Time to assess Jerome Corsi's prediction

         Jerome Corsi is the author of this, among other worthless pieces of self-published trash:

        He's very fond of writing and saying "Donald Trump always looks like he’s going to lose just before he wins", and on 3rd December he said, on Coast to Coast AM, "I'm 100% certain Trump will win the election" (note that that was exactly a month after Trump had decisively lost the election). Well, I don't think we need to wait for the inauguration. Today, as the mob assault on the Capitol is shameful history, and Congress has duly certified Joe Biden's win, I can say I'm 100% certain that Jerome Corsi was wrong.

        He's not a particularly interesting character this Corsi fellow. Just like his InfoWars colleague Alex Jones, he gives himself permission to write anything, regardless of the truth. The only purpose of his writing and speaking is to promote Republicans with lies and denigrate Democrats with innuendo (example: Obama was married to his male Pakistani roommate before Michelle^{note 1}). Yesterday's diatribe, headed "Trump Will Continue the Fight", included this lead:

« It is up to VP Mike Pence today to ... take action to preserve the greatest nation on God’s green earth from a takeover by the CCP division of the Army of Darkness. Pence presides over the joint session of Congress at 1pm Eastern, and has the power and responsibility to declare the fraudulent pre-certification of state electoral college delegates pledged to the #bidencrimefamily invalid. The battleground states must decertify their Biden electors and certify Trump electors.»

        Shows how much Corsi knows about constitutional law. Trump himself tried the same idea on Pence, and to his credit Pence replied "Sorry squire, no can do" (or an Americanised version thereof).

De-platformed
        Corsi was invited to the news segment of C2C-AM last night, as the joint session of Congress was reconvened and debating a trimmed-down list of ridiculous objections to the electoral collge voting. He made no comments about Trump's chances at all, instead wailing that he was being "de-platformed", that there is no freedom of speech, and that this will probably be his last appearance on the radio show because he'll soon be arrested.

         Well, I had a look round this morning and I don't know what he's talking about. His web site is still up. His YouTube and Vimeo channels are live. His Twitter and Farcebook accounts seem OK.^{note 2}

         Shame, really. I rejoice in the decision of Twitter and Facebook's to nix Trump's accounts and I wish they'd do the same to Corsi. Somebody who is that wrong has nothing useful to contribute.

Update 10th Jan

corsination.com now contains a notice, all tagged h1-strong, beginning:

« Due to the rampant censorship of the past few hours, our videos have been de-platformed. Because of this, none of the videos on the website currently play. »

        But wait... this is his own web site, the domain name bought by proxy in June 2018 and not due to expire until 2029. And his vids play perfectly well on the Tube that is You.

So Corsi's lying for some damn reason. Also he doesn't understand CSS.

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[1] Source :https://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2012/08/09/corsi-obama-was-in-gay-marriage-to-pakistani-roommate/

[2] His YouTube channel has 70,000 subscribers. His Twitter and FB presences have 131,000 and 22,000 followers respectively. These people must be the most naive, credulous people on the face of the Earth.

False information on Coast to Coast AM

        It's not exactly hot news that what a few million late-night listeners heard on C2C-AM last night was nonsense. That program's respect for truth is hardly better than that of some of our favorite liars and propagandists—Robert Morningstar, Mike Bara to name but two.

        But it's particularly egregious of the producers (Lisa Lyon, Tom Danheiser) to be trotting out Ben Fuchs at a time when the hospital systems of the USA are tottering on the brink of collapse due to the flood of COVID-19 victims. In the Los Angeles area, several hospitals are now turning away ambulances because they have nowhere to put the patients they bring. One hospital in that area has been treating patients in the gift shop. Surely the time for accurate information is now.

ICU at Loma Linda University Medical Center.(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

        Ben Fuchs and Joel Wallach are regulars on C2C, pretending to be doctors giving useful advice. In fact, they are pill-pushers whose most frequent advice is "BUY OUR SUPPLEMENTS". Fuchs is a cosmetic pharmacist by training and Wallach is a vet who often advises his audience to eat a dozen eggs a day.

GMO humans

        Last night Fuchs handed out bullshit on the topic of the vaccination programs now under way in many parts of the world. He said that the vaccines are scary because they enter every cell in your body and take over the cell's genetic machinery. They permanently alter cellular DNA such that for the rest of a recipient's life he is "a GMO human being".

        Some of that erroneous information is merely a repeat of what George Noory himself stated on the show on 20th December. The fact is that a vaccine, just like a virus, does possess a "key" allowing entry to a cell, but the key is only useful if there's a corresponding lock into which it fits. Such locks are only present on a class of cells called antigen-presenting. Dendritic cells and macrophages are two common examples. I emphasize that the cells the vaccine has the key to are exactly the same as the cells the virus can get into. That's really the whole point. The vaccine gets in ahead of the virus and creates antibodies that are as effective against the virus as they are against the vaccine itself.

        The new vaccines are essentially just single strands of messenger RNA, a few thousand nucleotides long. They need to be decoded just like the cell's indigenous mRNA, and for that purpose they seek out a ribosome. So yes, it's true to say that they make use of the cell's genetic machinery, but "take it over" is a useless exaggeration. If that were true the cell would soon die.

