So you’ve come to believe that aircraft are spraying dangerous substances above your heads and you want to get rid of them?   So, how about using some vinegar?

Um…

Well… it is a weak acid so it could possibly react with chemicals that are either alkaline in nature or are just prone to breaking down in acid.  But those “chemicals” are rather high up in altitude, and aside from that obvious problem, one might think that if the chemicals were potent enough to be dangerous even after drifting down and surviving the harsh conditions of the upper atmosphere than vinegar probably would not do much.

Really, do I need to explain the flaws in the logic here?

Apparently so.

There are actually a lot more videos about this on Youtube. I did not have time to look at them all, so some may be even more lame.

I’m trying a new method of addressing the lunacy of chemtrails by showing that dumping chemicals at altitude wouldn’t generally do very much or be a very effective way of exposing populations to the chemicals that some claim are being sprayed.  It’s worth noting that the chemtrail loonies can’t even seem to agree on what is being sprayed, so here are some of the more common chemicals claimed.

If chemtrail conspiracy theorists are to believed, then large jet aircraft, possibly the same aircraft that carry passengers are being used to spray unknown quantities of chemicals of some type at high altitude.  While it’s rather difficult to judge the altitude of an aircraft by sight alone, based on what has been claimed to be chemtrails it’s fairly clear that the aircraft were flying at normal jet altitudes, well above tropospheric weather.   If they were indeed passenger aircraft then the altitude is generally above thirty thousand feet.

Some commonly claimed materials:

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(Browsers that cannot view embedded content, click here for the original Youtube video.)

You may notice that there’s something a bit off here.   Claims that vaccines are a dangerous conspiracy purported by horrible pharmaceutical companies are usually associated more with the Loony Left of the political spectrum, while Bachman is decidedly on the Loony Right side of the isle.  It’s interesting to note that different ridiculous beliefs tend to come from different sides of the isle.   Vaccine conspiracy theories tend to center on mistrust of corporations and capitalism in general and are often part and parcel of theories of how the military and big corporations are killing us with fluoride, chemtrails and depleted uranium, which means we all need to embrace the “natural way” and move back to mud huts where we can practice free love and drop acid.

You’ll notice, however, that Backmann is not opposed to vaccinations in general, but is singling out one vaccine which apparently has a nearly magical power to steal the innocence of sweet lovely little twelve year old and make them retarded.   The reason that conservatives are so opposed to the HPV vaccine is that it’s seen as somehow encouraging sex or that requiring it is somehow offering a government endorsement of premarital sex.   It’s an extremely warped view when one considers that they’re effectively saying that they are so opposed to what they consider to be offensive forms of sex that it’s worth avoiding a vaccine that could wipe out most cervical cancer.

Her sentiment seems to have been touched off in part by the state of Texas adding the HPV vaccine to the required immunizations for school admission for girls.   This was done by another Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry.   Some have accused Perry of taking pharmaceutical money for this policy, it really does not change the fact that it’s a good idea to have girls vaccinated.   If he did do so because he was paid off, then all he can be accused of is doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
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Lets get something straight:  No matter how much I disagree with a group or person I’ll support their right to protest.  By protest I mean hold rallies, demonstrate, wave banners, hand out leaflets, run advertisements, arrange boycotts and run petition drives.   Even groups I completely hate have the right to do these things.

Going onto property that does not belong to you and blatantly destroying it is not protest.   It’s vandalism, trespassing and theft.  Except in rare circumstances where a group is denied the right to express themselves otherwise and is actively oppressed, such measures are simply not justified and intolerable.

It is even more intolerable when the action comes as a result of the fact that the group is sore about the fact that they tried to stop something legitimate from happening and failed.

This is what happened in England, Belgium and elsewhere by groups which still thinks they are persecuted and can’t seem to wrap their mind around the fact that it’s the job of the police to stop them from doing this.   Perhaps I should show them how this works if the tables are turned.  Since I disagree with these people maybe I should assert my right to burn down their houses in “protest” of their view?

It’s amazing how tolerant society is of these bastards. They actually stand there and hold a press conference after breaking the law. I wonder if a bank robber could get away with setting up a podium after an armed robbery and then taking questions from the press on what he intends to spend the loot on.

This is also a classic example of fear and ignorance driven action. These people can’t understand what these crops are even all about and only know that their leaders told them to be afraid of them and destroy them before it’s too late. The developers of these crops must be evil and the crops themselves are horrible entities which must be destroyed. It’s sad but even as religion fades in much of Europe, the exact same kind of demonic thinking seems to have been applied elsewhere.

The potatoes in question are a variety that is now being tested after years of research and development. They are modified to make them resistant to damage by fungus, commonly known as blight. This is the fungus that decimated potato crops in the 1800s and lead to the Great Irish Potato Famine. Today blight no longer threatens populations with starvation but is still a major problem for potatoes, especially in Europe. Selective breeding has given potatoes some resistance to the fungus and every year huge amounts of fungicide are used to keep it in check. Still many tens of millions of Euros are lost annually.

