I’m starting a blog detailing my own crackpot theory about human digestion.

I try to give people, even people with apparently bizarre beliefs, the benefit of the doubt.  Lots of things which are at first glance ridiculous – the success of the Left Behind books comes to mind – turn out to be real or true, after all.

But when you’re talking with someone, there are certain red flags that may indicate that they’re not altogether on the same reality train as the rest of us.

1. Insistence that they’ve discovered a hidden truth no one knows.

2. Vague plans to inform the authorities.

3. They are being stalked or harrassed in subtle ways by the nefarious evil-doers in question.  Such stalking might take the form of property damage that is too minor for others to notice, but that the putative crackpot insists was done.

4. Either no one else or a only select few are aware of the truth.

5. Yet any oppression the nefarious evil-doing group has experienced is because people won’t tolerate their wicked, wicked ways.

6. The evil that the nefarious evil-doers do is all-encompassing and vague in nature, ranging from sex crimes to drug dealing.

7.  The nefarious evil-doers are in some way sub-human.

8. Saying, “Really?  All the [insert name of purported nefarious evil-doing group here] that I’ve met have been really nice,” gets the response, “They’re good at putting on an act.  They’ve been pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes for centuries.”

9. The putative crackpot claims to practice extreme caution in spreading the truth, because the all-powerful nefarious evil-doers will come after him if he goes public.

10. Yet he’s telling total strangers at the pub all about it: in case they DO come after him someone will know why.

And lastly…

11.  General craziness red flags such as nervous laughter at odd times, an unwillingness to engage in different topics, and a moustache.

So, as you might guess, I ran into someone yesterday who displayed all of the above signs and more.  Guess what group of nefarious evil-doers he thought were making small dents on his car, staking out his house, and reading his emails.

No, it wasn’t the Jews.

Seriously, not the Jews.  Not the Illuminati, not the Pope, not the reptoid aliens.

Click through if you want to know who, according to this guy, are just as bad as the Mafia.

It was the Mennonites.

MENNONITES.   Those nice, traditional, choral singing, bonnet-wearing butter-churning unfortunately corporal-punishment believing people who to varying degrees still think it’s 1750.

The nefarious conspiracy uncovered!

This man thought Mennonites were reading his emails.

Of course he was a completely delusional nut.  I felt really sorry for him, actually.  It must really ruin your life to be convinced that sinister people in buggies are waiting just around the corner to take you out.

You know what’s kind of ironic?  Guess in what context I met the Mennonite conspiracy theorist.

It was at Skeptics in the Pub, an event put on by the Association for Science and Reason.  I went to hear a talk about the Large Hadron Collider (which was awesome).  If there was anywhere you’d be safe from conspiracy theories and other nonsense, you’d think it’d be there.

But noooooo.  I sit next to someone who thinks that Mennonites are out to get him.

Other than that it was a lot of fun, though.

There has been a crackpot frenzy a brewing against vaccines especially in the recent months with the H1N1 flu. Conspiracy theorists wish us to believe that the government is trying to kill us, control our minds, or some other equally ridiculous things. So, I will try to inform you to the best of my ability why vaccines are a good thing and why you should get all the vaccines available to you.

What is a vaccine?
A vaccine contains weakened or “dead” forms of a disease. Some vaccines are given as needles or shots, and others as drops to be swallowed.

How do vaccines work?
Vaccines trick the body into thinking it is being attacked by a disease. The immune system identifies these foreign substances (viruses and bacteria), also known as antigens. And once these antigens are identified, the immune system develops proteins called antibodies that circulate in the blood. They fight the induced “infection” by killing the antigens and are mass produced by the body so they are available to fight off the real disease if exposed later on.

The effectiveness of vaccines
According to the WHO, over 2 million lives are saved each year by vaccines. And in the developed world, immunization has been so successful that diseases such as polio, diphtheria, mumps and measles are rarely if ever seen.

Misconceptions about vaccines
Do vaccines cause autism? The answer is a resounding no.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) has conducted evidence-based reviews and has rejected any causal associations between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism spectrum disorders in children. In addition, a large Danish study of all children born in Denmark between 1991 and 1998 (537,303 children) concluded there was no difference in the rates of autism between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. A Montreal study of 27,749 children born from 1987 to 1998 also concluded there was no relationship between pervasive developmental disorder (autism) rates and a 1-or 2-dose measles-mumps-rubella immunization schedule.

The reason why parents see a connection between vaccines and autism can be found in psychology. These parents fall victim to the ex-post-facto fallacy wherein correlation is believed to be the same as causation. Many children are diagnosed with autism around the time of their first vaccinations and may begin to show clearly discernible signs of the condition around this time. And not surprisingly, given that there are thousands of children with this condition, some parents become fully aware of their child’s difficulties shortly after the child receives a vaccination. Unfortunately, this has led to the rise of Jenny McCarthy to the height of crackpot fame.

Do vaccines contain harmful additives? The answer again is no.

Formaldehyde may be used early in the manufacturing process to inactivate some viruses and toxins. But, purification removes almost all of the formaldehyde. Furthermore, formaldehyde occurs naturally in the human body and helps with metabolism. And there is approximately ten times the amount of formaldehyde in a baby’s body at any time than there is in a vaccine.