        The worst boo-boo dropped by both Fuchs and Noory was the nonsense about GMO humans. mRNA, being single-stranded, cannot possibly graft itself into double-stranded DNA. There's a biochemical incompatability, too—where DNA uses thymine RNA uses uracil. There is an interesting exception to this precept— HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, finds an enzyme called reverse transcriptase and turns itself into valid DNA. But, mercifully, that's not a trick that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has learned, and certainly that is not what the vaccines are designed to do.

        In my opinion, it is the height of irresponsibility for a popular radio show to be telling its listeners to be suspicious of the vaccine now. There are three ways this pandemic can end: the virus undergoes a suicidal mutation, which is more or less what happened to the flu pandemic of 1918-20, it kills the majority of the world's population, or we all get vaccinated.

Time to assess Mark Richards' February prediction

 On February 20th, I wrote the following:

« I promise I'll be back at the end of the year when Mark Richards' prediction can be assessed with certainty. Given that Richards is now serving a life sentence in Vacaville jail, with no special access to sources, I'm very confident that I will be telling him, if he's listening, that he was wrong.»

So here I am, as promised, to evaluate the prediction. Here it is in full:

« 100,000 people in China [are] involved in the virus. 30% have died, 30% are infected and 40% are taken off-world by Reptilians assisting China in their drive to eliminate approx. 500 million people ...

Those humans taken off-world, according to Mark, by Reptilians, are sold to other races for food and used as sex slaves. This virus will mutate and other governments are using it to facilitate eliminating some of their populations as well. One-quarter of a million people will die of the virus this year.»

Evaluation: 

• At the time of the prediction, 74,588 Chinese were confirmed infected. I can't now retrieve the number of deaths at that time, but 30,000 is undoubtedly wrong.
• As of today 4,782 Chinese have died. The Reptilians have apparently made no significant progress toward 500 million.
• "This virus will mutate". Absolutely correct.
• As I noted in a later comment, it only took until 5th May for the quarter-million deaths to rack up. As of today, 1,822,467 have died world-wide. The USA alone passed the quarter-million mark about a month ago.
• Now USA 346,408 deaths. UK 74,235 deaths

So Richards was not all wrong, but wrong enough for me to do the toldya dance.

Corsi
        I'm not going to be able to resist similarly assessing Jerome Corsi's "Trump will win" prediction. But that will have to wait until 21st January.

Here's a surprise, Richard Hoagland was wrong

 From this blog, March 14, 2016:

« When Gale crater was first announced as MSL's destination, Richard Hoagland announced on C2C-AM that Sharp Mountain was obviously an artificial construct, and that everyone at JPL knew that. Even President Obama knew it. ..... When Curiosity finally reveals Sharp to be just a mountain, what will he say then? Why, NOTHING, of course. Glad you asked. »

        Well, Curiosity has been on the lower slopes of Mt. Sharp for quite a while now and of course Hoagland has been silent on the topic.

        Yesterday NASA/JPL/CNES released the largest photo-mosaic of Mt. Sharp yet created. The images were from the ChemCam's Remote Micro-Imager, and the mosaic was created by a team at the University of Nantes, France from 216 overlapping images. Stéphane Le Mouélic provided the detailed explanation in a Marsblog. Here's a screen capture of one part of the huge photo-mosaic, but it's really worth looking at the whole thing.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech /LANL/CNES/CNRS/ IRAP/IAS/LPG

        If you think for one moment that Richard Hoagland is going to see that and publicly announce that he was completely mistaken, you don't know your Hoagland. Admitting error is NOT what he does. Let's face it, if he did he'd be doing so much of it that he'd have no time to plan and compile his ridiculous blogtalkradio show.

        Click on the label "hoagland errors" below to see a partial listing.

Planetary conjunctions

       The imminent Great Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction, plus a recent comment on this blog, got me wondering about gravitational forces at conjunctions. When Mars and Jupiter are in conjuction (as happened in 1836-7 and 1979-80, and will recur in 2123, 2170, 2313, and 2456) which of them exerts the greater pull on planet Earth? Mars is 8 times closer but more than 3000 times lighter. Let's find out.

DATA:

G = 6.674 x 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2 

Earth mass   5.97 x 10²⁴ kg
Mars mass    6.42 x 10²³ kg
Jupiter mass  2.00  x 10²⁷ kg

Earth-Mars av. dist.    78 x 10⁹ m
Earth-Jupiter av. dist 628 x 10⁹ m

FORMULA:

F = Gm₁m₂/d²

RESULT

Gravitational attraction Earth-Mars:      4.2 x 10¹⁶ newtons
Gravitational attraction Earth-Jupiter 202 x 10¹⁶ newtons

Eccentricity
         The orbit of Mars is sufficiently eccentric (0.09) that its closest approach to Earth is 55 x 10⁹ m. It's possible for a conjunction to coincide with closest approach, but that still wouldn't be enough to overcome Jupiter's dominance.

Congrats to CNSA (again)

        The Chinese National Space Agency is due congratulations for successfully retrieving lunar samples in its Chang'e 5 spacecraft today.

