LEAVING ALEX JONESTOWN

1 Crazy Notion 'til Christmas: The False Flag Underwear Bomb

2011-12-24T14:44:00.001-08:00

On Christmas Day, 2009, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam. The plane was heading for Detroit.

Umar looked like an ordinary guy, wearing a baggy T-shirt and jeans. No one would have guessed he came from one of the wealthiest families in Nigeria, if not all of Africa. His father, Umaru Abdul Mutallab, was a wildly successful banker and businessman, and Umar and his 15 older siblings had been sent to excellent international schools and universities. In fact, Umar was supposed to have been in school throughout the latter half of 2009, attending the San'a Institute for the Arabic Language in Yemen. No one in his family had been pleased about his choice of this school, and none of them knew that he had basically dropped out after a month. In October, his father refused to fund a seven-year course in sharia law and Arabic that Umar supposedly wanted to take. Umar informed his dad that he had other backers who would sponsor and support him, and wrote that he was breaking off contact with his family because he had discovered "the real Islam". Mutallab feared that his son had become a radical Islamist (Yemen has long been a hub for Islamist terrorism). He was worried enough about this possibility to report it to CIA agents at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, in late November.

This was not the first time that Umar's activities had alarmed people. In May 2009, while studying in Australia, he applied for a student visa to study "life coaching" at a certain college in the UK. Officials noticed that the college didn't actually exist. His application was rejected and his name is added a Home Office watch list, preventing him from entering the UK.

After his father's warning to the embassy, Umar was allowed to keep his U.S. visa (issued in 2008), but his name was immediately added to the U.S. Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a database maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. However, it was not added to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database, which functions as a source list for both the Secondary Screening Selectee list and the No Fly list. Umar would have no trouble getting on a plane to the U.S.

So far as anyone knows, Umar wasn't taking any courses in December 2009. He says he was working with Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Umar had long held more extreme religious views than the rest of his family. In 2005 he posted comments to an Islamist website, reeling out a "jihad fantasy" in which Muslims would rule the world. This was the same year he began studying engineering and business finance at University College, London, and attending the East London Mosque in Whitechapel, a mosque known for inviting some extremist figures to give speeches (take a look at some of the visiting lecturers listed on the mosque's Wikipedia entry).
He became president of University College's Islamic Society, and in 2007 organized a five-day series of lectures about the War on Terror. Speakers included former Guantánamo Bay detainees and human rights lawyers. The topic of one lecture was "Jihad vs. Terrorism".

On the Christmas Day flight, Abdulmutallab had an explosive device sealed in a pouch hidden in his underwear. As the plane neared Detroit, he used a liquid-filled syringe to ignite the explosive powder. It burned, but did not explode. Fellow passengers immediately noticed the unusual odor coming from his seat, and saw flames develop. Dutch filmmaker Jasper Shuringa took it upon himself to tackle Abdulmutallab, struggling with him as flight attendants put out the flames (another man who helped subdue the bomber, Theophilus Maranga, sued the airline).

The Blame Game, Detroit Edition

To explain what really happened on Christmas Day two years ago, Alex Jones brought ~~Mr. Lebowski~~ Webster Tarpley onto his show. Tarpley presented the following suppositions and factoids to support his contention that Abdulmutallab was not a terrorist, but a patsy (Tarpley's statements are in bold):

- Abdulmutallab was mentally defective, with a developmental disorder of some kind, incapable of doing anything without close supervision. There is no absolutely no evidential support for this. Though he was known as a quiet young man, Abdulmutallab studied complex subjects at excellent schools, wrote normally, and served as president of a university Islamic associaton.
Jones is quite fond of calling terrorists "sub-mental" or mentally ill. He has repeatedly stated that Marinus van der Lubbe was "retarded", though the man spoke two languages and functioned perfectly well as a labour volunteer. Tarpley and Jones both referred to shoe bomber Richard Reid as "retarded". Reid was a career criminal with little education, but there is no evidence that he was of below-average intelligence. If he was mentally handicapped, he may have been able to successfully plead not guilty, or could appeal his conviction on those grounds.

- Abdulmutallab was probably selected and groomed by MI5 while studying in London. This is a completely unsupported statement. Like all LaRouchites, Tarpley really, really hates England.

- Abdulmutallab purchased a one-way ticket to Detroit, which should have served as a huge terror tip-off. This is incorrect. Abdulmutallab purchased a return ticket from Lagos to Detroit (via Amsterdam) from a KLM office in Ghana on December 16, 2009. (see the Telegraph's timeline)

- A "patsy chaperone", a well-dressed Indian man, accompanied Umar to the ticket counter in Amsterdam to explain that Abdulmutallab did not have his passport. This goes to show that he was incapable of independent action, and that someone was pulling strings to get him on the flight. The "Indian man" (also described as an African man) reportedly seen with Abdulmutallab has not been identified. He could have been an accomplice, or an acquaintance. No one knows. So Tarpley doesn't know, either. And airport officials in Amsterdam have stated that Abdulmutallab did present a valid Nigerian ID and a U.S. visa.

Why Mrs. Cleaver, you're looking prettier than usual today

The conspiranoids of the world didn't have much to work with in the underwear bomb case. Abdulmutallab's own father suspected him of being a radicalized Islamist. He fit the same profile as many young, upper-class Muslim men who are turned on to extremism while studying abroad. He was caught almost literally red-handed trying to blow up an airplane. What kind of conspiracy theory can you cobble out of this sad, all-too-familiar story?

Enter Mr. Haskell. The following comes from Haskell's interview on The Alex Jones Show.

Kurt and Lori Haskell were passengers on Flight 253. The married attorneys were returning from a vacation in Africa.
Kurt went to the media immediately after the would-be bombing to declare that the FBI and nearly everyone else involved with the incident were lying; Abdulmutallab was a patsy in a U.S. government operation.
Haskell said he and his wife had watched the "Indian man" intercede on Abdulmutallab's behalf at the airport in Amsterdam, getting him onto the flight without his passport. In Detroit, all the passengers were detained at the airport by the FBI. Bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in to sniff luggage, and one dog sat down beside a carry-on bag belonging to a man Haskell refers to as "the man in orange", a thirtyish man of "Indian or Pakistani descent". The M.I.O. was taken into a separate room for about an hour, and when he emerged he was in cuffs. FBI agents escorted him somewhere else. The other passengers were told they had to be moved to another part of the airport because there could be another explosive device in the area. They were ushered into a corridor.

The FBI denied that anyone other than Abdulmutallab had been detained. Later, it stated that one man had been taken into custody over a passport issue, but declined to give the man's name or any details.
No explosive devices were found outside of Umar's underwear.
In October, Haskell informed Jones he intends to sue the FBI to obtain more information about the bombing attempt, including the identity of the M.I.O.

Jones unreeled quite a lot of nonsense during his interview of Haskell. He said there are "over a million Americans" on the No Fly list (there are about 400,000 people on the list). He said Abdulmutallab's dad went to the U.S. embassy "repeatedly" (he went once or twice) to report that his son was "training with terrorists in Yemen" (he said only that he was concerned his son could be involved with radicalized Muslims).
Jones said, "Witnesses report someone videotaping the whole flight, aimed at the underwear bomber..."
This has been reported by numerous alternative news outlets and YouTube users, but the incident behind it is a little less than astonishing. A young mother named Patricia Keepman merely told the media that a man in her section of the plane (about 20 seats behind Abdulmutallab) was using his videocamera during the flight. Keepman did not know what he was filming, as he didn't seem to be aiming the camera at any particular person, so she assumed it was the man's first flight and thought little of it.
As this person has not been identified, it's entirely possible he was recording his flight for posterity. There would be little sense in videotaping the back of Abdulmutallab's head from a distance for surveillance purposes.

It's commendable - hell, necessary - to demand the truth when we feel it's being concealed. If there was a "well-dressed man" and/or a "man in orange" involved with the underwear bomber, we have a right to know about that. But there is no need whatsoever to manhandle the facts to suit our own preconceived notions about what happened. To date, there is zero evidence that Umar Abdulmutallab was an MI5 agent or an American government patsy. There is zero evidence that he had an accomplice or "handler" on the flight, or that he was being filmed. There is zero evidence that Abdulmutallab is anything other than what he claims to be: An angry man who wanted revenge, and believed he was acting in the interest of Islam.

2 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: The Christmas tree bailout of '11

2011-12-23T14:58:00.000-08:00

On November 10, Infowars announced a "15-cent stealth tax on all fresh Christmas trees", which would apply to Christmas tree sellers who move more than 500 trees per year. And as with all federal stealth taxes, the consumer will end up paying "double or triple the levy". That's 45 extra cents for your tree, people! 45 cents! It's like the New World Order is breaking into your home at Christmastime and raping your pockets!

Oh wait, never mind. The very first link in the article itself reveals that the Obama administration squashed the crippling tree tax.

But that doesn't mean there wasn't a pizza bailout of '11! Dairy lobbyists got the ball rolling on that one, but author Patrick Henningsen expects "pizza lobbyists" to be demanding bailouts on a regular basis from now on.

I don't know if there are any pizza lobbyists, but I do know that one young American couple of my acquaintance owns a Domino's franchise. They're just the kind of hard-working, middle-class, salt-of-the-earth people that Alex Jones continuously praises. Perhaps because of that pizza bailout, they get to stay in business and continue raising their family.

3 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: The FBI staged Patty Hearst photos

2011-12-22T15:11:00.000-08:00

On his July 5/10 broadcast, Jones declared it has now been declassified that the infamous images of Patty Hearst holding guns and robbing banks were all scripted and stage-managed by the FBI. That's all he had to say. No details. No sources.
A Joseph Cannon story re-posted on Infowars a year earlier doesn't mention anything about this new, declassified information that blows the lid off the Hearst kidnapping - in spite of the incredibly misleading Infowars headline "SLA Worked for The Man". Cannon simply wrote that trial transcripts and books on the case reveal "many indicators that the tale has always had a hidden side." That's quite true - the SLA case has always been crazy weird - but Cannon makes the waters even murkier by badly mangling the facts. For one thing, Hearst did name Kathleen Soliah (AKA Sara Jane Olson) as a participant in the Crocker bank robbery in her memoir Every Secret Thing. This was not something she invented after Soliah's arrest, as Cannon states. His article basically just rehashes the theories of the late conspiracy doyenne Mae Brussel, without offering up any new information. This is the only SLA-related story on Infowars.

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 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 had expressed enthusiasm for robbing banks and such. This man, Jack Scott, died of cancer before his testimony could be recorded. And that's pretty much the extent of the "new information" that has come out about Hearst since SLA days. 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.

As an aside, I'd like to point out that the SLA murdered Oakland's first black school superintendent, Dr. Marcus Foster. Their stated reason for shooting him eight times with cyanide-tipped bullets? They believed his (withdrawn) support for school ID cards was some sort of sinister CIA plot to keep tabs on schoolchildren.
If that notion sounds familiar, maybe it's because you've heard virtually the same thing from Alex Jones and Infowars on many occasions...

"Mark of the Beast Rears its Head in Pennsylvania"

"Mark of the Beast? Electronic skin tattoo has medical, gaming, spy uses"

"Thumb Scanning Sheeple"

"Implantable Microchips and Cyborgs are No Longer Conspiracy Theories"

"Emergency Alert - Stop the NEW Real ID - S.1261 - the PASS Act"

"Still Ridiculing People Who Talk About Forced Microchip Implants?"

"Texas Plans to Implement REAL ID in 2013"

"A National ID Card for American Citizens? Get Ready - the Real ID Act Goes into Effect on May 11"

"Interpol chief calls for global electronic identity card system"

"Florida School Installs Fingerprint Scanners on Buses"

"Biometric ID Checks on School Children as Young as Four"

"Disney's Finger Scan Upgrade Raises Privacy Concerns"

"Just Say NO to Biometric Tyranny and DNA Databases"

4 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Hitler was on the MI5 payroll

2011-12-21T20:31:00.000-08:00

Jones declared this in a November 2009 broadcast. Somehow, he confused Hitler with Mussolini (who was on the MI5 payroll early in his career, during WWI). Wrong country, wrong dictator, wrong decade. Other than that, he was 100% right.

5 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Israel was behind the Norway massacre

2011-12-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

Jones and the Infowars crew declared, hours after Anders Breivik's rampage, that the whole thing was a false flag terror operation headed by globalists, as an excuse to crack down on white, anti-banker activists. But Infowars was happy to leave the door open for other stupid, unsupported theories.

In a piece was re-posted to Infowars, Jones's frequent guest Wayne Madsen wrote that because Breivik was reportedly a fan of Pamela Geller's blog, this all but proves he was part of an Israeli Mossad operation to take over... well, pretty much everything.
He writes, "Because our police forces in America, New Zealand, Norway, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France, Canada, Australia and elsewhere are infiltrated with Mossad sayanim, katsas, and jumper katsas, we must take it upon ourselves to expose these agents, publicize their names, turn the disinfectant of sunshine on their subterranean operations, and generally, make life miserable for them."

Pamela Geller (a leading opponent of the "Ground Zero Mosque") had informed us that while, yes, Breivik's behaviour was monstrous, the Liberal-sponsored youth camp he targeted was an "indoctrination camp run by Norway’s ruling Labor Party for up-and-coming children of the ruling elite".
This was also pointed by Alex Jones's ideological twin, Glenn Beck, on his radio show. As reported by The Telegraph, Beck said: "There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing."
He made a point of adding that a Republican youth camp would also be disturbing. I guess his fact-checker took the ~~year~~ day off, and couldn't tell him about this. It's a little creepy, sure, but "Hitler youth"?

Madsen seemed confident of his wild-ass guess, but to most people Geller's callous post does not in any way indicate Mossad involvement in Breivik's crimes. The desire to believe was there, but the evidence simply wasn't.

Then, four days ago, Prison Planet re-posted this article from YNet: "Swedish professor links Israel to Norway massacre". The title sounds pretty solid, right? But the article itself shows us only a "hint" of some possible link. The professor brings no actual evidence to the table.

Keep trying, guys. Sooner or later, if you keep going in this direction, you'll be the Jew-haters you seem to aspire to be.

6 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Ron Paul's racism has been debunked

2011-12-19T16:59:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul supporters often tell me it simply doesn't matter that for two decades, Ron Paul's newsletters cranked out bizarre and alarmist stories about race wars, blacks taking over white neighbourhoods with their drugs and their random violence, the "gay agenda", and the political liability that blacks have become.*
"He's not really racist," they tell me. "He didn't even know those articles were being written." They say that anyone who still makes an issue of it should be ashamed, because there is no issue and there never really was. Paul apologized and took some of the blame, so now we should just erase it from our minds.

Paul Joseph Watson makes all these arguments, and some others, in today's Infowars piece "Gingrich-Linked Propagandist Recycles Debunked 'Racist' Ron Paul Smear".

To this day, we don't know who wrote the racist articles published in Ron Paul's newsletters, because no one has taken credit/blame for them, and Ron Paul apparently doesn't know who it was (Lew Rockwell is the prime suspect, though).
That in itself is a problem, because a man who wants to run an entire country should have the organizational skills to know what's being published under his name. If I had a newsletter going out to people all over the country, I wouldn't let one stamp touch them until I at had least skimmed the latest issue. I realize Dr. Paul was a busy dude in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but there's really no excuse for allowing your staff to publish bizarre racist screeds under your name with your consent. Even to this day, Paul claims he doesn't know who was writing what. Doesn't that seem negligent at best, and dishonest at worst? I don't blame Ron Paul for the screwy stuff that gets posted to the Daily Paul forums, because cleaning those up would be like clearing the Aegean stables. I don't fault him for the fact that the American Free Press, a rag established by white supremacists, prints his column; AFP pays him for syndication, and like most columnists who are in syndication, he doesn't pick and choose the publications in which his work appears. But I do blame him for failing to monitor his newsletter more closely. All of this has to make you wonder how many other bucks Paul has passed.