Aluminum salts (aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate, or potassium aluminum sulfate) are used as adjuvants, substances added to a vaccine to enhance and strenghten the immune system’s response. Adjuvants used today make it possible to reduce the amount of antigens (parts of weak or dead viruses or bacteria) in a vaccine. Monitoring of vaccines over seven decades has proven adjuvants are safe. Furthermore, aluminum is the most abundant element in the earth’s crust and is found in air, food and water. And, aluminum is present in breast milk and infant formula in similar amounts as in vaccines.

An ethyl mercury derivative called thimerosal is has also been used as a preservative. However, no vaccine made in Canada since March 2001 for routine use in children contains thimerosal, with the exception of the influenza vaccine. DTaP, polio and Hib vaccines have not contained this preservative since 1997-98. The MMR vaccine used in Canada has never contained thimerosal.

A message to the people who do not think they are at risk to H1N1
Yes, you may be young and healthy and not be at risk to H1N1. But, vaccination is not about protecting one person. The main concern is to protect people who are highly at risk such as the elderly, pregnant women, and small children. The higher the number of people who get vaccinated, the smaller the chance that those of the high risk group will be in danger. If you care at all about your fellow human beings you should get the vaccine.

This comics page was made as an appreciation of the comic book Rebootus Maximus by Krishna Sadasivam, and to save a beard. A beard you say? Yes, read this blog post to find out what that is all about.

If you must know, this page took me approximately eight hours to make, excluding the preparations, like sketching Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak. It is hand-drawn on paper and digitally colored.

That is all.

Although my creative talents were on a low today, I managed to put out this title for a comics page that I hope to publish later today. It seems that mere discipline and determination can bring you a long way.

If I’ll do another page with these two characters, I’m sure I’ll redraw the title.

Basically, the parts were drawn on a piece of paper with mechanical pencil, reordered and traced on tracing paper with the same pencil, inked with a brush pen, scanned, retouched, and coloring in GIMP (where I also added the encircled “AND”).

That is all.

This is a rough approximation of a title illustration I’m preparing for a personal project. The actual result will be quite different, though. More stylized, less realistic.

That is all.

Last night I introduced my wife to this film, one of my favorite documentaries. In it a quirky engineer named Fred Leuchter stumbles into thinking he's proven the Holocaust didn't happen. In other words, he becomes a crackpot conspiracist.

From October 4 through October 8 NewsReal featured “Crackpot Chronicles: Van Jones, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, Rorschach, the Truthers, And Me.” The series’s purpose was to define and explain the “Crackpot Conspiracist Mindset” through analyzing a dialogue I had stumbled into with a 9/11 Truther. In doing so we could understand why A) former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones needed to be fired, B) how popular talker Glenn Beck did not fit into this pattern of  thinking, and C) why conspiracists need to be shunned from mainstream political movements.

Here’s a listing of all the parts of the series for those who missed it:

• Click here for Part I
• Click here for Part II
• Click here for Part III
• Click here for Part IV
• Click here for Part V

The series also inspired a few subsequent posts highlighting various notable “Truther Punksmacks” by commenters:

• One of Our Regulars Take on a Truther Crackpot
• Nixon and Cults
• Making the Point

Throughout the series various conspiracist crackpots showed up to protest in the comments and promptly proved my point to NewsReal’s readers. (Many especially didn’t like my use of the word “crackpot” to describe them, no matter how clearly they fit the term’s definition.) They showed that I was exactly right in that this sort of thinking is a specific mentality. It’s not whatever the individual conspiracy might be that’s the issue. The problem is that those who stumble into conspiracy advocacy have a certain style of thinking which is deeply different than the rest of us. This approach makes it so it’s all but impossible to reason with them.

In engaging one of the crackpots I pointed out that my series was not about disproving 9/11 Truther garbage but explaining the Crackpot Conspiracist Mindset. He seemed to have missed this and demanded that I write a cliffs notes summary of the series.

I initially balked at the crackpot’s demand. Eventually, though, it seemed like perhaps it might be valuable to make a listing of the various aspects of crackpot conspiracist thinking. In fact there were probably a few more that I didn’t mention in the series which could be added to the list.

So let’s begin:

