WWIII! For realsies this time!!

I've written before about Jones' interesting habit of predicting the outbreak of WWIII about once a year. This year, the alleged transfer of nuclear warheads from an Air Force base in Texas (Dyess AFB) to one in Florida (DERMO) is the tip-off that WWIII is about to erupt, Jones claimed in early September. Jones and Anthony Gucciardi wrote, "There’s a reason that Russia has begun amassing 160,000 troops and heavy military equipment following an Israeli strike on Russian missiles in Syria. There’s a reason that the troops were called along with naval ships and bombers to attain ‘immediate combat readiness’ along the border. We reported on this months ago while the media was too busy focusing on the Trayvon Martin case to talk about the ignition of World War 3." The entire story is based on the say-so of a single anonymous military source. 
Today, Infowars is crowing over the firing of Major General Michael Carey, the person in charge of intercontinental ballistic missiles at three U.S. bases (note that Dyess is not one of them). Carey was allegedly engaging in illegal gambling in his off-hours, but of course Jones doesn't accept that explanation. Jones is certain that Carey was canned for the paperless transfer of warheads. On his Facebook page, Jones (or someone representing him) posted the following status update yesterday morning: "The General in charge of America's long range nukes has been fired a month after Infowars exposed the top secret transfer of nuclear weapons by Dyess Air Force base." 

Let's assume, for a moment, that Jones' unknown military "insider" is legit and truthful. Let's say that Dyess really was shipping all its ICBMs to Florida for some reason, without the proper authorization and documentation. I have absolutely no reason to trust this information, but let's just say it's solid.
Does this mean WWIII has to start soon?
Of course not. Even if a nuclear strike against Syria takes place soon (and there is absolutely no reason to believe this will be the case), subsequent events are not a foregone conclusion. 
Take a look at Jones' other WWIII predictions. Ask yourself how plausible they were. Keep in mind that he was just as adamant about those predictions as he is about his most recent, Syria-based one. 

A Collection of Facebook Comments about the Aurora, Colorado Murders

The silly and derpy shall remain nameless, but these are real comments culled from my own Facebook network. My thoughts on them are in blue. Because cut-&-paste conspiracy theories make me sad.

"not said much about this shooting as still waiting for all the 'evidence' to come out.. but the shit loads of ammo online reinforces my original thoughts of this being something to use to disarm the americans without many complaining...In other words an inside job"

"lone gun man with military grade equipment.... riiight"

Which anyone, including Mr. Riiight, can buy online.  

"this person most definitely was out of character not to mention the mind control attributes that have been involved in quite a few historic incidents such as the Moscow Theater hostage. Very similar media coverage also. Definitely something fishy with this one."

"I've been researching this for the past 12 hours. The connections to CIA are BIZARRE, to say the least. It's far too much to get into right now, but suffice it to say there is more proof coming out hourly that Holmes was recruited by the CIA when he returned to the University of Denver last fall. In fact, the evidence that suggests this entire rampage was a planned operation timed to coincide with the signing of the UN Gun Treaty is bone chilling. This is no "conspiracy theory". The evidence is quite literally mounting on an hourly basis."

The CIA "links" to James Holmes, as laid out by one Tony Elliott (NO RELATION),  are as follows:
1. James lived on campus. CIA recruiters like college campuses. (Ivy League and top forty ones, yes. If CIA recruiters are skulking around the University of Colorado on a daily basis, they're scraping the barrel.)
2. His withdrawal from school coincides with his purchase of weapons. This is an indication that he was recruited during that time. (Or that he had nothing left to live for and decided to act out his sick fantasies, or that he had a mental breakdown caused in part by academic pressure, or that he had a brain tumour like Austin shooter Charles Whitman, or about seven thousand other possibilities.)
3. The CIA wants to stage fake terror attack to keep the fear of terrorism alive, justifying their foreign wars of aggression. (So...how does staging small-scale domestic attacks accomplish this, exactly?)
4. The UN Arms Treaty thing. Reuters dealt with this better than I can. 

"9/11 was more than 10 years ago, and they got a veritable grab-bag of powers and TWO wars (afghanistan and iraq) over that false flag attack. Go back some more, to the wars with Cuba and Vietnam, and the false flag attacks that preceded those. There are (lots) more too, but these will be the easiest for most people to find out about." 

I'm sorry, "war with Cuba"? Did I fall asleep in history class? Also, no false flag attacks preceded Vietnam. 

