Boston: Everyone is a Patsy

Yesterday, Infowars was miffed that the FBI ignored "their" two suspects (either Navy SEALs or contractors with Craft International) and instead published photos of two "patsy" suspects.
In a video made early this morning (around 5:00 CST), Jones boasted that Infowars would soon release the name of the suspect who remains at large, thanks to the efforts of Anonymous. But Jones was clearly not in possession of that name yet, because he went on to speculate about the nationality/ethnicity of the two men. First he said, “These guys kind of look like Israelis. I’m not saying Israel is involved in it, we don’t have any evidence of that. It’s just that they kind of look Israeli.” Then he said they could be “North African” or “Spanish Muslims.”
Jones touted his suspects again, but then marginalized them by saying they, too, were "patsies" put into place by whoever did the actual bombing. Beyond "the FBI", Jones has not identified who did the actual bombing.

A few hours later, the FBI released the names of the suspects: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev (deceased). Infowars did not beat the FBI to the punch, and to date, I have found no evidence that Anonymous was in possession of either of these names. The names Anonymous tweeted early this morning were not the correct ones.

Bizarrely, Jones commented about halfway through his video, "MSNBC and the White House will be upset, though, turns out to be a real group of foreigners that attacked us, 'cause they won't get to go after the Tea Party..."
Here, Jones seems to be saying the White House is not calling the shots in this "false flag operation". The FBI is fully in charge. He is also admitting - tacitly - that his predictions were wrong (or as he puts it, the FBI changed the storyline). No one blamed him, Oath Keepers, Tea Party members, or gun-rights advocates for the Boston bombings. There was vague talk about "right-wing extremists" among media commentators, and little else. In fact, the public has been pretty evenly divided between those who suspected Middle Eastern involvement and those who felt the bombings were domestic.

The primary purpose of the bombings, Jones maintains, is to give the TSA increased powers. I don't know why that couldn't be done without a bombing, but I'm not the expert. Jones is. He knew exactly what was going on. Sure, the Great Tea Partier Frameup of 2010 didn't happen, and The Great Tea Partier Frameup of 2013 was a bust, and none of the "false flags" of the past two years has been directly connected to Patriots, but one of these false flag ops has to be a Tea Partier frameup, right?

Update: As of 6:44 PM (CST), Infowars has still not posted anything about the boat standoff occurring in Watertown. But they have posted an indignant article claiming that Facebook is blocking re-posts of "their" suspects. This turned out to be untrue; I was able to re-post the article on two separate Facebook groups after Facebook supposedly started blocking it (see the Leaving Alex Jonestown FB page). 

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

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.

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?

"Pentagon Preparing for Martial Law!"

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.

"Lindsay Lohan Poisoned"

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."

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!

The road to hell is paved with GMO corn and suicidal shrimp

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?

Nightmare Fuel

There's really nothing I can say to make this any less frightening or any more coherent. It's like somebody crossed a Juggalo with a John Bircher.

Then I'll stand somewhere else

No time to post, so I'll have to expose you directly to the wit and wisdom of Mr. Jones. Sorry 'bout that. In this piece, he talks about - what else? - eugenics, John Holdren, and the globalist monsters. He also *complains* about those who attack his message, and explains that we're probably just jealous. He could be right about that; I do envy his ability to live in a world of his own design, and I admire his extraordinary success at staving off nearly every intrusion of factual information and common sense into that world. That takes true skill.

"Obama Deception Director Alex Jones Reaches Out to Obama Supporters"

And Obama supporters promptly file restraining orders.



But seriously, at least he has enough sense to leave the birth certificate and "closet Muslim" nonsense out of his latest *documentary*. He even admits "We can't prove that."

So...um...why does he mention these issues as facts on his show, then? Around the time of Obama's inauguration, he baldly stated on-air that Obama is a Muslim who will usher in "Black Identity/Nation of Islam" persecution of white Americans. He has frequently stated as fact that Obama was not born in Hawaii. And even though Ron Paul told Jones's listeners in November '08 that Obama is in the pocket of big business and Jones agreed with him, Jones still warns that Obama will be using socialism as a stepping-stone to U.S. Communism (make up your mind, man!). He also tells listeners that Obama was pre-selected and groomed to become President and to usher in the long-awaited New World Order: FEMA concentration camps, martial law, "unmitigated depression", execution of dissidents, etc. "Obama will probably be the president who has me arrested," he has said.
Obviously, Jones considers this material good enough to use on thousands of radio listeners, but not good enough for a *documentary*. Interesting.