1. Conspiracist Crackpots do not have a measured view of human nature and human ability. They are unable to realize that human beings are not capable of keeping the secrets and pulling the massive cons required of conspiracy narratives.
2. Conspiracist Crackpots do not understand Ockham’s Razor, one of the key principles of logical thought. Even if you explain it to them they’ll just say, “Aha! You contradict yourself. It says right there that the simplest explanation is only usually the correct one.” You pointing out Ockham’s Razor to them is probably the first time they have ever heard of the concept.
3. Conspiracist Crackpots tend to be obsessed with Nazism to one degree or another. The Crackpots see the horrors of Nazism as somehow evidence that grand conspiracies happen. “If a government murdering its people happened in Germany in the ’30s it can happen anywhere right now!”
4. Conspiracist Crackpots are oblivious to the fact that their conspiracy of choice tends to relate directly to their political views. Not only that but their embrace of the conspiracy actually flows out of their political ideology. Every single Birther is opposed to Barack Obama on policy grounds. Truthers who think 9/11 was an “inside job” done by the government are almost always politically opposed to the government. Leftist Truthers hate America and Right-wing Truthers hate the federal government. Holocaust deniers hate Jews. Afrocentric leftists who think the government engineered AIDS and crack also think America is fundamentally racist. You can do this with virtually every conspiracy.
5. Crackpot conspiracists are unqualified amateurs who rarely have any expertise to analyze the events they’re talking about. Yet they have the audacity to come to conclusions that run counter to the majority of trained experts.
6. Crackpot conspiracists do not understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A youtube video proves nothing. What kind of mind actually gets changed as a result of some video on the internet?
7. Crackpot conspiracists do not dialogue. There’s no reason for it. They have the Truth and are there to preach, they’re not “questioning” or “chasing truths.” They’ve already found the answers. They are in no way “open minded.” Hence they won’t really answer your questions. They’ll just change the subject.
8. Crackpot conspiracists usually believe in more than one conspiracy. It’s no coincidence that perennial third-party candidate Ed Noonan, who showed up on one of the threads, is both a proud Birther and Truther.
9. Crackpot conspiracists are not able to see ambiguity or complexity. In my dialogue with the Truther he said multiple times that I had the fallacy of believing that there weren’t any conspiracies. I never said that. Conspiracies do in fact happen. 9/11 was indeed a conspiracy. Al Qaeda conspired in secret to attack America and they did it. Rational people understand the difference, though, between rationally acknowledging small, individual conspiracies and irrationally seeing grand conspiracies that are unsupported by adequate evidence.

OK, so that’s nine points. I imagine I’ll want to come back to this list as more ideas come to me. Does anyone else have any other characteristics of the Conspiracist Mindset that I’ve forgotten? I’ll add any good ones to the list. (And give credit to the person who identified them!)

I’m not an economist (so take the whole post with a generous helping of salt).

The world economy would probably not be the unpredictable beast it is today if money still represented something of value, i.e. was backed by predetermined amounts of something that has intrinsic value (such as gold or silver), which the issuer (such as a central bank) needs to hold in reserve in case the holder of the currency note wants to collect it.

This, as you may or may not know, how printed money came to be. Gold used to be the real money: as long as purity and weight of the metal could be determined, anybody could legally make their own coins and bars. Naturally it was the goldsmiths who did this. Then somebody, it seems, realized that they need not bother collecting back their gold from the goldsmith’s once all the ’smithing’ was done. He could simply pay another person by giving him the goldsmith’s receipt (or note), provided that both parties trusted the goldsmith. It probably didn’t happen exactly that way, but long story short, they found it a lot more convenient to carry around the notes than the gold coins themselves, which were safely stored at the goldsmith’s (or whoever was storing them). But the note could be produced at the goldsmith’s at any time and exchanged for a real quantity of gold, which the note holder legitimately owned. This, they say, was how currency notes were born.

Now, try going to your Treasury or Central Bank (or to the Federal Reserve, if you are an American) and exchanging some of your currency notes for precious metal. I bid you good luck. No government in the world will redeem its currency in anything anymore. What is called the Gold Standard is gone. The American Dollar went off the gold standard in 1968. I believe the Swiss Frank was last to go in 2000. All the world’s money is what an economist would call fiat money, in other words, legal counterfeit. It’s like our hypothetical goldsmith writing up a few extra receipts on his own and buying things with it, which I think you would understand is fraudulent. Somehow, this does not seem to bother modern economists. Nor does it seem to bother anybody else (except for the crackpots who go on about the gold standard). In fact, there is enough economic theory that supposedly explain exactly why it should not bother us, but I could never get them to make common sense to me.

Which brings us to inflation. As a child, I once heard Margaret Thatcher say in a televised speech “Everyone knows that things become more expensive with time” or something to that effect — which is when I first learned about inflation. But this is not really true at all. We’ve all got used to the idea that bread will cost more in a few years than it does now. And if you live in a developing country, you know this all too well and would tend to agree with Thatcher. But the truth is, supply and demand being equal, there is no reason why bread should be any more valuable this year than it was last year. And it really isn’t. Bread hasn’t really become more expensive, money has become cheaper. There’s more of it around because the government has printed more of it and bought things with it, without having anything of value to back it up with. That’s inflation 101 — ‘everybody’ knows this, or at least is supposed to. It’s nothing new.

What’s new, or rather what I’ve realized anew is this. In addition to making us poorer, inflation is indirectly responsible for recessions. The way I see it, all economic problems of the sort that we’ve been experiencing lately (such as the US subprime mortgage crisis) have one root cause — spending money you don’t have yet. In other words, the more debt driven an economy is, the more unstable it is.

Perhaps if it weren’t for inflation, this much debt would not exist. People go into debt for two reasons — one, they want to make more money (by starting businesses), and two, they don’t want to wait until they earn the full cost of an expensive item they want to buy. Both desires are worsened by inflation. If money didn’t bleed out its value with time, people would be more content in storing it than trying to multiply it (i.e. invest it) as a means of beating inflation. And more people would consider saving money to buy an item without debt if they felt saving wasn’t a losing proposition. Debt can never be eliminated — investment cannot work without debt. But with the present system, we seem to have a lot more debt than is necessary because we’re trying so hard to beat inflation. Nobody wants to keep money in their hands. They either try to lend it for investment or borrow the deficit and buy whatever they are saving to buy.

The problem with debt is that we’re more likely to overestimate our ability to pay it back than underestimate it (anybody with a credit card would agree). So anybody who has debt is potentially poorer than he thinks he is. Since everybody’s in debt, directly or indirectly, we’re all poorer than we think we are.