"I refuse to look at this man. I refuse to learn his name. I'm tired of the perps getting press. I will only learn the names of his victims, see THEIR faces and hear THEIR stories. Conspiracy or not, he made the choice." 

^ If I was single, and bi, I would ask this gal to marry me.  

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

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

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.

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

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).

Fritz Springmeier, "political prisoner"?

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

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?

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

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

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

The Dark Ages

Once in a great while, Alex Jones says something so offensive, so absurd, so wrong that I actually feel unclean after hearing it. My stomach lurches and I think, "Gawd, that's so evil I don't even want to blog about it." The most recent examples are his assertion that the Anti-Defamation League was probably behind the Holocaust Museum shooting*, and that people who suffer schizophrenia aren't mentally ill, they're demons.**

But even those two statements, appalling and untrue as they are, don't quite match up to what Jones said on last Thursday's broadcast. He was talking again about human sacrifice, and this time - to his credit - he actually mentioned Caucasian forms of the practice (Druidic, Nordic, etc). Then he added, "The Jews were constantly turning back to human sacrifice."

Excuse me? Are we in the Middle Ages? First he attributes mental illness to the supernatural, then he dusts off one of the worst anti-semitic slurs of history; that the Jews have practiced ritual sacrifice.

I would like to give Jones the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he's simply confusing Jews with the Molech-worshipping Ammonites and Canaanites of the Bible, who allegedly sacrificed children to their god. He may think that when the Jews turned to worshiping a golden calf during the Exodus, they must have embraced human sacrifice as well. However, that doesn't alter the fact that human sacrifice was repeatedly proscribed in the Old Testament. It has always been reviled by Jews and Christians.

Of course, that didn't stop Christians from accusing Jews of ritually slaughtering Christian children at Passover. Desperate to separate themselves from the religious tradition of which they were only a minor sect, and eager to consolidate their power over the peoples of Europe, Medieval Christians routinely leveled charges of murder and cannibalism at the continent's Jewish population. Most commonly, Jewish men would be accused of abducting Christian, pre-adolescent boys and killing them in hidden chambers beneath synagogues, draining their blood to be baked into their matza. Catholics venerated the relics of these so-called child martyrs. The first, and most famous, was William of Norwich, a 12-year-old tanner's apprentice murdered in 1144. The crime was never solved, but blame fell on the Jews of Norwich. Anti-semitism was already rife throughout England, and the tensions in Norwich came to a bloody end in 1190 - the entire Jewish population of the town was slaughtered.

The blood libel continued long past the Middle Ages. In 1911, a young Ukrainian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky was killed and a Jewish man, Menachem Mendel Beiliss, was charged with murdering him. The lead detective in the case was fired for refusing to hew to the ritual murder theory of the crime. Investigating on his own, he learned that a criminal gang with which Andrei was associated was probably responsible. They had feared the boy would rat on them.
One of the state's expert witnesses was Professor Ivan Sikorsky, a psychologist at Kiev State University (and father to the man who developed the first helicopter). Sikorsky gave his opinion that Andrei's death was, indeed, a ritual murder committed by a gang of Jews.
Beiliss was acquitted in 1913.

In 1928, a four-year-old girl named Barbara Griffiths wandered away from her home in the village of Massena, New York. Because Yom Kippur was two days away, some locals immediately leapt to the conclusion that the village's small Jewish community had abducted her for a ritual sacrifice. The police began questioning Jews, including the rabbi, in the belief that this was entirely possible.
One day later, little Barbara was found in the woods - alive and well. She had simply gotten lost.

In 1986, Syria's completely insane defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, published a book entitled The Matzoh of Zion. You can guess what it was about.

I would love to say that Christians and Muslims finally smartened up and stopped spreading this horseshit, but the sad fact is the blood libel persists to this day in certain quarters. The Yushchinsky murder is still cited by anti-semites and religious supremacists, who claim it was covered up and that the prosecuting attorney in the case, G.G. Zamyslovsky, was put to death for writing a book about it. Recently, someone erected a sign on Andrei's gravestone: "Ritually murdered by Jews in 1911". Other instances:

