(Many scientists believe that there are alternative universes in which events have taken different paths from the ones we are familiar with. In that spirit, I present the current Republican candidates as they responded to Hurricane Katrina as President in 2005.)
President Romney: “Today is a day of great tragedy and I cannot idly stand by. Therefore I have directed the Federal Reserve to allocate one billion dollars to assist in the recovery of Gulf Coast banks and brokerage houses. As I speak, the US Air Force is flying in a crack team of automotive technicians skilled in the restoration of waterlogged luxury vehicles. We will also assist in the recovery of Gulf Coast golf courses which will help restore the spirits of the job creators, and this will eventually help this vital region, especially all the blah people down there. I am also proposing a massive tax cut for the highest earners and the oil industry in order to spur the economy.”
President Santorum: “The sad part is that this disaster was completely preventable. If only the people of New Orleans had spent more time reading the story of Noah, they would never have allowed homosexuals to flaunt their abortions and birth control in public where they could corrupt the youth; thank God for his mercy in not drowning every one of you. I am sending in an elite team of trained disaster-recovery Christian clergy to rebuild the spiritual flood defenses of the Gulf region. I am also proposing a massive tax cut for the highest earners and the oil industry in order to spur the economy.”
President Gingrich: “This administration will take immediate steps to ensure that such a tragedy never again threatens New Orleans. Today, Sandia National Laboratory and the Army Corps of Engineers will begin a plan to place the city of New Orleans on a giant raft, allowing it to rise above any and all flood waters. In the future we can use this technology to build new states out in the ocean and to colonize other planets. I am also proposing a massive tax cut for the highest earners and the oil industry in order to spur the economy.”
President Paul: “A great disaster has befallen the people of New Orleans; I ask all Americans to join me in signing this giant sympathy card. I am also proposing a massive tax cut for the highest earners and the oil industry in order to spur the economy.”
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Shape-Shifting Lizards from Space - An Exercise in Logic
An Englishman named David Icke has spawned a subculture of people who accept his claims that the Earth is ruled by a conspiracy of shape-shifting reptilian aliens posing as human, from a planet around a star in the constellation Draco. Most people would shrug and laugh this off. I know I do. I think I can show how unlikely it is. I am not a scientist and I don’t play one on TV, but I know a thing or two about a thing or two, so here goes.
David Icke is a former football (soccer, to Americans) star who became a successful sportscaster and spokesperson for the Green Party in the UK. One day, on Terry Wogan’s popular BBC talk show he announced on live primetime television that he was the son of God and that he would only wear turquoise-colored clothing, among other things. Now this article is not an ad hominem attack on David Icke, but an examination of the heart of his claims, so let’s leave his alleged divinity and his sartorial tastes and look at the implications of his allegations about aliens.
When analyzing a claim it’s useful to apply Occam’s Razor. Simply put, it’s a logical principle that the explanation based on the fewest unprovable assumptions is one the more likely to be true. If my dog gets out of the yard, you may argue that a helicopter came down and tossed a line around Spot and carried him out of the yard. Without solid evidence that this happened, it is more reasonable to assume that I left the gate to the yard open. Dogs get out because gates get left open all the time. Even if the gate is now closed we can find lots of everyday reasons why it might have been open before and now is closed. It is vanishingly rare for helicopters to abduct dogs from suburban yards and drop them in the street or for freak mini-tornadoes to lift them over the fence. Let’s apply this principle to our alleged alien overlords.
It seems they come from a planet around a star in the constellation Draco. “Draco” means dragon and dragons are imaginary reptiles. This is an awfully big coincidence. Not impossible, but an awfully large coincidence nonetheless. Okay, so somewhere in Draco there is a star, and this star has at least one planet. That’s not an incredibly huge leap. This planet is special – it has life on it. Again, not impossible. Earth has life on it and if it happened on one planet it could happen on another. Now, knowing what we are told about the beings from this planet, we can make some assumptions about it.
First, this life is remarkably similar to Earthly life. These reptilians can live and reproduce here in some degree of comfort. This implies that their planet has gravity similar to ours. The relationship between our bodies and our gravity is an ancient one, one that we have usually taken for granted. Our adventures in space are only beginning but we already see that gravity has effects on our bones, muscles and circulatory systems. It seems reasonable to assume that it has an effect on gestation, too. It appears that our gravity is near enough to their world of origin for them to get along here. The next point is that the composition of their world must be fairly similar to ours, too. They do not appear to suffer any serious ill effects from the overabundance or absence of any minerals in our food and water, or from the balance of gases in the atmosphere. Given two planets with similar gravity and chemical composition, it’s fair to assume they’re of similar size orbiting similar suns. Backing this assumption is that our sunlight doesn’t seem to have any seriously harmful effect on them, or lacks something they can’t do without. Add to this that they tolerate our range of temperatures you must place their planet in an orbit around its sun similar to Earth’s around our sun. Pretty amazing, that. Two planets of roughly the same size, composition and orbit. That’s got to be pretty rare - astronomically rare. It gets better.
You see, they breathe oxygen, just like us. Now Earth didn’t always have much oxygen free in the atmosphere, and on a world so similar to ours it’s a fair assumption that it was that way too. Free oxygen is not readily found in environments that are friendly to newly-evolved life. Oxygen was once a deadly poison to most living things and still is to some Earthly organisms. Early plants liberated the oxygen from the carbon dioxide they breathed in and used, letting the oxygen go as a waste product. So, on this very similar planet, some living things excreted a lot of oxygen into the air and other things evolved to take advantage of this oxygen, just like on Earth. There is no clear reason why they should be carbon-based like us, or why they should breathe oxygen instead of say, hydrogen sulfide. Their atmosphere has other similarities to ours, too. The amount of nitrogen in our atmosphere doesn’t faze them at all. We can live with far less nitrogen than we do, but if we absorb too much, it’s poisonous to us. Divers used to die from nitrogen poisoning (“nitrogen narcosis”) in days gone by. Even too much oxygen can be almost as harmful as too little. Atmospheric pressure is also crucial in determining how our bodies interact with the gases we breathe. The reptilians breathe here without a hitch – virtually identical atmospheres, and with the implication that plant and animal life evolved in a similar manner on both worlds. Amazed yet? It gets even better (worse?).
The next shocker is that these reptilians look a lot like us. They have a body plan virtually identical to ours. They stand on two legs; have two arms, an abdomen, a chest, a head at the top of a neck, and all in very similar proportions to ours (I imagine them as looking like Albert Alligator in the old Pogo comic strip.). Their heads have two eyes, two ears, one mouth with teeth, all remarkably similar in appearance and layout to their human equivalents. Their size is also similar. We are told they range in size from about five to about twelve feet in height. There is no really good reason why they should share any of these characteristics with us. I have seen no claims that they have five digits on their limbs, but I would say it’s a good bet. Why not three, six or eight limbs? Four hands? Ten eyes? Why do they even have a body plan based on bilateral symmetry (a body divisible into essentially similar left and right sides)? I don’t know and you probably don’t either. As near as our science can tell, we just came out that way and we could have evolved differently than we did. If they are real, it is a pretty amazing example of convergent evolution. I hope your mind hasn’t boggled too much yet because there’s more to come.
At this point, any idea of convergent evolution goes right out the window. In addition to sharing our biochemistry and body plan, they use DNA for heredity. Earthly DNA uses four chemicals, referred to as bases, to spell out its instructions. It appears that the possibility exists that other bases could function in DNA. But these alien lizards can mate with humans! They not only use the same DNA for their heredity but they must also use the same kinds of RNA that transmits the DNA’s instructions. Their cells must also have the same basic structures inside them to be so compatible with ours, structures that evolved very early, when there was only single-celled life on Earth. There are several major implications here. To mate with humans they must have two sexes. These two sexes must function just like ours in terms of having sperm and eggs and the proteins on the surface of their sperm must be essentially identical to those of human sperm, or they would never fertilize human ova. Likewise for their egg cells if they mate their females with our males. Their DNA has to be arranged in forty-six chromosomes, just like humans, and unlike most other creatures on our planet, too. Our closest Earthly relatives, the great apes, share about 98 to 99% of their DNA with us, but we can’t mate with them. Their DNA is arranged differently in their chromosomes and the differing part is too different to be compatible. Apparently the reptilians also find at least some humans sexually attractive in some way. Here on Earth, physically and socially healthy individuals have no sexual interest in members of other species. Very few gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orang utans or humans have any interest in mating with any other species, not even our fellow primates - their sex organs are very different and their mating habits aren’t any too similar either. Yet here are these human-like but nonhuman green skinned lizard types who have come from untold light years away happily crossing with hairy pink and brown, moist, probably overheated primates. Did I say convergent evolution went out the window? Actually, it has left the yard, gone down the road to the highway and on to the nearest spaceport and when last seen it was heading for the edge of the Universe at warp speed, taking probability and reason along for the ride.