Recession is not a time when we become poorer. It is merely the time we realize we already are.

By Columnist Harry Trunckles

I consider myself something of a skeptic. Always have been. When I was a little kid, a teacher explained that there were 24 hours in a day. I wondered if that was for real or not. Now I finally have found the evidence to prove that my sonofabitch kindergarten teacher was a filthy liar!

Loyal reader, Kylie Ruminiator, sent this site to me: http://www.timecube.com/

The good doctor.

Time Cube is absolutely brilliant. It accounts for why we need a 4-cornered family unit in this country. A family consisting of mom and dad and daughter and son.

The truth of the matter is that my kindergarten teacher was educated evil. I learned from Gene Ray, doctor of cubicism and the Wisest Human, that there are actually 4-24-hour days! If you need any proof of this, take a look at this cube:

See the four sides?

It has 4-corners! You can’t deny it, therefore, the Time-Cube Principle is correct. If the evil and stupid notion of a 24-hour day were true, then why do I always feel like each day passes before me so quickly in a flurry of wasted and meaningless life? Simple, it is because of the reality of the cube day. All those who deny the cube day shall be spit on like the educated evil they are!

Sometimes it is difficult to convince people of this. I asked Dr. Ray for some assistance and he helped me out. Whenever you encounter someone not quite getting Time Cube, hit the button to the left on your keyboard. IT WILL MAKE YOUR WORDS COMPLETELY CAPITALIZED. PERSUASIVE POWERS ACTIVATE! If this fails, you should kill them for being educated evil.

Also, Ray is a genius in other areas as well. He knows how to reform education: “Tis Time to kill any educator who does not teach Cubicism above cubelessness. To save humanity from extinction, like prior civilizations perished, youth must redirect self teachers, or destroy them. … It is not immoral for students to kill all educators who ignore Nature’s Harmonic Time Cube or suppress free speech rights to debate Time Cube Creation Principle”

I have some issues with Gene Ray’s theories though. First, I’m pretty sure god isn’t queer. Look at all the destruction he wrought throughout the New Testament! Only straight males can be violent like that. Sure, God’s Jewish and yeah, I believe you when you say the Jews deserved their holocaust, but calling god queer? That just goes too far.

But lately I’ve begun to question one major principle of my master’s theory. I just can’t help but think maybe there are actually five 24-hour days instead of the conventional notion of 4. This controversial time-pentagon explains many of the holes in the current theory. The pentagram, normally thought to be pagan, is actually not. It’s just what evil pagan liars want you to believe that so that you cannot reap its benefits! The pentagram is actually a godly source of energy. If you could only think in terms of 5-24-hour days, you’d know that pentagrams are just higher-dimensional crosses.

The time pentagram can explain why parents, who have 2 kids, usually want just one more kid. It’s because they should! The parents should have 3 kids in order to balance out the 5-member family unit.

But the time pentagram explains much more than just families. The time pentagram also explains why the terrorists attacked the 5-sided Pentagon. Yes, they knew the good in 5-sided figure and they knew the evil they were doing. Need I say more?

The time pentagram also explains why the Spice Girls were so popular. A 5-member group will radiate goodness, just like a pentagram, and everyone will soak it up. The only reason the Spice Girls failed as a group was because of their rampant lesbianism. If it wasn’t for this, they might have ruled the world. I also don’t understand this dogma about 2-become-1 that was later preached by the Spice Girls before they broke up as a group, as revealed in this video. It’s obvious that 2-must-become-5. It just goes to show you that evil cannot exist in a 5-member anything. Eventually the 5-member entity must dissolve or the evil must be expelled!

I’m a skeptic, it’s true, but I can claim to be a true believer in burning people to a screaming death when they say they believe in 24-hour days. You may remember me talking about my old kindergarten teacher…he will not educate evil into anyone ever again.

One thing we can all agree on though, is Ray’s take on academia. “Academia destroys your brain,
your ability to think opposite.”

How ’bout, “Cats For Clunkers?”

This poster released by the Michigan Humane Society shows the poster for ‘Catfax’ which allows would be owners to get the history of their ‘new’ cat before they adopt. (AP Photo/Michigan Humane Society)

see also: Michigan Humane Society

REDONKULUS!?!

Your vacation pictures… become squirrelcation pictures. See links, below.

Now YOU can add your very own ‘Redonk’ squirrel to any hosted photo!… ’cause I know you people have nothin’ better ta do: squirrelizer

Follow the instructions — scroll down ta get yer squirrelized picture.

see also: here’s the original, thisisphotpbomb, cuteoverload, redonk, redonkulus, Urban Dictionary, squirrelizer

BTW. This was all popularized on Countdown: With Keith Olbermann, last week. If you watched that show, you’d be as cool as I am. Have fun, kids!

By Political Opinion Columnist Wilhelm Blitzkrieg

My liberal Missippian friend Tony Crandall thinks that Osama, I mean Obama ought to be treated as 4/5ths instead of 3/5ths of a President.  His reason is beyond me.  The big latte drinking liberal!

blog.aynrandcenter.org

Honk if my cash paid for your clunker

The senate voted yesterday to extend the “Cash for Clunkers” program–a piece of Obama’s economic stimulus agenda in which the government doles out up to $4,500 for people to trade in older vehicles (the engines of which are then destroyed) for new cars that meet a government fuel efficiency standard. Calling this “crackpot economics,” the Wall Street Journal points out that “the subsidy won’t add to net national wealth, since it merely transfers money to one taxpayer’s pocket from someone else’s, and merely pays that taxpayer to destroy a perfectly serviceable asset in return for something he might have bought anyway.”

