When I first heard that Democratic Candidate Dennis Kucinich wanted GOP Candidate Ron Paul as his running mate, I expected an out-of-context quote to be given undue prominence. However this is not the case. Cleveland Plain Dealer has recent audio of Kucinich clearly expressing his wish to an audience of seventy people for Ron Paul to be his running mate.

This may not be of great consequence, since either candidate has little chance of winning. But it does indicate a severe error of judgement on the part of Kucinich. Ron Paul is one of the most socially conservative members of Congress, as well as a darling of the far-right, from conspiracy theory entrepreneur Alex Jones to the white supremacist Stormfront website.

Kucinich's like of the "good doctor" is emblematic of a wider misinformed attitude on the left. Ron Paul has been lauded by many on the US left as the "good Republican" who is anti-war and anti-PATRIOT Act. These two platform positions mask a frightening agenda of far-right lunacy, as mentioned in a June 2007 article at Daily Kos.

This story also illustrates that Dennis Kucinich may be not what he is cracked-up to be. Kucinich's infatuation with new age woo, and pseudoscientific nonsense like "chemtrails" make it difficult for a sceptic to take him seriously as as an administrator or a legislator. It can be argued that Ron Paul is the woo "yang" is Kucinich's "yin", given Ron Paul's own wooish reputation for global warming denial and creationism.

procrastinate later's blog | 8 comments

Loose Change, a 9/11 conspiracy theory film made by Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas has been through three incarnations already: the first edition, second edition, an unfinished final cut, before the release of their proclaimed 'Final Cut.'

The film through its various incarnations has made its name through accusing the US Government of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks itself via an "inside job." The information the film creators used to support its arguments included utilising sources from the Far-Right American Free Press, as well as heavy-use of quote-mining and confirmation bias.

Much of the worst-offending disinformation has been dropped in the process, and the Loose Change film has backed away from many of its earlier more outlandish claims (but not all). Loose Change has quietly dropped much of the information sourced from anti-Semitic organisations, due to an outcry by sceptics groups and critics.

Loose Change and its creators are not entirely clear of the links with hate groups. Jason Bermas is promoting LCFC at the "2007 Texas Justice, Peace, and Freedom Conference" (16-18 Nov) run by the 'Freedom Law School' which is anti-tax far-right group with links to anti-Semitic organisations. The 'Freedom Law School' is on the ADL's and Southern Poverty Law Center's watchlist. The conference is sponsored by the fascist American Free Press. The 'Freedom Law School' is supporting the Ron Paul campaign, as are other right-wing and far-right organisations.read more »

procrastinate later's blog

The relative success of Trutherism has peaked and is now on the decline. Its genesis lies in right-wing populist conspiracism that was repackaged post-9/11 to appeal to left-of-centre consumers who felt traumatised and disenfranchised as a result of GOP dominance of US politics to 2006. An explanation of 9/11 as a plot masterminded by Bush or his associates appealed to some on the left, as another example of the illegitimacy of the Bush Administration and an example of their evil.

One of the greatest blows to the Troof Movement was when the Democratic Party took Congress in the 2006 Mid-terms. It destroyed the notion of "BushCo" as an all-powerful clique that controlled space-time, controlled all media, and could steal any elections it wanted. As Katrina, Iraq, and Afghanistan have unfolded, the capability of the Bush Administration to orchestrate the greatest deception of all time has been severely dented.

Since 2006, Trooferism is returning to the right-wing populism from which it was originally-derived. Trooferism's love affair with Ron Paul(1) is rather indicative of this, as well as Trooferism's bolder assertions that the Democratic Party was also "in on it". On the progressive messageboard DemocraticUnderground, resident Troofers are becoming bolder in smearing leading Democrats such as Bill Clinton and John Kerry.read more »

procrastinate later's blog | 2 comments

We all know and love Sylvia Browne, right? I read this piece on Guardian Unlimited (hat tip to mr blur over at DU) that planted himself on a cruise with Browne in order to try and get an interview with her. It is rather lengthy, but really is worth your time.

Day 1: At sea

It is Tuesday evening and I am on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship called the Westerdam. I'm in the audience in the Vista lounge. A grouchy woman is sitting on a beige and golden throne on the stage. She's complaining about builders and dispensing dietary advice. Her name is Sylvia Browne and for years I've wanted to interview her. She's America's most controversial psychic. She's become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on The Montel Williams Show on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, "Your child is dead" or "Your child was sold into slavery in Japan."

She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents' front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed and drove off. Her distraught grandmother went on Montel's show and said, "This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can't stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?"

Sylvia said, "She's not dead. But what bothers me - now I've never heard of this before - but she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro."

varkam's blog

Sundays WaPost had an interesting piece in their editorial section about the experience of two African-American XM radio hosts who were cancelled after a battle over a conspiracy theory popular on African-American radio stations. I thought the other NG readers would find it interesting as well. (the following selections are not in the order they appear in the original). read more »

A 1990 survey by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference found that one-third of black American churchgoers believed that AIDS was a form of genocide. One-third also believed that HIV was produced in a germ-warfare lab, and 40 percent of black college students in Washington, D.C., agreed. An even higher percentage of blacks polled said they thought that crack cocaine was custom-made to be planted in African American communities to keep them crime-ridden and poor and that the government deliberately targeted black elected officials to drive them from office. These beliefs keep some black Americans from having their children vaccinated, from receiving AIDS tests and early medical treatment, and from practicing safe sex or using clean needles, as Patricia A. Turner and Gary Alan Fine note in their book, "Whispers on the Color Line." They also make seeking the truth an uphill battle.

woodrowfan's blog

Here's some quality blog carnivals for your Sunday reading pleasure.