You are probably asking yourself by now, “If they’re here, why don’t we see them?” Well, there’s an app for that. They are shape-shifters. That’s right, just like countless aliens of science fiction, they can alter their appearance at will. They must also alter their mass, because a twelve-foot tall lizard that weighs one hundred and seventy pounds would be painfully skinny and fragile. Likewise, if a twelve-footer weighs a more appropriate three or four hundred pounds, then when it is disguised as a five-foot-something human what does it do with the extra mass? This is a remarkable property. I wonder, how do they alter their bones? Changing the appearance of skin is not impossible. Chameleons and octopuses do it all the time. An octopus can also change its shape to some extent because it has no bones and no shell. Bones, on the other hand, are made of a very hard mineral. They grow over years and take months to heal from the slightest break because they have only limited blood circulation and demand large amounts of mineral salts that are less common in our diet than the elements we use for most of our chemistry. Yet here are these creatures who have exactly the same DNA, body structure and biochemistry that we do, and they apparently change the size and shape of their bones at will. They also seem to be able to shed mass in violation of all known physics without any of that messy creation of massive amounts of heat that seems to be required of instant mass loss, and regain it just as fast without eating a couple of elephants or carloads of vegetables. Had enough yet? It gets weirder from here.
You see, these beings came here to rule over us. In spite of having the technology to fly across the Universe, they are pretty incompetent rulers. Our cousins, the apes, are comprehensible to us because we are so similar. The reptilians, appearances aside, must be even more similar to us, so it’s reasonable to assume that their behaviors must also be broadly similar to ours. Now if we found a planet that was so improbably similar to ours and we could reach it, it would be a treasure. We would want to explore and study it, maybe colonize it. If it were found inhabited by even somewhat intelligent beings of lesser development it would set off a great debate as to how to deal with them. There are three basic approaches: beneficent, neutral and malign. The beneficent approach might mean trying to help them and speed their development. It would be interference with good intent. A neutral approach might call for taking some remote uninhabited place for a base or colony, keeping out of the way until they were ready to encounter us. The reptilians, we are told, drink human blood, molest human children and secretly manipulate human society for their own ends: malign it is, then: they came to our planet to dominate us. Humans, we know, are commonly violent, deceitful, curious, stubborn, and generally resistant to being conquered even by our own kind. The reptilians are said to have come here about three thousand years ago. At that time, humanity was scattered and less numerous than today, and our best weapons were the bow and the bronze sword, and not everyone had them. We are also not very different among mammals in our biochemistry. If they didn’t want any trouble, why not use their superior technology to wipe us out and use the immense herds of large animals worldwide for blood? Why not go on to terraform (dracoform?) the entire planet to make it more to their liking? Assuming we had some value as slaves, or our blood had some special value, say for ritual purposes, why not domesticate a few humans, wipe out or isolate the rest and selectively breed the captive population for docility? Some say they’ve already domesticated us and made us docile – they use the word “sheeple” a lot; if it happened, they haven’t done a very good job. Instead, they hide among us in human form to rule as if they were humans, in a secret cabal, occasionally mating with us. This is the worst way to keep power that I can think of. They supposedly make up the ruling classes and yet they disseminate their genes with their super-secret power of shape-shifting among us slaves. One of their supposed clans is the British royal family. Everyone knows that the British royals never kept their genes to themselves but have produced endless numbers of royal bastards, at least up to the time of Victoria and most likely well beyond (This would also suggest that we are sexually attractive to them in spite of being a different species. Perverts From Space!) They also rule through the Rothschild family, or so we are told. Good thinking. If you want to rule secretly, do it as members of a minority that is already distrusted, feared and discriminated against. It must be far more effective than infiltrating the Borgias of the 15th Century to gain the Papacy, or the Manchus, or the dynasty founded by Julius Caesar, or the Habsburgs. Or did they? If they did, it didn’t work too well since all those families have become as irrelevant as the British royals are fast becoming. They also leaked a document that lays out their plans for world domination. It’s none other than the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. If you’re already a secret cabal, why risk a book at all, especially one so poorly written? Why not just require everyone to memorize the plan? Why cast it as a plan involving that same oppressed minority? Why do you need one that seems to have plagiarized a third-rate ghost story by an obscure 19th Century German novelist and an even more obscure 19th Century pamphlet attacking Napoleon the Third? And why did it take three thousand years to come up with a plan for global domination? Why ignore all their super alien technology? Why bother with manipulating politics, finance, and the mass media in an increasingly technological society when they could so easily have crushed the simple societies of the Bronze Age? Why even set out to rule a world thirty centuries away from inventing the flush toilet and the sewage plant? Why would they be so indolent as to need thirty centuries to get their act together with so little result? And why would they be so careless as to let a jock with no scientific training, no experience in government, intelligence or investigation, tumble to their plot and spread it all over the world?
Given the unlikelihood of their even existing at all, you’d have to be massively ignorant and a little warped to believe in them. Assuming even for one second that they do exist on Earth, there’s no reason to fear such hapless incompetents.
Let the lizards bring it on. They don’t stand a chance.
David Icke is a former football (soccer, to Americans) star who became a successful sportscaster and spokesperson for the Green Party in the UK. One day, on Terry Wogan’s popular BBC talk show he announced on live primetime television that he was the son of God and that he would only wear turquoise-colored clothing, among other things. Now this article is not an ad hominem attack on David Icke, but an examination of the heart of his claims, so let’s leave his alleged divinity and his sartorial tastes and look at the implications of his allegations about aliens.
When analyzing a claim it’s useful to apply Occam’s Razor. Simply put, it’s a logical principle that the explanation based on the fewest unprovable assumptions is one the more likely to be true. If my dog gets out of the yard, you may argue that a helicopter came down and tossed a line around Spot and carried him out of the yard. Without solid evidence that this happened, it is more reasonable to assume that I left the gate to the yard open. Dogs get out because gates get left open all the time. Even if the gate is now closed we can find lots of everyday reasons why it might have been open before and now is closed. It is vanishingly rare for helicopters to abduct dogs from suburban yards and drop them in the street or for freak mini-tornadoes to lift them over the fence. Let’s apply this principle to our alleged alien overlords.
It seems they come from a planet around a star in the constellation Draco. “Draco” means dragon and dragons are imaginary reptiles. This is an awfully big coincidence. Not impossible, but an awfully large coincidence nonetheless. Okay, so somewhere in Draco there is a star, and this star has at least one planet. That’s not an incredibly huge leap. This planet is special – it has life on it. Again, not impossible. Earth has life on it and if it happened on one planet it could happen on another. Now, knowing what we are told about the beings from this planet, we can make some assumptions about it.
First, this life is remarkably similar to Earthly life. These reptilians can live and reproduce here in some degree of comfort. This implies that their planet has gravity similar to ours. The relationship between our bodies and our gravity is an ancient one, one that we have usually taken for granted. Our adventures in space are only beginning but we already see that gravity has effects on our bones, muscles and circulatory systems. It seems reasonable to assume that it has an effect on gestation, too. It appears that our gravity is near enough to their world of origin for them to get along here. The next point is that the composition of their world must be fairly similar to ours, too. They do not appear to suffer any serious ill effects from the overabundance or absence of any minerals in our food and water, or from the balance of gases in the atmosphere. Given two planets with similar gravity and chemical composition, it’s fair to assume they’re of similar size orbiting similar suns. Backing this assumption is that our sunlight doesn’t seem to have any seriously harmful effect on them, or lacks something they can’t do without. Add to this that they tolerate our range of temperatures you must place their planet in an orbit around its sun similar to Earth’s around our sun. Pretty amazing, that. Two planets of roughly the same size, composition and orbit. That’s got to be pretty rare - astronomically rare. It gets better.
