Monday, October 16, 2017

Hoagland's radio show goes from bad to worse to FAIL

Back story: In July 2015 Richard Hoagland, the former museum curator who hasn't had a job since the 1970s, launched a two hour, five-nights-a-week radio show The Other Side of Midnight, live on  Dark Matter Digital Network, and archived for members only. This blog commented several times as he first lost his best producer, Ross Campbell, then got kicked off DMDN, went to KCAA-AM for a while and thence to the cheaper WBCQ ($50/hr cf. $150.) In October 2016 the show folded.

        It was back in June this year, on a reduced "weekend only" schedule. In July the membership fee was doubled from $5 to $10 per month. From 15 July until 8 oct there should have been 26 shows, but seven of them were cancelled for various reasons, mostly technical issues. It became obvious that Hoagland was no longer paying a professional engineer.

        A week ago the announcement was made that Hoagland was abandoning the radio medium and falling back on the oh-so-cheap ($99/month) BlogTalk Radio. The announced show for Saturday night 14th October was Barbara Honegger: Historic 9/11 breakthroughs. NB: BlogTalkRadio is supposedly foolproof.

        What follows is a verbatim transcript of the train-wreck that ensued. The "Keith" referred to is not Keith Rowland of DMDN, the original tech. manager of the show,note 1; but Keith Laney, an imaging expert who had guested on the show numerous times. Laney has no known experience at managing radio or even podcasting.

[JAZZ MUSIC TRACK]
00:05 BH: "I'm hearing music."
RCH: "Yes, yes, you and I should not be going out over the air."
00:20 RCH: "Keith can you hear me?" [MUSIC VOLUME INCREASES]
[..?..] Can you call Keith and tell him..?? I need Skype
00:58 RCH: "OK, well, that's good. ?..?...you should hear it.
01:09 RCH: "OK, Barbara, what are you hearing?
BH: "I keep hearing music."
RCH: "No, I mean, when I called on you, you said you could not hear. What could you not hear?"
BH: "You mean when we were on the air?"
RCH: "Yes, yes, what could you not hear?
BH: "No, I can hear everything but there is a delay. When I spoke..."
RCH: "Ohhh it's..it's...it's a delay. Keith... You.. you're cutting out horribly, I can't hear you.
01:40 BH: "You talking to me?"
RCH: "I'm talking to Keith. My engineer. My temporary engineer. [LOUD THROAT-CLEARING] Keith I cannot hear you.  ... OK. Well obviously we can't solve this so we're gonna have to go to a back-up show, and we will recycle the ?show?, have the proper filters in place by tomorrow night. Guys I am so sorry. .. All right?
BH: "So are we on tomorrow night?"
RCH: "OK, I'm hearing a terrible delay. So this is a technical catastrophe. I guess....?? But, er... yeah, let's try and recycle the ?show? for tomorrow night."
BH: "Yes, that's fine."
RCH: "OK, good. So let me goodnight you, and then goodnight the music. And... good night everyone, and we'll go to a backup show, and tomorrow night same time, same bat-channel. We will try it without the echo. OK?"
BH: "Same time, same place. Tomorrow."
RCH: "Yep, yep.Thank you."
BH: "OK, all right."

==================================
The FB announcement was "OUR APOLOGIES, POSTPONED TO TOMORROW NIGHT DUE TO UNEXPECTED LAST MINUTE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES THAT WE HOPE TO RESOLVE BY TOMORROW EVENING…"

After a similar experience the following night we were told "DUE TO CONTINUING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES THE PROGRAM WITH BARBARA HONEGGER ORIGINALLY SCHEDULED FOR SATURDAY NIGHT TONIGHT, SUN / MON OCT. 15-16 HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE."

[Insert Homer Simpson D'oh icon]

Update:
        The 21st October show was CANCELLED, Hoagland complaining that after "hours and hours of checking" the settings suddenly changed. Personally I don't find that credible. However, he did get through an entire 3-hour show on 22nd October—Robert Morningstar commenting on the Las Vegas massacre. Now why, I hear you ask, would AM* be considered an expert on the topic, considering that he can't even get the name of the perp right? He first called him Steven Pollack, then half-corrected it to Steven Paddock. The actual name is Stephen Paddock.