Look at this way: If I welcomed a group of other bloggers to contribute to Leaving Alex Jonestown, and they began posting stuff like "Alex Jones Can Suck My Big Hairy Balls Becuz He Is a Faggot" (that's an actual YouTube comment, BTW), wouldn't you be offended and annoyed with me? I think you'd have every right to be. Clearly, I was shirking my responsibilities and allowing the lunatics to run the asylum.

I'm approaching this from the best-case scenario angle, the one that says Ron Paul simply had some racist associates and let them have too much control over his publications. The worst-case scenario is, well, worse. In that one, Ron Paul did write some or all of the content for some reason (to appeal to a certain demographic, or to convince constituents that he would keep them safe from the invading non-white hordes, or whatever), then lied about it. I would prefer not to think that of Paul. He doesn't seem like a racist. A touch homophobic, certainly, but not the kind of guy who's going to make fun of Kwanzaa or use the phrase "nappy-haired hos" in casual conversation.
Let's face it, though: If we don't know who wrote the stuff, that means we don't know who wrote the stuff. Nothing has been debunked in the newsletter affair.

* There's really no dispute that some of the newsletter content was racist and disparaging of minorities. An unidentified author referred to Martin Luther King Jr. day as "Hate Whitey Day". Another wrote, "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities." That's fine for a southern newsletter put out by a "League for Racial Purity", but it's not acceptable for a U.S. president.
Check out loads more of the newsletter content at Et tu, Mr. Destructo?.

7 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Robot Ebola Copters

2011-12-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

On his August 2/11 broadcast, Jones went into a rant rant in response to a caller who despaired for the future (how could you not be miserable, if you believe everything you hear from Alex Jones?), and said something about "robot helicopters spraying airborne Ebola" to kill us all. The story must be at least three years old, because he cited his source as the Sunshine Project, which shut down in 2008. The SP kept tabs on the latest biochem and nonlethal weapons technology. The website's last update was posted in October 2007.

Jones was 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. 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.

8 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: White Rastafarian Nazis who are probably gay

2011-12-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, Jones had this to say about college environmentalists:

"You can go to any university and see the people with their Rasta fake hair, the wannabe white Rastafarians and their sandals and their patchouli, going, 'It's what we gotta do for the earth', and I just wanna knock their Nazi teeth in. Don't you understand the Nazis have fake Rasta hair, with limp wrists...they're walking around in coffeeshops actin' real cool, and I just wanna knock their teeth out...I WANNA CRUSH YOUR SKULL! Because I'm just a normal mammal...I'm a normal...[pause for thought] creature that when I see innocence being torn apart, my instinct as a warrior is to stand up and fight."

9 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: "Squidbillies" is Pentagon propaganda

2011-12-16T15:50:00.000-08:00

I know it's unfair of me to keep bringing this up, but I just can't help it. It's such a classic (and hilarious) example of how Jones can turn anything, even a goofy 15-minute cartoon about anthropomorphic squids, into "government propaganda".

10 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Your friend's nervous breakdowns are good for business

2011-12-15T14:28:00.000-08:00

"I've already been on MSNBC today, and I'm on a whole bunch of stuff coming up tonight. And obviously, we'll be able to inject infowars.com into the discussion when I'm on those broadcasts, and the people will come here and find the larger picture. It's kind of the red pill. Thanks to Charlie Sheen." - Alex Jones (Feb. 25/11 broadcast)

Is the glass still half-full if it's half-full of your buddy's tears?
Throughout Sheen's manic episode, or crack bender, or whatever the hell it was, Jones milked the media cow like a fiend. He insisted that Sheen was 100% clean and sober, never better. Whatta pal.

11 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Droning on about drones

2011-12-13T18:40:00.000-08:00

I figured the title alone would make this video a crazy notion - one use of a Predator drone in U.S. airspace is not exactly a Crisis of Epic Proportions. And I don't quite understand the alternative media's obsession with drone aircraft. Is a drone really worse (ethically speaking) than a manned bomber? If you kill civilians by remote control or by hand, aren't they just as dead?
But it turns out that drones are just the beginning. This video is bursting at the electronic seams with crazy notions...

1. Goldman Sachs runs the world now. I really hope he's not being literal here. I'm afraid he is, though. Later he talks about the "banker takeover".
2. Cattle rustling is illegal, but not really. Jones would do well to stick to the ostensible topic, but he can't help throwing in a mini-sermon about common law, pointing out that cattle rustling isn't against the law if the cattle somehow find their own way onto your property and damage it. Defending blatantly criminal activities is not the best way to make a point, particularly when you're supposed to be defending Constitutional rights.
3. Americans are the #1 enemy of law enforcement and the government. "Self-sufficient country boys" are their primary target. Jones says helicopter and camera surveillance is already common in rural areas. This is just another expression of his Persecution of Patriots meme, which is utterly unconvincing, NDAA notwithstanding. The government could not possibly care less about your victory gardens, water filtration systems, and backup generators. You can be self-sufficient until the cows literally come home, and I guarantee that you won't attract attention beyond the staff room of Mother Jones magazine. Jones doesn't realize the self-contradiction here; if the government is persecuting small farmers, why in the hell would local police be allowed the use of a drone to track down small-time cattle rustlers?
4. The U.S. gave Libya to Al Qaeda. Yes, Al Qaeda is present in Libya, but it has no part in the leadership of the revolutionary forces. That's not to say this isn't a possibility. It just hasn't happened. I'm sure Al Qaeda would like to be in control of Libya, but it has not yet had the opportunity.
5. NORTHCOM is the real government. This is just another expression of the military-industrial complex/permanent war economy meme. But it sounds stupid when you put it that way. Like every other government agency, NORTHCOM is a hostage to Congress. If you don't get the funding, you die. And technically speaking, there's nothing to stop Congress from slowly starving NORTHCOM to death. Whether they ever do so or not is up to you, the voter.
6. "I knew ten years ago we would have TSA checkpoints." He's talking about highway checkpoints. WTF.

The Russia Today anchorwoman is nearly as bad, scoffing at the idea that Jones has been branded a conspiracy theorist (LOL), and at the notion that high technology would be used to retrieve cattle. Did she miss the part of the CGI recreation in which it was explained that the police wanted to find out if the men had guns, so as to avoid an armed conflict that could have cost human lives? Guess all that mascara made her blink.

12 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Mass shootings are never what they seem, unless leftists perpetrate them

2011-12-13T14:23:00.000-08:00

Jones has yet to unreel any wacky theories about today's events in Belgium, but let's review what he and the Infowars crew had to say about a few other crazed gunmen (usually within hours of their attacks):

James von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter, the deranged geriatric racist who shot and killed security guard Stephen Johns: The attack was part of a government "Valkyrie takeover drill", and von Brunn was probably either blackmailed or persuaded to shoot the security guards by the Anti-Defamation League.

Rod Ansell, the inspiration for Crocodile Dundee, who ambushed police and killed officer Glen Huitson in 1999: He was a victim of police tyranny. "First they took away his guns, then they shot him." (Clearly, no one took away his guns. While Australia's gun laws are extreme, Ansell was not a martyr and should definitely not be a poster boy for gun ownership.)

Anders Breivik: He was a patsy. The whole thing was a globalist false flag attack designed to "destroy political opposition to the bankers". This was Kurt Nimmo's second theory. His first was that Al Qaeda would be blamed.
Jones claims he predicted this attack with his criticism of some Department of Homeland Security videos.

Pretty much every single school shooting: The gunmen went out of their minds after taking SSRIs (antidepressants). This ignores the fact that many of the worst school massacres, including the worst one in American history, occurred long before these drugs were on the market. For instance, a California vice principal killed five of his colleagues and injured a sixth in 1940.
Jones once stated, "We didn't have these school shootings until 1988, when Prozac came out." At one point, Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars actually tried to pin Mark Chapman's murder of John Lennon on Prozac...which wasn't even available until two years after Lennon's death.

Interestingly, when manic environmentalist James Lee rampaged through the offices of the Discovery Channel in 2010, Jones was perfectly okay with the mainstream media's version of events.

13 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: What Happens at Gun Shows

2011-12-12T13:22:00.000-08:00

"When you drive in it's a big Homeland Security scan. Then when you get out, they normally got a camera mounted on the roof. They get a face scan, then a satellite - I'm not kidding - dials in if they've got the sat time (that's why they're launching hundreds more to do this), then they get your heat resonance. They're using the gun shows to get your heat resonance, uh...uh...uh...heat resonance biometric body print, to then track. It's done in Iraq, as well. It's a total grid. You're now uploaded to the sat grid so they can track you from space by your heat resonance pattern. How do you like that?" - Alex Jones (Dec. 7/09 broadcast)

I have no idea where Jones picked up these factoids. There is indeed a lot of infrared satellite tracking going on, but it's being used to detect missiles. Infrared satellites cannot pick out individual people, because we don't give off enough heat. And what would be the point, anyway? If They have your photo and license plate number, there would be very little need to track you from space just to find out where you stash your guns.

14 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: "Goldman Sachs dictatorship: Hitler's dream"

2011-12-11T15:35:00.001-08:00

Yes, Hitler longed for a firm established by Jews to control the world.

This bit of WTFery comes from a quirky anti-Bilderberg/anti-fascist, Bible-thumping commentator by the name of Tony Gosling, via the Russia Today clip below. To be fair, Gosling does not actually specify Goldman Sachs; that headline was added by Russia Today and posted to the headline news feed on Infowars.

15 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: CERN scientists want to commune with elves

2011-12-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

This is Santa's brain.
Any questions?

For over two years now, I have been trying to figure out what the hell Jones means when he says The Matrix was based on actual government plans. I think I first heard him mention this on the Feb. 20/09 broadcast. After interviewing Lt. Col. Greg Hapgood of the Iowa National Guard, Jones declared twice that The Matrix was based on military documents. He said the government has plans to raise humans from birth in tanks, just like the vats of strawberry Jell-O in The Matrix. (To be honest, if I had the choice between living in a vat or living on Morpheus's ship, I'd take the vat. That ship makes Das Boot look like a freakin' spa. Apparently, there will not be household cleaning products in the future.)

After declaring this at least half a dozen more times, Jones finally gave his source: A 1958 Pentagon paper. He didn't give any other specifics, but he did say the paper involves microchips, which were brand-spanking-new at that time. While I still couldn't find the document, I did find a reference from another Pentagon paper released in the late '50s that indicates the Pentagon might not have had the most realistic expectations when it came to computer tech. It envisioned a computerized "troop-carrying missile" that could "loop through outer space" and deliver an entire platoon of troops 500 miles behind enemy lines with pinpoint accuracy, all in the time it takes to deliver a pizza.
Somebody was smokin' the good stuff.

Listening to Jones' June 2009 interview of David Icke, I heard Jones refer again to that elusive military document. But this time he said the paper was written in 1968, not '58, and declassified in 2000. He said the paper mentions civilians living in vats full of styrofoam packing material or something.
Knowing how Jones mixes up his facts, I realized this "military document" could be a chef's manual on how to store the leftovers from a Pentagon pig roast, and just gave up.

"This is what the government's into, folks! They're taking the DMT. They've got the black op commanders gobbling high-powered hallucinogens in...in...see, I don't even get into all this stuff."

I have no idea what he's talking about, here. Military commanders tripping out on the government's dime? What would be the point of that? Performance-enhancing drugs, sure, but hallucinogens just wouldn't make any sense. Back in the '50s, '60s and early '70s, the CIA tested a vast array of psychoactive drugs on soldiers, mental patients, johns, and just about anyone else who came within arm's reach. But that was before LSD was fully understood, when some researchers still hoped it was some kind of wonder drug that could boost cognitive function, cure mental illnesses, and work as a truth serum. Today, most of us realize it can't do any of those things.

And no, Bildergergers were not "jacking DMT 70 years ago." Like all other psychotropic drugs, it didn't become popular in a recreational way until the late '60s, and it never took off the way LSD did. For an understanding of why that is, take a look at this charming video, in which a DMT user explains how she squirted DMT up her butt to avoid all the hideous side effects of ingesting it orally. DMT users have to strap on diapers and position themselves close to a toilet or other receptacle. This is not a club drug. Take a look at the 1950s-early 1960s attendance lists for Bilderberg meetings and tell me if you think any of these guys were tripping balls and wearing diapers. Maybe Dean Acheson and David Rockefeller were partying Hunter Thompson style, but I doubt it.

Anyway, on to those "clockwork elves". Jones is obviously referring to the late Terence McKenna's machine elves, the insectoid images that appear to many people during DMT trips. McKenna never implied that these were real elves that you could go and visit in a parallel dimension or anything; he was just putting a name to the freaky shit he saw on DMT, kind of like an ornithologist naming a new bird. Of course, this doesn't stop people from taking McKenna really, really literally. Some DMT users suspect machine elves are aliens, or ultradimensional entities, or souls of the dead.

But physicists at CERN? I dunno. I'm guessing that if you walked up to a CERN scientist and said, "Hey, I hear you guys are using the LHC to commune with elves!", he/she would summon security immediately, thinking some lunatic had wandered into the facility.

16 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Egyptian History and Math Lesson

2011-12-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

There's nothing I can say about this one that isn't painfully obvious, so just watch and cringe (and don't worry, Jones was not having a stroke).

17 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Boy Scouts are trained to kill veterans

2011-12-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

As with the last Crazy Notion, this one is a matter of interpretation. It's not that Boy Scout Explorers in some parts of the U.S. aren't being trained to take out bad guys, because that's really happening. But they aren't being trained to shoot veterans. They're mostly being trained to shoot Mexicans. In the 2009 New York Times article that first exposed this, a California Explorer-Scout troop took part in an exercise in which an Iraqi war vet takes hostages and has to be apprehended. But a Border Patrol agent baldly admitted that what they're trying to do is recruit young people to man the border and git those durned immigrants. In my opinion, the domestic terror drills are a blind. Border Patrol generally doesn't handle such incidents. They just don't want people to accuse them of training kids to hunt down illegals, because that's exactly what they're doing.

Once again, Jones has tried to hijack an ethnic issue and turn it into a plank in his Persecution of Patriots paranoia platform. The DHS, the U.S. military, TSA, and countless other federal agencies have made life very rough for Mexicans and Middle Eastern immigrants... but in Alex Jonestown, it's mostly about white people.

18 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: ZOMG FEMA CAMPS NOW

2011-12-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

Jones has been fretting about U.S. Patriots being dumped into concentration camps since... well, always. And today Infowars has issued a special alert about imminent mass detention of the New World Order's greatest enemy: Paranoid white people. Forget about all the Arabs in Gitmo or the Mexican illegals in privatized prisons. Let's just worry that a guy with deer antlers strapped to his truck might get pulled over and indefinitely detained because of his Ron Paul bumper sticker. That's reasonable.

This latest red alert is based on a KBR document supposedly leaked to Infowars by a government employee who wishes to remain anonymous. At first glance, it appears to be a call for contract proposals related to KBR's formation of a "National Quick Response Team". The projects will involve designing, constructing, maintaining and servicing camps that can hold 300-1000 people, ostensibly in emergency situations.

There are some problems with Kurt Nimmo's and Jones's interpretation of the document. It was sent from Kentucky procurement counselor Bobbi Carlton to Bob Siefert, manager of KBR's Houston office, on the morning of November 16. Yet Nimmo and Jones state, "KBR’s call for FEMA camp service bids arrives soon after the Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which permits the military to detain and interrogate supposed domestic terror suspects in violation of the Fourth Amendment and Posse Comitatus."
The 2012 NDAA passed the Senate on November 29. This subcontracting document, if genuine, did not "arrive soon after" the NDAA. And as of this date, the act is still sitting in the House.