You see, they breathe oxygen, just like us. Now Earth didn’t always have much oxygen free in the atmosphere, and on a world so similar to ours it’s a fair assumption that it was that way too. Free oxygen is not readily found in environments that are friendly to newly-evolved life. Oxygen was once a deadly poison to most living things and still is to some Earthly organisms. Early plants liberated the oxygen from the carbon dioxide they breathed in and used, letting the oxygen go as a waste product. So, on this very similar planet, some living things excreted a lot of oxygen into the air and other things evolved to take advantage of this oxygen, just like on Earth. There is no clear reason why they should be carbon-based like us, or why they should breathe oxygen instead of say, hydrogen sulfide. Their atmosphere has other similarities to ours, too. The amount of nitrogen in our atmosphere doesn’t faze them at all. We can live with far less nitrogen than we do, but if we absorb too much, it’s poisonous to us. Divers used to die from nitrogen poisoning (“nitrogen narcosis”) in days gone by. Even too much oxygen can be almost as harmful as too little. Atmospheric pressure is also crucial in determining how our bodies interact with the gases we breathe. The reptilians breathe here without a hitch – virtually identical atmospheres, and with the implication that plant and animal life evolved in a similar manner on both worlds. Amazed yet? It gets even better (worse?).
The next shocker is that these reptilians look a lot like us. They have a body plan virtually identical to ours. They stand on two legs; have two arms, an abdomen, a chest, a head at the top of a neck, and all in very similar proportions to ours (I imagine them as looking like Albert Alligator in the old Pogo comic strip.). Their heads have two eyes, two ears, one mouth with teeth, all remarkably similar in appearance and layout to their human equivalents. Their size is also similar. We are told they range in size from about five to about twelve feet in height. There is no really good reason why they should share any of these characteristics with us. I have seen no claims that they have five digits on their limbs, but I would say it’s a good bet. Why not three, six or eight limbs? Four hands? Ten eyes? Why do they even have a body plan based on bilateral symmetry (a body divisible into essentially similar left and right sides)? I don’t know and you probably don’t either. As near as our science can tell, we just came out that way and we could have evolved differently than we did. If they are real, it is a pretty amazing example of convergent evolution. I hope your mind hasn’t boggled too much yet because there’s more to come.
At this point, any idea of convergent evolution goes right out the window. In addition to sharing our biochemistry and body plan, they use DNA for heredity. Earthly DNA uses four chemicals, referred to as bases, to spell out its instructions. It appears that the possibility exists that other bases could function in DNA. But these alien lizards can mate with humans! They not only use the same DNA for their heredity but they must also use the same kinds of RNA that transmits the DNA’s instructions. Their cells must also have the same basic structures inside them to be so compatible with ours, structures that evolved very early, when there was only single-celled life on Earth. There are several major implications here. To mate with humans they must have two sexes. These two sexes must function just like ours in terms of having sperm and eggs and the proteins on the surface of their sperm must be essentially identical to those of human sperm, or they would never fertilize human ova. Likewise for their egg cells if they mate their females with our males. Their DNA has to be arranged in forty-six chromosomes, just like humans, and unlike most other creatures on our planet, too. Our closest Earthly relatives, the great apes, share about 98 to 99% of their DNA with us, but we can’t mate with them. Their DNA is arranged differently in their chromosomes and the differing part is too different to be compatible. Apparently the reptilians also find at least some humans sexually attractive in some way. Here on Earth, physically and socially healthy individuals have no sexual interest in members of other species. Very few gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orang utans or humans have any interest in mating with any other species, not even our fellow primates - their sex organs are very different and their mating habits aren’t any too similar either. Yet here are these human-like but nonhuman green skinned lizard types who have come from untold light years away happily crossing with hairy pink and brown, moist, probably overheated primates. Did I say convergent evolution went out the window? Actually, it has left the yard, gone down the road to the highway and on to the nearest spaceport and when last seen it was heading for the edge of the Universe at warp speed, taking probability and reason along for the ride.
You are probably asking yourself by now, “If they’re here, why don’t we see them?” Well, there’s an app for that. They are shape-shifters. That’s right, just like countless aliens of science fiction, they can alter their appearance at will. They must also alter their mass, because a twelve-foot tall lizard that weighs one hundred and seventy pounds would be painfully skinny and fragile. Likewise, if a twelve-footer weighs a more appropriate three or four hundred pounds, then when it is disguised as a five-foot-something human what does it do with the extra mass? This is a remarkable property. I wonder, how do they alter their bones? Changing the appearance of skin is not impossible. Chameleons and octopuses do it all the time. An octopus can also change its shape to some extent because it has no bones and no shell. Bones, on the other hand, are made of a very hard mineral. They grow over years and take months to heal from the slightest break because they have only limited blood circulation and demand large amounts of mineral salts that are less common in our diet than the elements we use for most of our chemistry. Yet here are these creatures who have exactly the same DNA, body structure and biochemistry that we do, and they apparently change the size and shape of their bones at will. They also seem to be able to shed mass in violation of all known physics without any of that messy creation of massive amounts of heat that seems to be required of instant mass loss, and regain it just as fast without eating a couple of elephants or carloads of vegetables. Had enough yet? It gets weirder from here.
You see, these beings came here to rule over us. In spite of having the technology to fly across the Universe, they are pretty incompetent rulers. Our cousins, the apes, are comprehensible to us because we are so similar. The reptilians, appearances aside, must be even more similar to us, so it’s reasonable to assume that their behaviors must also be broadly similar to ours. Now if we found a planet that was so improbably similar to ours and we could reach it, it would be a treasure. We would want to explore and study it, maybe colonize it. If it were found inhabited by even somewhat intelligent beings of lesser development it would set off a great debate as to how to deal with them. There are three basic approaches: beneficent, neutral and malign. The beneficent approach might mean trying to help them and speed their development. It would be interference with good intent. A neutral approach might call for taking some remote uninhabited place for a base or colony, keeping out of the way until they were ready to encounter us. The reptilians, we are told, drink human blood, molest human children and secretly manipulate human society for their own ends: malign it is, then: they came to our planet to dominate us. Humans, we know, are commonly violent, deceitful, curious, stubborn, and generally resistant to being conquered even by our own kind. The reptilians are said to have come here about three thousand years ago. At that time, humanity was scattered and less numerous than today, and our best weapons were the bow and the bronze sword, and not everyone had them. We are also not very different among mammals in our biochemistry. If they didn’t want any trouble, why not use their superior technology to wipe us out and use the immense herds of large animals worldwide for blood? Why not go on to terraform (dracoform?) the entire planet to make it more to their liking? Assuming we had some value as slaves, or our blood had some special value, say for ritual purposes, why not domesticate a few humans, wipe out or isolate the rest and selectively breed the captive population for docility? Some say they’ve already domesticated us and made us docile – they use the word “sheeple” a lot; if it happened, they haven’t done a very good job. Instead, they hide among us in human form to rule as if they were humans, in a secret cabal, occasionally mating with us. This is the worst way to keep power that I can think of. They supposedly make up the ruling classes and yet they disseminate their genes with their super-secret power of shape-shifting among us slaves. One of their supposed clans is the British royal family. Everyone knows that the British royals never kept their genes to themselves but have produced endless numbers of royal bastards, at least up to the time of Victoria and most likely well beyond (This would also suggest that we are sexually attractive to them in spite of being a different species. Perverts From Space!) They also rule through the Rothschild family, or so we are told. Good thinking. If you want to rule secretly, do it as members of a minority that is already distrusted, feared and discriminated against. It must be far more effective than infiltrating the Borgias of the 15th Century to gain the Papacy, or the Manchus, or the dynasty founded by Julius Caesar, or the Habsburgs. Or did they? If they did, it didn’t work too well since all those families have become as irrelevant as the British royals are fast becoming. They also leaked a document that lays out their plans for world domination. It’s none other than the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. If you’re already a secret cabal, why risk a book at all, especially one so poorly written? Why not just require everyone to memorize the plan? Why cast it as a plan involving that same oppressed minority? Why do you need one that seems to have plagiarized a third-rate ghost story by an obscure 19th Century German novelist and an even more obscure 19th Century pamphlet attacking Napoleon the Third? And why did it take three thousand years to come up with a plan for global domination? Why ignore all their super alien technology? Why bother with manipulating politics, finance, and the mass media in an increasingly technological society when they could so easily have crushed the simple societies of the Bronze Age? Why even set out to rule a world thirty centuries away from inventing the flush toilet and the sewage plant? Why would they be so indolent as to need thirty centuries to get their act together with so little result? And why would they be so careless as to let a jock with no scientific training, no experience in government, intelligence or investigation, tumble to their plot and spread it all over the world?
Given the unlikelihood of their even existing at all, you’d have to be massively ignorant and a little warped to believe in them. Assuming even for one second that they do exist on Earth, there’s no reason to fear such hapless incompetents.
