The Extinction Event Did Not Happen Yesterday

        I'm not even going to write the name of the ignorant liar who made a few hundred dollars by telling everyone that Planet X, or Nibiru, would impact the Earth yesterday and wipe out all life. I do not wish even my microscopic influence on public opinion to add to the publicity this liar has already had. Still less am I going to name his wretched, wretched book about a non-existent planetoid. If any readers wish to read 115 pages of self-published poppycock they can surely find it for themselves.

        I understand this nincompoop is now claiming that he's been misquoted by the media and he never said September 23rd—the true date is some time next month. That's what end-of-the-world liars always do, isn't it? Keep advancing the date. It's truly pathetic.

        Last night Coast to Coast AM, with Jimmy Church as relief host, poked a bit of fun at this prediction, as the hours of September 23rd ticked away. Quite a lot of fun, actually. In my opinion they should have been poking fun at themselves, for having helped to make this nonsense credible in a show aired 19th January. The other guest that night was a numerologist—they made a nice pair of delusional con-men (con-persons, I should say.)

        C2C's bio-note tells us that this ridiculous person studied astronomy "at a mid-Western university," but it also noted:

"[This barefaced liar] has concluded that the prophetic Book of Revelation actually foretells the apocalyptic arrival of Planet X in our time period, and he added that Bible Code expert Rabbi Glazerson also backs a similar timeline."

So this is not just nonsense but biblical nonsense.

        This barefaced liar writes of his own work "This book is a must-read and a Survival Guide to the most important story of the century." Fuck You. It never happened.

Update:
        Exposing Pseudoastronomy also tackles this topic this week, being a bit kinder to the barefaced liar than I am.

Update:
October came and went. No Nibiru—what a surprise.

Jimmy Church slams Sean David Morton

        Jimmy Church is a four-days-a-week podcaster, and a fairly frequent relief host of Coast-to-Coast AM. As I've written before, I think he's pretty good. His show is called Fade To Black, and many of his guests are the standard pseudoscience mob that this blog exists to mock, and I guess that's who he means when he talks about "our community." Last Monday, he gave his audience a quick update on the fate of Sean David Morton (sentenced that very day to six years in the slammer,) and then editorialized as follows:

18:31: "No matter what you feel about the government, or the IRS—the IRS may be the most evil thing in the history of the known world—and I get that, I understand.. um, but no matter what your feelings are about the feds, and the IRS, if you have a check in your hand for half a million dollars, and you know it ain't your money, you don't cash it. We all know right from wrong. We do. We really, really... if we don't know right from wrong then we shouldn't be out in public. But, if we do know right from wrong, and we have our faculties about us, holding a check for half a million dollars in your hand that you know is not yours—don't cash it. And if you do, that is a decision that you make as an adult. Nobody is forcing you—you make the decision on your own. And he made that decision. The... the complications with the case, and how many charges were there, and... you know, the bottom line is, you don't cash the check. [..?..] Anyway, he got caught. OK? And he and his wife were found guilty. [..?..] He tried to hide the funds—they split it up, and took out $7,000 in cash, kept that, split up the rest of the money, put it in a bunch of different accounts, and [..?..] when the IRS asked for the money back, they said NO. The IRS literally said "we want the money back," and they said "No. come and get us." Well, OK. They did. [...] The bottom line is that they were officially sentenced today and that's it, they're going to prison."

"But, I have been silent on this whole thing. [...] I don't wish prison on anybody—this is a non-violent crime. It's a non-violent crime. And prison sucks. It absolutely sucks. So, I don't wish it on anybody. All I'm saying in this case, is sometimes you bring things onto yourself. You go and cash a check for $500,000 hoping to get away with it, and you don't, well you get caught [and] that's the end of the story. There's a couple of other things about Sean that... that kind of need to be said here. OK, today I went and watched a video on the ConspiraSea Cruise,^{note 1} actually an excellent video by the way. Ahhm... and well presented. But in this video ..ahhm, Sean is sitting there, and this is what he says publicly out of his own mouth. He says that he went to Stanford, that he went to Oxford, and that he was a doctor. [...] And then he says that he's an award-winning director, and a screen writer. And so, I stopped right there and I did just a little personal investigation on the web, just to check the record, the IMDB things. There's no "award-winning director" of anything anywhere, there's no screenwriting credits of anything. ..... So anyway, but then he said this, in this video that he has the largest internet radio station in the world. Now, hold on a minute here. He's in prison, but you can't say things like that ... Ok, fine, I can't change what people think, but me, I'm a black-and-white numbers guy. ... So it's very easy to go and check out a few things. Where is his web site ranking, for his web site? If it is the No. 1 radio show in the world that means it's quite simply that you have revenue that is God-like. You must have in your driveway seven different color Lamborghinis, one for each day of the week. ... That's what that means, and when he says something like that, that is a crazy thing. So you go and you look up... it's easy to check, go look at his web site, go look at the ranking. I don't know what it is. I don't remember—it's something like 12 million. Know what 12 million ranking world-wide is? It means you have maybe one person a day going to that web site. One. The largest internet radio broadcast in the world. Go and look—who's the network, who's the syndication? It's gotta be somebody BIG. It's got to be a household name. .... You must have 5 million,10 million ... All of the things that he has said about himself—and he's turned around and defrauded the government and then convicted of that—what do we depend on here? And what upsets me with all of this is our community is represented by a guy like that ... claiming screen credits, and the largest show in the world, and it's all B.S. And so for us, [..?..] that's what makes me upset, he's never been a guest on this show, so I have that going for me. But it's everybody else.  And it allows them to go 'Look. This is why that community is crazy, because they're represented by this. It's all ficticious, it's not true.'"

