So, I shot a very quick, subsequently (badly) ADR-ed, video to help introduce Social Media to the Critical Thinking course (which we call PHIL105) I sometimes teach. You might be interested in it or you might not, so here it is.
Category: General
The Christchurch Quake Conspiracy (plural) – Part Four – Mining, Dairying, the Reptiles and You
Whilst the LHC and HAARP conspiracy theories for the earthquake of September 4th are well fleshed out (fatty, even), the other contenders, aside from, of course, the official theory that it was perfectly natural (but inopportune) seismic activity, are young, thin and pliable. Yet, and I say this advisedly, some of them are much more plausible than their bigger, elder siblings.
Mineral Westcoast ((No puns.))
Over at Trademe (the local equivalent of eBay), the finger of guilt has been firmly pointed in the direction of “Minerals Westcoast,” a local, Crown-owned, prospecting firm. Apparently they have been puncturing the Earth with their drills, and this has resulted in a release of pressure which caused the earthquake.
The argument presented on Trademe is complete supposition. There are no facts being cited, just conjecture and pseudoscientific handwaving, but that shouldn’t get in the way of the story ((Although, in this case, maybe it should, given that it isn’t a very good story.)). Indeed, the Trademe post is so lacking in actual details, aside from the name “Minerals Westcoast,” that it seems like a perfect case of disinformation. It is almost as if this absurd theory has been pushed out there so it can be used to tar the other conspiracy theorists with it (i.e. if they believe that, then they’ll probably also believe this ludricous theory, so obviously they must be wrong; let’s go and have a drink). Frankly, if I had thought of that hypothesis, I’d have been tempted to lay claim to it.
The argument that prospecting caused the quake rests upon the ambiguous way “shallow” has been used and re-used with respect to both the earthquake and the aftershocks. The earthquake originated in a relatively shallow layer of the Canterbury Plains were shallow. The prospectors have been drilling holes and thus their holes must have had some effect on the tectonic plates.
Now, the tectonic plates are a long way down and the kind of exploratory drilling Minerals Westcoast may (or may not) have been doing are not going to reach that far; the earthquakes originated in the relatively shallow layers some ten kilometres beneath the surface.
The mining arguments falls down at the first hurdle, but it does link in with another, related, conspiracy theory, one that claims the dairy industry is truly evil.
Water, water, everywhere…
It’s no secret that dairy farmers are evil; they pollute the waterways, they produce foodstuffs most of the world’s population are allergic too and then they try to sell said product overseas ((As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of the diary industry or its products.)). However, I was not aware that they might be out to get us via induced natural disasters.
Take this (local) letter to the editor:
Have any studies been made into the role of excessive water extraction around fault lines in the generation ofearthquakes or exacerbating the consequences of an earthquake?
Now, there is a legitimate worry that the dairy industry, with its quite heavy water usage, has lowered the water table. Some have gone on to speculate that, maybe, this has changed the weighting of the Canterbury Plains on the tectonic plates beneath them, thus causing the earthquake and the aftershocks.
This thesis relies, like the Minerals Westcoast conspiracy theory on the ambiguous nature of “shallow.” The shallowness of the earthquakes and the shallowness of the water table are taken to be equivalent when, really, they are not.
The earthquake and the aftershocks originated ten kilometres beneath the surface (which, for quake in this region and of this magnitude, is relatively shallow). The water table is, however, much, much higher; despite the fact that water extraction has lowered said table, it hasn’t lowered it to the extent that it would become a contributory cause for the quake (although it might have contributed to the extent of the damage caused by said quake). Both the water table and the area in which the earthquakes originated are shallow, but they are shallow with respect to their geological peers and not to each other.
Now, a finessed version of this conspiracy theory would talk about how the National Government abolished the local, democratic, control of the Canterbury region and gave it over to a cabal of dairy farming interests, who then used it to… Test their new geological weapon? Experiment on the local populace? Whatever the case, this conspiracy theory would show that the dairy industry have been planning this earthquake for quite some time and that the national (National) Government is in on it.
