It'd be easier to meditate if this silhouette would stop kicking me in the eye.

When I saw that the Body, Soul, and Spirit Holistic Wellness and Spirituality Expo was coming to Vancouver, I knew I had to clear whatever plans I had for that weekend. The website promised a roller-coaster ride of conspiracy, pseudoscience, and New Agery – from Jesus as a Tibetan quantum wizard to instructions for ascension to the next plane of consciousness, it’s all there. So last Saturday I met up with fellow Simon Fraser University Skeptic Josh Grant and took the plunge into the unknown. We decided to present ourselves as somewhat informed, very curious, and minimally snarky, in hopes of getting as much information as possible.

Due to the sheer amount of material coming out of this expo, I’m splitting it up into a few different posts – in the first installment, I’ll look at some of the wonderful applications of quantum physics, that wonderful branch of modern science that describes how the universe is basically a giant psychic vending machine that takes wishes instead of coins and dispenses huge wads of money and cancer-cures instead of experimental Dorito flavours and expired Snickers bars.

One of the first exhibits I went to was a largish booth with a gaudy red-on-blue display, helpfully searing into my retinas the fact that I could SUPERCHARGE CARS WITH QUANTUM NANOTECH MAGNETS. One of the guys running the exhibit explained to me how they work. When applied to the battery and engine block of a car, the wonder-magnets cause all of the atoms inside (gas, oil, even those tricky electricity atoms) to helpfully line up in single-file, vastly increasing the engine’s efficiency and power.

The car magnet guys also sold these.

“These are the result of years of research into quantum nanotech theory,” he said, handing me a couple to try out. “They work great! In fact, you don’t even have to put them directly on your car – my boss over there can just put the magnets on a picture of your car, and it’ll be supercharged!”

I pulled the magnets apart and let them snap back together. “That’s pretty strong. Neodymium magnets, right? But they have nanoparticles or nanobots in them or something?”

“No, it’s just the structure, the way they’re manufactured. Very specific, precision engineering. Quantum.”

I noticed that a largish chunk had broken off of one of the magnets, and pointed it out. He shrugged. “Eh, it should still work fine.”

Moving on, I came to a booth advertising Scalar Quantum Pendants. These are basically the forbidden love-child of  Masuru Emoto and Nikola Tesla, and serve all kinds of different functions: they protect the body from electromagnetic radiation, cure all known diseases, and “improve cell permeability.”

The last one caught me off-guard. “Isn’t increasing the permeability of all your cell membranes kind of dangerous? It’s a very fine biological balance…”

This pendant is a quantity without direction.

“Oh no, of course not,” said the woman attending the booth. “These can only have positive effects. They just improve the balance of your system. Most people aren’t balanced anyway, if they’re not wearing one of these.”

She went on to demonstrate the efficacy of the pendant via applied kinesiology – I would hold my arm out and she would try to push it down, and it would be easier to do so if I had something “bad” going on, like holding a cell phone, not wearing the pendant, or professing my undying love for Adolf Hitler. (I’m pretty sure she just pushed harder on my arm then. At one point she audibly grunted and complained that I was resisting too hard.)

Much later, while Josh was getting his fortune told by a tarot reader, I wandered into a booth advertising quantum DNA reprogramming. The woman running the place was very nice, with the smile of an aid worker unloading a truck full of rice in the midst of an African famine, and gladly took time to explain the process. In essence she intuitively senses her client’s needs, talks it over with them, and when ready, psychically reprograms their DNA accordingly.

“I aborted a fetus with it once,” she chirped, the beatific smile still on her face.

“Wh– you performed an abortion with quantum DNA reprogramming?”

“Right. Well, not a fetus. Really just a, uh, germinating cell.”

“That sounds safer than a regular abortion.”

“It is!”

I later asked her if she went down to the molecular level and changed, say, thymine to guanine. She frowned for a second. “I don’t know what any of that is.”

Quantum was in the air at the Body, Soul, and Spirit Expo. There were many more quantum-based services being offered – a lot of them were along the lines of the ones I’ve described here, while others stuck fairly close to The Secret and related mythology about the “Law of Attraction” – think positively and the universe will give you whatever you want, because of quantum.

But there are some common threads. In no case was there an actual explanation of quantum physics – no Feynman diagrams, no investigation of electron spin or hybrid orbitals. Rather than a quantifiable mathematical concept, quantum is a winsome universal force that can be courted and appeased with the proper charms, prayers, and sacrifices, like a pagan deity or a pixie that lives in the forest.