[Examples of real research done by the "alternative" community]

"You know, and I do my best every single day to make sure that we... we have fun with this show, that we're honest with this show—anybody can go and check our numbers. When we say something... Go and check, the numbers are all public, they're all there for the world to see. I am proud of what we have done here. ... And that's our community, and it just kills me that this went down. It's unfortunate that he got caught and he went to prison. Melissa got taken down for the count. I doubt that she would have done any of this if it wasn't for his influence, and now she's spending two years in the federal pen. And if they could go back and do it all differently I'm sure that they would. Now they've got time to go and quite frankly think about this, and how they represented all of us. They lied to us and the rest of the world. And that's it—I've held back from speaking about this, but our community just needs everything that it can to be represented correctly."

        It beats me how Jimmy can protest that Morton was giving his "community" a bad rep for saying things that are totally wrong, when at the same time one of his pet guests is Mike Bara. Bara gets everything wrong.

       From the report on ufowatchdog, what made me giggle was that this "Legal scholar," at his sentencing hearing, declared that he had been mistaken in representing himself at trial, and now requested legal representation. Denied. If he behaves himself (unlikely) we may be seeing SDM again in four years or so. Jimmy Church is dead right about one thing—prison sucks.

Thanks to Stuart Robbins for the audio

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[1] ''One Week on a Cruise for Conspiracy Theorists - ConspiraSea'' --Youtube. Morton (at 06:16) "I'm a legal scholar.. I host the Number #1 radio show on the Internet"

Mike Bara goes the full delusion

        Yesterday Mike Bara came up with another vlog, eagerly lapped up by his admirers (all four of them), in which he attempted to connect hurricanes Harvey and Irma to the recent eclipse. He also explained that hurricanes are GOOD because they create jobs.

        For data support, he cited perhaps the most unreliable source imaginable—namely, Richard Hoagland's Accutron readings^{note 1} at Coral Castle during the Venus transit of 8th June 2004. Bara said that what was significant about Hoagland's data was that the disturbance created by the transit event continued after the event was over. So, you know, seeking to justify his link between a solar eclipse on 21 August and the formation of Harvey (17 August) and Irma (30 August).

        So is it true that the disturbance persisted? If so, you'd never know it from Hoagland's data which only continue for approximately another hour. Would-be interpreters of Hoagland's data are somewhat thwarted by the facts that (a) he got the time of the transit wrong,^{note 2} and (b) he has published two different and incompatible traces. First was this one:

credit: Richard Hoagland

        He said fourth contact happened at 07:21 (all times EDT), and the trace continues until approximately 08:20. His second attempt was this:

credit: Richard Hoagland

        Note that both traces show a spike to 364.474 Hz at what Hoagland (wrongly) calls the time of third contact, but then the first version shows three spikes to 360.53, 360.42 and 360.30 Hz respectively. The second version has two following spikes to 360.7 at times that are not the same as those of the first version, and does not even continue until the transit is over at fourth contact.

        So what should we say about Mike Bara's idea that the eclipse was linked to a hurricane that developed four days earlier, and that Hoagland's data support a link between the eclipse and a different hurricane nine days later? Poppycock is the word that comes to mind. Certainly not science.

The magic number
         A second thread that Bara picked up was also Hoagland-based. He told us that both Harvey and Irma developed at a latitude of 19.5°N, and that is the latitude at which "hyperdimensional energy" is permanently available on any spinning sphere such as a planet.^{note 3}

        Well, let's see. Harvey developed from a tropical wave East of the Lesser Antilles. Those islands stretch all the way from Anguilla (18.2°N)  in the North to Grenada (12.07°N) in the South. Irma developed near the Cape Verde Islands (15.06°N). FAIL. Hurricane José is next in line, currently gathering strength at roughly 15°N. FAIL AGAIN.

        Perhaps Mikey believes that merely by passing through that latitude, hurricanes pick up power. In fact, that's the implication of the way he phrased it. Does he think meteorologists and hurricane-trackers would not notice this effect?

        At one point in the vlog, Bara held up a copy of his 2011 book The Choice, saying "I explained the significance of 19.5 in this book." What he actually wrote, in justification of the idea, is that the following planetary features are at 19.5° latitude:

• Neptune's Great Dark Spot
• The Great Red Spot of Jupiter
• The erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io
• Olympus Mons on Mars
• Mauna Kea volcano

        Know how many of those are actually at 19.5? NONE OF THE ABOVE. If he'd written Mauna Loa instead of Mauna Kea he'd have got one right.

        None of the top ten volcanic eruptions in history, and none of the most destructive earthquakes, have been at 19.5°. The case for instantly available energy at that latitude is not merely weak but non-existent.

An actress speaks
          Jennifer Lawrence opines that Irma is nature's payback for electing a chump named Trump. In his vlog, Bara advised JL to "leave the science to the science people". I think he should do exactly that.


Further reading
         Since Mike is a doctrinaire climate change denier, and mocked climate science as "bullshit" in this vlog, here's an antidote.

Scientist Slams Climate Change Deniers In Brilliant Viral Post --Katharine Hayhoe's take-down of people just like Mike Bara who put their faith in pseudoscience.

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[1] For a briefing on what "Accutron readings" are, see this.

[2] Hoagland reported third contact at 07:03:53, but this table issued by NASA Goddard says it was 07:07:33 at Miami, same longitude as Homestead.

[3] For a derivation of the 19.5 figure, see this blogpost. Simple enough geometry that neither Mike Bara nor Richard Hoagland is capable of.