"Thank 'God'" - Tom Tomorrow

The assumption by the Main Stream Press of the goodness of Believers as well as the assumption that the exception in a disaster is somehow the sign of a beneficent deity has always bothered me.   What kind of asshole thinks they're extra special pets of their master in the sky because they didn't die and everyone around them did?  How can you worship a monster that destroys elementary schools but saves your sorry adult ass?  What kind of cunt deity wipes out an entire city but blesses one lady by saving her dog or one woman by not killing her child while killing dozens of other people's children?  Believers are full of shit and the news media that panders to them is as well.

Married to the Sea - Goddamned Government

 

My dad is a life long hunter and I've hunted a bit as well.  My shotgun is a full choke 20 gauge single shot shotgun.  We also have a 20 gauge pump that holds three shells and my dad prefers a double barrel 12 gauge.  As far as rifles go we only had a single shot .22 because we only ever used it for "varmints" or to pepper unwelcome dogs with so called rat shot which is pretty much a little tiny shotgun shell for a little bitty rifle.  My brother has a bolt action 30.06 sniper rifle from WWII that he has for deer and I think it might hold six rounds.  There really is not a good reason for anyone to have the kinds of gigantic magazines the NRA is so desperate to defend, unless you consider murdering as many people as possible as quickly as is possible a "good reason."  Guns are not toys and should never be treated as toys.  The only other reason for extended magazines would be for people that treat their firearms as toys to have fun with.  In my opinion there is no good reason for extended magazines.

Tom the Dancing Bug - "Nixonian"

Tea Party Butt Hurt - Matt Bors

Seriously, your entire rhetoric and even your fucking name is based on your hatred of paying taxes and you get upset that you get extra scrutiny from the taxman?  Idiots.

This is the scandal that simply isn't a scandal.  There may have been some clumsiness and bumbling at the bottom but trying to make this out as if it were ordered by that Kenyan Muslim in the White House is silly.

Drunk on Power - Clay Bennett

Twitter

You can follow me @AlanEvil on Twitter.  Because I'm awesome.

Who Answers These Things?

Tom Tomorrow

Mother Jones With Some Gun Facts

The ten most common piles of bullshit thrown at you by gun nuts.

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.
Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.
• In one survey, nearly 1% of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

"Chemtrails": The Silliest Conspiracy Theory?

The "Chemtrails" conspiracy theory began to appear in the 1990's.  The theory is that "The Government" is conducting some kind of mind control experiments or procedures by mounting spraying equipment on jets and then spraying chemicals of some kind at high altitudes.  The reasons why this is silly (at least) are myriad and the actual explanation is simple and mundane.  Sadly, people that believe are not easily convinced by evidence, science, or common sense, instead they believe in something fantastically convoluted and impossible to pull off because it fits their paranoid belief system.  The basis for this paranoia is not illogical, however when this paranoia is extended to occurences that are easily explained by basic laws of nature it enters into a realm that distracts a person from actual scandals that are actually occurring.  So, let's look at why this particular conspiracy is fantasy and impossible and hopefully keep the paranoid from continuing to waste their energy and time on something that is so obviously imaginary.

There are more than these three reasons that the notion of jets spraying something on the world is silly but you can find all these reasons in massive amounts with dozens of links to dozens of independent scientific sources at this one site but I only feel like venting about these three:

1.   There would need to be a fleet of aircraft operating day in and day out flying long routes with the sole purpose of spraying some kind of chemical drug or something. 
2.   There would be tens of thousands of people covering up the operation to the point where noone infiltrated long enough to take pictures or provide any concrete proof this was happening.
3.   There would be no other explanation for those trails in the sky.

The reasons ordinary commercial aircraft cannot be performing these clandestine activities are pretty simple:  commercial jets fly prescheduled routes from one big airport to another and everything to do with their maintenance and preparation between landing and the next take-off is readily observable by the public and is performed by a large group of employees.  For commercial jets to spray chemicals continuously as they fly thousands of miles they would have to have tanks for the chemicals and the lines and nozzles to spray them.  As anyone that has dealt with spray equipment can tell you nozzles need to be cleaned and replaced regularly.  Also these tanks would have to be filled.  But most importantly these tanks would eliminate large amounts of cargo space in the hold and would drastically increase the fuel requirements for each flight.  There would have to be some secret crew handling the chemicals, maintaining the spray equipment and the extra fuel, etc. would have to be paid for by someone.  Ask any pilot, they know how much weight is on their plane before they taxi to the runway.  They have to know because it tells them the take off speed of the aircraft, how long of a run they'll need to reach that speed, and how rapidly they will consume fuel in flight.  Airplanes do not carry large reserves of fuel because every pound of weight decreases the efficiency of the flight.  But more importantly, for commercial flights to be used for this purpose it would mean that hundreds of thousands of mechanics, baggage handlers, in flight suppliers, and other ground crew would all be keeping this operation secret.  I don't know about you but do you really think every single person that works at an airport can be kept in the dark about an operation of this magnitude?  Someone would have taken pictures of this unusual extra gear on jets.  All mechanics and maintenance personnel would have to be keeping secret that the aircraft they take care of have this additional machinery and storage tanks.  On top of all that, simply using a telescope to look at aircraft producing contrails at high altitude will show you the airline and then tail number of these craft.  Believe it or not you can track any aircraft anywhere in the world with these identifiers.  You'll know where it took off from and where it lands.  Surely someone would have observed something out of the ordinary while these planes were on the ground and they haven't because there is nothing out of the ordinary going on.