Others, with better blogs, have said that applying the word “quantum” to something gives it a scientific sheen. While that’s true to some extent, I think it’s important to note the word also carries with it an air of magic and mysticism. The one thing that everybody knows about quantum is that it somehow involves uncertainty. This gives the whole quantum-pseudoscience industry a paradoxical feel. True, uncertainty is the oldest justification in the book for trying alternative medicine: how do you know this doesn’t work? Well, you don’t know for certain… so why not try it out, anyway? It also helps to drive people to seek out alternative ways of figuring out the world – one could infer that science, unable to find a fully deterministic way of explaining the universe, has failed, and that we must turn to mysticism to discover the hidden order behind things (this, of course, neglects the possibility that there is no hidden order – that what looks random is just that).

But while uncertainty may drive people to adopt a pseudoscientific view of quantum physics, it is quickly resolved – there’s little tolerance for “I don’t know.” Rather than random happenings governed by the laws of probability, in this philosophy quantum events are determined by our own thoughts – we can make a waveform collapse just-so by thinking the right thoughts at it, and in doing so bend the universe to our will. If we clap hard enough, we can bring Tinkerbell back to life. That’s how awesome we are.

I think that this dichotomy between uncertainty and surety, between predestination and agency, between being in control and being controlled, between revering the self as a near-omnipotent god and imagining humanity to be essentially helpless, carried through history by forces beyond our control and destined to meet a particular end in a few years’ time, is at the heart of much of the conflict in the sub-subculture exemplified by this expo.

I’ll probably get into this more in later posts, but for now I’ll leave you with a picture of another exhibit at the expo – a feminine hygiene product that involves negative ions somehow. It has nothing to do with quantum, but you should see how much blue liquid one of those things can suck up.

Seriously!

Earlier this summer, Alex Jones’s InfoWars (no relation to William Shatner’s TekWar)  picked up a story on the impending imposition of martial law, delivered via a “bankster holiday” in which a run on American banks will be avoided, FDR-style, by simply shutting them down for a couple of days. The government will take the opportunity to ruthlessly communisticize the economy, enabling the implementation of a global currency, leading to global government, rise of the Antichrist, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria:

Bob Chapman’s influential International Forecaster is reporting on the possibility of a so-called “bank holiday” planned for late August or early September. According to Chapman’s sources, U.S. embassies around the world are selling dollars and stockpiling money from respective countries where they operate . . .

Mr. Schultz believes a “bank holiday” would suit the burning desires of the international bankster elite. It will lead to “nationalization,” which is a polite word for brazen thievery. It will allow the government — owned lock, stock and barrel by the global elite and run by their corrupt whores and cronies — to rape secured creditors and bondholders.

The story spread throughout the paranoiasphere, and with the doomsday date of September 9th (or August 26th, depending on who you ask) fast approaching, the prospect of a catastrophic bank holiday is currently a hot topic of discussion on conspiracy boards like Above Top Secret and Godlike Productions.

Still, this isn’t a very popular conspiracy theory – not yet, anyway. The date-setting is probably a red flag for a lot of people, but there’s still a certain appeal – the idea that the financial crisis was engineered will probably gain traction over the next little while as people try to come to terms with what’s happened. Probably the biggest obstacle is that right now, it’s not in anyone’s ideological interest to push it as true. There’s always libertarians, I guess, but they’ve generally got a full schedule as far as conspiracy advocacy goes.

I'm pretty sure octopus isn't even kosher.

But there’s also a lingering nervousness about the topic itself. Like most people, conspiracy theorists in the Internet age are very careful with their dogwhistles – they’re quite conscious of seeming overtly racist, sexist, or antisemitic, and it’s difficult to talk about a conspiracy of “international bankers” without raising some hackles. Troubled times drove Henry Ford to believe in the authenticity of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and “international bankers” became a not-so-subtle synonym for “Jews” in his running soapbox-rag, the Dearborn Independent.

So as a replacement, “banksters” is a good, value-free term – it doesn’t have the antisemitic connotations of “international bankers,” and is instantly understandable even to anyone who hasn’t heard it before (though less so when it is written rather than spoken). And there are a lot of legitimately horrible things that the financial industry has done to drive us into this crisis, though I have to differ from Alex Jones regarding the commu-Nazi globalist Muslim illegal immigrant genocidal environmentalist Reptoid plot to destroy the world’s economy.

