Where I talk about true crime and serial killers.

A fan of true crime, psychos, serial killers, celebrity crime and good-looking bad girls and bad boys? Check out this link to my recent guest turn on the Lisa Valentine Clark radio show. We had a great talk about the appeal of this sort of dark entertainment. We touch on the natural morbid curiosity people have always had for shocking, unsolved true crime stories. Jack the Ripper, after all, made blockbuster headlines in Victorian London. Plus, do we really get even more excited when the criminals and alleged criminals are really hot-looking…like Jodie Arias, Ted Bundy, and accused Theranos swindler Elizabeth Holmes? My segment begins at 25 minutes.

A state of moral depravity.

On occasion I wander back to the State of the Nation website to check whether or not I am being accused of plotting an alien invasion or putting the finishing touches on the Illuminati’s plan for creating a Luciferian one-world government. Stories like that amuse me. They’re a source of a good a laugh for the day. But when I looked at their page in the aftermath of the recent mass shooting in Virginia Beach, there was nothing at all to be amused about.

The page was only the site of cynical, moral depravity that has taken root in a sizable percentage of the American population. It is a moral depravity that is being fostered and nurtured by a handful of con artists and swindlers who run webpages like SOTN, the Millennium Report, Before it’s News, and the rest of the Alex Jones wannabes on the Internet. On the very day of a tragedy, these parasites are already at work spinning their—rather predictable and stale at this point—conspiracy theories about another “false flag” attack.

So consider this: on the very day of the Virginia Beach shooting, SOTN had already come to the conclusion that the murders were actually a false flag. Wouldn’t you think that it’s quite remarkable that the people who run this site, where ever they may be holed up in some basement, would be able to put the pieces together and determine exactly what happened even before law enforcement agencies even started their investigation? But investigations, facts, data, evidence, of course, are completely pointless in the bizarro world of SOTN. They already have their set conspiratorial world view they graft onto any major event. They take their master narrative, something that might have been spun from a second-rate self-published conspiracy thriller about a Deep State cabal of Illuminati New World Order supervillains plotting to bring about a global totalitarian order through a series of manufactured emergencies, and graft this narrative onto the events of the day. Then, without any form of evidence—save for links to OTHER CONSPIRACY WEBSITES and their unfounded, unproven allegations—they begin repeating their claims of false flag attacks over and over again, their stories looping back on themselves where links to “evidence” are previous SOTN or Millennium Report postings.

But at the core of these conspiratorial fantasies are the dead, the injured, and the traumatized. The swindlers and the charlatans like SOTN exploit these victims to get page-views, social-media likes, and shares. Individuals who follow these websites must recognize the ugliness, the sheer callous disregard for pain and suffering people running these “alternate news” sites are capable of.

If you want to imagine what the people running the State of the Nation are doing after every loss of life, imagine them laughing with glee and high-fiving each other, happy as they can be that there is a new tragedy to exploit, a new opportunity for page views by the gullible, simple-minded rubes that will swallow every claim of a conspiracy.

And let me repeat something that I have written here before. Every committed State of the Nation fan, please take note. Please jot it down on a paper just in case you might forget and need to refresh your memory. If the sort of New World Order your favorite website claims exists is really out there, orchestrating these mass murders, how come they haven’t yet found and eliminated the entire SOTN editorial staff? Why are the grand plans of the globalist insider Freemasons and Satanists appearing all over the Internet unchecked?

The answer, of course, is simple. There is no New World Order, there are no grand plans, no false flag attacks, no Satanic secret societies, and the people running State of the Nation are not only lying to you but laughing at you as they are doing so.

They are doing the right thing in Maine.

According to this piece in CNN, Maine is now the fourth state to do the sensible thing and prohibit people from opting out of immunizations on religious and philosophical grounds. 

Good for Maine!

Of course, I am almost tempted to take some credit for this. I almost want to claim that I called a meeting at the Jersey City headquarters of the American branch of the Illuminati and gave the order to my minions—just as I had done when I ordered the measles outbreak up in New York, according to the State of the Nation website—but it would be really dishonest of me to do so.

In all seriousness, this is a step in the right direction. But it’s also staggering to consider that in 2019 only three other states—California, West Virginia, and Mississippi—have ended religious exemptions to life-saving vaccinations. As I have written before, are we completely committed to returning to the Dark Ages where we are willing to let people suffer and die out of superstitious fear when the power to prevent diseases exist? When it has existed for decades and has saved lived for decades? 

This issue is so frustrating because we see the political power of people so ignorant as to not realize that the religious liberties guaranteed by the Constitution are not without boundaries. Your rights to practice the worship of your invisible magical beings does not outweigh others’ rights to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. People are not allowed to infect others, to spread death and disease out of religious liberties. Saying that people ought to be allowed to opt out of vaccinations on religious grounds is like saying that I had visions where my deity commands me to drink a half a bottle of whiskey every Friday night, then get in a car and drive it as fast as I can, and I must be allowed to do so by law enforcement lest my religious liberties be trampled upon.

The First Amendment rightly protects people’s consciences and allows them to believe as they choose or not to believe as they choose. But it does not give them the right to force their beliefs on others and it certainly does not give them the right to put others’ lives in danger because of religious belief.

So now the rest of the states need to do the right thing, too, and they must protect the lives of their citizens. There must be no exemptions to vaccinations allowed for anything other than medical reasons.

No, you should NOT have the right to do your own research and make a choice!

This is an interesting article from a couple of weeks ago that was just brought to my attention. It’s a piece by Jennifer Reich, a sociologist and author of the book “Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines,” condensing the topic of her book. Both the book and the article give a glimpse of the complex decision-making processes of people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. 