Via Biofortified:

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Could the “Roswell Incident” of 1947 have been more than the crash of an American balloon-borne sensor system?   According to a relatively new claim it was in fact the crash of a secret Soviet spy aircraft.  The idea that the Soviet Union might attempt to conduct aerial reconnaissance flights over the US in the late 1940’s does not seem that far fetched until you read the entirety of the claim being made.

Via Yahoo News (includes video clip of Daily Show Interview)

New book says USSR was behind Roswell UFO
By Claudine Zap

Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that’s already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it–maybe.

According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored “Area 51,” the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre-looking, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the news would cause widespread panic in the U.S.

The story gets even stranger: The leader of the USSR had apparently been inspired by the 1938 radio adaptation of the HG Wells story “War of the Worlds,” produced by Orson Welles. The broadcast triggered panic in some listeners who tuned in and mistook it for a real-life alien invasion. (Though later students of the episode claim that the media of Welles’ day vastly exaggerated the scale of public alarm over the broadcast.)

And those ET-looking aviators? They were scientific experiments created by the “Angel of Death,” Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, for the USSR after the war. The flight was piloted remotely, according to accounts in the book, and was filled with a crew of “alien-like children.”

According to Jacobsen’s source, a retired engineer who was put on the project in 1978, the look of the human experiments could explain the alien conspiracy theories: “They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes.”

Is any of this true? There’s no way to prove it. Documents surrounding the Roswell incident are still classified–as is virtually all information related to the mystery spot.

Still, lack of proof hasn’t exactly stopped the book from sparking speculation on the media circuit and on the Web. In the last day, Yahoo! searches skyrocketed 3,000 percent for “area 51 book.” And the tome is penned not by a crackpot conspirator, but a respected journalist.

Even the New York Times gives her credence, writing in its review: “Although this connect-the-dots UFO thesis is only a hasty-sounding addendum to an otherwise straightforward investigative book about aviation and military history, it makes an indelible impression. ‘Area 51′ is liable to become best known for sci-fi provocation.”

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A lot of people like to speculate about what is going on in secret US military “black projects,” the kind of things carried out at places such as the installation known as Area 51.   Some like to think it includes things like captured alien technology, anti-gravity craft, aircraft that are invisible to the naked eye, flying disks and other scifi-like devices.

The truth is that what is being developed is not quite that cool, but it’s still pretty dam cool.  Right now it’s almost assured that the US is developing advanced aircraft, some of which are prototypical and intended to demonstrate technology while others are intended for eventual combat deployment.   The aircraft being developed don’t violate the laws of physics, but likely use the latest advancements in materials sciences, jet engines, computer control and stealth technology.  Some of these may not even be fully known to the mainstream.

Every once in a great while one of these projects becomes public.  Eventually they all have to.  You can keep an aircraft secret during development, but you can’t deploy a secret weapon in combat and expect it to remain secret – although some of the design features may remain secret, its existence certainly can’t be kept secret.

The raid that killed Bin Laden is one example of a previously unknown project being revealed to the public.  It seems that the raid was of a high enough value that military officials decided it was worth blowing the cover on a project that had been kept under lids for some time.

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There’s a lot of crap on television, and there’s really no denying that. Yet despite this, the medium does occasionally deliver world class programing that actually is good enough to redeem its overall value. There are a huge number of shows that promote illogical thinking and unfounded claims from UFO’s to paranormal beliefs to conspiracy theories and precious few good shows with a skeptical, rational theme that portray reality for what it is.

Since others have asked for examples of such shows, and because of the general lack of programing in this nitche, I’ve started to compile a list of the few TV programs that actually do provide good rational, reality-based debunking and informing on superstition and other unfounded claims.

I will add more as I find them, so please feel free to contribute any ideas. I live in the US so this list may be skewed toward American programing, since that’s what I happen to be personally familiar with. If you know of any good additions please let me know!

Note that there are plenty of good science documentaries, so I’ve tried to keep this toward ones that focus on myths, unfounded beliefs and other areas where skepticism should be applied, as opposed to just general science-related content.