Isn’t taking money from some people, giving it to others, and pretending that this creates wealth the essence of what Bernie Madoff was doing? The fact that Congress is doing it openly, with the sanction of law and under the guidance of Ivy League economists, doesn’t make it any less unjust.

Like Forrest Gump, I seem to be placed in historic moments. In the wee hours of the morning of Aug. 11, 1969, the Los Angeles Police stopped my travel companions and me. We were on our way out of town in my 1948 Cadillac hearse. It was the morning after the LaBianca murders, and just two days beyond the Sharon Tate massacre.

They searched the 22-foot-long vehicle and checked out its hirsute occupants. At the time, we had no idea why they had stopped us. They released us, to continue on our way to, oh yeah, Woodstock.

Our path through history had also taken us through Eureka, California the morning the Apollo 11 crew took their first giant step for mankind just a month earlier. My post “Moon Landing is Backdrop to Song” captures the irony of that moment.

Actually, we all seem to be reliving these events as 40th anniversaries abound. But this post isn’t my “On the Road” chronicle. It’s about the Manson clan and their quest for freedom.

My take is simple: no. No parole. No freedom. No leniency. Not for Susan Atkins. Not for Leslie Van Houten.

I’ve never been big on the death penalty, but I’m sorry the Manson team wasn’t fried. Their original death sentences were commuted to life behind bars, when the Supreme Court struck down death penalty laws in 1972. Consequently, now the families of Sharon Tate, her murdered friends and the LaBiancas must suffer the pain of further hearings, of impassioned pleas for mercy from the famous and the infamous, and of the possibility that one or more of the clan — specifically Atkins and Van Houten — could be set free.

True, Atkins, 61, is paralyzed and has terminal brain cancer. According to CNN, in her 1993 parole board hearing, Atkins said Tate:

asked me to let her baby live. … I told her I didn’t have any mercy on her.

But, according to Time.com (Time Warner owns CNN), Atkins really said:

Look bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you are having a baby. You are going to die and I don’t feel a thing about it.

The latter account is just a tad bit different in the evil department. Maybe Atkins’ reinvented, kind persona just “can’t handle the truth.”

Sharon’s sister, Debra Tate told CNN this spring that Manson family members convicted of murder should remain behind bars. She said the slayings were:

so vicious, so inhumane, so depraved, that there is no turning back. The ‘Manson Family’ murderers are sociopaths, and from that, they can never be rehabilitated. They should all stay right where they are — in prison — until they die. There will never be true justice for my sister Sharon and the other victims of the ‘Manson Family.’ Keeping the murderers in prison is the least we, as a society who values justice, can do.

Meanwhile, Van Houten continues her request for release. Her latest supporter is filmmaker John Waters. In a recent piece on Huffpost, he says, believe it or not:

I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do.

CNN’s Erica Hill featured Waters on a show earlier this week. He pitched his latest book, “Crackpot,” and attempted to explain his friendship with Van Houten. CNN’s AC360 is doing a weeklong special on the Manson murders.

Water’s sense of justice is misplaced at best. Maybe he’s just trying to reclaim his past celebrity. He’s always courted the outrageous, so why should his appeal hold, uh, water.

So I’ll think of the victims of the Tate-LaBianca murders on this anniversary and forget once again the evil clan who took their lives in such cruel fashion. Then, I’ll move on to celebrate Woodstock as I did when I pulled away from the Los Angeles police back in 1969.

Thanks to all the new visitors who commented on this blog entry, when Coast To Coast Am linked over to FrankenSteams’ Log.

As an amateur weather observer, one of the first things I do in the morning after I turning on the computer, is check the East Conus Water Vapor Loop and today, this is what I saw.

GOES Eastern US SECTOR Water Vapor un-retouched Image -- July 15th, 2009

Demon's fiery breath roasts Texas, in the "Summer from Hell," a phrase recently popularized by George Ure of urbansurvival.com fame.

updated:  July 26th, 2009

As if it were ripped straight from the front page of a supermarket tabloid, this morning’s satellite image shows what we’ve all been thinking:  namely, there must be some exceptional reason it’s so damn hot in Texas and now we know. Demons! The fiery-hot breath of flaming demons, stoke “The Summer from Hell, ” roasting Texans in their own juices.

Austin-Camp Mabry weather records go back to 1898 and show that no other 30 day period has been hotter than what we’ve just endured!  –Burton Fitzsimmons

Hottest 30 Days in Austin Weather History!

