Assorted Summer Weirdness: Chicken nuggets, killer blood, and Deadheads who actually do stuff

Whether you think Alex Jones is on-target with his Big Picture or not, you have to admit that a lot of the bizarre factoids he throws into his broadcasts make roughly as much sense as the stuff that people mutter to themselves on buses when they think no one is listening. Most of the time he's trying to impart half-digested information from credible sources, but he garbles it so badly it amounts to a one-person game of Whispers. Sometimes he has no idea what he's talking about, and it amounts to absurd alarmism. Either way, it's annoying as hell. While expanding his studio and cranking out a dozen films a year, he somehow forgot to hire a fact-checker to help make him sound sane. Oprah, Glenn Beck, and quite a few other radio and TV personalities have an identical problem, of course, but because Alex Jones' message is already so over the top (Everyone's trying to kill you! Get bullets and food before it's too late!), his mistakes tend to be super-sized as well.

• Bill and Melinda Gates have viruses that can reprogram your brain, and will be in total control of the weather 20 years from now. (July 5/10 broadcast) I'm not sure how these two things are related, but the message is clear: Bill Gates is the scariest mother on the planet. Never mind that pretty much everything Jones has ever said about Gates has been completely, utterly wrong. Not only does his dad run Planned Parenthood (he doesn't), but Gates wants to kill everyone (he doesn't) and he doesn't have to pay taxes (he does). Anyway, yes, brain researchers have been tampering with ways to alter brain activity using lasers and a virus that attacks blue-green algae. It's complicated, but the bottom line is that this research has absolutely no connection to Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation. It's being funded, sponsored, and carried out by MIT. And I know of no instance in which Bill Gates has expressed the slightest interest in controlling the weather. I mean why bother, he controls everything else.
• It has now been declassified that images of Patty Hearst were all scripted and stage-managed by the FBI. (July 5/10 broadcast) A Joseph Cannon story re-posted on Infowars just last year doesn't mention anything about this new, declassified information that blows the lid off the Hearst kidnapping - in spite of the misleading headline "SLA Worked for The Man". That's because there isn't any new, declassified information. The Hearst story has remained fundamentally the same on all sides since it occurred. When Kathleen Soliah went to trial, her attorneys tried to get testimony from a former SLA member who claimed that Hearst wasn't raped as she claimed, and that she expressed enthusiasm for robbing banks and such. This man, Jack Scott, died of cancer before his testimony could be recorded. So that's pretty much the extent of the "new information" that has come out about Hearst. The FBI hasn't released any new documents on the case... um, ever. If the SLA and/or the kidnapping were in any way engineered by the FBI, that has yet to be proven.
  
• Rockefellers coined the term "philanthropy" and basically started the practice. It's true that John D. Rockefeller made huge contributions to and founded numerous colleges, schools, and institutes, but philanthropy in general actually took a nosedive during the railroad-tycoon, bathing-in-gold-nuggets days when the Rockefellers came to financial power. American philanthropy in its true sense (not in its current, tax-dodging sense) originated with the early colonists and the founding brothers of the U.S., particularly Benjamin Franklin.
• Silicon has been found in chicken nuggets. If by "found" Jones means "has always been a listed ingredient in", then he is absolutely correct. Silicon dioxide, commonly known as silica, is used in many foods and drink mixes to prevent sticking. Silica also naturally occurs in most grains, water, and meats because it's one of the most common minerals on the planet. It's perfectly safe to digest in dioxide form. Even if chicken nuggets did contain ground glass, though, I think that would be the least of their problems.
  
• The NAACP promotes aborting 51% of black babies. This is a less a factoid than a deliberately misleading statement. The NAACP briefly gave its stamp of approval to legalized abortion in 2004, backing away from that position when supporters expressed disapproval. Since that time, the organization has largely avoided the issue - which is the wise thing to do, if the NAACP wishes to preserve its tax-exempt status.
  
