Trying to talk sense to Kerry Cassidy

       Trying to talk sense to Kerry Cassidy... a mug's game, you may well think. Well, so indeed it is, to judge by her guest spot last Monday on Rob McConnell's 'X' Zone internet radio show. McConnell (the ex-Cop, not the jazz trombonist) interviews as many of the woo-woo people as he can get, but takes a much harder line than, say, Jimmy Church or Scott Teeters.

        After a long preamble during which Kerry introduced herself as someone who had a burning desire to get the truth out (but also explained how ETs stole her eggs for a breeding program,) we got to some nitty-gritty.

22:49 RMcC: "I understand that there was a time when you believed that you were being targeted by the government."
KC: "Yes, sure. We're all being targeted. Some people don't know it though."
RMcC: "Why are we being targeted?"
KC: "Because your government is out to get you."
RMcC: "But isn't the government..."
KC: "They are not your friends."
RMcC: "Isn't it for the people..."
KC: "..and I'm not talking about the people... you know, sort of... government flunkies that just simply follow orders, I'm talking about the people at the higher levels."
RMcC: "So are you talking about the New World Order, the..."
KC: "They have a plan, and you're considered  collateral damage, and they will  lay false flags, and there is  only one way in which they will use you as, basically... you know, cannon fodder. So your governments are, um... they're out to get you.

        As Kerry expounded on her usual themes -- you know, like how US soldiers who believe they've been deployed to Iraq have actually been to Mars to battle the ETs -- McConnell got more and more scornful, until it finally descended into acrimony.


37:44 RMcC: "Why do you hate the government?"
KC: "Well, you know, I don't hate the people... er, that don't know anything, although I do think they're probably fairly stupid if they don't at this point, because in 2016 there's a lot of information out there, but.. I don't hate... you know, I don't really go around hating. I simply note their... their faults. That they are doing things that are against ...um, what is good for the rest of the world. That they are... sort-of run by the dark side. And, um... what can I say? They're trying to control humanity and limit its growth. Limit its ability to become self-reliant and be sovereign."
RMcC: "OK, you know I... I... I admire your passion. I really do. And once again I'm going to have to ask you why you have not thrown your hat into the political arena, to try and make a difference where people will not be able to deny what you're saying. Bring the evidence forward."
KC: "But elections are rigged. Your so-called political arena is rigged. Judges are bought... the system itself is corrupt. It's corrupt all the way through. It's run by the mafia, the CIA and... er, you know, unbelievable numbers of dark magicians, etc. etc. So ...you know, I don't consider people who run for office as going to get very far... [...story about Mike Harris...] So that's what I can tell you about your system."
RMcC: "Well, you know what? I love my system. I have nothing... I have nothing but the greatest.. the greatest..."
KC: "You know, Rob, really seriously, you sound... you sound like a fairly intelligent guy..."
RMcC: "I am a very intelligent guy."
KC: "You're absolutely sleep-walking...you're just feeding yourself..."
RMcC: "But you know what? I was part of the system. I was part of the system for a great number of years."
[talking together...]
RMcC: "....and what you're saying as a person who was never part of any established government organization at all. You're blowing smoke up people's asses. That's what you're doing. Because not one word..."
[talking together...]
RMcC: "....not one single word. It's true. Not one single word that you have said about government corruption, and about the, er... the, er... "
KC: "...not a single word of what?"
RMcC: "....is true."
KC: "Oh My God! You know, really.. what era are you from? I mean, seriously. Do you do no research at all? You have a radio show for what? You know, How many years?"
RMcC: "25 years."
KC: "Come on, Rob, you can't be living in the dark like this..."
RMcC: "No, I live in the truth. I don't live in a land of... of conspiracy, where everybody's out to get me. I can't... you know, I can't do this..."
KC: "Thank you for having the guts to bring me on your show, but seriously, I can't... I can't even take you seriously. I really think... you really..."