“THE 30 DAY PERIOD FROM JUNE 15 TO JULY 14 AND AGAIN JUNE 16 TO JULY 15 THIS YEAR IS SO FAR THE WARMEST 30 DAY PERIOD OF RECORD AT AUSTIN MABRY SINCE 1898 AND AT SAN ANTONIO SINCE 1885.” — National Weather Service

San Antonio residents encouraged to ‘rat-out‘ water wasters. Deep in the heart of Texas, cattle are not king.

see also:  State Drought Monitor, GOES Eastern US SECTOR Water Vapor Image, Burton Fitzsimmons, National Weather Service, Urban Survival, Summer From Hell, CoastToCoastAM, Internet meme, Pareidolia

On July 8th, 1947, the Roswell newspaper published a Front Page Article – taken from the official press release written by Lt. Walter Haut of the RAAF 509th acting under orders of Col. William Blanchard – reading”RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region”

Following orders…Haut recanted the flying disk press release hours later, claiming…that it was just a weather balloon…

And, as they say –the rest is history.

see also:  Roswell UFO Incident

book: The Day after Roswell

Charly D. Miller a self-anointed advocate against prone restraint caught extolling the safety of prone restraint.

Ms. Miller says one thing on her web site and an entirely other thing in a private chat room. Why?

According to this post Ms. Miller believes prone restraint is perfectly safe.

.  Re: [RESTRAINT_INFO] Request for advice

These are excerpts from a Charly Miller on a Yahoo groups chat room.

Hey, Dianne!

High, everyone!  (I finally signed up!)

FIRST:  I want to go “on record” as being someone who does NOT suggest “we should never restrain.”  Restraints are often necessary to ensure the safety of individuals suffering from aggressively-altered levels of consciousness, and to ensure the safety of those around them.  My complaint is that the people who perform restraint are so rarely ever effectively trained in how to SAFELY and effectively employ restraint — rarely ever effectively educated about HOW restraint can kill.

Yes.  Some companies who educate restrainers are still advocating prone restraint positions. . . .  However, if effectively educated . . ., restrainers [can] avoid using a prone restraint position in a manner that can kill.  (Effectively-educated restrainers actually CAN employ prone restraint positions safely.)  In fact, even without specific training in “restraint application” techniques, if restrainers are effectively-educated about how and why restraint asphyxia occurs, they’ll instinctively restrain in a manner that does NOT risk causing restraint asphyxia.

Montauk Monster?

updated:  November 17th, 2009

…salvaged from the wreck of YAHOO 360.

Call it, ‘now, I’m really confused’ or ‘that fly on the hip thing’ –take your pick at the title ya like best! Taking another look at the original pictures, I notice a big fly (what we all here in Texas call a ‘horse fly’) on the rump of the beastie. Could be just the icing on the cake or the real thing, don’t know, (I’m conflicted, as usual) but the fly does add realism to the overall story. Still, if I was makin’ a movie prop beastie, addin’a fake fly to top it all of, seems reasonable.

Waiter! There's a fly on my monster.

The saga of the so-called Montauk Monster appears to have taken another bizarre turn, this time toward Hollywood…movie production crew claiming…carcass.

And then there’s the little detail that all these stories are coming outta ‘Fixed News’ –makin’ it even more dubious.

Jenna Hewitt's photo of the corpse, revealed to the Internet on 29 July.

Montauk Monster goes all Hollywood

New eye witness reports seem to corroborate the claim that the creature was in fact a ‘living thing’ once, perhaps a raccoon. Speculation was the ‘beastie’ was actually a model created by clever craftsmen, possibly in the hope it’s discovery would lead to the story going viral, for some feature film promotion.

Alas, the facts, as we see them on the ground are:

Looks as though it’s a (was a) dog or a raccoon!
A boy.
Ferrel.
Poor critter.
lots of — eew — gross photos of a carcass that looks more domestic than exotic, a bloated dog, not the Hound from Hell.

Seen envivo.

It looked about the size of an average fox, gray in color, eyes like a mole, hairless and was breathing quite heavily,” he wrote, “needless to say we were freaked out by this discovery and fled the area quickly.

Theorised by some to be a raccoon

Eric Striffler, gets the scoop — watch out, Current TV.

This being said, Montauk, has been a birth place of many a mythic and mysterious monster. The survivers of the Philadelphia Experiment are said to have re-grouped there, to carry out their experiments in the seclusion of the island. One need only do a GOOGLE search on Montauk to find just how weird a place it is. So, it should come as no surprise, strange things wash up on the beaches of Montauk, Long Island, from time to time.

The Montauk Project was alleged to be a series of secret United States government projects conducted at Camp Hero or Montauk Air Force Station on Montauk, Long Island for the purpose of developing psychological warfare techniques and exotic research including time travel. People had their psychic abilities enhanced… they could materialize objects out of thin air… An alien, supposedly designed a chair, [in]which an individual could sit to boost his mental and precipatory powers.

What could be more fabulously outrageous than the idea that your tax dollars have subsidized the demented experiments of an evil cabal of Navy brass, CIA shrinks, fugitive Nazis and Reptoid ETs? What could be more fantastic than the vision of them pow wowing together for a little high-tech, tantric voodoo?

the Montauk mind control chair

How very spicy, that this panoply of government geeks and their alien pals, fired up inter-dimensional vortexes by means of a buff, naked dude who was ‘jacked‘ into a psychotronic chair — while sporting a raging boner!

