Sometimes I Forget

Just how insane the people we deal with on this blog actually are. It is easy, when one has debated Jon Gold, or Dylan Avery, or Jason Bermas, to assume that while they may be a little paranoid, they are not stark raving bonkers.

And then we have this. I noted the other day that the inaptly named "9-11 Debunkers" blog had chastised us a bit for expressing some humor about Steven Jones' nutty claim that the Haiti earthquake was man-made. Well, Scootie (that appears to be his nom de troof) slipped a hinge or two:

So, one of the rare moments of speculation on this blog was not suprisingly seized upon by the 9/11 truth gossip artists. In my last post I talked about the possibility of man-made earthquakes and used a US Air Force document that discusses the physics of teleportation as evidence that technology is much more advanced than we think. Now of course Strawman Pat made out that I was claiming the government has teleportation machines, when I never said that, I was simply pointing out the existence of the document.

In fact, I did not say that the government has teleportation machines, or even that Scootie said that the government has teleportation machines. However, I will say that any idiot who actually thinks because there's a paper somewhere that discusses the possibility of teleportation, that indicates that wow, the technology is far more advanced than we thought, is a nut.

Oh, but we have not begun to plumb the depths:

See that's what we do here, we read documents. We read scientific literature. We do research! We're not just some blogger parrots who act like we know what we're talking about while attacking people's character. And we're skeptical of both sides. We don't endorse pentagon no-plane theories or fake phone call theories, and we're skeptical of the assumption that "pull it" was a confession. We stick to science.

You read a paper on teleportation and assume it indicates that the technology is there to create massive earthquakes? Yeah, that's science, buddy.

Most of the time however I stick to the facts. And one fact I learned, and have referenced a number of times, is that Southcom was, just by coincidence, preparing for a drill based on the scenario of a natural disaster in Haiti, the day before the earthquake ... Fact!

Well, the link goes to some site called NextGov, which is apparently a site pushing up-to-date technology to the government. But if you read the article linked, it's no where near as specific as he indicates.

On Monday, Jean Demay, DISA's technical manager for the agency's Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. After the earthquake hit on Tuesday, Demay said SOUTHCOM decided to go live with the system. On Wednesday, DISA opened up its All Partners Access Network, supported by the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, to any organization supporting Haiti relief efforts.

Hurricane, earthquake, what's the difference? They were preparing for a drill involving Haiti and the real thing happened? What are the odds? It must have been an inside job; if only they hadn't spilled the beans to the NextGov website!

Oh, but it gets much wackier:

As I said, they blew up skyscrapers with nanotechnology back in 2001. Another fact! You debunkers can deny it all you want but the fact is basic chemistry proves that the red material is thermitic. This stuff ignites when heated to 400-450°C and after ignition we find molten iron. Since iron doesn't melt until 1500°C, this ignition temperature of 400-450°C couldn't possibly melt iron.

Okay, can somebody see the problem here? Scootie claims they found thermitic material that does not get the temperature high enough to melt steel. Therefore, they must have melted the steel with something else! The mind boggles.

Oh, and the claim that Scootie doesn't speculate much? Check out this most recent post:

The following is an excerpt from a recently filmed TED presentation (watch in full here) in which Bill Gates talks about how we humans can go about lowering our evil carbon footprint. Near the end he says...

"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent!" [About 1 Billion People!]

Scootie interprets that to mean that vaccines will kill off a billion or so. Of course, if he had half a brain cell, he'd understand that what they are talking about is reducing the rate of population growth, not killing off a bunch of people. In the third world, parents have lots of children for a few basic reasons:

1. Many babies do not survive.
2. Children are valuable in subsistence economies as they provide cheap labor for farming which does not require a lot of training.
3. Their parents do not have access to birth control methods like the pill in the West, which had dramatically reduced birth rates.

If more babies survive due to vaccines, then parents do not have the need to have as many children. If their parents have access to birth control, they will actually be able to avoid having more children.

Now, I think that the fly in Gate's ointment is #2; until you transcend subsistence agriculture in poorer regions of the globe, people will tend to have more kids. But while I am no fan of Microsoft, I certainly don't think Gates wants to kill off a couple billion or more of us for some nefarious New World Order; it's far more likely that he buys into the argument of environmentalists that there are too many people already and that we need to reduce population. A bit creepy, to be sure, but not nefarious by any means.