Me, 50 years later

 

Ahem, is *this* how you end up after a lifetime of kundalini yoga? I assumed you would become a being of pure Light or something to that effect. This just looks like the boomtown kook spewing catch-phrases from some Tantric manual...

Dude.

A taste of Tartaria

 

Hans Wormhat - one of the biggest kooks on the Internet - actually sounds surprisingly sympathetic in this video. At least when he isn´t discussing conspiracy theories! I might be the last person standing who cares either way, but here you go.

Hitler was a bot

 

- LOL, the humans actually think there were
no psy-opses before somebody invented AI!

This is just a moral panic. Nothing new have been disclosed here. 

Secret experiment on Reddit users, creepy results 

Pandas are fake and gay (?!)

 

YouTube´s biggest troll and/or resident kook extraordinaire Hans Wormhat claims that Giant Pandas aren´t real animals, but human actors in fur suits?! The reasons are somewhat unclear. Other fake animals include koalas, anacondas, penguins and the Great White Shark. Zebras are real, but probably painted to look striped. OK, so I haven´t linked to *all* of his fake animal videos. But you get the pic. 

Great Apes are of course also fake, but in this case, the supposed reasons are at least clear enough. Wormhat is a creationist, so obviously the human primates dressing up like apes in zoos and national parks are paid agitators for Darwin´s evolutionary theory! I mean, aint that obvious?

Apparently, Mike Tyson knows the truth - that´s why the legendary boxer offered to fight a gorilla in the ring. He knew that the rilla was really a non-boxing man in a monkey suit. Tyson knows since he is presumably initiated into the Club, and is really a very muscular female?! Yes, Mr Wormhat also believes in conspiracy theories about transgender or intersex people being pretty much everywhere... 

Tinfoil Hat, pardon, Wormhat also claims to believe that the Earth is flat, so naturally the ISS must be a gigantic hoax, too. It´s actually a submersible.

I think I know exactly who is fake around here, but sure, I suppose there is a remote chance that Hans actually believes all of this. Just don´t tell Tyson.      

Transvestigation

 

Hans Wormhat is a notorious troll on YouTube, who claims to believe in a large number of fairly absurd conspiracy theories. My favorite is the claim that Giant Pandas are really human actors dressed in fur suites! The whole thing could be parody (note the strange name "Wormhat" and its similarity to "Tinfoil Hat"), but on the web, it´s really impossible to know. 

The clips above sound seriously paranoid, but - as I said - who knows? Wormhat is into something called "transvestigation", apparently the idea that many female celebrities are really male (and sometimes vice versa). I noted accusations like this against Michelle Obama and the first lady of France, but always assumed they were tongue-in-cheek. However, it seems some people (Incels?) un-ironically believe in the claims. This is combined with ideas about secret societies and initiations, et cetera. 

Mr Wormhat takes the whole thing to an entirely new level, claiming that "they are all trannies" and that transvestigation has therefore become meaningless. Says Wormhat, half of the current human population is intersex. Many "men" are really women, many "women" are men. Mike Tyson, for instance, is a woman. Wormhat claims that his entire family consist of "Baphos" or "Baphometians", a reference to the androgyne devil-like figure Baphomet (popularized in the US by the Satanic Temple). His "sister" was really his brother, his "brother" was his sister, and his "father" was the one who gave birth to him?! It´s not clear why these genetic deformities didn´t hurt Wormhat? 

Wormhat claims to be a Biblical Christian (while rejecting the apostle Paul!), but his view of the intersex people is surprisingly coy. He sees most of them as victims of the system and therefore preaches charity. Which is intriguing to be sure, since conservative Christians are dead against any form of transgenderism, regarding it as fakery. Wormhat hints that it´s more complicated than this. Perhaps the intersex caste system is the result of a eugenics breeding program of the secret cabals?

Make of this "investigation" whatsoever ye wish.    

Transvestigation

Humiliation fetish

 

Why do some people believe (or pretend to believe) in obviously absurd and downright silly things, such as flat earthism, that giant pandas are really actors in fur suits, that Mike Tyson is a woman, and so on? One explanation I stumbled across on the proverbial internets is that it´s a "humiliation fetish". 

But who is being humiliated? Answer: pretty much everyone. This includes those who believe in the strange claims of the troll, those who know he´s trolling but can´t help getting angry anyway and - most importantly - the troll himself. 

Yes, the troll gets a kick out of being humiliated. In other words, the whole thing is a form of sado-masochism. 

That would actually explain a thing or two. Once you see it, you can´t unsee it! And it works just as well for true believers in really absurd causes... 

No forests on Flat Earth?

 

Content creator Emma Thorne (a former conspiracy theorist turned basic left-liberal) comments a bizarre flat earth video, which is apparently something of a classic. 

I assume the original version is titled "No Forests on Flat Earth", but there is also a dubbed version called "No Trees on Flat Earth". Emma is commenting the original, narrated by a guy with a heavy Russian or East European accent. 