Carnival of the Godless #68 can be found at The Uncredible Hallq

The 63rd meeting of The Skeptics' Circle took place at Relatively Science

Carnival of Space #8 took off from Universe Today

A brief note to blog carnival organizers too... It makes your carnivals much easier to find if you update your blogcarnival.com listings. They have feeds set up for each carnival so when you update blogcarnival.com, those of us who subscribe to the feeds for our favorite carnivals find out about them much quicker. That means more incoming links and wider exposure for your carnival.

tng's blog

I was just over at Stump Lane and saw that Montag had posted a link to a great article in New Scientist debunking all the common climate change denial myths/talking points. This is serious one-stop shopping for debating all your wrong-headed friends and family members about climate change without resorting to appeal to emotion and ad hominem (unless you want to). Bookmark this one folks!

Also, while we're on the topic of climate change denial, I highly recommend the Real Climate blog because you know, sometimes it helps to get your information about things from people who actually know what they're talking about. And the Denialism blog will have you debating the most ardent and repugnant Republican like a pro in no time, and not just on global warming either. There isn't a fact about anything that the right wing won't deny.

By the way gang, I'm moving out of state at the end of the week so the blogging's gonna continue to be light to non-existent for a while. I don't even want to think about all the stuff I've got to get done in the next four days. There's just no way I'll be able to get anything out for you this week. Then there's the wonderful prospect of being without internet service until Verizon deigns to grace me with DSL. It's about half the speed of cable broadband which I have right now through Road Runner but where I'm moving it's Comcast or Verizon and I decided Verizon was the lesser of two evils. I feel so dirty!

tng's blog | 1 comment

It's true. It may still be cold and frozen slush where I am but it must be Spring somewhere because Geek Counterpoint has a bumper crop of woo for you at  The 58th Skeptics' Circle.

Also, don't forget that I'm hosting Carnival of the Godless right here at Neural Gourmet this Sunday, April 15th. Send me some infidel love (or blog posts, I'm not picky) via blogcarnival.com. The deadline is by midnight Friday.

tng's blog

By now you may have heard that Dennis Kucinich will investigate a narrow element of discrepencies in the 9/11 Report. Many 9/11 Truthiness seekers are celebrating excitedly about this but I think this will come back and hit them in the face.read more »

procrastinate later's blog | 1 comment

Wally Wallington has shown that it would have been possible for neolithic man to not only build Stonehenge, but to build it with a far greater ease than one might think. In this video, Wally uses only himself, ingenuity and gravity to move and lift a 19,200 pound monolith into place. Why? Because Wally likes moving things. Really big things.

I love stuff like this. For instance, I remember a WGBH/PBS Nova special where Norm Abram, the master carpenter of This Old House fame showed how the Egyptian pyramids could have been built using only the tools and materials available in the 25th Century BC. Sure, neither Wally nor Norm can prove that their methods are how the pyramids or Stonehenge were actually built, but rather what they show is that humans are incredibly clever primates and there's no need to look any further than ambition and the human intellect to explain the construction of ancient monuments.

Like the pyramids, Stongehenge attracts a lot of woowoo explanations for its' construction, often invoking the supernatural or, in modern times, UFOs. It's really a curious form of soft-bigotry embedded in our culture. After all, we have no trouble believing the Ancient Greeks or Romans built the great architectural wonders of their civilizations yet for some reason we see other ancient peoples as incapable of carrying out such massive construction projects. Thanks to people like Wally, we can all see how silly these sorts of prejudices are. And how much fun it is to move a pole barn using just simple mechanical principles and your own muscle power!

You can find out more about Wally at his website The Forgotten Technology. Hat tip: Deeply Blasphemous.

tng's blog | 2 comments

Happy Five-Oh PZHappy 50th Birthday to everybody's favorite champion of cephalopod sexuality and scourge of Creationist nimrods everywhere! That's right, PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame turns fifty today and the blogosphere is having a party. Everyone's invited!

PZ asked for poems for his birthday, and not being the creative type, I'm going to cheat and present a little poem about (personal) Evolution that I like by Sharmagne Leland-St. John (after the fold). And since it'd be rude to show up at a party without bringing anything, you can imagine I brought some delicious stuffed squid. read more »

tng's blog

A bumper crop of blog carnivals for the inquiring mind (and I don't mean the kind of minds that read The National Inquirer):read more »

• A numerologically themed 55th meeting of The Skeptics' Circle is taking place at The Second Sight.
• Speaking of tabloids, the seventh Philosophia Naturalis, the blog carnival for the physical sciences and technology is up at The Geek Counterpoint featuring a tabloid headline theme.
• The fourth edition of the GNIF Brain Blogging carnival is up at GNIF Brain Blogger.
• The venerable Carnival of Education has been posted at Dr. Homeslice
• And for those of you into DIY didacticism there's the 60th Carnival of Homeschooling at HomeschoolHacks.