        At his point we went to dead air for a few beats. McConnell said "Hmmm... Jeez, I wonder what happened there..." In her own blog, Kerry wrote that McConnell hung up on her. "He was rude and I guess he was way out of his comfort zone.  Rob McConnell is one of the people they had in mind when Jack Nicholson said, "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH".   Poor guy."

        It sure sounded to me as though it was Kerry who disconnected. But I'm just the innocent bystander, getting a kick out of hearing someone say to Kerry what I'd like to get a chance to say. "blowing smoke up people's asses..." Oh yes. That.

Thumbprints on Mars?

 photo credit: JPL/Univ. Arizona HiRISE

        Just a pretty (and enigmatic) picture today, instead of having a go at pseudoscientists. This is a treatment of a HiRISE frame done by Lori Fenton, who studies these things.^{note 1} Please read Lori's blog for an explanation -- it's extremely interesting.

        Question: Why do the pseudo-astronomy people feel the need to invent bullshit artifacts on Mars, when there are genuinely interesting features like these to discuss? Ooops, I couldn't resist having a go after all.

========================
[1] Lori Fenton is a planetary aeolian geomorphologist. A dune guru, in other words.

Sean and Melissa Morton arrested

        Passing on gossip is not the most noble of this blog's raisons d'être to be sure, but this is too good to pass up. Yesterday, an anonymous Wikipedia editor using the name "Nofway" added the following content to Sean David Morton's article. The text was sourced as copied from http://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/hermosa-beach-couple-arrested-federal-charges-related-tax-scam-and-passing-false-checks, which looks authentic but it is just possible that it's spoofed.

        So I make no claim to the authenticity of this information, but enjoy it anyway. It's plausible because the Mortons are known to be in deep shit with both IRS and SEC^{note 1} (read the the article if you need to know why.) Bear in mind that the Mortons are very good pals of both Mike Bara and Kerry Cassidy. Remember this pic from the Summer of 2012? Sean and Kerry swanning around Europe, leaving Melissa to interview Mike on the Internet radio.

photo credit: Project Camelot

        Strange synchronicity -- that four year old interview also covered Ken Johnston's accusation of Apollo negative tampering, that I wrote about again yesterday. But I digress — here's the dirt.

Two Hermosa Beach residents were taken into custody yesterday after being indicted by a federal grand jury on a host of charges related to a scheme to defraud the Internal Revenue Service, which included passing bogus checks and bonds as a way to pay off debt for themselves and others.

On February 1, 2016 Sean David Morton, 58, and his wife, Melissa Ann Morton, 50, were expected to be arraigned in federal court in Los Angeles on a 56-count superseding indictment that was returned by a grand jury on January 27. The couple was arrested by special agents with IRS - Criminal Investigation in San Pedro Sunday morning after disembarking from a “Conspira-Sea Cruise.” According to the superseding indictment, Sean David Morton filed a series of false income tax returns for the years 2005 and 2010 that sought millions of dollars in refunds. Melissa Morton allegedly filed several false tax returns for the year 2007. The couple “caused multiple copies and multiple versions of their income tax returns to be submitted to various IRS service centers throughout the United States in 2009 and 2010,” according to the indictment, which alleges they attached false Forms 1099-OID to support their claims for refunds. The indictment specifically alleges that Sean David Morton filed a false 2006 income tax return 2010 that requested a refund of $2,809,921, and that in 2012 he filed a document that sought a tax refund of $1,560,634 for 2006.

In relation to the scheme, the indictment alleges that Sean David Morton on multiple occasions submitted to the IRS documents he called “Coupon for Setoff, Settlement, and Closure” in the amounts of $5,286,867 and $8,429,763. “These fictitious financial instruments were a purported bond in exchange for the refunds they sought from the IRS,” according to the indictment.

Melissa Morton allegedly presented to the IRS in 2010 a “Coupon for Setoff, Settlement, and Closure” in the amount of $44,450 as a purported bond in exchange for a $14,450 refund that she sought. And, in 2013, both defendants allegedly presented to the IRS two “Non-Negotiable Discharging Bond and Indemnity” in the amounts of $10 million for Sean David Morton and $600,000 for Melissa Morton.

