Thursday, January 24, 2013

The Name Probably Should Have Been a Clue....

A rapper named Lupe (Loopy) Fiasco (yep) decided to spice things up at one of the Obama inaugurals:

Although Fiasco was booked as the headliner for the StartUp RockOn concert in celebration of Obama's reelection, the 30-year-old Chicago rapper apparently had no plans to cheer the current administration. Instead, after taking the stage at The Hamilton in Washington, he reportedly announced that he didn't vote for the president in the 2012 election and spent more than 30 minutes performing an anti-war song.
More details on his "performance" here:

"At the Obama inauguration party Lupe Fiasco opened his set with his 2011 single “Words I never Said,” in which he criticizes Obama for the president’s silence after the bombing of the Gaza strip. He rapped the song over and over again for more than 20 minutes. “Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn is a racist, Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say s---,” he continually rhymed.
The rapper also criticizes the War on Terror and questions the Sept. 11 attacks in the song, asking “9/11, building seven, did they really pull it?”
I suspect that his trutherism and his comments on Limbaugh and Beck didn't get him booted offstage, but his criticism of Obama did.  And although I am not a huge fan of the President, I think the song was inappropriate for the time and place.  And apparently, the knucklehead just kept repeating that over and over again:
"This was not about his opinions. Instead, after a bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance that left the crowd vocally dissatisfied, organizers decided to move on to the next act."

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Alex Jones Predictions

Don't think we have posted this before.  Hard to keep track of all the nutty things this guy says.  Enjoy.


Thursday, January 17, 2013

More Bad News for the Truthers

The White House has now upped the number of signatures needed to get a response to a petition, so now it looks like the Truthers will get enough people to sign on, oh, about the second Bristol Palin administration.


A petition on the White House's "We the People" website used to require 25,000 signatures within 30 days of being posted to earn an official administration response. On Tuesday, the White House quadrupled the signature threshold. "As we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama administration," said White House digital strategy director Macon Phillips in a Jan. 15 statement. 

 Although the Truthers failed before the new threshold was raised, the petition to build a Death Star did receive a response, albeit negative.


This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For
By Paul Shawcross
The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:
  • The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
  • The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
  • Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?
For added humor, you can check out the response from the Galactic Empire here.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Sandy Hook Truthers

Heh, no surprise, the conspiracy nutbars are at it again:

Yes, there really are Newtown truthers.
But in the crazy world of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, this one may be the worst yet. (Maybe you’ve already heard some of the others, like the one about fantasy ties between the gunman’s family and the LIBOR banking scandal and a related theory about the Aurora shooting and the “Dark Knight Rises.”) Most of the theories are really pieces of a larger meta-theory: that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, perhaps by the Obama administration, designed to stir demand for gun control.
And yes, there is an overlap with the 9-11 kooks:
One popular video, which already has 134,000 views, was made by the producers of a popular 9/11 Truther film. “Just as the movie ‘Operation Terror’ shows the 9/11 attacks were a made-for-TV event, so too were the mass shootings … There can be no doubt that Sandy Hook was a staged event,” the narrator intones. He goes on to say that the adults who participated in the media coverage of the shootings “should be prosecuted as accessories after the fact in a mass murder” — i.e., the parents whose children were murdered in the massacre should be thrown in prison.
 Get this guy's credentials:
One man has taken it upon himself to catalog all of the theories at SandyHookHoax.com. By way of credentials, creator Jay Johnson explains: “I am the only person in the world to solve LOST,” he writes (yes, the TV show).
Hey, that's pretty amazing.  I watched every episode and I still haven't figured it out.  Was Jack really dead in that last episode?  Was everybody dead?

No surprise, old Foghorn pops up:
Websites owned by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory pundit who helped start the 9/11 Truther movement and has millions of readers, are a virtual one-stop shop for Sandy Hook “false flag” miscellanea. So far, mainstream conservative figures haven’t hopped on board, though Gun Owners of American head Larry Pratt told Jones this summer that he thought there was a good chance the Aurora massacre was perpetrated by government agents.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Stupid Zero Dark Thirty Theories

I saw Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, today.  While getting critical reviews, it has also been rather controversial for its depiction of torture.  I don't want to get too much into the politics  but I thought that was rather silly.  Yes, it depicted some rather gruesome interrogations, but they were hardly glamorizing it.  The main character Maya, seems to have trouble with the methods used, although she never does anything about it, and with the main source the movie starts with, they only start getting information after they stop abusing the guy and use subterfuge and rapport building instead.

