Nutjob Watch

I think much of my initial reaction to the petition to "Stop Domain Name Parking and Cybersquatting" has already been said in my Attack of the TechnoPinkos post of a couple weeks ago. This is a typical example of leftist angst stemming from the fact that people actually earn a living and gasp generate profits from monetizing domain names.

As somebody in the domain industry (we aren't a big domain parking player and as a registrar we have exactly 0% of the domainer market, and most people know how I feel about the aftermarket and how overheated it is), there are a few issues with this "petition" that I feel duty bound to point out.

It is with ever increasing bemusment I scan nutjob havens like GodlikeProductions and RumorMillNews and find the tempo of the hysteria has been palpably building lately (possibly because of the impending destruction of Earth by Planet X within the next 6 months)

When everything is a conspiracy and the shadowy cabal at the top controls all history, it comes as no surprise that the new London Olympic Games logo:



Spell's "ZION" to the gaggle of nuts in the tinfoil hats. All you have to do is "some slight rearrangement of symbols on the 2012 logo it spells out ZION!" (which is a real quote). I love that phrase "slight rearrangement". These BigConspiracy nutjobs have no problems shoehorning anything into a worldview where a bear can't crap in the woods unless a reptillian overlord in the shadows has planned it out.

Some slight rearrangement of the symbols also gets you ZZ Top, and if you don't move anything I think if it spells anything it's either ZOIN or ZOIZ or maybe ZIOZ. I think Jon Stewart nailed it when he said "it looks like a slot machine going down on an ATM".

About a year ago I blogged about the approaching June 6, 2006 date and owing to its MM/DD/YY date string I predicted that a lot of rubbish was going to surface in form of conspiracy theories around this date.

It looks like I was right, just a small sampling of net.kookiness brings all kinds of hyperbole from the lunatic fringes of the internet like June 6, 2006: 6 Things You Must Know, the Left Behind folks are releasing The Rapture on June 6, and even mainstream Hollywood is re-releasing The Omen on this date.

What I didn't expect was that my original blog post would become the #1 organic search result in Google for various June 6, 2006 related terms and that over the last few weeks, there have been a lot of those and they've been accelerating.

A quick look at some of the search terms people are using include:


june 6, 2006
june 6 2006 the end?
end of the world june 6
june 6, 2006 and 666
6th of june conspiracies
what is going to happen on june 6 2006
june 6 2006 end of world
earthquake prediction june 6 2006
significance of june 6, 2006
world ending on june 5th
wwiii 666
june 6 2006 bible


and the list goes on. It's pretty interesting. I moved the blog today (wanting to get a handle on all the trackback spam I was getting on the old one, and to put it on one of my own servers), and I'm now tailing the access logs in realtime. Over the last few weeks it was getting up to a couple or few hundred visitors per day to this 1 year old blog post (the average post on my blog gets maybe 5 or 6 visits a day), and I think today it will go over the 1000 uniques mark, I expect a crescendo of activity leading up to D-Day next week (pun is very much intended).

Anyone concerned that the world may end on June 6th should bear in mind there was another subculture of net.kooks who were pretty convinced there would be an asteroid hit on May 25th, and some of these people (as I've remarked before), seem genuinely disappointed that it didn't happen. They keep their hopes up. Maybe the asteroid will hit week.

Plane crashes are in themselves so rare and so spectacular that when they occur we are both horrified and fascinated. Hence the eyewitness reports from yesterday's Air France crash at Pearson that spotted drivers pulled over to the side of the 401, standing on their car roofs photographing the spectacle with their camera phones.


Yesterday was a good day. It's rare that something like that happens and everybody gets out alive. In fact it's quite amazing and I think everybody should be thankful and happy that there were no fatalities.


Of course, this kind of event brings the nutjobs out en masse:

Cloak and Dagger

RADIO-NEWS Bulletin

4:54 PM EDT August 2, 2005


WAR BETWEEN BRITAIN

AND FRANCE BREAKS

OUT IN TORONTO


Toronto - British Secret Police Forces attacked an Air France Jet at Pearson

Toronto Airport this afternoon.


This escalation of hostilities comes on the heels of four British MI-6

agents being arrested by the French in Chicago and are in detention for

attempting to assassinate the Chicago Grand Jury Special Prosecutor Patrick

Fitzgerald who brought down criminal indictments against George Bush and

Dick Cheney last night.


Last week French Special Forces prevented British Intel from assassinating

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.


Stay tuned to the Cloak for more breaking news on this new escalation of the

ongoing Anglo-French War.


It seems things are unraveling fast.

This came from http://www.cloakanddagger.de/, which if you look at the web page has the stamp of CREDIBILITY all over it. (*sarcasm*). Note to the fringe: animated graphics and java ticker messages are the stamp of the loons and the lowfi net users. If you want to be taken seriously, do not use these elements in your web pages. They've gone the way of the <BLINK> tag.


I remember when JFK Jr. went down in his plane and there were nutjobs posting all kinds of conspiracy theories about it, one going so far as to claim the event was prophesized by Nostradamus.


This is getting ridiculous folks. The lunatic fringe is diluting the credibility of true social, political and economic scrutiny and criticism.

It looks like I made a poor choice of an examples in my How To Detect a net.myth in 4 easy steps post the other day.


The original article in American Conservative magazine is available from their website here, so the article itself is real. I must have overlooked it the first couple times I was on the website.


In tracking down an "original sighting" of the article I left a message in Larouche Publications general mailbox after reading their Guns of August press release on the matter. Anton Chaiktin was kind enough to return my call this morning and point me to the original article on the website. Further, he added that White House Chief-of-Staff Scott McClelland was asked about this on thursday and the exchange was picked up by CNN.


I can at least tell that the exchange happened, since full transcripts of the White House briefings are available from the White House website and thursday's session contains this exchange:

Q: Scott, an article in the American Conservative by Philip Giraldi, former intelligence operative, indicated the Vice President has revamped strategy towards Iran where there are now 300 to 400 missiles targeted various sites in Iran, including tactical nuclear missiles, especially aimed at the Iranian nuclear capabilities. These are now, according to Giraldi, also under command of the theater commander.


Given our problems with Iran and the fact that now that they have decided to go for the full cycle of their peaceful nuclear program, might we be anxious that if there were a terrorist incident here in the United States in any way connected to Iran, that there might be a knee-jerk reaction of utilizing this hair-trigger against the Iranians?

MR. McCLELLAN: One, I appreciate your question. I'm not going to get into accepting anything that you alleged in your comments. I'm not going to get into discussing matters relating to national security of that nature.


Two, in terms of Iran, Iran made some commitments to suspend their uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities. We expect them to abide by that commitment. If they were to begin those activities again, they would be violating the commitment they made under the Paris agreement with the Europeans. And we have made it very clear that Iran has a history of hiding their nuclear activities from the international community. That's why it's so important that you have some confidence-building measures, or objective guarantees in place, so that they show the international community that their nuclear program is not being used to develop weapons, or that they're not developing weapons under the cover of a civilian program.


And if Iran is going to violate their agreements, then we would, obviously, be looking at discussing with the Europeans, who have also committed to doing so, looking at going to the Security Council.

So I stand corrected on doubting the veracity of the original quoted article. It is real, and perhaps this post emphasizes my earlier point, now that I've found citations outside the original circular linkages.