This is just one minor example of Jones's FEMA camp panic, which is a component of his Persecution of Patriots panic. He tells us that he, as a U.S. Patriot, may be shut down at any minute (actually, he expanded operations this year with the introduction of his subscription Infowars Nightly News service). Before Obama was even in office, Jones was telling Ron Paul and his audience that this is the president who will probably have him killed; a Muslim extremist itching to usher in the persecution of white people. (Nov. 5/08 broadcast)
Infowars "reporter" Aaron Dykes tells us that the Department of Homeland Security, "empowered to fight terrorism, has instead been turned against the American people, targeting returning veterans, Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists, Federal Reserve activists, and more". Yet there is not a single Tea Partier, U.S. vet, Constitutionalist, or anti-Fed activist in Gitmo. Not one has been the victim of extraordinary rendition, handed over to a foreign country to be tortured, nor been detained indefinitely without charge.

19 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: When fighting the New World Order, pretend you're beating up a beloved Christmas figure

2011-12-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

"Every punch we throw lands right on the end of the New World Order's nose, and it's like Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer with blood spraying out in both directions." - Alex Jones, Nov. 22/09 broadcast

20 Crazy Notions til Christmas: DynCorp runs child trafficking rings worldwide

2011-12-06T12:24:00.000-08:00

DynCorp trafficks in abducted children everywhere it goes (i.e., almost everywhere on the planet). This is something Alex Jones has said over, and over, and over again. For instance, 4 minutes and 6 seconds into the video below he states, "DynCorp runs child kidnapping child rings worldwide..."

As you probably know, several men contracted to DynCorp did engage in human trafficking while working in Bosnia, selling women and girls as young as 12 to each other and smuggling them into places of prostitution. This is extremely common in war-torn and conflict-ridden areas. The first people to move in are always the predatory ones.
By all accounts, DynCorp's response to the problem was to ignore it and sweep it under the rug.
The activities of the DynCorp men were exposed by two other DynCorp employees. One of them, Kathryn Bolkovac, wrote about her experiences with DynCorp in Bosnia in her book The Whistleblower (adapted into a film of the same name). What follows is drawn from that book. Some of the information in Bolkovac's book is substantiated, but much of it is hearsay or rumour. I include here only the most serious allegations.
The problem of sex trafficking in post-Yugoslavia Bosnia, and the international community's hamfisted efforts to deal with it, are also covered in the 2002 BBC documentary Boys Will Be Boys.

What Happened in Bosnia

As part of the UN peacekeeping effort in Bosnia, several countries contributed police officers or military personnel to the International Police Task Force (since replaced by the European Union Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina).
The U.S. decided to send contract workers, and contracted DynCorp to do the job. Police officers were recruited to sign on with DynCorp, then assigned to various cities in Bosnia. These workers were known as monitors. In addition to providing IPTF monitors, DynCorp held other contracts in Bosnia.

- In October 2000, several women and girls reported to the IPTF station in Doboj that they had been smuggled into Bosnia from other countries and forced to become prostitutes. They described in detail an unstated number of "clients", including members of the IPTF. The investigation into these allegations was dropped for unknown reasons, and the monitors were apparently never identified.
- In December 2000, a colleague of Bolkovac, in casual conversation, told her he had purchased a girl from a local trafficker in order to rescue her from a life of prostitution. He had wanted to marry the girl, and was sad that she had run away. This man saw nothing wrong with his actions, so he freely confessed to his superiors. Rather than being fired and prosecuted, he was simply repatriated to the U.S.
- A Spanish IPTF station commander in Doboj had a relationship with a 17-year-old trafficking victim. This man was not with DynCorp.

Ben Johnston, a DynCorp contract employee stationed in the Bosnian city of Tuzla, made even graver allegations. He alleged that some of his supervisors and colleagues were trafficking in teenage girls (ages 12-15) purchased from the Serbian mafia. His site supervisor, John Hirtz, admittedly videotaped himself having intercourse with two of these girls. DynCorp worker Kevin Werner admitted to "buying" at least one prostitute from a bar owner.
Johnston reported these crimes to his DynCorp superiors late in 2000, and nothing was done. So he went to the Army Criminal Division. Military police raided the DynCorp hangar where Johnston worked and found evidence supporting Johnston's allegations. Though the contract workers had immunity, the Army could have waived it and prosecuted the men under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000. It chose not to do that. The case was left in the hands of DynCorp and Bosnian law enforcement. Hirtz and Werner were repatriated to the U.S. without being prosecuted.

Both Bolkovac and Johnston claimed they were wrongfully dismissed by DynCorp because of their whistleblowing.

The Bottom Line

So what happened is that several DynCorp contract employees, on their own time, decided to purchase human trafficking victims from the Serbian mob and Bosnian brothels. They were not the only "peacekeepers" to do so at that time; IPTF members from other countries were also involved, men who were not working for DynCorp. Since then, no other people contracted to work for DynCorp have been accused of human trafficking. The only remotely similar allegation, revealed by Wikileaks, is that some DynCorp workers in Afghanistan hired young male prostitutes known as "dancing boys".

You can certainly say that in the Bosnian affair, DynCorp was criminally negligent at best and criminally complicit at worst. You can certainly say that sex trafficking is a grievous, worldwide problem that has not yet been appropriately addressed. You can certainly say that military contracting is a shitty idea that isn't working out at all. But it is the men themselves who should ultimately bear responsibility for their alleged crimes in Bosnia. Saying DynCorp trafficks in children is like saying that since Jeffrey Dahmer worked at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, Ambrosia Chocolate kills gay men.

21 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: Pasteurization is a Scam

2011-12-04T13:20:00.000-08:00

Death & Cookies

On his May 16/10 broadcast, Alex Jones declared that drinking pasteurized milk causes heart attacks, and pasteurization is a scam.

This bit of nonsense isn't original to Alex Jones, though he should have said "homogenization" instead. He probably picked this up from raw milk promoters who insist that homogenization and pasteurization render milk less nutritious, if not downright hazardous, or from the vegans and whole food folks who will try to convince you that all milk is dangerous (this weird little factoid sheet even tells us that feeding pasteurized milk to any living creature is "abuse").

A few of these people contend that drinking cows' milk radically increases your risks of heart disease, not because it's high in cholesterol, but because homogenization supposedly allows a certain enzyme to be absorbed into the bloodstream to wreak havoc. For example, vegan Keith Nemec claims the enzyme xanthine oxidase is digested in the stomach when it is present in raw milk. But if the milk has been homogenized, the enzyme is encased by fat globules that can pass undigested into the blood, adhering to artery walls and becoming abrasive. The body repairs the abrasions with cholesterol, resulting in atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). Therefore, xanthine oxidase from pasteurized milk products is a significant cause of heart disease in the U.S.
This concern has been around for a while (it first surfaced in the '60s), but research has yet to find a link between homogenized milk and cardiovascular disease (see, for instance, this 1983 article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition).

No one except Jones contends that pasteurization contributes in any way to heart problems; he obviously confused homogenization with pasteurization. There is nothing in the pasteurization process that could possibly make milk more harmful than raw milk. Most of the milk you buy in U.S. stores has been pasteurized with the High Temperature/Short Time (HTST) method, meaning the raw milk was evenly heated to a temperature of 161 °F (71.7 °C) for 15–20 seconds, then rapidly cooled.
This simple process kills nearly all pathogens in the milk, making it not only safer to drink, but longer-lasting as well. It is no way a "scam". $8 jugs of unpasteurized milk strike me as a bit on the scammy side, though. Even if the cows are grass-fed and raised in hygienic conditions, raw milk may contain yeast, mold, fecal matter, and bacteria, including Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, Staphylococcus aureus, Yersinia pestis, and Campylobacter. It can also transmit TB, scarlet fever, diphtheria, Q fever, and brucellosis.

According to the CDC, raw milk products were behind 86 outbreaks of food poisoning between 1998 and 2008, causing 1,676 illnesses and two deaths.
But the number of deaths may actually be much higher than two. This 2008 article in AAP News (the in-house publication of the American Association of Pediatrics) lists seven raw milk deaths in the U.S. between 2000 and 2005. Five deaths resulted from Listeria in four states (Texas, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and New York) and two resulted from Mycobacterium bovis in New York and Maryland. Of the 473 people affected in 19 cases, 66 had to be hospitalized. This starkly contradicts the raw milk cheerleaders who tell you no one has been harmed by raw milk. Yet this Natural News story re-posted to Infowars in November claims the CDC admitted there have been zero U.S. deaths related to raw milk consumption since 2001. Who's right? That will have to be sorted out by someone else. What I can tell you is that raw milk is reportedly making people very sick. Just last month, five children in California were infected by E. coli after drinking dairy from Organic Pastures, the country's largest producer of raw milk. Three of the kids were hospitalized with hemolytic-uremic syndrome. Though the children lived in four different counties, had the same strain of E. coli, and all drank Organic Pastures products, owner Mark McAfee insists his milk had nothing to do with it.
Between 2006 and 2008, the California Department of Food and Agriculture issued three recalls of Organic Pastures products containing Campylobacter, E. coli, and Listeria.

Raw milk articles re-posted to Infowars, such as this one by Karen De Coster, leave readers with the impression that They are staging a tyrannical war against the sale of raw milk products. In reality, the majority of states (30) allow it despite all the known health risks.

Comments on Infowars indicate that Jones's fans are on the raw milk/anti-pasteurization bandwagon. Take this comment posted on December 2 by "Luke 10 18":

The largest cause of the disease process you know as diabetes is pasteurized and ultra pasteurized homogenized FAKE ASS FACTORY milk BECAUSE bovine serum albumin fragments aka what you are left with when you heat something past it’s mp melting point AND CRUSH IT OS HOMOGENIZE IT AND DESTROY ANY REMAINING BENEFICIAL FAT CO ENZYMES OR VITAMINS AND CO FACTORS ALL THE BIO AVAILABLE ESSENTIAL NUTRIENT ACTIVATORS. in healing arts practitioners circles it’s called autoimmune DIABETES. A diet VERY HIGH IN certified RAW organic grass fed CREAM and pure butterfat whether from reindeer cow sheep goat buffalo or camels are the only stable fuels for your brain and body. anybody pushing anything else on your BODY is really a nobody uh huh that’s right oh no!!!

Luke 10:18 also claims that soy products cause premature baldness and infertility, and opines that women who feed soy-based formula to their babies should be publicly executed.

Before leaping onto the raw milk bandwagon yourself, take a look at this scientific references page at Real Raw Milk Facts, and the CDC's information and links on raw milk products.

22 Crazy Notions 'til Christmas: "Even Hitler wouldn't bomb cities."

2011-12-02T17:15:00.000-08:00

And now, a short history lesson from Alex Jones.

Jones contends that Nazi Germany didn't bomb cities (civilians, in other words) until Britain goaded them into it with the August 1940 bombing of Berlin. "Not saying Hitler's good. The point is, even Hitler wouldn't bomb cities."

So what can we learn from this, kids? Apparently, that Warsaw and Rotterdam were not bombed by Hitler in September 1939 and May 1940, respectively. Hitler didn't bomb cities until a British psy-op tricked him into it. Maybe Guernica was an Inside Job, and Picasso was a shill.

Fritz Springmeier, "political prisoner"?

2011-11-09T14:48:00.002-08:00

On Halloween, Alex Jones conducted a Skype interview with Fritz Springmeier, who was released from prison in March. You can watch the full interview on Infowars, but here's the first part:

I have written about Fritz Springmeier many times in passing. He has appeared at least once on this blog ("Al Gore and the Suitcase of Blood"), several times on Swallowing the Camel, and quite a few times on blogs dealing with "Satanic panic".

It would be exhausting and rather pointless to detail his entire career here, but if you're unfamiliar with Springmeier, here are some details you may want to know:

Born in 1955, he used the name Victor Earl Schoof until legally changing it to Fritz Springmeier in 1987.
He says he attended West Point, but did not.
He professes to be a very religious man, and once ran a sort of Christian lay ministry (he is not an ordained minister, and does not have any theological training).
In 1997 he allegedly circulated a strange "affidavit", accusing several other Christian ministers, including Alex Jones's mentor Texe Marrs, or trying to sabotage this ministry. "Several people have told me my ex-wife is controlled by demons and given her life to Satan," he wrote of his second wife, Gail.
To his mind, every religious tradition outside of the Judeo-Christian is basically Satanism. This includes ancient Egyptian beliefs, Theosophy, and any form of occultism. Oh, and Jehovah's Witnesses. And the Catholic Church. In a 1996 Prophecy Club lecture, Springmeier said every human on Earth is tracked from birth to death by Jesuit priests.
His conspiracy writing and lectures have been a huge influence on David Icke. Much of Springmeier's misinfo has made it into Icke's books. For example, the Belgian castle called Chateau Amerois is referred to by both Springmeier and Icke as the "Mothers of Darkness" castle, in which the elite hold ghastly Satanic rituals and slaughter children.
In the early '90s, he became deeply interested in the subject of government mind control programs, and trained himself to be a deprogrammer of women who allegedly survived "Project Monarch", a supposed offshoot of MK-ULTRA*. He ended up leaving his second wife and young son for one of these women, Cisco Wheeler. Together they authored books and gave lectures on Illuminati mind control techniques. Their best-known work is the massive book The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Mind Controlled Slave.
Cisco Wheeler, like all alleged Monarch victims, was deliberately programmed to have multiple personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder). One of her alter personalities was a cat.
Springmeier's take on history is, um, creative. In the Prophecy Club lecture cited above, he declared that Hitler was descended from the Rothschilds. You'll see more of his unique interpretations of history later in this post.
He really, and I mean really, hates The Wizard of Oz. He's convinced it's a Satanic parable used in the mind control programming and ritual torture of young children. He thinks the same of every film, book, and TV show that appears to reference Oz in any way (for instance, the movie K-Pax).
In his book Bloodlines of the Illuminati, Springmeier attempted to identify the 13 families that have controlled the world for centuries. His M.O. was to tick off lists of prominent people with the same last name, without bothering to ascertain if they were actually related to one another, then link them to the Illuminati by the most tenuous connections. For example, reporter Robert Collins was implicated simply because he had the surname Collins and because the Illuminati "control the press" (Springmeier provided no evidence that the Illuminati does, in fact, control the press). Likewise, he tied serial killer Ted Bundy to the Bundy/McBundy families, and explained that his sadistic sociopathic condition is quite typical of Illuminati members, even though Bundy's name came from a working class stepfather.
In the '80s, he vociferously defended "former Illuminati member" John Todd long after Todd's stories were shown to be fraudulent. The late Mr. Todd was a "Christian" con artist posing as a former Satanist. He was also a convicted rapist. Though he had a long history of complaints against him for propositioning teenage girls, and faced related criminal charges several times, Springmeier insisted that Todd's rape conviction was a frame-up by (who else?) the Illuminati. At one point, he even claimed that Todd had been abducted from prison and murdered by Illuminati agents in 1994. This was not true. Todd was released from prison in 2004, was remanded into custody as a dangerous sex offender, and died a natural death three years later. Now, Springmeier uses the same cry of frame-up in reference to his own criminal activities.
In their book Deeper Insights Into the Illuminati Formula, Springmeier and Wheeler state that the Illuminati has been creating "synthetic humans" (made partly from cows) since the 1970s.
In 2001, he and his third wife, Patricia, were arrested for having a marijuana grow op in conjunction with a white supremacist, Forrest E. Bateman, Sr. Bateman was convicted in 1989 of racially intimidating a high school student in Forest Grove, Oregon, and three years later he appeared on the state police's Ten Most Wanted list for firearm offenses and assault connected to skinhead activities. And now we get to the heart of the matter...

