Category: Conspiracy Theories

The tin-foil hat brigade: the wingnuts who see conspiracies and cover-ups everywhere, from local bloggers to international gadflies who dilute the web with their claptrap.

The non-story of the year: the Elvis contract

Collingwood / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Planning & PoliciesOne Comment

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The “big” news in the Collingwood Connection this week is the release of the contract between the town and Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE). Now we all know that Elvis tribute artists can’t engage in pie-eating contests.* The shame, the shame. The community reacted with… a loud snore. Really? This is NEWS? Who the frig cares? Why not cover something exciting, something really relevant? Like the contract for the paint for fire hydrants? Or the contract for aviation fuel? Why not get into the nitty gritty of the photocopier contracts? All of them are at least as important and worthy of your front ……… click below for more ↓

The Flat Earthers Respawn

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery5 Comments

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While flat-earther might be a metaphor for a certain kid of myopic, political stupidity (think of your local council…), I learned this week that it’s also a thriving online subculture of rabidly pseudo-science wingnuts. A couple of entertaining articles about the flat-earthers appeared on the UK’s Guardian paper site (here and here) this week (and in the HuffPost, too). They surprised, but also disturbed me. I hadn’t actually believed in flat-earthers as a modern reality: while I knew of their former existence, I thought the concept was simply a trolling mechanism to expose the silliness of other pseudo-science like creationism or anti-vaccination ……… click below for more ↓

The “Secret” Space Program Hoax

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Pseudoscience & Quackery2 Comments

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It’s just one more of those wingnut fantasy conspiracies that popped up on my Facebook feed recently. It’s not a new one: the old aliens-among-us nonsense just gets recycled and re-spewed by a whole new group of ignorati who follow the scam artists, hoaxers and charlatans who in turn make their living off this stuff. This latest group is, apparently, led by two top wingnuts. If there was an army for wingnuts, they’d be five-star generals. One is Corey Goode, described as having… …an extensive knowledge of the Off World Colony & Exchange Program, Secret Earth Governments, MILAB & Black Ops ……… click below for more ↓

The Mouse on Mars

Astronomy & Cosmology / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

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No, that’s not the title of a 1960s’ sitcom or a 1950s’ movie. It’s what some conspiracy theorist thinks he found in a NASA photograph taken by the Curiosity Rover on Mars, in late 2014. The story was posted on the IFL Science website this week. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Why pay these poor, deluded wingnuts any attention when it’s such an obvious case of pareidolia?” The answer is because they must be mocked in order to keep their silly gullibility from spreading to the scientifically-challenged. Not everyone who reads their content has your keen, critical eye, your cool ……… click below for more ↓

What KIC 8462852 Says About Us

Astronomy & Cosmology / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Science & Technology5 Comments

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KIC 8462852. Hardly a household name. But it may be, one day soon, or at least when it garners a more prosaic name. It’s a star and it sits rather forlornly in space in the rightmost edge of the constellation Cygnus, almost 1,500 light years away. And although it’s too dim to be seen by the naked eye, it has caught the attention of astronomers and conspiracy theorists alike, worldwide. KIC 8462852 is a mature F3-class sun, more massive than the Sun and both brighter, hotter. It’s the kind of sun we usually search for habitable planets around, at least within the range of potential candidates. ……… click below for more ↓

Apocalyptic Wingnuts At It Again

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age CodswallopLeave a comment

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The end-of-the-worlders are again predicting the immanent destruction of the planet. This time it will happen on 22-23 September, 2015. You might recall the world ended in 2000, 2003, 2009, 2012 and again in 2013. So this is what it looks like after the end… The latest wingnut theory is that an asteroid will land in the Caribbean that month, swamping Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It will create 300-foot tsunami waves up to the east coast of the USA. Florida will be completely inundated. As you might expect, the source of this fantasy is a religious wingnut: Efrain Rodriguez ……… click below for more ↓

Jade Helm 15 and the Madness of America

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Politics / US PoliticsLeave a comment

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For a guy who gets great entertainment from reading the wild and wacky conspiracy theories that sprout like mushrooms online, I was surprised that I missed the rapid growth of the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy. I only noticed it as a surface ripple until this past weekend, when I realized it had blossomed into a full-blown madness. Jade Helm 15 goes beyond the usual tinfoil-hat conspiracies: it’s full tinfoil body armour stuff.  And it’s been raised to the level of a hundred voices in an audience all screaming ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre – that being, of course, the internet. ……… click below for more ↓

