Category: conspiracy theory

Categories
conspiracy theory science skepticism thinking out loud this shit is fucked up

Pop culture matters, and education, and history, and…

On the way to Dallas for ConDFW, I started reading (listening to, actually) The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book is a great read if you want a reminder of how we actually shouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised about all the gross shit that went down surrounding our invasion of Iraq (we’ve been training for it since the 60s, really) or that the free market should never be considered a magical unicorn that farts healing rainbows.

But there’s one particular detail in the book that’s sticking with me. One of the first chapters includes quite a bit of information about the CIA’s MKUltra program, including a conversation that Klein had with one of the program’s victims. You’ll note that I’ve just linked to Wikipedia for this, because that’s a decent enough overview. And if you try to just google MKUltra and go past Wikipedia and Rationalwiki, you will find yourself in deep in the bad parts of crazytown with no idea how you got there.

There are a couple reasons this is still niggling at me and sticking with me. First off, MKUltra was a deeply fucked up, horrifying thing. The government of the United States, through the CIA, basically paid scientists to clinically research torture. And Klein does an excellent job connecting the dots of that basic research to a whole load of incredibly awful, inhumane practices that have happened ever since, up to and including the “enhanced interrogation” (translation: torture) of detainees in recent years. And then there’s this asshole, Donald Ewen Cameron, who was the person who perpetrated torture on the woman to whom Klein spoke, including extended sensory deprivation, medically-induced near constant sleep, and electroshock therapy, rendering her incapable of remembering pretty much the first 20 years of her life and putting her in constant pain until this day due to persistent microfracturing in her spine from all of the convulsing she did while being shocked and going through induced insulin seizures.

And then you consider that this man was involved in examining Rudolph Hess during the Nuremberg trials (including testifying that he wasn’t insane) and then somehow went on to torture his patients in an attempt to remove their personalities entirely so he could create better ones for them. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around this particular dichotomy.

These details are all fascinating in a horrifying way.

But then there’s the fact that I actually had heard of MKUltra before. Fairly frequently. It actually gets pop culture shout-outs regularly. The first mention I can recall is in the X-Files, but it regularly gets mentioned with two purposes:

  1. To denote that the person mentioning MKUltra is a serious paranoid conspiracy crackpot who might be on to something nonetheless
  2. To trot out the fact that the US government apparently paid researchers to get people high on LSD.

Point number one is kind of hard to avoid when a cursory search yields mostly results that involve pop stars and how their behavior is obviously a sign they’ve had the MKUltra treatment done to them. And that then makes you feel weird about even trying to have a serious conversation about this, because I started talking about creepy CIA shit and spontaneously generated my own aluminum foil hat, stop looking at me like that.

And point number two honestly has the effect of reducing the entire thing to a punchline. Up until I learned more about this particular subparagraph of horror in the 10 volume set of Shitty Things America Did in the Last Century, this treatment of MKUltra had me filing it in the same part of my brain as the Stargate Project and research that I parroted dismissive talk about back years ago when I was a Republican (eg: “They spent a hundred thousand dollars and researching how fruit flies have sex! What a waste!”) and didn’t get that basic research is not only a thing, it’s an important thing. The CIA got people high on LSD, what a waste of money, amirite? Except we’re not talking about giving a bunch of college kids a few tabs of acid just to see what happens; we’re talking about doses of LSD and PCP and weird cocktails of uppers and downers administered with the specific purpose of trying to completely destroy someone’s personality and sense of self.

Which isn’t funny in the slightest.

So this bothers me. It bothers me that I just sort of consumed this bit of pop culture presentation without thinking more critically about it. And it also bothers me that something brutal and fucking horrible that the United States government perpetrated on innocent people—in this case innocent people with psychiatric problems who then had those problems made exponentially worse and in many case ceased to be able to function independently afterwards—is basically a dismissive punchline. And I don’t think it’s even something that’s being done willfully; apparently when the ugly facts of MKUltra came to light, the thing the media latched on to most was the line about LSD. So I’d imagine that it’s something writers remembered hearing about without looking into it more deeply, and used it as a throw-away reference, and then the next generation of writers picked it up and it’s just become a meme.

Kind of like that fucking ‘humans only use 10% of their brain’ bullshit that I wish we could just kill with fire but it’s got a life of its own now too just because it’s been repeated so many times.