Whatever it was, where ever it came from, however you project your beliefs about the structure of the universe, seeing isn’t always believing, and believing what you see, isn’t always the way to know what’s behind the darkened vail –of reality.

pictured above:  Montauk mind control chair, photo collage by Earl Saathoff   (newsday.com) A photo of the “Montauk Monster” was taken by Christina Pampalone (Photo by Christina Pampalone)

see also:  Monkauk Monster–WIKI, Another Montauk Monster Washes Ashore,  Montauk Monster Mystery,  Montauk Monster Goes Hollywood, Montauk Sea Creature, Montauk Project, The Montauk Project, The Montauk Monster – Hell Visits The Hamptons,  Montauk Chair — Things Got Legs, Al Bielek, Eric Striffler

Eating Eurovision – one continent under a groove: 25 food bloggers try to eat the cuisine of all 25 finalists in 25 hours within the confindes of the M25! This challenge was thought up by food journalist Andrew Webb and I discovered it through London Food and Drink Bloggers. When the 25 Eurovision finalists for tonight’s song contest were picked on Thursday night (just think how bad the 17 entries who don’t get to sing tonight must be…), we each lucky-dip-picked a country.

My challenge was Iceland and I had 25 hours to find out about Icelandic cuisine. This is a country with a population of about 320,000 people, so it’s no wonder it was hard to find Icelanders, let alone their food, in London. I began my Friday morning at Portobello Road, where there were rumours of Icelandic meat being sold…

Here at Kingsland, The Edwardian Butchers (140 Portobello Road, Notting Hill, London W11 2DZ, Tel: 020 7727 6067) I asked friendly butcher Hayden Field if he could help with the Icelandic quest. He was pretty surprised, as he had stopped stocking Icelandic smoked lamb four years ago. His description of it did make my mouth water though: leg of lamb, salted for two weeks and then oak-smoked. It sounds like one of the food traditions of this North Atlantic island that would be most akin to English taste buds.

Some of those dishes I’d love to try include: blueberry soup, moss/lichen soup, velvet pudding and sheep’s head jam. I’m not so sure about puffin in milk sauce – aren’t they endangered species? ‘Nuked fish’ and ‘putrified shark’ just sound wrong.  Fruit and vegetable dishes include pickled beetroot, red cabbage, stewed rhubarb and caramelized potatoes – hearty, richly coloured, heavily cooked foods. Puddings, pancakes, cakes, doughnuts and biscuits seem popular. I particularly like the sound of wedded bliss and pepper cookies. Icecook (formerly Jo’s Icelandic Recipes) is a great recipe blog.

The antipodean lady at the Icelandic embassy was as helpful as possible, but with only eight people at the Icelandic embassy, two of whom aren’t from Iceland, there doesn”t seem to be much native banqueting going on. There was some Icelandic chocolate for sale there at £1 a bar, but unfortunately it had run out. She suggested water and yoghurt (skyr) from Whole Foods on High Street Kensington. I thought she said yoga at first, which led to some confusion. She also mentioned Icelandic cod in Waitrose, but I’m not quite sure what she meant by “but that might be a bit smelly for you.” “They have to bring food with them when they come back from holiday,” she said sadly. “Lamb is a particular favourite.” She was the second person to mention Kinglsand butchers.

I rang up Nordic Bar (25 Newman Street, London W1T 1PN, Tel: 020 7631 3174) to see if they served any suitable food or drink. Manager James Dutton had a rummage around and discovered some snacks. So I said I’d pop down later that afternoon. In the meantime, I rang The Warwick (1-3 Warwick Street, London, W1B 5LR, Tel: 020 7734 4409), which was rumoured to be the meeting place of the Icelandic Society (unfortunately I couldn’t find any details on this mysterious group). The barmaid at The Warwick didn’t know if they had any Icelandic customers and they certainly didn’t serve any food, but there was a Scandanavian party on tomorrow night – I wonder if that’s something to do with Eurovision.

I sent out Facebook and Twitter pleas for help. Predictably, the Facebook query received a supermarket response and went something like this:

- Iceland’s fish fingers are boss. They used to do something called a ‘crackpot’ which I loved but they discontinued it. True story.

- What on earth is a crackpot?!

- Its an ice cream pot…was mint ice cream with layer of choc on top you had to crack to get to the ice cream. WAS SIIIICK.

- Sounds amazing. Maybe I’ll end up making that…

- Yes I went, they eat lots of herring and cod, go to Ikea and buy their Scandinavian food, which is basicaly the same thing.

Hmmmm. On Twitter I’m now following Bjork, the Republic of Iceland and someone called LaughingPuffin. But no food tips unfortunately.

Another bike ride away and I was down at Nordic Bar. There were plenty of  photos of Iceland on the walls…

And a sort of glacial feel to the decor, with a veritable Aurora Borealis of cubic, colour-changing lights and animal furs on the walls. The place was empty bar a raucous hen party yelling at some poor man to get his kit off and three men perched at the bar. “It’s not usually like this…” said one of the bar staff. I’m not sure if she was referring to the screaming hens or the three besuited men who offered to take me to a Spanish strip party. Bill, aren’t you doing Spain?

Here I am with some Icelandic snacks: snowflake-shaped crisps and popcorn-shaped popcorn. They taste much like English crisps and popcorn. James also gave me some exciting chocolate lollipops. My dad, who likes to think of himself as a viking, particularly liked the viking ship:

Continuing on the snack theme I decided to bulk up my catch of popcorn, crisps and chocolate with a fishy snack. Iceland is known for its fish:  fresh, dried, salted, pickled, smoked,  not to mention nuked and putrified. Cod, haddock, halibut and herring seem to be the main fish eaten. Hayden the butcher talked of dried fish snacks, which are eaten with butter. Yum. I went for British honey flavoured hot smoked mackerel from Sainsbury’s, served on Scottish oatcakes. Oats are quite Icelandic – see Wedded Bliss cake.

