Tuesday, September 28, 2010

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".

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

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.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

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.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

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.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

"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:
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.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

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.

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I'm a 30ish housefrau living in Canada

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