Thanks to Bellgab commenters "Nobody" and "Pablo Smash" for info

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[1] The very first three words ever heard on the show were from Rowland. The words were: "I said go!"

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Robert Morningstar gets the Las Vegas massacre story hopelessly wrong

James Concannon writes...

        First we have Kerry Cassidy listening to the voices in her head and reporting them as if they were factual, and now we have Robert Morningstar, frisbee expert, publishing 3000 words on the Las Vegas massacre and getting almost nothing right. I will respect his claim of "All Rights Reserved" by not quoting from the piece, but I will review it and comment on it.

        For a start, Morningstar gets the name of the perp wrong. Throughout his essay, he writes "Steven Pollack" instead of Stephen Paddock. He may have corrected the text by the time you read it, but the original version was wrong. OOPS.

Original text © 2017 Robert Morningstar

        Reading this essay through, we don't have to wait long for the first major error. In the very first line Morningstar claims that this event was the worst killing in the history of the United States. Well, compare 58 dead with 268 (Battle of Little Bighorn), 2,996 (World Trade Center) and 700,000 (American Civil War.) What Morningstar is unsuccessfully grasping for is that the death toll was the largest of any mass shooting by an individual.

       Morningstar's whole thesis is that Paddock did not act alone—that there was at least one additional gunman at the Mandalay Bay. He gets started along that road by telling us that Paddock must have had help getting 23 firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition into Suite 32135. Well, perhaps... my remark on that is that bellmen at the Mandalay are quite used to carrying heavy equipment, since many pornographic videos are shot in Vegas hotel rooms.

        Morningstar embeds this video in his text, purporting to show gunfire from around the 10th floor of the Mandalay Bay. But that's impossible—there are no broken windows at that level, and the alternative explanation that the flashes are reflections is infinitely more credible.

        A second embedded video, recording the onset of the attack and almost all the carnage, is used by Morningstar as if it proves the "second gunman" case. Very few of the gunshots sound like the weapons fire we're used to hearing in films and TV—some sound almost like a slow drum roll, and some are more like loud clicks. The distinction between the two sounds is the heart and soul of Mr. Frisbee-man's case. But bump stocks were found on 12 of Paddock's 22 rifles, and two of them were mounted on bipods. Does it somehow strain Morningstar's logic to suggest that more than one weapon was used, perhaps even simultaneously, by a single shooter?

         Morningstar originally stated that he had triangulated (how?)note 1 the position of the second shooter to the ledge at third floor level.


        That idea has too many problems to be credible. How would a sniper get access to that ledge, and come back down after the event, without being observed? Why were no shell casings reported on that ledge? Is that vantage point too low to be effective, considering that bleachers at the concert venue would obstruct the view from that angle?

        Morningstar next alleges that both the Bellagio and Flamingo hotels were sprayed with gunfire that night—a claim that has specifically been denied by authorities. He shows us smartphone video made by RenĂ© Downs, but that video does not show what he says it shows. It shows crowds of excited people in the lobby and corridors of the Bellagio, prevented from exiting because the hotel (like all others on the Strip) was in lockdown.

        Our favorite frisbee expert wraps it all up by alleging, with no evidence whatsoever, that Pollack [sic] was working with the FBI over an arms deal that "backfired badly." Morningstar styles himself a "civilian intelligence analyst" but if this essay is a fair sample of his analysis I'd say he's a major, major failure.

Credentials
        In addition to making himself his own CIA, Morningstar writes that he is "a specialist in photo interpretation, geometric analysis and computer imaging." The Rational wikipedia lists six specific examples of where Morningstar's photo interpretation has been dead wrong. In May 2016 this blog listed 28 errors of interpretation by him. Once again, OOPS.

Update:
        Morningstar re-worked his essay into an article for UFO Digest. In it he suggested that a second gunman could have been positioned on the balcony over the main entrance to the hotel. The image below shows how more than half the concert audience would be obstructed by the stage and bleachers from that position:



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[1] Let's remind ourselves how triangulation works, shall we? You take optical bearings on the object of interest from two different places as far apart as is practical. Transferring your bearings onto a map then pinpoints the object.