I served this with some caraway-infused vodka, which was actually rather tasty. I put a good shake of caraway seeds into a tumbler of vodka and within about a minute the alcohol had taken on the flavour. This is an imitation of the national drink Brennivín, also known as ‘Black Death”.

This morning I refreshed myself with some Icelandic water from Nordic Bar. It tastes remarkably like my tap water. Great novelty value, but I don’t think it’s environmentally sound…

So, thank you Andrew for the challenge, and GOOD LUCK TONIGHT ICELAND! The music isn’t quite my cup of tea, but I think Yohanna might be a winner.

I’ve never been too impressed with Fox’s Chris Wallace, but mainly because I believe he is a right-wing partisan who masquerades as a straight-down-the-middle journalist. Now, Vice President Joe Biden has been known to make some regrettable statements, and he made one recently with precautions he advocated for this swine flu deal. Personally, I think Biden and a lot of other people are panicking way too much about swine flu, but Wallace was way out of line. Wallace clearly stepped over the line of professionalism when he made this comment in reference to Vice President Biden on Fox News Sunday (as captured by Crooks and Liars).

WALLACE: I have to tell you, some people have said to me since Vice President talked. Maybe you guys are telling the public one thing, but at the highest levels of government you’ve heard something else, no – you’re saying to me that everything the Vice President Biden said, I’m not talking to the travel to Mexico. Being in a confined space, being in a classroom. Being in a school. Being in a subway, no health danger to any of that?

SEBELIUS: Again, with, we’re letting the science lead this investigation and trying to be prudent…

Soon thereafter, he took this unprofessional shot at the vice president of the United States of America:

WALLACE: So why would the Vice President tell his family that? Are we to believe that the Vice President of the United States is a crackpot?

If Biden feels like that is the measure he wants to take to keep his family safe then that is his business. Wallace could have asked: Do you think the vice president may be getting a little carried away here? No, he went to the nuclear option (I believe for political reasons) and used the term “crackpot.” But, there is a bigger point here. The Comments from Wallace are an example of how so many individuals on Fox destroy the reputations of true journalists who strive to objectively bring the facts to people. This was a calculated and partisan cheap shot. It also spits in the face of nonpartisan moderators who want to facilitate discussion among their guests without inserting their own opinion (or worse) making nasty comments about the vice president of the Untied States of America. This is part of the reason Fox appeals so much to the far-right nuts – cheap shots at Democrats like the one Chris Wallace took. Wallace, in this instance, was a disgrace to the airwaves.

Crooks and Liars:
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/fox-news-chris-wallace-called-vp-joe-bi

Botched hemorrhoids operation

Beck started out 2008 as the victim of a botched hemorrhoids operation when what should have been a routine outpatient procedure sent him to the hospital for five days. In the hospital, the serious painkillers he was on led him to contemplate suicide. A video of Beck, unshaven, disheveled, bleary-eyed and with his head propped up on a pillow as he told his fans about his disastrous health care experience, became a YouTube sensation in early 2008. [Dickipedia]

BTW, if you didn’t already know, Glenn Beck is a lunatic with a tiny little home.

For film connoisseurs, there is rarely a story too minute about a production or a detail too obscure about an actor.  Luckily for those with insatiable appetites for film lore there are a few books out there that should quell their hunger.  These books all tell stories that show, no matter when the production or era, that people were just as strange back in the day as they are now.  It’s no wonder there have been so many popular films about Hollywood’s strange dark side (think Hollywoodland, Ed Wood, Sunset Boulevard, or Postcards From the Edge), the tales recounted in these books are true and are as strange or stranger than anything Hollywood’s top writers could imagine…

Shock Value by John Waters

This book is the closest John Waters has come thus far to a memoir.  In it he details, though a series of essays, his early life in suburban Baltimore, shockingly normal if you consider he would later go on to be dubbed the “Pope of Trash” or “King of Puke.” His college career at NYU, which was cut short due to lack of interest and and a marijuana scandal.  Most interesting are his early encounters with beyond bizarre characters like Mealcum Sole, a modern day Mea West, who dressed like a prostitute, wore so much make-up it melted off her face in the heat, and supposedly fucked Jack Kerouac in a buffalo exhibit at the Baltimore Zoo.  The book is rife with photos and stories of prostitutes, burlesque strippers, and other curious people he and his dreamland crew (Mink Stole, David Lochary, and, of course, Divine) saught the company of.  The book also goes through most of his early, more grounbbreakingly shocking films and has interviews with Herschell Gordon Lewis (the “Wizard of Gore”) and Divine (where she talks about the most she’s eaten in a single sitting and recounts the time Elton John invited her to join him and Elizabeth Taylor on his private jet as a birthday present).  Waters seems intent on not leaving out a single detail of his exploits with his outrageous and larger than life crowd, and you get the feeling that he could make an entire alternate filmography just by adapting his real life into movies.  An interesting follow-up book is Crackpot, though more a collection of essays written for various magazines like Rolling Stone and Film Comment, he still sneaks in interesting tidbits about his life and films, see “Going to Jail” and especially “Whatever Happened to Showmanship,” where he parallels his career with that of the king of gimmicks, William Castle.