If they are convicted of the charges in the superseding indictment, Sean David Morton would face a statutory maximum sentence of 650 years in federal prison, and Melissa Morton would face a statutory maximum sentence of 625 years.

Update 1:
The story is now confirmed.

Here's the full 56-count indictment.

Update 2:
        A reporter who is legally trained has now reported from the ConspiraSea cruise, and it's well worth reading. An excerpt:

"Winston Shrout and Sean David Morton were the subjects of my Day 2 post. That post was much more critical and aggressive than I expected any of my writing to be. To the extent that it earned me a little browbeating from a Shrout fan who was upset that I criticized him....I couldn’t hold back. As I’ve said I’m a lawyer, and I know that what Shrout and Morton were teaching was absolute crap. It wasn’t arguably right. It wasn’t thinking outside the box. It wasn’t creative reinterpretation of the law. It was complete nonsense, in that it literally did not make any sense."

============================
[1] See the SEC's 4 March 2010 complaint filed in US District Court, and the judgement issued on 15 February 2013.

Kerry Cassidy does Ken Johnston (again)

        Almost two weeks ago, Kerry Cassidy released a new two-hour interview with Ken Johnston onto what she calls her "TV network." It's permanently available on the Tube that is You.

        She introduced Ken as a whistleblower, largely reading from the Rational Wikipedia article about  him, but missing out the part which details misrepresentation of his military career. James Oberg has written about that in much more detail on this blog.

        Technically, the interview was quite hard to follow, being done via webcam with extremely choppy audio, but I reviewed it and got the idea (perhaps because I've heard most of the material before.) Kerry, of course, had a different explanation for the poor audio quality.

59:00 KC: "It's very funny that we have a bad connection, when you've done so many interviews. It's really fascinating... er, that they're really afraid that you're going to say something ... because I'm going to ask you some good questions that most people don't have the guts to ask you."

        Yes, sure Kerry, when the bad guys want to censor you they don't just jam the whole thing, but only cut out the audio at times when they can't predict what exactly they're going to be cutting.

Skullduggery at the light table
        It surely didn't take any "guts" at all to ask Ken to repeat the story he's told many times, of wandering into a secure NASA backroom to find a team of people altering the original film images shot by the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. This time around he added the detail that this was being done on a light table, the images in question were large negatives, and the technicians were blotting out stars in the lunar sky "because they might confuse people."

        There are two major problems with that story. First, there were no stars visible in those photographs. It's impossible to take a shot in such a way that the bright lunar surface is correctly exposed and the much fainter stars are also visible. Second, if they were dealing with negative film,  stars, if they existed, would appear as tiny black dots while the sky surrounding them would be transparent. There is no retouch process that would make those little black dots also transparent.

        The tiny kernel of truth hidden here may be that the photographs were being retouched to remove sparkle that might have been misinterpreted as stars. However, if this was done it would have been done on a print, not a negative, and not on a light table.

        Later (at 1:12:40) Kerry suggested that the purpose of smudging out stars was that the constellations would have revealed too much about where they really were. You have to admire a mind that is ignorant enough and paranoid enough to come up with that one. They were on the fucking Moon, Kerry.

Looks like we've got something in that crater there
       Kerry had some exhibits -- mostly images from Ken's  own Apollo collection that she invited him to comment on. Nothing illustrates the shoddiness of the analysis these two clowns bring to lunar imagery better than this one.

        Ken said "See that bright area there? Looks like a bit of smudging out that's been done." Kerry replied, enthusiastically, "We definitely look like we've got something in that crater there." Yeah, Kerry, a central peak. They're all over the Moon. So what we have here is two people to whom overexposure of part of a film frame is evidence of tampering. God give me strength...