Kooky as he was, and annoying as his continuous stream of nonsense could be, I had no reason to suspect that Springmeier was in any way a violent man. So I was shocked in 2002, when Springmeier was indicted on charges of planting a bomb in an adult video store and robbing a bank in Damascus, Oregon, years earlier.

Here's what happened: On the afternoon of October 8, 1997, a propane bomb exploded in the Fantasy Adult Video Store in Damascus. No one was injured.

Roughly ten minutes later and six miles away, a man in camo fatigues, later identified as Forrest Bateman, Sr., walked into the Damascus branch of Key Bank of Oregon and demanded cash from a teller, firing his assault rifle at the ceiling to intimidate bank employees and patrons into complying with his demands. He exited the bank with a mere $6000.

The bombing and robbery went unsolved until 2001, when police discovered the pot operation Springmeier, his wife, and some friends were running.
Springmeier and Bateman were arrested after deputies of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office seized fifty marijuana plants, bomb-making materials and illegal weapons**, and Army of God literature from Bateman’s home in Sandy, Oregon, in February. Anthony Huntington (Bateman's housemate), Patricia Springmeier, and a woman named Jennifer Williams were also arrested. Bateman already had outstanding warrants against him for of assault and illegal possession of an assault rifle.
The FBI was brought into the case because of the weapons and Army of God literature, which indicated possible terrorist activities.

Anthony Huntington turned out to be the weakest link in the robbery chain. Faced with serious prison time for weapons and drug charges, he confessed his own role in planning the 1997 bombing and bank robbery, and gave up the names of his co-conspirators, including Springmeier and Bateman (most reports hint there was at least one other man involved, but no other co-conspirators are named). The drug and weapons charges were dropped and replaced with charges related to the bombing and robbery.

Batemen pled guilty and was sentenced to 9 years in prison. Springmeier pled not guilty, was convicted, and received the same sentence as Bateman. Huntington, for his testimony against Bateman and Springmeier, received a reduced sentence for his role in the bombing and robbery. He was released in 2005.
It should be noted that the longest prison term was served not by Springmeier, but by Bateman. Bateman was released from prison in September, a full seven months after Springmeier.

In my opinion, these three guys got off easy: Five and nine years are ridiculously short sentences for two violent crimes that could easily have resulted in fatalities.

Now here's where the "political prisoner" part comes into play. Springmeier claims total innocence in this affair. His story is that he knew Huntington only from Bible study. He knew nothing about the bombing, he knew nothing about the robbery, and the whole thing was a frame-up. He has even said he has an alibi: He was working at a print shop in Eagle Creek, a town ten miles from Damascus, exactly when the robbery occurred. But his boss refused to confirm this, he says, because Springmeier had once offended him by criticizing Billy Graham.

According to Fritz, he was framed for a variety of reasons: He helped people leave the Illuminati, he published his mind control research, he exposed an "entire community" of Illuminati members in Bend, Oregon (forcing them to sell their homes and move elsewhere).
He insists there was no evidence against him (both he and Jones betray a total lack of understanding of just what circumstantial evidence is, and how powerful it can be when used properly). He claims the three witnesses who testified against him at trial were bribed, though he presents no evidence of this. Not even circumstantial evidence.

Hard information about the case is scanty. Most of the original news articles have been taken down, and Internet searches just bring up the same small amount of info provided by Springmeier's supporters (you'll find dozens of re-posts of Henry Makow's essay "How Fritz Springmeier Was Framed", which will not tell you how Fritz Springmeier was framed; it's simply more of Makow's usual "the Illuminati did everything and that's the end of it" b.s.).

It is not known to me precisely why Springmeier was growing pot, nor why he decided to take part in a bank robbery. The authorities seem to think he and his buddies were "fundraising" for even more sinister activities, such as bombing abortion clinics or federal buildings. It's entirely possible, however, that Springmeier just wanted some cash.

In spite of his association with the racist Bateman, I have found no evidence that Springmeier is directly involved with organized racist or racial separatist groups. His wife maintains that he is not a racist.
He does have some peculiar ideas about Nazis and Jews, though. In Deeper Insights Into the Illuminati Formula, he and Wheeler contend that the Nazi concentration camps were established not because the Nazis wanted to confine and exterminate citizens they deemed non-Aryan, but simply to perform mind control experiments on children. The racial supremacy thing was just a "cover". And he espouses conspiracy theories that Jewish people essentially control the world. In Bloodlines of the Illuminati, he and Wheeler wrote, "Since the core of the conspiracy of power is Jewish, the attitude of those allied with it hinges on their attitude toward the Jewish people." They also stated that Oliver Cromwell was "financed by Jews, and helped the Jews gain power in England."
It has been widely reported that Springmeier penned literature for the Christian Patriot Organization, an allegedly white supremacist group that operated an illegal warehouse bank in Oregon. I have found no evidence of this.

Is it possible that Springmeier was framed? Sure. Not likely, but certainly possible. Given the dearth of reliable, readily available info on the case, it's difficult to discern exactly what happened here. To reach an opinion on the case, you have to rely heavily on hearsay and on Fritz's word.

I choose not to believe Springmeier because he is not credible. He already had a criminal record (for parental abduction), and was engaged in drug-related activity, before the bank robbery charges were filed. He hung around with a skinhead bank robber, which is creepy any way you look at it. He believes - or wants us to believe - that fake Illuminati cowpeople walk among us, and that Auschwitz was more a science lab than a death camp. There's just no reason to take his his word for anything. Springmeier is one odd, shady dude.

Alex Jones has a history of supporting incarcerated people who were definitely not persecuted, yet insist they were. Remember Ed and Elaine Brown, the elderly New Hampshire couple who decided that paying income tax is for fools, and were duly convicted (after an armed stand-off) of not paying their taxes? They cried foul from prison, and Alex Jones put them on the air to share their story with the world. What he did not share with the world were the couple's various allegations that Freemasons, Zionists, Illuminati members, and Jesuits had framed them. That would have seemed silly to most of his listeners, because it's fairly obvious that Freemasons and priests don't give a flying crap about a couple of goofy senior citizens in rural New England who don't feel like paying their taxes.

The same goes for Springmeier, of course. The Powers That Be aren't particularly interested in persecuting small-town Oregonians who publish underground books full of weird mind control instructions, quirky religious beliefs, and warnings about synthetic cowpeople. If they did, Alex Jones wouldn't have many guests left.

I know I'll be getting a shitstorm of emails about this, along the lines of "You don't know if Fritz is innocent or not!". Yeah, well, Jones doesn't know either. In the opening of the video, he makes it clear that he based his opinion of Springmeier's sincerity on vibes: "I didn't get any bad vibes from him, and I know that that's always the real signal." Somehow, I don't think that would stand up in court.
Also, Jones has been selling Bloodlines of the Illuminati, and it would certainly not be to his benefit to admit that he's been hawking the wares of a convicted bomber and bank robber, would it?

* H.P. Albarelli, Jr., spent nearly two decades researching the CIA and its mind control programs. He uncovered startling new evidence, but he found no evidence of Monarch, nor any comparable program. However, he did locate a man who admitted "the Monarch Project" was something he invented.
** According to one report: a machine gun, a grenade launcher, an assault rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, 3000 rounds of ammunition, ammonium nitrate, homemade C4 explosives, six homemade grenades, dynamite blasting caps, primers, fuses, black powder, and 200 timing devices, as well as a bizarre "suit of armor" made out of ceramic bearing an Army of God patch

Infowars Nightly News presents a not-so-special report on a decade of 9/11 Truthiness

2011-09-12T13:49:00.000-07:00

This "special report" by Aaron Dykes, one of the first broadcast on Infowars Nightly News, was a whole week in the making. How very sad, then, that most of it can be demolished in five minutes or less.
Every single piece of "evidence" presented is old stuff that has either been discredited, or never really served as evidence of an Inside Job in the first place. A few of the statements are flat-out wrong.
How this in any way qualifies as a "special report" or "news", I don't know. If Jones wants to be the new Rupert Murdoch, and if Aaron Dykes fancies himself the next Wolf Blitzer, they need to step it the hell up.

Jones: "I did say they were gonna blow up the World Trade Center and blame it on bin Laden two months before 9/11..."

If you listen to the prediction Jones made on July 25, 2001, you'll hear for yourself that he wasn't anywhere near this specific. He did mention bin Laden, but did not provide a timeframe, a target, or a means of attack. When he mentioned explosives, he was referring to the '93 World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings. When he mentioned the World Trade Center, he was again referring to the '93 bombing.
What he does not mention is that the late conspiranoid broadcaster William Cooper gave an identical warning (also mentioning bin Laden but not a specific target) a full month earlier. We don't know if Jones was aware of Cooper's prediction at the time he made his, but he sure as hell knows about it now. It's been all over the Internet for more than a decade.

Dykes (with all the enthusiasm of a dead squid): "Homeland Security, empowered to fight terrorism, has instead been turned against the American people, targeting returning veterans, Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists, Federal Reserve activists, and more."

Really? How many Tea Partiers, U.S. vets, Constitutionalists, and anti-Fed activists are in Gitmo? How many have been prosecuted or court martialed for terrorist activities? How many have been the victims of extraordinary rendition, handed over to foreign countries to be tortured? How many have been detained indefinitely without charge?

And speaking of returning vets, take a look at what Alex Jones has to say about them...

Dykes: "Six of the ten [9/11] Commission members stated their disappointment with the conditions and their doubt about the conclusions: Co-chair Lee Hamilton who admitted they were set up to fail, Bob Kerrey who said there was ample reason to suspect there was an alternative to what was outlined in the version, Timothy Roehmer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting", John Leimer who said, "We purposely put together a staff that had had, in a way, conflicts of interest", and 9/11 Commission member Max Cleland resigned after concluding it was..."a national scandal", and that the investigation was compromised, and senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission John Farmer wrote an entire book, saying he was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described..."

The Commission had to deal with lying, dissembling, and obfuscating on the part of government employees (from the FAA, NORAD, FBI, etc.) who were desperate to shift culpability from themselves onto... well, anyone else. At some point, every commission member was frustrated by this. But the report issued by the 9/11 Commission was unanimously approved by all members, and there was no minority report.

Lee Hamilton co-wrote an entire book defending the work and conclusions of the commission. His complaint that the commission was "set up to fail" was directed at the officials who did not cooperate fully with the commission's investigation, not at the commission itself. The same complaint was expressed by John Farmer, who was justifiably outraged by the lies initially told to the commission by NORAD officials (as you probably know, NORAD/NEADS tried to make itself look more competent than it actually was by claiming, falsely, that it came close to intercepting at least one of the hijacked airliners; later, under oath, the officials had to admit they lied).

To date, not one member of the 9/11 Commission has criticized its findings. And not even Max Cleland, who resigned from the commission because of White House stonewalling, has ever suggested that 9/11 was anything other than a terrorist attack instigated by anti-American extremists.

Dykes: "NIST was unconfident in its own conclusion. After years of delay in its own report... finding only a low probability that the building [Building 7] fell due to fires."

I'm going to be blunt and crude here: Only a fucking idiot would make this mistake. The "low probability" statement was made by FEMA, not NIST. NIST was unequivocal in its "Summary of Findings". This was reported on Infowars itself just three years ago.
FEMA spent less than 6 months studying the collapses of the three World Trade Center buildings. NIST spent over 7 years completing its investigation.

Dykes: "Testimony from police, firefighters, and rescue workers who witnessed bombs that day were ignored by the 9/11 Commission."

No one "witnessed bombs" on 9/11. Most people heard incredibly loud, percussive noises (what they described as explosions) as the buildings fell, which of course is to be expected when any large building collapses.
It's true that not every first responder present that day was allowed to testify for the Commission, but I don't understand how hearing numerous people say "I heard loud noises" could possibly have aided the commission members' work or resulted in different conclusions than the ones they ultimately reached.
Contrary to what we've been told in this special report, NIST did explore the possibilities that demolitions or unconventional weaponry were involved in the collapses, as stated in their "Summary of Findings". They found no evidence to support either notion.

Dykes: "Video evidence showed molten steel, but NIST denied this."

The narrator is referring to the same 9/11 footage that you'll see in the video below. The molten metal looks like steel, but it wasn't. When pouring out of something, molten aluminum can lose its distinctive silvery sheen and appear just as fiery-orange as melted steel. The maximum temperatures of the fires in the World Trade Center towers could significantly weaken steel, but not melt it. You can argue this until the world ends. You can do all the rinky-dink backyard experiments you care to do. The facts won't change.

Dykes: "Whereas early polls in 2002 showed very few skeptics, as the years moved along, there have been more and more who doubt the official story. In 2006, more than 80% of people were found questioning the official 9/11 account, and more than a third believed it was an inside job or that the U.S. government had a role in the actual attacks."

What does this prove? That people believe in conspiracy theories. I didn't need a poll or a "special report" to tell me that.

Dykes: "FBI translator Sibel Edmonds broke her gag order to blow the whistle on wiretaps she translated leading up to and including the day of September 11, proving that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were working for the U.S government up until the day of 9/11."

We aren't told where or when Edmonds revealed this information, but it was on a 2009 broadcast of The Mike Malloy Show. Edmonds said, "I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11." But in the same interview, she unequivocally stated she does not possess any evidence that 9/11 was an Inside Job. Her knowledge extends only to operations in Central Asia. You can read a transcript of the interview here.
Two years later, she still hasn't elaborated on the precise nature of that "very intimate relationship."

Dykes: "As the group [Al Qaeda] was re-branded as an enemy, its iconic leader, Osama bin Laden, a billionaire whose family has heavy business ties with the West, and whose codename was Tim Osman..."

Hold it right there. You are kidding. No one in their right mind would accept the idiotic "Osman" story concocted by the late conspiranoid Ted Gunderson and his favourite source of misinformation, jailed drug dealer Michael Riconosciuto.
If you carefully review and examine all the many bizarro claims made by Gunderson and/or Riconosciuto over the years, and you still find either man credible, you may need to see a professional ASAP. Riconiscutio, in particular, is a troubling character. In the '80s he was a close associate of serial killer Philip Arthur Thompson, who employed thugs to abduct young women for him to torture.
I know Alex Jones buys the Osman story, though.

Dykes: "Chuck Norris is only the most recent of many prominent citizens who've become concerned about videos depicting white Americans, not Muslim radicals, as likely terrorists."

This is a reference to the cheesy, less-than-helpful PSA videos the Department of Homeland Security produced as part of its "See Something, Say Something" campaign. I'm guessing the DHS chose to use Caucasian actors in these videos to avoid cries of racial profiling. But hey, if Chuck Norris is worried about it...

Dykes: "The truth about 9/11 has a dangerous parallel to the JFK assassination."

Yes, Mr. Dykes, indeed it does. As amply detailed in Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, conspiranoids have been crafting bullshit theories out of nothing for half a century. And they will continue to do so forever. The question is: Will you believe them?

Nude vlogging about Steve Jobs is not a good idea even at the best of times

2011-09-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

I'm no fan of Steve Jobs myself (the Apple Store gives me hives), but this is just absurd. The state of Jobs's soul should not be keeping you awake at night. Dude has cancer. Let him die or recover in peace, and stop being a ghoul about it. Also put on some clothes.

Watson, you are so busted. Again.