The whole thing could be a troll, perhaps a parody of flat earthism. Or it could be a real kook. This far out on a limb, it´s impossible to tell. Nor is it overtly obvious how any of the weird factoids in the video proves that the Earth is flat?! But sure, the claims that Devils Tower is the petrified stump of a truly gigantic tree, that Grand Canyon is a quarry, or that a secret nuclear war was fought between 1780 and 1815, do have a certain intrinsic charm. 

There are other whackadillos and wingnuts out there who claim that dinosaurs never existed, that Stonehenge is a modern fake, that the US Socialist Workers Party killed Trotsky, that many insects are robotic UFOs...you get the picture. However, I know for a fact that the claim that birds are really drones covered in plumage is parody, and I strongly suspect it´s the same with the girl who believes the cicadas in her backyard are harbingers of the apocalypse. 

But, as any paranoiac will tell ya, that´s exactly what They *want* you to believe!

WORM MOON

 

Something called "Worm Moon" or "the Worm Moon Eclipse" will take place on Monday. Apocalyptic speculations on Kook YouTube will start in 10, 9, 8...

Any relation to the blood moon or the rare blue supermoon, btw? 

I want to believe

 

Credit: Unknown

Me, trying to explain to Richard Carrier that you really can´t prove unique historical events with probabilistic equations, and that the probability of atheism in a fine tuned universe is 0% since consciousness in principle can´t come from brute fucking matter... 

Come and chat with Crowley

Annoying atheist Richard Carrier argues against the recent claims by a Google engineer (now fired) that the LaMDA chatbox is sentient. It turns out that the engineer in question, Blake Lemoine, is actually a member of the OTO, a sex magic group often accused of being Satanist! Carrier calls him an "idiot" and a "loony". 

Carrier himself believes in trans-humanism and eternal progress through...I don´t know...sentient computers perhaps? So it´s really *two* kooks arguing against each other (LOL), with Carrier taking the sensible position mostly because he wants to engineer a chatbox that´s *actually* sentient... 

Why Google´s LaMDA Chatbox isn´t sentient

Under investigation

The Australian TV news show "60 Minutes" recently discussed the UFO disclosures made by the US military last year (see clip above). Under the monikers "Under Investigation" and "The Unidentified", reporter Liz Hayes interviews a number of talking heads about this strange new development (almost stranger than the actual UFOs). For decades, the US military denied any knowledge of or interest in UFOs. Now, they made a sudden volte-face, and claim that the UAPs (as they have chosen to call the flying saucers) are real and probably of earthly origins, although an extraterrestrial explanation can´t be ruled out.

I admit that I haven´t really looked into this (yet), and that I´m skeptical to the UFO phenomenon in general. Some kind of intelligence community psy-op certainly can´t be ruled out, and if so, the present "disclosure" might simply be another wave of disinformation. Maybe its a deliberate hoax directed at the Russians and the Chinese? No idea, frankly. Or maybe *that´s* the point. Nobody is supposed to have any clue as to what is going on. Sounds familiar...?

"60 Minutes" claims that the mysterious objects closely follow American military aircraft during large scale exercises, as if they were monitoring US defenses. The UFOs have not just been spotted on radar, but also on infrared cameras (confirming they are solid) and even visually. One UFO looked like a cube within a sphere! One of the talking heads finds this to be perplexing in the extreme - why would somebody place a non-aerodynamic object (the cube) inside an aerodynamic one (the sphere)? Well, why would anyone place a human inside an aircraft? The idea that Russia and China has developed advanced drone technology is mentioned, but UFOs with similar bizarre patterns of flight were observed already during the 1950´s. Were they also Russian (Soviet) or Chinese? Interestingly, the former fighter pilot interviewed assumed that the UAP´s he observed were some kind of secret American military project! Unless, of course, he has been instructed by his superiors to say precisely this...

A more tantalizing possibility, of course, is that the flying saurcers really do come from another world. "60 Minutes" have interviewed Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist who believes that the weird interstellar object called ´Oumuamua wasn´t a comet or asteroid, but an artificial craft (or strictly speaking a "solar sail") built by an alien civilization. So far, support from his scientific collegues have been lukewarm at best. 

Maybe I´m out on a limb here, but for some reason, I´m not particularly interested in UFOs and aliens. It feels to "retro" somehow. My guess is that we are dealing with a some kind of complex psy-op scenario, and that nothing will happen. We will still be at exactly the same spot in 2032 as we are now. More blurred pictures, military mixed messages, ghost stories...

But sure, I could be wrong. We *do* live in "interesting times"! 

Trot Watch

Credit: Will Haigh/MOD

The only working class guy in the entire Spartacist tendency? Note that he was Jim Robertson´s enforcer! Note also the bizarre sectarianism. To sell literature inside a building where a social forum is organized is apparently "popular frontism"?! 

Otherwise, I note that Workers Hammer has raised the truly Spartacist slogan "Donate Trident to North Korea". Shades of the Yuri Andropov Brigade and the Jalalabad trail? I admit that I missed the publications of this tendency, and Jim´s colorful insults...