But it's the government doing it!  Right?  Well, that seems just as unlikely.  When the air conditions are right for contrails to form there are literally thousands of them in the skies over the world (that's right, it's not just over America that contrails form!) so that would mean there would have to be thousands of aircraft flying these missions.  So where are they and how are they being paid for?  A single new airliner costs around a quarter of a billion dollars and, if you use your telescope to look at the aircraft producing high altitude contrails you will see that they are newer craft (and you will also see that most of them are commercial aircraft and both they and military craft have wing and tail numbers you can trace).  More on that when I get to the real reason for contrails.  So, if "The Government" is making these planes and flying them all over the world (I guess it must be the Illuminati or the U.N. since contrails appear everywhere airline routes cross) how are they paying for it?  Where are they being produced?  Where are they taking off and landing from?  How many tens of thousands of people are involved in this conspiracy and are somehow keeping it secret?  Isn't it amazing that the strongest believers in this silliness are also the ones that will, without a hint of irony or hesitation, tell you that government can't do anything right.  Amazing.  They can't balance taxes and spending but they can keep an enormous conspiracy costing trillions of dollars per year secret.  They can't oversee the Pentagon budget with any kind of reason or sense but they can hide the production of thousands of large jet aircraft.  They can't agree on pretty much anything but they can maintain secret airbases all over the world and all the personnel to run them and all the other basic infrastructure that goes with keeping thousands of aircraft in the air day after day and somehow nobody has printed an anonymous account of this dastardly undertaking and there are no pictures of the bases or aircraft and they're so talented you can't even find any of them with satellites (though you can see what Area 51 looks like on Google Earth). 

I have never heard any conspiracy theorist address just what is being sprayed from these planes.  What is the "chem" in "chemtrails"?  How is an aerosol mist sprayed at 35,000 feet supposed to have any effect on the ground?  Do the Believers think that something sprayed at that altitude is going to fall straight down to the earth below where it is sprayed?  It's supposed to be some kind of mind control substance but I doubt that something as powerful as LSD would have any effect by the time it reached the ground from the cruising altitude of the jets producing contrails.  There is almost no UV or IR protection from the atmosphere at those heights and most complex chemicals break down rapidly from that combined with the extreme cold and low atmospheric pressure.  And in reality a fine mist sprayed at 35,000 feet above your town, if it did make it all the way to the ground, is probably going to do so on on the ocean somewhere or another continent.  There is a science to the way the air moves in the atmosphere and we know a great deal about it.  But if you ask a Believer to learn the basics of atmospheric science they won't because obviously scientists have been publishing lies for the last two centuries to cover up this conspiracy that started in 1995 or so.

So what is the real explanation for high altitude contrails that the Believers call "Chemtrails"?  Let's start with your car.  You may have noticed that new cars drip water out of their tailpipes.  On cold days there is a cloud of white vapor coming out of the tailpipe that hangs around.  Anyone older than 20 should remember when cars did not do this.  As a matter of a fact, up into the late 70's cars were more likely to blow out visible smoke rather than steam or dripping water.  What happened?  It's very simple.  Engines have become more and more efficient as they've been redesigned.  As engine design has progressed more and more of the hydrocarbons in fuel is burned through recirculation of exhaust, catalytic converters, and computer controlled fuel injection and ignition.  As a result most of what comes out of a modern tail pipe is water vapor and warm air.  The old suicide method of locking yourself in the garage and running the motor simply will not work anymore with a well tuned small car.  You will run out of gas and get a headache.  So what happened in the 1990's to spark the "Chemtrails" conspiracy you ask?  A new design of jet engine.  There ya go.  A simple, logical, and documentable explanation.  The efficiency of newer jet engines dramatically increased how efficiently fuel was combusted leading to more water vapor and less particulate pollution.  You can hear the difference between older an newer jet engines.  Newer engines are quieter and have a different tone to them.  Here's a picture of a 1991 Airbus A340 (introduced in 1991) flying next to a Boeing 707 (1957) at 33,000 feet.  Notice anything?