• A new kind of fake blood made from umbilical cord blood, designed for use on the battlefield, will cause "massive mutations". I had no freaking clue what Jones was talking about here. He was clearly referring to some kind of genetically engineered stuff, but so far as I knew there have been no major innovations in hemoglobin-based blood substitutes for a while. Besides, cord blood is already being used in transfusions. Then I learned that an Ohio company called Arteriocyte, with DARPA funding, has been developing artificial blood derived from stem cells. The product is pending FDA approval, but if it works it will turn stem cells into red blood cells through “blood pharming,” a machine process that artificially simulates what blood marrow does in the body. One umbilical cord’s worth of cells will be able to produce enough blood for three transfusions. So the question is, can blood pharming be dangerous? Will it cause mutations in people who receive transfusions? Theoretically, there should be no difference between your own blood and the artificially produced blood. The blood itself is not genetically engineered, it's just created outside the human body. When "test tube babies" were first introduced, people freaked out because the fertilization that normally takes place in the privacy of the womb was happening in a lab for all to see. Exploitation films about the weirdness of in vitro fertilization were cranked out, and conservatives ranted about the hubris of science and the dangers of messing with God's handiwork. Today, of course, millions of test tube babies have grown into healthy, productive, happy people.
• A secret "Dead Head Group" has been working diligently for years to tank the world economy, as reported by Rick Wiles about 9 years ago (and since reported by several alt news outlets, including NewsMax and of course Prison Planet).
  
  This leads to two key questions:
  
  1. What is the Dead Head Group, who belongs to it, and why would anyone in the business of making money want to kill the economy?
  
  2. Who the freaking hell is Rick Wiles?
  
  The second question is much easier to answer, so I'll start there. Rick Wiles is a radio evangelist who hosts his own syndicated program, TruNews Radio. He's also a prophet of sorts, predicting major world events.
  On to question #2. The only source of the Dead Head material is Russian economist Tatyana Koryagina. She revealed the existence of this shadowy group during an interview by Rick Wiles in November 2001, having left it out of her startling July 19, 2001 article in Pravda. In the 2001 article, she had announced that an August attack on the U.S. by a "shadow government" would collapse the country's economy. This indicates that she had some link to intelligence, as her prediction of a U.S. attack was off by only one month (note, please, that she didn't attempt to warn anyone outside Russia). But the "economic collapse" bit didn't quite pan out quite as she anticipated.
  
  In her interview with Wiles (available here), Korayagina didn't say that anyone was trying to sabotage the U.S. economy, but she did contend that neo-Marxist scholars have been trying to slow or limit industrial growth for the benefit of the planet. In other words, watch out for Commie treehuggers. Yawn. Nothing new here. But wait! Korayagina also mentioned that some of these money-hating bastards operate through secret societies. She coyly declined to name them, of course, but she did reveal that one such group is referred to as "The Dead Head".
  
  So that's it. A single Russian economist mentioned The Dead Head to a radio evangelist on a single occasion 8 years ago, without giving any specific details about it. We don't know any of the members, how it functions, where it operates, or anything else. The NewsMax article cited by Jones discusses Korayagina's prediction of collapse and Russia's possible foreknowledge of 9/11, but doesn't even mention the Dead Head group.
  "Underwhelming evidence" would be an overstatement, here. This is basically just one-woman urban legend. Korayagina had plenty to say about Marxists and other underminers of the economy. She hinted that these people, and those who want to rule the world, are "religious fundamentalists". She had lots to say about another unnamed secret organization that was involved with 9/11 and plans to take over the world, not making it clear if this group is connected to the Dead Head Marxists or is a parallel effort. She had very little to say about fiscal shortsightedness, national debt, inflated defense spending, speculators, or any of the other things that actually caused our current financial crisis. It seems to me that Ms. Korayagina simply had an axe to grind against communism and/or socialism and perhaps the Jewish people, and a fringe radio preacher gave her the opportunity to do so.
  
  Then Jones comes along and translates "slow down economic development" as "utterly destroy the world economy". What he does not mention (or does not know) is that Koryagina attempted to play her own role in the collapse of the U.S. economy, by urging her fellow Russians to drop the U.S. dollar immediately - the same stance for which Jones has been excoriating the UN.