So, moral of the story: start throwing “bankster” around if you get a chance. What’s the harm in a little nickname that you can mutter under your breath while kneeling before Ben Bernanke as he sits atop his skull-throne, sipping pensively from a goblet filled with the blood of Christian babies?

Cover is blown! CODE BLUE CODE BLUE

But sometimes the shill gambit, as it’s called, backfires – and then we start to see ugly spats like those between the regular 9/11 truthers, who think that the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition, and the “no-plane” truthers, who think that the planes were holograms or cloaked missiles or computer-generated fakes designed to cover up the fact that the attacks were perpetrated using laser microwave rays from space. Each side accuses the other of being disinformation operatives – many vanilla truthers claim that the no-plane people were planted by the conspirators to discredit the movement by making them look crazy (a similar criticism has been leveled at lizardman-theory proponent David Icke by more mainstream New World Order conspiracists):

This is what the no-plane disinfo artists do. This is why they’re called disinfo artists. To take several news programs, chop them up into pieces and paste them together to make them say something they never did, and then post it as PROOF like the OP did with this thread is blatant deception and disinfo.

They have no proof and that’s why they resort to such unbelievable tactics.

Meanwhile, the no-plane truthers insist that their version is correct, and that the mainstream 9/11 conspiracy movement is actually a government operation to cover up the US government’s use of holographic cloaking microwave laser-missile technology. Judy Wood, one of the most widely known no-plane truthers, hosts an article on “ways to spot a spook” at truther meetings:

7) Method of destruction. Controlled Demolition by thermite/thermate. No other theories are allowed to be discussed. You will hear a great deal about thermate’s glow and how the military uses it in their controlled demolitions. Open and shut case. The jury is out. Further discussion is neither entertained nor welcomed. It matters not that this individual has not even studied other theories. This individual has made up his mind without the necessity of examining other information.

The shill gambit is most often used as a defensive mechanism against debunkers – a way of poisoning the well. If your opponent in a discussion has been hired by the Powers That Be, their arguments against your position are both invalid (since they have a vested interest in a particular outcome) and proof of a conspiracy (why are They hiring disinfo agents to cover up a conspiracy if there’s nothing there?). But it can turn very, very ugly when people within a conspiracy community disagree on major points – circular firing squads start to crop up, and the movement loses cohesion, with paranoia running rampant and everyone accusing everyone else of being in on the conspiracy. And really, isn’t that what a real disinfo operation would try to make happen?

To their credit, many conspiracy theorists realize that not everyone who disagrees with them has been hired by the cabal to do so – and so we get attempts to systematize the shill gambit, like H. Michael Sweeney’s influential list of common tactics and traits of disinfo agents. The problem, of course, is that without a gold standard for judging who is a shill and who isn’t, there’s no way to evaluate how good any of these criteria are – the predictions made by the list can only be evaluated against themselves, which is quite circular.

In fact, a close examination of the list reveals that many of its guidelines could be applied to nearly anyone. For instance, here’s one supposed trait shared by paid disinformation agents:

2) Selectivity. They tend to pick and choose opponents carefully, either applying the hit-and-run approach against mere commentators supportive of opponents, or focusing heavier attacks on key opponents who are known to directly address issues.

This trait is surely seen in regular people as well – one can deal with something on a deep level by constructing arguments in depth, or simply try to refute smaller points without delving into great detail. Almost any pattern of behaviour on an Internet forum would result in someone exhibiting this trait – except for indiscriminately replying to everyone, and that would no doubt be judged as even more suspicious.

6) Artificial Emotions. An odd kind of ‘artificial’ emotionalism and an unusually thick skin — an ability to persevere and persist even in the face of overwhelming criticism and unacceptance. [...] With respect to being thick-skinned, no amount of criticism will deter them from doing their job, and they will generally continue their old disinfo patterns without any adjustments to criticisms of how obvious it is that they play that game — where a more rational individual who truly cares what others think might seek to improve their communications style, substance, and so forth, or simply give up.

So, one common trait of paid shills is a refusal to give up in the face of opposition. While a normal person would give up and go home, a shill will stick around and continue to argue. This makes sense, as I’ve had the shill gambit pulled on me with this justification – “Why do you care so much?” “What are you trying to cover up?” “If you’re trying this hard to prove me wrong I’m obviously on to something!”

Compare this with disinfo tactic #6 from the same list:

6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet  and letters-to-the-editor environments where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism, reasoning — simply make an accusation or other  attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent’s viewpoint.