Also, which end of the Trident is the business end?

George Crawford´s obituary in "Workers Hammer"

Kooks and spooks

"UFO" is a recent four-part sort-of-documentary about the UFO phenomenon, made by J J Abrams, a succesful US film-maker involved in both the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" franchises. It´s extremely confusing, jumping back and forth between different topics for four episodes straight. Is it meant to confuse? I couldn´t help wondering, since the truth (the real truth) about UFOs *is* mentioned in the third episode... 

However, that truth is surrounded by all the usual bunk and myth-making. UFO cases extensively discussed include the observations made by the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, the Chicago O´Hare International Airport case, and the almost proverbial Phoenix Lights (yes, we get to see Fife Symington´s alien buddie again). We are also taken on a long but very disjointed and non-chronological excursion through UFO la-la-land from Kenneth Arnold, Roswell, "The Day the Earth Stod Still" and the Hill abduction case, all the way to Budd Hopkins and John Mack (but, alas, not Whitley Strieber). Even Richard Doty, the man who fed disinfo to UFO-logist Paul Bennewitz, agreed to appear on camera (and continued lying, as usual). 

The docu series takes the US government faux disclosure of the UFO phenomenon earlier this year as its point of departure. Or rather the beginning of the story on 16 December 2017, when the New York Times published an article revealing the existence of a secret group (called AATIP) within the Pentagon tasked with investigating UFOs. The price tag: 22 million dollars. The NYT also released the now famous Pentagon UFO videos. What the documentary shows, perhaps inadvertently, is that the whole thing is probably a psy op or black op by the Pentagon, and that the NYT has been fed the information by certain interested parties. Probably the same guys who were behind the "secret UFO research" in the first place...

The truth is disclosed in the third episode, with some context provided in the second. So what is the truth? Here´s a hint: I´m not saying its the government, but it´s the government. There are no alien space craft. People are seeing top secret American military test flights: spy balloons, stealth planes, high-altitude blimps, and (these days) advanced drones. Obviously, the military can´t admit that they exist. Here, the widespread belief in UFOs come in handy as a smoke screen or sleight-of-hand. The proper authorities are encouraging belief in aliens and military cover-ups of aliens, making everyone look the other way, not noticing the real cover-up (of the secret military craft). To this end, UFO researchers must be controlled. AATIP tried to "buy" MUFON, according to a former director of the organization interviewed in the documentary. Another example is the previously mentioned Bennewitz case, where the military clearly applied the principle "keep your friends close, and the kooks even closer". (I review Greg Bishop´s book on the case, "Project Beta", elsewhere on this blog.) And yes, the NYT´s own exposé is probably just another example of UFO researchers being "played" by forces they can´t or won´t understand (unless they too are part of the kook op). And it continues: the NYT´s main source, Luis Elizondo of the AATIP, later worked for "To the Stars", a pro-ufology group largely made up of "former" CIA agents and such! 

I think it´s rather obvious that the Phoenix Lights were military test flights - one proposal made in "UFO" is that it was a high alitude blimp known as the Ascender - while the weird craft seen by the Nimitz pilots may have been drones. It´s quite frankly *weird* that so few people have thought of this possibility, but as the ex-MUFON guy points out, you really can´t argue against a true believer. UFOs and aliens are like a religion to them! 

One name that turns up quite often is that of Robert Bigelow, a multi-millionaire who may have a quite serious interest in UFOs and the paranormal. Bigelow´s business is part of the US space industry, and he has excellent political contacts. Indeed, it seems to have been Bigelow who headed AATIP, the secret team tasked with "investigating UFOs" (and take over MUFON). It´s possible that AATIP did *something*, since the US black budget sometimes does fund exotic research ranging all the way from parapsychology to the military training of cats or dolphins. Bigelow & Co were looking into topics such as "can you travel in outer space through worm holes" and so on. Probably absurd, but if you can just print the money and send the bills to the tax-payers, why the heck not? Before his stint for Pentagon, Bigelow carried out research at the so-called Skinwalker ranch in Utah, where a plethora of bizarre paranormal phenomena had been reported. (See my review of Colm Kelleher´s and George Knapp´s "Hunt for the Skinwalker".) 

Several of the true believers on this show point out - quite correctly - that strange phenomena in the skies and elsewhere have been observed since ancient times, and that "alien abductions" are a very old thing, too. It´s certainly possible that some of these events were truly paranormal. But that doesn´t contradict the fact that the modern UFO phenomenon is to a large extent driven by science fiction, quasi-religious fanaticism and (surprise) American spooks trying to cover-up very human gizmos. 

I´m frankly surprised that the UFO phenomenon has managed to survive for this long. One person in the docu suggests that it´s because of deliberate government policy. Every time the public gets less interested in UFOs, some new "revelation" is published in the media, making the thing go center stage again. If true, then new "disclosures" will continue happening until our earthly high technology is permanently taken off line around the year 2100 or so, making disinformation about it pointless...