Seems like a plausible story to me.
Probably…
Well, probably not.
Bob Parker and Jon Gadsby – Reptilian Overloards and Muffin magnates
Possibly the most interesting site to emerge from the chaos of Christchurch is this one. It proposes that former “This Is Your Life” host and current Mayor Bob Parker:
GENERATeD DESTrUCT1VE TeCTONIc PLaTE SHiFTS Via PSYCHiC MINd WAVES BRoADCAST fROM PUbLiC SCULPturE.
Pure satire, but the amount of work that has gone into it to give it the right amount of verisimilitude is scary. It almost looks “right,” (if you know what I mean) and yet, at the same time, it looks just a little too polished to be true to the fiction. Still, I’d recommend keeping an eye out on this one; who knows where it might go. If you also know who might be behind this marvellous deception, then please drop me a line. I’d like to congratulate the purveyor of such a fine entertainment.
Next time: Some concluding thoughts and maybe a few Freemasons.
A Conspiracy Week of Tweets 2010-09-19
- Watching "The Pillars of the Earth" mini-series. Van Gogh appears to be the king of England and Lovejoy is a priest. England's a funny place #
- I reckon I'd be really productive if I didn't have to spend so much time explaining jokes to my cat. (via @thisfog) #
- I think I exhausted my supply of potential tweets at the Blend. #ogb #
- Has a tin-opener. #
- Today I am not interested in saving civilisation but merely ending it. #
- Why the new Foreshore and Seabed Bill is no good:
http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/mj080910.htm # - Spent the morning trying to make sense of Christchurch Earthquake conspiracy theories. Head hurts. So much. Gah. #
- The benefit of the chemtrail people will be all the photos of clouds they post online; so much data for free. #
- New Post: The Christchurch Quake Conspiracy (plural) – Part One http://bit.ly/9RD9kB #
- First draft of part two of the Christchurch earthquake conspiracies post completed. I really should have been working on the thesis. #
- Bids the world goodnight. #
- We just reached 2500 signatures on the Toonstruck Two petition! Sign it at http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/toonstrucktwo #
- The Borad make-up in "Timelash" is very good. #
- Hey hey. I gotta joke. Ready? I guess ACT should get their ACT together. Geddit? Hilar. (via @poundito) #
- Part two of my ramblings about the Christchurch Earthquake: http://bit.ly/98SsV9 #
- Monckton debunked again: http://bit.ly/9sctOx #
- What is the opinion of my elucidated twitter chums about the use of "Read more beyond the cut" links on blogposts? #
- Construction Complete On 9/11 Truther Memorial – The Onion http://tumblr.com/xquioro68 #
- The reason no one ever asks me to perform their Civil Unions is that Birth, Deaths and Marriages lists my full name: http://bit.ly/91xnGn #
- He tried to leave me with only a band of gold but I also got the house, the car… #rockretractions #
- In this day and age, no one ought to employ a girl to putter around the house. #showtuneretractions #
- "Delta and the Bannermen." Bonnie Langford isn't much of a actor. #
- The Pope has compared atheists to Nazis. And from him, there's no higher compliment than that. (via @Lawrence_Miles) #
- Part three of my Christchurch Earthquake conspiracy theories musing: http://bit.ly/cr1P2W #
- RT @CherylBernstein: As if the earthquake weren't bad enough: http://is.gd/fdYY0 #eqnz #
- "She had a good experience with a goat." #thingssaidinclass #accidentalinnuendo #
The Christchurch Quake Conspiracy (plural) – Part Three – HAARP
HAARPing on about the weather ((Poor title pun the second. This is just embarrassing.))