So a paid disinfo agent will decline to engage at length, and will instead run away. In this sense, contrarians are between a rock and a hard place – if they continue to argue with a community of conspiracists then it’s good evidence that they’re being paid to do so, while if they stop posting it’s a “hit and run,” similarly proving that they’re in the pay of the cabal.

... Or is that just what THEY want you to think??

These guidelines are basically Barnum descriptions – they can be fruitfully applied to almost anyone involved in an online discussion. The supposed telltale signs of disinformation, through their vagueness and nonspecificity, have amplified the already considerable paranoia of online conspiracy communities, leading to a witch-hunt mindset in which anyone with a contrary view is immediately suspect and dissent is met with accusations of collaboration.

Conspiracy is often used as a justification for unscientific or pseudoscientific beliefs, and the pseudoscientific mindset of the conspiracy crowd comes out in laundry-lists of supposed disinfo tactics – without external validation they are little more than lists of “stuff that someone on the Internet thinks looks suspicious,” and in the long run may do much more harm than good to the communities they seek to protect.

The Manchurian Candidate?

With the birther arguments picking up steam again, it’s not a bad idea to try and anticipate some of the new arguments that might be coming out in the next little while. Though the birth certificate controversy has been brewing since shortly after Obama announced his candidacy, the arguments have changed – a year ago you couldn’t swing a dead cyberspace-cat without hitting a blog post claiming that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a forgery, but that argument has largely fallen by the wayside. Now the focus seems to have shifted to ways in which he could have obtained it from the government (other than, of course, being born in Hawaii).

One talking point that’s been popping up sporadically for a few months, but seems to be gaining traction recently, is the birth certificate of Sun Yat-sen, the father of Republican China. Sun spent a great deal of time in Hawaii in his youth, and his early exposure to Western culture (via missionaries and British and American visitors) played a part in shaping his later political views. After the islands’ annexation by the US he was able to obtain American citizenship through a fraudulent birth certificate. Though Sun was born in the Guangzhou prefecture of China, and did not visit Hawaii until the age of thirteen, he was apparently able to find enough people to submit false affidavits to the contrary, allowing him to obtain a Certificate of Hawaiian Birth.

Therefore, the argument goes, Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate means nothing – anyone can get one; all you have to do is get a few people to lie to the government and hey presto! You’re a natural-born citizen. Sounds convincing, yes?

What trips up this argument is, ironically enough, something that the birthers paid much attention to a little while ago. For a long time they’ve made much of the fact that Obama released a certification of live birth rather than a certificate of live birth; while the former is a short form that the Hawaii Department of Health just prints out and distributes, the latter is an original paper form. In other words, the certification means nothing, because it’s not a real birth certificate. The fact that Hawaii no longer releases copies of certificates of live birth does not seem to matter.

Anyway, the devil is in the details. A Certification of Live Birth is not the same as a Certificate of Hawaiian Birth. Though the program under which Certificates of Hawaiian Birth were issued was discontinued in 1972, you can still request a copy if you happen to have obtained one before then. Except you get a copy of a Certificate of Hawaiian Birth (COHB), not a Certification of Live Birth (COLB) – they are different forms with different requirements. If Dr. Sun’s COHB is any indication, a great deal of information is also left out – there was no information about the parents, for instance, which Obama’s birth certificate does contain. If Obama did obtain his citizenship through a fraudulent COHB, that would be the form posted online.

What’s more, the purpose of the COHB program, to quote the Hawaii State Department of Health, was:

… to register a person born in Hawaii who was one year old or older and whose birth had not been previously registered in Hawaii.

This utterly torpedoes the birther idea that Obama’s COLB is somehow derived from a fraudulent COHB. If you look at Obama’s COLB, the date on which it was filed by the registrar is August 8th, 1961 – 4 days after the birth date. By Hawaiian law a COHB could not be obtained so quickly after the birth; it would have had to wait for at least a year.

Of course, this will not convince those birthers who believe that the certificate itself is a forgery, that the images of it online are photoshopped, or that the state of Hawaii is part of the conspiracy to cover up Obama’s Kenyan birth – but for them, Sun Yat-sen’s birth certificate is of no importance anyway. It is only relevant to those who accept it as an explanation for the existence of an official State of Hawaii document contradicting their belief that Obama is not legitimately the President, and at least for those people, I believe there’s some hope of de-conspiracizing.