• In 1955, a retarded bitch Chicago woman named Lyrl Clark Van Hyning (publisher of Eustace Mullins) attributed the brutal murders of three young boys to a Jewish ritual. Brothers John and Anton Schuessler Jr., along with their friend Bobby Peterson, had disappeared en route to a movie matinee. They were found a short time later, strangled and beaten to death. Frau Van Hyning believed that details in a Chicago Sun Times article were indicative of Judaic human sacrifice: an unidentified grain was found on the bodies (flour for the blood matzo, founding John Bircher Revilo P. Oliver contended), and "Kabalistic symbols" were carved into the boys' flesh (though an entry in the ragingly anti-semitic Ziopedia referred to the patterns, correctly, as being caused by the floor mat of a car, "probably a Hewitt or some other luxury brand such as a rich Jew might possess". Actually, it was a Packard.) The ritual murder theorists insisted that Anton Schuessler, Sr., was also murdered by the city's Jewish community, specifically a psychiatrist. Mr. Schuessler did die during electroshock treatment administered for his crippling depression, but the stories of his widow being paid off by Jews are unfounded. Nearly 40 years later, the Schuessler-Peterson murders were found to be the work of Kenneth Hansen, a pedophile who belonged to the local "Horse Mafia", the same group of cons and crooks responsible for the disappearance of candy heiress Helen Brach. Though the leader, Silas Jayne, bore a slight resemblance to Norman Mailer, not one of these men was Jewish. Sadly, though, when you Google "1955 Chicago murders", most of the top hits involve "Jewish ritual murder".
• If you search for "ritual abuse" on YouTube, one of the first vids you'll find is a clip from an 1989 Oprah show about Satanic ritual abuse. A heavyset, thirtyish woman called "Rachel" (real name Vicki Polin) explains that her outwardly Jewish family has practiced Satanism since the seventeenth century. Like all SRA victims of the '80s, Vicki was sexually assaulted and forced to participate in human sacrifice from a tender age. Some of the women in her family, being overweight, were able to successfully hide pregnancies - enabling them to be "breeders" for the cult. Their infants were born in secret, then ritually sacrificed. Vicki was impregnated by her own father five times, and forced to have abortions. But like most SRA victims of the '80s, Vicki had no idea that everyone in her family worshipped Satan. She really thought they were nice, middle-class Jews living in the Midwest. Then, as an adult, she recovered her repressed memories. Unlike the average '80s SRA victim, Vicki is still telling her story. She moved to Baltimore, became a therapist, and established The Awareness Center Inc. A bio of her that appeared on Henry Makow's website last year provides additional information: Vicki's family was part of the Illuminati, which evolved from the Frankist movement of the 18th century. (I guess Makow missed the part about Vicki's family practicing Satanism in the 17th century, but that's understandable. I'm pretty sure a guy who calls his website "Save the Males" doesn't watch Oprah often.) All of this is in complete contradiction to what Vicki's therapist, Tina Grossman, said on Oprah in '89. Grossman related Jewish/Satanic ritual abuse to pre-Judaic Paganism that incorporated human sacrifice. In 2004, Vicki told a rabbi that many rabbis imported "Sabbatean Satanism" to the U.S. from Europe, and her family's rabbi was a member of the cult. She was sexually abused on top of Torah scrolls laid on the floor of the synagogue.
• In 2005, 500 Russian clerics, Duma members, and intellectuals supposedly signed a petition calling for the government to outlaw all Jewish organizations. The signatories believe that all Jewish groups are "hate groups", and in support of this contention the petition cited an 1884 work incorrectly attributed to Dr. Vladimir Ivanovich Dal: “Criminal investigation into the murder by Jews of Christian infants and the use of their blood". The same year, Russian anti-semites fingered Jews in the still-unsolved murders of five young boys and demanded that the authorities begin searching bakeries that produce matzo.
  
• Every year, Catholics in the village of Rinn, Austria, still trot out the preserved remains of a 3-year-old boy named Andreas Oxner. He apparently died in 1462, but it was not until 1642 that his death was openly blamed on Jews.
  

Among all these absurd and implausible allegations, you will fail to find one very important thing: Evidence. There is simply no evidence. There is no reason to believe that Jews practiced human sacrifice at any time in the history of Judaism. Whether you're talking about Hebrews in ancient Egypt or baby-killers in Chicago, it just didn't happen.


*If you hate the Anti-Defamation League as much as Jones does, you should consider blaming anti-semites for its existence. It was created in response to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai Brith. He had been falsely convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a young girl who worked in his uncle's pencil factory. When locals learned that his death sentence had been overturned, a mob stormed the jail and lynched Frank.
**If schizophrenics are demons, then demons spend a great deal of their time embroidering tea towels and taking in stray cats and watching game shows, because my grandmother is schizophrenic.