Another installation which has been blamed for the Christchurch earthquake of September 4th is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) installation in Alaska. HAARP, according to Wikipedia, is:
an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its purpose is to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance purposes (such as missile detection).
although conspiracy theorists, like former wrestler and governor, Jesse Ventura, think that it is an above top secret weather control system and part of a geo-engineering effort run by the global elite. Aotearoa’s own Clare Swinney, one of the country’s leading conspiracy theorists ((Clare Swinney has written for Ian Wishart and Jonathan Eisen, which is real pedigree here in the Antipodes. Currently she is watching out for chemtrails in our southern skies, which are part of, apparently, some geo-engineering effort by the rich and powerful.)), agrees with him.
One of the chief tools of the geo-engineering elite is said to be the HAARP installation in Alaska, which, I am told, is based upon technologies developed by Nikola Tesla over a hundred years ago. Whilst the stated purpose of HAARP is the refinement of radio and satellite technologies, the real purpose, according to people like Swinney, is weather control for the overall purpose of population manipulation and the eventual installation of a One World Government.
Like the LHC conspiracy theories, the HAARP equivalents are examples of explanatory hypotheses only the “awakened” truly comprehend. The awakened are those people (although not those of us who are reading this post with approval) who have seen the connections between all things and realised the scary truth of what is really happening. Those of us who approve of blog entries such as this, are “sleepers;” we accept what the “mainstream media” say and trust in the words of scientists and other supposedly “qualified” experts whose goals are the dissemination of disinformation ((The grammar of this sentence seems odd; please send help.)).
Most of us are sleepers and have not yet awakened; we are not aware that there are people, out there in the world, who are manipulating the environment to subdue and control us.
Now, once again, the kind of people who believe this also tend to deny that Anthropogenic ((I always seem to type “Anthropomorphic” before “Anthropogenic,” which probably proves their point.)) Climate Change is occurring (as mentioned previously).
Now, I find it a little hard to take the LHC and HAARP theories all that seriously; whilst there is a possibility that scientists, in their scientific research installations, are out to get us, it is a slight one (and, let us face it, I’d rather it was mad scientists than cunning politicians).
However, conspiracy theorists, like Swinney, can detect that particular “natural” phenomena have been induced by acts of geo-engineering. Over at Issues That Matter Most ((A site which you won’t be able to get into unless you sign up; I’ve been lurking there for quite some time now.)) some of the citizens-cum-denizens seem to be able to tell that the Christchurch quake was engineered because it feels unnatural.
The awakened can do this because they can detect… Oh, I was about to say “disturbances in the Force” but I can’t pull that off without making it the subject of my self-deprecating wit. Anyway, the awakened can detect the difference between a natural disaster and an unnatural and induced act of seismic activity, in the same way that they can see that the clouds that surround them are not natural ((Clare Swinney’s Northland New Zealand Chemtrails Watch site is filled with pictures of clouds she and her cronies take to be examples of geo-engineering. No matter what we think of their conspiracy theories, such sites are going to be a internet treasure when it comes to a record of cloud types one day in the future.)). Now, I’m no connoisseur of quakes ((I’ve been in one, a very small affair, in Wellington. The children, who I was helping mind, didn’t even look up from their train set.)) but I’m fairly sure that even if I were, I’d find it hard to distinguish between a quake which was artificially produced and one that was entirely natural. The end result, presumably, is the same: the Earth moves! ((Exclamation mark used for effect; in the audiobook version of this site Orson Welles intones that last clause.)). To know anything else, well, I’d need to be a seismologist.
Now, perhaps I should give the conspiracy theorists some credit here; one of the ways you can apparently distinguish between a natural quake and the artificial alternative is by the mental fatigue HAARP activity brings about in the general populace. See, the HAARP installation doesn’t just affect the weather; it also makes people docile, confused and easily controllable.
Now, it is true that, post the quake, the population of Christchurch were fatigued, tired and looking for leadership. They were docile, confused and suspect to control. Now, call me a folk psychologist (and amateur student of the human condition), but I would have thought post any quake, natural or not, that the general populace would be confused, stressed, tired and looking for leadership. These are, I would wager, perfectly normal reactions for people, post a crisis (like, say, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake ((The conspiracy theorists are also concerned that the magnitude of the quake changed from a reported 7.4 to a 7.1, as if there is something sinister about that, rather than accepting that the initial estimation of the quake’s magnitude was refined as more measurements were received.))), to have. You do not need some additional theory to explain those reactions.