This circles back to a weird and uncomfortable place for me, because I’ve gone on record before saying that I don’t think it’s the responsibility of movies/tv/etc to get science right. I’d rather have a good story even if that means bending the rules—though I do also think that it’s goddamn lazy writing when people just can’t be arsed to even check. Particularly when hewing closer to the facts would actually make for a more interesting conceptual framework than the lazy bullshit you pulled out of your ass, which happens often. And I still do hold to my position that if we’re looking to the movies to be educational vehicles, we’re fucked anyway because we’ve failed our schools and therefore the kids in them so badly.

But on the other hand now, this is a place where I got skunked by something that wasn’t quite true and didn’t take it upon myself to look any deeper. Which is mostly on me, but also feels like a failure of writing. It does show the power of pop culture to shape perception in very subtle ways, and makes me wonder what else I’m missing the gross (perhaps literally) detail on because it just doesn’t even seem that important when it comes up.

And it also does feel like an educational failure. Not that I think all children should have to specifically learn about MKULtra and Donald Ewen Cameron (gosh, want to make sure kids will never want to trust a psychologist again ever?), but this is one more little, tinkling horror in the giant black bag full of pustule-laden zombie demon clowns that is modern American history. I don’t know how it is currently, but we spent plenty of time learning how shitty the US government was to the Native Americans (very important) and then sort of… glossed over the rest with a sense of well yes, the civil rights movement happened and now black people can vote and isn’t that awesome, and there was the Cold War and things got a bit grim and the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t really a thing to be proud of but it’s all better now, right? Go America!

When in fact, the more I learn about recent history the more I’m horribly, horribly unsurprised about everything that’s gone down since 2001.

I don’t really have a good answer for any of this. I’m still thinking it through. I mostly just want to register how very disturbed I feel about… everything, right now. If nothing else, this is a harsh reminder about the importance of not only what you say, but how you say it. And at the least I’m going to try to take this as a lesson to be more mindful about knowledge I’ve picked up as a meme rather than via research, and just take the time to at least use the damn Google. For all that we have so much knowledge at our fingertips, it’s still frighteningly easy for something to get distorted so out of shape that it doesn’t even seem like it’s worth a second look.

Categories
conspiracy theory silly spam

In which I answer (spam?) e-mail out loud.

from: christian bile
to: katsuhiro at gmail.com
date: Thu, May 8, 2014 at 4:13 AM
subject:

hey i’d like to know if u r an illuminaati member?

Good question! Actually, I’m an Illuminaaati member. They’re easy to get confused, but one is sort of an off-brand Illuminati that’s generally manufactured in sweatshops by children who are held under terrible conditions and paid almost nothing, and the other is a shadowy, terrifying global organization whose agents sneak into your house in the dead of night and make certain your car tires contain the appropriate amount of air pressure. They also have a highly disturbing yet intensely helpful habit of being already waiting at the proper intersection with a tow truck before before your car has broken down. Almost as if they know it will happen. As if they engineered it perhaps.

(I imagined that question being read in an extra gravelly voice, as if Batman has had food poisoning and been dry heaving for a while. No idea why.)

Categories
conspiracy theory oil and gas

Abiotic/Abiogenic Oil

You know, the stuff I squeeze out of people who ask me what abiotic oil is on Twitter.

Today, shortly after I admitted (gasp) to being a geologist, one of the guys on my judging team asked me about abiotic oil, saying that “there’s been some study in Russia about this.” Which I hadn’t heard about, but he then said that it was a recent thing.

To the best of my knowledge, abiotic oil is a fairly laughable theory. But I decided to do some googling around, just so I don’t get caught off guard by this again.

The first post that I find via google is from FreeEnergyNews.com, which gives me a tingle of apprehension to begin with, just from the website name. Abiotic Oil: This post has a bunch of links for stories from WorldNet Daily, which I’m more familiar with as WingNut Daily, insert logical fallacy here (possibly poisoning the well?). It also posts links to two books from an author whose name I recognize, Thomas Gold. And my recognition of his name comes from this mention of him at the Oil Drum, which is not terribly complimentary. Thomas Gold was also an astrophysicist, not a petroleum geologist.

Now, the post over at the Oil Drum brings up one example where people got all excited about oil being abiotic because OMG IT’S COMING OUT OF BEDROCK, when the facts really looked more like it was oil migrating through faulted horst blocks of the bedrock, since tectonics had partially shifted source rocks so they were under the basement rock in some places. This conclusion comes from this AAPG article, and I will say that AAPG is a professional organization of petroleum geologists and puts out several trusted publications, including the one this article appeared in (Explorer), so I’m going to take their word for it.