I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but it was only a matter of time. Rumours about a conspiracy to cover up the fact that Obama was born in Kenya (and is therefore not eligible to be President) have been bouncing around the Internet since well before the election, and now, finally, Rush Limbaugh has started repeating the birth certificate conspiracy as fact.

LIMBAUGH: Barack Obama has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen. All he’d have to do is show a birth certificate. He has yet to have to prove he’s — I have to show them 14 different ways where the hell I am every day of the year for three years.

WHERE'S THE BIRTH C- oh, here it is.

There are a couple of ways to take this – you could say that Rush has finally gone off the deep end and will probably take his listenership with him, that he’s caved in to pressure from a listenership that already believes in the conspiracy, or that he’s finally uncovered the truth about B. Hussein Obama, the Kenyan usurper. Personally I don’t think this is much of a shift; Rush has been pushing the conspiracy about the Clintons having Vince Foster killed for years now, so it’s not like promoting unfounded conspiracy theories is new for him (or for the right in general).

Probably the driving force behind all this kerfuffle is a series of lawsuits filed by Birther Extraordinaire Orly Taitz. Ms. Taitz, who’s been beating the birther drum for quite some time now, is recommending that any active-duty American soldier who doesn’t want to follow an order can sue the government and get out of it (since Obama, being a Kenyan Muslim Marxist sleeper agent, is not legally commander-in-chief of the military), which will surely turn out well. The current plaintiff, Major Stefan Cook, actually volunteered for duty in May of this year and protested his orders immediately before being deployed, so clearly there’s absolutely no ulterior motive here.

At any rate, the birthers seem to have been emboldened by the lawsuits and will probably keep going until they are handed a major court defeat. But there’s no way even that would stop the conspiracy theories; frivolous birth certificate lawsuits have been percolating through the US court system since the Obama presidency was just a glimmer in Rahm Emmanuel’s eye.

Here’s where I take off the tinfoil hat, start channeling the Zetas, and make a prediction about the future. The birth certificate lawsuit(s) will be defeated in court. The birthers will justify the defeat by claiming that activist Democrat judges are part of the conspiracy and are blocking inquiry, which will be taken as evidence that the cabal, despite controlling the courts, is starting to panic and clamp down on dissent. The only solution is to:

a) Send more money to keep fighting the good fight! We’re almost there!

b) Buy guns!

c) Continue to disregard any and all evidence that the birth certificate Obama has provided is in fact legitimate, and constitutes sufficient proof that no, the President of the United States was not secretly born in Kenya, you idiots.

As you can probably see, the resolution is not fantastic, so people around the Internet are having a fun time picking the images apart, claiming that there’s a coverup, that the images are photoshopped, and so on. I doubt that much will come of these pictures; people who think the landing was faked are going to find some way to discount the images, and those who don’t will point to them as evidence for their own position.

What should be very interesting is the shots of the rest of the moon – UFO-based conspiracy theories have often incorporated moonbases (occupied either by native aliens, aliens from elsewhere, or Nazis), and NASA’s upcoming moon-bombing mission has some UFO buffs crying foul:

The planned October 9, 2009 bombing of the moon by a NASA orbiter that will bomb the moon with a 2-ton kinetic weapon to create a 5 mile wide deep crater as an alleged water-seeking and lunar colonization experiment, is contrary to space law prohibiting environmental modification of celestial bodies.  The NASA moon bombing, a component of the LCROSS mission, may also trigger conflict with known extraterrestrial civilizations on the moon as reported on the moon in witnessed statements by U.S. astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and in witnessed statements to NSA (National Security Agency) photos and documents regarding an extraterrestrial base on the dark side of the moon.

I musta taken that wrong left turn at Albuquerque.

So what should we expect to see in the wake of the LRO images’ release? If the shot of Bigfoot on Mars is any indication, the lunar surface should be a fruitful source of pareidolia – the apparent recognition of images in noise, like the Face on Mars or the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. People who are expecting to see aliens will spend hours poring over these maps, and so are going to see all kinds of weird and wonderful things.

I suspect it’ll be an echo of all the stuff that’s supposedly lurking about on Mars – we can expect to hear about canals, pyramids, roads, towers, and who knows what else. I will update with whatever falls out of this situation!

Hmmm – the stock market isn’t doing so well, but I might consider purchasing stock in the companies that sell Old English 40 ounce malt liquor, Newport cigarettes, and Kool cigarettes. They are probably making a killing during the election season, with ACORN getting bulk shipments to bribe bums and thugs to vote.

