absurd ideas in the '70s. My own mother advocates zero population growth, but is not a eugenicist by any means. She and Holdren are from a generation that is highly concerned about the world's future.

Watson then quotes some of the comments that Infowars readers have made on the article itself, including a registered nurse who claims he/she is abandoning his/her profession because he/she disapproves of vaccination and water fluoridation. This person repeats the often-cited but never-verified assertion that the Nazis used fluoridated water to "make the Jews more docile". Watson also brought this up in his first Infowars article on "brain-eating vaccines".
I have been trying to trace this factoid to its source for over a year, and it leads only to dead ends. The most authorative source of the Nazi fluoride story was an anti-fluoridation crusader of the 1950s named Charles Perkins, who also declared (without providing any evidence at all) that water fluoridation was a Communist plot brought to the U.S. by Soviet brainwashers. Perkins did not give any source for his statement that the Nazis used water fluoridation in the concentration camps, and at any rate fluoride does not render people docile. (If it did, wouldn't crime rates have dramatically decreased since the introduction of fluoride to municipal water supplies?)

As error-riddled and alarmist as Watson's articles on the issue are, Jones' video on the "brain-eating vaccines" and "lithium in the water" is even less factual and even more fear-based. Jones states that articles in Time magazine, the New York Times, and "all the major medical journals" are promoting the idea of putting lithium in our water. This is not the case. Those periodicals were reporting the results of the Japanese study, not promoting adding drugs to the water. In fact, The New York Times and BBC articles both quoted Sophie Corlett, director of the British mental-health charity Mind, who warns against adding drugs to the water.

The road to hell is paved with GMO corn and suicidal shrimp

As you've probably noticed, Jones' biggest bugaboos these days are not false flag terrorism, martial law, or even Obama's secret identity as the Kenyan-born AntiChrist. No, he's currently more worried about tapwater, chicken nuggets, MSG, vaccines, and other forms of depopulation-by-food-and-healthcare. On yesterday's broadcast, he ranted for a good twenty minutes about suicidal shrimp. The way he told the story, shrimp are so stoned on fluoxetine (Prozac) that has made its way into the ocean from wastewater runoff that "they just don't care anymore!" and have "lost their inhibitions" (if shrimp even have inhibitions, that is). I pictured thousands of shrimp hurling themselves into nets, or maybe just floating around obliviously while they're scooped off into scampiland. It reminded me a little too much of Disney's suicidal-lemming hoax, but here's the deal: University of Portsmouth researchers have found that shrimp exposed to the same concentration of fluoxetine found in treated wastewater are five times more likely to swim toward light rather than away from it. This would be a dangerous habit in nature, of course, because shrimp are more easily detected by predators in the light.
But this is one study, and its results don't exactly make me tremble for the future of our oceans. If fluoxetine made shrimp 15% more likely to swim towards light, then maybe we'd have a problem. But wait, we already have a problem when it comes to shrimp: People are killing more shrimp than wastewater fluoxetine could possibly kill. Thanks to our hugely increased consumption of shrimp in the past decade, we've created overfishing, wasted shrimp catches, and the incidental killing of other marine life by trawlers' nets. Not to mention the human toll of shrimp fishing. Then there's the oil. The only good news for shrimp is that with oil-induced prices soaring, many people are backing away from buying shrimp. If these trends resume, however, we'll never have to worry about shrimp being too stoned to evade capture - there won't be any shrimp.

Maize and Monsters

When I saw that Jones had reviewed the film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I flashed back to his bizarro review of Watchmen (in which he declared that Allan Moore is a Freemason and that "Ozymandian" [sic] was supposed to be the hero of the film, among other absurdities) and I cringed. But there was no need to cringe, after all - Jones gets The Road. It's just that he tries to liken nuclear holocaust (or whatever happened in The Road) to things like HIV as an engineered bioweapon, the deaths of bees from GMO corn, and mercury "deliberately" put into high-fructose corn syrup. "Folks, that is even much more horrific than this nightmare dystopic film."




Oh wait, I spoke too soon about Jones understanding the film. After talking about the horrors of GMO corn, he states that the film had some "global warming propaganda" in it. Apparently the cinematic destruction of the atmosphere, along with the landscape, is "propaganda" now. May have been caused by nuclear war, but it's still NWO fake environmentalism in Jones' book. Then he launches into a random litany of complaints about spider-goats, depopulation, and the destruction of the family.

At the very end he somehow brings himself back to the movie that he's supposedly been reviewing, calling it "truly the greatest masterwork in filmmaking that I have ever seen."

Now I agree that The Road, both book and film, are brilliant and strike at the heart of what makes us human. Highly recommended if you're not too squeamish. But what about the terrors of GMO food, sterile cattle, and some of the other stuff Jones talks about in his "review"?