I should also point out that there are more jet aircraft flying at high altitude than there were 20 years ago.  The worldwide fleet of passenger and cargo jets is slightly lower than it was before the economic collapse of the late naughties but there are still hundreds of thousands of flights every day and fewer and fewer of the craft in service use the older engine designs (though it is kind of surprising to see how many still fly in and out of Louisville's airport).

So which explanation is more believable?  That there is some mind boggling worldwide conspiracy that is flying these mystery planes with their sinister payload around the world or that the contrails are just that produced by more efficient jet engines?  Occam's razor says that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and there is none.  There is a ton of basic science that would have to be disproven for the extraordinary proof to be believable so you decide.  You get to choose between imaginary and science. 


Most of this article was pulled from my memory but here is a staggering set of resources about this, the silliest of conspiracy theories:  http://contrailscience.com/how-to-debunk-chemtrails/#more-948

Damn You Facebook!!!

My time for political discourse has been limited and fragmented and has mostly occurred on Facebook.  I hope to copy and paste a few of those "discussions" to this blog and then spending more time writing cohesive, long pieces.  Trying to debate with believers is like beating your head against the wall.  I won't stop so I guess I'm insane, but every once in a while someone says, "You changed my mind" about something and that means there's one person out there armed with the facts.  One person who understands the argument and maybe a little how to make the argument stick.  It's a nice feeling.

Shhhhh... Be Vewy Quiet...

I'm hunting wabbits.

Not really.  My life become an unexpected trainwreck a few weeks ago but I promise to post some amazing content in the next few days!

Death Party! March 1, 2013!

Ding dong this worthless piece of shit is dead.  Fuck him and fuck everyone that loved him.  Big party next year to celebrate a year on earth much improved by his absence from it.

[updated 3/3/2012]  By "everyone that loved him" I was referring to his fans, not his family or friends. -AM

Some Cartoons and Links

A list of items I felt worth bookmarking this week.

 

9/11 Was Not an Inside Job

Recently a friend of mine and sporadic co-host of my podcast, Dr. David Overbey, saw a “9/11 inside job” “documentary” and was swayed by it, not knowing that he was being sold a rather old bag of bullshit.  Now I’m not saying the Bush administration is not to blame for the disaster that 9/11 was, nor am I saying that it wasn’t allowed to happen by the craven and evil bastards that made up that bunch.  But these wild theories of controlled demolition and missiles instead of airplanes are just that:  wild theories proposed and propagated by unqualified conspiracy theorists in opposition to real world data and eye witness accounts.  They are malicious fiction.

I have a lot of problems with conspiracy theories, mostly that they impugn hundreds (or even millions in the case of climate change denial) of scientists and enormous amounts of hard data.  The very idea that all the scientists, technicians, investigators, assistants, secretaries, law officers, attorneys, and everyone else involved in the examination of 9/11 and the World Trade Center collapses are lying about not only the conclusions of all the thousands of different tests and analyses but the accusation that they falsified data and altered evidence across the board makes me absolutely furious.  The people that make these conspiracy movies and blogs are not scientists and they are preying on the American public’s ignorance of how science functions to make sure they get paid to speak at conventions, their books are purchased, websites are visited, and tickets to their movies are purchased.  They are leeches and charlatans no better than the nineteenth century snake oil salesmen.  Science is a meritocracy.  You don’t become the head of a scientific organization because you bought some cameras with your mom’s credit card and made a movie.  You start learning the basics in elementary and high school, then you learn more detail and methodology in college, and start to put that knowledge into practice in post graduate education and as a professional. 

Scientists are not perfect and they are not immune to the influence of fame and money, any more than normal people are, and I would argue that for most scientists the very idea of falsifying data or conclusions is the ultimate sin.  But conspiracists are all frauds to some degree.  They may believe what they’re saying but what they believe is wrong and by a) not using rigorous methodology to test their hypotheses and b) continuing to spread their lies as if they were proven they make themselves frauds.  For the most part scientists are specialists in a particular subject or field, not general, uneducated theorists like conspiracists.  The people that make movies like this have done nothing other than come up with a theory and then forced facts to fit that theory.  Science exams the facts and data and sees what that tells them, testing hypotheses with the goal of causing them to fail if they will.  Real scientists do everything they can to test how strong their theories are and, if they have extraordinary conclusions they actively look to other scientists to further test these conclusions, often in the hopes that they made a mistake they couldn’t catch.  That’s science.  None of these movie makers/bloggers are metallurgists with a lifetime of experience looking at the molecular structure of materials and how they react to conditions like occurred after the collisions and fires.  None of them are experts in fluid dynamics or combustible materials or architecture or design.  But using still frames from blurry movies, tenuous logical leaps, and ominous music, they are so bold as to deny and contradict what these expert scientists have concluded after extensive study of the data returned from extensive lab tests of the materials from the sites, data recorded in black boxes, radar stations, radio logs, data from examination of the site itself, and data contained on entire videos, not a single frame of a window blowing out that is then called the result of an explosive rather than the massively compressing air in the buildings.