Reich especially focuses on the kind of damage unvaccinated children can do to herd immunity, or the way measles epidemics can spread when a large enough segment of a population is not immunized. Parents refuse to consider the greater, herd immunity factor because, as Reich argues, of a cultural atmosphere of hyper-individualized parenting. Parents who have come to believe that vaccines are harmful to their children will quickly and readily ignore the greater good in an effort to protect their own children from a perceived threat.

This complete and total disregard for the greater social good is as infuriating as the fact that somehow at the start of the twenty-first century so much of the world, even parts of the so-called developed world like the U.S. and Europe, is slipping into a new Dark Age of superstition, ignorance, and beliefs in unsubstantiated pseudoscientific crap being shoveled all over the internet by charlatans and conspiracy theorists. And remember what I wrote in several of my posts here: I’m a libertarian and I am all for individuality. I am passionate about forms of government that allow their citizens as much individuality as possible. But I am also passionate about empirical scientific facts, about reason and rationality. Vaccines work! Period! This is a fact that has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know that vaccines work just like we know that that Earth is round. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism!! This, too, has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. And vaccines are not a New World Order/Illuminati/Satanist plot to depopulate the world, or whatever deranged fantasies predators and nightcrawlers like Alex Jones, State of the Nation, The Millennium Report, and the rest of the festering moral cesspool that is the “truther” community keeps propagating for attention and profit.

Reich’s article also points out the other frustrating aspect of the hyper-individualistic parents; the parents who want to have the “right to do their own research and make up their minds about vaccines.” Is this sort of behavior not want to make you test which is harder, your head or the nearest concrete wall? Is this not the height of the most toxic sort of hubris, the most insane form of solipsistic behavior? I definitely think so. And, remember, I’m the individualist libertarian! However, facts are facts. Consider the following: if any of these concerned parents suddenly heard a banging and wheezing noise come out of their car’s engine just a moment before said car sputtered to a stop and died on the side of the road, what would they do? Would they pop the hood, roll up their sleeves and go to work trying to fix it right then and there? Would they whip out their smart phones and Google “how to fix dead engine?” Of course, not! They would call a tow truck and have that car taken to an expert to fix the problem. So sorry, folks, but this is why I have no patience and sympathy for the let-the-parents-do-the-research-and-make-up-their-own-minds crowd. The average Middle American soccer mom does not have the ability to research the issue on her own and come to accurate conclusions. Unless that soccer mom has medical training and is a physician, she has no business making decisions about whether or not to vaccinate! This is also why I am once again being uncharacteristically un-libertarian in favoring very tough punitive legal measures against people who refuse to vaccinate their children.

Now I do agree with Reich’s argument—and the arguments of many other dismayed doctors and scientists—that the real villains in the recent measles outbreaks are not necessarily the parents themselves. The parents are merely gullible and ignorant of scientific and medical data. And, of course, they are also fearful. I completely understand the kind of dread fear any parent might have over the thought of their child becoming sick, disabled for life, or dying. I am completely sympathetic to the fact that any decent parent will always fear for their child’s health and welfare. But the real villains are the ones who feed on this fear, who exploit it, who tell parents lies.

The real villains are the anti-vaccination activists, the conspiracy-peddling vampires like Jones, the State of the Nation editorial staff, The Millennium Report web page, the Call for an Uprising YouTube channel and the rest of their sociopathic ilk.

Don't EVER make the fans angry!!

Last week I was interviewed for this CNBC article about the final season of Game of Thrones coming to a close and all of the controversy surrounding it.  Could the future of the show's DVD sales, a spinoff series, and producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' involvement in upcoming Star Wars films be jeopardized by all the fan hate?

So I guess I called it right in the article. Apparently the fans were so infuriated by the final episode that many are vowing to retaliate now. Many are promising to stay away from Star Wars if Benioff and Weiss are involved, vowing to ignore a spinoff series, and there is that goofy Change.org petition to remake the entire season.

Reportedly, George R.R. Martin, author of the original novels, has hinted that he will take his remaining books in the series in a different direction. Again, as I called it in this article.

The power of culture and audiences should never, ever be underestimated. There are many who think the media are a completely irresistible force upon the minds of malleable, vulnerable audiences. People who believe that are very wrong.

As I was saying..."A Companion to the Action Film"

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm proud to have my chapter on Asian action films and their impact on Hollywood included in this new book by James Kendrick.

A genre that is often overlooked by film studies, this book includes essays by the most accomplished scholars of action cinema, including Lisa Purse, Mark Gallagher, Cynthia M. King, Susan Jeffords, and Yvonne Tasker, among others.

Far from being an entertainment of just shallow, kinetic spectacle, action films, as the essays in this volume explain, have long reflected a wide a range of social, political, and gender issues and controversies American society has wrestled with for over a century now.

So check out this book...and check out some of the best action films ever made.

The joy of horror!

And for a complete change of pace, check out this article about horror films on the Rewire webpage I was interviewed for. Horror's one of my favorite genres and this piece has a good discussion about why telling scary stories is one of the oldest forms of story telling.

When I teach my courses on horror films and media theories, we often come around to the discussion of horror and our need to feel fear. In fact, probably the first stories cave people told around the campfire were horror stories. The uses and gratifications theory of how audiences make their choices in entertainment and information also raises interesting questions about why people might be so enthusiastic to seek out films and books that will keep them up all night with fear. Our need to seek out a safe scare, the opportunity to experience the kind of fear you can stop at any time by changing the channel or closing the cover of the book, probably has a lot to do with it. Research has also shown that fans of extremely graphic horror films--the kinds that have been termed "torture porn"--like to watch such films as a sort of personal test. How long can they watch the blood and gore and mayhem before they cover their eyes?