Now they’re being implicated as some kind of urban Gestapo, answerable only to the President, bent on destroying America by rigging the census so that Americans can be put into internment camps.

Now, there are a lot of reasons to think that ACORN is not nearly as scary as some would have you believe – though they have had some workers convicted for voter registration fraud, many of those convictions were due to ACORN seeing fishy registrations and turning over their employees to the authorities. In any case, voter registration fraud and voter fraud are quite different things; one might register Adolf Hitler to vote, but the Führer is unlikely to show up on Election Day. Beyond that, the election results were essentially in agreement with polls in the days leading up to the election. This, naturally, is no obstacle to people who think that the poll results were also part of a vast left-wing conspiracy; the McCain campaign certainly is not guiltless here, having released internal polls days before the election showing Excellent News for McCain.

ACORN is just the latest shadowy organization wrongly accused of having rigged an American election, and the phenomenon is certainly not confined to conservatives. The last time the left lost in the US, back in 2004, the scapegoat was the sinisterly named Diebold, manufacturers of electronic voting machines that were used in the election. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote an article for Rolling Stone popularizing the very dubious idea that voting machines systematically counted Kerry votes as Bush votes, alongside legitimate complaints like inadequate voting machines in poor districts and difficulties in voter registration. Since then, the Diebold conspiracy theory has spread far and wide.

Again, there are good reasons to think that the 2004 election was not stolen. Again, the results were in line with polls taken just before the election,  and the discrepancies between exit polls and election results are similar to those seen in other, non-disputed elections. But conspiracy theories have a way of living on regardless.

The contrast between the supposed conspiracies to rig the 2004 and 2008 elections is interesting. Why? Well, let’s take a look:

Nationalsozialistische Democrat Acornpartei?

ACORN is an anti-poverty group, bent on promoting social justice and helping out low-income families through grassroots activism, voter registration drives, and affordable housing. Its membership includes a large number of minorities, young people, and low income earners, and the organization itself is politically liberal (or at least advocates liberal causes).

Diebold is nearly the opposite: a polished, top-down, high-profit corporation, with offices in immaculate gleaming towers and a board of directors made up entirely of middle-aged white people in suits who contribute overwhelmingly to the Republican Party.

The two organizations are two sides of the same coin: they’re scapegoats in the classic sense, symbols of the elements of American culture that their detractors hate and fear the most. American conservatism is characterized almost inevitably by some degree of xenophobia and a desire to preserve the status quo, as well as a distrust for large, politically liberal organizations (recall the McCarthyist accusations that the ACLU had Communist affiliations, and the recent spate of accusations of Marxism for many left-leaning policies and their advocates). This element of conservatism is as old as revolution – who knows when the unwashed masses are going to be dissatisfied with their lot and start to make trouble?

Diebold, on the other hand, is the perfect liberal boogeyman. The evil, slick, faceless corporation is probably the most popular movie villain of the last half-century, and for good reason – it embodies the leftist disdain for corporatism and unregulated free-market capitalism, the fear of exploitation at the hands of the rich, the distrust of racial homogeneity, and the creeping suspicion that the real power behind the throne is corporate, not democratic.

It’s overwhelmingly probable that neither organization is guilty (otherwise, why didn’t both elections go the same way? How long until Diebold’s baby-killing mercenary stormtroopers get into a pitched street battle with ACORN’s legions of AK-47-wielding Marxist Women’s Studies professors?), but veracity isn’t what makes the ACORN/Diebold conspiracies interesting. They’re conspiracies, sure, but they’re also a kind of scapegoating – and the choice of scapegoats for a defeat tells a temptingly plausible story about how the losing side views the world.

Devout Christians praying to a golden bull for material wealth. Seriously.

What is it that makes something valuable? You’ll probably get a different answer depending on whom you ask – a capitalist would say something about supply and demand, an academic might talk about the degree to which something increases our knowledge of the world, and so on.

But radical libertarians, alternative medicine proponents, ancient-astronaut pseudoarchaeologists, and five-year-olds on Ritalin will give you more or less the same answer: “That depends – how shiny is it?”

The obsession with gold, silver, and precious stones in the pseudoscientific subculture is massive.  You might be excused for thinking that this is based on some kind of materialistic greed – but mere wealth is no object for those who have transcended the material and focus entirely on the spiritual. Gold has a special vibration, a special frequency. Gold is one of the greatest sources of natural healing (next to silver, of course). Gold is the reason why ancient astronauts came to Earth; if you eat it, it reprograms your DNA to make you more intelligent, so aliens fed it to us so that we could mine even more gold for them. Gold is the only valid form of currency; if a country is not on the gold standard, it is doomed to failure.