Now, the conspiracy theorists will go on to say that these symptoms were present in the build-up to the quake; the evidence predicts and thus lends support to the thesis that the quake was induced by the HAARP installation. The symptoms, which include itchy eyes, swollen lymph nodes, headaches and the like, are all so vague as to be easily satisfied by any feeling of unease or discomfort in the days prior to the event. If you felt unwell at any point prior to the quake, it seems, then that is proof positive that something was about to happen. This is simply not good enough, as evidence, to be a prediction that lends support to the explanatory hypothesis that the earthquake was caused by the HAARP facility. Predictions need to be novel; they need to be unexpected pieces of data if they are to support such an extraordinary. People feeling generically sick… Well, that happens all the time. Eyeballs leaking blood and cats transforming into all-singing, all-dancing chorus line-ups of Michael York impersonators… Well, if that is what the theory predicts and that had happened, then we would have something to talk about.
Quite how HAARP creates these effects (both physiological and seismically) is due to its manipulation of the Earth’s Magnetic Field (EMF), which is an example of those wonderful hand-waving theses in pseudoscience. We all know that the EMF is important and thus we should be rather worried if it turns out people that people are manipulating it. If you can suggest that some installation can affect that field, well, conspiracy theories will flow from that “fact.” Of course, if you then go away and do the calculations to work out how much energy that would require to have an effect on the scale the conspiracy theorists claim it had (and explain away why Alaska doesn’t seem to suffer cataclysmic disaster every time the facility is fired up), then the theory begins to falter. Much better, I think, to look for some principal cause which is local for the quake.
Mining is a bit of a buzzword at the moment; let us look at doing some exploratory drilling.
Next time: Some other sundry theories about the Christchurch Earthquake of September 4th.
The Christchurch Quake Conspiracy (plural) – Part Two – The LHC
On September 4th, 2010, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Christchurch, the largest city in Te Wai Pounamu, the south island of New Zealand ((Whilst no lives were lost, the aftershocks, ten days on, still continue. It’s fair to say, for the people of the Canterbury Plains, that the disaster is an on-going concern.)). Natural disasters, of any kind or size, are terrible things.
If, indeed, it was a natural disaster.
It seems odd to think of the earthquake of September 4th as the focus of a conspiracy theory, let alone (at least) three competing conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories tend to focus on events of political import; earthquakes are not particularly political, even given the very weird dictatorial powers given to a certain Minister of the Crown post the event. Bombings, land confiscations, so-called terror camps in the Urewera; these are the political fodder of conspiracy theories. Earthquakes, not so much. No conspiracy there, you might be forgiven to think.
Yet, the quake of September 4th has been variously attributed to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the HAARP facility in Alaska and even to a New Zealand-owned mining operation called “Minerals Westcoast.” If the conspiracy theorists are to be believed, then there’s just no room left in the story for natural forces.
Geneva: A CERN thing ((I apologise for this poorly constructed pun. It really is quite terrible.))
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been the focus of a lot of conspiracy theories, some of which deal with the huge cost associated with building the LHC (“Who paid for it,” the conspiracy theorist will say, “let’s follow that money…”), what its real purpose is (“Does anyone really believe they just want to smash particles together at high speed?”) and whether the strangelets it may be producing are eating away at the Earth’s core.
Now, this latter claim, along with worries about what the LHC might be doing to the planet’s electromagnetic fields, has lead some conspiracy theorists to posit the LHC as the primary cause of the September 4th quake. Let me crib the reasons why the LHC could be a or the cause of the earthquake from the delightful people at CERNTruth:
– There are 3 possible ways in which the LHC can cause earthquakes:
A) If the magnetic field of the magnets drawn above interact with other magnetic fields in the magma.
B)If it made black holes or strangelets that are now in the center of the Earth, slowly eating the planet.