Let the lizards bring it on. They don’t stand a chance.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Bad and wasteful product design, or why I now hate Verizon and LG...
(Murphy's Law Rules My Life, ep. 100,000,003, approximately.)
Last Fall, my new and much liked LG Octane phone disappeared. Whether I lost it or someone found it before it was lost, I don't know. All was not lost - my son's older LG phone, an eNV3, was still in the house. I called Verizon Wireless and had the Octane bricked and the other phone reactivated with my number. All went well until a few days ago when I needed to know the phone's serial number. I had to remove the battery to see it. When I went to put the battery back it wouldn't go into place properly. On a second attempt, a tiny spring in a tiny notch fell out. The notch was one of the places where the battery tabs insert. Now by tiny I mean tiny. The whole thing was about 4mm long when compressed in the notch. I couldn't find it. The battery did go back into place without it and seemed to stay well enough until this morning when I picked the phone up and it fell out. Nor will it stay anymore. I thought, "Hey, let me try the Verizon Store! Maybe they can help me." The only thing they could do was look for a similar phone in their junk drawer to cannibalize. "I'm guessing it's more than a year old," said one of the guys. They said a corporate-owned store wouldn't be able to help me either, and had the nerve to suggest buying a new phone! Right, spend maybe $150 on a new phone because of a 4mm spring that probably costs ten cents per kilogram. Good thinking, Verizon Store guy. I may be older than the guys in the store, but I am not so old that I can't tell anymore when someone is acting like a dick. I'm more than a year old too, but I am not ready to be replaced by a newer model just yet, either.
There is nothing remotely related on the Verizon Wireless website. The 'contact us' link on the LG site gave me a popup that told me I was not authorized to use it and demanded an authorization number and a password - clearly another example of intelligent design. After hunting around I did find an email contact link that worked, and I am now waiting for a reply.
All this for a spring the size of a penpoint.
I hate you, Verizon and LG.
UPDATE: I have now heard from LG support. They have offered to have me send in the phone to be repaired out of warranty for the "low" price of between 40 and 100 dollars, not including shipping fees. In my response, I asked to be pointed to the assembly plant or the original supplier of the springs. I don't think I will ever buy another LG product again and I advise you who are reading this to beware of such crappy design and such contemptuous service.
MORE: If I were stupid enough to send in my phone, I would have to have it deactivated and use my even older phone until it was returned. When it would be returned, I would have to call to have it reactivated. What's practically the first thing they ask? "What's the serial number?"
Really, there is no reason that you shouldn't be able to remove and replace the battery easily as often as you feel the need. My old RAZR had the micro SD card under the battery; never had a problem.
EVEN MORE: LG customer service finally deigned to tell me that they don't send out "internal parts". I asked for either an exception or another source for this tiny cheap spring - no answer. I sent a letter to the chairman and CEO of LG. I can't wait to see what happens.
Last Fall, my new and much liked LG Octane phone disappeared. Whether I lost it or someone found it before it was lost, I don't know. All was not lost - my son's older LG phone, an eNV3, was still in the house. I called Verizon Wireless and had the Octane bricked and the other phone reactivated with my number. All went well until a few days ago when I needed to know the phone's serial number. I had to remove the battery to see it. When I went to put the battery back it wouldn't go into place properly. On a second attempt, a tiny spring in a tiny notch fell out. The notch was one of the places where the battery tabs insert. Now by tiny I mean tiny. The whole thing was about 4mm long when compressed in the notch. I couldn't find it. The battery did go back into place without it and seemed to stay well enough until this morning when I picked the phone up and it fell out. Nor will it stay anymore. I thought, "Hey, let me try the Verizon Store! Maybe they can help me." The only thing they could do was look for a similar phone in their junk drawer to cannibalize. "I'm guessing it's more than a year old," said one of the guys. They said a corporate-owned store wouldn't be able to help me either, and had the nerve to suggest buying a new phone! Right, spend maybe $150 on a new phone because of a 4mm spring that probably costs ten cents per kilogram. Good thinking, Verizon Store guy. I may be older than the guys in the store, but I am not so old that I can't tell anymore when someone is acting like a dick. I'm more than a year old too, but I am not ready to be replaced by a newer model just yet, either.
There is nothing remotely related on the Verizon Wireless website. The 'contact us' link on the LG site gave me a popup that told me I was not authorized to use it and demanded an authorization number and a password - clearly another example of intelligent design. After hunting around I did find an email contact link that worked, and I am now waiting for a reply.
All this for a spring the size of a penpoint.
I hate you, Verizon and LG.
UPDATE: I have now heard from LG support. They have offered to have me send in the phone to be repaired out of warranty for the "low" price of between 40 and 100 dollars, not including shipping fees. In my response, I asked to be pointed to the assembly plant or the original supplier of the springs. I don't think I will ever buy another LG product again and I advise you who are reading this to beware of such crappy design and such contemptuous service.
MORE: If I were stupid enough to send in my phone, I would have to have it deactivated and use my even older phone until it was returned. When it would be returned, I would have to call to have it reactivated. What's practically the first thing they ask? "What's the serial number?"
Really, there is no reason that you shouldn't be able to remove and replace the battery easily as often as you feel the need. My old RAZR had the micro SD card under the battery; never had a problem.
EVEN MORE: LG customer service finally deigned to tell me that they don't send out "internal parts". I asked for either an exception or another source for this tiny cheap spring - no answer. I sent a letter to the chairman and CEO of LG. I can't wait to see what happens.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Logic-Testing the 9/11 “Truthers”
Much evidence has been presented on both sides of the conspiracy claims surrounding 9/11. I don’t believe in the conspiracy myself due to the sheer unlikelihood of the whole thing. People with more technical knowledge than I possess have argued endlessly about nanothermite and acceleration rates of debris. Let's test the logical implications of some of the conspiracy claims.
Claim: The Israelis were behind the 9/11 attacks.
Logic: What did the Israelis have to gain from staging such an attack? The United States has been the most powerful nation in the world for over half a century, and has been Israel’s most important and steadfast ally for most of that time. Could Israel possibly have gained any more support from the US than it already gets? Would any country as embattled and endangered as Israel is, and has long been, risk losing the staunch support of the most powerful nation on Earth for at least a couple of generations, alienating the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish community in the process? Does this question really need an answer?
Claim: Four thousand Israeli citizens (or Jews in some versions) were warned of the WTC attacks and stayed home from work that day.
Logic: This claim started to appear in newspapers in the Arab world just days after the attacks. It is clearly aimed at, and possibly propagated by, people with no firsthand knowledge of Americans, American Jews, Israelis, American cities, American employers or America. I cannot think of any way that someone could identify four thousand Jews at their work sites in a major city and then approach them without giving away the plot and I cannot imagine how then some among those four thousand Jews would comply with such mysterious instructions without any of them immediately proceeding to call friends and coworkers, including non-Jews, or law enforcement or other government agencies, or friends in the same, to tell them about this weird approach or even recalling this strange contact after the fact. It’s just too ridiculous for anyone to buy into for one second. It’s beneath contempt; it shows searing contempt for the people it's aimed at.
Claim: The government of the United States was behind the attacks.
Logic: Again, what is to be gained? The usual justification is that the Bush administration was seeking to gain support for a war against Iraq or for some unspecified gain in the Middle East. Some claim it was to gain support for legislation to give the government sweeping new powers of investigation and detention. Okay, Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq from at least the first days of his administration. Why, then, did they not bother to manufacture evidence linking the attacks directly to Iraq instead of going through the whole WMD dog-and-pony show? Why didn’t they manufacture evidence that they could have stopped the whole thing if only they had had more sweeping police powers before the attack? It’s so little gain for so much effort.
Then there is the whole question of risk. Launching such an attack would easily meet the definition of high treason. If there were trials, conviction would result in death sentences for the top plotters and life sentences for the next tier or two. They would be impoverished by their legal costs. Their families would be hard-pressed to find places to live remote enough or obscure enough to avoid the ignominy that would fall on them, ignominy that would follow them for generations. Their political party, associates and supporters would desert them and their ideology in droves. Even trials with acquittals or strong evidence that did not result in indictments would subject them to devastating suspicion and scorn. What people as well-situated in American society as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the others would risk all that to get a law passed or to promote a war against a second-rate crippled state when they already held the levers of power?