Take for instance the GoldIsMoney forums, which is basically a gathering place for people who are so obsessed with precious metals that they get sexually aroused at the thought of diving Scrooge McDuck-style into a vault of gold coins. They actually have a gold porn thread.

^^^ Oh My God! Is that real??

I really miss my gold………………………….:(

WOW!!!! All of this gold is making me drool all over myself.

An old timer once told me it doesn’t matter how big it is. It’s how big everyone thinks it is that count’s. While I don’t entirely agree with that logic, there is an element of truth to it.

This is your skin on libertarianism.

Another section of the site is devoted to the medicinal uses of precious metals. Most of the threads there are about colloidal silver, an old-school patent medicine that supposedly cures pretty much everything. When prepared improperly it also leads to argyria, a condition in which you acquire the attractive skin tone of Papa Smurf. Of course, the people on GoldIsMoney are probably chugging as much of the stuff as they can in the hope that one day, a drunken Gargamel will mistake them for the Smurf patriarch and turn them into gold.

If you believe Zecharia Sitchin, the granddaddy of pseudoarchaeology and the Planet X conspiracy theory, and David Icke, the first person to realize the truth about the ruling elites (that all politicians and Jews International Bankers are actually shapeshifting lizard people from the constellation Draco), even aliens love gold! The extraterrestrial Annunaki, who were worshipped as gods by the Sumerians, made us intelligent by feeding us monoatomic gold – which God also gave to the Israelites during Exodus so that they could do… something.

Did the Bible conveniently get the spelling wrong? Could it be the Arc of the Covenant? As in electrical arc? Is it the arc that melts the gold, with which they make the bread for higher intelligence? Is this why it’s been hidden from us for thousands of years?

Hey man, I’m just asking questions here!

The gold obsession continues in the ancient astronaut literature. Erich von Däniken’s The Gold of the Gods examines a massive collection of allegedly alien-created gold artifacts in South America. Can we see some pictures, Erich? Well…

On several occasions Moricz had stopped me taking photographs as we passed through the tunnels. He kept on making different excuses. Sometimes it was the radiation that would make the negatives unusable, sometimes it was the flash which might damage the metal library with its blinding light. At first I could not understand why, but after a few hours underground I began to sense the reason for Moricz’s strange behavior.

You could not get rid of the feeling of being constantly watched, of destroying something magic, of unleashing a catastrophe. Would the entrances suddenly close? Would my flash ignite a synchronized laser beam? Would we never see the light of day again? Childish ideas for men engaged on serious investigation? Perhaps.

But if you had experienced what it was like down there, you would understand these absurd ideas. Teams equipped with modern technical aids will have to work down there to see whether there are any dangers to be overcome or avoided. When I first saw the pile of gold, I begged to be allowed to take just one photo. Once again I was refused. The lumps of gold had to be levered from the pile and that might make a noise and start stones falling from the roof like an avalanche.

Well sure he didn’t take any photographs of this secret cave of incontrovertible proof of alien intervention on Earth, which would be perhaps the greatest discovery in human histoy – but in his defense, it was really really creepy, and you never know when your camera flash is going to cause bits of gold to dislodge themselves and start a massive collapse.

Then there’s NESARA. There’s a whole series of posts that could be dedicated to these guys, but suffice it to say that NESARA started as a libertarian-inspired economic bill to, among other things, reinstate the gold standard. Money is worthless unless it’s backed by shiny metal, you see, and going back to the gold standard will solve all our economic woes.

Minimally crazy so far, right? The story doesn’t end there, though – NESARA was later picked up by a rather crafty cult leader by the name of Shaini Goodwin, who claimed it was passed by the US Congress and changed at the last minute to not just implement a gold standard, but also to declare world peace, disclose alien activity on Earth,  release suppressed free energy technology, and resurrect Elvis. Naturally, there’s a conspiracy to cover it up (not just NESARA itself, but the fact that there’s enough gold to support an actual gold standard), and the only way to get it out in the open is to give lots and lots of money to Ms. Goodwin.

Don't even get me started.

So what can we learn from all this? Why is there this obsession with gold, silver, and other precious metals within pseudoscience? Why don’t ancient astronauts come to Earth for granite, or pumice, or niobium? Why don’t libertarians drink colloidal iron and advocate an argon standard? Why don’t advocates of crystal healing attribute healing powers to the ugliest stones, rather than the prettiest ones?