Series and Mini-Series:

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage – PBS, 1980

Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World – ITV, 1980
Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers – ITV, 1985
Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe – ITV, 1994-1995

James Randi: Psychic Investigator – ITV, 1991

Is it Real? – National Geographic TV, 2005-2007

Mythbusters – Discovery Communications, 2003 – Present

Penn and Teller’s Bullshit – Showtime TV, 2003- Present

Naked Science – National Geographic Television, 2004-Present

Best Evidence – Discovery Communications, 2007-Present

Single Event Shows, Documentaries:

The Search for the Loch Ness Monster – BBC Television, 2003

The Kennedy Assassination – Beyond Conspiracy – ABC News, 2004

9/11 Conspiracy Theories – Fact or Fiction? – A&E Television (the History Channel), 2007

Peter Jennings Reporting – UFOs: Seeing is Believing – ABC News, 2007

Conspiracy Moon Landing – National Geographic TV, 2007

The Enemies of Reason – Channel 4 Television Corp, 2007

Homeopathy is not exactly the kind of thing that one tends to associate with things like logic, accuracy or sanity, but this statement from a new homeopathy page really took my breath away.   The site is like most homeopathy sites:  a lot of claims about how the “skeptic” movement is corrupt and run by big evil corporations and how homeopathy is good medicine and supported by volumes of evidence.

Via “Extraordinary Medicine”

The skeptical movement is an offshoot of the Communist Party. (Really: see the top two links below.) Its top organizers were hired by pharmaceutical company and medical industry representatives to recruit malcontents in bars to spread hate propaganda against non-conventional medical systems. One of the first such skeptic groups referred to itself as “Skeptics in the Pub”. Not surprisingly, their rants against Homeopathy sound like the drunken cacophony of soccer hooligans.

A “who’s who” tour would not be complete if we neglected to mention Sense about Science. This group features a prominent spokesperson who is an advertising “consultant” to pharmaceutical and oil companies. It’s been scrubbed from their website as of this writing, but they get large donations from Big Pharma.

It’s impossible not to encounter ties to the prevailing medical industry among any of the individuals or groups who currently identify themselves with the skeptic moniker. The mainstream media, which depend on advertising revenues from pharmaceutical companies and are always in search of a scandal are often co-opted by business interests that have little regard for the welfare of the average individual.

Sir, I am not and have never been associated with the Communist Party!

Seriously, I’m not a communist. Not that I feel the need to defend myself against such a ridiculous allegation, but I’m just not.  I’m a member of multiple skeptic organizations, but I’m not a communist.

Most skeptics I know are also not communists. In fact, skeptics come from just about all political persuasions. There are certainly many libertarian skeptics, and many who would be considered to be social progressives, modern fiscal conservatives or something else. There are some who are legitimately supporters of socialism, and a few who are unabashedly pro-communism. I have not met any self-described skeptics who are supporters to hardcore, rigidly-enforced Marxism, but I can’t say that they don’t exist.

Whatever the case, the notion that the skeptic movement is at all related to communism is preposterous.

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It’s often claimed that there’s some spectacular new technology, miraclel cure or secret that is being suppressed to keep profits of a certain industry from suffering. It’s one of the most common claims in “alternative” medicine, with the big pharmaceutical companies being blamed for keeping down the truth about cancer cures or natural treatments that would result in huge losses. Another common claim is that the oil industry is responsible for stopping technologies that would allow cars to be powered by water or increase gas mileage ten-fold from seeing the light of day.

Such claims tend to ignore some big problems with the whole idea of a conspiracy to keep down a technology. For one thing, companies and industries have tried to stop the proliferation of competing technologies before and have failed. At best, expensive lawsuits and lobbying have managed to stifle adoption for a short time, but have never kept a truly revolutionary technology from seeing the light of day. It’s impossible to keep information about something big and beneficial contained, especially these days and once it gets out, the incentive to implement it will always exceed the incentive to keep it under wraps.

Above all else, despite the fact that there are companies and industries which would suffer losses, there are others that would reap enormous rewards. Many of these companies and sectors are extremely powerful in their own right, and taken together represent a very powerful force whose own self-interest offers motivation to oppose the suppression of such technologies.

Does anyone really think that Walmart Corporation would continue to happily pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to fuel their delivery trucks if they could just as easily be fueled by water? Would the massive corporations continue to happily pay billions and billions in worker health plans and lost productivity knowing that homeopathy was capable of solving every health problem known to man?

Lets consider a few common claims and who exactly stands to gain or lose if they were really true.

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This video has recently been floating around the internet.   It is reported to show footage transmitted from a secret Apollo mission conducted in the mid 1970’s, sometimes called “Apollo-20.”   According to some sites, it was a joint US-Soviet, like the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.   Others claim that it was just America.  What they all say is that it went to the moon and found evidence of extra-terrestrial life, including some kind of mummified alien body.

Of course, there was no Apollo-20. There would have been, but the program was cut short early on to include only missions up to Apollo-19.   Then, further cuts resulted in Apollo 18 and 19 being axed, although some of their mission objectives were rolled into Apollo 15, 16 and 17.

The launch of a Saturn-V is pretty hard to hide.   The only facilities equipped to handle and launch the rocket were at Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is not far from populated areas that can easily observe the launch.   The flights were fairly easy to track into orbit and even beyond, even with amateur telescopes and radio receivers.   Not only that, but all the hardware from Apollo was accounted for.   All rockets were either used for the Skylab program or left as museum pieces.

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