Something for everybody! And last but not least, the umpteenth edition of Carnival of the Godless will be this Sunday at Hell's Handmaiden so get that godless blogging in via blogcarnival.com. Oh, and I should probably also note that Neural Gourmet will be playing host to Carnival of the Godless on April 15th. You know, just to give you a little extra time to work on those infidel masterpieces that you're all going to send my way.

tng's blog

Guy Smith, producer of the BBC documentary 9/11: The Conspiracy Files which was the subject of our first Neural Gourmet open discussion via Skypecast yesterday recently appeared on the Alex Jones show to defend his work agains Jones and Dylan Avery. I've updated the post for our discussion to allow you to listen to Smith online or download the MP3. Probably nothing you've never heard from truthers before but it can be humorous to hear Jones and Avery twist logic and spew countless baseless factoids as if nobody would notice.
read more »

tng's blog

Just a brief note to thank everyone who participated in today's open skypecast discussion on 9-11 and conspiracism. That was seriously one hell of a lot of fun! Moriarty, procrastinate later, Caution and myself defended the skeptical viewpoint (successfully I think) while new NG member Paula credibly (and politely) represented the questions raised by the 9-11 Truth movement. Thanks Paula for giving us four hardcore skeptics some stimulating conversation. In between we had several other representatives of the conspiracist arguments whom I wish had hung on but sadly dropped out of the conversation and even one person who just sat back and listened to the whole sordid affair. All things considered, for our first run at doing this sort of thing, I thought it went really well (even if I wasn't quite sure how to wind it up after an hour and a half) and a good time was had by all. I definitely want to do another skypecast discussion, perhaps in about 1 month.
read more »

tng's blog | 3 comments

Everyone is invited to participate in something new we're trying here at NG. For quite a while now, some Neural Gourmet members and I have been having discussions using Skype. These discussions have been so much fun we'd like to extend that. So this Sunday, we're going to have our first public discussion using Skype's Skypecasting feature. This allows up to 100 people to talk, conference call fashion, at once. If we see a lot of interest, we'll be doing this regularly with a different topic each time.

The topic for our first discussion is centered around the recent BBC program 9/11: The Conspiracy Files which took a skeptical look at the the various paranoid conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. You can watch the whole program and read more about the discussion after the fold.read more »

tng's blog | 3 comments

Funny. When Dr. Bill "Cat Killer" Frist diagnoses a patient by videotape we call it bullshit, and rightly so. When grifters selling myths, lies and anti-semitic bigotry based on the tragedy of 9-11 pretend to diagnose crime by videotape, hordes of true believers eat the shit up like it was candy. I'd laugh at it and get in on the carny sideshow myself to make a little spare cash if it weren't all so ghoulish and detrimental to the goals of the left. 

The 54th meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is taking place at Action Skeptics. 

tng's blog

Who knew!? Orac reports on how when autism-mercury fear mongerer grifter David Kirby goes up against Rosie O'Donnell, it's O'Donnell who comes out on the side of reason. But donchaknow, it's a conspiracy? That's right, Big Pharma has somehow managed to silence Rosie!

Of course, that's not enough for Kirby:

During the breaks, however, I could hear women in the audience murmuring to each other: "But what causes it? Why so many children? What about mercury? How can I get more information?"

During the final break, I asked Rosie when the question of causation would come up.

"We're not doing that," she said, bluntly. "We're focusing on families and their kids."

"Rosie," I replied, "I think a lot of people are wondering about what's causing this."

"We don't know what causes it," she said. "You just want me to ask so you can talk about mercury."

Stung, I explained that her audience members were asking, and that production staff had also asked me about causation privately backstage.

"We're not doing causation," Rosie repeated. "In fact, I told them not to book you."

My head spun as the show wrapped up. Had The View finally squelched Rosie O'Donnell? Did mercury trump Trump? Was this the heavy metal that dare not speak its name, at least on a network flush with Pharma ads?

It's hard to say for sure. Last year, former host Star Jones posed the vaccine-autism question on the air, (but then again, look what happened to her).

Damn. Sometimes I actually miss not owning a television anymore.read more »

tng's blog | 7 comments

Well, no love for Jason Bermas' version of the TRUTH!!!111 anyway, not from the Disco Volante and Veronica Moore of the newish podcast Food Is Not Love. This is a must-listen just to hear [MP3] Disco tear apart Bermas who is one half of the team that produced the wildly anti-semitic paranoid conspiracy theory video Loose Change which alleges that the U.S. government was really behind the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. While Disco's shredding of Bermas is more emotional than skeptical debunking I'm not sure what more needs to be said at this point than to solidly ridicule and scorn these grifters (just two of many) profiting over the tragic events of that day. Props to NG member greyleonard and the JREF forums for introducing me to this excellently produced and very entertaining podcast. 

tng's blog