The Art of David Dees

This is a peripheral issue, but it's something that's been bothering me for a while. The satirical Photoshop artwork of David Dees is tremendously popular on the websites of Alex Jones, Jeff Rense, and other conspiracy broadcasters, because he covers everything from the Federal Reserve to chemtrails. In fact, Rense hosts Dees' online image gallery.

Some of Dees' images are quite clever: firemen hose down a blazing bank with money instead of water, a drooling man is literally brainwashed by the major media outlets.
Others are ridiculous: vaccine injections are the fangs of a poisonous snake, Obama shreds the Constitution in front of a bust of Marx, the moon landing "hoax" is exposed in a single paragraph.
Some are stupid: Obama's African birth certificate, references to Larry Sinclair.
Some are bizarre: Obama prances past a zombified Queen Elizabeth, who clutches an iPhone with Dr. Manhattan on the screen; a mother and her children suffer some kind of necrotizing disease as they shop for GMO produce and processed foods containing MSG (Dees and Jones believe it causes obesity, diabetes, and organ failure).

And some of the images are so very wrong that I could cry.
- One points out that the number of murdered Jewish people on the Auschwitz memorial plaque was revised from 4 million to 1.5 million, and asks, "Was Israel created on a total lie?".
Even if the disparity between the original and final estimates was ten times greater than this, "total lie" would not be fair. Millions died. Period.
- Another declares there were no mass graves at Treblinka and Belzec.
- One gives a capsule of the Canadian genocide against First Nations schoolchildren. This was very real, but Dees mentions the "United Catholic Church" as the only perpetrator. There is no such church. In reality, every Protestant denomination in the country (excluding Mormonism) was involved. The Anglican and United churches actually played larger roles than the Catholic church.
- Another depicts starlets parading on the red carpet. In the distance, the Hollywood sign looms. The O's have been replaced by Stars of David. And the carpet, on closer inspection, is made up of dead bodies. The Star of David appears frequently in Dees' art, always in a deeply negative context.
- Another identifies the Holomodor as "the real Holocaust". Holomodor was an atrocity, a genocidal campaign launched by a tyrant. It is one of many that have occurred on nearly every continent during the past two centuries. They are all travesties. Yet Dees feels it necessary to turn crimes against humanity into some sort of competition.
- There is a Christmas card to Ernst Zundel, a "heroically brave man" who was "unjustly imprisoned by World Zionism". Others depict the "persecution" of famous Holocaust revisionists, and one shows a woman being tasered by helmeted police for reading Zundel's "Did Six Million Really Die?".
- A popular revisionists' mantra ("Zyklon-B was only a pesticide, used only for de-lousing camp inmates") is given its own *fact* sheet. Maybe U.S. death-row prisoners were only being de-loused by helpful prison guards, as well? And then they coincidentally died from unrelated conditions whilst sitting in the gas chamber?

Dees prefaces his archive by denying that he is anti-Semitic. He and Rense are only anti-Zionist, he writes, and "those who attempt to smear my art as 'anti-semitic' are fools and frauds."

Fair enough. But so are those who attempt to deny or minimize the Holocaust, blame a single Christian denomination for crimes simultaneously committed by over a dozen religious denominations (plus the federal government), and spread discredited and libelous rumours about political figures they don't like.

How Green Were the Nazis?

If you're a regular reader of Infowars and/or Prison Planet as well as a Jones listener, you've noticed that whatever crawls up Jones' butt and dies gets hauled out by his stable of "reporters" and slapped up on the websites. Usually with extreme haste. Paul Watson, Kurt Nimmo, and the rest don't really go out into the world to look for stories; they just wait for something to irk Jones. This makes for some sad, sad "reporting".

Example: Jones mentioned in a recent broadcast that Hitler was an environmentalist and a vegetarian. (FYI, by today's standards Hitler wouldn't be considered veg, because he regularly consumed meat broth. And trying to link fascism to any particular diet is a hopeless task. Kim Jong Il reportedly loves Italian food and Mao liked fatty meats with hot peppers; Mussolini drank bucketloads of milk for his ulcers. While most dictators drank little to no alcohol, Pinochet liked his pisco. Later in life, he adored the same diet cola as G.W. Bush* - but Chavez, who once flirted with dictatorship, has banned it from Venezuela. Just try to figure that sh-- out.)