But horror is most effective when it mirrors the real world and symbolically speaks to fears we have in our every day lives. The article discusses how the major horror films that attained iconic status over the decades had also been extremely effective metaphorical mirrors on the times they were made in.

Check it out for my comments and also great comments from James Kendrick, film professor from Baylor University who edited the new book "A Companion to the Action Film," in which I have a chapter on Asian action films.

Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

Well, the folks over at State of the Nation seem to have an incredibly high of opinion of me! They just blamed me for starting a massive "false flag" measles outbreak up in Rockland County, New York. I'm not kidding. Check out this delirious rant about me from a few days ago.

I almost missed the article since they weren't insulting me in the title.

They claim that my blogging about my frustration with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children was immediately followed by the measles outbreak in New York. It was suspiciously too soon after I blogged, SOTN claims. My post apparently was the command for the New World Order conspirators to infect people with measles so that New York authorities could respond by banning those infected from public places.

So SOTN is now making me out to be some kind of a Bondian super villain, sitting in my lair in Jersey City and issuing false flag orders to all of my NWO minions as a part of my diabolical plan...TO RULE ZA VORLD!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Seriously! Read the article. It sounds exactly like the rantings of a hopelessly deranged mind.

However, if you're running the SOTN web page and you actually take seriously what you write, shouldn't you be asking yourself one very important question right now? If Donovan is so powerful that he can just order a measles outbreak at will, what's to stop him from sending a black helicopter full of Illuminati assassins after you for attempting to foil his grand plans for global domination?

Correction: The Repulsive State of the Nation

If you are ever targeted for insults and trolling by anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists, you should be proud of yourself because you are doing something right. You are doing some small bit of good to help dispel unfounded and deadly myths. You are helping shine a light on people who in every sense of the word can be called “terrorists.” They are a pack of jackals, predators who spread fear to parents concerned with the health and well-being of their children.

I recently seemed to have raised the ire of someone—or some group of people—behind a sleazy little fake-news and conspiracy theory web page called State of the Nation. I had written about these people before, but you can find a link to their main page right here. After you read most of their featured stories, you will, I’m sure, walk away feeling more than a bit unclean. Their headlines are now screaming about the measles outbreak across the country being a result of a government conspiracy secretly poisoning people with the virus. But the people responsible for SOTN also believe that the California fires had been started by laser beams from space and Notre Dame cathedral was burned down by those same lasers.

Then a couple of weeks ago one of the fans of SOTN sent me a series of emails with links to incontrovertible “proof” that vaccines are a health hazard and parents must resist vaccinating their children. These links to the “evidence” led to information so absurd, so laughable to anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size that I needed to write a reply to the poor deluded soul who sent the email. Now the writer claimed to be a Saint Peter’s University student, something I am highly skeptical of. But I still tried to urge them to get their facts about the vaccination issue from sources other than web pages that blame the California fires on death rays from space.

I recently noticed that State of the Nation posted my letter. Check it out right here. In their reply, the people running SOTN take me to task for not refuting their long list of links to “high-integrity articles and scientific research papers” proving the deadly harm caused by vaccines. They also inform me that the editor of SOTN—whoever this person is, since he or she does not reveal their name, probably out fear of being assassinated by the Illuminati hit squads of the globalist New World Order—is “Board Certified in Integrative Medicine.” So this individual must know true scientific evidence when he/she sees it, right? Since they’re board certified, you know.

Well, their board certification does at least make them sharp enough to catch spelling errors, so I am impressed by that much of their “open letter” to me. They do point out that I used the word “pray” when I meant “prey” when referring to the unconscionable lowlife of the alternative news community who PREY on the gullible, fearful, and weak-minded. Well, all I can say is that gall-dinged autocorrect got the best of me, actually giving away its Satanic Illuminati programming that had been installed all across cyberspace by the Y2K bug, hinting at how the members of the East Coast Intelligentsia pray three times each day to the Antichrist for the chance to incarcerate the children of American patriots in FEMA camps targeted by death rays from space.

But do not let me digress. The board certified individual behind SOTN accuses me of not refuting their plethora of evidence in all of the links they—or one of their devoted readers—emailed me. But, in fact, I did exactly that. Let me explain…

As I wrote, “facts…are NOT unsubstantiated claims made by other silly conspiracy theorists. You are NOT doing cutting edge research by reading and listening to the rantings of dozens of other websites, YouTube videos, and blogs linked to by State of the Nation.”

The “evidence” offered for most of the ridiculous claims made by SOTN—from the dangers of vaccines to space weapons burning California—are nothing more than links to the web pages of other conspiracy theorists. When one follows one of these links, they wind up at some other conspiracy site where someone is making crazy, unsubstantiated claims about Freemasonic Satanists or crisis actors. Now since the editor of SOTN is a board certified medical professional, one would think that he would know what real scientific, empirical evidence looks like. And, best of all, most of SOTN’s links promising “hard scientific evidence” are actually links back to yet other SOTN posts making unsubstantiated claims about yet more conspiracies.

For example, the first link in the open letter by the board certified editor of SOTN promises evidence of a “PSYOP to Compel Vaccination Compliance: Measles-Infected Residents Banned from Public Places in Rockland County.” But when you click on the link, you wind up at another SOTN link that summarizes a very short article from a web page called ZeroHedge.com about the measles outbreak in New York City. Disappointingly enough, there is no evidence of any “psyop” anywhere in the article. ZeroHedge, by the way, is an alt-right conspiracy web page run by someone with the rather unoriginal pen name of “Tyler Durden.”

Then we have a second link to what promises to be an article about a lawyer who “demolishes pro-vaccine talking points.” Looks intriguing, doesn’t it? Except the fact is that court decisions or arguments by lawyers do not qualify as scientific evidence. And, moreover, when you click on the link, you wind up at…wait for it…another SOTN page! You didn’t see that one coming, did ya? 

