Infowhat?

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

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

Bugging Out

Remember the guy who's going to ground to avoid the New World Order smackdown?

It gets worse. On his YouTube channel, he has posted an explanation of his reasons for doing what he's doing. Among them:

• Flesh-eating robots. Sure, they haven't actually been developed yet, and the creators never actually said anything about using corpses for fuel (that was a fun little factoid added by the ultra-conservative media, to teach us that science is scary and that only crazy, evil bastards use it), but holy mother of god flesh-eating robots!!! RUN!!!
• The Army is rehearsing to take over the country right now. This is apparently a reference to the so-called "gun confiscation drill" conducted in Iowa in April and the international FEMA terror drills that are taking place. Also, the vlogger has heard stupid rumours of "burnout drills" (setting fire to citizens' homes to evacuate them from an area). After the epic fail that was Katrina disaster relief, you'd think people would be happy to see FEMA officials doing some dry runs. They could sure use the practice.
  
• Food shortages, riots, and martial law are imminent because THEY will cut off all water, electricity, and food supplies to major cities, to starve residents into submission. It will probably start in California. lol wut
  
• Swine Flu vaccinations may become mandatory. While I'm not comfortable with the idea of involuntary inoculation with a vaccine that has been developed quickly, I don't believe the vaccine is part of a "depopulation agenda". It would definitely be the first of its kind, because despite the occasional problems with contamination, no vaccine in recent history has harmed more people than it has helped.
  
• Obama's science czar, John Holdren, wants to impose limits on the number of children Americans can have. As the vlogger is actually holding a baby in his video, I don't fully understand why this is a concern for him. Does he really want seven more children that he'll have to hide from THEM?
• Each nation will be alotted so many babies. Only test tube babies will be allowed. The source of this info? Bertrand Russell. I love the guy, but dammit - he was one paranoid, misanthropic old mofo. Best not to take all his warnings literally.
• John Holdren plans to sterilize Americans against their will.
  

That last possibility seems the least likely of all. Americans are staunch defenders of their reproductive rights, and the fertility industry is huge. But let's examine this, since it's also something that Jones has mentioned via Paul Watson's Prison Planet story"Obama Science Czar's Plan to Sterilize Population Through Water Supply Already Happening".
No, there isn't any evidence that antiandrogens found in some drinking water and pesticides were placed there to sterilize the male population. And Holdren's "plan" was more like a wild suggestion; I'm sure he wasn't dense enough to think it would be implemented in his lifetime.
The truth is, however, that Holdren and co-authors Paul and Anne Erlich did discuss involuntary population control in their 1977 book Ecoscience. Erlich had published an even more alarmist book, The Population Bomb, in 1968. Holdren and the Erliches wrote that if population growth wasn't slowed voluntary, involuntary sterilization could be introduced via food and water supplies. Women could be required to have abortions. Otherwise, mass starvation would result.

The strange thing is, Paul Erlich's failed predictions of the late '60s bear an eerie resemblance to the predictions Jones has been making: Food shortages could lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions. The only difference is, Erlich did not view such catastrophes as part of a depopulation scheme, but the inevitable result of overpopulation. He believed there would be worldwide famines in the '70s and '80s if population growth was not curbed.

Erlich knows he was wrong, or at least he knows that his timeline was whack. While he's still concerned about overpopulation, his views have been tempered considerably by age and experience. I think the same could safely be said of Holdren. The things both men wrote over 30 years ago probably seem as brash and silly to them now as they do to the rest of us.

It's not time to head for the hills just yet.