        However, unlike CNSA's brilliant achievement of January 2019, when they landed Chang'e 4 on the far side and placed a relay satellite in lunar orbit to talk to it, this was not a First. The Sovs performed this trick three times, with  Luna 16 (September 1970), Luna 20 (February 1972) and Luna 24 (August 1976).

More detail on Hoagland's jail time

        Jason Colavito, who does for pseudo-history what I do for pseudoscience, evidently tortured himself by listening to the whole three hours of last Sunday's Other Side of Midnight — Richard Hoagland's podcast on blogtalkradio.

        Colavito made his review into yesterday's blog, and I enjoyed his digs at pseudo-historian Scott Wolter — Hoagland's Sunday night guest and one of Colavito's perenniel punching bags. I enjoyed reading that Hoagland called the Utah monolith (now disappeared) a “hyperdimensional tetrahedron” because it's SO HOAGLAND to be that wrong about a current event.

        Perhaps most of all I enjoyed a comment from someone who labels himself "HOAGLAND HOKUM" but can only be Richard Grossman, publisher of Hoagland's 1987 book The Monuments of Mars. I reproduce Grossman's comment in full:

« Here is another little secret about Monuments: the only way the damn thing ever got written was that Hoagland went to prison for one of his inexplicable and weird scams (ostensibly something about a stolen rental car and New York Planetarium credit card)—whether it really happend or not as reported, whether it was really a scam or not, and whether he was really guilty or sentenced fairly or not (the answer to the latter is definitely “not,” as he had an attorney involved in his own weird paranoid cosmic conspiracy theories, including Hoagland). In the end he was incarcerated over a New York State warrant that he chose to flee (to the Golden State) rather than defend in situ; he was apprehended in Berkeley when stopped for having a cardboard rear license plate; refused to plea-bargain; and so got housed in L.A. County jail for over a year. Admittedly my version of the story is cobbled out of hearsay from a variety of semi-reliable sources, but it roughly tracks some event that actually happened. He was in jail; that’s where I addressed my mail to him regarding the book; and he did write much of the book there.»

David Sereda tells us a fairy story

       The Rational wikipedia describes David Sereda as an "all-purpose wingnut" — a believer in contact with Pleiadians, zero-point energy, and the healing power of solfeggio frequencies, among other crackpot ideas. He's one of those people who don't thoroughly understand what the U part of UFO means, and proclaims, in at least one book, that he can identify the unidentified, and explain the unexplained. Those blobby things, he says, are spaceships carrying hostile extraterrestrial intelligences.

        He was interviewed last Thursday by another all-purpose wingnut and conspiracy theorist, Kerry Cassidy. His theme was not at all topical—it was a theory that has been hashed and rehashed on websites and in books and TV shows for 17 years. The theory is nothing less than the idea that one of those blobby things was responsible for the breakup and destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, 1st February 2003. His evidence is this strange time-lapse photograph taken from Bernal Hill in San Francisco by an amateur photographer as Columbia streaked overhead.

        To Sereda, the squiggle is an incoming extraterrestrial attack. He quite rightly says that lightning—an explanation that some have come up with^{note 1}—is not a possibility. Columbia was too high, and lightning does not last for any substantial fraction of ten seconds. However, he's so enamored of his attack theory that he fails to consider any other mundane explanation.

Just a jolt
        Sereda did not identify the amateur photographer who shot this and four other images over San Francisco. It is, in fact, a man by the name of Peter Goldie. Goldie himself was puzzzled enough by what he had captured that he went to great lengths to contact NASA and offer his photographs as forensic evidence. NASA took notice, and sent astronaut Tamara Jernigan to examine the shots personally. Goldie willingly allowed his camera to be taken to the FBI lab at Quantico, and the story hit the crackpot headlines. Goldie writes:

« Pick a fringe group, be it anti-government, fundamentalist believer, HAARP, chemclouds, right wing, left wing, secret dreams of psychics, etc… they all seem to have an angle on what really happened to the Columbia Shuttle, and it always involves the “purple corkscrew”, my “confiscated” camera and that “they” are forcing me to hide the truth.»

        Goldie's own explanation? He goes with the result of the FBI investigation: a jolt was all it took. He did not have a cable release, so the mere act of opening the shutter would have jogged the camera enough to cause the squiggle. Consider this, too: Goldie took five ten-second shots, panning the camera between each. During the minute that took, at a reentry speed of 17,500 mph, Columbia would have traveled nearly 300 miles. And yet, in every shot the squiggle ends at the point where the spacecraft is. If the squiggle was an attack the intercept point would have fallen further and further back in each photo.

        The cause of the tragedy has been well explained by a foam strike at take-off. Goldie told his story to Rawstory in February 2013. Read it here.

        So, basically, Sereda made a fool of himself last week.

Oberg on the case
        James Oberg investigated this claim in 2008. Here's his report.

Update:
      Sereda told the same fairy story on Coast to Coast AM, 7th December. Unchallenged by George Noory, of course.

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[1] Quest TV floated the lightning theory in a YouTube vid in May this year.