Wow! Another amazing coincidence and conclusive proof that there is some kind of cosmic force guiding this blog's adventures.
Whilst browsing the international magazines (which I only read for the articles and the amusing letters) in my local Kinokuniya Bookshop today I noticed a copy of Truther-baiting publication, Popular Mechanics. I'd never looked inside an actual print edition of this magazine although I do own a copy of the Debunking 9/11 Myths book they published. Imagine, if you will, my surprise when while leafing through it I found a little article squashed into the corner of one page illustrated by the very Lee Harvey Oswald picture I wrote a post on, last week!
The article was about a study conducted by a professor of computer science, Hany Farid, who used a 3-D computer model of Oswald's head (created from his mugshots taken in custody in Dallas) to see if the shadows in the backyard photographs were inconsistent. His analysis showed them to be "perfectly consistent". His results were published in Perception Magazine. The latest edition of Popular Mechanics doesn't appear to have made it to the Web yet, but Huffington Post did a story on this back in November last year.
But wait! If the photographs appear to be genuine after all, then that means Oswald was lying! If he was lying he really had been in possession of the rifle seen as the murder weapon of President Kennedy and it may not have been planted by the FBI or the Dallas cops! It means Oswald really had been in possession of the pistol that killed Officer Tippit! And it means Kennedy conspiracy theorists may have to ruminate their brains out to come up with an explanation.
Update: Here is a video of Hany Farid explaining the methodology behind his analysis of the Oswald photograph.
7 comments:
Wow! Another amazing coincidence and conclusive proof that there is some kind of cosmic force guiding this blog's adventures.
Nonsense! There are no coincidences! We know whom you work for!
Haha but seriously...
I'm guessing you speak Japanese after living there for a decade? How widespread do you find conspiracy theories of various forms to be among the Nihonjin?
Huffington Post is a bastion of some of the worst conspiracy theories. While 9-11 truthers are usually mocked and dismissed in their comments sections, the site iteself is constantly pushing anti-rationalist nonsense about natural "medicine," Homeopathy, and the worst of it all, the anti-vaccine bullshit.
While I find the natural medicine and homeopaths to be somewhat benign, when asked why there are no scientific studies demonstrating the effectiveness of their quackery they inevitably imply or claim outright that the scientific community is involved in a massive conspiracy to cover up the evidence to bolster drug company profits. Utter nonsense.
The anti-vax crowd, in my opinion, are the most dangerous conspiracy nuts of them all. Their lies have convinced gullible people to forgo MMR vaccines and now we have diseases once eliminated in the mid-20th century reappearing because of pseudo-scientific mythology.
It infuriates me to no end.
On JFK conspiracy theories, the reason I find them to be such a dull topic is that they seem to be so widespread as to have taken on the form of a widely held urban myth. I know many otherwise rational people who think the mob or someone other than Oswald killed JFK. Belief in (albeit silly) theories about JFK don't seem to indicate a conspiratorial mindset the way that belief in 9-11 conspiracies or belief in the NWO and Illuminati do.
Huffington Post is a bastion of some of the worst conspiracy theories.
I very rarely read the Huffington Post, so I don't know.
While 9-11 truthers are usually mocked and dismissed in their comments sections, the site iteself is constantly pushing anti-rationalist nonsense about natural "medicine," Homeopathy, and the worst of it all, the anti-vaccine bullshit.
Yes, I was thinking of writing a post on alternative medicine but I usually get cold feet because I don't really know enough about medicine to start arguing about which is better. But, it looks like the Lancet medical journal has now formally retracted a paper it had published in which a link between the MMR jab and autism was suggested.
Here's an article on that.
If you're interested, here's a good review of a book that has come out recently which is highly skeptical of the anti-vaccine movement and what the author considers quackery around autism.
On another blog another 9/11 debunker linked to a blogpost about one of the leading alternative remedy gurus and what the author sees as his dangerous crank conspiracy theorizing and his quack remedies for (I think) such serious illnesses as cancer and AIDS.
If he really is pushing such medicine then I don't consider it to be "somewhat benign" at all. What's especially worse is that a lot of this is propagated in the mainstream media (the Daily Mail being one of the worst examples).
I'm guessing you speak Japanese after living there for a decade? How widespread do you find conspiracy theories of various forms to be among the Nihonjin?
There are a number of conspiracy theories that are popular in Japan. I think the 9/11 one is not really one of them. But, I have found that there is widespread belief in the idea that Princess Diana was whacked by the Royal Family. This comes, I think, from a sensationalist documentary that was broadcast here.
Apart from that, I have seen that conspiracy theory books do seem to have some kind of market here. There is a guy called Benjamin Fulford who lives and writes in Japan who is a bit of a celebrity for his beliefs in HAARP and secret societies that rule the world. And of course, he believes in the 9/11 conspiracy theory.
I have seen books there by David Ray Griffin and David Icke (but I haven't spoken to anyone who has heard of them) and also a writer called Jon Ronson seems to be well-represented.
There was a Japanese title which debunked conspiracy theories which I'll try and find the title of.
Jon Ronson is an interesting character. I don't think that he is a conspiracy theorist but he writes about them. After all they are an interesting subject! He wrote a book called Them: Adventures With Extremeists that looked into some of the usual suspects but also showed very interesting parallels between beliefs of white supremacists and Islamic radicals who all pointed to the Bilderberg Group (and the Jews of course) as the secret rulers of the world.
...so is Daily Mail the worst of the British tabloids? lol
so is Daily Mail the worst of the British tabloids?
Competition in that field is fierce but the Daily Mail is certainly a contender. It doesn't sound so different from your description of the Huffington Post actually. It is a driver of a number of sensationalist stories, some of them conspiratorial, such as the invesitagtion by MP Norman Baker into whether or not David Kelly was murdered (they serialized his detective novel in their pages, for example) and were one of the MMR=autism proponents.
This is ironic really as conspiracy theorists like to paint themselves as brave dissidents fighting the "Zionist"-controlled MSM which they say suppress such stories.
Ben Goldacre has a good blog in which he dissects a lot of the "science" news stories that appear in the mainstream press. A lot of the stories he trashes are in the Daily Mail, although given that he writes for the Guardian maybe it comes from a conflict of interest. :P
Jon Ronson is an interesting character. I don't think that he is a conspiracy theorist but he writes about them.
Y'know what? I think I may have got the names mixed up. I'll go and investigate.
Ah! I made a mistake. I was thinking of John Coleman who is apparently popular here. No idea why I said Jon Ronson.
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