This, however, is not what Morningstar did. He took a single freeze-frame from the taxi driver's video (perhaps around 03:00?) and visually matched a part of the canopy to arrive at what he now says is a position on the balcony over the drive-through hotel entrance. Fatal to his case is the fact that no shell casings have been found at that position—many windows overlook the balcony and canopy and it's inconceivable that such obvious evidence would have been missed.

At exactly 03:03 there are two flashes, but they are not associated with any sound of gunfire and it's impossible to tell what the actual source is. They look a lot like flash photography to me. If this is what Robert AM* claims to have "triangulated," he's a flim-flam man, not an intelligence analyst.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Kerry Cassidy on the road to Mandalay

        Kerry Lynn Cassidy wants us all to believe she has secret information sources that enable her to interpret current events more correctly than the professional media. Judging by her track record, I'd say that's just what Kerry wishes were true as opposed to anything with any actual truthiness. Yesterday she wrote "Years ago Camelot was told that 2017 was to be the final date for the showdown related to the currency reset." Well, there's not much of 2017 left for that one to play out, and there's no sign of this "reset" at all. Sean David Morton was another one who fretted about conspiracies in relation to currency, and look where that got him (in Federal jail, in case you hadn't already heard.)

        If you've guessed that the context of Kerry's remark is the horrible massacre that killed 58 country music fans in Las Vegas last Sunday night, you're correct. In a blogpost titled "War of Worlds: Pirates of Mandalay Bay : Illuminati versus U.S. Navy?" Kerry lays down her usual mix of paranoia, untruth and misunderstanding. She begins:
"The location of this latest false flag however real the human casualties relates to the history of Mandalay and Kipling, the British illuminati versus possibly what they may see as the U.S. Navy "pirates".  This may well be a turf war between illuminati factions over who will run the financial system and how and when it gets taken down and reformulated into the NWO currency.
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No doubt this is also all about controlling the guns (and getting the U.S. populations under control by attempting once again to take away their guns).  One would think by now they would know this will never work."
         My reformulation of that last comment would be "One would think the likes of Kerry Cassidy and Alex Jones would have realized by now that relentlessly interpreting shooting tragedies this way has no basis in fact or experience. From Sandy Hook to Pulse to Dallas to San Bernadino, such speculations have been shown to be hopelessly wrong. Guns have never been confiscated or even significantly reduced as a result."

Shooting blanks
She continues:
"The claimed shooter Stephen Paddock is a Manchurian Candidate if I have ever seen one...  Avid gambler, accountant and property manager.  Why?  Gamblers are heavily under mind control and in this case Paddock was an avid video poker player.  This only facilitates inserting subliminal commands necessary to activate a sleeping assassin.  Most likely he had no idea what he was doing. However, with the number of other shooters operating that night there may be no real way to tell if Pollack's gun was shooting blanks as a distraction or not."
        I'm not a poker player at all but I believe hundreds of thousands of men and women play video poker. How anyone would "insert subliminal commands necessary to activate a sleeping assassin" without activating everyone else is a problem for me. Besides, I doubt Cassidy has any evidence that Paddock spent any more time at video poker than the average teenager spends nattering and texting on his or her smartphone.

        The speculative connection to the British Illuminati via Kipling would be hilarious if it didn't show such gob-smacking ignorance and insensitivity to the agony of families who have lost sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. Not that we expect anything approaching sensitivity from Kerry—four days after the Charlie Hebdo assassinations she wrote "Where are the bodies?" as if she wouldn't even believe it had happened without seeing for herself the mutilated corpses of cartoonists.

        In a much briefer post a day earlier, Kerry Cassidy wrote "The signs are everywhere that the shooter in the Mandalay Bay massacre was a patsy and that shots were coming from other directions as well as on the ground"—to which I have to say WHAT signs? She also revealed just how gossamer-thin her "evidence" is, writing "I think there are some striking similarities to shooting in Manchester concert in the UK.  Man-dalay / Man-chester / Manchurian." That's about as convincing as the connection Kerry Lynn Cassidy / Killing LasVegas Concert / Kinky Laughable Codswallop.

Update:
Snopes has now looked at the evidence for a second gunman and confidently declared it FALSE.