If somehow plotters so clever as to successfully manage such a huge plot did so for such paltry reasons, why do it on US soil? With American forces all over the Persian Gulf and such a committed ally as Saudi Arabia right there, with a prying press and public so far away, why not do it right there in the Gulf? If a super-secret covert force staged an operation out of an American base in the Gulf no one would blink twice and the evidence could easily be stage-managed, especially with the help of the autocratic Saudi state.
Claim: A cruise missile was used to strike the Pentagon rather than a hijacked airliner.
Logic: A cruise missile is a large piece of property and is hard to move around in a subtle manner. It also costs millions of dollars and contains secret, or at least, classified, technology. They are therefore tempting targets for sabotage and espionage. They are certainly kept in some form of secure storage. They must also be subject to audit controls. A commanding officer and his subordinates who could not account for every cruise missile held by their unit would be in serious trouble that would likely end their careers and possibly result in criminal charges. It could be answered that a few cruise missiles could have been bought on a covert basis and hidden in cost overruns, but it would not have been hidden from everyone. Covert operations have always been tempting sources of extra income for covert operators, and I have to believe that somewhere in Washington is an office full of accountants and auditors with top-secret clearances who try to make sure that covert funds are not being spent on covert luxury vacation homes furnished with covert mistresses. The audit trail would not be cut off, just pushed back a little farther into the underbrush.
Cruise missiles can be launched from ships, aircraft and land-based launchers. Ground-launch units were never operational; that capacity only existed for testing purposes. No matter where they are launched from, some things must surely take place when they are used. Cruise missiles are basically subsonic unmanned jet aircraft, in effect flying bombs not unlike the V1 of World War II, with a range of about 1,500 miles. A technical crew must go over it to put in a state of readiness. The engine, electrical system, guidance computer and sensors and the warhead all have to be checked before launch. Cruise missiles also have to be fueled up shortly before launch and can only be held in readiness for a relatively short time. The launch officer would certainly want to obtain a weather report in the launch area and all the way to the target to avoid sending the missile through an unexpected thunderstorm or tornado that could disrupt the mission. There would have to be some way to make sure no aircraft were in the vicinity, maybe a check with a flight controller. All this is even more critical when it is being launched as part of a super-secret conspiracy. Nothing makes for a giant arrow flashing “Conspiracy This Way!” than a cruise missile taking off and smacking into an airliner, falling into a suburban Virginia parking lot or smashing into the Pentagon and failing to explode.
The 1,500-mile range means that any launch against Washington would have to take place in the Eastern United States, off the Atlantic Coast or in the Gulf of Mexico; the area from Bermuda to the Caribbean is far too crowded with ships and planes for adequate secrecy.
A submarine launch is probably the most difficult to hide. There is no place to hide an extra cruise missile aboard a sub, and the captain is ultimately accountable for every last one aboard at the end of the cruise. To make sure that any launch would not be accidentally observed the sub would have to come to at least periscope depth to conduct a visual and radar sweep. Russian submarines still operate in US coastal waters so precautions would have to be taken to make sure one was not in the vicinity (or any other ships or planes). Subs are dangerous places to handle jet engines and explosive warheads. One error can sink a very valuable vessel and cost the lives of several hundred sailors. There would have to be strict protocols in place for a launch and the entire crew would have to be placed on alert, not just the crewmen responsible for the launch itself. It would not be much less strict aboard a surface vessel. In addition, the launch of a cruise missile involves bright engine flames and loud noises. The entire crew of the ship therefore become witnesses; on a typical warship equipped for launch that might mean as many as three hundred sailors.
An air launch is no more likely to be kept secret than a seaborne launch. Air-launched cruise missiles are no longer in service with the US Air Force, but may have been in 2001. They were withdrawn because they were primarily used to carry nuclear warheads, so have been put away due to nuclear weapons limitation treaties. They could be launched from three types of strategic bomber: the B-52, B-1 and B-2. Launching a bomber with an armed cruise missile is not an event that would go unnoticed at any operational airbase. The missile would have to be withdrawn from the armory with some kind of convincing orders, which might be double-checked if anything looked suspect. Having a conventional warhead fitted would be remembered. There must be airbases out West where a bomber taking off is unlikely to be witnessed or arouse suspicion among the locals, but the bomber would have had to be withdrawn from its regular unit, which would be noticed and recorded even for a covert mission. Still, dozens, possibly hundreds, of people would have to be aware that a bomber with a live cruise missile was launched on 9/11 and it would not be hard to find out that it landed without one.
Any cruise missile fired at Washington would have to pass over densely populated areas for at least part of its course. Typically, a cruise missile flies at low altitude, at “treetop” height and civil aviation speeds. If so, it would probably be spotted by hundreds or thousands of people, some of whom would be likely to recognize it for what it was. At higher altitudes the likelihood of being spotted on air traffic control radar and seen from aircraft would be more than zero. In any case, the risk of collision in the heavily-used air corridors of the Middle Atlantic states would be significant.
It seems hard to believe that careful plotters would want to expose their operations to hundreds of military personnel and civilian witnesses or risk failure that would inevitably lead back to them.
Claim: Donald Rumsfeld was a part of the alleged conspiracy.
Logic: It is well-known and undisputed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when it was hit. His presence there raises serious issues with any conspiracy hypothesis. Assuming he was in on the plot raises one set of questions and assuming he was not raises another and even more difficult range of questions.
If there was a plot, it would be hard to assume that he was not in on it. It is much easier to pervert significant military assets into serving a massive plot if the Secretary of Defense is one of the plotters. On the other hand, would he really have hung around the Pentagon to be endangered by a missile or aircraft strike? Things can go wrong when deadly craft are flung around the skies and if some unforeseen event caused the plane to swerve or the missile to go off-target by no more than a couple of hundred yards, if that, it could just as easily have landed on the Secretary’s desk. It also seems unlikely on the face of things that he would have consented to have his own department targeted. Besides, if the plan was to promote some sort of military action, it is not good planning to risk destroying your supreme military headquarters and your top defense manager along with it. Rumsfeld has been around Bush and Cheney for decades. He would know how devious they could be, and if he hadn’t noticed before, he surely would have figured it out when the plot was hatched. I don’t know how far he would have trusted them if they told him it was crucial for him to be at the Pentagon and that there was no real danger involved; besides he could always call up someone in the Pentagon to find out just how accurate a cruise missile really is.
If Rumsfeld was not a party to the conspiracy or was and was not warned about the site and timing of the attack, then there is every likelihood he would have tumbled to it soon enough. He was at the crash (or missile) impact site, and if there were cruise missile debris he might have seen it for himself; if not, his technical experts would have given him the evidence soon enough. If he suspected military involvement he would certainly have demanded answers and he would have gotten them: the Secretary of Defense commands a small army of military and civilian investigators, inspectors, scientists and auditors as well as a real army, navy and air force and has a large number of senior military officers at his disposal, people who are used to not only demanding answers, but compelling them. The Defense Department also carries a lot of weight with other departments and agencies. Defense has huge resources in money, personnel, technology and logistics and provides essential services to many other parts of the Federal government; few of those agencies would be in a position to stonewall a Secretary of Defense once he was on the warpath. Any Secretary of Defense is bound to be a Washington insider to a large degree and Rumsfeld is very much one. This means that he has lots of friends and debtors in all branches of government. Once he got a hint that there was a conspiracy and that it had endangered him and his agency, there would be no calling him off. If he chose to go public, he would be holding convincing evidence. If he chose to keep it to himself it would have taken a bribe of awesome size to keep him silent, and probably not in money because he was already rich. Nor would threats have deterred him easily, not with all the resources at his command to keep him and his family safe.
So we are left with Rumsfeld the conspirator recklessly endangering himself and risking the safety of his department, or Rumsfeld left out in the cold and mighty unhappy to have been at the bull’s-eye, commanding his formidable power to root out and smash the conspiracy. Neither one seems to be particularly likely.
Claim: A plane from US Customs was involved in the downing of Flight 93, or alternatively in the attack on the Pentagon.
Logic: The aircraft used by the Customs Service are essentially business jets. They are not fighter planes. They are not fast enough to make good interceptors, even of a big airliner. They lack the hardpoints used to carry missiles or guns and they lack the high-powered radars and sophisticated fire control systems of fighter aircraft. They are not built to carry heavy missiles or gun pods. If one could have been retrofitted to carry and use weapons, that means that somewhere out there is a crew of aircraft engineers and technicians who could blow the whole plot open. The pilot would have to have recently left military service as a fighter pilot, since any other kind of pilot would lack the necessary skills and training.