Well, in case you keep reading, you do have the article giving the full text of a lawyer making an anti-vaxxer argument, supporting his case by references to a Dr. Mark Geier, a supposed “moderate” in the vaccination issue. A very quick online check of Geier reveals, however, that he’s had his medical license suspended in several states and eventually revoked for administering harmful treatment protocols to children with autism.

This article, which is supposed to demolish the pro-vaccination position, does eventually make reference to a reputable physician and researcher, a Dr. Gergory Poland of the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Poland’s work, unfortunately, has often been misquoted and mischaracterized by anti-vaxxers. He does, if fact, support vaccinations.

And so it goes. The rest of the State of the Nation list of articles amounts to this type of slight-of-hand. They’re loud, click bait titles that link back to other SOTN articles or postings on other conspiracy and anti-vaxxer web pages.  

Now I am not going to continue responding to all those links…right now. The thing is that I have a life and I have a full time job that makes enough demands on my time that I am not able to reply to the massive piles of nonsense like this. When academics and scientists usually give up on replying to all the quackery, the pseudoscience, the conspiracy theories of all the charlatans and cranks out there, it is not because they are unable to dismiss the incontrovertible hard truth of the anti-vaxxer claims, the crisis-actor fantasies, or false-flag delusions. It is simply because they don’t have the time to reply to the sheer volume of fabrications the conspiracy community foists upon the world every single day. 

But I think I will come back to both this list of links and the rest of the toxic sludge that makes up the State of the Nation web page. The board certified editor pleads that the information on his page be disseminated to SPU and other universities and colleges around the country. So yes, the information about the deception, mischaracterizations of science, and fearmongering most definitely will be disseminated. 

And yes, I most definitely wish that children could be legally taken away from parents who refuse to give them life-saving vaccines. Refusing to vaccinate a child is nothing short of child abuse.

But that is all for just now…I do need to make it to a New World Order Illuminati pizza party where I will be given my next round of instructions by my clandestine sponsors of falsehood.

I'm not sure which one is worse...

On the one hand we had a gang of murdering animals like ISIS on a bombing spree in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, killing over 300 people.

And less than 24-hours-later - literally, almost on the very same day - we see the bloodsuckers exploiting it for attention and money on the internet.

I had written before about how almost immediately after some tragedy - from the Boston marathon bombing to the various mass shootings - we see the grave robbers, the bottom-feeders of the conspiracy culture posting their demented alternate theories about "false flag" attacks and "crisis actors." Except in the case of the Sri Lanka attacks, these "alternate news" sleaze bags like State of the Nation and the Millennium Report posted their theories about false flag attacks within a few hours of the news breaking from Sri Lanka.

Check out this link to State of the Nation about the Sri Lanka false flag theory and note how it links to the Millennium Report. The two sites are virtually identical, with State of the Nation regurgitating almost everything that appears on Millennium Report, from its anti-vaxxer nonsense to its plethora of delusional stories about prophecies and Pizzagate and massive deep-state conspiracy theories.

And yes, I admit that this is not any sort of measured, civil piece of discourse on an important issue of the day. But how much civility is warranted when we have a grimy little cottage industry of paranoia thriving on the internet today? How much civility do we owe people like State of the Nation, and Alex Jones, and Millennium report, Before it's News, and Sheila Zilinsky and their ilk who capitalize on death and suffering, who exploit grief so they can make money off their web pages, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Can you not see each of these lowlives jumping with glee, with absolute pleasure every time we have another story of mass destruction, mass murder? The higher the bodycount, the more opportunity there is to make a quick buck of the gullible, the paranoid, and the alienated.

Looking at the sickening handiwork of killers...or looking at the people who cash in on the murders by spreading even more fear, even more paranoia through their conspiratorial BS. I'm really not sure any more which of the two sides is actually worse.

By the most basic definition of the word, they are both "terrorists."

Time to call garbage what it is...

So this article was brought to my attention and I scratch my head and wonder how historians and anthropologists in the future will make sense of the early 21st century, a time that appears to be going insane. Long after the atom has been split and men walked on the moon, we wind up in a world where scientists still need to waste their time explaining to adults that the Earth is round and that vaccines that have been administered to people for generations are not causing autism. Worse yet, as the CNN piece above argues, science seems to be losing the social media war to the anti-vaxxers!

And that is where the article asks an important question. What can science and academia do now? Has the war for the minds of the alienated, the troubled, the naive, the paranoid, those so far on the fringes of modern society as to be seeking a community among those who reject all consensus reality, been completely lost?

The answer, hopefully, is 'no.' But what science needs to start doing is what it has dreaded for the longest time. They need to engage the trolls. The thinking among scholars has so far been that replying to the various "truther," "crisis actor," anti-vaxxer and flat Earth conspiracy theorists was a mistake because it gave such charlatans and con artists attention. But this sort of don't-feed-the-trolls approach has not been working. When we are seeing a sudden surge in measles outbreaks because fearful parents have been deceived into withholding life-saving vaccinations from their children, science and academia must fight back. Science must develop a public relations campaign for an evidence-based, rational world view, for a belief system that must be based on objective, quantifiable truth. And science and academia must start finding the nerve to do something they had so far loathed to do. They need to "lower themselves" to the level of the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. They must call the frauds, the con artists, the hustlers like Alex Jones, Call for an Uprising, and State of the Nation parasites exactly what they are. People running the conspiracy and "alternate news" web sites, podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs are blood-suckers and bottom feeders who spread disease and death for a quick buck in online advertising.

At least he's partially right...