"[T]hey're feeding GMO crops to animals that is causing them to become sterile. "
The rumour that GMO foods is causing sterility in cattle and other animals comes primarily from a single Russian study. Please keep in mind that the Russians have also produced studies documenting the "reality" of things like artificial reincarnation and torsion physics; the problem of pseudoscience in Russia has been troubling true Russian scientists for quite some time, and many of them have taken a stand against it. But let's put that aside for a moment. The Russian study was conducted by biologist Alexei V. Surov and his Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the National Association for Gene Security. Their results have not yet been published, but Surov has claimed that three generations of hamsters fed Monsanto soy suffered sterility, increased infant mortality, increased oral hair, and slower growth rates in comparison to control groups that were not fed any Monsanto soy.

By this point in our history, we should know better than to base any belief on a single scientific study, particularly one that hasn't even been published yet. How many times has the mainstream media jumped all over the results of a new study, only to backpedal or retract their alarmist statements when it comes out that, oops, that particular study was deeply flawed and about a dozen other studies have contradicted its findings? I've lost count.
A 2005 study, also conducted by a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, concluded that rats fed GMO corn had reduced birthrates and higher mortality. This study was never published, and its reported results have been nullified not only by other scientists, but by half a dozen prior studies that showed no differences between animals fed GM soy and animals fed organic soy (Marshall, 2007; Brake and Evanson, 2004; Teshima et al., 2000; Zhu et al., 2004; Hammond et al., 1996; Cromwell et al. 2002).

That's not to say there isn't cause for concern. A Baylor study found that corncob bedding made with GM corn increased estrogen levels in rats, leading to reduced sex drive and reproductive cancers. A 2008 Austrian study showed that mice fed GM corn had reduced birth rates and lower birth weights. These results are alarming, but they're a far cry from declaring that GMOs are causing widespread sterility. To date, there have been no reports of increased sterility in livestock.

"[T]he BT corn that grows its own natural pesticide is wiping out the bees. In all the studies, it's causing massive organ failure in lab rats."
Jones ran these two things together, but I'll deal with them separately because one statement is supported by (guess what?) a single recent (and controversial) study, and the other isn't supported by any studies at all.
Last year, the International Journal of Biological Sciences published the results of a study by a French team led by Gilles-Eric Séralini (already a vocal critic of GMOs). The study supposedly found that rats fed Monsanto corn with pesticide had more signs of liver and kidney toxicity than control groups. The "study" was not actually an experiment, but a re-analysis of the data from an earlier study conducted by the same team, and the authors themselves concluded that they did not find toxicity, but signs of possible toxicity.
Google "GMO organ failure" and you will find many scientific critiques of the French study. Do what you will with this information. Personally, I think corn is one of the least nutricious and most overused food sources in the world, and I avoid it whenever possible. This means staying away from just about all processed foods and beverages.

Now, on to the corn. Bt corn is corn that has been genetically modified to create Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that acts as a natural pesticide. A 1999 study published in Nature concluded that the pollen from Bt corn could harm Monarch butterfly caterpillars, despite the fact that Bt does not concentrate in the pollen. This study has been nullified; rather than declining precipitously, Monarch numbers actually increased.
Next, researchers began to wonder if Bt corn was responsible for the mysterious decline in honeybees. A March 2007 report by the the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium revealed that there is no evidence that pollen from Bt corn has contributed to this decline. Furthermore, bee deaths are occurring in areas of Europe and Canada where Bt corn isn't grown. If Jones still believes that GM corn is the culprit, then he's about three years behind in his research. The cause(s) of "colony collapse disorder" remain unknown.

"Then when you read the globalist plans, where they openly want to destroy the family and basically mechanize humanity and turn us basically into biological androids, you realize that the threat in the short term isn't asteroids, it's not global warming, but that it is the elite with their open-air genetic engineering."
For my entire life, I have heard conservatives and fundamentalist Christians warn that They are going to dismantle the traditional family. Some say it's part of the "homosexual agenda". Some say it's a Communist plot. Some say it's both. (Weirdly, no one seems to point any fingers at the divorce industry.) Some, like Jones, say it's a key part of the New World Order/UN takeover of the planet. But where, in writing, do the globalists make this plan clear? Jones' vague references to white papers and "a Pentagon study I read years ago" aren't helping me find the literature that lays out The Plot to Destroy the Nuclear Family. I need less invective and way more information, Mr. Jones.

Rather than airing legitimate concerns and solid research about the problems of genetic engineering, or the breakdown of the family, Jones refers to the least credible (and most alarming) information out there, then ramps up the fear factor tenfold by tying these issues to one of the grimmest post-apocalyptic films ever produced. Hmmm. Isn't this kind of how the mainstream media operates? Wild generalizations, cherry-picked data, over-hyped results, vague warnings of doom? Only instead of villifying religious extremists or trans fats, Jones is trying to get you to fear science itself. The lesson, as usual, is "Science is really freaking scary and only crazy evil bastards use it." Let's face it, he despises just about every technological innovation of the past century (except the Internet, of course). Robots terrify him. Inoculation infuriates him. Thumbscanners and RealID cards horrify him. Anti-depressants depress him. Universities drive him to the brink of homicidal rage. Would he prefer that our society return to a pre-intellectual state? Or maybe a post-scientific one? Wouldn't those societies look a little bit like... The Road?