Fishy Thoughts

Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Education & Learning / Science & Technology / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Canadians, the headline reads, now have shorter attention span than goldfish thanks to portable devices. The story in today’s National Post underscores a growing problem that is fuelled by technology: our dwindling attention spans. The Microsoft study of 2,000 Canadians found our collective attention span has dwindled to a mere eight seconds, down from an already embarrassing 12 seconds a similar study found back in the year 2000. Goldfish have an average nine second attention span. Eight seconds! How can you read a newspaper article, let alone a novel, with such a short attention span? How can you write or ……… click below for more ↓

The Grey Wolf Escapes

Books & Reviews / Conspiracy Theories / History & Biography / War & Military / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XsuZUggi4I] Forget your chemtrails, your big pharma, your New World Order; forget UFO abductions, Bigfoot and GMOs. This is the granddaddy conspiracy theory of them all. This one makes all the rest look like grade school gossip. It makes the petty conspiracies of local bloggers look like the diaphanous piffle they really are.* What is it? That Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun escaped from Berlin in 1945 and survived until the 1960s in exile in South America. And his dog, Blondi, got out with them, too. And, in their marital bliss Adolf and Eva had two children after the war, living in their ……… click below for more ↓

Another TEOTWAWKI

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Christianity / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Faith2 Comments

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TEOTWAWKI – The End Of The World As We Know It – has been predicted ever since humans looked up in wonder at the sky and decided it was peopled with invisible beings. Beings who wanted to do us harm, it seems. And as quickly as we people the sky, there developed an industry predicting when they would harm us, which soon led to the invention of the cash register. Wikipedia has a long list of dates predicted for the end of the world over the last two millennia. So far, every prophecy has been wrong. But because we’re here ……… click below for more ↓

Bad Thinkers and the Unknown Knowns

Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Social Order & Disorder / UncategorizedLeave a comment

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I came across an interesting piece on bad thinking online recently. In it, the author argues some of the points I’ve mentioned in the past about people who believe in conspiracy theories, gossip and other online codswallop: The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. In the piece, the author, Quassim Cassam, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry, argues that the fault ……… click below for more ↓

Extraordinary Claims

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Creationism / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

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As the poster for the Centre for Inquiry notes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s a popular catchphrase for the skeptical movement, but should be an intellectual policy for everyone. Regardless of what is being claimed, it requires evidence at the same level of the claim. Anecdote is not evidence, please note, especially personal anecdote even with the corroboration of other witnesses. People often “see” what they choose to see, and interpret events and objects according to preconceived ideas. Seeing UFOs instead of ordinary aircraft, or chemtrails instead of mundane contrails are examples of this. Evidence is something concrete; a body ……… click below for more ↓

Bad News For Balderdash

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Creationism / Critical Thinking / Memes; Internet & Social / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Social media & cyberbullying / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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A recent story on New Scientist gives a glimmer of hope for those of us who bemoan the swelling tsunami of claptrap and codswallop that fills the internet: THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness. What a relief that will be. Of course it may spell doom for the popularity of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, fad diets, racist, anti-vaccination fearmongers, yellow journalism, Fox News, celebrity wingnuts, psychics and some local bloggers – all of whose ……… click below for more ↓

Comets, Aliens and Conspiracy Wingnuts

Astronomy & Cosmology / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Science & Technology / Technology & GadgetsOne Comment

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The European Space Agency has accomplished one of the greatest engineering and scientific achievements in human history this past week. Not only did it get a space vehicle into orbit around a comet travelling at more than 55,000 km/hr (34,000 mph), it landed a probe on the very rough surface of that comet. Outstanding, brilliant, superb… the superlatives fail me when trying to describe this event. The Rosetta spacecraft chased Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for ten years (since March, 2004) travelling almost four billion miles (6.4 b km) to rendezvous with the small chunk of icy rock, currently about 510 million kilometres away ……… click below for more ↓

The Ebola Panic

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Ebola has gripped the imagination of North American media and been spun into a terrifying spectre looming like a horseman of the apocalypse over us. So widespread has it become that Jenny McCarthy, one of the top wingnuts of quackery and pseudomedicine, and poster girl for the pro-measles-pro-mumps parents, felt compelled to pipe up with her own “cure,” should it spread to the USA: Lemon juice. Yep. Wonder how the scientists missed that one. A quick trip to the grocery store and you’re immune. Safe easy and natural! Well, okay, she didn’t really say that. It was from a story posted on ……… click below for more ↓

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