Anyway, on Thursday someone posted "The Green Nazis"by Jurriaan Maessen** at Infowars. The article supposedly exposes Hitler's environmentalist thuggery, yet the subject doesn't really come up until the very end. Even then, it's just a few lines from a book titled How Green Were the Nazis?***, noting that the Nazis "created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature." Rather than conditioning Germans to sacrifice personal liberty for the greater good, as Maessen contends, these were really just the sort of cosmetic measures that Hitler loved. Apparently, he wanted the whole country to look like a freaking Dick and Jane book.
Even Maessen has to admit that most of the Nazis' environmental efforts were soon replaced by the war effort. And he fails to explain how sustainable forestry, clean air, and nice parks in any way contribute to a totalitarian milieu.
As with the food thing, trying to link environmental policy to fascism is an exercise in futility. Historians of ecology generally agree that Mao raped the environment; carbon emissions soared and water standards plummeted under G.W. Bush*; Ferdinand Marcos depleted rainforests in the time it takes most people to nap. On the other hand, Mussolini reduced newspaper sizes to help conserve wood. Somewhere in the middle there was Slobodan Milosevic, who loudly decried the environmental destruction of Kosovo without actually doing a single thing to alleviate it.

But if you really want to waste your time equating environmentalism with fascism and eugenics, check out Lisa Makson's "Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot ... Rachel Carson", posted at the severely Islamophobic Front Page Magazine on July 31, 2003. It will show you just how warped such thinking can get. Makson, like a few other reactionary conservatives (Limbaugh, Pat Robertson), tries to make DDT look like the nectar of the gods. If you're truly patriotic and humanitarian, this line of reasoning seems to go, you'll happily tolerate air pollution (the smell of progress!), environmental disasters (collateral damage!), and dismal corporate farming practices (yum!).


*Yes, I know he wasn't a bonafide dictator. Shut up and let me have my fun. You can't honestly expect me to be 100% serious on a blog devoted to Alex Jones.
** I don't know either. He might be the co-author of The Secret of Zionsburg, which attempts to link a mysterious 2003 fire at a famous Dutch estate to the Crusades and Holy Grail. Srsly.
*** Ohio University Press, 2007. Edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller - all university professors, if you can believe it. Shortlisted for the very prestigious Diagram Prize in 2007, this book lost out to If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs by "Big Boom".

Jones & JFK

Here are two classic examples of how Jones wildly miscontrues and/or distorts historical information so that it suits his own preconceived notions about an event, both dealing with the Kennedy assassination:


The Case of the Psychic Kiwis

On his Apr. 12/09 broadcast, Jones mentioned that New Zealand newspapers carried news of Lee Harvey Oswald's arrest hours before he was caught.

You probably recall the scene from JFK in which X (Donald Sutherland) tells Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) that he was in New Zealand when Kennedy was shot, and was startled to find that the newspapers contained detailed information about Oswald before he had even been charged with the President's murder. The implication, of course, is that someone at the CIA accidentally distributed a profile of their patsy to the international press (or at least the New Zealand press) a little ahead of the game. Oopsy doodle. "I dunno what happened, Chief. I guess my watch musta broke."

X is a character based largely, if not wholly, on the late L. Fletcher Prouty, who really was in Christchurch on November 22, 1963 and really did notice that the Christchurch Star's front-page article "Kennedy Shot Dead" contained a description of the suspected shooter, Oswald. He found it suspicious that the paper could have this information well before Oswald was charged with the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (at 7:00 PM on Nov. 22nd Dallas time/2:00 PM on Nov. 23rd Christchurch time).

However, Oswald had been arrested hours earlier (at 1:50 PM Dallas time on Nov. 22nd/8:50 AM on Nov. 23rd Christchurch time), and arrived at the Dallas police station around 2:00 PM. The station was literally crammed with reporters by this time. Though major American news outlets didn't declare Oswald the prime suspect in Kennedy's shooting until 3:54 PM Dallas time, when NBC News announced it on national television, there was plenty of speculation.

In response to JFK, the Christchurch Star explained that the paper received the news of Oswald's arrest by 10:00 AM (3:00 PM on Nov. 22nd Dallas time). It was simple to get info on the guy - his defection to Russia in 1959 and his repatriation to the U.S. in 1962 had made international news. The Star was even able to obtain a photo of Oswald, taken on November 16, 1959, at Moscow's Hotel Berlin. As it was an afternoon paper, there was plenty of time and more than enough information to put together a piece on Oswald and the shooting of the U.S. President.

So this is what happened: Shortly after Oswald's arrest, papers worldwide (including the Christchurch Star) received the news via wire services. The Star gathered information on Oswald from stories related to his defection and repatriation, which were very detailed, and ran a story on him in the afternoon, sometime between 1:30 and 2:30 PM Christchurch time.