If one had been fitted for weapons, what kind of weapons would have been used? A radar-guided missile is unlikely, because it calls for the aircraft to be fitted with a good-sized radar for detecting the target and guiding the missile in. These radars are not lying around like spare truck axles. They are expensive and contain classified technology that some other countries would love to get hold of. That means a potential audit trail. So, let us say a heat-seeking missile instead. There is still an audit trail that might point to the missiles being removed from inventory, but with over a hundred thousand Sidewinders having been produced, one might go astray without being tracked. The plane would still have to be fitted with launching rails, fire-control equipment and the equipment that sounds a tone in the pilot’s headset when the missiles have locked on to a potential target. Heat-seekers have been known to fail spectacularly in combat, so let us say two would be fitted for contingencies. These missiles are over nine feet long and two of them on the average business jet would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Anyone seeing it might be expected to recognize what he saw. Then there is the question of what happens if one missile (or even both) fail to strike the target. A nine-foot missile lying around in a pasture would certainly draw notice and if it exploded on contact wouldn’t be much less conspicuous. The finder would most likely call the police, who would be likely to bring in the fire department and local press and curiosity seekers would soon follow. With a hijacked plane in the vicinity, and especially a crashed one, this would be hard for the conspirators to cover up or wave away.
So, let us say it carried a gun pod instead of a missile. This gun pod would also have to come from military inventory. A gunsight would have to have been fitted. A radar gunsight raises the same issues as any other military equipment that might have been fitted. Maybe an old electro-optical gunsight from the World War Two era could have been fitted, but aerial gunnery is a demanding skill even with the best technology available today, and would require extensive expert training and considerable practice to ensure hitting a target reliably, even one as big as an airliner. In addition, the search for debris could hardly avoid turning up some of the hundred or more twenty-millimeter cannon shells that would be left around the area. These are substantial in size. No one would mistake them for shells from a deer rifle.
Some conspiracy theorists have another claim involving a Customs Service aircraft: that one was used to vector the cruise missile or remotely controlled aircraft that struck the Pentagon. The issues of fitting the necessary equipment to the plane and getting a pilot with the necessary skills apply here too.
What both claims also fail to address is: where did this Customs plane fly out of and return to? Customs (now ICE) aircraft are used to patrol near the Mexican border, in the Gulf of Mexico and over the waters around Florida and Puerto Rico. It would be noticed if there were one flying out of, or even to, the Northeast. Flying a heavily-armed business jet could not safely be done out of the civil or military airports that such aircraft typically fly out of and the plotters would probably be reluctant to send such a plane on a flight of hundreds of miles. The Middle Atlantic states are crowded and there are not many suitable locations for a secret airfield, fewer where the takeoff and landing of an armed civil aircraft would pass without risk of notice. Someone would have to preflight and fuel the plane. Some crew with the requisite skills would have to prepare the weaponry or other equipment. Someone would have to clear the plane for takeoff and square its presence with air traffic controllers.
While not impossible for determined conspirators with vast resources, it poses lots of unnecessary risks that could be avoided by simpler and more direct means.
Claim: NORAD was ordered to stand down on 9/11.
Logic: The North American Aerospace Defense Command is charged, like its name implies, with the air defense of North America, meaning the USA and Canada. The deputy commander always comes from the Canadian Forces, and there are always several hundred Canadian Forces personnel staffing the various sites across the USA and Canada. To issue a blanket stand-down order would mean that all these Canadians would have to have been aware of it. None of them would have any particular reason to be loyal to the Bush administration. Even if they didn’t shout out what they knew on the CBC or in "The Globe and Mail", at least some of them would have reported it up the chain of command. The Canadian prime minister would then have faced the choice of either making it public and bringing down the US government, or keeping it quiet. There would only be one possible incentive to keep it quiet: blackmail (Suggestions that the PM, or anyone else, is a lizard from another planet can be dismissed as too addled to seriously consider.). He wouldn’t have gone and enriched himself because that would be too conspicuous and even if he did, he would still want to bolster himself politically by wringing major concessions from the US. As a foreign head of state he could insulate himself from most kinds of revenge that the plotters could dish out. Canada is the largest trading partner of, and a major oil supplier to, the USA, so American economic threats would go nowhere. So where are the major economic, military or political concessions that the US would have had to make? Is it necessary to point out that they never occurred?
Claim: The Israelis were behind the 9/11 attacks.
Logic: What did the Israelis have to gain from staging such an attack? The United States has been the most powerful nation in the world for over half a century, and has been Israel’s most important and steadfast ally for most of that time. Could Israel possibly have gained any more support from the US than it already gets? Would any country as embattled and endangered as Israel is, and has long been, risk losing the staunch support of the most powerful nation on Earth for at least a couple of generations, alienating the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish community in the process? Does this question really need an answer?
Claim: Four thousand Israeli citizens (or Jews in some versions) were warned of the WTC attacks and stayed home from work that day.
Logic: This claim started to appear in newspapers in the Arab world just days after the attacks. It is clearly aimed at, and possibly propagated by, people with no firsthand knowledge of Americans, American Jews, Israelis, American cities, American employers or America. I cannot think of any way that someone could identify four thousand Jews at their work sites in a major city and then approach them without giving away the plot and I cannot imagine how then some among those four thousand Jews would comply with such mysterious instructions without any of them immediately proceeding to call friends and coworkers, including non-Jews, or law enforcement or other government agencies, or friends in the same, to tell them about this weird approach or even recalling this strange contact after the fact. It’s just too ridiculous for anyone to buy into for one second. It’s beneath contempt; it shows searing contempt for the people it's aimed at.
Claim: The government of the United States was behind the attacks.
Logic: Again, what is to be gained? The usual justification is that the Bush administration was seeking to gain support for a war against Iraq or for some unspecified gain in the Middle East. Some claim it was to gain support for legislation to give the government sweeping new powers of investigation and detention. Okay, Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq from at least the first days of his administration. Why, then, did they not bother to manufacture evidence linking the attacks directly to Iraq instead of going through the whole WMD dog-and-pony show? Why didn’t they manufacture evidence that they could have stopped the whole thing if only they had had more sweeping police powers before the attack? It’s so little gain for so much effort.
Then there is the whole question of risk. Launching such an attack would easily meet the definition of high treason. If there were trials, conviction would result in death sentences for the top plotters and life sentences for the next tier or two. They would be impoverished by their legal costs. Their families would be hard-pressed to find places to live remote enough or obscure enough to avoid the ignominy that would fall on them, ignominy that would follow them for generations. Their political party, associates and supporters would desert them and their ideology in droves. Even trials with acquittals or strong evidence that did not result in indictments would subject them to devastating suspicion and scorn. What people as well-situated in American society as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the others would risk all that to get a law passed or to promote a war against a second-rate crippled state when they already held the levers of power?
If somehow plotters so clever as to successfully manage such a huge plot did so for such paltry reasons, why do it on US soil? With American forces all over the Persian Gulf and such a committed ally as Saudi Arabia right there, with a prying press and public so far away, why not do it right there in the Gulf? If a super-secret covert force staged an operation out of an American base in the Gulf no one would blink twice and the evidence could easily be stage-managed, especially with the help of the autocratic Saudi state.
Claim: A cruise missile was used to strike the Pentagon rather than a hijacked airliner.
Logic: A cruise missile is a large piece of property and is hard to move around in a subtle manner. It also costs millions of dollars and contains secret, or at least, classified, technology. They are therefore tempting targets for sabotage and espionage. They are certainly kept in some form of secure storage. They must also be subject to audit controls. A commanding officer and his subordinates who could not account for every cruise missile held by their unit would be in serious trouble that would likely end their careers and possibly result in criminal charges. It could be answered that a few cruise missiles could have been bought on a covert basis and hidden in cost overruns, but it would not have been hidden from everyone. Covert operations have always been tempting sources of extra income for covert operators, and I have to believe that somewhere in Washington is an office full of accountants and auditors with top-secret clearances who try to make sure that covert funds are not being spent on covert luxury vacation homes furnished with covert mistresses. The audit trail would not be cut off, just pushed back a little farther into the underbrush.
