Don't talk bollocks, cancer isn't 'man made' and did exist in the ancient world

Every now and then when I'm looking for something to write about I come across or I'm sent something so spectacularly stupid that really a new word needs to be invented to describe it, and this article on a study published in Nature Review: Cancer is no exception. I am fairly certain that just by reading it a portion of my intelligence was sucked away, So thanks to my brother David and his friend Clare for making me stupiderer.

Nazis, atheists and a Pope

With a title like that, you know this one has got to be interesting. Right? OK, maybe not. But this post will put me in the schizophrenic position of kicking the Pope in the arse and then picking him up and fetching him a cup of tea afterwards.

It may or may not have escaped your notice that the Pope recently visited the UK, an event that had the BBC falling all over itself to cover favourably. Anyway, whilst the child rape covering up pontiff was there he made a statement that was guaranteed to set off both the atheist and the historian in me.

Holy Scripture not working for you? Then re-write it!

Just when you think that the ultra conservative right wing hardcore religious inhabitants of this planet couldn't possibly extend and expand their capacity for preposterousness you will find yourself, as I recently did, running across the simpletons and buffoons that inhabit the world of Conservapedia. There apparently really is no depth of intellectual absurdity to which these imbeciles will not sink, and here is the proof. In case you haven't heard, Conservapedia are re-writing the Bible to remove, astonishingly, its liberal bias!

Wait, what now? Yes you read that right, translations of the Bible are apparently too liberal for ultra-conservatives. Just exactly how delusional or detached from any real connection with reality do you have to be to consider any translation of the Bible as liberal? For crying out loud, Hitler was more liberal than any translation of the Bible ever was. At least he was a vegetarian.

Days of infamy part 4 - the end?

OK, after a long break and some unpleasantness it's time to finish what I started all those weeks ago!

So, we've looked in detail at the circumstances surrounding the actual attack on Pearl Harbor and the details of the global political situation before the attack - and we examined what these things meant for the conspiracy theory. Now we're going to return in detail to the list of factors I mentioned in the first post.

Here I am going to flesh out the details, repeat some stuff and wrap it all up!

Days of infamy part 3.2

Earlier parts in this series can be found here, here and here.

In this part we're going to look at the actual attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and how that shows that there was no grand conspiracy to bring the USA into World War II by provoking a Japanese attack, specifically an attack on the US base at Pearl Harbor.

Again, I rely on Hughes-Wilson's book, my own knowledge and the Internet, particularly the Wikipedia page.

Days of infamy part 3.1

Parts 1 and 2 of this series of blog posts are worth reading first, to give you an idea what this is all about. The long and the short of it is this: I once argued with some maroon calling himself RedPill who claimed the 9/11 attacks were linked to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 - and both were part of US government conspiracies and allowed to happen. This is, to put it simply, bollocks.

By showing how the Pearl Harbor attack was more to do with intelligence (in the military information collection and analysis sense as well as the more literal sense) failures, I hope to illustrate that firstly there is no New World Order conspiracy dating back to the Second World War and second, to show that these enormous world changing events can happen without us being ready for them and without us expecting them - they're called surprises for a reason.

Days of infamy part 2

Part 1 of this series can be found here, and if you haven't read it yet you should before continuing here.

In this second part of the series we're going to look at the historic background to the attack on Pearl Harbor, stretching back to Japanese actions in the 1930s. This is an area that Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists mistakenly ignore. Most PCTs focus only on the year or two before the Japanese attack, because taking events in isolation like that it could be argued that the US was deliberately provoking the Japanese into a confrontation.

You just have to ignore the events of the previous 10 years to argue so.

Pay attention, here comes a history bit. For the sake of brevity this is a grossly oversimplified account, but there is plenty of easily accessible information out there if you're interested.

Days of infamy part 1

A few years ago I got in to an online argument about 9/11 conspiracy theories with someone calling himself RedPill, on the BBC's 606 football forums of all places. He was a hardcore proponent of the Loose Change view in particular. He also linked the events of 9/11 with the assassination of JFK and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - all down to the New World Order of course. He very firmly believed that the events of 7 December 1941 were a precursor and inspiration to those of 11 September 2001. His belief was that both were perpetrated/ provoked by the US government or the mythical New World Order in order to allow the government to declare war. He believed he had all the evidence he needed. He believed he understood the history. He believed he knew how military operations were planned and how intelligence services and intelligence gathering worked.

He was wrong. Very wrong.