C) If it produces perpendicular gravitational waves, affecting the antipodes (Tonga, Fidji region), which is reaching a maximal with occurrences at very deep level (over 500 km.)
Now, all of these hypothetical situations are, indeed, well, hypothetical conjectures ((And the award for “Magnificence in English language usage goes to…”)) . The LHC could be producing micro-singularities, which might develop into black holes, that would then eat away at the Earth, subsequently growing exponentially in size until such time that the Earth is swallowed whole ((Which, incidentally, is a plot point in Dan Simmon’s “Hyperion Cantos.”)).
Now, it’s important to notice the layering of “mights” and “coulds” in this scenario; the chance that the LHC has created a black hole eating up the Earth and, in the process, causing the Christchurch earthquake is remote. For one thing, even if the LHC did create a micro-singularity, it would most likely dissipate before becoming a planet-devouring black hole ((This is the current thinking on the matter by the appropriately qualified experts, although I should say that this is one scientific theory in which the debate is still ongoing.)). Whatever the case, all the LHC is doing, in that particular respect, is something that already happens in the ionosphere on a day-by-day basis; the danger of micro-singularities actually being formed by the LHC is thought to be so low that you could run it continuously for longer than we’ve existed and not expect a stable micro-singularity to form. Given that we only operate the LHC for small periods of time at best, chances are that Amanda Tapping and Adrian Paul will not be chasing a rogue black hole through Christchurch in the near future.
Options A (the magnetic fields interfering with magma) and C (the production of perpendicular gravitational waves) are, in essence, examples of pseudoscience. Pseudoscience, the made-up scientific theories of non-experts, is the kind of science conspiracy theorists like to appeal to. Presumably this is because it requires them to have no accreditation, no pesky student loans and, more importantly to my mind, allows you to avoid abominations like the University of Auckland’s old online enrolment system, nDeva ((Which, for current readers and former students, has been killed off. Huzzah!)). It’s easy to be an expert in a pseudoscience; just assert that something might be the case and then claim the burden of proof is on your detractors, no matter their qualifications.
It’s a little weird, actually, to consider the kind of reasoning that gets used in options A and C, because the people who routinely suspect CERN is up to no good also tend to be the kind of people who suspect the Intergovernmental ((I always want to say “Interplanetary.”)) Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be conspiring to persuade us of the “fraud” that is Anthropogenic Climate Change. You see, opponents of Anthropogenic Climate Change often argue that “Humans can’t possibly be fouling the environment; the six billion humans on the Earth, collectively, don’t have the ability to overly affect the environment in a disastrous way.” Yet, the conspiracy theorists who think the LHC is responsible for the ills of the world will claim that a single installation (operated by a vastly smaller group of humans) can affect the environment and cause earthquakes, tsunamis and the like.
They make the same claim about the HAARP installation in Alaska; more on that soon.
Now, if we extend the principle of charity to the conspiracy theorists in this instance you can see that this isn’t that big a discrepancy as it first appears. Conspiracy theorists who believe both that the LHC is making our lives a misery and that the UN is using the IPCC to bring about a One World Government are merely claiming that ordinary (read: unaided) human beings can’t change the environment but that extraordinary human activity (read: machine-aided human activity) can. However, once you admit to that, then you need to deal with the scientific data that, quite conclusively, shows that our industrial activity has had a measurable effect upon the climate (archaeologists can wax lyrical about how the Industrial Revolution is clearly marked in the C14 record, as evidenced by work in dendrochronology and radio-carbon dating). Once that data comes in to play, well, that seems to show that maybe the worries of the IPCC (and the cohort of scientists who agree that Anthropogenic Climate Change is occurring) are well-founded.
But I digress.