However, the “abiotic” oil of Vietnam is not what I’m after here, rather I’m looking for Russia in particular. By adding Russia to my search, I came up with some interesting sites:

An introduction to the modern petroleum science, and to the Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins: I think this pretty much outlines the theory, and is in favor of it. As an amusing aside, there’s a link to a discussion of plagiarism of the theory. Specifically Thomas Gold plagiarizing the theory from Russian scientists.

One of the sections in the Russian-Ukrainian theory post talks about refuting a biotic origin of oil. While at this point I could see trying to find some wiggle room to allow for both biotic and abiotic oil, but trying to claim that no oil is biotic makes little sense. As just one example, one thing we look for when exploring possible oil sources are kerogens, which come in different types (dependent upon original depositional environment) and release oil when sufficiently cooked. Trying to take kerogens out of the equation (or claiming they’re not organically sourced) really flies in the face of a lot of well-established science.

I will also note that going on the theory that oil comes from sedimentary source rocks (where you find those kerogens) has proved to be extremely predictive in oil exploration. Which is a good sign for oil coming from dead critters.

On the other side, a post at FromTheWilderness.com examines many of the fields considered to be “abiotic” proof, and finds them wanting. This post also has found a special place in my heart because of this:

While everyone is free to form his or her own opinion, when people start talking about a conspiracy of scientists to cover up the supposed abiotic origin of oil, then all an honest scientist can do is to shrug her or his shoulders and say that he or she is not aware of any such conspiracy. In fact, such a contention makes numerous logical errors; based on the logical fallacies listed at http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/index.html, I can count at least 17 errors of logic frequently made by those who argue that the biological origin of oil is a conspiracy. Such errors of logic are the province of a politician, not a scientist.

Back to the Oil Drum post, they recommend reading Richard Heinberg’s The “Abiotic Oil” Controversy, which I wholeheartedly recommend as well. Heinberg makes a very well-thought out, reasonable argument, and here’s the summation of his take-home point:

There is no way to conclusively prove that no petroleum is of abiotic origin. Science is an ongoing search for truth, and theories are continually being altered or scrapped as new evidence appears. However, the assertion that all oil is abiotic requires extraordinary support, because it must overcome abundant evidence, already cited, to tie specific oil accumulations to specific biological origins through a chain of well-understood processes that have been demonstrated, in principle, under laboratory conditions.

I don’t think it’s possible to, in detail, refute every claim of abiotic oil genesis. Because if nothing else, we don’t know everything there is to know about how most oil is generated, let alone how all of it is generated. And Heinberg makes another good point – even if we eventually reach the conclusion that some hydrocarbons are generated abiotically, this does not really change the energy crisis our dependence on fossil fuels is causing. He says:

What if oil were in fact virtually inexhaustible—would this be good news? Not in my view. It is my opinion that the discovery of oil was the greatest tragedy (in terms of its long-term consequences) in human history. Finding a limitless supply of oil might forestall nasty price increases and catastrophic withdrawal symptoms, but it would only exacerbate all of the other problems that flow from oil dependency—our use of it to accelerate the extraction of all other resources, the venting of CO2 into the atmosphere, and related problems such as loss of biodiversity. Oil depletion is bad news, but it is no worse than that of oil abundance.

To a certain extent, I think the attraction of the abiotic theory is that it means people can ignore the thought that we might some day (some very soon day) effectively run out of oil. But whether we can run out of oil or not changes nothing about the environmental damage we are causing by recklessly burning a natural resource that really deserves to be treated with more care.

Categories
conspiracy theory

Watch a conspiracy theory form

Juggle.com examines how a Wired story started trending on Google as a “brain eating vaccine.” It’s interesting to see just how quickly a story can be misinterpreted and then taken on a left turn to Weirdsville – particularly when the inaccurate version of it supports someone’s rather odd fears. Jonah Lehrer, author of the original Wired story, responds here.

Also in conspiracy nut news, how about a little follow up from yesterday? Susan Greene at the Denver Post points out just how full of winners this year’s gubernatorial race is.

Turns out that Dan Maes stands behind his assertion that the red bike cooperative and Denver’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives are signs of a global conspiracy.