"The essence of tyranny..."

...or minor inconvenience?

Jones was very keyed up yesterday over this footage of a cameraman (whom I've identified as Steven Greenstreet of the American News Project) being told by security personnel not to film the Federal Reserve:



Here are a few facts about this incident:

1. It is not illegal to film federal buildings from the sidewalk, provided you aren't violating any restrictions. However, this cameraman was clearly off the public sidewalk and on Federal Reserve property.
2. This kind of incident is not common. The cameraman admits he had already taken footage of the White House, the Treasury, the Capitol, and the National Academy of Sciences "with no problem".
3. While somewhat disturbing, this is hardly "the essence of tyranny", as Jones called it. True tyranny would involve detainment, a trip to the head of security's office, the trampling of film, etc.

This has happened to me, too. While photographing my stepkids inside a government building in '01, security told me that I could take pictures in a north-south direction (as I was doing), but not in an east-west direction. I thought I was being punk'd or something. Then the guy explained that since government offices like Revenue Canada (that's the Canuck IRS, for non-Canadian readers) are arrayed along the eastern and western sides of the building, they wanted to ensure I wasn't doing reconnaissance for a terrorist attack. If I did take pictures of these offices, he informed me politely but firmly, they would have to confiscate my film.

There are a couple of valuable lessons to be drawn from experiences like this:

1. Even though security personnel cannot legally confiscate film or prevent filming/photography in most public places and circumstances, there are some legal restrictions on photographing/filming federal property, particularly for commercial purposes. It's a good idea to know your rights (and your limits) before filming. Find out if your film or equipment can be legally confiscated (in most places it can't). And keep in mind that some places only appear to be public property.
2. It is perfectly within the bounds of both law and propriety for security personnel to politely question you about filming/photography. It's also common sense. Security people are responsible for what happens on their watch. If they allow you to film the exterior of a building for half an hour, and that building later becomes the target of an intrusion or attack, they've got to explain to their bosses why they let you scope out the building without any interference whatsoever. I don't blame these folks for erring on the side of caution. It's their job. Overcaution or improper training on the part of security personnel does not necessarily equal tyranny.

Alex vs. G.I. Joe

Whilst ranting/singing about National Guard recruitment propaganda, Jones brought up one of his favourite accusations: The U.S. military is deliberately injecting each and every military officer with vaccines that contain very aggressive cancer viruses. I'll be exploring Jones's ideas about a global depopulation agenda in other posts, but I wanted to point out this Prison Planet article on cancer viruses in polio vaccine. It contains one of the weirdest statements I have ever seen in a Prison Planet article, and that's saying quite a lot:

"polio can be prevented in most people simply by eliminating sugar from their diet."

Where is one even supposed to begin with a statement like that? First of all, polio is an infectious (viral) disease with no known risk factors, other than transmission-related ones (like being unvaccinated or coming into contact with an infected person). There are risk factors for paralysis caused by polio, but "consuming sugar" is not among them. In fact, there are no dietary risk factors at all. But back in the '40s and '50s, a Dr. Benjamin P. Sandler declared that diets high in sugars and starch might increase risk of heart attack, bronchitis, polio, and virtually any other disease.

Was Sandler's hypothesis ever tested? No. His only support for it consisted of his clinical experience, together with a drop in North Carolina polio cases in 1948-49 (which didn't necessarily have anything to do with his dietary recommendations). The notion that diet alone can stave off all infectious disease was, and remains, extremely popular among certain quacks and their victims.

"That's what's really going on with this criminal government..."

Jones later mentioned this widely-reported story of two Pennsylvania judges who pled guilty to receiving kickbacks from a private company, PA Child Care, to place juveniles in the company's detention facilities. This is a deeply troubling story, and it should be widely reported. However, it's not quite the symptom of New World Disorder that Jones presents it as. Democracy Now! more accurately describes it as an "unprecedented" case. It is also a case of judicial corruption rather than government malfeasance. Not to mention that both judges have been disbarred and were sentenced to 87 months in prison. If this scandal was a genuine instance of the government "trying to destroy all the liberties we've got", it would have been swept under the rug.