ricketyclick

There’s a paper floating around [PDF, 935 KB] alleging that Barack Obama is hypnotizing his followers using the techniques of “Neurolinguistic programming”, aka NLP.

You know, it’s tempting. Obama has captured so many otherwise intelligent, educated, sophisticated, well meaning people, and convinced them to believe things that simply do not hold up when examined closely (or even casually). At the same time, he’s managed to keep people, including virtually the entire press corp, from examining closely not only his ideas, but his past associates, words, and actions.

Discredited socialist, central-planner politics aside, I find Obama profoundly creepy, and don’t really understand what people see in him.

I absolutely agree that “this unaccomplished man’s unnatural and irrational rise to the highest office in the world [is] suspicious and frightening”.

However, scanning through this paper — no. I can’t easily identify it, but it has the faint reek of crank to it. The crowded formatting, the lack of a by-line on the first page, the exhortation to read the table of contents….

The command to “READ THIS DOCUMENT IN ORDER, FROM BEGINNING TO END, AS DEFINITIONS ARE BUILT ON TOP OF ONE-ANOTHER, AND UNDERSTANDING OF THESE DEFINITIONS IS NECESSARY TO FOLLOW LATER INTERPRETATIONS AND ANALYSIS”.

Sigh. All-caps, in an extra-large typeface. It might as well have more than three exclamation points at the end, the inarguable sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head!!!!

There’s the desperate footer, “EXPOSING OBAMA’S DECEPTION MAY BE THE ONLY WAY TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY”. Again, note the all-caps.

Then there’s this video:

Here’s the give-away: many, many vaguely threatening clips of Obama, but not one clip of him actually speaking, nothing demonstrating the techniques allegedly in use.

Notice the oddly cadenced narration (”Why, it’s almost as if the narrator wants to hypnotize us to bypass our rational…Oh.”), and the vaguely threatening background music straight from the X-Files.

Oh, yes, Hitler and his rallies put in an extended appearance.

Not proof that this is crackpot work, but there’s simply too many signs to take it seriously.

Obama is indeed a dangerous demagogue, but he is using techniques that have been used for centuries, not some weird modern mind-control.

Via M. Simon’s Classical Values. I do recommend Simon’s article on “The Cult of Personality” at his other blog, Power and Control.

Update:
The Language Log has another skeptical article on Obama and NLP, with excellent comments on the history of NLP.

OK, there’s really, really important stuff to talk about, like factcheck.org lying about guns, B. Hussein Obama being a lying Commie tool, the current financial crisis resulting from Democrat efforts to force lenders to make bad loans, and the media response to Ike, but somehow this is what forces me to write:

PETA Urges Ben & Jerry’s To Use Human Milk

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow’s milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

“PETA’s request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow’s milk in the food he serves,” the statement says.PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

I’m, uh, trying to, uh, get a grip on the, uh,  logistics of harvesting enough human milk to cover Ben and Jerry’s production needs. As fantasy, every single aspect opens pornographic panoramas (and indeed, has been pornoed somewhere, sometime). As policy, this is a horror beyond even my fevered imaginings; “ripe for abuse” stretched to thin, pale tatters does not even begin to cover….

I’ve known for a long time that PETAns are deranged. This is proof positive that they simply do not understand the difference between humans and animals.

The official Ben and Jerry’s response: “We applaud PETA’s novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother’s milk is best used for her child” . Bravo.

Via Snowflakes in Hell.

RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags are little paper stickers with circuitry hidden inside that can broadcast identification data when probed with the appropriate radio signal. They’re cheap- close-to-free, yet each one has a unique number, and that number is large enough that essentially every thing in the universe can have its own tag. They’re extremely useful for things like warehouse inventory, where radio transponders can continuously query the entire contents, and track the location of each and every pallet, carton, and box on the shelves.

I have one on the windshield of my car; it automatically debits my account when I go through local tollbooths. Passports have them.

Credit card companies are starting to put them into what they call “contactless cards”. The day is coming when you walk into the grocery story, stuff things into a bag or into your pockets, and walk away without going through checkout.

There are even implantable versions that can be placed under the skin. Currently, these are used for pet identification, but there’s no reason why they can’t be used on humans.

Problem: it turns out that it’s fairly easy to spoof existing RFID systems, including those being used for critical applications such as passports and, well, credit cards.

The brilliant Discovery Channel science education show Mythbusters was planning to do an episode on testing ways to spoof RFID cards. They’ve done this before with things like radar detectors and alcohol breath testers.

However, The Powers That Be turned out to be a bit touchier about RFID:

Link.

Adam Savage, one of the show’s co-hosts, explains what happened when they tried to contact Texas Instruments, a major manufacturer of RFID tags and readers, while doing research for the show:

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.

If the system is that weak, I don’t want it anywhere my bank account, my security, my health care, or my anonymity. RFID is scary enough on it’s own, but this response shows that those pushing RFID know that it is bogus, and want to keep that quiet, rather than fixing the problems before chipping the whole world.

Let’s be clear: the plan is to make RFID mandatory, in driver’s licences and other forms of official ID. “Show us your papers” becomes obsolete if you can’t hide your papers, if they’re actually planted under your skin, and it gets worse if somebody can claim to be you by showing your “papers” in places  you’ve never been.

Very, very scary.

Via Slashdot.