I’ve been following the latest news stories about Alex Jones’ legal troubles with a sort of nauseous fascination. The latest twist in the defamation lawsuits brought against him by Sandy Hook families is Jones’ attempt to worm his way out of taking responsibility for inciting the harassment of these families by claiming that he was a victim of “psychosis.” You can check out the particulars of the case in this story in the Columbia Journalism Review, or by just Googling Jones’ name. The “psychosis” story should be among the first that pop up during your search. (Because, of course, the Insiders and the New World Order controlling Google are doing their best to tear a truth-teller like Jones down)

But basically Jones is up against a wall in court and he claims that it was a form of temporary insanity that made him claim for years that the Sandy Hook shooting – like numerous other mass shootings he had been bloviating about – was either a “false flag” attack or a hoax using “crisis actors.” This is similar to the time he claimed in court during his divorce proceedings that the things he talks about on his program are a form of “performance art.” 

The reality is probably closer to his so-called performance art. Or, to put it more accurately, a con job. Jones, I am certain, has never suffered any sort of psychosis that drove him to spout all of his illogical, contradictory, unprovable mountains of horse turd on his show. He is a showman who has been telling his delusional, gullible, alienated fans exactly what they want to hear. No psychosis there, only an absolute and utter lack of scruples. 

With this psychosis claim, one can see that he is also a pathetic coward who can’t bear to admit any responsibility for his reprehensible behavior and take the consequences like a man.

But the reason I am nauseated by all of this is because I think of all the people who still listen to him and take all of his words as gospel. No matter that their idol admits to being either a liar or mentally unstable, his fan base will still continue to hang on his every word, believing in all of his claims of NWO and Illuminati and Insider conspiracy theories. 

So Jones is at least partially right when it comes to his fans. Believing in these conspiracy theories is a form of mental illness.

No, it is not amusing

So something has been nagging at me over the past several days. I just somehow knew that I had made a mistake in my post below about the State of the Nation article about me. And then it hit me. I had used the word “amusing” in describing their links to other conspiracy web pages about the Sandy Hook shooting. And there is absolutely nothing amusing about any of these theories about “false flag” attacks and crisis actors and people pretending to be grieving over nonexistent children in the aftermath of some kind of hoax at Sandy Hook.

Vile, perhaps. These false flag conspiracy theories are vile beyond all comprehension. They are disgusting. They are filthy. They are examples of the absolute depths of depravity some people are capable of sinking to. 

And what is even more revolting than the conspiracy believers are the people who make a living feeding the delusions of these sick, demented individuals. Just as I had written here before, I am absolutely convinced that perhaps the people who are getting the biggest laugh out of the absurdity, the sheer stupidity of these theories are the people behind all the scores of conspiracy web pages, blogs, and various types of social media. I am certain that Alex Jones does not believe a word of the garbage he spews on his show every day. Likewise, I am certain that all the other Jones wannabes out there, the people running the State of the Nation site or the Call for an Uprising YouTube channel, or all of the other charlatans peddling in paranoia, are probably laughing every day at the rubes they are swindling with their Pizzagate and Qanaon and anti-vaxxer bilge.

But then the rubes turn into the people who harass the parents of children who had died because they haven’t gotten a flu vaccine. Check out this article about parents having to suffer the loss of a child and then becoming the victims of the anti-vaxxer sociopaths. The believers in these conspiracies become the human trash that harassed the Sandy Hook parents like Jeremy Richman who took his own life earlier this week. Read the article about Richman’s death right here. He had been one of the people suing Alex Jones for accusing the Sandy Hook parents of being crisis actors.

So no, none of this is amusing.

The sad "State of the Nation"

So how does that saying go that if you have enemies it means you’ve stood up for something some time in your life? 

A few days ago the State of the Nation website ran this little insult piece about me, claiming that not only am I the “torchbearer” of the anti-conspiracy movement, but that my “torch went out.” To illustrate that my torch went out, they provided several examples of the typical “proof” that is in the tool box of all conspiracy theorists worth their salt: links to unsubstantiated claims made by other conspiracy theorists and articles and quotes taken out of context. Do check out their links and see for yourself. They are quite amusing, especially the link that supposedly blows the lid off the Sandy Hook false flag conspiracy…posted by someone called “Dr. Eowyn” from the Millennium Report web page. It’s fascinating to see that much of the content on the State of the Nation page is just material reposted from the Millennium Report. Although the Millennium Report doesn’t appear to be reposting stuff from State of the Nation. Or at least they didn’t run the article about me. I’m somewhat disappointed.

Now am I upset about the State of the Nation’s article? Not in the least. As you will see when you visit their page, these are the people who argue that the California fires were started by lasers from space! How upset can you be if people like this criticize you? Plus, if you scroll down to my anti-vaccine post below, someone criticizing me put up their own link to the State of the Nation article. That person also thought that I would remove their comments and give them the comfort of feeling like the martyr for the “truth” they crave for. As I wrote here before, I won’t remove any criticism of me, and I certainly do not need to remove any State of the Nation fan’s conspiracist rants. Illogical, absurd foolishness will be recognized as such by the normal people that make up the majority of the population. The tinfoil garbage of State of the Nation, Millennium Report, Alex Jones, the Before It’s News website, the anti-vaxxer movement, and the rest of their ilk will be laughed at and dismissed by most individuals whose IQs are larger than their belt size.

And the State of the Nation piece also reminds me of the work I also need to do as a writer and educator. The sad fact is that we do have a number of unfortunate lost souls out there who, for whatever reason, are so alienated from mainstream society and all sources of expertise and consensus reality that they choose to believe in fantasies about the Illuminati, the New World Order, Satanic secret societies running the world, and autism-causing vaccines being given to children on purpose. The paranoia of these people is then being fed by unscrupulous charlatans like Alex Jones, the State of the Nation, Before It's News, or A Call for an Uprising-type YouTube channels. It’s only education that has a chance of standing up to this new rising Dark Age of irrationality.