2011-08-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

When the Oslo bombing happened and no one knew what was going on, Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars knew exactly what was going on. As he confidently reported that very day, "Oslo police were conducting a bombing exercise at a location near the Oslo Opera House just 48 hours before a terrorist blast hit a government building in the Norwegian capital." In Alex Jonestown, of course, "exercises" are really practice drills for false flag terror attacks. Why Oslo police would wait until the eleventh hour to rehearse for something that must have been in the works for months, Watson didn't attempt to explain. The fact that the "exercise" happened so soon before the bombing was proof enough that something false-flaggy was going down.

However, "Jussumguy" has alerted me to a Norwegian news report about the opera house exercise conducted by Oslo police, and it didn't take place exactly two days before the bombing. It was more like two days, four months, and a year. The story is dated March 17, 2010.

Now, to be fair, this could have been an accident. Watson posted a link to a translation of the Norwegian article, and the translation does not bear the original publication date. But if you were about to broadcast an already tenuous theory to the world, wouldn't you, I dunno, look at the original article?

Robot Ebola Copters & Super Congress Gun Raids

2011-08-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

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.

The Blame Game: Norway Edition

2011-08-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

It's not entirely Anders Breivik's fault that he slaughtered dozens of innocent people. We should also blame the New World Order, Muslims, liberals, Jews, people who don't like Jews, and maybe Hitler.

As Alex Jones showed us, the Powers That Be staged a false-flag terror attack in Norway expressly to give themselves an excuse to squash all patriots who oppose big government and "bankster" fraud. This isn't a Norwegian thing; it's a globalist elite thing. So we must remember that domestic terrorism is not the real threat, here.

Pat Buchanan, who has been a guest on The Alex Jones Show several times, may not agree with the first part of that statement, but he's totally on board with the end of it: The media is using the massacre to undermine right-wing populist movements throughout the world. Domestic terrorism isn't the real problem.

Muslims are. Specifically, Muslims immigrating into countries like Norway. In a column at World Net Daily He writes:

"... awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists."

In conclusion:

"As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right."

Meanwhile, Pamela Geller (a leading opponent of the "Ground Zero Mosque") informs us that while, yes, Breivik's behaviour was monstrous, the Liberal-sponsored youth camp he targeted was an "indoctrination camp run by Norway’s ruling Labor Party for up-and-coming children of the ruling elite".
The same sentiment was expressed by Alex Jones's ideological twin, Glenn Beck, on his radio show. As reported by The Telegraph: "There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing."
He made a point of adding that a Republican youth camp would also be disturbing. I guess his fact-checker took the ~~year~~ day off, and couldn't tell him about this. It's a little creepy, sure, but "Hitler youth"?

Frequent Jones guest Wayne Madsen has a different take: Because Breivik was reportedly a fan of Pamela Geller's blog, this all but proves he was part of an Israeli Mossad operation to take over... well, pretty much everything.
He writes, "Because our police forces in America, New Zealand, Norway, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France, Canada, Australia and elsewhere are infiltrated with Mossad sayanim, katsas, and jumper katsas, we must take it upon ourselves to expose these agents, publicize their names, turn the disinfectant of sunshine on their subterranean operations, and generally, make life miserable for them."

Madsen's piece was re-posted to Infowars.

Alex Jones was supposed to be Glenn Beck

2011-07-24T23:51:00.000-07:00

I missed this show when it was broadcast (Sept. 4/10), but when someone tweeted a link to the video titled "Beck was Developed to Counter Alex Jones" I just couldn't resist poking fun at it.
This gem is jam-packed with dodgy assertions that Glenn Beck was elevated to his then-current status specifically to bring down Alex Jones.

THE EVIDENCE:

He's Copying Me!

Jones pulls out a copy of Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope and makes a big deal about Glenn Beck using a quote from it in his "factional" book The Overton Window. Why? Because Jones used to recite the very same quote on his show all the time. Coincidence?!

Well, yeah, probably. I mean, it's a famous book, and conspiranoids love quoting from it when they're out to trash the "Damnocrats" or prove some theory about the shadow government.

In The Overton Window, Beck "admits" that the U.S. government stages false flag terror attacks against itself, and that it's planning to launch a false flag nuclear strike as an excuse to declare martial law. The story includes FEMA concentration camps. Most damning of all, the character based on Beck himself is a government agent posing as a patriot.

Jones considers this book a New World Order insider's take on the Master Plan.

Okay, why would Beck so blatantly expose a real top-secret agenda and his own role in it? Dunno. According to Jones, the NWO just likes to throw stuff in our faces for shits and giggles. You know, like movie villains who spend five minutes explaining how and why they're going to kill the good guy.

"I was offered Glenn Beck's job before Glenn Beck existed!"

Really? Beck's first politically-oriented radio show was The Glenn Beck Program, which began airing on Tampa's WFLA in 2000. This was his first respectable gig, the show that launched him into the Conservasphere. Before that, he was just another morning zoo monkey making racist jokes, laughing about a competitor's wife suffering a miscarriage, and continuously getting shitcanned for his dismal ratings.
Was Jones offered the WFLA job before Beck? Jones won't say. He just says he was told by unnamed Bigwigs that he could become the next Rush Limbaugh. He can't reveal the names of any of these Bigwigs, he explains, because he agreed to keep everything confidential and will not violate his agreement. Never mind that it's been at least 11 years since this alleged offer, or that it's unethical for studio heads to make you promise never to tell a living soul they once offered you a job.

I'm going to go out on a limb and call bullshit on this one. If Jones could name even one of the dudes who turned Glenn Beck into the NWO's #1 media shill, I think he would.

Also, Jones never gets around to explaining why the NWO would try to co-opt his mad radio skillz to serve their agenda, then select a paranoid populist "shill" to debunk him, only to have the shill say 90% of the same stuff Jones does. Jones harps on the 10% of their content that differs (bailouts, 9/11, etc.) in an effort to convince us that Beck is a disinfo machine, but it just doesn't ring true. I've said before that Jones and Beck seem to have been separated at birth.

Of course, Jones said all this when Beck was at the top of his game, raking in the highest ratings Fox News has ever seen. Nowadays, he's hawking his Glenn Beck Network, an online-only "tv station" that will never, ever, have as many viewers as Fox News. Hell, a huge percentage of Fox News viewers don't even know how to use computers.
Would the New World Order really let Beck, their carefully-groomed stooge, sink so low?

If They really wanted to debunk Jones's rants about FEMA camps, false-flag terror attacks, and patriot persecution, They would not hire a self-described "rodeo clown" to talk about FEMA camps, false-flag terror attacks, and patriot persecution. They would do what I do, but on a significant scale: Point out the many, many flaws in Jones's "facts", theories, and opinions.

Face it, Mr. Jones: Glenn Beck is you in a suit.

Alex Jones Predicted the Norway Massacre

2011-07-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

Late on Saturday night, Jones suddenly realized that Infowars predicted the Norway attacks the day before they happened. He explains it all in these video messages.

It seems even Prison Planet/Infowars commenters are getting bored with everything being a "false flag", so Jones spends some time chewing them out for not knowing their history. False flags have happened, ergo everything that happens is probably false flag.

On Friday, Infowars started out speculating that Middle Eastern terrorists could be responsible for the Norway attacks. Within hours, Kurt Nimmo had concluded the whole thing was really a false flag NWO attack designed to crush the growing populist movement in Norway. Then Infowars decried the mainstream media's scapegoating of Middle Eastern terrorists. Pot, meet kettle.
Throughout all this nonsense, Infowars didn't say anything about Jones predicting the attacks.

Now, Jones insists he saw it coming on Thursday. "How did I know? How could I not, it was like the media was rolling out a new soft drink, it was so in your face."

So did he actually call it, just like he "predicted" 9/11 and the Austin plane crash? Not really. What Jones griped about on Thursday was the use of white terror suspects in DHS terrorism-awareness videos. These are the same hokey PSA videos I discussed back in January. In his opinion, they're a huge part of the NWO effort to brand white populists like himself as The New Threat to Mankind. In my opinion, they're generic PSAs. The reason the vids don't feature Middle Eastern men acting suspiciously is because the DHS didn't want to come off as a bunch of racist fucks.
Besides, what the hell does the DHS campaign have to do with Norway? I know Jones thinks the NWO hands down global edicts from some secret location, but it doesn't. What happens in Norway pretty much affects only Norway. It's a socialist nation with universal healthcare and gay marriage. Obviously, it is not following the exact same script as the U.S.

To be fair, though, governments are growing concerned about homegrown terrorism perpetrated by angry right-wing dudes, and they might take some unwise measures to try to prevent the Breiviks among us from going apeshit. Jones tells us that in order to do this, the governments first have to stage false flag attacks that look like right-wing atrocities.
But, wait, sometimes terrorist acts really are carried out by angry right-wing dudes. Can't the NWO baddies just wait until one of them goes apeshit, then crack down on the anti-government movements?
Well, no. You see, as Jones has explained to us many times, there are no right-wing mass murderers, only right-wing patsies. All crazy gunmen are left-wing.

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The Norwegian Massacre Mystery Is Solved

2011-07-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Infowars!

As mentioned in the last post ("Let's All Jump to Conclusions"), Kurt Nimmo of Infowars has decided that Anders Breivik is "obviously a patsy for a Gladio operation to destroy political opposition to the bankers." The Powers That Be in Norway were fed up with populist opposition to the New World Order agenda, so they staged a false flag terrorist attack that implicates a right-wing, anti-government terrorist.

Sounds good. But just for fun, let's be contrarian and examine this theory a little.

Evidence for a false-flag attack:

1. Breivik belonged to Norway's Progressive Party, a populist libertarian party that opposes big government and economic bailouts.
As Nimmo himself states, however, Breivik hasn't been a member of the Progressive Party for four years. Wouldn't it make more sense to frame, I dunno, a current member? If you pick a patsy whose membership has lapsed for nearly half a decade, the sensible members of the public will just assume that Breivik no longer subscribes to the PP platform, and conclude that his involvement isn't germane to what happened Friday.

Breivik's major beef, if the video and manifesto attributed to him are authentic, was Muslim immigrants. If you wanted an anti-government/anti-big business patsy, would you pick this guy? No. You'd pick a guy who makes incoherent vids about the evils of banksterism.

Protip: If you're trying to destroy the reputation of a large political movement by making its members look like psychotic mass murderers, you might want to frame more than one guy, and make sure they actually belong to said political movement.

2. Lots of false flag attacks have been staged.
Well, yes. And lots of people have gone on shooting rampages for any number of dipshit reasons.

3. The Norway massacre has been likened to the Oklahoma City bombing, and that was a false flag attack designed to squash the Patriot movement.
Really? Then why did every other douchebag in Washington try to pin it on Middle Eastern terrorists? Did they not get the memo?

4. Breivik may have been a Freemason. Another gunman who targeted children, Thomas Hamilton of Scotland, was a Freemason - and perhaps part of a Freemasonic conspiracy.
The Dunblane conspiracy theories are, to be blunt and crude, fucking retarded. And no, I don't mean retarded in a developmentally disabled way. I mean retarded in the I-have-a-fully-functional-mind-but-I'd-rather-waste-it-thinking-up-idiotic-conspiracy-fairytales way. The Dunblane theory is basically this: The Scottish Powers That Be wanted to outlaw guns, but They knew The People would fight them tooth and nail. So they blackmailed or persuaded a mentally unstable pedophile Freemason to go into a school and shoot as many little children as possible. Voila! Problem solved! No more guns, and only 16 innocent Scottish children had to die.

To buy this theory, you have to ignore the fact that the Tory government didn't outlaw handguns, but restricted legal handguns to single-shot .22s. This was on the recommendation of the Home Affairs Select Committee, which advised that outlawing all handguns would be worthless "panic legislation". It was the Liberal [correction: Labour] government that put a ban on all handguns. If the sinister master plan was to get rid of guns, then the Tories would have done it ASAP. They're good at sinister master plans.

The shooter, Thomas Hamilton, was very peeved that people kept getting in the way of his youth group leadership (he was turfed from the Scouts back in the '70s for inappropriate behaviour, but had set up several "youth clubs" since that time). He was continuously getting complaints from parents, and felt that his favourite activity was about to be taken away from him. He was also unemployed and completely freaking insane.

Theoretically, yes, Masons could blackmail other Masons to do all kinds of wacky stuff. But I don't suppose that's any more common than plain old blackmail.

5. The blasts may have come from beneath the buildings, rather than from a car bomb. Whew! Finally, some meaty physical evidence!
Or maybe not. According to this article by Paul Joseph Watson, the source is the father of an anonymous Norwegian emailer. According to Anon's dad, an explosives expert, the "pattern of damage and debris" reveal the blast came from underground. Until this alleged guy gives us some details, or someone else notices the same thing, I'd say this piece of evidence is thinner than lefse.

And to get all semantic and shit, let's remember that the term "patsy" was originally used to denote scapegoats; innocent or marginally involved people blamed for someone else's actions. Nowadays the word is used promiscuously, slapped on everyone from co-conspirators to masterminds who get busted for their minions' doings. This is bullshit. Real patsies are not involved in the plot, don't know there even is a plot, and probably won't admit to doing anything wrong unless there's some heavy-duty coercive questioning going on.
As Breivik has already reportedly confessed to this crime without implicating even one accomplice, he's likelier to be the guy who did this than a fall guy.

Terrorism in Norway: Let's All Jump to Conclusions

2011-07-22T17:52:00.000-07:00

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It's way more fun than waiting for real information to come in.

When I heard that someone disguised as a police officer opened fire on a Liberal youth camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya, 3o minutes from Oslo (where a car bomb went off earlier in the day), I doubted Al Qaeda involvement. How does an Arab terrorist convincingly pass himself off as a Scandinavian police officer, and how would Al Qaeda know (or care) about the youth camp? This seemed more likely to be a domestic thing, perpetrated by someone with a beef against the government in general or the ruling Liberal party in particular.

This guy has been arrested on suspicion of being the shooter, and police have stated they believe the bombings and shootings are linked. According to his Facebook profile (which was just yanked), he runs a farming operation, so getting the materials for a car bomb would have been cake. He's a conservative with an interest in political analysis. He lives in Oslo. He enjoys hunting, so perhaps he's a decent marksman.

This looks fairly simple. Dude combines a grudge with a homemade bomb and his hunting rifle. Chaos ensues. Middle Eastern terrorists get blamed until people realize there's no evidence of their involvement. Then we all select a favourite pet peeve and try to tie it in to this deranged jerkoff. He did it because there's no prayer in Norwegian schools! He did it because socialists have no souls! Or whatever.

Infowars has of course taken a quantum jump to the conclusion that this isn't what it seems. It's a false flag operation, like everything else that has ever happened since the dawn of civilization. People never just do bad things on their own steam. Personal responsibility is bunk. There's always someone or something else to blame: psych meds, Jews, arcane military ops.

Already, Infowars has posted a slew of articles dissecting the Norwegian Government Plot Against Norway.

Paul Joseph Watson: "Oslo police were conducting a bombing exercise at a location near the Oslo Opera House just 48 hours before a terrorist blast hit a government building in the Norwegian capital." He implies such exercises are typical of false flag terrorism, serving as "the fallback of a drill."
Really? Norwegian NWO baddies planned this thing for Friday, and they conducted their first major drill on Wednesday?

Watson again: The media is manufacturing a "white Al Qaeda myth", and anonymous callers and e-mailers have already alerted Alex Jones to inconsistencies with the Official Story.
Actually, the media seems to be backing off on the Al Qaeda speculation, as it doesn't really jive with the arrest of a blonde guy named Anders.
Not really knowing why the NWO would go after Norway, Watson throws everything at the wall in the off-chance something may stick. Norway halting payments to Greece, not joining the EU, backing away from action in Libya.