        Other exhibits included a possible Moonbase in the background of AS15-88-11967, and "advanced technology" in AS12-49-7224. To be fair, on the latter image, Ken added

(1:27:49) "A lot of these anomalies that people will see -- I don't necessarily see them, 'cause I'm pretty much a straightforward engineer .. We know that if we stare at the wall long enough we can make all kinds of pictures."
KC " At least we can say that it doesn't look natural."
KJ: "That is correct, it doesn't look natural."

Disclosure
         At one point Kerry said that Brian O'Leary left the USA because he felt he was under threat because of his disclosures. That annoyed me because I have personal knowledge of this. O'Leary didn't disclose anything. He had nothing to disclose, having never flown in space. He left the USA because he was shagging Meredith Miller, and she wanted to go off to Ecuador to establish a New Agey retreat (which still exists, by the way, even though O'Leary died in 2010.)

        Kerry boasted that the Project Camelot Youtube chan has 122,000 subscribers, which is close to true (actually 117,173 right now, and some screens say more.) But she also claimed (at 1:41:02) to have 42,000,000 viewers. Er... I think that should be viewer minutes, not viewers, Kerry.

Robert Morningstar does something disgusting

        Robert Morningstar, a self-described "civilian intelligence analyst," has made many errors in reporting what he thinks are facts, as this blog has pointed out here, here, and here (I could go on.) Two days ago he excelled every previous outlier in both mis-reporting and bad taste.

        Morningstar is a propagandist for the ultra-right in US politics, and also for the rising resistance against the spread of Islam. On 26 January he posted this on Facebook:

"Islam is certainly NOT a "religion of peace" as Obama professes and pontificates. Islam is a religion of pieces of human beings, left scattered, with many other victims maimed across the world in the Name of Allah, the merciless and despicable, a demonic deity who demands and condones subhuman barbarity and depravity such as this."

         Immediately underneath this text was a picture which I am not going to reproduce, but I'll describe it. It shows a decapitated young woman in stark, horrific detail. She's dressed in a black bra and figure-hugging denim trousers. Her severed head lies about a foot from her body, and she is lying in a lake of blood. There also appears to be a stab wound in her chest.

        Barbarity and depravity indeed. The problem with this as anti-Islamic propaganda is that it has nothing to do with Islam. The victim is Patricia Pereira da Silva, a Brazilian who was killed by her jealous boyfriend, Renato Guilherme Silva, after he caught her posting photos to another man on WhatsApp. It happened last Spring in the State of Pernambuco, in a village called Angelito Agreste.

        What can be said about a man who would use such a revolting picture so dishonestly? His own words "despicable" and "depravity" are pretty good for a start. I suggest that this outrage has stripped everything he has ever said and written, plus everything he will ever say and write in future, of any credibility.

Mike Bara, Joseph Farrell, and Albert Einstein: Guess which two faces have egg on

        That was Mike Bara the world-famous theoretical physicist, tweeting yesterday complete with the usual keyboard error (the end of the sentence is "....rotation.") The brain error involved is not so easy to spot, but it's predictable to those of us who know Bara's habits. He's so keen to snipe at physics that he'll grab anything that looks like ammunition without considering it, checking it, or discussing it. In this case --as in the past-- he's made a total slobbering idiot of himself.

        The link is to an edition of Giza Death Star, the webblog of Dr Joseph Farrell. Farrell is treated like a guru by the woo community because he has what they like to call "an open mind"^{note 1} and he also has academic credentials (unlike, say, Bara, Hoagland, Morton, Cassidy et al.) His doctorate, however, is in patristics^{note 2} which is more like religion than physics. Anyway, here's a screen capture of the start of Farrell's piece:

        Why am I showing a screencap instead of linking to the article? Farrell has taken it down, that's why. And why has the professor of religious writings taken it down, I hear you ask. BECAUSE IT'S BOLLOCKS, that's why, and even Farrell came to realize that. The link is to this article in the London Daily Telegraph.^{note 3} See the date? 22nd September 2011. This is just the old story of the neutrinos that seemed to exceed the speed of light until the technicians checked the optical fiber connections and found one of them to be faulty.