Not sure if I should laugh or cry.

So here's a link to YET ANOTHER major study verifying what the scientific community has known for a long time: there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest that measles vaccines cause autism. Case closed!

Except given the state our modern world is in - and not just America society, but many other countries in the world where we've been seeing measles outbreaks - will this make much of a difference to an ever-growing segment of the population that likes to make up its own facts and create its own belief systems completely unconnected to any empirical evidence? I fear that the answer to that might be..."not likely."

I'm as pessimistic as I am because I recently watched a fascinating, hilarious, frightening, absurd, disheartening documentary on Netflix called "Behind the Curve." It focuses on that other great modern derangement I've been writing about here, the flat Earth movement. The documentary is quite fair to the flat Earthers, actually, as it lets them tell their story in their own words. We see some of the thought-leaders of the flat Earth movement as they explain their beliefs and why they came to believe what they do.

Now the idea that the Earth is flat I will just leave in the same category as the "Pizzagate" conspiracy and the Qanon conspiracy. It is so staggeringly absurd that it's not worth spending the time addressing all of its claims.

What makes the documentary especially fascinating, though, is when we see how this monumental foolishness serves as a magnet, a community, and a surrogate family for people who are and always have been, for whatever reason, completely alienated from consensus reality and any organization or institution of expertise. We see these people congregate in online communities - when they don't get together at actual conventions - and spin their wild yarns of a massive, world-wide conspiracy to hide the truth about the real shape of the Earth. We also see how the people who make up this zany movement already have a propensity for paranoia and for living in their own self-made fantasy worlds. The stars, if you will, of the flat Earth movement profiled in "Behind the Curve," people like Patricia Steere or Mark Sargent, are also staunch believers in vast collection of other conspiracies, everything from 9/11 trutherism to flase-flag-attack theories and all the way to the vaccine conspiracy theories.

But a really sad part of this documentary is when we see people who take their kids to the flat Earth conventions, who teach them to believe in this archaic, utterly unrealistic load of demented nonsense. In my eyes, the behavior of those parents borders on child abuse. It borders on child abuse as much as the behavior of parents who refuse to give their children vaccines. It makes me want to scream that if children can be removed by authorities from families where they are beaten, starved, and tortured, why shouldn't they be taken away from parents who refuse to vaccinate them? Or who indoctrinate them in idiocy like the flat Earth beliefs. That, of course, will never happen. But sometimes it really makes me wish!

So what about our new study debunking the vaccines/autism link yet again? Is there reason to believe it will change minds?

I hope so.

But, then again, when we still have flat Earthers despite all the evidence...

When my students make me proud!

I was so proud of several of my students who brought a story that I had missed to my attention about flat Earth beliefs and YouTube. This is a link to an article about a new study from Texas Tech University that found that a number of people who believe the Earth is as flat as a pancake seem to have been swayed to this belief through YouTube. Again, I’m kind of embarrassed that I missed this story, but very proud of students who brought it to my attention.

The study adds some interesting points to the conversation about unlimited speech and expression on social media and what to do about the spread of hoaxes, fraud, and fake news on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and the like. Being a knee-jerk free expression absolutist, I don’t like to limit speech of any kind in any medium. Democracy can only function when we trust the individual and allow each and every person to express themselves without any governmental interference. As I had written here before, even the unadulterated horse manure that comes out of Alex Jones’ mouth should enjoy the same free speech protection as any other American citizen’s opinions and social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter are in the wrong for banning him. I firmly believe in the arguments John Milton laid down in “Areopagitica” for a free marketplace of ideas. To counter ideas one might not believe in, to counter ideas one might even find dangerous, each person has an obligation to speak up, speak out, and criticize. If you don’t like someone else’s speech, you should add more speech to it, not ban that individual from speaking.

And that comes back to the very sensible conclusions of the Texas Teach study. It’s author, Asheley Landrum, does not blame YouTube for flat Earth beliefs. The core of this nonsensical belief system, I am certain, is rooted in much more complex psychological and sociological issues. The flat Earth videos exist because there is a growing number (although I am curious about the exact number of true Flat Earth believers out there) of people who are already given to believe in anything that goes counter to all scientific consensus. And, quite correctly, she argues that the findings of her study should actually be a call for scientists and academics to start adding more of their voices to counter flat Earthers, the conspiracy theorists, the anti-intellectuals on YouTube and other social media. 

So dear academic colleagues, please start producing your YouTube videos right away! 

There's still hope for the future!

Check out this article about the vaccination issue for a very heartening turn of events! It's one of several where we see kids actually being smarter than their parents. A couple of these articles have appeared recently about teenagers getting vaccinated in defiance of their "anti-vaxxer" parents. The kids, it seems, are able to understand such things as logic and evidence-based reasoning. That, of course, is unlike their parents who keep clinging to completely discredited myths and conspiracy theories about "Big Pharma" and "Big government" and big this and big that knowingly poisoning people with MMR vaccine for whatever nefarious reason that make sense only to the minds of conspiracy theorists. In the meantime, of course, we have had measles epidemics breaking out in...wait for it!!...population clusters where parents are refusing to vaccinate their kids. Quite a coincidence, isn't it?

But it is great hearing that young people are capable of understanding science and are willing to reject the dangerous conspiracy fantasies of their misguided parents. This is the power of education at work.

I just hope that when I am teaching my students about the myths and logical fallacies of all the major conspiracy theories, I can have this sort of impact on them as well.

Truth found!