An unattributed article starts to pick apart the "holes" in a story that hasn't even emerged yet, trying to get us to be paranoid as hell. Why would a terrorist attack an empty building on a holiday? Doesn't this point to a false flag op?
Well, there are any number of potential answers to that questions. Maybe the perp(s) aren't quite as murderous as professional terrorists. Maybe he/they were scared of approaching a building full of people with a car bomb. You can't really make sense of terrorism, which is inherently irrational.

Kurt Nimmo wonders if "CIA contact" Mullah Krekar was responsible, and says the attacks will probably be blamed on Al Qaeda. Like I said, the Al Qaeda theory is already melting away in the media.
On Saturday, Infowars re-posed this article from Zero Hedge: "Establishment Media Rushed to Blame Madman Attack on Muslims With No Evidence."
Wait, what? Didn't Nimmo do that just yesterday with Krekar? Also, this article clearly takes the view that Breivik is the real perp and acted alone, which Infowars wouldn't accept under any circumstances. Lone shooters don't exist on Infowars, unless they're Zionist-controlled zombies or raging ecoterrorists. Or Freemasons, as Breivik apparently was.
But it's too late to agree with Nimmo, anyway; he already changed his mind. Today, he declares Breivik is "obviously a patsy for a Gladio operation to destroy political opposition to the bankers". His "evidence" for this is wafer-thin. Basically, Breivik was a member of a libertarian-style political party that opposed bailouts, and was set up as a patsy to demonize all like-minded Norwegians. This doesn't quite explain why he confessed, but there ya go. Kurt Nimmo has solved the whole mystery in about half a dozen paragraphs.

But as Gwynne Dyer has quite sensibly pointed out, it doesn't really matter.

It's Time for WWIII Again

2011-05-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of people on the planet, Alex Jones is very concerned about the possible outbreak of WWIII. The difference between Jones and the others, though, is that Jones loves to guess when and how WWIII will start - and needless to say, he gets it wrong every time.

On his August 10, 2006 broadcast Jones said a false-flag attack on the U.S. could trigger WWIII (the U.S. would attack Syria or Iran).

In 2008, frequent guest Bob Chapman said WWIII would start soon. It would be initiated by the U.S., in a vain effort to save its economy.

In the wake of the Mumbai attacks, Jones declared that this was an Anglo-American effort to trigger WWIII (India would go to war with Pakistan).

In 2008, an Infowars article suggested that a Tom Clancy videogame could be a warning about WWIII.

Also in 2008, frequent guest Lindsey Williams said WWIII will begin in 2012.

Last May, Jones said an attack on Iran would spark WWIII.

Last August, guest Hamid Gul warned that the War on Terror could trigger WWIII.

In February, Jones and radio host George Noory agreed that U.S. actions against Egypt could start WWIII.

In March, Jones speculated that actions against Libya's Gaddafi would start WWIII. Also in March, an Infowars article stated that Western nations are gearing up for WWIII. Contrary to what Jones and Williams et. al. have said, writer Tony Cartalucci believes Russia and China are ill-prepared for the outbreak of war.

After bin Laden was reported dead, Jones declared that this was a wholly Western effort to trigger WWIII (the U.S. will invade Pakistan and China will defend Pakistan, or Israel will start WWIII with false-flag attacks). Frequent guests Webster Tarpley and Lindsey Williams concur.

The "Truth" About Osama's "Death"

2011-05-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

Straight up, I admit my prediction of Jones' response to bin Laden's reported death was wrong. I thought he would try to convince his listeners that They had to pretend to kill bin Laden at this point in time because Jones had done his job too well; as founder and leader of the 9/11 Truth movement (he's neither, but that's another post), he had convinced the world that 9/11 was an inside job committed by neocons and other New World Order baddies. Thanks to Jones' runaway success, the heat was coming down on Them. They had to put an end to their decade-long charade.

To his credit, though, Jones didn't take the credit. Instead, he hammered at the "fact" that bin Laden died in 2002. He also trotted out former ISI chief General Hamid Gul, the guy who went on CNN in December 2008 to declare that 9/11 was perpetrated by "neocons and Zionists". In my opinion, given Pakistan's shadowy links to 9/11 and international terrorism in general, this is kind of like asking the bank robber for a description of the getaway car. Again, though, that's another post.

Keep in mind that I have some doubts about the story of bin Laden's demise. Like bin Laden's entire life, it is shrouded in mystery and contradictions. Why take his body only to dump it in the Indian ocean? Was it really worth the risk of extracting his corpse, simply to avoid the construction of a shrine? What the hell took so long, anyway? Granted, at least one of bin Laden's children claims to have witnessed his death, but there are a lot of unanswered questions. Only time will tell if this story is accurate.
However, I'm going to show you that Jones' 2002 death claim isn't any more valid than the current government claim. In fact, it's even flimsier. Let's look at Jones' primary sources:

Steve Pieczenik. On his May 2 and May 3 broadcasts, Jones repeatedly referred to Pieczenik as "the number two man next to Kissinger" (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, which was a more elastic title than you might think). I certainly wouldn't brag about that, but never mind. What Jones did not dwell upon is that Pieczenik has collaborated with Tom Clancy. You may recall that Jones has accused Clancy of participating in the New World Order conspiracy, using "predictive programming" in his novels and videogames (see here and here, for example). Dr. Pieczenik was also granted a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship.
I'm surprised that Jones considers him a reliable source. I certainly don't, but not for the reasons stated above. I think the guy uses Wikipedia and his website to exaggerate his achievements, possibly to promote his "nutritional medicine" practice and line of related products.
But let's be generous. Many résumé -padders and shameless self-promoters have given the world valuable inside information. It would be neither fair nor prudent to dismiss Pieczenik's bin Laden revelation just because he has a touch of Walter Mitty syndrome. Let's look at the meat of the matter: What evidence does Dr. P. bring to the table?
None.
Here is what he told Jones in 2002: "I think that Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, spilled the beans by accident three months agao when he said that bin Laden was dead because his kidney dialysis machines were destroyed in East Afghanistan. Well, he was one of the few that knew he had a kidney problem. That wasn't well known before. Everybody thought he had a heart disease. "

That's it. That's all he had to say. Pieczenik was just repeating what Musharraf had said in a CNN interview in January 2002. Musharraf didn't say bin Laden was dead. He said, "I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a ... kidney patient. I would give the first priority that he is dead and the second priority that he is alive somewhere in Afghanistan."
Musharraf now believes bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011 (and is desperately trying to convince the world that Pakistan knew nothing about bin Laden's presence in his country). So Pieczenik's sole piece of "evidence" - Musharraf's 2002 opinion that bin Laden could be dead - is null and void. Pieczenik was making a guess based on someone else's guess. And for the record, Pieczenik didn't say anything about bin Laden's body being preserved so officials could "roll it out later". Jones added that bit.

Sometime between April 2002 and this Tuesday, Pieczenik's story changed dramatically. Now he claims that back in '02, he knew from the "intelligence roster" that bin Laden had Marfan Syndrome and had been treated by CIA doctors. He died in late 2001.
This is certainly a lot more specific than Pieczenik's 2002 pronouncement, but Pieczenik still doesn't provide any evidence. It has long been speculated that bin Laden suffered Marfan Syndrome (see here and here), so that's not exactly inside information.
Pieczenik does not claim to have seen bin Laden's corpse, he does not provide any details about the circumstances of his alleged death, and he doesn't or will not give the specifics of bin Laden's alleged treatment by CIA physicians. His story rings every bit as hollow as the CNN reports.

Walter Cronkite. The late Walter Cronkite never stated that bin Laden was dead. Just the opposite, actually. Like Heinz and Albright, he made a cheeky remark about bin Laden being used to boost Bush's approval ratings in the run-up to the 2004 elections. Specifically, he commented on Larry King Live about the bin Laden tape released on October 29, 2004: "I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I'm a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, that he probably set up bin Laden to this thing." Cronkite believed it was bin Laden on that tape, alive and well. In fact, he conceded the tape could be a "double-edged sword" for Bush, because it presented the threat of further attacks along with evidence that his administration still hadn't bagged their number one enemy.

Prison Planet reported on this at the time, so I don't understand how Jones could so wildly re-interpret Cronkite's words.

Two unnamed "White House sources". Information that comes from anonymous sources is essentially worthless unless it leads to documentable sources. That's not the case here. No one has offered up verifiable evidence that bin Laden is dead.

Madeleine Albright. On December 17, 2003, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was about to be interviewed on the Fox News show Special Report With Brit Hume when she turned to Fox News analyst Morton Kondracke and wondered aloud if the Bush administration could already have a living Osama bin Laden in captivity, and was just waiting for the most politically expedient moment to announce his capture. She said nothing about bin Laden being dead. She did not say he was "on ice", as Jones repeatedly stated. Kondracke promptly relayed her comments to the world, and the story was picked up by many news outlets, notably the Washington Times.
If she had accidentally spilled the beans, Albright could have denied the conversation even took place. Instead, she confirmed her comments, but hastily assured the public that her speculation was made in jest. Clearly it was, because Bush did not spring bin Laden's capture as an October Surprise before the '04 elections.
Just like Musharraf, Albright has publicly accepted the report of bin Laden's death.

Theresa Heinz Kerry. I've spent all freaking day trying to find any instance of Teresa Heinz saying bin Laden was dead. Can't. It seems, however, that just like Madeleine Albright she made a catty remark about Bush capturing bin Laden just in time for the 2004 elections. At a fundraiser held in Pheonix, Arizona on September 22, 2004, she said, "I wouldn't be surprised if he [bin Laden] appeared in the next month."
As we've seen, these October Surprise remarks came to naught. Bin Laden did not appear in time for the 2004 elections - yet Bush nabbed a second term, anyway.

Conclusion: For some reason, Jones chose the weakest links to build his Osama-was-already-dead chain. He would have been better off trumpeting the bizarre statement made to David Frost in 2007 by Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former prime minister of Pakistan. She told Frost on November 2, 2007, that bin Laden had been killed by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, one of the men accused of murdering journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. She offered no details, and Frost didn't ask her to elaborate.
That was probably a wise choice. Nine days later, while under house arrest in Pakistan, Bhutto gave an interview to NPR in which she commented that her guards should be out searching for Osama bin Laden rather than confining her to her house.

On his May 2 broadcast, Jones repeatedly said They announced bin Laden's death at least ten times after September 11. This is a misleading statement. There were many rumours and unsubstantiated reports that bin Laden had been killed or captured at various times and in different places, but the only official government announcement of his death was made on May 1, 2011.

For a more reasoned take on bin Laden's reported death, check out the article Five Surprising Truths About the Killing of Osama Bin Laden by Joseph Fitsanakis at Intelnews.org.

Anatomy of an Alex Jones Fan

2011-05-03T16:40:00.001-07:00

artist's crappy rendering of "Steve"

On 4/20, my Significant Other stopped by a cannabis rally to give his pot activist buddies a bit of good news: An NDP candidate had said, on the record, that he supports legalization. The Signif Other isn't a cannabis aficionado, himself, but over the years has forged ties with pot activists who support peace/anti-war efforts and the 9/11 Truth movement.

Now as you can imagine, 4/20 rallies tend to be casual affairs. This particular one had a small stage-like setup, but no PA system and no schedule. Through the crowd, the Signif Other spotted a fellow he has encountered many times in the past few years, a medical marijuana activist who was once head of a provincial Marijuana Party. We'll call him Steve.

Steve may look and sound like a granola-lovin', tree-huggin' socialist, and in some respects he is. He claims to be a peacenik and an admirer of Gandhi. But he's also a hardcore Alex Jones fan.

Most of the Alex Jones fans I've encountered understand that Jones can get his facts a little, um, confused, and they take him with a grain of salt. They appreciate his overall message without necessarily believing that Bill Gates is trying to kill them, or that schizophrenics are demonically possessed, or that pi is 33.
Then there are those rare few who live, breath, and defecate Alex Jones. They deck themselves out in his merchandise, watch his entire show every day, and preface every other sentence with, "Alex says..."

These people are, quite frankly, insane. Not mentally ill. Just insane. Of the hardcore Jones fans I have met, not one exhibited a single symptom of emotional stability or common sense. One guy popped up out of nowhere, illegally plastered my neighborhood utility boxes and light poles with Infowars posters declaring "THERE'S POISON IN THE WATER" for several days, then vanished. He didn't round up other concerned citizens and petition the city council to stop putting fluoride in our municipal water supply. He didn't sponsor an educational seminar on the hazards of fluoridation. He just freaked everybody out and left.
Another hardcore Jones fan was TrutherBitch. She literally could not utter a sentence without inserting "Alex Jones", and her mass emails were batsh** insanity on crank. She was heavily invested in one of those Scamway-style MLMs.
Then there's Steve. When he learned I was the author of this blog, he growled at me. Actually growled. Like a dog when you get too close to something it's trying to bury.
His Twitter feed has exactly one subscription: Infowars.

Anyway, back to 4/20. The Signif Other saw Steve standing on the edge of the stage, hollering something. Steve didn't seem to be addressing the wandering, distracted crowd, though he later insisted he was making a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT (as every hardcore Alex Jones fan knows, ALL CAPS convey that you are CREDIBLE and IMPORTANT).
The Signif Other wandered over to the stage and called out something like, "Steve! Hey, Steve! I have some good news!"
Steve didn't respond, but a few seconds later he hopped off the platform, stalked directly up to the Signif Other, and threw a sheet of paper in his face. He growled something along the lines of, "Don't you ever do that to me again. I was making a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT." Then he stomped away without a word of explanation.

The Signif Other told me about this later in the day. I said, "Well, you shouldn't have interrupted someone who was on a stage. That was kinda douchey."
He said, "I didn't know he was making an announcement. I thought he was just yelling at somebody. I felt bad when I realized he was actually trying to say something." Undoubtedly, he would have apologized to Steve the next time he ran into him. It was one of those minor misunderstandings that happens all the time.

Fifteen hours later, we received an e-mailed death threat from Steve. I can't repeat 98% of it here, 'cause this is sort of a PG-13 blog, but the gist was that the Signif Other had deliberately interfered with a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT, COINTELPRO-style, and in so doing had "dishonored" Steve. One line was "Notice the abundance of scars on my knuckles. You will keep your f***ing mouth shut whenever I speak" (emphasis in original). Another was "I'll wipe your blood up with your family." Another was "Stay the f*** out of this visionary genius's way or you'll get walked on." You get the drift. It was a rambling, paranoid, two-page screed about all the ways and means and desires Steve has to inflict violence on those who disrespect him. You know, like Gandhi.

This letter was followed by a spate of other bizarre emails and messages, like, "The dishonoring stands until you honor me again."

Now I'm not saying that Steve is representative of Alex Jones fans. He sure as hell isn't representative of hippies, Canadians, or potheads. But maybe you can tell me why so many of Jones' hardcore admirers seem to be unhinged paranoiacs with massive chips on their shoulders...

"Pentagon Preparing for Martial Law!"

2011-03-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Jones took time of out of his busy schedule - shrieking at John Boehner's answering machine and whatnot - to be interviewed by ~~Pravda TV~~ Russia Today. None of what he says about the economy points toward martial law (or "marshall law", for that matter), but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.

NAU Deja Vu

2011-03-03T15:53:00.001-08:00

Jones hasn't talked at length about the North American Union for quite some time, but today he resurrected the NAU and linked it to the Mexican drug war. Apparently, They are using Mexico's drug violence as an excuse to allow Mexican military troops into the U.S. and Canada, and vice versa.
(He's also back to attacking Machete, holding it responsible for recent beheadings in Mexico. Please disregard the fact that such violence has been rampant in Mexico for years.)