Cruise missiles can be launched from ships, aircraft and land-based launchers. Ground-launch units were never operational; that capacity only existed for testing purposes. No matter where they are launched from, some things must surely take place when they are used. Cruise missiles are basically subsonic unmanned jet aircraft, in effect flying bombs not unlike the V1 of World War II, with a range of about 1,500 miles. A technical crew must go over it to put in a state of readiness. The engine, electrical system, guidance computer and sensors and the warhead all have to be checked before launch. Cruise missiles also have to be fueled up shortly before launch and can only be held in readiness for a relatively short time. The launch officer would certainly want to obtain a weather report in the launch area and all the way to the target to avoid sending the missile through an unexpected thunderstorm or tornado that could disrupt the mission. There would have to be some way to make sure no aircraft were in the vicinity, maybe a check with a flight controller. All this is even more critical when it is being launched as part of a super-secret conspiracy. Nothing makes for a giant arrow flashing “Conspiracy This Way!” than a cruise missile taking off and smacking into an airliner, falling into a suburban Virginia parking lot or smashing into the Pentagon and failing to explode.
The 1,500-mile range means that any launch against Washington would have to take place in the Eastern United States, off the Atlantic Coast or in the Gulf of Mexico; the area from Bermuda to the Caribbean is far too crowded with ships and planes for adequate secrecy.
A submarine launch is probably the most difficult to hide. There is no place to hide an extra cruise missile aboard a sub, and the captain is ultimately accountable for every last one aboard at the end of the cruise. To make sure that any launch would not be accidentally observed the sub would have to come to at least periscope depth to conduct a visual and radar sweep. Russian submarines still operate in US coastal waters so precautions would have to be taken to make sure one was not in the vicinity (or any other ships or planes). Subs are dangerous places to handle jet engines and explosive warheads. One error can sink a very valuable vessel and cost the lives of several hundred sailors. There would have to be strict protocols in place for a launch and the entire crew would have to be placed on alert, not just the crewmen responsible for the launch itself. It would not be much less strict aboard a surface vessel. In addition, the launch of a cruise missile involves bright engine flames and loud noises. The entire crew of the ship therefore become witnesses; on a typical warship equipped for launch that might mean as many as three hundred sailors.
An air launch is no more likely to be kept secret than a seaborne launch. Air-launched cruise missiles are no longer in service with the US Air Force, but may have been in 2001. They were withdrawn because they were primarily used to carry nuclear warheads, so have been put away due to nuclear weapons limitation treaties. They could be launched from three types of strategic bomber: the B-52, B-1 and B-2. Launching a bomber with an armed cruise missile is not an event that would go unnoticed at any operational airbase. The missile would have to be withdrawn from the armory with some kind of convincing orders, which might be double-checked if anything looked suspect. Having a conventional warhead fitted would be remembered. There must be airbases out West where a bomber taking off is unlikely to be witnessed or arouse suspicion among the locals, but the bomber would have had to be withdrawn from its regular unit, which would be noticed and recorded even for a covert mission. Still, dozens, possibly hundreds, of people would have to be aware that a bomber with a live cruise missile was launched on 9/11 and it would not be hard to find out that it landed without one.
Any cruise missile fired at Washington would have to pass over densely populated areas for at least part of its course. Typically, a cruise missile flies at low altitude, at “treetop” height and civil aviation speeds. If so, it would probably be spotted by hundreds or thousands of people, some of whom would be likely to recognize it for what it was. At higher altitudes the likelihood of being spotted on air traffic control radar and seen from aircraft would be more than zero. In any case, the risk of collision in the heavily-used air corridors of the Middle Atlantic states would be significant.
It seems hard to believe that careful plotters would want to expose their operations to hundreds of military personnel and civilian witnesses or risk failure that would inevitably lead back to them.
Claim: Donald Rumsfeld was a part of the alleged conspiracy.
Logic: It is well-known and undisputed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when it was hit. His presence there raises serious issues with any conspiracy hypothesis. Assuming he was in on the plot raises one set of questions and assuming he was not raises another and even more difficult range of questions.
If there was a plot, it would be hard to assume that he was not in on it. It is much easier to pervert significant military assets into serving a massive plot if the Secretary of Defense is one of the plotters. On the other hand, would he really have hung around the Pentagon to be endangered by a missile or aircraft strike? Things can go wrong when deadly craft are flung around the skies and if some unforeseen event caused the plane to swerve or the missile to go off-target by no more than a couple of hundred yards, if that, it could just as easily have landed on the Secretary’s desk. It also seems unlikely on the face of things that he would have consented to have his own department targeted. Besides, if the plan was to promote some sort of military action, it is not good planning to risk destroying your supreme military headquarters and your top defense manager along with it. Rumsfeld has been around Bush and Cheney for decades. He would know how devious they could be, and if he hadn’t noticed before, he surely would have figured it out when the plot was hatched. I don’t know how far he would have trusted them if they told him it was crucial for him to be at the Pentagon and that there was no real danger involved; besides he could always call up someone in the Pentagon to find out just how accurate a cruise missile really is.
If Rumsfeld was not a party to the conspiracy or was and was not warned about the site and timing of the attack, then there is every likelihood he would have tumbled to it soon enough. He was at the crash (or missile) impact site, and if there were cruise missile debris he might have seen it for himself; if not, his technical experts would have given him the evidence soon enough. If he suspected military involvement he would certainly have demanded answers and he would have gotten them: the Secretary of Defense commands a small army of military and civilian investigators, inspectors, scientists and auditors as well as a real army, navy and air force and has a large number of senior military officers at his disposal, people who are used to not only demanding answers, but compelling them. The Defense Department also carries a lot of weight with other departments and agencies. Defense has huge resources in money, personnel, technology and logistics and provides essential services to many other parts of the Federal government; few of those agencies would be in a position to stonewall a Secretary of Defense once he was on the warpath. Any Secretary of Defense is bound to be a Washington insider to a large degree and Rumsfeld is very much one. This means that he has lots of friends and debtors in all branches of government. Once he got a hint that there was a conspiracy and that it had endangered him and his agency, there would be no calling him off. If he chose to go public, he would be holding convincing evidence. If he chose to keep it to himself it would have taken a bribe of awesome size to keep him silent, and probably not in money because he was already rich. Nor would threats have deterred him easily, not with all the resources at his command to keep him and his family safe.
So we are left with Rumsfeld the conspirator recklessly endangering himself and risking the safety of his department, or Rumsfeld left out in the cold and mighty unhappy to have been at the bull’s-eye, commanding his formidable power to root out and smash the conspiracy. Neither one seems to be particularly likely.
Claim: A plane from US Customs was involved in the downing of Flight 93, or alternatively in the attack on the Pentagon.
Logic: The aircraft used by the Customs Service are essentially business jets. They are not fighter planes. They are not fast enough to make good interceptors, even of a big airliner. They lack the hardpoints used to carry missiles or guns and they lack the high-powered radars and sophisticated fire control systems of fighter aircraft. They are not built to carry heavy missiles or gun pods. If one could have been retrofitted to carry and use weapons, that means that somewhere out there is a crew of aircraft engineers and technicians who could blow the whole plot open. The pilot would have to have recently left military service as a fighter pilot, since any other kind of pilot would lack the necessary skills and training.
If one had been fitted for weapons, what kind of weapons would have been used? A radar-guided missile is unlikely, because it calls for the aircraft to be fitted with a good-sized radar for detecting the target and guiding the missile in. These radars are not lying around like spare truck axles. They are expensive and contain classified technology that some other countries would love to get hold of. That means a potential audit trail. So, let us say a heat-seeking missile instead. There is still an audit trail that might point to the missiles being removed from inventory, but with over a hundred thousand Sidewinders having been produced, one might go astray without being tracked. The plane would still have to be fitted with launching rails, fire-control equipment and the equipment that sounds a tone in the pilot’s headset when the missiles have locked on to a potential target. Heat-seekers have been known to fail spectacularly in combat, so let us say two would be fitted for contingencies. These missiles are over nine feet long and two of them on the average business jet would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Anyone seeing it might be expected to recognize what he saw. Then there is the question of what happens if one missile (or even both) fail to strike the target. A nine-foot missile lying around in a pasture would certainly draw notice and if it exploded on contact wouldn’t be much less conspicuous. The finder would most likely call the police, who would be likely to bring in the fire department and local press and curiosity seekers would soon follow. With a hijacked plane in the vicinity, and especially a crashed one, this would be hard for the conspirators to cover up or wave away.
So, let us say it carried a gun pod instead of a missile. This gun pod would also have to come from military inventory. A gunsight would have to have been fitted. A radar gunsight raises the same issues as any other military equipment that might have been fitted. Maybe an old electro-optical gunsight from the World War Two era could have been fitted, but aerial gunnery is a demanding skill even with the best technology available today, and would require extensive expert training and considerable practice to ensure hitting a target reliably, even one as big as an airliner. In addition, the search for debris could hardly avoid turning up some of the hundred or more twenty-millimeter cannon shells that would be left around the area. These are substantial in size. No one would mistake them for shells from a deer rifle.