The people that buy these ridiculous conspiracy theories don’t seem to understand that it’s not just one guy or two or a couple dozen that are coming to the conclusions that show what actually happened.  In the case of the WTC collapses there are literally thousands of people involved in the investigations.  Thousands.  Most of them are simple lab technicians who were doing the grunt work of examining and analysing samples of material from the sites.  Hundreds were men on the ground, looking for sections of the building’s frames that were relevant to the collapses (while dealing with the horror of the pulverized remains of thousands of their fellow citizens).  Hundreds of different scientists in different locations were going over the data provided and testing every possible hypothesis.  They all wanted to know how such an awful thing could have happened and, again, the idea that they all lied and continue to lie to all of us is so incredibly insulting to all those people that it makes me taste bile in anger.  The evidence shows, plain and simple, that the fires weakened the structures and caused them to collapse.  Building 7 got help from tons of debris on the roof and the violence of the two big buildings coming down right next to it but it was mostly the fire.  End of story.  The conspiracists know that it’s easy to tell people that They are “covering it up” because most people envision one scientist in a white lab coat who has done everything and has just made everything up and lied to us not seeing how many people would have to be participating in this vast invention of fact.  If the data were being falsified the people who actually did the work would be coming out of the woodwork in droves to disclaim the results.  They’re not because it didn’t happened.

I am not about to argue the myriad lies told by the 9/11 nuts.  It has been done in depth and at great length and can easily be found by Googling “9/11 debunked.”  Popular Mechanics has an excellent series of articles that condenses the conclusions of scientists and, surprise surprise, they are not the wild theories of these crackpots and snake oil salesmen that make their living off lying to you.  Impact and fire explain the WTC collapses.  A jet hit the Pentagon (there really are pictures of it going in) and a fourth jet did a nose dive after the passengers attacked the hijackers.  The 9/11 conspiracists are in the same league with the vaccination deniers, holocaust deniers, climate change deniers, moon landing deniers, alien abduction promoters, chemtrails believers, big foot believers, psychics, fluoride fear mongers, and the like and the main thing they do is muddy the waters with their bullshit and extract money from the pockets of true believers.  They distract intelligent people from what is really happening, causing them to waste their time and energy worrying about the wrong stuff. 

There are questions about 9/11 that need to be answered, but the ones the conspiracists harp on have been answered but by their circular logic if you deny what they say is true you are part of the conspiracy that’s covering it up.  Any proof you give to the conspiracists and Believers will be countered by the “cover up” claim because there’s this conspiracy to lie to everyone in the world about what “really” happened.  Again, the insult to the investigators is just horrendous.  The incredible incompetence and arrogance embodied by the Bush administration is squarely to blame for the 9/11 disaster.  They were told Al Qaeda was planning an attack like this, they even ran a drill loosely based on the scenario.  They had shut down Clinton’s anti-terrorism efforts, not to allow this to happen necessarily, but because they were a bunch of stupid assholes that had decided that anything Clinton had started must go without a moment’s thought to the program’s value.  I have my suspicions that Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of the criminals that made up that administration secretly were hoping for an attack, but I’m pretty sure they never imagined the attacks would be so incredibly deadly and disastrous and I don’t think they knew it was going to happen that day.  They did not hesitate on taking us into the wars they had been thirsting for for a decade or more and immediately began destroying our rights in the name of security, there is no doubt of this, but there is enormous doubt as to whether they planned and executed these attacks themselves.  By going that extra step the Believers negate their entire argument against these crooks and they all go free in the end because millions of intelligent people around the world are barking up the conspiracy tree instead of the incompetence tree.  The conspiracists were muddying the water from 9/12/2001 onwards.  I really wonder how many of them were/are on Cheney’s payroll.  There’s a conspiracy I can believe in.

Overbey used a phrase the conspiracists like to plant in people’s minds, that he was trying to “think for himself.”  But when you are accepting weak and bogus arguments filled with logical fallacies and in complete opposition to facts you are letting the conspiracists think for you. 

Alan Miller

1.22.2012

Two Misplaced Posts

I'm not sure how this happened but these two short pieces ended up on my art blog and I never noticed.  Here they are, in their rightful place:


November 24, 2011
Bat Shit Crazy Report: Bachmann Leaves Me Speechless

November 20,2011
Bat Shit Crazy Report: She's Baaaack!!!

Birther queen Orly Taitz is back and she's as batshit crazy as ever.  Yes, having her law license revoked and being fined for wasting the time of California courts means nothing to this lunatic.  She filed a suit to have President Obama removed from the ballot in New Hampshire which was summarily and unanimously thrown out by the Ballot Law Commission.