While there is definitely a bipartisan push for military and corporate cooperation among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, the theory that They want to form an actual amalgamated superstate (Amerida? Mexica?) is bunk. Even the infamous paper "Building a North American Community", put out by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2005, completely eschewed the notion of a North American superstate administered by a single goverment.
The U.S. and Canada simply would not benefit from a merger with Mexico. Corporate North America is already benefitting hugely from the deregulation and "free" trade brought about by NAFTA; why would union with strife-ridden, impoverished Mexico be desirable? The shadowy deeds of Security, Prosperity, Partnership may invoke a few chills, but that organization clearly had no intent to create a NAU.

No credible evidence of the NAU has been presented by Jerome Corsi, Lou Dobbs, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, or any of the other talking heads who promote the theory.

No matter what Lindsay Williams says, there is no "Amero" currency.

The militaries of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. remain distinct and are not permitted to operate outside their own countries without explicit invitation.

There are no "open borders". Though I am an American-Canadian dual citizen, I need a passport to enter the U.S.

There are ambitious plans to construct a system of Mexico-to-Canada corridors collectively known as the NAFTA Superhighway, but construction proceeds so slowly it will not be completed in your grandchildren's lifetimes.

The truth is that NAFTA and related free trade deals have harmed the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in countless ways. That's worth discussing. The fictional NAU is not.

Apocalypse Wut

2011-02-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

or, How to Exploit Your Friends and Destroy People

"I've already been on MSNBC today, and I'm on a whole bunch of stuff coming up tonight. And obviously, we'll be able to inject infowars.com into the discussion when I'm on those broadcasts, and the people will come here and find the larger picture. It's kind of the red pill. Thanks to Charlie Sheen." - Alex Jones (Feb. 25/11 broadcast)

By now I'm sure you've all heard about (if not heard) Charlie Sheen's stream-of-unconsciousness rant on The Alex Jones Show, AKA "the rant that got Charlie Sheen fired". Sheen was supposed to be talking about 9/11, his 20 questions for Obama, etc. Instead, he talked for over half an hour about... Charlie Sheen. He dissed his enemies and critics, praised the "narly narlingtons" and "goddesses" who have stood by him, and bragged about his superstardom and talent. He read some of his baseball poetry, talked about watching Jaws on a yacht in the fourth dimension, and waxed ineloquent about Apocalypse Now. I can't even count the number of times he used the words "winning", "on fire", and "bring it".

When the rant began, I thought Sheen was on speed or coke. Then Jones went to great lengths to stress that Sheen is now totally clean. So then I thought maybe he just had a few too many energy drinks and was really hyper. As the "interview" went on, however, I finally realized that Sheen could be having a nervous breakdown or even a break with reality - and that Jones was basically exploiting a man who probably needs some help, rather than the fawning attention and acclaim Jones was throwing at him.

Inside jokes about being a "Vatican assassin warlock" aside, Sheen lavishly insulted his boss (Two and a Half Men writer/producer Chuck Lorre) and insisted on calling him Chaim Levine. That's not full-on anti-Semitism, but let's face it: It sounds like Sheen and Mel Gibson would get along just fine.
Sheen also referred repeatedly to violence against his enemies, joking (?) about decapitating Lorre in front of his children, "violently murdering" unnamed critics, and attacking people with "fire from above". Jones nervously nudged him to specify that he was talking about taking down his enemies "in the infowar", but Sheen stopped cooperating with him.

As for Sheen being clean, he says he cured himself of all addiction problems with his own mind. He had nothing but scorn for Alcoholics Anonymous, which he described as a cult made up of sissies, trolls, and losers. He said, "They have a 5% success rate. I have a 100% success rate."

"You sound like Thomas Jefferson," Jones told him.
"I'm not Thomas Jefferson," Sheen said, "Thomas Jefferson was a pussy."

So, now Charlie Sheen is out of a job (along with a lot of other people) and everyone thinks he's unhinged rather than just uninhibited. Great job, Mr. Jones.

I don't know what's wrong with Charlie Sheen and I don't know enough about the politics of network television to take a position on Chuck Lorre's "vanity cards", but I do know it's uncool to use your friend's nervous breakdown to promote your website, no matter how invaluable you think its content is.
Check out Jones' appearance on The View; Whoopi's reaction to him is classic.

The DHS "Police State" : Telescreens

2011-01-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

As a followup to yesterday's post on the Department of Homeland Security's "See Something, Say Something" anti-terrorism campaign, let's look at the other feature of the program that is riling Jones: "Telescreens".

Earlier this month, the "Orwellian" telescreens were placed in select Wal-Mart stores around the country.
Now by using the term "telescreen", you would assume that these devices enabled some form of two-way communication by which shoppers could report suspicious activity (not just activity in the store itself, but in any public place).
That's not quite the case. In fact, it's not at all the case. The screens are just that: Screens. A brief, looped message from Janet Napolitano plays on them. The screens are basically talking posters.

This Infowars article by Paul Joseph Watson implies that telescreens will be installed in 9000 other public places, including federal buildings and sports stadiums, but another article makes clear that only "signage" will be placed in 9000 federal buildings. There is no indication that screens will be placed in these areas.

Paul Joseph Watson likens See Something, Say Something to the Bush-era TIPS program in this article. But TIPS, which was canceled when the DHS was formed, encouraged repairmen, utility workers, and other home-service employees to keep an eye out for suspicious activity in people's homes. TIPS bears little resemblance to the new campaign, which deals solely with public places.

I'm sorry, but I have a difficult time viewing a handful of Wal-Mart TV screens, three bland PSA videos, and some posters as a "Sovietized police state" aimed at nabbing political dissidents. If you truly believe that these things are just like the tactics of the East German Stasi, then I strongly suggest you review some literature about the Stasi and remind yourself that if you're a lifelong American, you have never lived under that kind of oppression. To say that you have would be an insult to people who actually survived life in fascist police states.

And I have an equally hard time believing that Jones is really concerned about the DHS program fostering paranoia, distrust, and suspicion in Americans - because that's his stock in trade. He has told us to be suspicious of environmentalists, white Rastafarians, pretty much every law enforcement officer you'll ever encounter, cartoon scriptwriters, doctors, free mammogram clinics, comic books, and schizophrenics. If that's not paranoia, distrust, and suspicion, what is?

The Scariest Videos You Will Ever See

2011-01-21T17:43:00.001-08:00

Or not.

Jones is freaking over a trio of PSAs put out by the Department of Homeland Security as part of its anti-terrorism "See Something, Say Something" campaign. An Infowars article by Paul Joseph Watson claims that in the videos, "ordinary everyday activities are characterized as signs of potential terrorism".

I don't really have a problem with the DHS releasing videos like this. For one thing, they're chock-full of duuuuh information that the average, moderately functional person will not really need. They cover very basic security measures for hotels, malls, and stadiums.
For another thing, the DHS has an annual budget of over $55 billion and should damn well be doing something with all that lucre, even if it's just pumping out cheesy PSA vids for morons. They're spending a paltry $13 million on this effort, according to a Huffington Post article.

Give them a view (here) and decide for yourself. Personally, I would not call any of the following activities "ordinary" nor "everyday":
- Paying in advance for several weeks' stay at a hotel. In cash.
- Parking your car smack in front of the hotel entrance, then walking rapidly away from the hotel while bellhops and valets shout at you.
- Presenting false ID.
- Strolling into a hotel kitchen to take pictures with your cell phone, or covertly filming mall walkways for no apparent reason.
- Leaving bomb parts strewn around your hotel room for the maid to find.
- Calling the mall to find out how many security guards are working.
- Purposely leaving your stuff in an open spot and never coming back for it.
- Hanging out in employee-only areas even though you don't know any employees.

While I definitely don't want to foster paranoia in anyone, I don't think there's anything wrong with vigilance, either. Being aware of your surroundings and following your gut are called "survival instincts" for a reason, and that's basically all the DHS videos are asking you to do. It's not "Stasi-like" to report something funky.
Though the media has all but ignored it, a backpack bomb was found and defused along the MLK Day parade route in Spokane, Washington, last week - thanks to citizens' vigilance. They saw the pack in an open place, wondered how it could be "lost" in such an obvious spot, and reported it. There was plenty of time for the parade to be rerouted and the bomb removed.

Tomorrow I'll discuss the other scary part of the "See Something, Say Something" campaign: Thousands of "telescreens" in public places.

The Blame Game continues

2011-01-09T16:02:00.000-08:00

The greatest thing about The Alex Jones Show is that you usually don't even have to listen to it to know exactly what Jones is going to say. But I do anyway, just to be sure.

As I expected, Jared Loughner is probably a government mind-controlled assassin and an abortion-loving atheist Commie. Weirdly, he's also linked to white supremacy, but that's not very important. Remember, all crazy gunmen are left-wing, even if their unidentified government handlers have coached them on how to be right-wing zealots for the past twenty years.

Jones admits there isn't a lot of evidence that Loughner is a Manchurian Candidate, but like all other Candidates, he was preoccupied with mind control. So are many mentally ill people, but never mind that. Federal zombie assassins are way more interesting.

By the way, how dare the mainstream media jump to strange conclusions about this crime?

2010: The Imaginary Year in Review

2011-01-05T18:56:00.000-08:00

If everything Alex Jones warned us about had actually occurred last year, this is what 2010 would have looked like...

As a continuation of The Great Swine Flu Plot, which commenced in the autumn of '09, nearly every American was forcibly inoculated with the H1N1 vaccine, which of course killed and injured a vast number of them. The dead were dumped into mass graves, incinerated, or buried in plastic FEMA coffins (otherwise known as vault liners).
The holdouts and survivors, however, staged massive protests that resulted in the institution of nationwide martial law, administered by NORTHCOM and Americorps volunteers (AKA "Obama's thugs"). Dissidents were rounded up at their local post offices and confined to FEMA concentration camps, where they remain.

All of this happened, in part, because Americans voted in as president the Kenyan-born Communist Barry Soetoro. If they had opted for Ron Paul, the New World Order would have been stopped in its tracks and pot would be legal.

(Buy gold.)

Meanwhile, the government ramped up its decades-long depopulation policy by slipping sterilizing agents into municipal drinking water supplies, as per John Holdren's instructions (included in a 1970s textbook, but kept on a shelf until the moment was right). Fluoride, plastics, aspartame, intentionally contaminated Chinese products, sunscreen, genetically modified corn, body scanners, all vaccines, Obamacare death panels, and most prescription medicines are slowly killing the rest of us as I write this, with the help of Pentagon-produced progaganda like the cartoon Squidbillies. But filterless cigarettes, massive alcohol consumption, meat products, environmental pollution caused by under-regulated industry, and preventable diseases are not killing significant numbers of North Americans. Those things are mostly okay.

(Buy gold.)

By this time, the few Americans left alive and unincarcerated had helplessly witnessed the passage of bank bailouts, carbon taxation, the Clean Water Restoration Act, government healthcare, and hate crime legislation that basically stripped them of all rights and paved the way for a U.S. takeover by the United Nations. Today, the U.S. is a fully-owned subsidiary of the UN.

Worldwide, millions died as a direct result of carbon taxation. I'm not sure exactly how, but they did.

(Buy gold.)

In the summer of 2010, the New World Order takeover plan was beginning to drag a bit. Tea Partiers, Patriots, and Alex Jones fans were making things difficult for the plotters. So they blew up several IRS offices in the U.S. and blamed the attacks on prominent Tea Party activists and tax protesters. These people are now in FEMA camps.

(Buy gold.)

The depopulation agenda continues apace. Soon, up to 99% of the world's population will be dead and the elite will be able to sit around and gloat over their global domination. They can continue their transhumanistic, technocratic agenda in peace and quiet. Twenty years from now, Bill and Melinda Gates will have total control of the weather.

But the Spirt of 1776 just refuses to die, so all is not lost. There were stupendous advances in science, economics, and education throughout 2010:

Leonard Horowitz invented OxySilver, which "electronically zaps pathogens, and is a good replacement for vaccination." I don't quite understand how this zappy-thingy could possibly prevent viral infection, since it only zaps pathogens that are already in the body. But I'm not a genius like Dr. Horowitz, the man who taught us all about serial killer dentists and the New World Order's instruction manual Report from Iron Mountain.
The final solution to the (intentionally created) economic meltdown was presented to the world in a single feature-length documentary produced and directed by people who aren't even economists.
We learned that Hitler was on the MI5 payroll. The media told us Mussolini was on the MI5 payroll, but Alex Jones told us it was Hitler. So it was definitely Hitler.
The Alex Jones documentary Police State 4 was released. After watching it, "You'll basically have a master's degree in the police state takeover." Unfortunately, nationwide martial law had already been established by the time the DVD went on sale.
To the delight of Jason Bermas, the "fat cops" who arrested him at the G20 summit protests all died as a direct result of the elites' depopulation agenda. Bermas had a good laugh.
All climate change was exposed as a tax-grabbing fraud. This means that nearly all environmental regulations, sustainability measures, and "green" solutions are total crap. Exept for those solar panels GCN advertises.
Even though you'll be dead soon and you're probably already sterile from eating corn chips and drinking tapwater, you'll be able to ride your motorcycle in comfort thanks to jeans with a diamond gusset in the crotch, where you need it most.

On the global front, Wikileaks undermined the illegal wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq with leaked diplomatic memos and video footage of civilian deaths. But that's not really a good thing, because Julian Assange's former stepdad was once in a cult and George Soros might have some behind-the-scenes involvement in Wikileaks - so Assange can't be trusted. The unknown Climategate hackers can be trusted, however.

Not that any of this matters now. Like I said, we'll all be dead soon.

Assange Rap

2010-12-20T17:45:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-02T17:12:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-12-01T14:28:00.000-08:00

"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

2010-10-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-10-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-03T22:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-03T03:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-28T05:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-14T21:57:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

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"

2010-09-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-09-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

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

An Open Response to Critics of the Last Post

2010-09-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

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"

2010-08-27T15:13:00.001-07:00

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."

2010-08-26T15:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-08-09T22:52:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-04T02:15:00.000-07:00

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?

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

2010-07-27T22:52:00.001-07:00

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.

Please Stop with the David Duke Videos

2010-07-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

Lately, many people have been spreading videos, quotes, and articles featuring David Duke via email, Facebook, blogs, etc. This is a tangential issue, because it's not something Alex Jones is doing himself. It's something that has become mysteriously popular among certain fans of Jones, particularly Truthers and Canadian "Freemen". I have to say something about it because I hate racism more than just about anything else on this planet, and I realize that (strange as this may seem to Americans), a lot of Canadians seem to be unaware of David Duke's history and motives. They like what he has to say about the Israel-Palestine issue, or Zionism, or what-have-you, so they think it's perfectly acceptable to share his "work" for the enlightenment of others.

Here's the deal. I've watched these videos and read these articles, and I can tell you in perfect confidence that everything David Duke has to say about Israel and Palestine has already been said elsewhere, by far more credible (and far less racist) people like Gwynn Dyer, Robert Fisk, and Norman Finkelstein - to name just a few. Duke is not doing original research. I doubt he's even been to Israel or Palestine, as there would be no impetus for a Christian white racial supremacist to hang out with Jews and Muslims (unless it's at a Holocaust denial conference or a PR event). I believe that Duke's recent moral support of Muslims is a ploy; he doesn't actually care about their rights and issues, but it benifits him to align himself with them in the short term, to promote his anti-Semitism.
So by using Duke's words, his videos, his image to spread a certain message, rather than going to the source material and putting together your own presentations on the conflict, you look like a total asshole. I guarantee that anyone who knows you're disseminating David Duke literature and vids will look askance at you for the rest of your life, wondering if you're secretly a racial supremacist. It will damage your credibility and reputation beyond measure, no matter how many times you say something like, "I don't like David Duke, I just liked what he had to say in this clip."
The attitude seems to be that it's OK to learn from and collaborate with racial supremacists as long as they're not being overtly racist. It's the same attitude I saw among Truthers who worked openly with Holocaust deniers, arguing that if you're united on one issue, it doesn't matter what else you believe. Maybe that's true, but look how much damage was done to the Truth movement by its affiliation with anti-Semites. The bottom line is that by failing to challenge racist disinfo and supremacist propaganda when you're directly faced with it, you are basically aiding and abetting it. You are giving your tacit approval to it. And if you are helping racists spread their message by sharing their videos and literature - for whatever reason - you are actually participating in it.

