Robot Ebola Copters & Super Congress Gun Raids

You know, the usual.

Media Matters has posted a detailed report on some of Jones's most recent hysterical rants, apparently not realizing that this is like reporting "Earth rotated on its axis today." Two points in the report stand out: Jones's claim that the FBI and ATF are conducting illegal searches of homes belonging to Texans who purchase more than one firearm, and his weird screed about "robot helicopters spraying airborne Ebola" to kill us all.

The gun-search claim was mentioned on the Aug. 1/11 broadcast. The information comes from "two Texas gun dealers" and "someone in my office". Unimpeachable sources, I'm sure, but we're gonna need a bit more than that before we start freaking out. The NRA hasn't reported any such searches in its news feed. It's true, though, that a new regulation requires firearms dealers in U.S.-Mexico border states to notify the ATF if someone buys more than one semiautomatic rifle in a five-day period, a regulation that already applies to handgun sales throughout the U.S. Yesterday, the NRA filed a lawsuit against the federal government over this.

The robot-copter rant came the following day, in response to a caller who despairs for the future (how could you not be miserable, if you believe everything you hear from Alex Jones?). The story must be at least three years old, because he cites his source as the Sunshine Project, which shut down in 2008. SP kept tabs on the latest biochem and nonlethal weapons technology. The website's last update was posted in October 2007.
Freaking out over old news is Jones's stock in trade. After the Rocky Mountain News folded, he was still citing an article about a biohazard incinerator in Colorado, insisting the thing was really a crematorium for the remains of Americans who would soon be slaughtered en masse. Sound familiar? Yeah, that's because we hear this shit every other day. The New World Order is out to kill 99% of us. They just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Jones is possibly referring to this document, the outline for a presentation given to the Airline Pilots Association by the DoD's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program in 2001. It's pretty bizarre. The JNLW proposes using commercial aircraft to spray immobilizing agents or other chemicals onto battlefields, unruly mobs, or what-have-you. There's even a proposal for using nonlethals to knock out plane passengers, presumably in a hijacking situation. But there's nothing in this presentation about drone copters, so let's move on.
Back in June, Jones reported that surveillance drones have already been in use within the U.S. for years. If you combine the notions of planes spraying nonlethal chemicals onto crowds and drone aircraft monitoring crowds, you could surmise that drone aircraft will soon be dumping chemicals. But "airborne Ebola"? First of all, there's no such thing. This is clearly a reference to the infamous comments made by University of Texas-Austin professor Eric Pianka back in 2006, one of Jones's favourite bits of "evidence" that They are plotting to wipe out all but 1% of the world's population. I've discussed this before. The bottom line is that Pianka is a herpetologist, not a biochemist, and he was referring to a naturally occurring (not to mention fictional) strain of Ebola.

Ebola is easily transmitted, has a high kill rate (50-89%), and can't be cured. So if They did get their hands on an airborne strain, it's unlikely They would be reckless enough to spray this particular virus on their own turf. After releasing it into the open air, They would have to cower in underground bunkers for months, if not years.

So once again, we have Alex Jones grabbing some disparate facts and factoids and smushing them into one big ball of irrational panic. Not exactly headline news.