        Oh dear, there really is egg on some faces today, and I don't think Einstein's is one of them.

Update:
Somebody in Facebookistan pointed out that this was old news, and Bara dug himself further into the merde by revealing his ignorance in more depth:

Thanks to Chris Lawrence and Stuart Robbins for help with this post.

=============================================
[1] The translation of that is "advocates ideas that are popular with the woo people but have been thoroughly discredited by real people." Example: The Great Pyramid was a weapon of mass destruction.
[2]  The study of the writings and background of the church fathers (per Merriam-Webster).
[3]  The page will whinge at you if you have an ad-blocker, but at least you'll be able to see the date.

Planet Nine: Mike Bara in an eccentric orbit

        Anyone with a smidgen of interest in astronomy cannot have missed the recent announcement by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech, of a purely theoretical Neptune-sized planet in a highly eccentric 15,000-year orbit stretching way beyond the Kuiper Belt. Here's the article by Eric Hand in Science, and here's the diagram sketching the six Kuiper-belt objects whose orbits cluster in a way that Batygin and Brown say needs explaining.

credit: Science magazine

        It's very important to understand that "planet nine" has not actually been observed, and may never be. Claims for a Planet X have a long and erratic history.^{note 1} However, I admit that it is possible that the WISE survey could have missed such an object -- theoretically, WISE could have detected a Jupiter-sized planet up to a light-year from the Sun or a Saturn-sized object out to 10,000 AU, but if P9 is at or near the outer reach of its orbit, it could just possibly have slipped by.

        Mike Bara's blog today, predictably, is one long self-congratulatory TOLDYA. Here's the meat of it:

"In my second book The Choice from New Page Books, I made a series of predictions that I stated would validate or invalidate the basic thesis in the book. Foremost among them was the specific prediction that in the years after it's publication, one or possibly two gas-giant planets would be found far beyond the orbit of Pluto .... [Brown and Batygin] estimate the planet has an orbital period of between 10 and 20 thousand years. In The Choice I placed it at 13,000 years and 550 AU, or 50 billion miles."

        That passage has only a modicum of truthiness. The basic thesis of the book is "Using conscious thought and physics of the mind to reshape the world." The possible existence of P9 has nothing to do with that somewhat sophomoric idea, I suggest.

        It's true that Bara did discuss undiscovered outer planets, on pp. 176-183. However, it's not his theory. It's Richard Hoagland's theory, recycled from the book they wrote together, Dark Mission. Moreover, the object that he calls Nemesis and describes as 550 AU out in a 13,000-year orbit (p. 181) is not a planet at all, but a hypothetical brown dwarf forming a loose binary with the Sun. Bara makes this even more entertaining by suggesting that gravitational attraction is too weak to keep Nemesis and the Sun in partnership, but of course "there is no reason to think that the same unseen force (torsion) that holds everything together isn't also keeping this object linked to our Sun." Oh brilliant -- a former CAD-CAM technician with no training in physics sweeps aside the entire basis of planetary astronomy just like that.

        The brown dwarf pseudo-object was originally dreamed up to account for the so-called "Pioneer anomaly" -- an (at the time) unexplained deviation from the nominal trajectory of the two Pioneer spacecraft as they departed the known solar system. Mike Bara doesn't pay enough attention to understand that the so-called anomaly has now been explained by anisotropic radiation^{note 2}, and the need for a brown dwarf has vanished.

        Mike Bara, perhaps, should read his own text more diligently before doing the toldya dance.

see also Stuart Robbins' blog on this topic.

=================================
[1] Here's a list of trans-Neptunian objects.  Wow!!! Lots and lots. We don't hear much about Tyche these days -- once a favorite of pseudo-astronomers.

[2] Heat radiation that isn't the same in all directions.

How do you like this style?

This template seems pleasant and readable. My sub-head styles seem OK, too.