Infowhat?

There's silliness to spare on Infowars right now. There are a few articles on important issues, like "Dollar Plunges After UN Call to Ditch Greenback", and a piece that questions neo-natal screening for schizophrenia. There's mention of possible HIV infection at a VA hospital in Missouri. There's stuff that is also saturating the mainstream media right now (job loss, allegations of police misconduct and brutality at the G20, Goldman Sachs links to the oil spill, etc.). But then there are these messes:

• "Scientists admit chemtrails are creating artificial clouds". As I've said before, Jones' idea of "admit" and mine are slightly different. In the Daily Mail article cited by Paul Joseph Watson, scientists are "admitting" only that jets leave contrails, and that the skies over areas with heavy flight traffic can be so full of contrails/moisture/clouds that the amount of sunlight reaching the ground is decreased. This is not a newsworthy story. It is a side effect of jet pollution, and maybe we should worry about that before we even get started on "chemtrails". First off, how much of today's hugely increased jet travel is actually necessary? Much of it is for business trips that don't accomplish anything that couldn't be done with Skype or even just an old school teleconference.
• The "art" of looking for occult symbolism in pop music videos, which has been taken to tragicomic lengths by the likes of Lenon Honor and "Vigilant Citizen", has caught the attention of the Guardian - a paper that just loves to walk the wobbly line between the Washington Post and Weekly World News. Dorian Lynskey's article "Lady Gaga and the New World Order" describes Vigilant Citizen's theories about Lady Gaga's links to the Illuminati, Satanism, and mind control. But Lynskey clearly doesn't put much stock in them. He even notes similarities between Vigilant Citizen's work and the anti-rock rantings of uberconservatives like David Noebel, which is not a flattering comparison. And at the end of the article, Lynskey concludes that such analysis is a textbook example of "the paranoid style". He writes, "To the Vigilant Citizen, a pop star appearing 'vacuous, incoherent and absent-minded' must be 'a tribute to mind control' rather than them actually being vacuous, incoherent and absent-minded." I have no idea why Jones & Co. think this article supports any of their contentions about the New World Order. It's just a fluff piece about a slick-but-weird American website and American right-wing paranoia in general. The Guardian is laughing at you, Mr. Jones. For the record, I don't believe Lady Gaga is actually vacuous, though her music might be. IMO, any chick who tattoos Rilke on her flesh has more than the usual shit going on upstairs. And let's face it, she's a hell of a lot more interesting than Madonna with her macrobiotic gruel and her abducted children. It's Paul Joseph Watson's commentary that's vacuous. His analysis of pop music trends boils down to "pop music sucks" and "robots are scary". He trashes Katy Perry for failing to become the next Amy Grant, but gives Eminen a green light for "pushing back" against the "Babylon system". Hey, never mind those tributes to rape and murder, or the blatant pharmaceutical product placement, or the same promiscuity that you revile in female popstars, or the overt occult references in his early work. Never mind that in his song "My Darling", Eminem says he "sold his soul" just like Katy Perry. I mean, he rapped a little about 9/11 Truth, so it's all cool, right? If inconsistency was a terminal disease, Watson would be in ICU right now.
  
• "Israel Suspected in Bogus Claim Iran Developing Nuclear Trigger", by Kurt Nimmo, has one hell of a misleading title (one that was echoed in the latest issue of Nexus magazine, BTW). Now I don't doubt for a second that the nuclear threat posed by Iran is trumped-up or even just fabricated, but exactly who suspects Israel of creating the claim that appeared in the Times of London last December? Reading Nimmo's title, you'd think some government officials or investigative reporters suspect Israel. But no. The only person who has named Israel as a suspect is long-retired CIA agent Philip Giraldi, and his "evidence" is thin indeed. The intelligence officials who are actually looking into the 2009 report haven't reached any such conclusions. So the question becomes, is Giraldi a reliable source? The Nexus article mentions that in 2005 Giraldi identfied Michael Ledeen as an author of the infamous "yellowcake document" that led to the Plame Affair. This turns out to be an empty claim, as no one has conclusively proven its authorship. Besides, the first such allegations against Ledeen were made by journalists in 2004. Something quite similiar happened with the "Habbush letter"; Giraldi declared that Dick Cheney was behind the forgery, but only after journalist Ron Suskind did the actual work. Are we seeing a pattern here? A journalist digs up some juicy intel info, and Giraldi pokes his head out of retirement to say, "Oh, yeah, I already knew about that, and here's what my former colleagues from two decades ago have to say about it." Then he gives the alt media a few scraps of info that don't really contribute any knowledge to the events in question.