From Consumerist, how to get everything about a credit card, while it’s in someone’s pocket, using a reader bought for $8 over eBay. This requires basically patting the victim’s wallet with the reader — but this is essentially electronic pickpocketing, and it’s not hard to extend the range of the reader.

The RFID Buzz blog goes into my daily feed so I can keep up.

Take it away, Billy:

Behold the idiot, one Chris Benisch, who suspended an eight year-old kid at Harris Park Elementary School in Westminster, Colorado, who found the odor of a Sharpie marker interesting.

There can be no outer limit of contempt for an asshole like that. He cultivates his own delusions as he sees fit, and is in the business of pressing them on budding minds completely without reference to facts of reality. Reality doesn’t matter to him. And now, that kid has gotten an object-lesson in arbitrary power: it can strike out of the blue for no reason at all and reason has nothing at all to do with any of it. This will be an element of his understanding of politics for the rest of his life unless something happens in his developing world-view to condition what this creep did to him as a psychotic aberration.

Tell me again, exactly, why home schoolers continue to be taxed to pay the salaries of child abusers like Benisch.

My message, via the Harris Park Elementary “Ask Us” form:

Principal Benisch: Your suspension of Eathan Harris over sniffing a Sharpie pen is, in my opinion, an act of overt child abuse.

I am so very, very happy no child of my acquaintance will come under your smothering Stalinist hand. Nevertheless, I weep for those that do.

“Policies” like this turn out mindless, pliant sheep, not informed, self-reliant citizens.

No, I am not even trying to “engage in a dialog”. I do not dialog with evil. I do not imagine that you are remotely capable of understanding why what you did was wrong.

Yes, your empty face is on my blog now, for what little that might be worth.

You and your kind cannot hide your wickedness anymore. We may not be able to take direct action, like packing the next school board meeting and demanding your head on a pike resignation firing, but at least you can be exposed to far wider ridicule than you ever imagined.

Oh, isn’t this precious? From the Harris Park Elementary home page:

Welcome to Harris Park Elementary

Home of the Unicorns!

Hey, Mr. Unicorn? Looking for something to do with that sharp pointy thing?

This in the Fishwrap of Record, The New York Times, allegedly quoting “Doris Kearns Goodwin, a biographer of presidents from Lincoln to Johnson”:

When Mrs. Clinton talked about how it took Johnson as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to achieve the rights legislation, Ms. Goodwin said, “she was absolutely right.” Johnson’s great mastery was to get the support of Southern Republicans. “It required his understanding of absolutely every single senator,” Ms. Goodwin said.

===

Oops, clarification: Just about every Southern Senator was, of course, a Democrat. Including Sen. Robert Byrd, former Grand Kleagle of the KKK, who filibustered against the bill for 14 hours, and voted against it.

===

This item via Charlie Foxtrot:

However one can understand the confusion that must be felt at the NYT. I am sure that anything not north of Manhattan is considered “Southern” on the Upper East Side. How quaint.

Now either this crack NYT reporter forgot to fire up her internet-contraption-thingy to do some fact checking, or she firmly believes that the only ones who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act were those nasty Republicans, who we all know have infested the south since they started the Civil War… See, it slides off the tongue so easily, it almost sounds true!

Of course, this was a relatively simply confusion– a “slip of the mind”, as some would call it. I’ve made ‘em myself. However, the New York Times is supposed to have editors, people who’s job it is to catch blunders like this. Various Time columnists have claimed that the traditional news media, particularly the papers, are more reliable than bloggers and other online reporters who usually are acting alone.

Like CF, I think this error slipped through because it aligned with the prejudices of the Times staff: Democrats are the primary beacons of Light and Liberty, while Republicans are all racist warmongers.

History suggests otherwise, but the Times has apparently forgot.

===

There was a time when, if it appeared in the Times, it could safely be assumed to be fact. The Times was considered almost a primary source. Nowadays, though, anybody who believes anything from the NY Slimes without checking at least one other source is simply not paying attention.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the Times catches this error and prints a correction, or if they silently update the online article.

One of my standard dinner table debate tactics is “Do you trust George Bush to…? No? Then why do you trust him to be the only one with the guns?” And one of the “trust” questions is, “Do you trust George Bush to tell you whether or not you can smoke that joint? Remember, if he can tell you you can’t, he can tell you you must.” That last gets scoffed at.

No more, I think.

Melanie Wertin at the Lawrence Journal World and News writes:

President Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health wants to screen all schoolchildren for mental illness. The law has been passed in some states, and the program is called TeenScreen. Normal kids are labeled mentally ill with an array of disorders such as mathematics disorder, reading disorder, conduct disorder, just to name a few. This is ludicrous, and parents need to be aware of what is happening so they don’t let their children fall into a statistic.

Despite the evidence linking psychiatric drugs to suicide and violence, these drugs are prescribed to millions of children and teens based on subjective diagnoses made without any physical tests, such as blood tests, brain scans or X-rays.

[My comment over at Alphecca.]

“New Freedom”. >>Shudder< <

That’s even better than “Homeland Security”.

Sometimes, I’m ashamed to be, however peripherally, a member of the scientific community.

Forrest Mims, Citizen Scientist, recently attended a scientific conference at which an ecologist received a standing ovation for a speech recommending that 90% of the human race be killed off by ebola, one of the uglier tools in nature’s population control tool kit. You’re probably not going to hear about it on the news, though:

Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us.

Hat tip to Doc Russia.