Some conspiracy theorists have another claim involving a Customs Service aircraft: that one was used to vector the cruise missile or remotely controlled aircraft that struck the Pentagon. The issues of fitting the necessary equipment to the plane and getting a pilot with the necessary skills apply here too.
What both claims also fail to address is: where did this Customs plane fly out of and return to? Customs (now ICE) aircraft are used to patrol near the Mexican border, in the Gulf of Mexico and over the waters around Florida and Puerto Rico. It would be noticed if there were one flying out of, or even to, the Northeast. Flying a heavily-armed business jet could not safely be done out of the civil or military airports that such aircraft typically fly out of and the plotters would probably be reluctant to send such a plane on a flight of hundreds of miles. The Middle Atlantic states are crowded and there are not many suitable locations for a secret airfield, fewer where the takeoff and landing of an armed civil aircraft would pass without risk of notice. Someone would have to preflight and fuel the plane. Some crew with the requisite skills would have to prepare the weaponry or other equipment. Someone would have to clear the plane for takeoff and square its presence with air traffic controllers.
While not impossible for determined conspirators with vast resources, it poses lots of unnecessary risks that could be avoided by simpler and more direct means.
Claim: NORAD was ordered to stand down on 9/11.
Logic: The North American Aerospace Defense Command is charged, like its name implies, with the air defense of North America, meaning the USA and Canada. The deputy commander always comes from the Canadian Forces, and there are always several hundred Canadian Forces personnel staffing the various sites across the USA and Canada. To issue a blanket stand-down order would mean that all these Canadians would have to have been aware of it. None of them would have any particular reason to be loyal to the Bush administration. Even if they didn’t shout out what they knew on the CBC or in "The Globe and Mail", at least some of them would have reported it up the chain of command. The Canadian prime minister would then have faced the choice of either making it public and bringing down the US government, or keeping it quiet. There would only be one possible incentive to keep it quiet: blackmail (Suggestions that the PM, or anyone else, is a lizard from another planet can be dismissed as too addled to seriously consider.). He wouldn’t have gone and enriched himself because that would be too conspicuous and even if he did, he would still want to bolster himself politically by wringing major concessions from the US. As a foreign head of state he could insulate himself from most kinds of revenge that the plotters could dish out. Canada is the largest trading partner of, and a major oil supplier to, the USA, so American economic threats would go nowhere. So where are the major economic, military or political concessions that the US would have had to make? Is it necessary to point out that they never occurred?
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Intelligent Design - Unintelligent Designer?
The recent movement to teach so-called “Intelligent Design” in the schools raises many questions that its proponents have not begun to talk about.
As you may know, Intelligent Design is the theory that assumes that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved by accident, but instead implies a deliberate design. The implication is that the designer is God, but that is not made explicit to avoid church-and-state issues in the schools.
Now, ID is a little weak in specifics. It recalls a famous Sidney Harris cartoon, showing two scientists at a blackboard full of equations. In the middle of the math is the phrase “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS”. One says, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” This aspect is the one that most criticism of ID centers around.
There is another aspect that I have not yet seen addressed. ID advocates say that the theory says nothing about the designer, yet they clearly want us to think of the Christian God. What if it’s not the Christian God, but Zeus and the other Olympians? Or Rama, or some other members of the Hindu pantheon? What if it’s actually The Brain From Planet Arous that designed us? Nothing is solved by this; it just puts the question back one more step – where did the designer(s) come from?
And what if there is not one designer, but many? So many of the really complex designs around us are the product of many different minds, each working on a single aspect (recalling the old joke that a giraffe is a horse designed by a committee). Automobiles, airplanes and Windows operating systems are far less complex than the simplest bacterium, but the design process for each of those receives input from many minds, each of whom is building on the work of many other people. They do not have to invent tires or fuel injectors from scratch, much less the chemistry of fuels or paints. The famous Honeywell round thermostat was the work of one designer, but he did not have to invent the thermostat, central heating or the free enterprise system. While this point can be argued back and forth as to its relevance to evolution, it is necessary to emphasize that every example of complex design that we know of rests on the work of many past and present designers, discoverers and inventors.
Beyond this is that design implies intent and intent implies purpose. The ID’ers seem to run under the assumption that we are here for God’s purposes, perhaps to praise him or to perfect ourselves according to divine plan. This would further imply a perfect – because divine – plan, and a mature design. But could we be someone’s apprentice project? Or worse, someone’s “The Apprentice” project? Could there be some cosmic Donald Trump about to tell our designer “You’re fired!”? Maybe we are not even up to that level, but the equivalent of one of those elementary school dioramas made with toy dinosaurs, flocking trees and tinfoil lakes. Maybe we are some junior deity’s fingerpainting, and it is almost time to go home and hang on whatever junior deities’ parents have in place of refrigerators. It could be worse. We could be part of a mass-production run, one of countless virtually identical Earths available in fine universes near you. We might be a prank, or a holiday ornament, or a chew toy for some vast entity’s pet. Earthly life might be a demonstration model. It could be someone’s bad example: This is what you get when you set the reproductive drive too high, or you base your lifeforms on carbon molecules. We could be the result of a biological warfare project, intended to spread beyond our planet and damage other worlds, or the mold growing on some cosmic leftover, or the equivalent of some pest-control bacterium.
There is a great deal of unspoken hubris on the part of the ID’ers. I strongly suspect that none of the people pushing Intelligent Design has given much thought to these questions. After thinking about it myself, I would rather not know the answers.
As you may know, Intelligent Design is the theory that assumes that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved by accident, but instead implies a deliberate design. The implication is that the designer is God, but that is not made explicit to avoid church-and-state issues in the schools.
Now, ID is a little weak in specifics. It recalls a famous Sidney Harris cartoon, showing two scientists at a blackboard full of equations. In the middle of the math is the phrase “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS”. One says, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” This aspect is the one that most criticism of ID centers around.
There is another aspect that I have not yet seen addressed. ID advocates say that the theory says nothing about the designer, yet they clearly want us to think of the Christian God. What if it’s not the Christian God, but Zeus and the other Olympians? Or Rama, or some other members of the Hindu pantheon? What if it’s actually The Brain From Planet Arous that designed us? Nothing is solved by this; it just puts the question back one more step – where did the designer(s) come from?
And what if there is not one designer, but many? So many of the really complex designs around us are the product of many different minds, each working on a single aspect (recalling the old joke that a giraffe is a horse designed by a committee). Automobiles, airplanes and Windows operating systems are far less complex than the simplest bacterium, but the design process for each of those receives input from many minds, each of whom is building on the work of many other people. They do not have to invent tires or fuel injectors from scratch, much less the chemistry of fuels or paints. The famous Honeywell round thermostat was the work of one designer, but he did not have to invent the thermostat, central heating or the free enterprise system. While this point can be argued back and forth as to its relevance to evolution, it is necessary to emphasize that every example of complex design that we know of rests on the work of many past and present designers, discoverers and inventors.
Beyond this is that design implies intent and intent implies purpose. The ID’ers seem to run under the assumption that we are here for God’s purposes, perhaps to praise him or to perfect ourselves according to divine plan. This would further imply a perfect – because divine – plan, and a mature design. But could we be someone’s apprentice project? Or worse, someone’s “The Apprentice” project? Could there be some cosmic Donald Trump about to tell our designer “You’re fired!”? Maybe we are not even up to that level, but the equivalent of one of those elementary school dioramas made with toy dinosaurs, flocking trees and tinfoil lakes. Maybe we are some junior deity’s fingerpainting, and it is almost time to go home and hang on whatever junior deities’ parents have in place of refrigerators. It could be worse. We could be part of a mass-production run, one of countless virtually identical Earths available in fine universes near you. We might be a prank, or a holiday ornament, or a chew toy for some vast entity’s pet. Earthly life might be a demonstration model. It could be someone’s bad example: This is what you get when you set the reproductive drive too high, or you base your lifeforms on carbon molecules. We could be the result of a biological warfare project, intended to spread beyond our planet and damage other worlds, or the mold growing on some cosmic leftover, or the equivalent of some pest-control bacterium.
There is a great deal of unspoken hubris on the part of the ID’ers. I strongly suspect that none of the people pushing Intelligent Design has given much thought to these questions. After thinking about it myself, I would rather not know the answers.
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