“This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms,” he said.

Most politicians seem to backpedal and distance themselves when someone points out how crazy they sound, but not Maes. I’m thinking he comes from the Michele Bachmann school of nutty politics. This is me, backing away slowly.

What scares me most about Maes’ bicycle theory is that voters may not see its “damfoolishness,” as H.L. Mencken would have called it.

“The central belief of every moron,” Mencken wrote in 1936, “is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights.”

Word.

Categories
colorado conspiracy theory wtf

Cycling our way to a New World Order

This is why I love state/local politics. It’s also why I occasionally feel the need to drink cough syrup until I put myself in an uncaring stupor so that the unceasing bombardment of stupid will just stop for a moment.

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”

The ominous they of course are the United Nations, no relation to the giant radioactive ants of Them. (Or ARE they?)

I’m not sure what I find funniest about Maes’ position – that he’s attempting to make the UN some sort of boogeyman for Colorado, or that the UN’s supposed nefarious plot is to (THE HORROR!) get people to whiz around on cute little red bicycles in downtown Denver. Those bastards! Driving an enormous, gas-guzzling car between any two points that are more than ten feet apart is the American way, you know. Curse you Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, you won’t get away with this twisted plot no matter how adorable the little dingly bells on those bicycles are. We’re Americans, damnit!

“At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty,” Maes said.

Imagine me doing this in my best Glen Beck Voice:
First they came for our SUVs, and I said nothing because I didn’t own an SUV. Then they gave me a bicycle, and I still said nothing, because I thought they were kind of cute. Then they established the new world order in our city and started exterminating anyone that didn’t believe in their twisted socialist agenda and…

I can’t do it. I just can’t. I threw up in my mouth a little just then.

Needless to say, Maes is the “Tea Party” favorite, which I’m starting to think translates out to “we think a strait jacket is a perfectly valid fashion statement.” I find myself actually hoping that he gets the Republican nomination. First off, because I like Hickenlooper, and I think this level of crazy is just the boost his campaign needs. And secondly, there’s something wrong in my brain which means I actually enjoy trying to laugh and cry at the same time, so this man’s campaign literature (which I’ll no doubt be bombarded with since I’m unaffiliated with a political party) would be an amazing resource for me.

Categories
conspiracy theory stoopid

More HAARP conspiracy nuttiness

Chavez says US ‘weapon’ caused Haiti quake

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a ‘tectonic weapon’ to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week.

And:

Venezuelan media have reported that the earthquake “may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate.”

The absolute breadth of the stupid leaves me almost speechless. Almost.

I’d love to know exactly how people think an atmospheric research facility – even if we’re nice and allow the conspiracy nuts the notion that HAARP can somehow effect climate via it interaction with the atmosphere, which it can’t – can manage to effect the Earth’s crust, 10 km below the surface and almost a hemisphere away. You know, we think the atmosphere is pretty awesome, probably because we couldn’t live without it. But let me break it to you – tectonic forces really don’t give much of a shit what the atmosphere is doing. In fact, it’s really the tectonics that get the final say on what the climate is doing, not the other way around.

Otherwise, what kind of tectonic “weapon” are we proposing? Secret injection well that’s putting highly pressurized fluid in to the fault to lubricate it? Nah, too plausible. Underground atomic explosions? These are the sorts of things people would tend to notice.

It makes my brain hurt. But we also know that conspiracy nuttiness of this variety requires no plausible mechanism. And in this case, not even a vague understanding of geology.

Categories
conspiracy theory feminism links science-based medicine

A handful of links

Abortion and breast cancer: The manufacturversy that won’t die – Orac takes a look at this steaming pile of BS. I remember the last time the awful people with the giant mutilated fetus posters were making life miserable on campus, they were pushing this claim. And seemed very puzzled that I was angry they were actively lying to people.

Cruise ships still find Haitian berth – this is certainly one messy issue to think about. On the one hand, there’s the utterly squeamish thought of people being on vacation (and eating their bbq) that close to a disaster site. On the other hand, there’s the aide, the promised proceeds, and at least some money being put in to the Haitian economy. My brain’s chasing itself in circles just thinking about this.

Science project prompts SD school evacuation – from the department of *facepalm*.

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.

I know, right? Kid wants to play with science and engineering outside of school. There MUST be something wrong with him. Ugh.

