Tag: paranoia

What happened on June 26?

The radio monitoring world is nerdy rather than political, and when ideology shows up it’s almost always right-wing: crew-cutted middle-aged white guy thinking. But in general, it’s off the table.

This week, however, Monitoring Times‘ “Utility World” blog asks the interesting question: What happened on June 26?

The short version, for those who TL;DR or aren’t interested in radio geekery: the transmissions being heard indicate either an unusually large exercise, or preparations for war.

spinach chain letter stupidity kills

I got a chain letter which I will not reproduce here about how the spinach is just fine and it’s a big conspiracy and no one is really getting sick from the spinach and it’s the evil spinach-hating anti-raw-food forces spreading the lies about the virtuous spinach because “they” don’t want you to eat nice raw healthy spinach and live forever.

It was sent from a local raw food place which may well make very nice food themselves but will never get a goddamn dime from me after seeing this. Thanks for the dangerous tinfoil hat bullshit, goodmoodcafe.com

Please don’t forward crap like this. It’s not “just another side to the story.” It’s deadly paranoid garbage.

It’s bad enough that this country is trashing its public health infrastructure and letting Big Agriculture “regulate” itself. Let’s not make things worse. Hundreds of underpaid and underappreciated scientists and public health experts are working 24 hours a day to trace the source of this and every other food-borne disease outbreak and save lives. Calling them liars is nasty and irresponsible.

There is no anti-spinach conspiracy. If you want safer food, pay attention to things like this and why they happen. Super E. Coli bacteria exist because of brain-dead factory farming, and they get into the food because big food corporations wrote the laws that say they can wipe their asses on your food if they feel like it.

There’s your conspiracy and it’s right out in the open.

Good morning. Here’s your paranoid thought of the day.

We have a quasilegal military prison in Guantanamo Bay. The status of the prisoners there is precarious. Military justice applies, and events are recorded and public records made.

We also have a murky gulag of international detention centers, to which various foreign terrorism suspects are flown in unmarked planes. It is not known how many prisoners there have been or what their fates have been. Nothing is publicly recorded.

At least one U.S. citizen has been detained in an irregular manner in a military prison, and his case has been well-reported and debated.

How do we know that U.S. citizens and others are not being simply picked up off the streets and disappeared? Any witnesses could be threatened into silence with the Patriot Act.

And if it isn’t already happening, how will we know? People go missing all the time. It’s a big country. They could try it out with some random people who don’t seem to matter before they went after someone who might be noticed.

Please panic now about everything and do as we say

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/05/terror/main1683852.shtml

It starts:

U.S. officials believe Canadian arrests over the weekend and three recent domestic incidents in the United States are evidence the U.S. will soon be hit again by a terrorist attack. Privately, they say, they’d be surprised if it didn’t come by the end of the year, reports CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart in a CBS News exclusive.

Then they go on to say that terrorists are committing robberies in order to finance terror attacks, and list a couple of incidents in which various bad guys had what seemed to be political terrorism objectives.

The fun is all in the last sentence, though:

The next attack here, officials predict, will bear no resemblance to Sept. 11. The casualty toll will not be that high, the target probably not that big. We may not even recognize it for what it is at first, they say. But it’s coming — of that they seem certain.

Okay. So, they’re now reserving the option of pulling out any Very Bad Day that might have some tenuous connection to Islamic extremists and calling it a terrorist incident. If some career criminals who got Muslim names in prison rob a store in a mall and there’s a big ugly shootout, or if some mentally unstable loser with a connection to Islam runs over a lot of people on a sidewalk, or if any number of medium-spectacular crimes occur that they can tie to “terror” in any way, it will be more evidence that we should be afraid and that we should give up yet more liberty.

And the news calls this an “exclusive” and runs it unchallenged. Bleah!

On a very special episode of “The X-Files”…

Delaware to test response to flu outbreak

By Patricia Breakey
Delhi News Bureau

DELHI — Don’t panic if you see officials wearing masks and gloves taking people into custody in Delhi. It’s just a pandemic-flu isolation and quarantine drill being staged by several Delaware County and state agencies.

Mandy Walsh, Delaware County Public Health preparedness program coordinator, said the drill will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday.

“We don’t want people to be alarmed,” Hamilton said. “We are just trying to be prepared.”

[ … ]

“The law-enforcement personnel will be wearing protective equipment,” Walsh said. “People may see unmarked cars driven by people with masks and gloves. They will be knocking on doors and serving orders.”

Walsh said the respirator masks cover the nose and mouth and have canisters on the sides, which give them the appearance of a gas mask. Some of the volunteers have been instructed to resist the court order, so people may see someone being taken from their home unwillingly and a scuffle may occur, Walsh said.

[…]

From http://www.thedailystar.com/news/stories/2006/05/22/dt7.html via trinnitl

Not likely to get national coverage

I’m fascinated by this one, though: $500K Seized: Strange Situation at Nuclear Plant.

Yeah, so. Big truck full of stuff. Nuke plant. Five hundred grand in small bills. Trucker with no ID. This sounds like the beginning of a Bob Trout story. One hopes the nuke plant is a coincidence and it’s just the usual drug deal/money laundering gone wrong.

Or maybe if you mix your crack with plutonium it’s even better!

Guaranteed not to contain any chicken jizz

While at Mother’s Market (local health food nut store) today I was browsing around in the My Abdomen Hurts section for charcoal, which I found. I also found all the other stuff that may or may not make one’s abdomen stop hurting: licorice root, ginger, dragon’s foot oil, chelated monkulare niblets, etc. One of these products was listed as being contained in “hexane-free caplets”.

Okay. Hexane is what we usually call “gasoline”. Who the fuck puts gasoline in their medicines? Is this some health food store nutcase fear, or should I be concerned that the Tylenol or the K-Y Jelly or the inferior-brand Daily Vitamins I’m guzzling have Chevron Mid-Grade in them?