With the current attitude, it shouldn't be a surprise that white supremacists and white separatists have been making some major headway lately. The separatist movement has its own syndicated radio show, Political Cesspool (on which perennial Jones favourite Paul Craig Roberts has been a guest). And now David Duke, of all people, has somehow managed to dupe certain members of the public - once again - into believing that he has changed and that it's time to stop mentioning his "past" as a Klan leader and racist. If you have fallen for this, I strongly urge you to review even the most basic information about Duke, even just his Wikipedia entry. He does, beyond any shadow of any doubt, believe that the Christian white man is morally, spiritually, physically, and mentally superior to any other race on earth, and that he has a God-given mandate to spread this message to as many people as he can. This is not past tense. David Duke is not appearing on TV and giving radio interviews to offer you unbiased, helpful information about Israel and Palestine; he is using public forums to subtly denigrate non-Christian and/or non-white people so that you will begin to think of yourself as superior to them and jump all the way onto his bandwagon. He is a propagandist. He is a popularizer. He is a recruiter. If you're comfortable with this, go ahead and share his information with everyone you know. If you're not, take a stand. Stop being a vector of thinly veiled racist propaganda.

Alex Jones Censored Again

2010-07-18T20:43:00.000-07:00

Alex Jones gets censored a lot. THEY have tried to silence him countless times by....by....

Well, basically just by tampering with his stuff on YouTube once in a great while.

This time, The Obama Deception was removed from a YouTube channel called ChangeDaChannel, apparently by a hacker. This isn't as big an "emergency" as the temporary removal of Jones' unoffical YouTube channel was, yet Steve Watson at Prison Planet calls the hack a "gross violation" of the First Amendment. The first problem with this statement, of course, is that hacking is not a First Amendment issue. The second problem is that even if YouTube removed the video, YouTube is and always has been a private corporate entity that can censor to its heart's damn content. Anyone who has not grasped this yet needs to, I dunno, maybe pay attention? Third problem: The Obama Deception is still available by the truckload. I have like five copies, and you can find it on just about every video-sharing site. You can order it from NetFlix, for the love of all that's holy! If this is censorship, lay some on me.

Creepier than the censorship claim is the statement that Jones is on "high-alert". What does that even mean? Are you we supposed to man our stations or something? Well, sort of. Aaron Dykes lays out the steps we're supposed to take to fight the end of freedom of speech on the internet, which I've helpfully paraphrased:

Every single time you go online, spend 5 minutes typing “The Obama Deception”, “Police State 4″, or “Endgame” into every major search engine. I'm not sure why this would take 5 minutes. Anyway, here's hoping Samuel Beckett's work will make a comeback.

Use celebrity/mainstream media hype to bring attention to real issues. "Hey, did you hear Lindsey Lohan might go to jail? Oh, and by the way, the Rockefellers are trying to kill your children with tapwater."

Nag the hell out your family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and random strangers to watch The Obama Deception. Then recruit them as Amway reps, ask them if they've accepted Jesus Christ, and sell them a vacuum cleaner. They'll love you.

Oh, and before we forget: Let your elected reps know you support an Internet free of surveillance and censorship. Then watch The Obama Deception.

"Treason"

2010-07-08T13:25:00.001-07:00

At the end of this month, Arizona's anti-immigration law will take effect. SB1070 requires all immigrants to carry proof of citizenship at all times, and gives Arizona law enforcement officers the right to ask for that ID if they reasonably suspect someone they're dealing with of being an illegal immigrant. Those who don't produce their ID on demand can be detained. Arizona has not yet decided what constitutes reasonable suspicion of illegal immigrant status; the Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training Board is tasked with figuring out that key part of the law. This will be quite tricky, as race is not an accepted criterion for suspicion. But the law is aimed specifically at Mexican illegals. Hmm. Complicated.
The passage of the bill was spurred, in part, by the murder of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz in March. On the day he was shot, Krentz reportedly used a two-way radio to tell his brother he had been seen an "illegal alien" in the area. He did not impart any other information. The attitude of many Arizona citizens seems to be, "We know it was an illegal drug smuggler, we just don't have any evidence of that, or any suspects."

Let me make it clear, for the record, that I have a great deal of sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico. If I had a family in one of the poorest parts of that country, I would certainly sneak into a safer, more prosperous country in the hope that my children would have opportunities they could never otherwise have. That's natural. We want the best for our families. So the problem is not with the illegal immigrants themselves. I don't believe, as Jones has stated, that they are "diluting the culture", because the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, anyway. Yes, I know that increased crime rates are being attributed to illegal immigration and/or trans-border drug smuggling - but that's not a situation that needs new laws. It just needs tougher enforcement of existing laws, and/or increased funding for law enforcement in high-crime areas.
The bottom line is, though, that I oppose illegal immigration. As difficult as it is to face, I believe that Mexicans must stay in Mexico until they can enter the U.S. lawfully to live and work. That's just the way it is.

But SB1070 has sparked fears of racial profiling and discrimination, and not without cause. I know that the U.S. doesn't treat even its legal immigrants well. Each new wave of immigrants is put through trial by fire: Racism, discrimination, marginalization, abuse. Hispanic Americans obviously don't relish the idea of being set apart from other citizens.
This is not the first attempt by a state to crack down on illegal immigration with extreme measures. Janet Napolitano, now secretary of Homeland Security, repeatedly vetoed similar legislation when she was governor of Arizona. A far less rigid anti-immigration bill, California's Proposition 187, was shot down in 1994.
An April Rasmussen poll showed that 70% of Arizona voters approved of SB1070.
On the other hand, San Francisco and a few other cities have passed laws protecting illegal immigrants from federal immigration law.

On Tuesday (July 6), the Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Phoenix against the state of Arizona and Governor Jan Brewer, seeking a court injunction to prevent the law from taking effect. The suit claims SB1070 interferes with existing federal immigration laws, and is therefore invalid.
Attorney General Eric Holder stated that "diverting federal resources away from dangerous aliens such as terrorism suspects and aliens with criminal records will impact the entire country's safety."

Jones calls this lawsuit "treason", raising the question: Is it legal and Constitutional for the federal government to oppose (via lawsuit) a state law?

The answer is "yes". The federal government cannot repeal or amend state law, not even by executive order. But there's nothing to stop it from challenging the constitutionality of a state law in federal court, which is exactly what the DoJ is doing now. This is made possible by the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which basically states that federal law is the law of the land and can not be superseded or negated by state law. The "preemptive doctrine" derived from this clause permits the federal government to challenge any state law that encroaches upon federal regulation, law, interest, etc. But don't go thinking that this doctrine always works in the federal government's favour; it's actually very difficult, in most such cases, for the federal side to prove it has "occupation of the field". One fascinating example is Silkwood v Kerr-Mcgee (1984). After Karen Silkwood died in 1974, her family filed suit against Kerr-Mcgee. They were awarded $10 million in punitive damages, and Kerr -Mcgee fought the judgment by arguing that the federal government (in the form of the Atomic Energy Commission) was responsible for any "irregularities" at the nuclear facility where Silkwood had worked. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that in this case, federal regulation did not supersede state or local regulation and Kerr-Mcgee would have to pay up (they settled out of court instead, for a fraction of the original judgement). In other words, Kerr-Mcgee was held responsible for lax safety at their Oklahoma plant even though it met federal (AEC) standards. The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law has an informative page on these issues.
You might not like it, but the DoJ lawsuit against Arizona is constitutionally sound and perfectly legal. It will be up to a judge to decide if, as legal precedent indicates, naturalization is in the federal domain. If the Arizona law stands, then we may have a problem. Immigration and naturalization could become a state-regulated affair, with each state setting its own standards of citizenship. You could be a legal resident in Vermont but an illegal in New Jersey.

An equally important question: Is SB1070 unconstitutional? The answer, I believe, is "yes". The 14th Amendment states, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States..." I'd say that stopping a citizen and demanding to see proof of citizenship is an abridgment of that person's rights. The argument that "he might be an illegal" is moot, because anyone might be an illegal. Now one of the Anonymi who commented on this post (along with many other supporters of SB1070) has pointed out that a driver's license can suffice as proof of citizenship, since you have to present your papers to acquire one. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with an officer asking someone for proof of U.S. citizenship. Jones states, in his special alert video about "Obama's treason", that SB1070 is just a "mirror" of federal immigration law. This is false. Federal law does not require immigrants to carry proof of citizenship at all times. It does require non-citizens ("permanent residents") to carry their green cards, but no citizen is legally required to carry any form of ID at all times.
You can argue that Arizona is struggling to fill in the gaps in federal legislation, but you cannot validly claim that the Arizona law is similar in any way to federal laws already on the books.

Jones also argues that the 11th Amendment, which forbids the federal government or any state from suing a state on behalf of a foreign entity, renders the DoJ suit unconstitutional. He's apparently referring to his belief that "foreign bankers" are taking over the U.S., and that illegal immigration suits their purposes nicely. He also seems to think the 14th Amendment makes the DoJ lawsuit unconstitutional. This is why Alex Jones is not a lawyer, folks.

Ironically, SB1070 could (and by "could" I mean "probably won't be") used as a gateway to the kind of mandatory universal ID cards that Jones & Co. fear. If immigrants must be required to carry proof of citizenship, why not the rest of us? It's interesting that both Jones and former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano criticized the Real ID Act, which contained anti-immigration provisions. Jones did so because he doesn't like the idea of national ID cards; everyone would be required to have one. However, the bulk of the administration of the Real ID system is under state control.

"Admitting"

2010-07-04T15:39:00.000-07:00

admit: 5. to allow or concede as valid 6. to acknowledge; confess
(Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language)

Jones loves to say that NWO conspirators have openly "admitted" to terrible things (scientists have "admitted" that chemtrails block out the sun, for instance).

Here's one that Jones has been particularly fond of lately: The U.S. military admits to growing opium poppies in Afghanistan! To mainstream news sources, no less! That's some pretty big news. The public should be hopping mad about that, but I guess we're all too busy watching Idol and kissing fascist butt to pay any attention, right?

Er, maybe not. Maybe the stories that Jones cites don't actually say a damn thing about American soldiers growing poppies.

Okay, screw the "maybe". The articles really don't say a damn thing about U.S. soldiers cultivating opium, and there's no evidence that they're doing so. Check it out:

- Jones claims that Reuters reported on the "admission". Reuters actually reported "Efforts to curb Afghan opium crop fail this year".
- The AP has turned out stories about the increased rates of opium use and addiction in Afghanistan, but has not (as Jones says) put out any "admissions" that the U.S. military is growing poppies or producing opium.
- Fox News supposedly blew the whistle, too. On his Sunday broadcast Jones declared, "Fox News interviewed a Marine Corps colonel who admitted, 'Yes, we grow the opium over there. We have to, or the Taliban will get the market.'" Jones is apparently referring to Geraldo's interview with Lt. Col. Brian Christmas, which revealed only that the Army is providing security for all cash crops in occupied parts of Afghanistan, and is currently tolerating the cultivation of poppies rather than destroying them, to avoid further pissing off Afghan citizens. Lt. Col. Christmas said nothing about the military growing opium. On the contrary, he said the army is buying up the harvested poppies just to get them off the market, and hopes that with encouragement the farmers will choose to raise food crops instead.
Now the ethical nature of all this is highly questionable, and you'd be right to question the army's real motives here. But did Lt. Col. Christmas (or any other colonel) say, "We're growing the poppies to push the Taliban out of the market?". No. The Taliban wasn't even mentioned. The attitude expressed was that poppy-growing is a cultural practice that just isn't worth fighting tooth-and-nail (duh).

Once again, Jones' idea of "admitting" and mine are quite different.

Forecast Something Else

2010-07-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

One year ago and a day ago, Bob "International Forecaster" Chapman declared on The Alex Jones Show that Bernie Madoff would be dead by this time. Actually, he said that Madoff would be "dead"... shipped off in the middle of the night to some super-secret hideout. You know, like Ken Lay?

I don't have to tell you that Madoff is alive and well. He's serving his life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution Butner Medium in North Carolina, working at the prison canteen. Aside from two scraps with other inmates late last year, there has been no violence against him. He has not suffered any health problems more serious than hives.

Infowhat?

2010-07-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

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.

On Vacation...

2010-06-08T21:52:00.001-07:00

until the end of the month. Have a good June, and give some thought to the recent actions of the man I call Alex Jones' spiritual twin: Glenn Beck. Watch the vid below and ask yourself, is Beck's embrace of the "anti-Communist" Elizabeth Dilling very different from Jones' embrace of Eustace Mullins, Texe Marrs, Ted Pike, "journalists" for rags started by Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, and guests who hold other racist and/or bigoted views? If Jones and Beck want to successfully "expose the truth" about Communism, the banking system, globalization, etc., there are many intelligent, erudite people they could choose as mentors - so why do they so often pick Jew-haters, people with fascist and/or neo-Nazi sympathies, and bigots?

The alternative media line seems to be, "If you have even a tiny amount of valid information, we don't care if you're a Holocaust denier, anti-Semite, fascist, or racist. It's all good so long as we agree on the really important stuff like fluoride, Illuminati symbolism in public places, and martial law (which is, of course, going to happen any minute now)."

There are key questions. We will not understand the true intent of Jones, Beck et al until we answer them.

Upcoming MSNBC doc

2010-06-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

This might be interesting. I wouldn't call Jones right-wing, exactly, but it's better than saying "rise of the conspiranoids" or "rise of the rednecks" or something like that.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Jackal?

2010-06-04T01:13:00.000-07:00

One of the top stories at Infowars today is the erection of a statue of the ancient Egyptian jackal-god, Anubis, outside Denver International Airport. The DIA has been a focal point of conspiranoia since its construction in the early '90s, partly because it gobbled up a massive amount of taxpayers' money ($4.8 billion) and partly because....well, people are a little nuts sometimes. They point to Masonic plaques and a peace-themed mural as *evidence* the airport is a New World Order monument, and/or the site of a secret underground base, and/or home to thousands of interdimensional Reptoid space monsters. Or whatever. Needless to say, you can find a whack of videos about all this on YouTube.

Basically, though, Denver International is just a freaking airport. And the Anubis statue is just a promotional piece for the upcoming King Tut exhibit at the aiport. This is a traveling exhibit that has hit hundred of cities worldwide, and the statue will be taken down when the exhibit leaves. Think of it as being like one of those giant gorillas you see at used car lots. It's not a celebration of death (which for the ancient Egyptians was simply a passageway to eternal life, just as it is for today's religious people). It's not an idol designed for worship any more than huge Paul Bunyon statues are tributes to axe murderers. Are Western Canadians supposed to worship pryogies, sausages, and decorative eggs just because some nut figured they'd make good tourist postcards? Probably not.
Besides, if the Anubis statue is a sign that THEY still worship ancient gods, who really cares? Most gods are ancient, are they not? Timeless, in fact? If we have freedom of religion, why not this religion? (though I'm pretty sure there aren't any Anubis cults still around...)

Oh, never mind. As the comments at Infowars show, people are going to believe whatever they want to about this "idol" and the Reptilian Hellmouth known as Denver International Airport.