Is Refusing Bed Rest a Crime? – This story made me so very, very angry. I understand that there is something of a public interest in babies being born healthy. That said, it’s not your goddamn body, and being pregnant doesn’t mean you give up your fundamental rights as an adult human being. Seeing women treated like public incubators with no rights really scares the crap out of me.

Haiti, HAARP, and conspiracy theorists – an excellent roundup from BoingBoing about the new nutty conspiracy theories about how HAARP somehow caused the earthquake in Haiti, since it’s a death ray. Or something. Mmm, I love the smell of crazy in the morning.

Categories
conspiracy theory

The "birthers" as classic conspiracy theorists.

I’ve been hearing a lot about the “birthers” lately, and it’s kind of driving me nuts for a variety of reasons. If you’ve been living under a rock (yay, rocks!), “birthers” are people who believe that President Obama is not actually a natural-born citizen of the United States. They think he was born in Kenya, and that his taking office as president is part of a conspiracy to allow a foreign national to be in that office.

Here’s a classic example of the birther theories laid out. Expect to be critted by a wall of text, but at least it’s black text on a white background?

In all honesty, I’m not interested in debunking the birther claims. Snopes has a short and sweet page about it that covers all of the important points.

The Birthers seem to be the Truthers for the new presidency. We still get Truthers in downtown Denver on occasion, normally two or three people, holding their signs and looking a little pathetic because they’re so totally ignored by everyone around them. While the Truthers live on, their conspiracy theory has lost a lot of its power and interest because of the simple fact that Bush is no longer president. I have a feeling that the Birthers are going to be with us and just as loud and annoying – up until the end of the Obama presidency.

What puts the Birthers in line with the 9/11 Truthers (other than similar short names for the theorists) and the people who think we didn’t land on the moon? The UK Skeptics have a very good, quick summary of the characteristics of paranoid conspiracies:
– Assumption that they are right
– Their theories cannot be refuted (also known as: evidence against the conspiracy is actually evidence for the conspiracy)
– Acceptance of supporting evidence and offhand dismissal of non-supporting evidence

All of these factors are very much in evidence for the Birthers. For example, the existence of birth announcements in the Hawaii newspapers or the scan of the president’s certificate of live birth are either dismissed out of hand or elaborately debunked. (If you surf around a bit in the site I linked to, you’ll find an… impressive “debunking” of the certificate of live birth scan, which reminded me of nothing so much as the loving dissertations on physics that the Truthers used to purportedly show that the towers fell faster than gravity would allow.) Any attempts to ward off the conspiracy theory have been taken as proof that the theory is right. Obama’s compaign provided the scan of his birth certificate, which was immediately leapt upon as a forgery and further proof. That, or the evidence is simply ignored since it does not fit the conspiracy. The latest round of news reporting about the Birthers was inspired by a woman at a Delaware town hall meeting standing up and demanding to know where the birth certificate is. Well, it’s as much in evidence as it has always been – there are the scans that prove it, and the Hawaiian government confirms it. But that’s either completely ignored or dismissed out of hand.

Another beautiful example of this is the Supreme Court deciding not to hear the birth certificate case in 2008.

Quote from the Examiner:

Before Barack was inaugurated, a New Jersey man named Leo Donofrio bravely created an emergency appeal regarding Obama’s qualification to be an American president and sent it to the Supreme Court to be reviewed. Without explaining why, the Supreme Court turned down the emergency appeal and soon after the media completely hushed about the dilemma.[4] Since then, a slew of other lawyers across the country have also attempted lawsuits without making any real progress.

If you’re at all aware of the process by which the Supreme Court hears cases, them turning down the case is absolutely not surprise. The Supreme Court actually elects to not hear most of the cases appealed to them. Normally, this is because they agree with the lower court opinion and wish to let it stand, or because the case is simply not within the purview of the court or of interest to them. It’s pretty obvious why the Supreme Court wouldn’t consider this appeal worth their time and effort, and it really isn’t big news that the Supreme Court has decided not to hear a case. But rather than taking that as support of the validity of Obama’s presidency, it’s taken as support of the conspiracy. SCOTUS refuses to hear the case and won’t say why, and then it’s hushed up by the media.

Okay, and I have to take one last cheap shot at the Examiner:

If Barack is truly a natural born U.S. citizen, why hasn’t his campaign effectively disproved the claims that he isn’t?

Holy crap, they haven’t effectively disproved that he’s a reptoid either!