Tomorrow: HAARP and Mining
The Christchurch Quake Conspiracy (plural) – Part One – Introduction
I’ve struggled to “find a voice” for the following (read: upcoming) post about the conspiracy theories surrounding the September 4th Earthquake in Canterbury. Reading through the various conspiracy theorists’ arguments for what “really” happened was a draining and depressing experience ((I even feel guilty saying that, given that I haven’t suffered from the effects of the quake whatsoever and am thus engaging in a very academic form of despair.)). Their arguments are not depressing because I couldn’t make heads or tails out of them but, rather, because I could see that the conspiracy theorists were just like anyone else (i.e. just like the rest of us). They were trying to make sense of the scale and terror of a natural disaster. The conspiracy theorists didn’t even seem particularly mad or delusional…
Well, I’m not sure how to phrase the idea I’m trying to express here. I suppose what I am saying is that I think some of the conspiracy theories around the quake of September 4th are motivated by the big and important questions, like “How did this happen?” and “Why didn’t we know about the possibility of this particular quake (which isn’t the big one)?”
Now, the answers these conspiracy theorists, most of whom are local to Aotearoa, have jumped to are clearly not even vaguely plausible. Still, I can see how if you think a major event must be the result of an intentional action, then a quake like the one that hit Christchurch on the 4th of September must have been induced for a reason.
Which is why the somewhat jocular tone I (will) take in the upcoming post should not be taken as evidence of my usual sarcasm. This is in part because the various conspiracy theories around the quake have not (yet) entered that strange region of ickiness and revulsion that demands it; whilst “they” are being blamed “they” are still caged references to the global elite rather than “the Jews” or something similar. Now, this might all be due to our curious political isolation from the big conspiracy theories overseas ((And our better (but still not good) race relations here in Aotearoa.)). We (as a nation host to some conspiracy theorists) don’t (often) go for, say, the anti-semetic cabalistic jugular when merely generic global elites will do the job just fine.
Still, it is early days and even in those early days people are noting, on some sites, that a certain Rothschild with holdings in the South Island was not resident there on the day of the quake ((He hasn’t been resident there for five years, it seems, which is either evidence of advanced planning for the quake or that holidays in Southland just aren’t his cup of tea any more.)), and so forth. So, give it time, I reluctantly find myself saying; the ichor will come to pass.
Any one of us could be a conspiracy theorist (in the pejorative sense. People usually don’t like me saying that; they do not want to have it pointed out to them that they, too, might hold weird views which are neither rational nor justified. Yet I know of philosophers who fastidiously and fallaciously appeal to anecdotal evidence or tradition when trying to resist the tide of modern pedagogy. I know people who would claim to be hardcore socialists or social democrats and yet are rather old fashioned, even backwards, conservatives on issues to do with race, gender or sexual identity. Very good friends of mine hold to conspiracy-like theories about Big Pharma, the Police and the IPCC. These are, in other respects, sensible people who go about their lives in what seem like perfectly normal ways, but on some issues they are, to quote a dear friend, just whacked.
I feel a certain amount of empathy with the whacked; I used to be a middle-class Shore boy, you see, who thought the Maoris ((Plural used here for emphasis.)) should get over their “so-called grievances based on now completely historical injustices.” I was an institutionalised racist with no appreciation for the tikanga of our tangata whenua and oblivious to the privilege I had by merely being Pakeha.
Now, comparing belief in conspiracy theories with institutionalised racism isn’t really very useful, but I just want to stress that I don’t regard people with weird views as being sub-human. Sure, I wouldn’t want to socialise with such people, but, then again, I’m never all that comfortable socialising with the Skeptics, for example, or the Rationalist and Humanists (humourless bastards, the lot of them (well, for the most part) who also tend to have weird and uninformed views, especially regarding the Philosophy of Science). The whacked might have, in my opinion, unfortunate beliefs, but, let us be fair and say, often such people have weird beliefs for reasons which aren’t entirely of their own making. There is a lack of critical thinking teaching going on in our education system, and wacky beliefs are a consequence of that.
I’m rambling now. Time to move on.
Tomorrow(ish): the actual conspiracy theories around the Christchurch Earthquake. Large Hadron Colliders, Alaskan weather control stations and local mining companies all will vie to be the cause of the quake of September 4th, 2010.