I’m a huge fan of all of Josh Gates’ exploration/mystery/paranormal reality shows like “Destination Truth,” “Expedition Unknown,” and “Legendary Locations.” As I was working on CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, I would often refer to his shows as a shorthand for describing who my main characters are. “They’re the cast members of a paranormal reality show, kind of like Josh Gates’ “Destination Truth,” I would say. When I was watching a marathon of his old “Destination Truth” show (on the SyFy channel originally from 2007 to 2012) recently and spent some of the commercial breaks channel surfing to a couple of other paranormal shows, I was taken by something wonderfully ironic. I almost laughed out loud.

OK, so let me set the scene: “Destination Truth” was oriented much more toward the exploration of supposed paranormal phenomena, whereas his recent programs are about exploration and the examination of legends, historical figures like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Billy the Kid, and historical mysteries like lost treasures. In “Destination Truth,” Gates and his team would specifically investigate claims of hauntings, monsters, alien encounters and such around the world. But the most entertaining aspect of each of each episode would be Gates’ droll, tongue-in-cheek presentation of the old myths and his interview with locals who told of their encounters with otherworldly entities with wide-eyed, stunned solemnity. 

Now, mind you, Gates’ winking presentation of these eyewitnesses never came across as condescension or disrespect for the simpleminded yokels who still believe in witchcraft, vampires, and demons in the twenty first century. But it is a lighthearted acknowledgement of how unbelievable this may sound in our rational modern world. “Destination Truth” had a fascinating subtext about old cultural traditions and folk beliefs colliding with a modernizing world. It is interesting to consider the comfort of old belief systems, especially superstitions and mystical belief systems, in a world where science has disproven the existence of the supernatural. 

And then it came to my channel surfing where I would run into the rest of the paranormal reality fare like “Paranormal Lockdown” or “Most Haunted Towns” or other Travel Channel shows like “Ghost Adventures” and “The Dead Files.” The straight-faced, humorless discussions of everything supposedly otherworldly on these shows, the recollections of encounters with ghosts and demons by “average Americans,” looks astoundingly like Gates’ interviewees in the back country of Guam recounting their experiences with blood-sucking hellhounds. Except, again, the people on these other shows are Average American Folks! They are the citizenry of perhaps the most technologically and scientifically developed nation on Earth. 

And, then again, they are the citizens of a country that has an ever-growing number of people who believe the Earth is flat, that Hollywood is run by devil-worshipping Illuminati cultists if you follow lunatic YouTube channels like A Call for an Uprising, or that a vast conspiracy is faking mass shootings. 

We sure are an advanced culture today, aren’t we? And we keep getting smarter and smarter by the day!

Enjoying "Project Blue Book"

And now for something completely different…a few of my impressions of the new History Channel series, “Project Blue Book.” 

I’ve seen the first two episodes of this series and as someone who used to love the X-Files (even as my skepticism of large-scale conspiracies grew), I am so far liking it. It is a good-looking series boasting some nice production values in its recreation of the early 1950s. I also like its quiet, silently menacing tone. It, so far, appears to be a show that wants to reward the patient, attentive viewer who is willing to invest his time in following the unfolding of a complex narrative and layered mythology. I hope the show will continue on this path of low key, subtle mystery and not devolve into ever more garish, hysterical conspiracy theories and over-the-top action. There is a place for action in the proper context, but “Project Blue Book” would be more interesting if it stays on the path of menace, mystery and unease.

The show is a very loose dramatization of astronomer J. Allen Hynek’s side gig as a consultant for the U.S. Air Force’s three major UFO-study projects: “Sign” (1947-49), “Grudge,” (1949-52) and “Blue Book” (1952-69). As the title of the show makes obvious, it focuses in on his “Blue Book” years. Hynek would become famous for being perhaps the most prestigious member of the scientific community to publicly declare that he had come to believe that the UFO phenomenon was the manifestation of something truly unexplained, perhaps extraterrestrial visitations or something extra-dimensional. He would also coin the UFO-encounter classification system of “close encounters of the first kind,” “second kind,” and “third kind.” He even had a cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg’s iconic film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Interestingly, Hynek was originally a staunch skeptic for decades when it came to the issue of UFOs. Throughout his years consulting for projects Sign and Grudge, he would enthusiastically debunk claims of UFO encounters as misidentifications of natural phenomenon. He had also famously dismissed a series of sightings in Michigan as being caused by nothing more than “swamp gas.” The swamp gas explanation of UFOs had become something of a punchline in the debate of the phenomenon.

But it was during Hynek’s time with Project Blue Book that his view of the phenomenon changed. Prompted by eyewitness testimony he had grown to trust as being credible, made by competent people whose character was beyond reproach – as well as his realization that some 11% of professional astronomers claimed to have seen unexplainable aerial phenomena – Hynek had become a staunch believer in the otherworldly nature of UFOs. He would eventually found the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago.

So I am curious as to the approach this show will take toward the claims of government cover-ups and vast conspiracies. The real Hynek, of course, would claim that the Air Force and top-level government officials also suspected the extraterrestrial nature of the UFO phenomenon but they were set on denying it from the public. But TV shows and movies have already shown perhaps literally hundreds of iterations of the “vast, shadowy government conspiracy to hide the aliens.” I am curious about where this show will go.

It would be interesting to see the show differentiating between a cover-up – the U.S. military wanting to hide that fact that it knows nothing about the true nature of this unexplained phenomenon – and outlandish conspiracy theories about back-engineered alien UFOs in Area 51.

I will admit that I am very much open minded to the idea of intelligent alien life somewhere on other planets. Scientists having detected scores of Earth-like planets over the last several years, it only makes logical sense that life would arise elsewhere in the universe. I am even open minded to the idea that intelligent, technologically advanced alien races have discovered the means to interstellar travel and visited the Earth. A significant percent of UFO sightings have never been satisfactorily explained.