Underlying this all, of course, is the assumption that the conspiracy is true, which is what makes it very easy for the theorists to dismiss any evidence presented to them, or interpret it in such a way that it supports their theory. At this point, the Birthers are mentally and emotionally invested in their conspiracy theory, and no amount of arguing is going to convince them otherwise.

Science News just recently published an article about conspiracy theorists, which definitely has bearing here. While the article is more particularly about British 9/11 Truthers, it’s an interesting read.

Goertzel says the new study provides an intriguing but partial look at the inner workings of conspiracy thinking. Such convictions critically depend on what he calls “selective skepticism.” Conspiracy believers are highly doubtful about information from the government or other sources they consider suspect. But, without criticism, believers accept any source that supports their preconceived views, he says.

Any “official” confirmation of President Obama as a US citizen is not going to make a dent in this conspiracy theory. Any websites or people coming out in defense of the president’s legitimacy are attacked as part of the conspiracy, or accused of being blind to the deception. (I haven’t heard the term “sheeple” thrown around yet, but that could be because I’m just not looking hard enough.) Sites like Worldnetdaily, which I’ve often heard lovingly called Worldnutdaily (yes, I admit, sometimes I can’t let an opportunity to poison the well slip by) support the conspiracy theory and are read and supported by the believes. Sites such as DailyKos or other more mainstream news sites don’t support the theory and are criticized for being part of the conspiracy or simply dupes.

“Arguments advanced by conspiracy theorists tell you more about the believer than about the event,” Goertzel says.

This is really what I find most interesting about this. What do the arguments tell us about the conspiracy theorists? In the case of the 9/11 Truthers, the conspiracy theory betrayed a hatred of President Bush so absolute that nothing could put a dent in it, and an absolute distrust of the government. I think the Birthers certainly show the same distrust of the government (though I suppose in this case it’s a liberal rather than conservative government) but the arguments are very focused on Obama’s supposed status as a foreign national – particularly a Kenyan. Maybe it’s xenophobia, or possibly racism. To me it really seems to denote a fear that “foreigners” are in some way taking over the United States. Considering the shifting demographics of our country at the moment, it’s not all that surprising. And the US (like many countries) certainly has a history of xenophobia, for all that our lofty stated goal is to be an all-inclusive melting pot.

And now for a slight rant on my part:

At this point, what I really wish is that the news programs would just drop this. This entry was, in fact, inspired by listening to Countdown from last night. The host (someone filling in for Keith Olbermann) was arguing with his guest about how it was somehow Liz Cheney’s responsibility to distance herself from the Birthers. Frankly, I disagreed with that a lot (She was sticking to her talking points, and basically ignoring the Birthers. So what?) and the guest kept trying to make the point that the publicity that the Birthers are currently being given is what’s giving the movement more steam. It’s not the internets or the politicians, really, it’s the news programs treating the Birthers as if there might actually be some sort of real controversy that’s getting them attention.

I couldn’t agree more. We’ve seen the same thing, over and over and over and OVER with the moon conspiracy nuts. It makes sexy news programming to act as if the theorists are anything other than cranks and treat their claims with even a whiff of validity. Giving them television time with that attitude causes an outbreak of conspiracy maundering, and in the case of the moon landing conspiracy, causes a single tear to roll down the cheek of Phil Plait as he stares nobly off into the distance. I’m sure that it is news that the Birthers are gathering enough steam that their proponents are shouting at politicians in town hall meetings (the Truthers certainly had their day in that arena as well). But if people in the news want to find a villain to blame for the growing popularity of the movement, they ought to be pointing the fingers at themselves, not at the Liz Cheneys of the world.

Yes, it’s news when a nut tries to sue regarding his deployment in Afghanistan (which he volunteered for) because he thinks the President isn’t really the President because of this conspiracy theory. And I admit, it’s even better news when his attorney has the utterly hilarious first name of “Orly” and looks like she wants to be Tammy Fay Baker. So fine. Report on that and move on. Don’t extend an already ridiculous story by making it news that – as shocking as it might be – conservative pundits would rather use their air time to get out their talking points than attack a movement that they either don’t care about or don’t want to directly alienate because its part of their base.

You want someone to dismissively say these people are nut cases and then drop the matter? Start by doing it yourselves. So far, Jon Stewart has dealt with the explosion of Birther news the best out of everyone, and he’s quick to remind us that he’s not actually a journalist.

Yeesh.