What's sinister about this? Nothing.

Does Jones have the story right? Absolutely not. He took a story that was already fact-free (Prouty's claim that overseas newspapers shouldn't have contained info about Oswald before he was formally charged) and twisted it into a complete fantasy (the papers carried stories about Oswald before he was even arrested). If this doesn't make you approach Jones' claims with caution, I don't know what will.


The Case of the Baffled Embalmer

During an interview of Jesse Ventura, Jones claimed he had spoken to the late Paul Groody, the Texas mortician who embalmed Oswald, shortly before his death. Groody told him that FBI agents had entered the Miller Funeral Home and placed Oswald's fingers on the rifle found in the Book Depository. Groody was willing to be on Jones' show to reveal this explosive information, but shortly after their meeting he was run off the road by a driver and was too shaken to go on the air.

When I heard this, I had recently watched the 1988 documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, in which Groody talked about the 1981 exhumation of Oswald's body. He hadn't mentioned this blatant evidence-planting.

I learned that when Morgan Reynolds interviewed Jim Marrs in September 2006, Marrs also said that Groody had told him "how the FBI came in and placed Oswald's dead fingers on the rifle."

Groody had spoken, on several occasions, of government agents (not necessarily FBI) entering his funeral home and fingerprinting Oswald's corpse, leaving black residue on the fingertips. But he never publicly mentioned this highly incriminating hand-on-rifle story, even though he had many opportunities to do so: He was in at least two documentaries, the one already mentioned and a 2002 Travel Channel program, Infamous Grave Sites. As one of the guests on a special JFK Coast to Coast AM broadcast in 2006 he again shared his story of the exhumation without revealing any new details. Furthermore, Marrs' book Crossfire included Groody's original account of postmortem fingerprinting without mentioning the rifle.

What's going on here? Did Groody change his story? Was he senile (he was in his '90s when Jones supposedly spoke with him)? If Jones' story is true, why would Groody withhold such a damning piece of eyewitness testimony for 40 years? It's not as though he shied away from controversy and conspiracy theories, as his behaviour after the Oswald exhumation shows.

In the '70s, British writer Michael Eddowes developed a theory that the Oswald who defected to Russia wasn't the same Oswald who returned to the U.S. in 1962. He had been swapped for a KGB lookalike. To back up his theory, Eddowes led Dallas-area conspiracy theorists in a campaign to have Oswald's body exhumed. Strangely, Marina Oswald joined the fight, and it was her 1981 lawsuit that resulted in the exhumation.

As the embalmer, Groody was on hand to identify the remains. He declared them to be Oswald's. A forensic team later determined that the corpse's teeth were a match to those of the "original" Oswald. Not until the body was reinterred did Groody realize he hadn't noticed a craniotomy incision on the skull; Oswald's cranium had appeared to be intact, and its top didn't fall off. Groody concluded that he had embalmed somone other than Oswald, and that at some point someone dug up his grave and replaced the corpse's head with the real Oswald's head so that the teeth would match if he was ever exhumed.

However, the doctor who headed the exhumation exam, Linda Norton, said the body did have a cranial incision. Photos taken during the exam show it clearly. Also, the team had to remove the skull from the rest of the body because it was still connected by tissues. Despite the evidence, Groody continued to insist that the man he embalmed was not Oswald.

So as you can see, Groody was no stranger to controversy and was not afraid to speak up. It's highly unlikely that he would have stayed mum about a government frame-up he had actually witnessed. Now that he's gone, we may never know if Marrs and Jones are telling the truth or not. Unfortunately, given Jones' track record of exaggerating and distorting the facts, I can't give him the benefit of the doubt.


Paul Groody describes the fingerprinting of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Other Sources

Reclaiming History. Vincent Bugliosi. Norton, 2007.

Name That Rothschild.

Try this on your neighborhood conspiracy theorist tomorrow: Approach him/her and ask him/her to name 4 members of the Rothschild family, living or dead.


I've tried this a few times, and I've never heard more than two names. The conspiracy world considers the Rothschild dynasty to be at the very pinnacle of the pyramid, yet they know precious little about it.


Yesterday a Truther sent me an excited email about The Obama Deception. He found it factual and impressive, of course, but was concerned that nothing was said about the Rothschilds. "The patrioch mother said in the early 1900's that; 'if my sons didn't want to have wars there would be no wars' ~old lady Rothschild~ "


"Old lady Rothschild"? Years of conspiracy theorizing, and this is the best people can do? Are their Google fingers broken?