But it is the outlandish conspiracy theories I found completely unbelievable: the back-engineered UFO theories, the alien bases under government installation theories, the claims that aliens made deals with the governments of the Earth to abduct humans for ghastly experiments in return for providing our scientists with fabulous technological secrets…which said scientists have kept secret for some reason. As if incredibly advanced alien visitors would actually need to make deals with the Earth’s leaders.

But J. Allen Hynek himself was the proponent of a very conservative and strictly rigorous scientific analysis of the UFO phenomenon. I am certain that today he, too, would be appalled by what the “conspiracy community” have come to believe as the gospel.

And I’m sure J. Allen Hynek would detest Alex Jones.

And the mystery persists!!

So this article is a quick overview of the legal hit Alex Jones just took from a group of Sandy Hook parents. Apparently he needs to turn over marketing and financial documents in the parents' group's lawsuit against him. This is information that could reveal the deliberate campaign Jones waged against the survivors and parents of the Sandy Hook shooting, accusing them of being a part of conspiracy to stage the attack as a "false flag" event and being paid "crisis actors."

This is the very least Jones deserves in perhaps the most despicable display we have seen from the modern conspiracy community. Still it's interesting, isn't it, that the New World Order of the Illuminati is merely taking Jones to court, rather than making him disappear "mysteriously" from the face of the earth? Such sinister plots, after all, are what Jones has been accusing the "elites" and the "insiders" of, right?  So why is Alex Jones still alive?? I just can't figure this out!

Binge watching! The pleasure...the pain!

We do it, it feels so good, and then we feel so guilty afterward. Right? 

After this post, in fact, I think I will log on to CBS All Access and watch several episodes of "Hawaii Five-0" I missed. Then there's the "Strange Angel" miniseries I started watching and need to get back to. Oh, and then there are the season 2 episodes of "Stranger Things" on Netflix and I already can't wait to see the new season of "Lucifer" when it premieres also on Netflix.

Yup, I can completely get addicted to bingeing TV and I admit it. 

So check out my quotes in this article about the psychology behind binge watching. It covers some interesting material, including mental health issues both in the real world and in the fictional world of all the binge-watched shows. For example, there do seem to be more and more shows where major characters contend with mental problems in ongoing storylines. As I comment in the article, this is commendable. It's good to help lift the stigma off of mental and emotional problems, to show major characters - often heroes and all sorts of admirable protagonists - being able to deal with mental problems and disorders and live productive lives. 

As for whether or not there are dangers in the binge watching trend, I am not entire convinced. The way in which entertainment and information is being consumed is merely changing right now, thanks to streaming technology. To immediately pathologize it, to turn it into the new moral panic of the evil dangers of entertainment, I believe, is unwarranted.

The Internet and paranoid thinking

This New York Times video is quite a good overview of the current phase online conspiracism is moving through in its ongoing evolution. As I have been writing before, the details of the conspiratorial claims are no longer really what scholars of the phenomenon need to focus on and engage with - all the silliness of the Pizzagate and Illuminati New World Order claims have no evidence whatsoever to back them up and they are really not worth the time to argue with - but the dynamics of cyberspace technology and audiences of the disaffected who create communities around the claims are really the most fascinating and troubling glimpses of 21st century culture. As this Times story points out, the core of conspiracism now is no longer to make specific claims about aliens, reptilian "elites," the Antichrist, the New World order or the Freemasons. The new phase of the conspiracy culture had evolved to a state where all consensus knowledge must be denied. The "ask questions" mantra of Alex Jones and all his imitators boils down to a call to reject the very concept of facts and all evidence-based rationality. The modern world of "alternative facts," indeed. The 21st century at its most disturbing.

Steph Curry got schooled

So earlier this week the Golden State Warriors' Steph Curry set off a little controversy when on a podcast he appeared to be maybe joking but not joking that he thought the moon landing never happened. Now whether he was kidding or not is hard to tell - let's hope really was kidding - but his comments did bring some furious criticism down on him. NASA even invited him to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to show him moon rocks and explain why the Apollo moon missions were all, in fact, real.

So now Steph clarified that he was absolutely kidding about being a moon "truther" and he never believed that the Apollo missions were a hoax. If anything, he said that his comments were a "silent protest" against how gullible people are and how quickly they fall for fake information just because they come from someone famous. Silent protest? Huh? Not sure I understand that one. But I hope he means it that this was but his clever wit at work, a big practical joke on the real moon truthers out there.

Although the best reaction to all this was just posted on my new favorite YouTube channel, "A Call for an Uprising." Check it out right here. In his customarily breathless monologue, the host of this show gave an exasperated, outraged explanation about what was REALLY behind the whole Steph Curry kerfufle. Steph, our anonymous host explained angrily, is actually a part of the Illuminati and the secret bloodlines that control the world - and orchestrated the moon landing hoax for some unspecified reason - and this stunt with the podcast was just a ploy by the Insiders, the Elites, the New World Order, and Them, to discredit belief in the moon conspiracy.

Now I still believe that whoever is behind this looney tunes "A Call for an Uprising" channel is pulling off his own massive con on tens to thousands (if his subscription count is to be believed) of people out of pure, simple, uncomplicated greed. Each posting, in fact, starts out with links to opportunities to donate money to the show. But the frightening thing is that there ARE tens of thousands of people out there who are gullible, simple minded, and alienated enough to believe all the bovine manure in these videos.

Or perhaps the shadowy operative behind "A Call for an Uprising" is merely carrying out a silent protest against the stupidity of the conspiracy culture.