It all comes back to the question of value. It’s an uncomfortable thought that there’s no real objectivity to the concept of value – people want to feel that the universe is understandable in some detached, God’s Eye sort of way, that there’s an objective standard of value that we can meaningfully access. If a crystal seems beautiful, it’s a nice thought that it looks that way because it’s objectively better than the less attractive rocks in some way.

And for whatever reason, we think that gold is very valuable indeed. A lot of  blood has been spilled over this particular shiny metal. So, goes the line of reasoning, there must be a reason for this – surely our desire for gold can’t be irrational. There must be something deeper there – some magical property; maybe it makes us psychic, or heals us. Maybe we were genetically engineered by aliens to mine it, or maybe it’s some kind of objective, Platonic embodiment of the concept of value. Or all of the above. Whatever the reason, gold must be meaningful for some reason beyond the value that we, as greedy little bastards, accord it.

When there’s this kind of strong connection between spiritual wealth and earthly wealth, the latter starts to become a way of getting to the former. Here we see echoes of Prosperity Gospel and The Secret – it’s spiritually meaningful to be rich, to flaunt your wealth; God and The Universe and Ron Paul want you to be wealthy, all you have to do is ask! Gold and silver and precious stones will make you whole, will fulfill you, will let you live forever, will render you a vessel of all that is good and right with the world.

Ah, the American Dream!

MJ? Who is this MJ? My name is... Guy Incognito.

Michael Jackson died a little while ago. Not being a fan myself, I took the news with equanimity, but this is apparently not a sentiment shared by many. The cable news networks assure me that despite overwhelming public outcry, Jackson is still dead. There’s probably no good reason for this state of affairs, and it seems a cruel trick on the part of Nature.

Naturally, some people are taking the news pretty hard – there are the usual suggestions that his death was faked, as with any celebrity who dies relatively young, though the Gloved One was no Elvis or 2Pac or Marilyn Monroe (although it could be argued that if you take those three, mash them together in a trash compactor, and force the resulting flesh-cube to take the lead role in Satan’s production of Peter Pan, you’d pretty much have Michael Jackson in a nutshell). A wonderful article in the Daily Telegraph sums up some of the early theories, and a series of hysterical Yahoo Answers threads provides a good gauge of paranoid opinion:

Yes, I believe he did fake his death. As a person who works in the medical field many things just do not add up here. His doctor working on him at his home for as long as he did before calling 911. The body “cold” when EMS team got there. Bodies do not get cold that quickly. If he was DOA when EMS got to him– why then not pronounce him dead as soon as he reached the hospital? They worked on him for hours ? When the body gets cold the blood begins to pool in areas — any doctor would know it is a lost cause. None of this adds up. And why now is the doctor missing???? I smell a fake — not that I blame him. As the master of disquise and reinventing, yes he COULD pull it off.

The challenge, of course, would be disguising himself as somebody with a functioning nose.

The faked-death theories eventually ebbed, as they must, but another subset of Michael Jackson conspiracy theories remained – that he was killed by the Iranian government so that his death would gain traction in the media and draw Western public attention away from the rigged election, by the US government to divert media coverage away from the climate bill, or some kind of amazingly nutty Russian CIA mind control EMP weapon thing.

There are a couple of reasons behind conspiracy theories popping up at a time like this – death is a confusing and arbitrary thing, and people have a hard time dealing with it being able to strike without warning. It’s only natural to look for some kind of order in things, which is why there’s a particular conspiracy crowd who see every event of even minor note – a plane being struck by lightning, a celebrity dying, an NGO holding a conference in some particular place, a spacecraft being launched – as a puzzle piece in the machinations of some sinister cabal. There’s also a compelling desire to score points off a tragedy like this; it affords a unique opportunity for pushing one’s own political agenda via scapegoating. Finally, the faked-death theories are spurred in part by wishful thinking on the part of Jackson’s more scarily obsessed fans, who no doubt are picturing him shacked up in a Brooklyn tenement with Andy Kaufman and the Count of St. Germain.

On the other hand, it’s Michael Friggin’ Jackson, so the conspiracy theories don’t seem to have taken much of a hold. After the drugs, the surgery, and the public displays of utter insanity, is it a surprise to anyone with a functioning brain that he’s finally joined the great castrato chorus in the sky?