Anyway, amidst all this it should come as no surprise that the Truthers would be all over this.  And in fact on 911 Flogger there have been several posts on the movie.  I was particularly drawn to this one though, linking to some kooky conspiracy site called The Cabal Times.  Here are some particularly egregious examples.


Disinformation # 8 There were only two helicopters involved in the raid. The film tries to shamelessly peddle this myth because it helps maintain the myth that Pakistan is an independent nation, not a surrogate state, and therefore would not tolerate a full scale assault. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The SEALs flew into Pakistan from a staging base in the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan [……] provided the two modified Black Hawk helicopters that were used for the raid itself, as well as the much larger Chinook heavy-lift helicopters that were employed as backups [..….] The Chinooks kept on standby were on the ground “in a deserted area roughly two-thirds of the way” between Jalalabad and Abbottabad, with two additional SEAL teams consisting of approximately 24 DEVGRU operatorsfor a “quick reaction force” (QRF). The Chinooks were equipped with M134 Miniguns and extra fuel for the Black Hawks. Their mission was to interdict any Pakistani military attempts to interfere with the raid. Other Chinooks, holding 25 more SEALs from DEVGRU, were stationed just across the border in Afghanistan in case reinforcements were needed during the raid. The 160th SOAR helicopters were supported by multiple other aircraft, including fixed-wing fighter jets and drones. According to CNN, “the Air Force had a full team of combat search-and-rescue helicopters available”.
This also became a major plot hole in the story. We are told that Pakistan has scrambled jet fighters and the American forces quickly leave the area with the one working helicopter and the body of Osama. But would they all fit in one heavily modified helicopter? 

 But they didn't all fit in one helicopter. In fact if the author had continued reading the post in Wikipedia, he would have seen:

 Since the helicopter that had made the emergency landing was damaged and unable to fly the team out, it was destroyed to safeguard its classified equipment, including an apparent stealth capability.[70] The pilot smashed "the instrument panel, the radio, and the other classified fixtures inside the cockpit," and the SEALs "[packed] the helicopter with explosives and [blew] it up". Since the SEAL team now had only one helicopter, one of the two Chinooks held in reserve was dispatched to carry part of the team and bin Laden's body out of Pakistan. 

 The movie, in a minor error, actually depicts another UH-60 coming in to pick up the rest, but the idea that this is some sort of smoking gun is rather silly.

 And even more ridiculous.

 Disinformation # 9
 The Pakistani army did not facilitate the raid in any way. According to neighbourhood accounts, several men ran through the neighbourhood, shouting out in Pashtu (using loudspeakers) instructing residents to stay inside. These could have been none other than members of Pakistan’s Armed Forces. To quote, 
  Late on Sunday night, locals heard the clatter of helicopters, gunfire and loud explosions. Most residents emerged from their homes turning on their lights. “I saw soldiers emerging from the helicopters and advancing towards the house. Some of them instructed us in chaste Pashto to turn off the lights and stay inside,” Gul Khan told India Today .
 The film tries to cover up this widely reported fact by showing one member of the US Special Forces as an ethnic Pakistani, who goes around the compound singlehandedly, with a loudspeaker in his hand, instructing locals in Pashtu to stay inside. 

 He was actually their interpreter, not a SEAL, and is written about in the book No Easy Day, going by the name Ali. The plan was for him to go around with a bullhorn and tell the locals that this was all part of a police operation and to stay inside.

 You have got to love truthers. They believe that we have the ability to blow up skyscrapers with super secret explosives and fly missiles into the Pentagon in broad daylight without being discovered, but apparently outfitting your interpreter with a bullhorn that you can pick up on Amazon.com for $29.95 is beyond the capabilities of the United States Special Operations community.

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Welcome to 2006....

I was bemused to see this on 911 Flogger, 9/11 "researcher" Aiden Monaghan takes on the pod theory and Judy Woods. Wha...? Seriously? Even in the fever swamps of the fringes on the truth movement does anyone actually take that that seriously anymore. Even we gave up making fun of the pod people several years ago, as fun as it was. Forty years from now we will still be seeing cutting edge research on how all the Jews stayed at home and such.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

The Nuttiness of Alex Jones

The bizarre confrontation between CNN host Piers Morgan and Alex Jones is all over the Internet, but this follow up bit by our favorite bipolar conspiracy mogul is even more nutty entertaining.